EVERETT BJORKMAN
211
"A pint of what?"
Everett thought the question an invasion of privacy. He resolved
to attend to his immediate needs and leave. "Do you have
Sal
Hepa–
tica?" he asked.
But the bartender's attention had returned to the man on the
gallery. He swung toward him now and shouted out toward the sea,
"Who can afford love? Who can afford tradition? The future is a
duty which obliterates all other demands, like the tide wiping clean
the margin of the sea!" Everett had often noted that those of he
bartender's race tended to overuse the word
like.
"Next," the bar–
tender challenged the man on the gallery, "next," he repeated, "you
will
speak to me of marriage."
As
he spoke he pulled a mug off the
shelf behind him, put it under the spigot and pumped vigorously
until foam rolled over the side.
"With an egg," Everett said, brightening.
"The dark starving masses of the world are in arms and you
speak to me of marriage," said the bartender, breaking an egg into
the mug and grinding the shell underfoot. He set the mug before
Everett with a kp.ock. "Love is an invention of the baronial caste, left
over from chivalric days, an anti-masque to the cult of the Virgin–
purely European, purely aristocratic, purely decadent," the bartender
was saying.
Everett thoughtfully sipped
his
Sal Hepatica.
"I do not speak to you of marriage," the man on the gallery
crooned to the sea,
his
chin rising and trembling as he spoke, then
subsiding with a quiver.
The bartender whirled to the cash register and came down on it
with two hands like a pianist striking a chord. Two cherries and a
lemon appeared in the cash register window. Everett felt in his pocket
for change.
"Soon you will speak to me of families," the bartender said
savagely, then, over his shoulder to Everett, hardly modulating his
tone, "Two cherries and a lemon."
Everett paid
him
and took
his
mug out onto the gallery. Below
him
gulls
banked and screamed like rusty hinges. A tiny figure could
be discerned on the rocks below tossing peeled shrimp into the air,
and Everett marveled that even in the dusk the ,birds could catch the
bits before they fell. He was not a man who often permitted himself
