Lenny's Hideaway

jane arriety

You know she's waiting. So you take a walk through the village. You pass the gaudy neon lights and pastel colored fronts of redecorated restaurants which have lost their quaintness, and you move on into the side streets. Here the summer night rests more quietly. Your high heels click past single rows. of cars parked half on the sidewalk and half on cobblestones of the narrow street. Then you turn into Tenth Street where West Fourth Street peeks around the corner to surprise you. Soon you enter a narrow doorway and go down steep, dimly lit stairs that lead to the small, square-shaped room called Lenny's Hideaway.

Here, just as you left it, is the borderline world. You give your eyes a few moments to focus into smoke filled candlelight, and your ears time to absorb the hum of masculine and feminine voices mixing with strains of "So In Love" from Kiss Me, Kate! and the clinking of wet glasses. As you stand hesitating by the doorway, some figures have turned to stare at you, while others are as unaware of your existence as a mechanical toy is unconscious of being wound. How delicate is the line: eyes that search for other eyes; meanings without words; an outward display of merriment undercurrented by a sadness that hurriedly refills the emptying glasses.

You search the room for the familiar face: your glance sweeps past the tiny bar at the end of the room where Joe is mixing martinis with the shaky precision of a drunken tightrope walker; past the side tables where heads lower, and arms gesticulate in drunken talk; you look across the walls plastered with foreign travel posters inviting you to visit quaint towns and provincial beaches; and finally your eyes rest upon a small corner table where three empty beer bottles stand guard over a filled glass that is lifted up and then replaced a moment later with an added beer-ring. Her face, looking down at the glass, makes you think of many things: the Egyptian Nephritite dressed in a modern corded suit, of delicate carvings in ivory, the sail of a ship on a calm summer day, but most often she reminds you of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. The hands that hold the glass are the hands of the mythical artist, strong yet delicate fingers, sensitive with nerves that make them seem in continual motion. They release the glass, wave out over the crowd toward the open doorway. You walk slowly past the others and toward the seated figure always surrounded by newly-met admirers, and you merge with the others in the borderline world of Lenny's Hideaway.

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