The Cloud of Unknowing by Mimi Lipson

like a good enough perch: a workingman’s bar. The kind of place that, if it were in South Philly, would have glass brick windows, and a jar of pickled eggs by the cash register, and penny tiles in the toilet. She pulled a book out of her bag and settled in.
    When she looked up again, a streetlight was buzzing outside the high window. She turned around on her stool and saw three new customers at a small table on the other side of the room. They were trashy-looking. Actually, they looked like hookers: shortie jackets, stripper heels, crotch-high skirts. They sat on the edges of their chairs, legs crossed high, smoking busily. On second glance, Kitty saw that they not women but transvestites. Of course, she thought, they must have come from Santa Monica Boulevard, a block down Western. She’d seen the trannies out at night, and even sometimes during the day: staking out the wide sidewalk, standing in groups under building overhangs, working their way out into traffic.
    Kitty signaled to the bartender for another beer. The soccer game had ended or been abandoned, and the jukebox came on. More girls arrived and hopped from table to table, talking loudly in Spanish and English, dancing in place, snapping open compacts to fix their make-up. A girl in an orange fur jacket squeezed her slim hips between two of the men sitting near Kitty and leaned across the bar. Squealing, she slapped one of the men’s hands off her ass.
    â€œYou ain’t paid for that yet, honey,” she teased.
    â€œHow ’bout I buy you a drink and put my hand in your dress?”
    â€œHow ’bout he buy my friend a drink?” She jerked her head back at the man on her other side. “Se siente sola por allá.”
    Suddenly, Kitty wished there were someone here to share this with. She thought about calling Cathy, the woman whose cubicle was across the aisle from hers. They sometimes had coffee together. Cathy had invited her out for drinks after work a few times, and she’d never reciprocated. But she thought of Cathy’s sweater sets, and the framed photos of her husband and kids that she kept on her desk. No, she wouldn’t appreciate this scene at all. Then she remembered Anton in the garden, the shadow of the fan palm and the glow of the torch, and how he’d smiled at her word, “apocalyptic.” She took his list out of her wallet and dialed the phone number he’d written down, hesitating for a second before hitting Send. She was relieved when she got his voicemail, and considered hanging up.
    â€œHi, it’s Kitty,” she said. “From Philadelphia. I’m at the Searchlite now if you want to come by.”
    The man sitting next to her got up while she was typing. She caught a whiff of floral perfume as someone sat down in his place. In the mirror behind the bar she saw a black Cleopatra wig and a green dress with three-quarter length sleeves. Glancing down, she saw matching green pumps. Her new neighbor sat attentively, hands resting on a pocket book, also green, on the bar in front of her—as though she were at the doctor’s office waiting for the receptionist to call her name.
    â€œWhat you want?” asked the bartender on her next pass.
    â€œA cosmopolitan?” said the transvestite. Her voice strained for an unnatural sweetness.
    The drink arrived in a plastic tumbler. When she looked up with obvious disappointment, her eyes met Kitty’s in the mirror.“I guess you have to ask for one of them glasses,” she said.
    Kitty smiled politely though, she hoped, not invitingly. She craned around to keep tabs on the girl in the orange jacket, but she’d lost the thread of that conversation.
    â€œI’m sorry, go on back to your book if you want,” her neighbor said.
    â€œIt’s too dark to read in here anyhow.” Kitty might have been able to hide behind her book indefinitely as a cover for eavesdropping, but it was useless now, so she put it