Circé

Her first counter stood on an island — that’s the only point of agreement. Which one: a Greek island, says the postcard; a traffic island between two avenues, says the land registry; an island in the trade sense, a place you don’t leave, say the old-timers, looking into their glasses. The bar had no name and no closing time. Sailors came in for one drink and missed their boarding call; tourists lost their flight, then their home address; two licensing inspectors came to run a check and now rank among the most punctual regulars. The inspection report was never filed.

The school of the counter teaches memory and patience. Circe added a department the curriculum never planned for: chemistry. Forty flasks, two copper alembics, and that amber vial she wears at her sternum, glowing softly, whose contents nobody — staff included — has ever known.

Her magic has one property that makes her precious to the Houses: it aims at everyone. Not the VIPs, not the celebrities — the normal world. The passerby, the lost tourist, the partier running on fumes, the tired regular: one drink at Circe’s, and the ordinary man comes back the next day without remembering having decided to. By the third night he has his stool, by the tenth he brings a friend, the way you pass on a gentle disease. She has never run a single advertisement. Her publicity is the relapse.

Three curtains have come down in her district; all three times she was drying a glass, and the glass was dry long before her hand stopped. That kind of calm can’t be taught, but the rest can: she trains counter girls in doses and silences, and her alumnae now run bars in three districts, working from numbered recipes she hands out incomplete. Ingredient seven is always missing. ’Ingredient seven is me,’ she says when pressed. And she pours another.

What keeps her standing at four in the morning is that four in the morning is her rush hour: the counter is full, the regulars are in their places, and she takes inventory of faces the way others count the till. She already has almost everything she wants — people who come back. There remains the almost, which she confesses only to the alembics: a customer who would come back for her, and not for the philter. Some nights she serves someone a glass of plain tap water, without a word, and watches to see if he returns. Nobody knows how many have passed the test. Everybody knows she still runs it.