Page 7 of Aftertaste

And he was thinking about it now as he wiped another glass dry. There were a dozen clean, wet glasses lined up on the bar in front of him, dripping onto the heirloom oak. Probably making water stains.

Kostya selected another and smiled smugly to himself.

He wasn’t supposed to be in the front-of-house, and he liked sticking it to Kevin, who was absurdly easy to hate. Kevin wanted Kostya and his stained T-shirts in the back, where he wouldn’t interrupt the high-end gentlemen’s club vibe he’d crafted, right down to the self-congratulatory cocktail napkins (BRAVO, OLD CHAP!in Edwardian Script, without any hint of irony). When Kostya complained about having to wait until the bartenders had a break in service to haul the dirty glasses back to him (which sometimes wasn’t until the very end of his shift), Kevin smiled with all his teeth and said he’d be happy to let him out front if he’d look the part, which in Kevin’s world meant spending more on a tailored shirt than Kostya made in a week. Kevin was a real piece of New York shit.

Duncan, the Tuesday night bartender, may have been anSNLsketch of a Park Slope hipster—tailored vests, Dublin accent, well-oiled beard—but that also made him look like a guy you could trust to pour your twenty-four-dollar apothecary cocktail. But Duncan had bailed when his girlfriend’s water broke, so Kostya got upgraded to the bar—Kostya, who, in stark contrast to Duncan, looked like he could only be trusted with the kind of schlock you’d pay a buck fifty for from a Port Authority vending machine, and no promises he wouldn’t keep your change.

It hadn’t always been like that.

Not that he could ever have driven home handsome, but he used to be able to at least idle in the vicinity of serviceable. There was a certain appeal (boyish face; bright eyes; good teeth; dark hair) that had gotten him by in the past, and he’d always felt (even if he never acted on it) that if he just lost the extra weight in his jowls and gut (twenty yearsand fifteenish pounds’ worth of eating his feelings), he’d be a solid six (seven in dim lighting).

But the last few months had been rough, so rough that he really wasn’t fit for public consumption: dumped (yetagain), moping (continuously), ungroomed and unmotivated and seriously unhappy, the weight the least of his issues. His wardrobe (like the T-shirt he wore now—phlegm colored, with Uncle Vanya’s sickle-and-shot-glass branding on the chest) had suffered considerably when Alexis, his ex, left him. And his body, grown soft on beer and burgers, had never done well in the standard-issue humidity of Manhattan summers, but had rebelled spectacularly since he’d stopped exercising altogether (coinciding with Alexis’s departure and her custody of their dog, Freddie Mercury, whose walks had wholly comprised Kostya’s calisthenics). Just now, there were dark rings of sweat migrating down from his armpits, where even the antiest of perspirants couldn’t penetrate.

If Kevin were there, he would have murdered Konstantin on the spot, wrung him out with his own dishrag. But Kevin was probably doing lines of coke off somebody’s bikini wax in the Hamptons, so fuck him and fuck his rules. Kostya would dry all this right on the bar, in plain sight of anyone with the balls to stroll in and order five minutes before The Library closed, fuck you very much.

OUTSIDE THE BAR,in the stacks of Bibliomecca, a man paced back and forth, casing the spine ofFantasmagoriana. He passed its shelf four and a half times before his itchy fingers finally gave in and tugged the book forward. As he watched the bookcase shimmy away from the wall, revealing the dim staircase down to a chamber that smelled like old money and privilege and Scotch—weren’t those all the same things?—a wave of relief broke over him.

He’d promised a half-dozen people that he wouldn’t drink tonight, and he’d really meant it then, but he didn’t mean it now. They must have known,he told himself, that he wasn’t good for his word, not on this. Not on the anniversary. So there he was, minutes to midnight, scurrying down the steps to The Library of Spirits, three hundred and five days sober. Or was it three hundred and four?

Didn’t matter. He’d have to start the count over again in the morning. If he woke up.

WHEN KONSTANTIN HEARDthe click-latch of shelving, his eyes darted up from the highball he was drying, barely believing his ears.

In the six months he’d been doing this job, not one person had shown up past eleven thirty. It was an unspoken rule. Speakeasies weren’t like the sleazy sports bars or collegiate watering holes where you could pop in for a single shot of Fireball on your way to your hairdresser’s Uber driver’s house party in Alphabet City. They were intimate spaces with exorbitant prices and cocktails that begged to be sipped, savored. He was dying to see what kind of person—money to burn, surely—would roll in at five-of only to lay down thirty bucks for a drink they’d barely get to taste. So imagine Kostya’s surprise when down the steps came a guy who looked—was it possible?—rougher even than he did.

The man was a rail. Tall. With dishwater eyes shining beneath a ball cap, and a huge, sad Steven Tyler mouth.

“Uh, hey?” he said.

“Hey.” It took Konstantin a second to catch himself. “I mean, hi! Hello! Welcome to The Library. Of Spirits.”

Steven Tyler’s long-lost twin blinked uncertainly at him. “You still open?”

He nodded at the pile of glasses.

“Yup. For the next”—Kostya consulted his watch—“three minutes.”

“Cool.” He slid a stool from beneath the bar and settled onto it, sniffing once, loudly. Kostya hoped he wasn’t getting comfortable; what he neededwas some extra sleep before his delivery shift, not a late close because this dulcet brosky wanted a nightcap. “Uh, can I get a Manhattan?”

Oh, here we go.

“Yeah, so… I’m not actually a bartender. He had to take off. Family thing. I’m just the dishwasher.”

“But you can still make a drink, right?” There was an edge of desperation to his voice.

“I mean, I don’t technically have a bartending license—”

“So I didn’t get it from you.”

“And it might not taste right.”

“A risk I’m willing to take! Just hit me. Whatever’s easy.”

“Okay… but I still gotta charge you full price.”

The edges of Steven Tyler’s enormous mouth twitched. His eyes were fixed on Kostya’s hand—the highball glass he was polishing held midair—as if he was willing its movements telepathically toward the booze.

“You okay, man? You don’t look so—”

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