xmm_barrows

The third girl in a row gives Barrows a polite refusal, and for the third time in a row, he makes a trip back to the bar. This time, though, instead of getting another beer and resuming his jovial trawl of his surroundings for the proverbial other fishes in the sea -- he flops down, with his elbow curving in its sport jacket against the surface of the bar's counter. "Oh, eh?" he says to the bartender, who is busy with other customers. With an aggrieved sigh, Robert smiles despite himself and rubs his knuckles along his jaw and up to his temple, where he props his head, its brace on his elbow. "Damn bloody damn. Oh well," he adds, "I didn't want another beer, anyway, did I?"

One of the other patrons at the bar is not a pretty girl but, dressed in dark silk shirt and darker jeans, he looks to be someone who can appreciate them. Remy's got his cane tucked discreetly up against the side of the bar, rich brown contacts in his eyes, and a look of wryly appreciative amusement as he looks over at Barrows. "All part o' the game," he offers up, cheerful commiseration from a fellow footsoldier in the trenches of l'amour. (Or at least Le Sexe.)

"They say if at first you don't succeed," Robert answers gamely enough, waggling a hand vaguely through the air above the bar as he continues to lean with his head propped on his fist against his temple. His accent is brightly English, marking his foreign shores as plain as Remy's Cajun roots.

"Try, try until closing time desperation sets in?" Remy caps the answer with a flash of a smile and a tip of a chin towards Robert's latest attempt. "I think I been shot down by her before, come to think of it... guess she's resistant to foreign charms too."

"Lesbian," Robert decides cheerfully. He finally manages to flag the bartender, and arrange for the arrival of a glass of beer on tap. He looks up at Remy as he sits up on the stool, palms resting against the bar's edge. "The trouble with the accent is that they start expecting me to be James Bond," he says, "and I'm really not. Sad, really."

"Trapped by the expectations of others," says Remy with a mournful shake of his head and a sigh. "Cruel, cruel world... although I don't even got the accent and I still get faced with expectations that I am a dazzlin' superspy," he admits, plucking up a beer bottle of some local concoction and taking a one handed swig.

"Really?" Robert tips his head first one way and then the other, puzzling over the advent of this information as he lifts his beer to his mouth for a swallow. "How's that?"

"Oh, I work up at Titan," says Remy, with the easy patter of office small talk. (Even if questions about children and the weather appear to be side-stepped.) "Project management, but y'so much as hint at 'security clearance' and their eyes light up. Of course, what it really means is I get the OK to look at a metric shitton o' papers that I mostly am not actually sure what spies could do with, but that are classified anyways."

"Oh, but classified work means you have that mysterious and dangerous allure," Robert points out in tones of bright delight, a laugh in his voice as he looks Remy over. "Paperwork? That doesn't sound very glamorous. Surely you don't just do paperwork."

"Oh, I get business trips, too," Remy answers, eyes bright from over his beer. "Where I get t'go and tell people about the paperwork."

"How do you get into a line of work so simultaneously secretive and stultifying?" Robert asks, taking a long pull at his beer and then licking his lips as he sets it down. "Although I suppose I found my way into radio more or less by tripping over my own feet, so maybe that's no fair question. Robert Barrows, by the way," he adds, extending his right hand with a sideways lean towards his new friend across a couple of empty barstools between.

"Oh, found myself at loose ends, couple o' people who knew me dangled a job offer... usual horse tradin'," Remy sums up, and takes the hand in a firm grip, eyes on Robert's in a handshake crafted to be the textbook creation of a management workshop. "Remy LeBeau... but radio, y'say? Sounds like y'got as good an angle there as a security clearance at least."

Robert's eyes are bright and blue and laughing as he shakes Remy's hand, and he shakes his head. "There's a joke about the face that's made for radio," he says. "It's not sexy like television, I'll tell you that. I suppose it's all about who you know -- for me, too, really."

"Ah, but dependin' on the show y'could draw the artist an' hipster girls," Remy suggests, false-coloured eyes a-twinkle and his mouth curved in a generous flash of a grin. "But," he notes, with a suddenly solemn lift of his beer. "Here's to cronyism, eh homme?"

"Mais bien sur," Robert answers, lifting his own beer and leaning on his elbow as he angles to clink it against Remy's before he takes a hefty swallow of it.

"{Man of many languages?}" Remy wonders, ears pricking at the reply as he meets the glass halfway. Out of a sense of general audiance, he thinks to shift into a more standard mode of French than true Cajun.

"{One or two,}" Robert answers cheerfully, waggling his beer glass on its way back down to the surface of the bar. "{Not so many I'd say many, but French is useful when you are completely drunk and in France.}"

"Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, c'est soir?" Remy hazards, although by the complete lack of once-over in the crooked smile he turns on Robert for a moment, this is more repetition of a song lyric than a proposition. "Lots of France is best seen while completely drunk, really."

"Thanks, but you're not my type," Robert says with a bright flavor of equanimity. He drums his fingertips against the side of his glass, lips parting in a quick smile. "I always found it so. Much friendlier to the drunk Englishman than the sober one, at any rate. Especially when he's bumming around with people who bring money."

"Just don't piss on anythin' historic," is Remy's judicious advice on drunken world travel, punctuated with another sip of his beer before he sets the bottle aside again for a moment. "O' course, easier done here than in Europe. Pretty sure I saw a historical urinal or two, last time I was over..."

"Pish posh. America has nothing historic," Robert says with airy pomposity. "Even your relics are what, two centuries? Come on now."

"Oh, we will cheerfully co-opt anythin' older we can lay hands on. Abandoned Indian villages in the Southwest?" Remy hazards, waving his beer bottle loosely. "Totally our idea. Probably would claim the pyramids if we coul."

"Nothing more enticing than a gigantic triangle." Robert drains the rest of the beer in his glass, and then leans forward against the bar, hunting the busy barman with his gaze.

"Four of 'em, even. Comin' to a -point-," says Remy with a deadpan look. Letting Robert commune with the barman, he himself cautiously spins his stool so that he might face out and people-watch the crowd. "So," he ventures after a suitable silence. "Radio. You got a station I should be tunin' into?"

"Not yet," Robert says. Once he has another glass full of beer, he grins a little sillily into it, and rubs at his face with the pass of his hand. He is probably getting to the point of having had enough, really. "I had an interview I'm still waiting to hear back, at the Santa Clara station. In the meantime nothing else has turned up yet. But I'm hopeful. I usually land on my feet."

Remy watches this with an air of interest that's mostly shrouded by a fall of his hair in a forelock, and the general busy swirl of a bar on the last night before work starts anew. "Useful skill, that," he ventures. "Wish y'luck with that... and if y'hopin' for more generalized luck, I bet that brunette off to the side there is better than y'last attempt."

Robert sits up quickly and turns an interested look in the direction indicated. "Really, d'you think?"

"Mmmhm," says Remy, lazy confirmation in his tone and a cheerful wave given to the brunette in question as she catches sight of the two men talking. "Only turns up when her boyfriend is outta town..."

"That sounds promising," Robert says, slipping down from the barstool only marginally unsteadily, "especially if you happen to be a bit of a cad which, unfortunately, I might be."

"Oh, she knows what she is about... just have an exit strategy planned," is the sum total of Remy's advice on the matter as he turns back towards the bar again with another lift of his beer. "To cads, roues, rakes, paramours and all them other little words."

Robert toasts to that, too, although this time it is with an imaginary beer, since he has gotten up. He laughs, then. "Nice meeting you," he says. "Once again unto the breach, and all," he adds, turning on his heel to wander a circuitous route towards this attractive brunette.

"Courage on the field, t'you sir," Remy bids, half bowing from his seat, before he gives Robert a last nod and a look, and turns back to his drinking.

Barrows drinks a lot on Sunday night, doesn't he?