Three-Martini Lunch

by Suzanne Rindell

  I couldn’t tell her about what I was typing because I didn’t want to explain about how I’d gone up to Harlem to see Miles. I was still disappointed that it hadn’t gone as I’d pictured it would and that things with Miles were still tense. In any case, for now she knew nothing about any of that Miles business and she smiled at me from across the room, happy I was feeling creative again and that I’d gone back to writing while I waited to hear back from My Old Man about the novel I’d sent him.

  “All right,” she said. “Let me know if you need me to get a new ribbon.”

  “I will,” I said.

  59

  Finally the day for my lunch with My Old Man arrived. The weather was beginning to turn cold in earnest just then and as I roamed the streets of midtown on my way to Keen’s, half the people I passed looked chilled and stiff in their fall jackets and the other half looked warm and stuffed, bundled into their bulky winter overcoats. The city was electric with the energy of late fall. Cold bluish light filled the narrow triangle of Herald Square and pigeons stalked around in jerky, pointless circles pecking at bits of discarded paper. The air was laced with the peculiar sweet yet burnt smell of roasted chestnuts.

  I was the first to arrive at Keen’s and the maître d’ walked me through the dark wood-paneled dining room to my father’s usual table under a grim portrait of a man in a wig who must have been important to New York in some way back in the day and who looked like George Washington but was not George Washington. I’d woken up with a strong case of nerves that morning so I’d decided to walk the whole way up from the Village and I’d smoked a bit of tea during my walk and now that I was sitting down it really started to hit me. The tea was doing a number on my head and I sat there lost in the beautiful blankness of the white tablecloth until I looked up and saw My Old Man crossing the room towards me.

  “I’ve never known you to be early.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, no one’s perfect,” I said. I don’t know why I said that, but it seemed like a witty thing to say at the time, but as soon as I said it I could tell neither of us knew how I had meant it. I was beginning to think maybe I’d gone a little overboard on the tea, which started to panic me because I thought my father would see it in my eyes and I’d be busted for sure. I had doubted he would smell it because Keen’s was very famous as a place where men went to smoke pipes and all around us men who had finished with their lunches were lighting up. I realized I was getting paranoid and needed to calm down. I reasoned with myself that there was nothing I could do about it now except to play it cool and anyway My Old Man seemed significantly less interested in my eyes than he was in the menu. He put on his reading glasses and disappeared behind the enormous rectangle of oversized card stock.

  “Don’t you have that thing memorized by now?” I asked. “And anyway, isn’t the point that everyone orders steak here?” I was trying to be jolly and I’d said it in a jokey way and meant it as a friendly comment, but for some reason My Old Man wasn’t in a very good humor that day.

  “They have different cuts,” he said. “And don’t be insolent, Clifford. If I’m looking at the menu, it’s for a reason. Trust me, with all the reading I do for a living, I don’t go around looking to read things for no reason.”

  I hadn’t expected him to snap at me like that and I could see no source for it, but it shut me up pretty good for the next few minutes. I wondered if I wasn’t going to be getting bad news about the draft I’d given him. But I told myself this was just my paranoia talking and that I needed to calm down and let the lunch unfold. I was dying to cut to the chase, but after our exchange about the menu it would’ve been terrible to bring the subject of my pages up. And I knew enough about My Old Man to let him be the one to bring it up first. Besides, it was better to get to him after he’d had two or three martinis and not a second earlier.

  I waited patiently while our lunch dragged on. At that point the tea really had made me lose all sense of time and it seemed like ages before our steak came and then another century before the creamed spinach we’d ordered finally showed up, but luckily the waiter was very attentive with the martinis and they came one after another in generous-sized glasses with lots of green olives. By the time the dessert cart rolled around, the tea had all but worn off and had been thoroughly replaced with a gin buzz. I ordered bananas Foster. They brought out the bananas and we looked on while a waiter poured rum over the top and lit it on fire and then dumped the whole thing over vanilla ice cream. I don’t know why I ordered it. I usually don’t like bananas; I think I just wanted to see the fire. Besides, I had a sweet tooth from all the marijuana I’d smoked and I didn’t want to be sitting there nervous with nothing in front of me while My Old Man smoked.

  As a general rule, My Old Man never ordered dessert at Keen’s. Instead he handed over his little membership card and the waiter sent someone up to fetch down his pipe. They were funny when they brought out people’s pipes. They always put it on a silver platter and draped a purple napkin over it, and then when they got to the table they whipped the napkin off like they were performing some kind of magic trick. This made me laugh a bit because it wasn’t like the guy being presented with the pipe was ever surprised by what was under the napkin; he owned the damned thing, for crying out loud. I wondered if they had ever brought someone the wrong pipe, because then it really would be a surprise.

  In any case, they brought out My Old Man’s pipe and pulled off the purple cloth and he picked it up and proceeded to light up.

  “About your pages,” he said, leaning back and puffing on the pipe.

  “My submission. The novel draft,” I said, not so much to correct him as to remind him how big my ambitions were and how seriously I was taking things.

  “Yes,” he said. I waited while he puffed some more. “I’ll be frank . . . it’s half-baked at best.”

  “Well, of course,” I said. “It’s not finished yet.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “The point is the potential.”

  “I agree,” My Old Man said. “The point is the potential. And I have to tell you, Clifford, I’m not entirely convinced it has that.”

  My mouth fell open. “No potential?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t see it.”

  I blinked at him or at least I think I blinked at him but the combination of having smoked a lot of tea and having been unexpectedly ambushed probably meant I only sat there wide-eyed and staring.

  “There,” he said affably. “Now I’ve gone and said it and we can get on with our afternoon. You know, I’m just as uncomfortable about this as you are, Clifford—perhaps even more so. Fathers don’t like to have to be the bearer of such news.”

  “No potential?” I repeated.

  “I can tell you’re disappointed, but it’s time you took it on the chin like a man.”

  “You’re . . . you’re jealous,” I said with sudden revelation. “You wanted to be a writer when you were my age but you didn’t cut it and now you can see I’ve got the balls you haven’t. I’m the one who’s a writer!”

  All at once his hand struck the table with a violent slap and his voice turned mean as hell. “Insult me all you want, Clifford, but I’ve built a successful career on being able to tell a writer from a beatnik, and I’m sorry to be the one to say it, but no, Clifford, you’re not a writer, and you should face the very real possibility you never will be.”

  “Well, gee, Pops. Don’t beat around the bush because you’re worried you might hurt my feelings.”

  He said nothing and instead smoothed the tablecloth and began glancing furtively around the restaurant and I could tell he was trying to determine whether anyone he knew had witnessed our argument.

  “Thanks for the swell lunch,” I said, and put my napkin on the table and walked out. I had tried to deliver the line with dignity and disdain but it came out sounding like the kind of sarcastic comeback a spoiled brat would dish out.

/>   • • •

  I’d been looking forward to Keen’s for the better part of a week and now things had gone completely pear-shaped but that wasn’t even the worst of it, if you can believe it. After I left My Old Man, I went straight down to the Cedar Tavern and ordered up some god-awful Wild Turkey and once Mitch, the bartender, had poured it for me I told him he might as well leave the bottle. He shot me a look of pity but didn’t say anything, only left the bottle on the bar and I promptly took it over to a booth in the corner and hunkered down, ready to drown my sorrows.

  The funny thing about the Village back in those days was everyone was always barhopping and if you were a Village kid and you sat around the same bar long enough you would eventually see all the other Village kids as they made their rounds. Sure enough, after I’d been drinking for a while, in walked Bobby and Pal and with them I noticed Gene and another fella. It was a gloomy day and I was kind of hunched up low in a booth, and they sat in another booth right behind me and never saw me.

  I was in a foul mood of course and already drunk to boot so I wasn’t exactly eager for company and I took a minute before getting up to say hello. I heard Gene’s friend ask him about how Gene was making out with The Tuning Fork. My ears perked up. My father had belittled my novel draft, but there was still the story that had run in The Tuning Fork and I figured I had that to my credit, at least.

  “It’s difficult to say,” Gene answered the other fella. “The copies I put out around the Village were all snapped up but part of the point in creating the journal was to get the attention of the publishing houses and see if I couldn’t influence their taste here and there.”

  “It was a very nice-looking issue,” Pal said, in typical Pal fashion.

  “Yeah, it was nice-looking, and the content was top-shelf,” the friend said. “Except for that terrible piece by that one fella.”

  “Which one?” Gene asked.

  “The Hemingway imitator. Some sort of terrible prep school drivel about a guy and his girl at a baseball game. I don’t know why you took it.”

  “I know . . . but there was a reason for that,” Gene said. “The guy who wrote it is Roger Nelson’s kid.”

  “You mean Roger Nelson, the editor at Bonwright? His son?”

  “Cliff,” Bobby chimed in. “His name is Cliff.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Gene said, nodding to Bobby and Pal. “You two are buddies of his.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. I waited for him to really give it to old Gene, but when he continued all he said was “But, say, you were wasting your time if you wanted to get to Roger Nelson through his son. Cliff and his old man are like cats and dogs.”

  “I didn’t know that when I took the piece,” Gene said, “or I wouldn’t have taken it. I thought if I printed Cliff’s story his father would be sure to read it, and even if his son was a hack he might see some of the other fellas’ work and they’d get exposure that way.”

  I waited a few minutes for Bobby—or even Pal, though Pal was not known for confrontation—to really lay into Gene and tell him where he could go, but as the conversation moved on to other subjects I realized I was waiting for nothing. Bobby wasn’t going to defend me and neither was Pal and maybe this was because all the while when they were telling me what a swell guy I was and how they believed I would someday be a writer if I kept at it, they hadn’t believed in me after all.

  Talk about kicking a fella while he’s down. I sat there not moving and barely breathing as they talked and drank until finally they pushed off to the next place.

  EDEN

  60

  Cliff was in a state. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what had happened. At work, Mr. Nelson had handled Cliff’s manuscript submission privately. After I spotted it on Mr. Nelson’s desk, I never saw it again. But between the two of them, I had my ear to the ground well enough to know they’d been scheduled for lunch that afternoon. Having typed the manuscript myself, and knowing that Cliff brought out his father’s harsh streak, I could only imagine what Mr. Nelson had said.

  So I was hardly surprised to come home from work that day to an empty apartment. I assumed Cliff was likely out drowning his sorrows, raising a ruckus with Swish or else Bobby and Pal, running around the Village like a madman. I didn’t care for Cliff’s destructive tendencies—which were becoming more and more a dominant part of his personality these days—but in this case I at least understood and felt sympathy for the impulse. I hoped, whatever he was up to, he could get it out of his system, lick his wounds, and carry on. It turned out my hopes were misguided, or at the very least terribly naïve, for his father’s rejection sent Cliff into a blind rage more terrible than any I’d previously witnessed. I had a very dim premonition of what was to come. I went through my usual routine of fixing a little snack for dinner, reading, and cleaning. The radiators were on too hot that night, I remember. I had just opened the window to air out the room and was getting ready for bed when Cliff suddenly came thundering through the door, even more rip-roaring drunk than I’d expected.

  “To hell w’th ’em!” he hollered in a slurred voice. “To hell w’th ’em ALL!”

  “Clifford!” I screamed as he dropped an empty bottle and glass flew everywhere.

  “And YOU,” he said, as though, upon hearing my scream, he’d suddenly noticed my presence in the room. He lifted a finger and pointed it in my face. “To hell with you most of all!” He lurched, his head swayed, and his attention fell upon the little card table where the Smith Corona sat. He suddenly seized the typewriter and, in one gut-muscled heave, threw it out the open window. I watched it fly with wide eyes, too surprised to make a peep, and heard the strange crunch and clatter of the typewriter as it hit the pavement outside. Cliff wasn’t quite done yet, however. Next he pulled open a dresser drawer and reached for the stacks of pages within. Page after page, everything he’d ever written and everything I’d ever typed up for him, went into the metal bucket we kept as a wastebasket.

  “There!” he shouted. “Now everything’s ’xactly where it should be!” He flopped down on the mattress. “To hell w’th ’em. To hell w’th ’em all,” he muttered into the pillow. Several minutes later I heard the telltale guttural growl of a snore.

  I unfroze and went to the window. Poking my head out, I saw that the typewriter was beyond salvaging. Luckily, the window looked down onto a small alleyway between our building and the next; therefore no one had been maimed as a result of his tantrum. I swept the broken glass into a dustpan. Then I crossed the room to the wastebasket, sighed, and began pulling Cliff’s pages out.

  I was in the midst of sorting and stacking Cliff’s manuscripts back into neat piles, when I got the second surprise of the night. One of the manuscripts caught my eye. I didn’t recognize it. It was significantly longer than most of the other things Cliff had written, a body of work that—except for the aborted novel manuscript his father had likely rejected earlier that afternoon—mostly consisted of half-finished short stories and the occasional poem.

  I began to read, right there, transfixed while in the middle of cleaning the floor, and soon couldn’t put it down.

  I don’t know where or how the story had come to him. The last thing I’d ever expected him to be able to write about and portray with such eloquence was the story of a father and a son. I knew there were sometimes writers who had rich inner lives, who could write out of a keen sense of imagined empathy; now, for the first time, it was clear Cliff possessed that gift. I reread the pages several times, startled, and increasingly convinced that here was the novel we had all been waiting for, a novel that wasn’t only about the war but about the next generation—our generation—picking up the pieces afterwards. It was truthful, it was poetic, and most important . . . it was publishable.

  • • •

  The next morning I got up per my usual routine. Cliff was still snoring. By that point the scent of bourbon had begun to sweat throu
gh his pores. I didn’t envy him the headache he would have, but I knew of at least one thing I could do that might make it better. I tiptoed about, laying out breakfast, and then left for work with the manuscript tucked neatly in my bag.

  MILES

  61

  I was frantic, but had no clue what to do about it. There was no way to know where or when my composition book had gone missing. Common wisdom dictates that, when you lose something, it’s best to retrace your steps. Unfortunately, being a bicycle messenger meant these steps stretched over the entire length of Manhattan, from the top of the island to the bottom, not to mention from the East River to the Hudson. It could have slipped out of my bag at any time, perhaps as I carelessly deposited and extracted packages and envelopes throughout the course of the day.

  I thought, too, perhaps it had fallen out at the coffee shop where I had met Cliff. But when I went back the next morning to inquire about it, the man behind the soda counter only shrugged and said, “Sorry, pal, no one’s seen anything like that.” If Cliff had picked it up, he would have returned it to me, I reasoned—wouldn’t he? I wasn’t entirely sure of this conclusion. He had seemed friendly enough, but I didn’t trust him. His cagey behavior unnerved me, and our conversation had amounted to little more than a superficial exchange. I couldn’t understand why he had come all the way up to Harlem to see me, unless it was to assuage a conscience I wasn’t entirely convinced he possessed. I went down to the Village and tried ringing his buzzer, then made a half-hearted search of all the regular bars he haunted, but couldn’t find him. Swish, Bobby, and Pal hadn’t seen him, either.

  • • •

  In the bigger scheme of things, I suppose I ought to have been grateful: I hadn’t lost my father’s journal, only my composition book. I brought the composition book along with me sometimes, just in case I had a spare moment between deliveries and remembered something from my childhood about my father that I felt like jotting down.