The question is how loud his shout was. Did I hear a moment’s pause in the clink of cutlery and buzz of voices from out in the restaurant? It was a bizarre sound he produced, the chef. A shout and a retching sound which was also like a bleat from the mouth of a sheep. Muzzle. The snout of a sheep? That’s how he bleated. Did they hear it? I try to sigh but can’t get the air all the way in, and I produce a strained hiss instead of the deep housewife’s sigh I wanted to make. The blister is empty and has become a pale flap of skin instead of a potent, full blister.
“What do we do now?” I say.
“You’ll have to put gauze on it; otherwise you’ll tear the skin.”
“Do we have any gauze?”
“Maybe a bit. In the wardrobe.”
I have to get going. The Pig is waiting, Widow Knipschild’s glass is still empty. She needs her Niepoort. She’ll get so much Niepoort. And the Pig: Does he want to see the dessert menu, or does he want to tease and agitate me with abstract questions about Sellers and rare works of art? I squeeze past the chef, go over to the old yellow medicine cabinet in the wardrobe, and apply a double compress over the skin flap. I’m terrible at applying compresses; it ends up lopsided and loose. I wrap what little gauze there is around my hand. It really is an amateurish attempt. What kind of provocation is he up to, the Pig? With the Niepoort in my good hand, I go out through the swing doors, back into the restaurant, back to the guests. The Pig turns to me—ugh. He holds my gaze. The Child Lady also looks up. Ugh. Widow Knipschild stares at me with those gray eyeballs, waiting, hoping for the bottle of Niepoort. I go to her first. I hold the Niepoort high, almost level with my breastbone, so that there’s no doubt in Widow Knipschild’s mind what is about to happen.
It’s generous, the serving I give her. I don’t stop. I fill it to the brim.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” she says.
Then the Pig.
“You’re busy?” he says.
I recognize it well, around my right eye, the tension. I don’t know what my right eye has to do with my emotional state, but it’s always around my right eye that it appears. “It” appears. What does? Distaste. Anxiety. Tension.
“How was the food?” I ask.
“Wonderful,” says the Pig.
“And the mushrooms did the job?” I say to the Child Lady. She giggles. “That depends which job they were supposed to do.” Blaise chuckles. Which job were the mushrooms supposed to do? Who knows. They were supposed to do the mushroom job, I guess. I will not try to be funny now. Unhappiness makes reliable consumers, Edgar often says. That also applies to the Child Lady. She smiles a childlike smile, but she’s not fooling me. How many squadrons of riot police are needed for the Child Lady to smile like a child? I make use of my only defense, the standard phrases.
“Can I tempt you with anything sweet?”
My left hand is firmly behind my back to avoid waving the gauze bandage in the guests’ faces. A compress placed over a wound isn’t exactly what you want to see while you’re tucking into char, a tart, or bouillabaisse. The only problem is that my back is turned to the watchful Sellers and company while I talk to the Pig: my hand is on show, so to speak; it’s illuminated no matter which way I turn. I can almost feel Sellers and his group’s eyes burning on the compress and the loose flap beneath it while I try to tend to the Pig. Sellers is so conflict oriented. I mean, not in a persistent, crude way, but in the intelligent double or triple way which, I want to say, is worse than one single, inappropriate, simple, embarrassing outburst. I turn to him.
“Everything OK out in the kitchen?” Sellers says ambiguously.
“Oh yes.”
“Just let us know if you need any help.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I say.
“Oh, well,” says Sellers. “Just let us know.”
“Anything else to drink?” I ask.
“Have you lost weight?”
Sometimes, as I’m serving or taking orders, I become aware of my own stooping. My stoop. There are no extenuating circumstances around being stooped, but there can, seen from a particular angle, be something about stooping which fits well with being a waiter. There’s plenty of leaning forward in this job. I’m bent over Sellers’s table right now. It might not look completely crazy for a waiter, but we’re talking about a serious stoop here. I stoop more when the situation weighs.
“I’ve been the same weight since I was nineteen,” I say.
“Good age. Nineteen. The evenings. The oomph,” Sellers says ambiguously.
It’s just a case of getting away. I’ve signaled that Vanessa should take the dessert and coffee orders from the Pig’s table. What will it be? Vanessa manages to mess it up. She can’t keep track of a single cortado, a double espresso, a double cortado, and a single americano. She has to ask again. Were both cortados doubles? No, just the one. And the americanos? Single? Yes. And a double espresso, no? “This shouldn’t be so difficult,” says Blaise. And he says it in a slightly prissy manner. He snaps slightly; there’s a sting to what he says. A sting which is heard a bit too far away. The observant Sellers and his table are very sensitive to snapping and prissiness. They might be endlessly indifferent to their own appearance, to the unease they consistently bring with them, but other people’s snapping, stinging—particularly if it is directed “downwards, from above,” as they say—well, that’s going to be noticed. A snap of the kind Blaise serves to Vanessa is seen as crude by Sellers and his group, I know that. I know them well. Blaise is, as described, particularly well maintained. Crudeness becomes proportionally cruder depending on how well groomed the supplier of the crudeness is. As a result, the crudeness he casts out becomes utterly piggish in Sellers’s and Bratland’s ears. There will be consequences, I fear.
Sellers would never attack with anything but his vocabulary. Tricks and cons in an emergency. He waves Vanessa over and calmly reels off what he wants. Vanessa nods despairingly. It’s a lot to remember. She goes to the bar and immediately returns with a number of coffees, plus a stack of hors d’oeuvres on a serving tray. It almost seems like she won’t be able to carry it. She approaches Sellers first and puts down two of the coffees, but Sellers corrects her and she takes them back, not without effort, then carries the whole overfilled tray to the Pig’s table and sets them out, one by one, plus a total of seven bowls of fennel salami; the Pig’s company is silent while she works. And once the slightly thrall-looking Vanessa is finished, there are nine double americanos and one Turkish coffee on table ten, in addition to all the salami. Vanessa studies the table. What has she done?
“Johansen!” Sellers shouts.
The playing stops.
“Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht!”
Johansen fires up Bach’s Coffee Cantata.
•
No blows are dealt, of course, but there are ripples on the water. Blaise gets up and goes over to Sellers’s table. Bratland, confrontational as he is, gets up to meet Blaise. They stand there, uneasily close to one another. Bratland is a good ten centimeters shorter than Blaise, Blaise is seven miles ahead when it comes to attire.
“Is this your coffee order?” says Blaise.
“I order coffee from time to time,” says Bratland.
“Is it his?” Blaise points to Sellers.
“What’s wrong with coffee?” says Bratland.
“What?”
“The tycoon’s out strolling?”
“What’s going on?” says Blaise.
“Manners. They apply to you, too. You’re in a restaurant.”
“Come again?”
Blaise holds out his arms and glances around as though searching for confirmation of the absurdities coming out of Bratland. He doesn’t get a thing. Perplexed, Vanessa begins to move coffees and fennel salami from the Pig’s table back to Sellers’s. The Maître d’ and I approach the two parties from different directions; he asks them to pull themselves together. Bratland doesn’t care about that, but Blaise yields, gentleman that he is. He takes a st
ep back. I place a hand between Bratland’s shoulders to pacify him, but Bratland twists like a teenager.
“Shame!” he says, pointing a finger at Blaise.
The Maître d’ takes Blaise by the upper arm and places his other hand on the back of his polished neck. He steers the fragrant man back to the Pig’s table. Will Bratland give in now? Ack, he grabs a piece of salami from one of the bowls of hors d’oeuvres. But before he has time to throw it at Blaise or the Child Lady, or eat it, or do whatever it is he’s planning to do, Sellers swats his hand, making him drop it. I shout a firm “Hey!” The fennel salami flies in a gentle arc, straight into the glass of the lovely little Isa Genzken assemblage hanging to the right of table fifteen before falling behind the almost monstrous radiator which stands there with its countless layers of peeling glossy varnish. The Maître d’ reacts strongly, with a jolt, a spasm.
“Watch the Genzken!” he says, pointing firmly at the artwork.
The fennel salami leaves a greasy mark on the glass. Sellers squints. He’s enjoying this. It looks like he’s trying to focus on the grease on the Genzken. He’s trying to get the fat in focus, to take it in.
NEZ
“YOU CLEAN THE GENZKEN,” THE Maître d’ says, his voice thick.
I go straight into the kitchen to get the spray. The chef looks up at me from his flambéing. He probably heard the commotion out there, but doesn’t ask; he never asks. He has an ability, the chef, to know exactly what’s going on in the restaurant without being there himself. And while I’m wiping, the Pig comes over and asks whether the picture is OK. Sure, it’s fine. It’s just grease. And then he’s at it again. He wants to talk. It was a bit unfortunate, he says, this episode. Because it was Sellers he wanted me to introduce him to. It so happens that Blaise has come across an artwork they need someone with competence to look at. And it should be someone who—how to put it? says the Pig. Someone who will give it a look under the table. Sellers is competent, so they’ve heard. That may be, I say dismissively. I don’t want to run this through restaurant management, says the Pig. It would be best if you, being a waiter, could introduce me to Sellers, says the Pig. Completely without obligation.
I decline. It’s way beyond my scope, I say. I don’t want to get mixed up in this. Take it up with the General Manager (M. Hill). But you don’t understand, says the Pig. Blaise has a real gem at his place—yes, he has one of Hans Holbein the Younger’s small portrait sketches there: not one of the most famous; a small, bleak one, but it’s a Holbein all the same; one of the Tudor drawings, no more, no less—and the Pig needs to get a conversation about it under way, with someone suitably discreet. Something the Pig assumes Sellers is. Blaise is thinking about donating it. No thanks, I say again. Holbein? No, no. I say it straight: You’ll have to do that yourself, Graham. I don’t want to get mixed up in this. But I need an introduction, says the Pig. The Pig is old-school: he demands an introduction. Then you’ll have to introduce yourself, I say, surprised by my own directness.
With that, the Pig leaves. Blaise struts off through the curtain with market liberal steps. The Child Lady remains. I’m still double-checking that the Genzken is grease-free. The Maître d’ is in the middle of the room. He has paused, as rigid as a stone. The Maître d’s face—which, even to begin with, has that drinker’s glow, that unhealthy hue—has turned an even deeper shade after what just occurred. I think the Child Lady should leave. She should have the decency to leave the establishment and allow the dust to settle. But instead she hangs around like a bacillus. She moves, that’s true, but only to a different table, to one of the smaller marble tops by the entrance. I wish she were gone. I wish she had never stepped her fancy foot in here. How can we push her out?
Sellers looks absent, with a thousand-yard stare, seemingly unaffected by the unpleasantries which just took place. His group orders new rounds of Moretti—all but Bratland, who insists on the dumb California chardonnay. It’s gone four, almost half past. Here Edgar comes, holding the curtain to one side for Anna, who slips in beneath his arm, radiantly cheerful, with her sweet child’s face in the middle of her head, if I can put it like that. Does she sense the toxic atmosphere? Should I escort her chaste, guiltless soul right back out?
“Hi!” she says to me. Edgar is also in a mood.
“Do your homework, Anna,” he says.
Anna pulls out her books with a complete lack of complaint: she starts immediately, with no hesitation; it truly is inspiring to see how she buckles down without beating about the bush. All that back-and-forth—what’s it good for? I hold the hand with the bandage close to my left thigh.
“Dad says you’re good at piano.”
“Not at all,” I say. “I’ve never played piano. What homework do you have?”
“Maths.”
“What kind of maths?”
“Geometry.”
“Oh, that’s easy.”
“Yeah . . . but the compass wobbles when I try to draw circles. It’s loose.”
“Let’s see.”
I catch a slight whiff of pencil case as she pulls it out. The mix of pencil and eraser has the distinct smell of school. So they’re still doing it. Pencils and erasers. It won’t last. Nothing does. I take the compass; it is fairly slack, and a loose compass joint is, as everyone knows, frustrating. Grotesque, even. A compass is anything but a compass when it’s loose.
“I’ll ask the chef to tighten it,” I say.
The chef nods mutely in the kitchen and tightens the compass screw with the tip of his most expensive Henckels knife before turning back to the careful frying of beef tournedos. I don’t smell the chef’s cooking anymore, but I know that this dish in particular has an exceptional scent. But God help me if I haven’t forgotten to add both the tournedos and the coq au vin to the board of recommendations. I grab a piece of chalk from the bowl behind the spool of butcher’s twine. As I walk through the restaurant, Bratland shouts “Rach!” loudly, which means that Old Johansen switches to Rachmaninoff up on the mezzanine, the internal balcony, and Piano Concerto no. 3 it is, Bratland’s favorite. I take the Morettis and the chardonnay and let them land, as quickly as three tits on a bird table, beneath the noses of Bratland, Raymond, and Sellers. Then I hand the compass to Anna.
“What’s going on?” says Edgar.
“ ‘Going on’?” I raise an eyebrow and try to hold my face steady; I try dragging it in the opposite direction to the downwards pull caused by the strain.
“You look a bit harried.”
“We had a slight situation.”
“A situation?”
“A slight situation.”
“I see.”
Edgar doesn’t have much patience for my noncommunicative tendencies. He shrugs. Anna is busy drawing perfect circles with the newly tightened compass. From the corner of my eye, I can see that the Child Lady has flagged down the inexperienced Vanessa. She spends a while talking to her; it seems like more than an order. What is she planting in Vanessa now? What seeds, which ideas?
“Anna’s worked out what she wants to be,” says Edgar.
“Oh yeah?” I say. “A geometricist?”
“There’s no such thing as a geometricist,” says Anna.
“What do you want to be, then?”
“A perfumist.”
“A perfumist?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no such thing as a perfumist,” I say.
“I want to work in a perfume shop.”
“You want to be a perfume shop employee?”
“Yes.”
“That’s something different to a perfumist.”
“OK, a perfume shop employee, then.”
“If there’s such a thing as a perfumist, it must be someone who makes perfume,” I say.
“They’re called perfumers,” says Edgar.
“Yes, of course.”
“Or nez.”
“Nez. French for ‘nose.’ Someone with a good sense of smell,” says Edgar.
“I don�
��t want to be a nez,” says Anna. “I want to work in a perfume shop.”
“Why’s that?”
“The people working there are so cheerful.”
“That’s true,” says Edgar. “They are.”
“You want to be cheerful,” I say.
“Yes,” says Anna. “That’s what happens when you work in a perfume shop.”
“I suppose it is.”
Edgar explains that they were in a perfume shop the other day. It had struck him (them) how incredibly positive the woman working there was. She was so unbelievably cheerful, he says, and Anna agrees.
“You should sell something which smells good and makes people glad,” says Edgar.
“That’s nice.” Anna nods.
“We talked about it afterwards,” says Edgar, “about how cheerful and nice she was. Same thing at Anna’s orthodontist. The woman behind the counter is so boundlessly positive. You should fit braces to teeth so they become straight and inviting. You should do the job really well and no more, but no less, either. You should be in a position to send people home with straight teeth or smelling nice. And then you could head off at the weekend to the cabin or some other nice place as fast as your feet can carry you. Ideally every weekend. And on top of that, you should focus intensely on holidays and celebrations. Get completely into the Christmas preparations. Decorate without restraint. Master Christmas. Go crazy with Easter eggs and decorative birch twigs when the time comes. I think that’s a source of happiness. Seriously.”
“What did you buy at the perfume shop?” I ask.
Edgar draws it out.
“Something for a friend.”
“Well, what do you know,” I say.
“Musk,” says Anna.
“Musk?”
I know who all of Edgar’s female friends are. He isn’t buying musk for any of them, that much is certain. This is interesting. The musk is left hanging in the air alongside everything else that’s already hanging in the air. There’s so much hanging in the air. Is there ever nothing hanging in the air?
The Waiter Page 8