A Place at the Table: A Novel

by Susan Rebecca White

  Kate stands from the table. “Amelia, dear, are you okay?”

  “Oh my God,” says the wet woman. “I’m so sorry. I thought you and Jack were just having lunch. I didn’t realize you were in the middle of an event.”

  I glance around at the awkward group of people seated at our table. “Event” seems too festive a word for this dreary little gathering.

  “Everyone, this is my darling niece, Amelia,” says Kate. Though her tone is upbeat, she looks agitated.

  “Sweetie, would you like to join us for lunch? Bobby’s food is out of this world.”

  Though I revel in Kate’s praise, I balk at her extending an invitation to this woman. I don’t think Amelia is going to make the talk around the table any easier. But then my southern hosting instincts kick in, and I stand, summoning my hardiest enthusiasm. “Yes, join us! Let me get you some towels so you can dry off. You must be freezing! Would you like some coffee? Or something stronger? A glass of Champagne? Some wine?”

  “Oh God, I’d love a towel. Thank you. And no, I’m not going to interrupt your lunch any more than I already have. I’ll just dry off and be on my way. I’m so sorry for interrupting.”

  When I return from the kitchen with a couple of clean dish towels, Kate and Amelia have moved farther away from our table, toward the corner of the restaurant that houses Gus’s startling white statue of Venus de Milo. Kate’s hand rests protectively on the arm of her niece, who is crying. I stand a few feet away from them, holding the towels, not wanting to interrupt but not wanting to eavesdrop, either.

  “Cam says I’m overreacting, of course. He says she’s just an old friend, that it’s completely innocent. They went to high school together, at Coventry, and you know how Cam is about that damn place; he’s prouder of having gone there than UVA. But I’m justified in being upset, right? I mean, it’s not normal to invite a single woman to stay at your house while your wife and daughters are in New York, is it?”

  “It would certainly upset me,” says Kate.

  I step in a bit closer to the two of them, holding the towels in front of me like an offering. I am embarrassed by how much of their conversation I have already overheard.

  Amelia glances at me, surprised, as if she had not noticed me hovering on the periphery.

  “Oh, thank you,” she says, taking a towel and dabbing at her eyes, before methodically squeezing it through her wet ringlets. “I’m so sorry I interrupted your lunch. What a mess I am.”

  She glances at her watch. “Shit. The girls are at their art class at the Met, but it ends in about twenty-five minutes. I should head up there to pick them up. I was feeling so nostalgic after I dropped them off earlier today that I went back to your apartment and called Cam. I wanted to reminisce about that first year of our marriage, when we were still living in the city. God, what a mistake. You know, I almost wish I didn’t know, that I could have just stayed innocent of all of this. But now that I do know—what should I do? Pack up and return to Connecticut today? Lay claim to my husband? Play like everything is normal and fix dinner for our houseguest?”

  “Amelia, you are not going to fix that woman dinner,” says Kate. “That’s insane. You and the girls are going to stay in the city tonight. Let yourself calm down. You can go home tomorrow if you want. Tonight let’s do something mindless and easy. Get Chinese food and go to a movie, something like that.”

  “Can we sneak a flask of vodka in with us?” asks Amelia.

  “Yes, dear, we can.”

  Amelia smiles grimly at her aunt, then hands me the now wet dish towel.

  “Please pretend a crazy woman never burst in here,” she says. “Just let everything return to its original loveliness.”

  • • •

  Kate walks Amelia out and then rejoins us at the table. As soon as she sits down she rolls her eyes toward her husband. “Cam again.”

  “Poor Amelia,” says Jack.

  “Yes, well, I apologize to everyone for the interruption. That was certainly unexpected.”

  “That was your niece?” asks Alice. This is the first time she has really spoken all afternoon.

  “Yes. My sister’s daughter,” says Kate. She presses her lips together as if she wants to say something else but is choosing not to in order to honor her niece’s privacy, though all of us around the table, whether we overheard Amelia’s dilemma or not, recognize that the woman is, as Meemaw would say, “in one hot mess of a situation.”

  “She’s a pretty girl,” says Alice.

  “She is pretty,” says Kate, and then everyone is silent for a moment, thinking of how to change the subject.

  “I hope folks saved room for dessert,” I say. I am eager to show off the banana pudding. I made a tester one for myself the other night and it was even better than I had imagined it would be, the pieces of toasted pound cake having soaked up the rich vanilla custard.

  “I’m going to have to pass,” says Alice. “I woke up with a headache this morning and it’s only gotten worse.”

  “Stay for dessert,” chides Gus. “The sugar might help your head.”

  “I can’t,” she says, standing. “But Kate, you and Jack stay. No need to cut your lunch short just because of me. Now, where is my bag?”

  Under normal circumstances I would jump up and get it for her, but I feel too dejected, too bitter. Would it kill her to be gracious? Would it kill her to acknowledge the effort that went into putting this meal together?

  Gus rises from the table and fetches Alice her weathered brown leather satchel. Alice leaves the restaurant to our mumbled good-byes. An air of defeat settles over us.

  Truman Capote, of course, fails to make an appearance.

  10

  Hostess Gift

  (New York City, 1982)

  It was Gus who introduced me to Sebastian, setting us up to meet at The Bow Tie, a fussy place not too far from Café Andres that is filled with men in May-December romances. When Gus first suggested I date someone in his forties, I balked, insisting that I was not interested in dating some sort of daddy. But Gus argued that I was an old soul and that dating someone my own age would bore and annoy me. I suppose I was flattered by his evaluation, though I was certainly not flattered when I first saw Sebastian. To be honest, I was insulted.

  Which is to say Sebastian is not, on first glance, attractive. His nose is bent at the end as if someone grabbed hold of it and twisted. And he’s got bug eyes behind thick glasses. Plus, he’s short, just under five-seven. But after spending five minutes with him, I forgot all of that. After five minutes I thought: I want to talk with this man forever. Maybe because he gave me all of his attention. Maybe because he’s traveled everywhere, met everyone, had a million interesting jobs. Right now he’s a curator at the Guggenheim, but he’s done so much else, including having produced several off-Broadway shows. With all of his accomplishments, he might be vain, arrogant. But he’s not. He’s got this great, peppy attitude, kind of like Meemaw. It’s as if he wakes up each morning ready to be delighted. And every time he eats something I have prepared for him, he acts as if he has just discovered his sense of taste. “Oh, Bobby,” he will murmur, and I will feel myself expand.

  And then there’s his Medusa hair, which I love: bright, black and silver coils that spring from his head, then flop in different directions. When he becomes animated in conversation he starts running his hand through his curls. Something about that gesture makes me want to get him right into bed.

  • • •

  I admit, our relationship has moved fast. After two months I pretty much moved into his three-bedroom apartment at the Belthorp, a glorious old building on West 88th that is in a state of total disrepair. Sebastian pays six hundred dollars a month for his three-bedroom, two-bath (crumbling) palace. For that privilege he gleefully takes the stairs when the elevator is out and sets mousetraps around the apartment to avoid the pretense of calling the super, who will not respond.

  “Never underestimate the tenacity of an Upper West Sider with rent con
trol,” Sebastian likes to say.

  Despite having mostly moved in with Sebastian, I have kept my studio. I pay the rent there while Sebastian pays the rent at the Belthorp. Sebastian calls the studio my laboratory because I go there to cook and work on recipes. I’ve become obsessed with translating old southern classics into dishes Upper East Siders can understand, simple tweaks such as topping chicken pot pie with puff pastry or frying grouper the way Meemaw fried catfish, but also more daring variations: a chess pie crème brûlé or a pimento cheese soufflé. I think of this as “stealth” southern cuisine, and I have to say, it’s bringing in a surprising number of customers. Or rather, the recent write-up we got in the Times is bringing in the customers, which called me “a dazzling young chef, barely out of short pants, who has breathed new life into a fading beauty of a restaurant.”

  Gus was both thrilled and annoyed by the write-up. “Are they implying that I am a fading beauty?” he quipped.

  Ironically, it was immediately after our disastrous lunch with Alice that Gus gave me autonomy in the kitchen. Kate, Jack, and Randy had left—having devoured my banana pudding—and I was just sitting at the table, head down, feeling as if I had fallen into a dark hole. Gus stood behind me and put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Don’t fret over Alice,” he said. “I love her, but she’s always been mercurial. Once, years and years ago, before Café Andres was even in existence, I slighted her while we were decorating a window at Saks by making the tiniest suggestion about how she could rearrange a mannequin’s fox stole. She abruptly claimed some sort of emergency and just walked off the job. Could not handle even the tiniest critique! At least not that day. A month later I forgave her and asked her to help me design a window at Bonwit Teller. It was an important job, and I needed her eye. Because when she’s on, nobody is better. But Bobby, darling, she was wrong to walk out today. Your meal was superb. And I’d love to see what else you can come up with. So, shall we make it official? Hand you the toque? Not that I’m ready to abandon my post in the kitchen entirely, but I’d love to have you come in and cook two or three nights a week, and take over half the lunches. That way Randy won’t be able to complain so tirelessly about how much I work.”

  And so what began as a disaster of a day turned into a triumph. Or as Sebastian (who has New Age leanings) would say: The universe delivered me a beautiful gift wrapped in hideous packaging.

  • • •

  Despite all of my time spent with Sebastian and all of the friends he has introduced me to, I have yet to meet his parents or to visit his childhood home, a town house on Amsterdam Avenue. But today I will do both. We have been invited over for brunch.

  I’m relieved that I’m meeting them over brunch rather than dinner, as brunch has become such a familiar custom for me. Sebastian and I are always meeting people for brunch. Sebastian is nothing if not social, which means that I have spent a lot of time meeting his friends, dozens of them, including his oldest friends, with whom he attended Dalton. After six months I am even—finally!—able to catch some of the cultural references perpetually bandied about at their dinner parties, to know who they are talking about when they refer to Chuck Close, or Mapplethorpe, or Jasper Johns.

  But it is the gay cancer we speak of most often, the cancer that keeps changing names, the cancer that is seemingly contagious, though nobody knows exactly how it is spread. And while the cause of this disease remains unknown, one thing is certain: We all know someone young and beautiful who has died from it.

  Everyone is scared, but nobody wants to admit it. We try to determine how the ones who are dying are different from us. That they have more sex, take more drugs, lift more weights, spend too much time in the sun. Really, we have no idea why some of us are dying and some of us are not. We make jokes that aren’t funny to ward off the fear.

  • • •

  “Nervous?” Sebastian asks as he presses the doorbell of the three-story redbrick town house, his childhood home.

  “Just get a drink in my hand as soon as possible.”

  “You’re such an adorable WASP,” he says.

  “I’m really not. My parents took a temperance pledge every year. My reliance on a good cocktail is solely your influence.”

  He smiles, grabs my hand. I squeeze his back but quickly let go. Sebastian has assured me that his parents are “Upper West Side Jewish intellectuals,” which I assume means tolerant. Still, I don’t want to be touching when they open the door. To ensure this, I shift the gift bag I am holding into the hand closest to Sebastian. It’s a hostess gift, as Mama would call it. Though Sebastian is doing his damnedest to play Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle—case in point, the fact that I now reference My Fair Lady!—I can’t relinquish some of the rules of my upbringing, one of which is: A guest should never arrive empty-handed.

  The front door opens, revealing a striking woman. She has black hair with a long silver streak down the front (à la Susan Sontag, whom I actually met, briefly, at a downtown party with Sebastian), and she wears a silk leopard print blouse tucked into white wool trousers, a tangle of thin gold chains hanging from her neck.

  “Dahling,” she says, kissing Sebastian first on one cheek, then the other. She is as tall as her son, which isn’t really that much of a feat.

  “And this must be your new friend, Bobby. Delighted to meet you, sweetheart. I’m Dahlia.”

  “He’s my boyfriend, Mother. Not just my friend.”

  Dahlia rolls her eyes, but indulgently.

  “Sorry, dahling, your boyfriend. Anyway, Bobby, it’s lovely to meet you. Sebastian can’t stop talking about you, and we’re all just so excited about your write-up in the Times!”

  I feel myself blush. This is all so new. I’ve had to become comfortable with so much around Sebastian, around his friends. Last weekend Sebastian took me to a pink party. We were all to dress in some shade of the color—Sebastian and I wore matching pink Brooks Brothers button-downs—but one of his friends was dressed head to toe in pink feathers, a human flamingo. Everyone was complimenting him for being so bold, so brave.

  It occurs to me that acknowledging the intimacy I have with Sebastian in front of his mother is a different sort of bravery altogether.

  “This is for you,” I say, handing her the gift bag.

  “How kind,” she says.

  She leads us through a front hall and into the living room. Everything is very modern, very stark. I look for family photos on the walls, or on the mantel, or framed and placed on occasional tables, but I see none. Dahlia must be a minimalist. There are two sofas that face each other, both made of white leather and chrome. The coffee table between them is chrome and glass and has nothing on it but a tall, rectangular vase holding a single dendrobium orchid. The floors are hardwood and highly polished. On the walls hang carved African masks, which is funny to me because Sebastian has them on his walls, too, and I’ve seen the same sort of thing hanging on the walls of many of his friends, as common up here as full-sized bridal portraits hanging over the mantel were—and probably still are—in Decatur.

  “We need drinks,” declares Sebastian.

  How I love him for that. How I love him for many things. Though I told Gus I didn’t want a daddy, I love how Sebastian takes care of me. Not just by spending money—though he does that—but by paying attention. Like how he bought Cheerios to keep in his pantry, because I once mentioned that I like nothing more than a bowl of them with a cut-up banana each morning. Or how he made me a cassette with a mix of all of the songs he played me that I had especially liked, having kept a running list in his head of the ones I complimented. Or how he brought matzo ball soup and Dr. Brown’s cream soda to my studio when we first started dating and I had come down with a cold.

  “Your father will be back in a minute. He had to go down to the bodega to get the Times. Someone stole ours again. I say ‘someone,’ but I know who it was. That gonif Harry Palmer. How is it that he doesn’t have a newspaper subscription, but every damn week I see the Sunday
Times in his garbage?”

  “He takes yours every Sunday?” I ask. “That’s horrible.”

  “No. He rotates. Steals it from one neighbor one week, then another the next. Us, the Millers, the Teitelbaums—it’s musical chairs with that one.”

  “So confront him,” says Sebastian.

  Dahlia shrugs. “Then I have to deal with his mishigas face to face.”

  “We need drinks,” Sebastian repeats, taking my hand and leading me to the kitchen, which is the size of my mother’s kitchen in Decatur. Sebastian opens the freezer door and pulls out a bottle of vodka. “Thank God. Dahlia always has the ingredients for a Virgin Mary, but doesn’t always have the vodka on hand to bloody it up. Want one?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I’ll have a virgin one while you’re at it,” Dahlia says. “You’re sure that’s not what you boys want? It’s not even noon.”

  “Mother, I am forty-two years old; I can have a Bloody Mary on a Sunday morning if I damn well want one.”

  “Bobby, are you this touchy with your mother?”

  “No, ma’am,” I say. “I am not.”

  I am, in fact, a little taken aback by Sebastian’s rudeness. He’s always so affable and good-natured with his friends.

  “Bobby is a good southern boy,” says Sebastian. “Which means he thinks plenty of mean things but never says them aloud. Open his ‘hostess gift.’ I’m dying to see what he got you. He wouldn’t tell me.”

  “It’s nothing,” I say.

  “Is this lox shmear?” Dahlia asks, opening the fancy gift bag I couldn’t really afford but purchased anyway and pulling out the Mason jar packed with the pink spread.

  “Crawfish spread,” I say. “But I imagine it would go very nicely on a bagel, same as lox.”

  I am underplaying how delicious this stuff is. It’s just poached crawfish tails blended in the Cuisinart with lots of butter and garlic, and a little cayenne pepper, but it’s become my favorite thing in the world to eat. I serve it at the restaurant as an appetizer with toast points. It’s probably the most popular thing on the menu besides the banana custard “trifle.” (Gus insisted I fancify the name, not letting me call it what it is—banana pudding.)