That stopped me. "You probably know better than I do."
She shifted her weight, one hip to the next. "I just wondered why you come here each day." There it was— the point of insertion into the other's life. Once that happens, you can't go back. "Of course, we're glad to see you," she added.
"I hope I'm not your only conspicuous patron."
"Oh, please," Allison sighed. "You should see how many different crazy people come in here."
I made some small noise of concurrence, noting at the same time Allison's nervous red fingernail digging against the wool of her trousers.
"There's one kind of person we need more of, though."
"What's that?"
"Flirters."
"Flirters?"
She looked at me deadpan. "Even though you would think."
"What would I think?"
"You would just think that in New York City there would be more people who could actually flirt." Allison cocked her head, mouth open, daring me for a response.
"Terrible," I agreed.
"Worse. It's unbearable!" she answered. "One feels so abandoned."
I could only smile down into my plate.
"You still haven't answered my implicit question."
I lifted my eyes. "Which was?"
"We know you are unencumbered, but we don't know if you are a flirter."
"True," I said, "but we do know the exact opposite of that."
Allison appeared pleasantly confused. "The opposite—?"
"We know," I began, keeping her eye now, "that you are a flirter, but we don't know if you are unencumbered."
"Well, yes," Allison said, catching up, shrugging away my cleverness, "but that's as it should be."
"Oh?"
"But thank you, anyway."
"For—?"
She bent over the table close. "It was very nice wordplay."
"It was all right," I agreed.
"Are you usually so good at— wordplay?"
I just stared into her eyes. "All right, I give up," I said.
"Oh, don't. Not yet, Mr. Wyeth."
I offered her my hand. "As I said before, I'm Bill."
"Very pleased," Allison said, shaking it lightly, her hand cool and small and experienced, "by the chance encounter."
And with that, Allison excused herself and whirled away to deal with a presumptive crisis in the kitchen. It had been, I reflected happily, a silly little chat, a witty suggestion of what might follow. Oh, I liked her. She liked me, we both knew it, but who knew what it meant? Maybe it was friendship, maybe it was benign, maybe it was prelude to great pounding sex. Maybe it was a lot of things. The city offers you possibilities. Whether you accept them is another matter.
So we began to talk, or mostly Allison did, telling me each day in a low, amused voice as she marched by that "the straight busboys are fighting the gay waiters," or "I have to go fire my druggie waitress," or "a woman vomited in the ladies' room and won't come out." Occasionally she pointed out the celebrities who'd arrived that night, or the woman with two limos waiting outside, one for her, the other for her dogs, or the man who could eat three steaks. It was a huge show, and she was running it. Dozens of employees, hundreds of patrons, money flowing everywhere. But although each night at the restaurant constituted a unique surge of calamity and exhaustion, the place was notable for what was constant, too, and I could see that Allison pondered its larger theatricality. As in any human drama, foolishness announced itself to the room, probity slept peacefully at night, weakness beckoned to strength, and lust bought drinks for loneliness. Night after night, Allison, perched near the maître d' stand, say, or turning the corner to the carpeted stairs leading to the party rooms, would notice one woman or another, or in groups of two or three, arrive late at the bar with only one intention— to find a man. Some would be successful, while a few looked like they might end up in a trombone case by the morning. Many nights Allison tilted her head toward one man or woman or couple like a handicapper at the racetrack, and whispered to me, "Watch this one, Bill. Give him about an hour, I'm telling you." Her suspicion rarely went unrewarded. The waiters had to separate men and women who fell upon each other in the rooms upstairs, or they asked a woman to rebutton her blouse, or they lifted a drinker to his feet after he had somehow fallen to the floor.
Allison would have to attend to these little disasters, and as I became witness to her work, saw what she did all day, this put us in a kind of intimate proximity. She felt known by me, and I began to understand that despite dealing with dozens of people, and behind those efficient-looking eyeglasses, she herself was lonely. She lived, she confessed, in an opulent apartment, her living room windows opening north on Eighty-sixth Street, directly at another apartment house, but from her westerly dining room she could look down on the rolling meadows of Central Park. The place had been left to her by her long-widowed father, a banking executive, and she'd moved in after he died with a sense of foreboding, because who really wanted to live in the huge apartment of one's deceased father? "Especially the wallpaper, and the smells and everything," she told me. "So depressing." But in time she'd come to love the spaciousness of the place, as well as the attentions of her father's old neighbors, many of whom took a parental interest in her. The rooms were comfortable, and in Manhattan the body craves comfort against the hard edges of curbs and cars and faces, and Allison was no exception.
Within a few weeks we were talking daily, usually after the lunch rush. She'd sit down and tell me about one or the other men in her life, and in general they were confident, intellectual types, witty and accomplished in all the right places, yet somehow insufficient. Something about them was minor, she confessed to me— never their achievements or romantic attentions or wallets— but something else, something hard for her to describe. Finally, of course, we are all minor, every one of us, but there was something in Allison that discovered this in men. If I hadn't liked her so much, I might have said she was peevish, a bit particular, streaked with a dark skepticism, even. Either she was overpowering the men or undermatching herself, I thought. But I saw a few of her dates when they met her at the restaurant and they seemed decent enough guys, even to me. In time I wondered if I saw a pattern in which Allison met a respectable man, let herself be taken to dinner or the theater, then quickly slept with him— once. Only once. As if by design. Soon she was on to the next one. What did this mean? "It would appear you're not a husband-hunter," I said.
"Nope." Allison shrugged. "I don't think I'd be very good at marriage. I mean, I did try it once." She'd had a short, disastrous union in her early twenties, she confessed. "I'd like to have a baby, though, if I found the right man. Or maybe I could adopt… there are all these beautiful Chinese babies with no mothers." And there she left it, her face a little sad, wary of even thinking about the idea. Truth to be told, Allison knew time was running against her. She'd taken good care of herself, as the phrase goes, but she was one of those women whose face brightly masks a deeper disappointment. She had not been satisfied yet. Her body did not seem girlish so much as unused, especially by maternity. Motherhood consumes the bodies of women, if not from pregnancy and nursing itself, then by the years of too little sleep. The mothers I've known don't seem to mind this, for in trading away themselves they have been rewarded with children.
Allison's problem, of course, was the restaurant. Running it was an enormous, addictive job, requiring very long days. The customers, the waitstaff, the cooks, the suppliers— each population was distinct in its demands. Allison arrived at 8 a.m. and, except for a few hours off after lunch, rarely left before 9 p.m., or until the dinner shift was running smoothly, a moment that often never came, for what was happening in the dining room was only part of the larger spectacle. On a slow afternoon she invited me through the swinging kitchen doors and into the labyrinth beyond. The restaurant had two enormous kitchens, one for meals, the second for pastries. The steaks arrived on rolling steel platforms from the butcher's room, where they had been trimm
ed and sized, and were forked onto long flaming grills by sweating, hassled chefs who addressed the waiters and busboys as "fuckhead" and "Mexico." The waitresses were called "kittycat," or "lovelips," which they hated. But it went with the territory.
Below the kitchen lay supply rooms and prep stations. The hallways were narrow, as on a ship, and pipes ran low overhead, red for fire, yellow for gas. Allison swung open a thick, insulated door— and I was surprised; it was the meat room, where dozens of sides of raw beef hung on hooks under a blue light, dated and stamped with wholesalers' marks.
"Don't want to spend the night in here," I muttered.
"I guess I'm used to it."
The room was cool but not cold, and we stepped inside. The enormous red carcasses— marbled with fat, headless, halved, rib cages sawed through, legs severed above the hoof— seemed aware of us through some essential mammalian affinity. The dead meat, soon to be transubstantiated into money and laughter, would also be revivified, of course, would become warm flesh again, this time human.
The room was controlled for temperature and humidity, Allison explained, so the steaks would dry-age to perfection.
"Who decides when it's time?" I asked, studying the back of her neck, so close that I could easily lean forward and kiss it.
"I do."
The room was small, the ceiling low, and we were alone.
"It's quiet in here," Allison said, turning, keeping my eye.
I nodded. Take her in your arms, I thought, do it now.
"Bill, something happened to you, didn't it?"
I wasn't ready for this, and the strangeness of the room amplified the power of the question. "Something happens to everyone, I think."
"Of course," Allison said softly. "I just wondered."
I took a breath, let it go. "I was a pretty high-powered real estate attorney, in one of the city's best firms. I was married, had a son. Then something happened, yes. Now I'm alone. I'm the guy you see every day."
Allison nodded, as if I'd confirmed something. "You want to tell me—?"
"Do we really know each other?"
"You see me almost every day."
I thought about it. "I don't usually talk about it much, Allison."
"I'm sorry. Shouldn't have asked."
But I had liked the intimacy of the moment. "I remain conversant on other topics," I said with more energy. "Okay?"
Her playfulness returned. "I'll get it out of you, somehow."
"You will?"
"Even if I have to go to extreme measures."
"That doesn't sound so bad."
"It isn't."
I asked her to continue the tour, so she did. Next came the produce walk-ins, filled with chopped vegetables ready for salads and quail eggs stacked by the dozen. All the supplies came in through sidewalk doors. I couldn't tell where we stood in respect to the Havana Room, whether it was above us or beside us, or if its location was what somehow made the room restricted. But I saw nothing unusual, just pipes and ceiling tiles and rough wiring. I was eager to ask Allison about the Havana Room, but suspected I'd learn more if I didn't.
"Then there's upstairs," she said.
"Oh?"
She meant the second floor, which housed three big private party rooms. The largest had a piano and seating for sixty, and was often used for corporate gatherings, wedding dinners, and the like. The second, also large, was furnished with better sofas and favored by married, middle-aged women for social events. The third room, considerably smaller, was rented almost exclusively by Wall Street men at night. This was where the strippers worked. The limit was twenty-five men. The more men, Allison told me, the more problems they had, and sometimes the stripper would run out of the room having been bitten or plundered in some indecorous way. "What does she expect?" Allison asked.
I followed her to the third and fourth floors, which contained furniture storage, an accountant's office, a main office where Allison worked, and employee locker rooms. Along the way I counted three dozen security cameras, and when we paused in the main office, I watched six black-and-white television screens cycle through their respective views of all that I had just toured, as well as views of the main dining rooms, the bar, every cash register, and even the street outside. I realized that Allison could watch people from her office, including me. Was the Havana Room similarly monitored? I studied the cycling screens but didn't spot any room I hadn't seen before.
"Well, that's it!" said Allison, perhaps noticing my interest. "Except for Ha's penthouse, which we can't see."
"Ha?"
"Yes," said Allison. "Ha. You know Ha."
"The handyman."
"Yes. The only man I completely trust." Perched above the bright inferno of the restaurant, Ha lived in a tiny room on the top floor. No one knew exactly where he came from or just how old he was, she said, and no one who depended on him insisted on being informed. He may have jumped off a ship in Seattle, he may have walked over the Mexican border. What was known about Ha was that he could fix anything— broilers, air conditioners, meat slicers, any of the restaurant's twenty-six refrigerators, the freight elevator, the washing machines, fire alarms. "He's quite brave, too," Allison added.
"Brave?"
"Absolutely." At night, she said, Ha navigated the dim catacombs of the restaurant by touch; one evening years back, after the night porter had left, a thief jimmied the sidewalk doors and crept in. Ha, lying on the kitchen floor wiggling a gas line, heard the intruder and surmised his route toward the kitchens. Immediately he darkened the narrow hallways, turned on the lights in the liquor walk-in, and waited. The intruder lurched along the hallways, drawn to the brightness like an insect, and when he scurried into the cave of expensive booze, Ha swung the door shut, secured it with a length of metal pipe, and called the police. Allison adored him, and believed, I think, that he was more spirit than man.
"He's the only one who has my cell number," she joked. "The rest of them can't have it."
"How do your sad supplicants call you, then?"
"They can look me up in the book." We took the stairs down to the dining room. "Actually, there's a new guy these days," she admitted. "Not that it's necessarily going anywhere."
I watched her bounce down the steps in front of me, and felt better for having not declared my affections for her in the meat room. "Go ahead and tell me, just to make me jealous."
"Well, you know I don't eat breakfast at home." Allison sat down at one of the back tables and I joined her. Two busboys were vacuuming at the other end. "I have breakfast at this little place on the corner near my apartment. You'd think I wouldn't want to be in a restaurant, any kind of restaurant, but I like this place— and my apartment is kind of big and drafty, you know, kind of empty, even though I love my kitchen, so I go to this little place, and have an egg and toast, something to get started." Her voice was animated, excited by the story, and she'd already forgotten our intimate moment in the meat room. "So I was minding my own business, just sitting in my booth, reading the newspaper, when this big man sat down next to me with his newspaper, and he was wearing this beautiful suit, very conservative, and I said to myself, Well, okay, I might be having a little bit of a problem."
"I know where this is going," I said, secretly miserable.
"I looked at his hand and saw no wedding ring, although you can't always be sure. But I didn't say anything or look at him, I just kept reading, sort of hoping, and then I watched him order and eat his meal and he had perfect manners." She sighed, remembering. "I see a lot of people eat, I know what perfect table manners are. And then the waitress brought my check because she wanted the table. And I kind of kept sort of looking at him but he didn't see me and I had to go."
"Which you didn't like."
"No, I didn't. And he wasn't there the next day. But the day after that he was, he was sitting behind me, back to back, and I could smell him, and that— I admit it, I was having a little problem. Then he pulls out a phone and he calls someone up and I'm trying to listen
as much as I can, you know." Allison smiled guiltily. "I want desperately to hear him, I want to know who he's talking to! It could be some woman, Of course. And I hear him say, 'Two-point-six million, I'm willing to do that.' That was all he said. And then he just listened and nodded and hung up. And I thought, All right, this guy is for real, you know?"
"You smelled the big money."
"I guess. I mean, I can't tell you how many fakers and braggers and jerks are out there, Bill, with their little gold pinkie rings and rented Jaguars. So now I was even more interested, I admit it. A girl has to watch out for herself, right? So I twisted around to see what he was reading. It was the Financial Times of London, which is the sexiest newspaper there is to read. Don't ask me why. Those pink pages. It's so European. So I liked that, too. I was trying to think of something to say and then he looked at his watch and got up and left. Afterward the waitresses talked about him. They liked him, too. So I was thinking, Come on, Allison, you're a smart girl, you're a catch, you know what to do. So the next day I decided I was—"
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