A Thousand Pardons

by Jonathan Dee

  “Mr. Chin,” Harvey said. Chin sat by himself at the table closest to the kitchen, his hands in his lap. “My associate, Helen Armstead,” Harvey said as he sat down and looked around hopefully for a waiter with a menu.

  “You say you help me,” Chin said without looking up. “How you help this? Nobody come. Nobody call for delivery. Sixty percent of our weekday business, delivery.”

  “Well, it is a little early for the lunch trade,” Harvey said encouragingly. “Though I confess I didn’t have much breakfast myself.”

  “Fucking liberal Upper West Siders,” Chin said abruptly. “They get hard-on for anybody say they oppressed. Guess what? I was oppressed too! I came here with nothing. Same province as all these guys. Only difference between me and them is that I work hard instead of complain and I make something of myself. What you supposed to do here, right? But do they congratulate me, respect me? No. I’m the bad guy now. Some fat bitch with a stroller call me a fascist.”

  “Well, that’s a term that gets thrown around a lot,” Harvey said. Chin looked up at him then; his lips began to quiver, and he put his napkin to his face and started to cry again. “Here’s the thing,” Harvey went on, his calm voice at odds with the panicked darting of his eyes back and forth between his weeping client and Helen, as if expecting her to know, by virtue of being a woman, how to comfort this wounded man whose hardships and resentments she could not possibly guess at. “What you just told us? You’ve got to get that story out there. You’ve got to tell people who you are. This isn’t just some management-labor dispute. You are an authentic American success story. You need to let us fight back, take the moral high ground from these jealous, petty, self-entitled people who would cut you down, and correct the injustice of the way you’ve been portrayed by the other side. Right, Helen?”

  “No,” said Helen.

  Harvey fell silent and stared at her in wonder, and, a moment later, Chin lifted his eyes and did the same. Helen had stunned herself as much as them. She hadn’t planned to say a thing. She felt what she was about to say coming over her, moving in her, before she understood what it was, and with an air of total conviction she began saying it so that she could hear it too.

  “What is the goal here, Mr. Chin?” she said.

  He looked at her confusedly.

  “To get people back at these tables?” she prompted him.

  “Yes,” he said. “To get people back into the restaurant.”

  “Then here’s what we do. We apologize.”

  “For what?” Mr. Chin said, bristling a little.

  “America is the greatest country in the world,” Helen said. “When there is an honest dispute between worker and boss, you humbly put your trust in the wisdom of the courts, which are the people’s instrument. I mean, that’s what’s going to happen anyway, right? The whole thing is probably on its way to court already, and you’ll have no choice but to abide by that decision. So you might as well make it seem like your idea. In the meantime, you only want to be fair. You only want to be a good American and give your countrymen the same opportunity you had, the opportunity to earn what you yourself have earned. We will put you on the front page of the Post and the News and on local TV.”

  “What will I say?” Chin asked.

  “You will say that you are sorry,” Helen said. “You will not defend yourself. You will not contest any particular charge, because contesting it is what allows people to keep talking about it. Without getting into specifics, you will apologize, and ask your customers and the people of New York for their forgiveness. And they will give it to you. They want to. People are quick to judge, Mr. Chin, they are quick to condemn, but that’s mostly because their ultimate desire is to forgive.”

  Chin and Harvey regarded each other submissively. Able neither to agree with her nor to challenge her in front of a client, Harvey pretended somewhat absurdly that this speech had brought the meeting to a satisfying end, and ten minutes later he and Helen were riding back downtown in shocked silence. She had no idea anymore what had come over her. She wondered if she had done the seemingly impossible and gotten herself fired from a job where no one expected her to do any work at all. Harvey, who hadn’t even gotten any food out of the meeting, wouldn’t so much as make eye contact with her, though in truth he seemed less angry than disoriented and embarrassed, as if he had climbed into the back of the cab only to find a stranger already sitting there. He went straight into his office and ordered out for lunch, and Helen borrowed Mona’s old Rolodex and started working the phones. The story was still fresh enough that she found takers everywhere she called. At four o’clock, staring at Harvey’s half-closed door, she called three different Peking Grills until she found Mr. Chin again and ran down the list of every media outlet that wanted to hear what he had to say. Over the next two days she sat in his eye line at every interview, just out of camera range but close enough to remind him of his commitment to repent. That weekend the picket lines were still active, but business was up to about two-thirds of what it had been before the lawsuit; customers asked so often if Mr. Chin himself was there that he took to traveling to all eight of his locations every night, just to shake hands with the diners and have his picture taken with them and thank them for coming back. Two weeks later the lawyers for the deliverymen settled out of court for $38,000 with no admission of liability. In return for a raise, they waived their demand to unionize. Mr. Chin celebrated the return of delivery service by going back to 1991 prices for a night, 1991 being the year he arrived in America. Business was so enthusiastic the deliverymen made more in tips that night than they had ever seen before.

  Though Helen’s own name was naturally left out of the newspapers, Harvey’s was mentioned once or twice, and a few of his old colleagues called to congratulate him. One even used the phrase “teachable moment,” with which Harvey was very taken. Over the next three weeks they picked up four new clients, a bonanza by Harvey’s standards. When Peking Grill threw itself a twentieth anniversary party at their first location, in Murray Hill, Helen spent the day pitching the event to various papers and freelance photographers and then put on a dress and accompanied Harvey to the restaurant. Chin made a special toast to the two of them, in the midst of which he began crying again.

  Harvey, after a carafe of complimentary white wine, began to talk himself up a little too. “I must say,” he told Helen, “I haven’t lost my touch. Not a lot of people would have hired you, you know. But I know people. I can spot talent. And now we are reaping the benefits. You have brought new life to the whole enterprise.”

  “To your genius,” Helen said with a laugh, clinking glasses with him.

  “You have brought new life to me too, actually,” Harvey went on. “Because after all, I am the enterprise. The enterprise, c’est moi. What I am saying, in part, is that you look quite stunning all dressed up like that.”

  She laughed again, then stopped. “Harvey?” she said. “Are you coming on to me?”

  “It’s been a long time,” he said, “but I think so, yes. I have a friend who keeps a suite at the Roosevelt. You probably shouldn’t be driving home to Westchester, after all.”

  She put her glass of wine, which was only her second, down on the nearest table and stared at him, flattered and amazed, but mostly disappointed. “You’d do that, Harvey?” she said. “After everything you just said, you’d risk the business by sleeping with an employee?”

  He waved grandly. “Business, life, life, business,” he said. “I have no use for people who draw the distinction. It is all one. It should all be one. No?”

  There was no real danger in the air. Laying her hand gently on his forearm, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “You’ve revitalized my enterprise too,” she said. “But come on. Let’s not be kids about it. You don’t need to get laid to celebrate every good thing that happens. Anyway, I have a daughter at home, and it’s a school night. Just promise me you’ll go to that suite at the Roosevelt and have a good night’s sleep and I will see you
at work tomorrow.”

  He took her hand and kissed it. “I shall,” he said. “But if you think this is all just about horniness or euphoria or whatever, it’s not. You are a remarkable, remarkable woman. Joanie would have agreed with me.” Helen, though she hadn’t heard the name before, did not need to ask who Joanie was. Harvey said his farewells to Mr. Chin and his wife and went outside to hail a taxi on Third Avenue to take him up to the Roosevelt. In the cab, though, with the windows rolled all the way down, he was feeling so good, so awake, that he redirected the driver west, toward his office. He picked up his car from the attendant at the underground garage across the street from the Empire State Building and headed out of town toward the house in New Paltz, even though he’d turned off the oil burner and drained the pipes three weeks ago; Joanie had never minded the cold, but since her death he’d closed it up for the winter a little earlier every year. He crossed the Henry Hudson Bridge and left the city. He drove with his window down, listening to the crickets at the stoplights, feeling the invigorating change in the air. On the Taconic he fell asleep and the car sped straight through a turn and down a short embankment, turning over once and landing upright on its tires. He was killed instantly.

  2

  THE FOREMAN ON HIS RANCH had called a meeting, just to grab the opportunity to update him on a few things while he was actually there: fencing problems, impending visits from the state D of A and from Immigration, a boundary dispute with the rancher to their south which was complete bullshit but would require hiring a surveyor to make go away. Nothing too far out of the ordinary, just himself and the foreman and two hands whose names he didn’t know, and it had all taken place very informally right there on the hacienda after breakfast. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than forty minutes. Still, it left a bad feeling in him, a rebellious or claustrophobic feeling, which only seemed to tighten its hold inside him as the otherwise empty day went on; he could tell it was the kind of upset that wasn’t going to go away on its own, that he was going to have to take some step to snuff it out. A meeting! On the ranch! What had he bought this place for, if not to get away from the world of meetings? He tried some yoga, and he tried reading some Basho translations his new small press was going to publish, but his concentration was shot, and when the afternoon was half done he got in the truck and raised some dust driving down the long, straight road to the front gate. Something mutinous rose up in him at the thought of the security cameras whose lenses took him in as he approached that gate, even though at some earlier meeting he had signed off on their installation. Near the fencing along the berm, he passed the foreman, whose name, impossibly, was Colt; tall and straight in the saddle, Colt looked down at the truck and touched his hat, and it was possible to be contemptuous and jealous of him at the same time.

  Five hundred yards beyond the gate was the crossroads; instead of turning left, toward town and the airstrip, he turned right, where he never went, where he imagined it was all but unmapped and a man could be alone with himself and clear his head. And it was like a moonscape for a while, just the cracked road and the scrub and the mountains, but after about ten miles he saw a sign for a bar; frowning, he decelerated onto the gravel and parked. As it turned out, it was truly a great bar—dark, no TV, nothing but ranch hands and day workers, silent except for the pool table—and he might have settled in for longer, but he hadn’t gotten halfway through the beer that followed his third shot before somebody recognized him. The dumb fucking hick leaned one elbow on the bar and stared right at his face like he was staring at a face on a billboard. “Holy shit,” the hick said. He gave the guy a smile that was like slapping a book shut, threw a twenty on the bar, and got into the truck again. There was still a ways to drive, apparently, in order to get outside of where he was.

  With the windows down, the noise and the heat were tremendous, but still he saw and felt his cellphone convulsing across the front seat beside him. He hadn’t even realized he’d brought it along. He thought for a moment about throwing it out the window, but then somebody would find it and figure out who it belonged to, and then that was a shitstorm of a whole other sort. He tucked the phone in his shirt pocket so he wouldn’t have to see it anymore.

  In the next bar it started vibrating again, right over his heart. He took it out and flipped it open and looked at the text on the screen: Hamilton? Where R U? It was from someone named Katie, which didn’t ring a bell. He asked the bartender to pour another shot and leave the bottle. They actually still did that out here. They did it in L.A. too, but then at the end of the night some guy came up to you and handed you a bill for a thousand dollars. When the phone went off again—the bar was so quiet you could hear it buzz in his pocket—he answered.

  “Hamilton? This is Katie Marcus from Event Horizon—we’re handling the PR for A Time of Mourning? I don’t know if you remember, but we met on the set at one point?”

  “Of course I remember,” Hamilton said. Hollywood was carpeted with young, borderline-attractive, overeager, callow young women like he imagined this Katie to be—on the set, at the studio, in your agent’s office, working at the club or in the restaurant or any other business of any description that you might have reason to go into—and he could not tell one of them from another. But that didn’t mean you shouldn’t conduct yourself like a gentleman.

  “Really?” Katie said. “Wow. Well, I’m calling just to remind you that you have that interview with The New York Times this afternoon. You got our reminders about that, right?”

  She had such a young voice. They got younger and younger. “Remind me again?” Hamilton said.

  “The Times wanted to talk to you for a profile they’re doing of Kevin.” Kevin Ortiz was the director of the last film Hamilton had shot. A movie was over, to him, on the day shooting wrapped and he could fly out to the ranch and slowly slip out of character; it was always a surprise to him when a few months or a year later the whole thing came back to life in the form of something strangers could buy tickets to see, and everyone wanted to talk about it all over again, expecting him to remember it, never knowing how much had gone into the effort to leave it behind in the first place. But Kevin he remembered. Kevin was a brilliant young artist, and a great running buddy. He would not have been at all out of place in this bar. “We told the Times they could have just five minutes on the phone with you, just to talk about what it was like to work with him. I don’t know if you remember, but we cleared this all with you, and you said it was okay, which we really appreciate. It should really help the film out a lot. But if you’ve changed your mind about it, we can—”

  “No, Katie, that’s fine.” The bartender was walking toward him. “What time does it start?”

  “It actually was scheduled for an hour ago? But we can work around whatever you want to do.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Katie,” Hamilton said. The bartender stopped in front of him. “Just have the guy call me any time.”

  “Well, we don’t do it that way, because we try hard not to give out your cell number. So we left it that you would call him. Do you have a pen?”

  “Do you have a pen?” Hamilton asked the scowling bartender, who handed him a pencil. He wrote down the New York phone number on his shirtsleeve, hung up, and smiled apologetically as he handed the pencil back.

  “We don’t allow those conversations in here,” the bartender said, pointing to Hamilton’s phone. The man’s ring finger was bent at a bizarre angle; Hamilton had seen an injury like that on a football player once. His skin was cracked like leather. Beautiful, Hamilton thought. To wear your life like that.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said. “I didn’t see the sign.”

  “Ain’t no sign,” said the bartender.

  So Hamilton decided he’d better do the interview itself in the truck. Two more shots first: just to show there were no hard feelings, he shared a third one with the bartender, who drank it solemnly and did not so much as touch his hat. Hamilton could feel himself imitating the man’s slow gait a
s he squinted against the brutal sunlight in the parking lot. He got the truck up to speed, looked down at his sleeve, and dialed the number.

  “Hamilton!” the nasal East Coast voice said. “So glad to catch you. Thank you so much for taking the time. First of all, I loved the film, I thought you were amazing in it. Where are you right now?”

  Hamilton looked out the window. He didn’t really know. He’d never driven this far north of the ranch; also, that last drink with the bartender had opened a door, and he felt his mood shifting. Suddenly he had an idea. “I’m in upstate New York,” he said. “Visiting family.”

  “Really? That’s cool. Are you—can I ask you—are you in a car right now? Because I’m having a little trouble hearing you.”

  “Oh, right,” Hamilton said. “Hold on a second.” He rolled up the driver’s-side window, then leaned across the cab to roll up the other one, which didn’t quite necessitate letting go of the wheel but did mean that there were a few seconds when he was stretched too low across the seat to see over the dashboard. He felt and then heard the tires drift off the macadam, but he straightened up and steered back onto the road. Nothing out here but scrub anyway. No other cars. You might drift off the road and go for half a mile before you hit anything tall enough to break your axle. “Better?” Hamilton said. His voice sounded way too loud, now that the cab was quiet.

  “Much,” said the voice. “So I don’t actually need to take up a lot of your time—I just wanted to ask a question or two about what it was like working with Kevin Ortiz. It’s his first film, he’s a good deal younger than you. Did you ever sense any—”

  “Kevin is a fucking genius,” Hamilton said.

  The voice laughed. “No doubt,” it said. “But in the beginning, were there maybe—”

  “Why did you laugh, man?” Hamilton said.