Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Page 8

  But the sidewalks were clean and the garbage was collected and I gave no thought as to where it was hauled or burned.

  Up there in my snug sweet tower, I felt I’d made landfall in the shoals of shifting clouds. Far enough from the crowds to relish the crowds.

  8

  The Pearl Anniversary

  You would think that food—its ready command of our senses granting it immediate access to our hearts and minds, our appetites and memories—could be trusted to speak for itself.

  Not so, apparently. In the 1950s, when I was freelancing, I was often enlisted as a grocery-aisle Cyrano, a ventriloquist for the new and improved, repeatedly making the case that the way Mother did it was not, in fact, best.

  Sometimes clients would send me samples of the product for which I was composing copy. Sometimes they would also request that I build the ads around recipes, or at least let me know that the ads would have these recipes embedded within them. One unforgettably repellent-sounding one was as follows:

  2 cups of roast beef, ground

  3 tbsp Karo syrup

  3 tbsp vinegar

  Take the gravy from the roast and cook all together about 5 minutes.

  A little salt may be necessary.

  Suggest serving this with pickled peaches.

  Fortunately, the food at Grimaldi—Northern Italian cuisine of a superior quality—is nothing like that. Unfortunately, I am still full of damnable Oreos when I arrive. Yet I find the garlic smells and the clinking knife-and-fork-on-plate sounds a welcome greeting. Even the Sinatra recording that’s playing—that tired Italian restaurant cliché that I’ve never liked—feels right tonight, just because it’s familiar.

  Alberto, the owner, is at the front of the house, standing next to the hostess, going over the evening’s reservations. Shoulders slightly stooped but still natty in his charcoal-gray suit, he hails me as if I were family.

  “Lillian, mia cara, right on time,” he says, embracing me. Then he says to the hostess, “The reservation is under Boxfish. I’ll take her to her table, don’t you worry.”

  Alberto moved to Manhattan from Lombardy in the early 1950s—born in Milan, like my ex-husband Max’s parents. He still has the accent, tuneful and rhythmic. Max’s accent was pure New York: dropped final Rs and nasal diphthongs.

  Alberto installs me in my red leather banquette, the same one I sit in every New Year’s Eve.

  Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured, but the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful. Grimaldi as conceived by Alberto is like this: garish paintings that one early reviewer said looked as though they’d been purchased by the square foot and gleaming reproductions of classical bronze statues.

  “What’ll it be tonight?” he says. “We got anything you like.”

  I hate that I have to tell him that I don’t want anything.

  “Alberto, I’m afraid I haven’t got much of an appetite tonight,” I say, without saying why.

  The white tangle of his eyebrows rears back, and he’s about to start persuading, insisting, but then he intuits my mood and stands down. “Mind if I take a load off for a moment and join you?” he says. Younger than I am, he is still categorically old, and he lowers himself into the seat with caution. “It’s not because you are too sad, now, is it?”

  “Not exactly,” I say.

  “There is something about the year’s end that leads to a taking of stock that can lead in turn to melancholy. Isn’t that so?” he says, candlelight from the red votive holder on the table flickering over his wrinkled face. “There is at least for me.”

  “It can tame one’s appetite,” I say.

  “For me, a way to handle that sadness is by being a Catholic,” he says, and I laugh. “I know it sounds maybe crazy,” he says, “but here is what I mean: The turn of the year is the time of resolutions, yes? Makes me feel like a confession. Like the sacrament of reconciliation. The examination of conscience, the contrition, the admission, and—eventually, maybe, if you’re lucky—the feeling of absolution following the penance.”

  A waiter comes by, and I order a glass of Chianti. After he’s gone, I say, “I’ll drink to that, Alberto. And that was rude of me—should we have ordered you one? To toast?”

  “Nah, Lillian, I’m working,” he says, waving a hand to brush the suggestion away. “But you, you celebrate.”

  I do not say that I feel uncelebratory. Rather, “It’s also a matter of personality, right? That feeling you’re describing. Important to, and practiced by, those who are already predisposed to lists and rituals.”

  “Ah, Lillian, Lillian, exactly, exactly,” says Alberto. “You and me, we’ve always been simpatico.”

  “Haven’t we?” I say. “You’ve always made the city feel even more like home—almost thirty years now. It’s the year after next that’s the big one for you, isn’t that right? What will you do to celebrate? Thirty years is the pearl anniversary, if memory serves. Oyster specials, maybe?”

  “It won’t be me who decides,” says Alberto, eyes down at the white tablecloth, not meeting mine. “I didn’t want to tell you, Lillian, but I won’t be here for that. We’re selling the place. To my nephew, so it’s not going to close. But we’re leaving this summer. Me and Fabiola are moving to Palm Beach to be near Al.”

  “But Al’s running the restaurant down there just fine by himself, isn’t he?” I say.

  “Of course he is,” says Alberto, looking up at me with brown eyes that seem faded, like mud that’s turned back to dirt in the sun. “I taught that kid everything he knows. He’s expanding the Grimaldi empire. But he’s expanding it to places we actually want to spend our twilight.”

  “New York City is the place to be,” I say, blindsided, sounding like a ludicrous tourism bureau.

  “Lillian, it was, but it’s not anymore,” says Alberto. “How to put it to a poet? It’s like in Dante. If he’d lived up to now, and wanted to add a Tenth Circle to Hell, he could call it New York. And the first ones he could throw in would be that Subway Vigilante and those guys he shot. Let ’em rot together forever.”

  “Forgive me, Alberto,” I say, “but that decision sounds a little bit irrational. Are you sure?”

  “Rationally, Lillian, business hasn’t been so great lately. There aren’t so many three-martini lunchers anymore. The businessmen with their fat expense accounts and their Diners Club cards are thinning out.”

  “But what about your loyal regulars?” I say, gesturing around at the other tables, slowly starting to fill with patrons, like grains of sand in an hourglass.

  “Not so many of those, either, as there used to be,” he says, then smiles. “Even you aren’t ordering dinner.”

  “But I do have this wine,” I say, making myself take a sip of the Chianti, making myself smile back. “And I’ll leave a gargantuan tip.”

  “You always do. You’re a peach, Lily, a true friend. It’s not personal, you know that. It’s just time.”

  “I know,” I say. “I hate time.”

  “Me too,” he says, lifting himself from the table, putting a sandpapery hand on mine. “I have to go see about the other tables now, but you come find me before you go, Lillian, yes? And I’ll see you out.”

  The betrayal I feel as he walks back toward the hostess stand is crimson and grand and unjust. How could he? How could Fabiola? How could they? But they are not mine to keep. Nothing is mine.

  I drink my Chianti and watch the other diners, none of them alone the way I am. And isn’t this key to the feeling of being alone—the sense that no one is like you?

  I didn’t used to be this way. I went to cocktail parties with friends and advertisers, with entertaining experts and houseware and furnishing designers. I rubbed elbows—literal elbows!—with Mary and Russel Wright.

  I watch the waiters and wonder whether anyone but me will notice a change after Alberto decamps. Whether his nephew will surrender to the dictates of fashion—introducing “blackened” entrees, a chocolate dessert with a mena
cing name, even, God forbid, a television—or keep the place the same, preserving its strange indulgences, like zabaione, a frothed concoction of egg yolks beaten with sugar and wine, poured over fresh berries, prepared tableside. The booth next to mine has just ordered it. It is all I can do not to say to the couple, fancy and middle-aged, Enjoy, because it won’t last.

  I’ve met the nephew, I’m sure, though I can’t remember his name. Younger than my Gian, certainly. Maybe younger than this restaurant. When Alberto and Fabiola are gone, no one here will know me any longer as the ex-wife of Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo. I’ll only be myself. Whatever that means. A strange old lady from around the corner. Orange Fire lipstick wiped off a wineglass.

  I sit awhile, watching the tables fill up. Trying to think of an Italian lullaby that Max used to sing, but with Sinatra’s relentless crooning I can’t recall the tune.

  True to my word, I leave a tip proportionate to my sense of betrayal. Alberto, meandering among the other tables like an ancient river, checking in with the newcomers, the regulars, sees me rise, excuses himself, and comes to my side to bid me good-bye.

  Like the old man he is, he shuffles his feet in their shoes of Italian leather, so I have to slow my own stride as he walks me to the coat check.

  “Safe walk home, Lillian,” he says. “Take good care, and sleep well, and happy 1985.”

  “Same, Alberto, same,” I say, as he helps me into my coat.

  Alberto hands me a salmon-colored rose—long-stemmed, no thorns—of the variety given out to every female guest, just as he has done for decades. This may be the last one I ever get from his hand.

  What I do not tell him—because he would worry, and because it would wound him—is that I have decided that I am neither tired nor ready to go home for the night.

  Instead, one last adventure to round out the year. I have mapped it out in my mind to go to Delmonico’s, the legendary steakhouse at South William and Beaver, near Wall Street and City Hall, way downtown. And I have resolved to walk there, because the calculus of exertion plus time should add up to my finally being hungry.

  Institution though Delmonico’s is, I have only been there once, and my memories of the occasion are entirely negative, except that it was a great restaurant with delicious food which I lacked any capacity to enjoy at that time.

  I put on my gloves. I adjust my hat. I kiss Alberto once on each rough cheek as he kisses mine, and off I go, into the night, into the last hours of 1984, with his customary “Ciao, bella!” rasping after me.

  9

  Slambango

  Can any telling ever be so thorough that there is no more story left to tell?

  My husband—ex-husband—Max seemed to think so. Wanted his version of our dissolution after twenty years to be the one of record. I would not permit this, though our divorce was uncontested; by then even I could see that there was no contest, that I had lost. As for the story, however, there was his version, and there was mine. There was more to say, and we were saying it, over lunch at Oscar’s Delmonico’s, early October, 1955.

  We had finalized our divorce after a short court appearance at City Hall. Delmonico’s was nearby and seemed a fair setting for discussing final details—mostly having to do with our son, Johnny, then thirteen—and for saying good-bye.

  I was conscious of making this decision—to go to the restaurant—but then somehow shocked to actually find myself there, amid the soft bustle of the noonday crowd. It was as if the span between the notion and the action had simply vanished, like events follow each other in dreams—an experience that I had often in those days, I’m afraid.

  Walking into Delmonico’s on Max’s arm felt like a ride in an ambulance, or the moments just after a car crash: an overwhelming rush of detail diamond-etched itself into my brain, as if I’d remember the scene forever, though of course I forgot almost everything right away.

  “Those columns at the entrance,” I said as the maître d’hôtel seated us, just for the sake of saying something. “They look freshly dropped off by Caesar Augustus himself.”

  “Indeed, madam,” he said. “The lady has a discerning eye. They were imported in the 1830s, from the ruins of Pompeii.”

  At the mention of Pompeii, my scant appetite shaded quickly toward nausea. “Oh my,” I said. “How unusual.”

  “We’ve been to Pompeii,” said Max. “We saw columns just like those, all covered in ash.”

  Max was referring to our honeymoon trip to Italy in 1935: our purest moment of wedded bliss, now disfigured by our unhappy end. If he detected any irony in the advent of this reminder, today of all days, then he didn’t show it. I suspect it never occurred to him. Max had no sense of irony. Most hypocrites haven’t.

  The maître d’ evinced the appropriate degree of regard for our worldliness. He and Max—who was always brutally casual, without even realizing the brutality part—chatted in affable generality on the subject of Italy, Max’s parents’ homeland, the place where Max had been stationed during the war. Watching him speak with this stranger made me think of my own first impressions of him—before I’d learned what did and didn’t lie behind his brassy vitality—and envy how little he’d changed: hardly thicker at the middle, wavy hair still black.

  As for me, I felt like a ruin. Still extant but not intact. A plaster effigy cast in the shape of my old incinerated self. A wreck one could contemplate as an object lesson in one’s own potential to become a ruin one day. It could happen to anyone. It could happen when one expected it, or when one did not.

  I placed my napkin in my lap and accepted the menu from the hands of the maître d’. His were steady, mine shaking, I hoped not perceptibly.

  Back then, in the divorce’s immediate aftermath, my mind briefly became even more bent and misshapen than it already had been, circling around revenge, wearing a track in the carpet to the alla breve march-beat of “retaliate, retaliate.” But I didn’t really want to. I was more hurt. More sad. I still loved Max, though he had proven himself by that point to be quite an ass, and callous.

  His birthday—the last one he’d have while we were still married—had passed while I was in the hospital. We likely would not have celebrated anyway, but I’d made him a card, original, hand-crafted, and self-composed, with what I hoped was recognizable—no Helen McGoldrick, I—as a pink tropical bird on the front. I handed it to him.

  “Lillian,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.” He sounded sincere, like I really shouldn’t.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Read it out loud. It’s the first new poem I’ve shown anyone in a while.”

  “All right,” he said. “Here she goes: ‘By jingo / The flamingo / Joins our fandango / For your birthday slambango.’”

  Our waiter arrived to take our drink order, saving Max from having to comment further. I asked for a glass of Amarone. Max did the same, then said to me:

  “Vino, eh? You sure Dr. R would think that’s a wise idea?”

  “I can’t very well toast to your birthday with water, now can I?” I said. “That would be unlucky, and I think we’ve already enjoyed enough bad luck.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, setting the card aside and opening the menu.

  The slight lowering of his head as he perused his choices afforded me the opportunity to see again what I already knew: His thick black hair was still truly black, almost no gray. I wanted to reach across and run my fingers through it one more time.

  What else can be said about Max? I loved him so much, even though doing so had become stupid and pointless.

  He had a hoarse laugh, but not a horse laugh. Had sex appeal. Most men I’d met would clearly have starved me emotionally, but Max was a feast. Max was too much. After I met him, all other men came to seem plug-ugly. He was dominant, but never a bully. A courtly salesman. How did that happen to attract me? When we met, way back in 1934, I was tall and graceful, but I willingly became his Little Woman. Proverbially: We were the same height, he said—and I let him—but in fact he was at least a full inch sh
orter than I. But he was as dashing in his daytime suit of blue serge as in his broadcloth evening clothes, when we still went out evenings.

  He rarely played in a minor key—not until these past few years. Back when we lived in the now-foreign land of our happiness, he would give the bottle to the baby and wash dishes with agility, if only occasionally. Change some diapers. Spend some evenings at the club and some Saturday afternoons in golf foursomes. No college reunions because he went to college in Switzerland. Rarely in his cups. Unlike—I know he would say, and justly so—me.

  The waiter returned to take our food orders. I sat there mute as he looked at Max, then at me, and I realized that Max wasn’t going to order for me. How could he? I hadn’t told him what I wanted, and I was not his wife anymore. He ordered for another woman now.

  The other woman. Julia. His second bride to be. Younger, conspicuously, merely thirty-nine, and easy to be around—just happy, so happy, Max had said when he’d given me the news of their impending nuptials. And I had to agree; she had a beautiful smile, if you like people who have thousands of teeth and no evident capacity to ever be sad.

  “Madam?” the waiter said, prompting me.

  “Steak, please,” I said. “Medium well.”

  I’d meant to say “medium rare.” But who cared? I didn’t correct myself. It had been awkward enough to place an incorrect order.

  I watched Max ask the waiter which of three popular options he’d most recommend, and I thought how young he seemed. Not boyish, per se, but not old. Not like me. I wondered how the waiter saw me. Did my pause strike him as doddering? Did I register to him at all? He was in his early thirties, probably, and I suspected that I had for him the relative invisibility of a woman of a certain age and face. I used to be beautiful, I wanted to scream. I used to be quick.

  Once, shortly after I moved to Manhattan, I accompanied Helen to the Met; she was looking for exemplars for her own sketches, bulking up her illustration portfolio in the hope of being more hirable. We were saturated, supersaturated, with art that day: so much craft and artifice all in one place. But the piece I remembered most indelibly—at the time, and ever after—was called “A Speedy & Effectual Preparation for the Next World.” It was an etching of an old woman applying rouge at her dressing-table, oblivious to the approach of skeletal Death behind her. A tiny funeral cortege drawn by racing coursers coasted down her architectural eighteenth-century hair. She was a figure of satire; as an onlooker, one was meant to laugh at her vanity. But I did not laugh: Even at twenty-seven, I didn’t find it funny. Even then I’d begun to think—and to push away the thought—that committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable.