Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(25)
“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 menacing 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.