Aftermath of Dreaming(20)

As was taking too much. We all went by a two-for-the-house, one-for-us rule of thumb mostly because of a notorious story about a former host who, on a freezing pre-Thanksgiving day in a burst of holiday-shopping need, took every single tip that graced the coat-room counter during an overflowingly full lunch shift. Unbeknownst to the host, the manager had emptied out the locked strongbox just that morning with the intention of doing a rare surprise check on it later that day. So when the manager found not even one lonely dime, he was forced to fire the host, as the thievery was too flagrant to ignore—which they did for the rest of us when we kept our take small. But that made it feel like the only ones who were really being duped were the customers, who kindly gave the tips thinking it was the hosts they were going to.

Lydia, another hostess, had explained the system to me on a rainy June evening about a week after I started working there when we were sent down to the coat-check room to work the early-dinner shift, which consisted of customers in from New Jersey and Elsewhere who arrived at six to eat from the fixed-price (meant to be cheap, but who are we kidding?) menu, then ran out by seventy-thirty to catch a cab for a Broadway show. So it was two time slots of hell. Once when they arrived and decloaked, and again when they descended en masse to be reclothed. Lydia had told me that night that she had no intention of handling all those drippy umbrellas and slimy raincoats without taking tips just to preserve my ignorance until they were sure I’d be cool. She wore her thick, strawberry-blond hair over one eye à la Veronica Lake, and would peer out the other eye under a perfectly groomed brow. She had moved to Europe with her mother when she was a small child, I was never able to ascertain why, and at five, she was put in a kindergarten in Germany though she didn’t speak a word of the language. She said she’d always remember that year as bright shiny objects and finger paint smells mixed with harsh German sounds. I held out from taking tips for about a week, then joined in.

But in August, the clanging iron mechanical rack was empty, so there was nothing to do in the coat room but stand and smile politely as customers came in from the street, then direct them up the stairs. Unceasingly, first-time guests would point a hand and say, “Right upstairs?” As if my presence, a coat-room clerk, prevented them from taking action without my consent. This was doubly odd because other than the restrooms, there was nowhere else for them to go. I wondered if they believed that if they just stayed down there long enough, the entire restaurant would descend to them. I’d smile and say, “Straight up the stairs,” and they would smile back as if they knew it all along, but had done me a favor by asking the way.

That Saturday night, I got to the coat room at twenty after eight, a perfect time to read a book or a magazine. The eight o’clock tables had arrived, the sixes had come and gone, the sevens hadn’t left yet, and the nines still had forty minutes to arrive, so I was reading The New Yorker, a splurge of a subscription I had started the month before.

I had grown up reading the magazine in a family that had read it from when it was first published. The spacious attic-playroom of my grandmother’s home in New Orleans was wallpapered with carefully cut and artfully applied covers of the magazine starting in 1925 and marching steadily along to 1953; then they stopped, but it was enough. I would stand for hours looking at them as a child. The different styles of the artists, each with their own separate worlds of the same universe, all on display for me to see. Rainy afternoons, of which New Orleans had plenty, found me with large drawing tablets and colored pencils, sketching my own versions of the scenes on the walls.

I was standing in the coat room with the left side of my body visible from the window and the other side hidden behind the wall. The New Yorker was held in my right hand so I could occasionally look out, nod, and smile if someone came through, then easily return to my place. I was in the middle of a lengthy article about bee-keeping written by a woman who wore long dresses with no underwear when she tended her hives, which I found brave and lonely somehow, when suddenly the awareness that I wasn’t alone came over me. I averted my eyes from the page while lowering the magazine and looked up to find Andrew Madden standing in front of me with only the coat-check counter between us, as if he had been instantly dispatched from a celestial realm.

“The men’s room is to the left.” My mind was on automode, though I knew directions were not what he was after. I surreptitiously slid the magazine onto a shelf.

“Uh-huh, thank you. Are you Yvette Broussard?”

“Yes.” The formal response came out on its own.

“I’m Andrew Madden.”

I thrust my hand out before I knew what I was doing and he took it, spurring on the combined shock and habitual behavior I felt locked in. I pumped a couple of times with a firm grip, an I’m-responsible-loyal-and-hardworking, interviewing-for-a-job handshake and maybe I was. His hand felt wintergreen, freshening mine from the work it had done. I let go first and he looked surprised that I hadn’t hung on.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, finishing the routine and immediately understanding why it had been devised so long ago. I wanted to cling to formality like a dress whose straps had been cut to keep from being exposed.

“Are you an actress?”

“No.” I hadn’t lived in New York long enough at that point to know that that wasn’t a strange question, nor did I understand that the predicate noun signified predictable dreams and, usually, eventually dreadful plan Bs. “I’m not.”