Writers & Lovers(28)

Mary Hand’s back there loading herself with desserts. ‘Johnny-on-the-spot,’ she says and vanishes.

Helene bends over a row of pear compotes, placing a blackberry in the center of each one.

I point to the small machine that’s printing out my order. ‘Could I somehow get a candle or two on that cookie plate?’

She nods. I wait.

Igor tears the ticket off slowly and places it beside the others. He always looks like a drawing to me, with his tiny upturned nose and long fingers. He moves like a dancer. He must be twenty years younger than Helene, but they’ve been together since the restaurant opened in the early eighties.

Their small walk-in has a glass door and inside it looks like a jewelry shop with its meringues and feuilletines, caramel tuiles and white chocolate butterflies. Igor pulls out a crème br?lée, places it on a doilied plate, and torches the top with a blue flame until the sugar glows and liquefies. Next he pulls a plate off the shelf and with a big pastry bag squeezes out a thick spiraled cone of mocha cream in the center. He slides this plate to Helene at the same time that she slides John’s coppa to him. She arranges three cookies around the mocha cream and sticks a tall sparkler in the cream while he drops glazed raspberries on both the sundae and the crème br?lée. She leans to her right so he can light the tip of the sparkler with the torch, and they both wipe down the steel counter as soon as I lift the plates. I leave their Chopin nocturnes, pass through Zeppelin—‘I’m gonna give you my love,’ Clark is screaming at the steaks on the grill—and emerge into Craig’s Sinatra mix in the dining room.

I approach Oscar from behind, so the boys can watch. John keeps his smile trimmed, but when Jasper sees the sparks flying in all directions he starts giggling and pounding his feet.

‘Oh no,’ Oscar says, turning. ‘No singing. Please no singing,’ he says, but his boys and I start and the people beside them and then the two Kroks at table 4 who were eating with their parents and Tony and Craig and Gory and pretty much everyone else joins in. Oscar glowers at me, and I can’t tell if his kids are singing or laughing too hard. Afterward everyone claps and Oscar tries to blow out the sparkler but has to wait till it blazes down the stick.

‘That was a dirty trick,’ he says.

‘Are you mad, Papa?’

‘I’m not mad at either of you.’

‘Don’t be mad, Papa, not at anyone.’

Oscar reaches over and touches John’s sleeve. ‘Oh sweetie, I’m not mad. I was kidding. This is the best birthday ever.’

Jasper is whacking at the shellac of burnt sugar with a spoon.

‘I love doing that,’ I tell him. ‘It’s like ice, even though it’s the opposite. Made from heat not cold.’

‘Yeah,’ he says, lifting out a jagged shard and trying to look at me through it.

I realize I’m just standing there, hovering. ‘Can I get you all anything else?’ I say, back in my waitress voice. It seems to startle all three of them. They shake their heads.

I stay in the wait station, drying the rack of clean glasses Alejandro brought out, embarrassed that I hovered. I have a problem with that sometimes, getting attached. Other people’s families are a weakness of mine.

When Mary Hand’s big table leaves I help her clear it. Oscar signals for the check. I print it out but put it in my pocket. It was $87.50. I pull out the wad of cash John gave me. It’s mostly ones: $24. Two of the tables in the club bar tipped me in cash so I can cover it easily.

I bring over one of our small check trays with three chocolate mints. ‘Your sons paid in advance. Happy birthday.’

‘What?’ he says, but I’m already walking away.

I watch him haggle with them. The boys are grinning. Jasper’s legs are swinging below the table. Oscar stands and John stands and Jasper stays in his chair. His brother pokes him, and he tries to poke back and misses. Oscar signals for John to step away, and he bends down and scoops Jasper up and drapes him on his shoulder as easily as cloth. Oscar turns and looks toward the wait station. I’m over near the far windows, working on roll-ups, and he doesn’t turn far enough to see me. Then they’re gone.

I clear the table: the martini glass scraped clean, the burnt-down sparkler laid among cookie crumbs, the basil-lavender crème br?lée nearly perfectly intact, minus its sheet of sugar ice. Iván, the brunch busboy, comes and helps me take away everything else, the salt and pepper and sugars and vase of flowers. We pull off the pink top cloth so that only the white one remains. I bring the dishes to Alejandro, and when I come back out Mary Hand says, ‘Looks like Marcus’s having a little dustup with your fellow.’ A dustup down at the gazebo. I feel the memory fall through my body like a stone.

Oscar’s back in the doorway, pointing at me. Marcus is clearly trying to intervene, but Oscar pats him on the arm and moves past him. I meet him halfway. All the tables are gone now and the room is stripped and Craig has left and no music is playing. I can hear his boys thumping on the stairs below. He’s breathing heavily through his nose. I would have thought something awful had happened, except I know it’s just about the money.

‘Hey,’ he says, out of breath. It feels like we’re alone in a narrow corridor instead of an enormous dining room. He stands close and plunges his hands deep in pockets, bunching up his shoulders. He looks younger without his kids, nearly boyish. ‘So, they pulled a fast one on you, didn’t they?’