7
Meeting Andrew for the first time was like getting pregnant—conception had occurred. And not unwittingly by me. Which is how I’d always thought it would be—to get pregnant. That somehow in that moment I would know. My body would know. And with Andrew, it did. I felt so deposited in. Like a bank. It made me wonder about withdrawals.
I was working and he was dining at a legendary restaurant in New York where I had managed to get a hostess job three months earlier, right after moving to the city at eighteen. “No daughter of mine will work as a waitress,” Daddy had once said when Suzanne and I were young and the topic of future possible summer jobs came up. “Babysitting is just fine.” Then he walked out of the room to go to his work shed to make another musical instrument, and that meant the subject was at an end. But I was all the way up north, it wasn’t waitressing, and anyway, Daddy had been out of my life for four years at that point.
Andrew was sitting at one of a line of tables that jutted out from a wall of windows shimmering with the gold-draped chains that the restaurant used instead of blinds. Two catty-corner walls were of this: panels of glass sheathed with swings of delicate gold chains one on top of another, like a totem pole of invisible necks, the chains swinging and swaying against one another, then flinging their shine across the room to echo upon the opposite no-gold walls. Against this backdrop, Andrew sat. With two women. One was a famous actress; both were horrifically beautiful. He was on one side of the table; they were on the other.
The air around them seemed stunned. It created a special space; the molecular makeup of their force field was clearly different from that of the other diners—as if the air itself realized it was too coarse in its natural form for them, so had transmuted itself finer and sweeter for their delicate intake. Everyone could see this. The captain of their table, Jurgos, practically gasped each time he penetrated the circumference surrounding them, knowing instinctively that the air he needed to breathe was not like their own.
It was into this atmosphere that I was asked (told, really) to carry a phone—this being 1987. Something about a call and Bonnie Davis, a name I also recognized, but even if I hadn’t, the urgency and importance with which Seamus, the Irish ma?tre d’, commanded me to do this—his brogue, already usually thick, now running all over itself—signaled its unusual significance. Which I found odd. Henry Kissinger, the Kennedys, and have-different-last-names-but-still-somehow-are-Kennedys, and all the New York gods ate here regularly, so why some silly movie star, for Christ’s sake, was putting Seamus into such a state, I had no idea.
The dining room was full. It was a Saturday night, late August, meaning the habitués were in the Hamptons. The city cleared each summer weekend, and that was my favorite time. Getting off work at the end of the night—eleven, if I came on at four; twelve, if I started at five—I would walk most of the distance home. Set out on Park Avenue, but usually, quickly, take one of the blocks over to Madison or Fifth. Those were the best. They were deserted; literally, quite empty. Often I would walk in the middle of Fifth Avenue so I could see the odd bus or cab approaching as I headed downtown, and the buildings stood on each side of me like tall adults surrounding a child’s first solo stroll, ready to reach out and hold me, if I were to fall. They felt mine in that dark, in that late-hour coolness, in that emptiness and uselessness they had at just those moments in time. Summer weekend nights made Manhattan a different country that I was able to enter by the sheer act of being there. I’d walk up Fifth, turn west at the park, and continue on, walking on the building side, passing the doormen at the restaurants and apartment buildings and hotels.
They were fighting when I got to the table. I was carrying the phone, the black streamlined (I think that model is called) phone with the funny push buttons on the receiver that were small and round and protruded like so many pegs. The dining room had the hushed buzz it would get—the vibrations of the diners’ hopes and needs and desires and fears all rising, moving up over their heads until each voice met and mingled with the buzz of the others already there, then the hush would step in, blending them all together, and the gold swinging chains caught so many verbs and nouns that the words lay on them like air bubbles on a fisherman’s net. I could only hear their conversation when I got up close.
“Because I don’t want to,” the famous actress, Lily Creed, said as I approached the table.
Andrew was looking down, fixing a forkful from his plate. A beautiful, fleshy pink meat from a lamb that once was small, had become smaller still, and now was being prepared smallest yet into calculated cuts to enter Andrew’s mouth.
He stopped, mouth ready and open, fork midair, when he saw me. Then it all went back so quickly—lips together, hand down—but our first moment was that. Seeing him like that. Then it was gone.
I knew I knew him from before. Like a dream I didn’t need to have, it was already so much a part of my sleep. So much that I didn’t even know that part of him was me until I saw him. Looked him in the eyes. Mine on his. His on mine. Again. Because that’s what it was—an Again. An “Oh, it’s you,” plus an “Oh, and that part of me I thought was me has been you. All this time, has been you.”
“Is that for me?” Andrew said, looking into my eyes and able to see all inside me and all outside me all at once me.
It was clear in that moment that everything was for him, whether it was meant to be or not.
I had to answer but didn’t know what to say. My mind had gone blank. I knew Seamus had said, “Take a phone to Mr. Madden’s table—a call [something] Bonnie Davis.” But I couldn’t recall if he had said “from Bonnie Davis” or “for Bonnie Davis.” That information had slipped away, as though my body had known ahead of time that something momentous was about to happen, and shut down my brain so it wouldn’t get in the way.
But it did get in the way because the word was lost, the preposition was gone, my mind did not grasp its short sound. And it wasn’t like I could turn around, go back to the ma?tre d’ stand, and say, “Seamus, hi, sorry, me again. Is this a phone call for Bonnie Davis? Or from Bonnie Davis?” That was not a possibility, so there I stood in front of them, holding the phone before me, clutched in both hands like some dead telecommunication bouquet.
Finally, I made a decision. “It’s for Bonnie Davis,”
“For Bonnie Davis or from Bonnie Davis?” Andrew replied.
Jesus God, all of this because of one word. I just wanted to hide, but then I saw the smile in his eyes and heard the hint in his words replaying in my head.
“From Bonnie Davis, for you.”
There was a pause. As if I had won. As if the contest were over and in one long, though barely perceptible, moment, we had shifted from crossing the finish line to celebrating the game.
“Thank you,” he said, and looked at me with a smile held inside.
I rested the phone before him, then knelt down to plug in the cord. I had to crawl on the floor because the jack was underneath the table in the middle of their legs. Lily had daintily painted toes on huge feet. Now, I’m usually rotten at telling the size of anything, but I had to put my hand flat on the ground next to her shoe while I inserted the plug, so it was easy to determine the space her feet took up. They were huge. The other woman was wearing clunky, closed-toe, hot-looking shoes of synthetic leather. I imagined neither of them thought while they were getting dressed that someone would be examining their feet from so close up. I figured Lily still would have chosen the strappy high-heeled sandals that she had on while the other woman maybe would not—they probably were stinky when she took them off. Andrew’s black silk-socked feet were encased in black leather loafers; I could sense their desire to be free, like two large children swimming in inner tubes. I scooted out the step or two backward and stood up, sure that I was a mess.
I looked at Andrew again. I hadn’t wanted to, because a small part of me has never stopped believing the one-year-old’s truth that if I’m not looking at you, you can’t see me. He had just said, “Bonnie,” with the receiver to his ear, and I immediately pictured a lass wearing a full soft skirt, sitting on his knee with one arm around his neck and the other feeding him the lamb. Andrew turned back to me and slowly mouthed, “Thank you.” His lips, teeth, and tongue formed each empty sound perfectly, trusting the air to transport and transform them into normal volume for me. I thought I should smile, but couldn’t. It was like being stoned, when just thinking of a response makes me believe it somehow was instantaneously conveyed to the room. I think he got it, but I couldn’t hang around to see. I figured Jurgos would soon notice me still standing there, so I walked away from Andrew.
My mind began its way with me on the walk down the long marble corridor back to the ma?tre d’ stand. Oh, for Christ’s sake, Yvette, you really are too much. Andrew Madden looking at you? Please. You are out of your mind and pigheaded to boot. No one is looking at you, missy-thing, in your polyester lime-green Nehru jacket uniform. You’re practically a walking diaphragm against attractiveness, honey, he was not looking at you.
But privately, away from that voice in my head, I thought of him constantly.
I thought of him so repeatedly that one week later, at seven-thirty as I went to take my dinner break at work, I wished it were the previous Saturday night, right before I met him, so I could live it all over again. I took my plate to the private dining room behind the barroom where customers usually didn’t eat on Saturday nights. When the three private dining rooms were full—during the fall social season or for Christmas parties—we were forced to take our employee meals in the hall, a long passageway that allowed for quick and hidden access from the kitchen to any one of the dining rooms. The few chairs not being used were lined up flush against the wall, like a no-view single-seat train that kept you in place, while waiters, table captains, and busboys streaked past, like the blur outside a windowpane, yelling to one another in the Romance and Slavic languages of their motherland. As I ate in the empty silence of the private dining room, I tried to imagine where Andrew was and who was holding his attention.
When I returned from my break, Seamus sent me down to the coat-check room, normally a prized position because there you could earn tips during your shift. Few to no people gave money for escorting them to their table or delivering a phone, and certainly not for writing down their reservation when they called, but coat-checking enabled us hosts and hostesses to dip into the pile of cash walking in the doors each night, from patrons whose monthly florist bills were the size of our monthly nuts.
Even though we weren’t supposed to. The house got the tips, but the customers didn’t know that; they assumed we did. They’d watch us working hard to keep their coats and scarves from falling on the floor; saw us smiling nicely as we handed their garments over after (usually) quickly locating them, so they’d gladly put a dollar or two down. The tips were then swept into a small square hole that had been cut into the top of the counter, and shot straight to the pockets of the owners via a locked strongbox. Except for the ones that we hid in our hands and surreptitiously slid into our pants pockets, being sure to take them out later to neatly fold since a bulge under the jacket uniform was a dead giveaway.
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.”
“Do you want to be?”
It was palpable in that moment that he had given me a question legions craved from him. I watched his face after he offered it. An idol mask had slipped on and his features set themselves in a practiced, enigmatic openness.
“No.” Then I smiled and shrugged. He clearly liked actresses, thought the profession a good job to have; I didn’t want to appear rude.
“Oh.” This seemed to escape without his consent because he followed it with a small little laugh. “Well, what are you, then, besides beautiful?”
Which made me blush. I didn’t feel beautiful in that polyester lime-green uniform, and I didn’t think of myself that way. With my father I had felt beautiful because he told me I was all the time, even though I figured he said it because I was his offspring, and with widow-man I had, but as a teenager around girls and boys my own age, I felt off, different, like my soul had been in a rush to get to earth, so had just grabbed the first face it saw, one left over from an earlier time, as if all the modern ones were off in a queue getting their magazine-styled, cheerleader-straight hair. “Porcelain” and “cameo” are words I’ve heard to describe me—not such stuff as high school boys’ dreams are made on.
“I’m an artist, a sculptor.” I tried to ignore how absurd I felt saying this in Modern Art’s hometown, and as a coat-check clerk, no less, though it had been worse in Mississippi. Back home, I could see in people’s eyes the cute-kitten and sweet-puppy paintings they decided a girl artist would create. “Sugar pie, that’s so nice,” they’d say, patting my hand as if making a physical prayer to Jesus for his light to shine through my work.
One of Andrew’s eyebrows shot up, and he lowered his chin to examine my face. I felt he was seeing every piece I had ever done.
“I’d like to help you.”
He took no breath for a pause, but it existed nonetheless, disuniting everything preceding it and since.
“Call me tomorrow. I’m at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Will you do that, will you call me tomorrow?”
“Okay, but…What’s your room number?”
Andrew smiled at me. Kindly. And it held me gently in place.
“Just say my name, Yvette, they know me.”
I never wanted his smile to stop.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
We looked at each other for a long moment, then he knocked on the counter between us twice with his forefinger crooked, like a substitute for the embrace that had begun.
“So I’ll talk to you; we’ll talk; I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Right?”
I nodded.
“Bye, Yvette.” And he turned and disappeared into the men’s room just to the left.
There was a gasp in the air and in me. A loud but silent, all-encompassing “Oh my God” inhaled into space and body and mind. I was too excited to stand still, so I started walking a tiny track in front of the racks. An entire year’s worth of experience had happened in that short exchange, and my mind was racing with its sounds and senses and smells. I noticed The New Yorker folded back to the article about bee-keeping. In that magazine, on that page, lay the sentence that was the point in time when Andrew Madden and I had met. I wanted to frame it. Every word I read henceforth would be infused with him. If I could read at all. My mind held only his words, a necklace of auditory pearls consisting of every syllable he had spoken, one I could listen to, look at, and hold.
Then I remembered he was still in the men’s room. I immediately wished there was someplace else I could be, some option more elegant than being stuck in the coat-check room with the lime-green of my uniform vibrating off my body, a strong signal from the lighthouse of my nonexistent art career. I paced a bit more, than decided my only real choice was just to stand behind the counter as nonchalantly as I could.
Andrew emerged from the men’s room, wagging his finger at me as he walked across the lobby’s marble floor. “Ritz-Carlton Hotel, tomorrow; don’t forget.”
I smiled. A smile I had never smiled before. A smile attached to a retractable cord that he had installed inside me, that pulled out and grew more taut with each step he took up the stairs, only able to snap back and coil up by talking to him again.
I wouldn’t forget. Was he kidding? I couldn’t wait.