Dinner with Secretary
Monday night at eight o’clock. I’m in my office attempting yesterday’s New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, listening to rap music on the stereo, trying to fathom its popularity, since a little blonde hardbody I met at Au Bar two nights ago told me that rap is all she listens to, and though later I beat the living shit out of her at someone’s apartment in the Dakota (she was almost decapitated; hardly a strange experience for me), earlier this morning her taste in music haunted my memory and I had to stop at Tower Records on the Upper West Side and buy ninety dollars’ worth of rap CDs but, as expected, I’m at a loss: niggerish voices uttering ugly words like digit, pudding, chunk. Jean sits at her desk, which is piled high with reams of documents that I want her to go over. Today has not been bad: I worked out for two hours before the office; the new Robison Hirsch restaurant called Finna opened in Chelsea; Evelyn left two messages on my answering machine and another with Jean, letting me know that she’ll be in Boston for most of the week; and best of all, The Patty Winters Show this morning was in two parts. The first was an exclusive interview with Donald Trump, the second was a report on women who’ve been tortured. I’m supposed to have dinner with Madison Grey and David Campion at Café Luxembourg, but at eight-fifteen I find out that Luis Carruthers is going to be dining with us so I call up Campion, the dumb bastard, and cancel, then spend minutes debating about what I should do with the rest of the evening. Looking out my window, I realize that within moments the sky above this city will be completely dark.
Jean peers into my office, knocking gently on the half-open door. I pretend not to acknowledge her presence, though I’m not sure why, since I’m kind of lonely. She moves up to the desk. I’m still staring at the crossword puzzle with my Wayfarers on, stunned but for no real reason.
She places a file on top of the desk before asking, “Doin’ the crossword?” dropping the g in “doing”—a pathetic gesture of intimacy, an irritating stab at forced friendliness. I gag inwardly, then nod without looking up at her.
“Need help?” she asks, moving cautiously around the desk to where I sit, and she leans over my shoulder to offer assistance. I’ve already filled in every space with either the word meat or bone and she emits only a slight gasp when noticing this, and when she sees the pile of No. 2 pencils I’ve snapped in half lying on my desk she dutifully picks them up and walks out of the room.
“Jean?” I call.
“Yes, Patrick?” She reenters the office trying to downplay her eagerness.
“Would you like to accompany me to dinner?” I ask, still staring at the crossword, gingerly erasing the m in one of the many meats I’ve filled the puzzle with. “That is, if you’re not … doing anything.”
“Oh no,” she answers too quickly and then, I think, realizing this quickness, says, “I have no plans.”
“Well, isn’t this a coincidence,” I ask, looking up, lowering my Wayfarers.
She laughs lightly but there’s a real urgency in it, something uncomfortable, and this does little in the way of making me feel less sick.
“I guess,” she shrugs.
“I also have tickets to a … a Milla Vanilla concert, if you’d like to go,” I tell her casually.
Confused, she asks, “Really? Who?”
“Milla … Vanilla,” I repeat slowly.
“Milla … Vanilla?” she asks uncomfortably.
“Milla … Vanilla,” I say. “I think that’s what their name is.”
She says, “I’m not sure.”
“About going?”
“No … of the name.” She concentrates, then says, “I think they’re called … Milli Vanilli.”
I pause for a long time before saying, “Oh.”
She stands there, nods once.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say—I don’t have any tickets to it anyway. “It’s months from now.”
“Oh,” she says, nodding again. “Okay.”
“Listen, where should we go?” I lean back and pull my Zagat from the desk’s top drawer.
She pauses, afraid of what to say, taking my question as a test she needs to pass, and then, unsure she’s chosen the right answer, offers, “Anywhere you want?”
“No, no, no.” I smile, leafing through the booklet. “How about anywhere you want?”
“Oh Patrick,” she sighs. “I can’t make this decision.”
“No, come on,” I urge. “Anywhere you want.”
“Oh I can’t.” Helplessly, she sighs again. “I don’t know.”
“Come on,” I urge her, “where do you want to go? Anywhere you want. Just say it. I can get us in anywhere.”
She thinks about it for a long time and then, sensing her time is running out, timidly asks, trying to impress me, “What about … Dorsia?”
I stop looking through the Zagat guide and without glancing up, smiling tightly, stomach dropping, I silently ask myself, Do I really want to say no? Do I really want to say I can’t possibly get us in? Is that what I’m really prepared to do? Is that what I really want to do?
“So-o-o-o,” I say, placing the book down, then nervously opening it up again to find the number. “Dorsia is where Jean wants to go.…”
“Oh I don’t know,” she says, confused. “No, we’ll go anywhere you want.”
“Dorsia is … fine,” I say casually, picking up the phone, and with a trembling finger very quickly dial the seven dreaded numbers, trying to remain cool. Instead of the busy signal I’m expecting, the phone actually rings at Dorsia and after two rings the same harassed voice I’ve grown accustomed to for the past three months answers, shouting out, “Dorsia, yes?” the room behind the voice a deafening hum.
“Yes, can you take two tonight, oh, let’s say, in around twenty minutes?” I ask, checking my Rolex, offering Jean a wink. She seems impressed.
“We are totally booked,” the ma?tre d’ shouts out smugly.
“Oh, really?” I say, trying to look pleased, on the verge of vomiting. “That’s great.”
“I said we are totally booked,” he shouts.
“Two at nine?” I say. “Perfect.”
“There are no tables available tonight,” the ma?tre d’, unflappable, drones. “The waiting list is also totally booked.” He hangs up.
“See you then.” I hang up too, and with a smile that tries its best to express pleasure at her choice, I find myself fighting for breath, every muscle tensed sharply. Jean is wearing a wool jersey and flannel dress by Calvin Klein, an alligator belt with a silver buckle by Barry Kieselstein Cord, silver earrings and clear stockings also by Calvin Klein. She stands there in front of the desk, confused.
“Yes?” I ask, walking over to the coatrack. “You’re dressed … okay.”
She pauses. “You didn’t give them a name,” she says softly.
I think about this while putting on my Armani jacket and while reknotting my Armani silk tie, and without stammering I tell her, “They … know me.”
While the ma?tre d’ seats a couple who I’m pretty sure are Kate Spencer and Jason Lauder, Jean and I move up to his podium, where the reservation book lies open, names absurdly legible, and leaning over it casually I spot the only name for two at nine without a line drawn through it, which happens to be—oh Jesus—Schrawtz. I sigh, and tapping my foot, my mind racing, I try to concoct some kind of feasible plan. Suddenly I turn to Jean and say, “Why don’t you go to the women’s room.”
She’s looking around the restaurant, taking it in. Chaos. People are waiting ten deep at the bar. The ma?tre d’ seats the couple at a table in the middle of the room. Sylvester Stallone and a bimbo sit in the front booth that Sean and I sat in just weeks before, much to my sickened amazement, and his bodyguards are piled into the booth next to that, and the owner of Petty’s, Norman Prager, lounges in the third. Jean turns her head to me and shouts “What?” over the din.
“Don’t you want to use the ladies’ room?” I ask. The ma?tre d’ nears us, picking his way through the packed restaurant, unsmiling.
“Why? I mean … do I?” she asks, totally confused.
“Just … go,” I hiss, desperately squeezing her arm.
“But I don’t need to go, Patrick,” she protests.
“Oh Christ,” I mutter. Now it’s too late anyway.
The ma?tre d’ walks up to the podium and inspects the book, takes a phone call, hangs up in a matter of seconds, then looks us over, not exactly displeased. The ma?tre d’ is at least fifty and has a ponytail. I clear my throat twice to get his full attention, make some kind of lame eye contact.
“Yes?” he asks, as if harassed.
I give him a dignified expression before sighing inside. “Reservations at nine …” I gulp. “For two.”
“Ye-e-es?” he asks suspiciously, drawing the word out. “Name?” he says, then turns to a passing waiter, eighteen and model handsome, who’d asked, “Where’s da ice?” He’s glaring and shouting, “Not … now. Okay? How many times do you need to be told?” The waiter shrugs, humbly, and then the ma?tre d’ points off toward the bar, “Da ice is over dere!” He turns back to us and I am genuinely frightened.
“Name,” he commands.
And I’m thinking: Of all the f*cking names, why this one? “Um, Schrawtz”—oh god—“Mr. and Mrs. Schrawtz.” My face, I’m sure, is ashen and I say the name mechanically, but the ma?tre d’ is too busy to not buy it and I don’t even bother to face Jean, who I’m sure is totally bewildered by my behavior as we’re led to the Schrawtzes’ table, which I’m sure probably sucks though I’m relieved anyway.
Menus already lie on the table but I’m so nervous the words and even the prices look like hieroglyphics and I’m completely at a loss. A waiter takes our drink order—the same one who couldn’t locate the ice—and I find myself saying things, without listening to Jean, like “Protecting the ozone layer is a really cool idea” and telling knock-knock jokes. I smile, fixing it on my face, in another country, and it takes no time at all—minutes, really, the waiter doesn’t even get a chance to tell us about the specials—for me to notice the tall, handsome couple by the podium conferring with the ma?tre d’, and after sighing very deeply, light-headed, stammering, I mention to Jean, “Something bad is happening.”
She looks up from the menu and puts down the iceless drink she’s been sipping. “Why? What’s wrong?”
The ma?tre d’ is glaring over at us, at me, from across the room as he leads the couple toward our table. If the couple had been short, dumpy, excessively Jewish, I could’ve kept this table, even without the aid of a fifty, but this couple looks like they’ve just strolled out of a Ralph Lauren ad, and though Jean and I do too (and so does the rest of the whole goddamn restaurant), the man is wearing a tuxedo and the girl—a totally f*ckable babe—is covered with jewels. This is reality, and as my loathsome brother Sean would say, I have to deal with it. The ma?tre d’ now stands at the table, hands clasped behind his back, unamused, and after a long pause asks, “Mr. and Mrs. … Schrawtz?”
“Yes?” I play it cool.
He just stares. This is accompanied by an abnormal silence. His ponytail, gray and oily, hangs like some kind of malignancy below his collar.
“You know,” I finally say, somewhat suavely, “I happen to know the chef.”
He continues staring. So, no doubt, does the couple behind him.
After another long pause, for no real reason, I ask, “Is he … in Aspen?”
This is getting nowhere. I sigh and turn to Jean, who looks completely mystified. “Let’s go, okay?” She nods dumbly. Humiliated, I take Jean’s hand and we get up—she slower than I—brushing past the ma?tre d’ and the couple, and make our way back through the crowded restaurant and then we’re outside and I’m utterly devastated and murmuring robotically to myself “I should have known better I should have known better I should,” but Jean skips down the street laughing, pulling me along, and when I finally notice her unexpected mirth, between giggles she lets out “That was so funny” and then, squeezing my clenched fist, she lets me know “Your sense of humor is so spontaneous.” Shaken, walking stiffly by her side, ignoring her, I ask myself “Where … to … now?” and in seconds come up with an answer—Arcadia, toward which I find myself guiding us.
After someone who I think is Hamilton Conway mistakes me for someone named Ted Owen and asks if I can get him into Petty’s tonight—I tell him, “I’ll see what I can do,” then turn what’s left of my attention to Jean, who sits across from me in the near-empty dining room of Arcadia—after he leaves, only five of the restaurant’s tables have people at them. I’ve ordered a J&B on the rocks. Jean’s sipping a glass of white wine and talking about how what she really wants to do is “get into merchant banking” and I’m thinking: Dare to dream. Someone else, Frederick Dibble, stops by and congratulates me on the Larson account and then has the nerve to say, “Talk to you later, Saul.” But I’m in a daze, millions of miles away, and Jean doesn’t notice; she’s talking about a new novel she’s been reading by some young author—its cover, I’ve seen, slathered with neon; its subject, lofty suffering. Accidentally I think she’s talking about something else and I find myself saying, without really looking over at her, “You need a tough skin to survive in this city.” She flushes, seems embarrassed and takes another sip of the wine, which is a nice sauvignon blanc.
“You seem distant,” she says.
“What?” I ask, blinking.
“I said you seem distant,” she says.
“No,” I sigh. “I’m still my same kooky self.”
“That’s good.” She smiles—am I dreaming this?—relieved.
“So listen,” I say, trying to focus in on her, “what do you really want to do with your life?” Then, remembering how she was droning on about a career in merchant banking, I add, “Just briefly, you know, summarize.” Then I add, “And don’t tell me you enjoy working with children, okay?”
“Well, I’d like to travel,” she says. “And maybe go back to school, but I really don’t know.…” She pauses thoughtfully and announces, sincerely, “I’m at a point in my life where there seems to be a lot of possibilities, but I’m so … I don’t know … unsure.”
“I think it’s also important for people to realize their limitations.” Then, out of the blue I ask, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
She smiles shyly, blushes, and then says, “No. Not really.”
“Interesting,” I murmur. I’ve opened my menu and I’m studying tonight’s prix fixe dinner.
“Are you seeing anyone?” she ventures timidly. “I mean, seriously?”
I decide on the pilot fish with tulips and cinnamon, evading the question by sighing, “I just want to have a meaningful relationship with someone special,” and before she’s allowed to respond I ask her what she’s going to order.
“I think the mahi-mahi,” she says and then, squinting at the menu, “with ginger.”
“I’m having the pilot fish,” I say. “I’m developing a taste for them. For … pilot fish,” I say, nodding.
Later, after a mediocre dinner, a bottle of expensive California cabernet sauvignon and a crème br?lée that we share, I order a glass of fifty-dollar port and Jean sips a decaffeinated espresso and when she asks where the restaurant got its name, I tell her, and I don’t make anything ridiculous up—though I’m tempted, just to see if she’d believe it anyway. Sitting across from Jean right now in the darkness of Arcadia, it’s very easy to believe that she would swallow any kind of misinformation I push her way—the crush she has on me rendering her powerless—and I find this lack of defense oddly unerotic. I could even explain my pro-apartheid stance and have her find reasons why she too should share them and invest large sums of money in racist corporations tha—
“Arcadia was an ancient region in Peloponnesus, Greece, which was founded in 370 B.C., and it was completely surrounded by mountains. Its chief city was … Megalopolis, which was also the center of political activity and the capital of the Arcadian confederacy.…” I take a sip of the port, which is thick, strong, expensive. “It was destroyed during the Greek war of independence.…” I pause again. “Pan was worshiped originally in Arcadia. Do you know who Pan was?”
Never taking her eyes off me, she nods.
“His revels were very similar to those of Bacchus,” I tell her. “He frolicked with nymphs at night but he also liked to … frighten travelers during the day.… Hence the word pan-ic.”
Blah blah blah. I’m amused that I’ve retained this knowledge and I look up from the port I’ve been staring thoughtfully into and smile at her. She’s silent for a long time, confused, unsure of how to respond, but eventually she looks deeply into my eyes and says, haltingly, leaning across the table, “That’s … so … interesting,” which is all that comes out of her mouth, is all she has to say.
Eleven thirty-four. We stand on the sidewalk in front of Jean’s apartment on the Upper East Side. Her doorman eyes us warily and fills me with a nameless dread, his gaze piercing me from the lobby. A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety. It’s as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there … is … no … key.
“Dinner was wonderful,” she says. “Thank you very much.”
“Actually, the food was mediocre, but you’re welcome.” I shrug.
“Do you want to come up for a drink?” she asks too casually, and even though I’m critical of her approach it doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t want to go up—but something stops me, something quells the bloodlust: the doorman? the way the lobby is lit? her lipstick? Plus I’m beginning to think that pornography is so much less complicated than actual sex, and because of this lack of complication, so much more pleasurable.
“Do you have any peyote?” I ask.
She pauses, confused. “What?”
“Just a joke,” I say, then, “Listen, I want to watch David Letterman so …” I pause, unsure as to why I’m lingering. “I should go.”
“You can watch it …” She stops, then suggests, “at my place.”
I pause before asking, “Do you have cable?”
“Yes.” She nods. “I have cable.”
Stuck, I pause again, then pretend to mull it over. “No, it’s okay. I like to watch it … without cable.”
She offers a sad, perplexed glance. “What?”
“I have to return some videotapes,” I explain in a rush.
She pauses. “Now? It’s”—she checks her watch—“almost midnight.”
“Well, yeah,” I say, considerably detached.
“Well, I guess … it’s good night then,” she says.
What kind of books does Jean read? Titles race through my mind: How to Make a Man Fall in Love with You. How to Keep a Man in Love with You Forever. How to Close a Deal: Get Married. How to Be Married One Year from Today. Supplicant. In my overcoat pocket I finger the ostrich condom case from Luc Benoit I bought last week but, er, no.
After awkwardly shaking hands she asks, still holding mine, “Really? You don’t have cable?”
And though it has been in no way a romantic evening, she embraces me and this time emanates a warmth I’m not familiar with. I am so used to imagining everything happening the way it occurs in movies, visualizing things falling somehow into the shape of events on a screen, that I almost hear the swelling of an orchestra, can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion overhead, the seventy-millimeter image of her lips parting and the subsequent murmur of “I want you” in Dolby sound. But my embrace is frozen and I realize, at first distantly and then with greater clarity, that the havoc raging inside me is gradually subsiding and she is kissing me on the mouth and this jars me back into some kind of reality and I lightly push her away. She glances up at me fearfully.
“Listen, I’ve got to go,” I say, checking my Rolex. “I don’t want to miss … Stupid Pet Tricks.”
“Okay,” she says, composing herself. “Bye.”
“Night,” I say.
We both head off in our separate directions, but suddenly she calls out something.
I turn around.
“Don’t forget you have a breakfast meeting with Frederick Bennet and Charles Rust at ‘21,’” she says from the door, which the doorman is holding open for her.
“Thanks,” I call out, waving. “It slipped my mind completely.”
She waves back, disappearing into the lobby.
On my way over to Park Avenue to find a cab I pass an ugly, homeless bum—a member of the genetic underclass—and when he softly pleads for change, for “anything,” I notice the Barnes & Noble book bag that sits next to him on the steps of the church he’s begging on and I can’t help but smirk, out loud, “Oh right, like you read …,” and then, in the back of the cab on the way across town to my apartment, I imagine running around Central Park on a cool spring afternoon with Jean, laughing, holding hands. We buy balloons, we let them go.