As Elisa stood up and shook my hand, I did my best to put her at ease with friendly chatter, and I continued with this as we made our way toward the dining room.
“Quite a town, London,” she said, surprising me with her ability to make small talk. “How’d you like living here?” Her voice was that same mannish deep tenor I remembered from a decade or so earlier. Her clothes, really, were the only remarkable change, and the fact she had aged the way drinkers do—red face, lined eyes, a little big around the middle. “Don’t much like big cities myself.”
“Really?” I said. “I love it.”
“But that’s great,” she grinned. “What do you do here, anyway?”
Hadn’t my father told her? “I’m an installation artist,” I said.
“Really! Sounds like fun.”
I cringed at what sounded like a somewhat condescending tone. Did she even have any idea what an installation artist was? My father stopped and fumbled in his breast pocket for a lighter. Elisa reached into her handbag and smoothly produced a purple Bic to relight his pipe. “Goddamn limey tobacco,” my father mumbled as we came into the fancy dining room. “Whole country’s damp.”
“We spent the day at Dunhill’s,” Elisa told me with a proprietary indulgence. “He’s trying out a new tobacco.”
“Just like old times,” I said. “Dad and I used to spend the whole day at Dunhill sometimes when I was a child.” Unsure how to continue, I looked over to my father, just then busy with the ma?tre d’. His spending the day with Elisa at one of our old haunts felt like a betrayal, and I sensed this would be the first of many times I’d feel this way.
Back in high school, I remembered hearing once that Elisa had been in a car wreck with her mother and that her mother had died, a fact that had elicited my respect and some deference in matters of suffering, though I couldn’t have imagined then that our separate longings for a parent would one day collide.
Soon we were seated at a round table at the center of the dining room. Our French waiter was one of the most handsome men I’d ever seen, and his flirtatious attention helped distract me. Still, I caught myself realizing, as the drinks were served, that Elisa, who’d been something of a wallflower back in high school, seemed determined to assert her new authority with assurance.
“So, do you get paid for that?” she said. “The installation stuff?”
My father sat smiling complacently as he nursed his vodka and ginger ale—a drink I hadn’t seen in his hand in ten years—seemingly happy that Elisa and I were “getting along,” probably telling himself that all his worries about the introduction had been for naught. I wasn’t sure which I found more disturbing—the fact my father was drinking again or that he’d brought that girl from the smoking exit all the way to London. The two events seemed fundamentally connected.
“In a sense, yes, I do get paid,” I told Elisa. “I came here on a grant, see.” I sipped my wine and hoped she wouldn’t ask me what, precisely, “installation” meant.
She took a mini baguette from her plate and tore off a bite with her teeth. “So, what is ‘installation,’ anyway?”
“Can they make me a hamburger?” I heard my father asking our waiter as he gestured toward the kitchen. “Well done, please.”
Elisa poured herself a glass of wine before the waiter had time to come around to our side of the table. The waiter took the bottle from her hand and finished pouring. She smiled at my father, who wheezed through the smoke as he lit his cigarette. He looked tired.
“Installation art,” I told her, “well, it defies boundaries or strict definition, really.”
“So it could be . . . anything.”
“I suppose it could . . .”
“Frances is a damn good photographer,” my father said. “I wish you’d get the old camera out more often.”
I smiled and lifted my glass of wine. “Cheers,” I said, and we all toasted, to what exactly I was not sure.
My father and Elisa had come over on the Queen Elizabeth 2 and would return on the Concorde. My father was rolling out the red carpet for Eat the Rich, and all I could do was drink my wine and act as if this were all perfectly normal. Elisa and I shared a bottle of cabernet while my father sipped his vodka.
After dinner, my father retired to bed, and Elisa and I went out to a nearby nightclub for a drink—her idea. My father chuckled, waving us off through the closing elevator door. “Don’t make it too late, girls.”
The club was very West London posh—low lit, ritzy, and full of sexy, well-dressed people out to be seen. “Cool place,” Elisa said, not without a certain discomfort in her voice.