I looked it over in the lobby—two letters for Helen and two for me. One was from my mother in D.C., expressing her worry at my ability to maintain an income steady enough to support this excursion into independent living, insulting as ever without meaning to be. “My darling girl,” she called me, and “my beloved child,” making me feel somehow even older than my twenty-six years.
The other, to my surprise, was from Abe. Seeing his return address and fluid handwriting, I thought at first that there must be a mistake and that he’d meant to write Helen, whom he was still seeing, even though Dickie and I, as of the last forty-eight hours, were officially uncoupled.
But no, it really was for me.
“My Dear Miss Poisonfish,” he addressed me, good-humoredly. Then, “In all seriousness, Lillian, Lily, most appealing Miss Boxfish, I fear you’ve broken poor Dickie’s heart, and poisoned the well of his zest for life, at least temporarily. I do not think this will make much difference, but since I hate seeing my pal so crestfallen and downcast, and since selfishly I adore the pleasure of your company on our double dates: Reconsider?”
The lobby felt stifling, and I crumpled both letters, one per fist, thinking to throw them in the trash bin near the stairs before I walked up, reluctant to carry such burdens to our rented heights.
Then the feeling passed and I felt all right. I loved them both, but neither Abe nor my mother had any purchase on me. They could say what they liked, and I would love them still, but I would not change my behavior, would not change my mind. I smoothed the letters flat again, replacing them in their respective envelopes, and kept them.
So for that first year of freedom, until the lease was up and we each had enough money to acquire our own places, Helen and I lived like happy cliff dwellers with our kitchenette and our combination shower and bathtub.
We had all we needed: work to do, vegetables and fresh milk and money to pay for them, even though they weren’t cheap. I think they would’ve sold autumn leaves for fifty cents a bunch if they could have found a market for them. It was a bandit city then, as it would always remain.
But the sidewalks were clean and the garbage was collected and I gave no thought as to where it was hauled or burned.
Up there in my snug sweet tower, I felt I’d made landfall in the shoals of shifting clouds. Far enough from the crowds to relish the crowds.
8
The Pearl Anniversary
You would think that food—its ready command of our senses granting it immediate access to our hearts and minds, our appetites and memories—could be trusted to speak for itself.
Not so, apparently. In the 1950s, when I was freelancing, I was often enlisted as a grocery-aisle Cyrano, a ventriloquist for the new and improved, repeatedly making the case that the way Mother did it was not, in fact, best.
Sometimes clients would send me samples of the product for which I was composing copy. Sometimes they would also request that I build the ads around recipes, or at least let me know that the ads would have these recipes embedded within them. One unforgettably repellent-sounding one was as follows:
2 cups of roast beef, ground
3 tbsp Karo syrup
3 tbsp vinegar
Take the gravy from the roast and cook all together about 5 minutes.
A little salt may be necessary.
Suggest serving this with pickled peaches.
Fortunately, the food at Grimaldi—Northern Italian cuisine of a superior quality—is nothing like that. Unfortunately, I am still full of damnable Oreos when I arrive. Yet I find the garlic smells and the clinking knife-and-fork-on-plate sounds a welcome greeting. Even the Sinatra recording that’s playing—that tired Italian restaurant cliché that I’ve never liked—feels right tonight, just because it’s familiar.
Alberto, the owner, is at the front of the house, standing next to the hostess, going over the evening’s reservations. Shoulders slightly stooped but still natty in his charcoal-gray suit, he hails me as if I were family.
“Lillian, mia cara, right on time,” he says, embracing me. Then he says to the hostess, “The reservation is under Boxfish. I’ll take her to her table, don’t you worry.”
Alberto moved to Manhattan from Lombardy in the early 1950s—born in Milan, like my ex-husband Max’s parents. He still has the accent, tuneful and rhythmic. Max’s accent was pure New York: dropped final Rs and nasal diphthongs.
Alberto installs me in my red leather banquette, the same one I sit in every New Year’s Eve.
Most of what we consider beauty is manufactured, but the fact of that manufacture does not make it unbeautiful. Grimaldi as conceived by Alberto is like this: garish paintings that one early reviewer said looked as though they’d been purchased by the square foot and gleaming reproductions of classical bronze statues.
“What’ll it be tonight?” he says. “We got anything you like.”
I hate that I have to tell him that I don’t want anything.