I didn’t used to be this way. I went to cocktail parties with friends and advertisers, with entertaining experts and houseware and furnishing designers. I rubbed elbows—literal elbows!—with Mary and Russel Wright.
I watch the waiters and wonder whether anyone but me will notice a change after Alberto decamps. Whether his nephew will surrender to the dictates of fashion—introducing “blackened” entrees, a chocolate dessert with a menacing name, even, God forbid, a television—or keep the place the same, preserving its strange indulgences, like zabaione, a frothed concoction of egg yolks beaten with sugar and wine, poured over fresh berries, prepared tableside. The booth next to mine has just ordered it. It is all I can do not to say to the couple, fancy and middle-aged, Enjoy, because it won’t last.
I’ve met the nephew, I’m sure, though I can’t remember his name. Younger than my Gian, certainly. Maybe younger than this restaurant. When Alberto and Fabiola are gone, no one here will know me any longer as the ex-wife of Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo. I’ll only be myself. Whatever that means. A strange old lady from around the corner. Orange Fire lipstick wiped off a wineglass.
I sit awhile, watching the tables fill up. Trying to think of an Italian lullaby that Max used to sing, but with Sinatra’s relentless crooning I can’t recall the tune.
True to my word, I leave a tip proportionate to my sense of betrayal. Alberto, meandering among the other tables like an ancient river, checking in with the newcomers, the regulars, sees me rise, excuses himself, and comes to my side to bid me good-bye.
Like the old man he is, he shuffles his feet in their shoes of Italian leather, so I have to slow my own stride as he walks me to the coat check.
“Safe walk home, Lillian,” he says. “Take good care, and sleep well, and happy 1985.”
“Same, Alberto, same,” I say, as he helps me into my coat.
Alberto hands me a salmon-colored rose—long-stemmed, no thorns—of the variety given out to every female guest, just as he has done for decades. This may be the last one I ever get from his hand.
What I do not tell him—because he would worry, and because it would wound him—is that I have decided that I am neither tired nor ready to go home for the night.
Instead, one last adventure to round out the year. I have mapped it out in my mind to go to Delmonico’s, the legendary steakhouse at South William and Beaver, near Wall Street and City Hall, way downtown. And I have resolved to walk there, because the calculus of exertion plus time should add up to my finally being hungry.
Institution though Delmonico’s is, I have only been there once, and my memories of the occasion are entirely negative, except that it was a great restaurant with delicious food which I lacked any capacity to enjoy at that time.
I put on my gloves. I adjust my hat. I kiss Alberto once on each rough cheek as he kisses mine, and off I go, into the night, into the last hours of 1984, with his customary “Ciao, bella!” rasping after me.
9
Slambango
Can any telling ever be so thorough that there is no more story left to tell?
My husband—ex-husband—Max seemed to think so. Wanted his version of our dissolution after twenty years to be the one of record. I would not permit this, though our divorce was uncontested; by then even I could see that there was no contest, that I had lost. As for the story, however, there was his version, and there was mine. There was more to say, and we were saying it, over lunch at Oscar’s Delmonico’s, early October, 1955.
We had finalized our divorce after a short court appearance at City Hall. Delmonico’s was nearby and seemed a fair setting for discussing final details—mostly having to do with our son, Johnny, then thirteen—and for saying good-bye.
I was conscious of making this decision—to go to the restaurant—but then somehow shocked to actually find myself there, amid the soft bustle of the noonday crowd. It was as if the span between the notion and the action had simply vanished, like events follow each other in dreams—an experience that I had often in those days, I’m afraid.
Walking into Delmonico’s on Max’s arm felt like a ride in an ambulance, or the moments just after a car crash: an overwhelming rush of detail diamond-etched itself into my brain, as if I’d remember the scene forever, though of course I forgot almost everything right away.
“Those columns at the entrance,” I said as the ma?tre d’h?tel seated us, just for the sake of saying something. “They look freshly dropped off by Caesar Augustus himself.”
“Indeed, madam,” he said. “The lady has a discerning eye. They were imported in the 1830s, from the ruins of Pompeii.”
At the mention of Pompeii, my scant appetite shaded quickly toward nausea. “Oh my,” I said. “How unusual.”