I offered her my hand. 'As I said before, I'm Bill.'
'Very pleased,' Allison said, shaking it lightly, her hand cool and small and experienced, 'by the chance encounter.'
And with that, Allison excused herself and whirled away to deal with a presumptive crisis in the kitchen. It had been, I reflected happily, a silly little chat, a witty suggestion of what might follow. Oh, I liked her. She liked me, we both knew it, but who knew what it meant? Maybe it was friendship, maybe it was benign, maybe it was prelude to great pounding sex. Maybe it was a lot of things. The city offers you possibilities. Whether you accept them is another matter.
So we began to talk, or mostly Allison did, telling me each day in a low, amused voice as she marched by that 'the straight busboys are fighting the gay waiters,' or 'I have to go fire my druggie waitress,' or 'a woman vomited in the ladies' room and won't come out.' Occasionally she pointed out the celebrities who'd arrived that night, or the woman with two limos waiting outside, one for her, the other for her dogs, or the man who could eat three steaks. It was a huge show, and she was running it. Dozens of employees, hundreds of patrons, money flowing everywhere. But although each night at the restaurant constituted a unique surge of calamity and exhaustion, the place was notable for what was constant, too, and I could see that Allison pondered its larger theatricality. As in any human drama, foolishness announced itself to the room, probity slept peacefully at night, weakness beckoned to strength, and lust bought drinks for loneliness. Night after night, Allison, perched near the maitre d' stand, say, or turning the corner to the carpeted stairs leading to the party rooms, would notice one woman or another, or in groups of two or three, arrive late at the bar with only one intention- to find a man. Some would be successful, while a few looked like they might end up in a trombone case by the morning. Many nights Allison tilted her head toward one man or woman or couple like a handicapper at the racetrack, and whispered to me, 'Watch this one, Bill. Give him about an hour, I'm telling you.' Her suspicion rarely went unrewarded. The waiters had to separate men and women who fell upon each other in the rooms upstairs, or they asked a woman to rebutton her blouse, or they lifted a drinker to his feet after he had somehow fallen to the floor.
Allison would have to attend to these little disasters, and as I became witness to her work, saw what she did all day, this put us in a kind of intimate proximity. She felt known by me, and I began to understand that despite dealing with dozens of people, and behind those efficient-looking eyeglasses, she herself was lonely. She lived, she confessed, in an opulent apartment, her living room windows opening north on Eighty-sixth Street, directly at another apartment house, but from her westerly dining room she could look down on the rolling meadows of Central Park. The place had been left to her by her long-widowed father, a banking executive, and she'd moved in after he died with a sense of foreboding, because who really wanted to live in the huge apartment of one's deceased father? 'Especially the wallpaper, and the smells and everything,' she told me. ' So depressing.' But in time she'd come to love the spaciousness of the place, as well as the attentions of her father's old neighbors, many of whom took a parental interest in her. The rooms were comfortable, and in Manhattan the body craves comfort against the hard edges of curbs and cars and faces, and Allison was no exception.
Within a few weeks we were talking daily, usually after the lunch rush. She'd sit down and tell me about one or the other men in her life, and in general they were confident, intellectual types, witty and accomplished in all the right places, yet somehow insufficient. Something about them was minor, she confessed to menever their achievements or romantic attentions or wallets- but something else, something hard for her to describe. Finally, of course, we are all minor, every one of us, but there was something in Allison that discovered this in men. If I hadn't liked her so much, I might have said she was peevish, a bit particular, streaked with a dark skepticism, even. Either she was overpowering the men or undermatching herself, I thought. But I saw a few of her dates when they met her at the restaurant and they seemed decent enough guys, even to me. In time I wondered if I saw a pattern in which Allison met a respectable man, let herself be taken to dinner or the theater, then quickly slept with him- once. Only once. As if by design. Soon she was on to the next one. What did this mean? 'It would appear you're not a husband-hunter,' I said.
'Nope.' Allison shrugged. 'I don't think I'd be very good at marriage. I mean, I did try it once.' She'd had a short, disastrous union in her early twenties, she confessed. 'I'd like to have a baby, though, if I found the right man. Or maybe I could adopt… there are all these beautiful Chinese babies with no mothers.' And there she left it, her face a little sad, wary of even thinking about the idea. Truth to be told, Allison knew time was running against her. She'd taken good care of herself, as the phrase goes, but she was one of those women whose face brightly masks a deeper disappointment. She had not been satisfied yet. Her body did not seem girlish so much as unused, especially by maternity. Motherhood consumes the bodies of women, if not from pregnancy and nursing itself, then by the years of too little sleep. The mothers I've known don't seem to mind this, for in trading away themselves they have been rewarded with children.
Allison's problem, of course, was the restaurant. Running it was an enormous, addictive job, requiring very long days. The customers, the waitstaff, the cooks, the suppliers- each population was distinct in its demands. Allison arrived at 8 a.m. and, except for a few hours off after lunch, rarely left before 9 p.m., or until the dinner shift was running smoothly, a moment that often never came, for what was happening in the dining room was only part of the larger spectacle. On a slow afternoon she invited me through the swinging kitchen doors and into the labyrinth beyond. The restaurant had two enormous kitchens, one for meals, the second for pastries. The steaks arrived on rolling steel platforms from the butcher's room, where they had been trimmed and sized, and were forked onto long flaming grills by sweating, hassled chefs who addressed the waiters and busboys as 'fuckhead' and 'Mexico.' The waitresses were called 'kittycat,' or 'lovelips,' which they hated. But it went with the territory.
Below the kitchen lay supply rooms and prep stations. The hallways were narrow, as on a ship, and pipes ran low overhead, red for fire, yellow for gas. Allison swung open a thick, insulated doorand I was surprised; it was the meat room, where dozens of sides of raw beef hung on hooks under a blue light, dated and stamped with wholesalers' marks.
'Don't want to spend the night in here,' I muttered.
'I guess I'm used to it.'
The room was cool but not cold, and we stepped inside. The enormous red carcasses- marbled with fat, headless, halved, rib cages sawed through, legs severed above the hoof- seemed aware of us through some essential mammalian affinity. The dead meat, soon to be transubstantiated into money and laughter, would also be revivified, of course, would become warm flesh again, this time human.
The room was controlled for temperature and humidity, Allison explained, so the steaks would dry-age to perfection.
'Who decides when it's time?' I asked, studying the back of her neck, so close that I could easily lean forward and kiss it.
'I do.'
The room was small, the ceiling low, and we were alone.
'It's quiet in here,' Allison said, turning, keeping my eye.
I nodded. Take her in your arms, I thought, do it now.
'Bill, something happened to you, didn't it?'
I wasn't ready for this, and the strangeness of the room amplified the power of the question. 'Something happens to everyone, I think.'
'Of course,' Allison said softly. 'I just wondered.'
I took a breath, let it go. 'I was a pretty high-powered real estate attorney, in one of the city's best firms. I was married, had a son. Then something happened, yes. Now I'm alone. I'm the guy you see every day.'
Allison nodded, as if I'd confirmed something. 'You want to tell me-?'
'Do we really know each other?'
'You see me almost every day.'
I thought about it. 'I don't usually talk about it much, Allison.'
'I'm sorry. Shouldn't have asked.'
But I had liked the intimacy of the moment. 'I remain conversant on other topics,' I said with more energy. 'Okay?'
Her playfulness returned. 'I'll get it out of you, somehow.'
'You will?'
'Even if I have to go to extreme measures.'
'That doesn't sound so bad.'
