Specimen Days

'Where are you?'

'Home.'

'Do you want some dinner?'

'I guess. I'm honestly not sure.'

'I'm going to buy you a drink and some dinner.'

'That'd be so nice.'

'Where do you want to go?'

'Someplace unchallenging. You pick.'

'Right. How about Le Blanc?'

'Great. Perfect.'

'Half an hour?'

'Half an hour.'

He hung up. While they were talking, Cat had done it again. Picked up a pen and written in her spiral notebook:

Fortress of solitude? Does dirt = filth? Whereas the little house?

She tore out the page, crumpled it, and tossed it away. When had regular note-taking turned into… whatever this was? Free association. Had it started after 9/11? She hoped so. Cause and effect were always comforting.

* * *

She got to Le Blanc in exactly half an hour. She was the first to arrive, as she'd expected. Simon could never just put down the phone and walk away, not even in an emergency. He lived in an ongoing state of emergency. He traded futures. (Yes, he had explained it all to her, and, no, she still didn't understand what exactly it was that he did.) Fortunes flicked across his computer screen, falling and rising and falling again.

He was the man behind the curtain. If he failed to take care of business, Oz might dissolve in an emerald mist. He'd be there as soon as he could.

Cat herself could not overcome her habit of punctuality. She'd tried. It wasn't in her to be late for anything, ever.

A place like Le Blanc was Simon's idea of unchallenging because it wasn't cool anymore. Three years ago it had been a Laundromat, just a dingy hole on Mott Street, and then somebody cleaned the hundred-year-old tile walls, put up yellowed mirrors, installed a zinc-topped bar, and poof, it was a perfect Parisian bistro. For a while it was an epicenter, then it faded. Regular people could get in now. At a front table sat a couple who were clearly not from the neighborhood. He was all gold jewelry; she'd draped her faux Versace over the back of her chair. Moscow-riche. A year ago, they'd have been stopped at the threshold. Cat's idea of unchallenging was more like… well, okay, an entirely unchallenging restaurant was not coming immediately to mind.

She passed through a moment with the hostess, a new girl, megasmiley in her confusion over what exactly to do with a black woman who'd arrived alone. Before the girl could speak, Cat said, 'I'm meeting Simon Dry den. I believe we have a reservation.'

The girl consulted her list. 'Why, yes,' she said. 'Mr. Dry den isn't here yet.'

'Let's get me seated then, shall we?'

The queenly bearing and the schoolmarm diction, the smiling ultraformality. You did what you had to do.

'Absolutely,' the hostess chimed, and led Cat to the second booth.

As Cat settled in, she locked eyes with Fred. Fred was one of the legion of New York actors who impersonated waiters while they hoped things would break for them. He wasn't young anymore, though. He was becoming what he'd once pretended to be: a wisecracking waiter, brusque and charmingly irreverent, knowledgeable about wines.

'Hello, Fred,' Cat said.

'Hey,' said Fred. Perfectly cordial, but glassy somehow. Caught up short. For Cat, sans Simon, he had no banter strategy.

'How are you?'

'Good. I'm good. Can I get you a drink?'

Funny how hard it could be, sitting alone in a restaurant. Funny to be someone who could calmly talk to psychopaths but had trouble being an unescorted woman who made a waiter uncomfortable.

She had Fred bring her a Ketel One on the rocks. She looked at the menu.

Cattle fed on bonemeal? Slaughter of the innocents? Poison in the walls?

Well, now. Apparently, at moments of stress, she didn't need to write them down anymore.

She was on her second vodka when Simon arrived. It still shocked her sometimes, seeing him in public. He was so unassailably young and fit. He was a Jaguar, he was a goddamned parade float rolling along, demonstrating to ordinary citizens that a gaudier, grander world a world of potently serene, self-contained beauty appeared occasionally amid the squalor of ongoing business; that behind the blank, gray face of things there existed an inner realm of wealth and ease, of urbane celebration. She watched the hostess check him out. She watched him stride with the confidence of a brigadier general to her table, stunning in his midnight-blue suit. It might as well have been spangled with tiny stars and planets.

He kissed her on the lips. Yes, people, I'm his date. I'm his girlfriend, okay?

'Sorry I'm late,' he said. 'You're fine. Is it crazy at work?'

'You're asking meT Simon frowned compassionately. His brows bristled like a pair of chocolate-colored caterpillars. Cat had an urge to stroke them.

'Crazy is a relative concept,' she said.

'Mm,' he said. 'So, you think you talked to this guy.'

Simon was going to be stern and unhysterical, even a little casual in this, his first secondhand crisis. He was going to be someone who could manage the news of a random bomber with the same grave suavity she knew he must bring to his business deals.

'Let's get you a drink, and I'll tell you about it,' Cat said.

He sat down across from her. Fred came right away.

'Hey, Fred,' Simon said. He'd been a regular since the restaurant's glory days, was adored for continuing to come.

'Hey, homeboy,' Fred answered, fluent in manspeak.

'Heard the news?' Simon asked.

'Scary.'

'You know Cat, right?'

'Absolutely. Hey, Cat.'

'Cat's with the police department. She's working on this one.'

/ live in a world of danger, Fred. Tm deeper inside of things than you can possibly know.

'You're kidding,' Fred said. Cat watched him go through an intricate reassessment. All right, she had a real job and quite possibly an interesting one. But bottom line, didn't this make her one of those grim black women, the sticklers for protocol who torture the populace from behind civic counters and post-office windows?

'Not at liberty to discuss it,' Cat said.

'Right, right.' Fred nodded sagely. He was up to the challenge of playing a waiter who could be trusted with a little inside information. He was more than up to it.

Cat said, 'Simon, why don't you order yourself a drink?'

Simon paused, then said, 'Right. Just a glass of wine, I think. Like maybe a Shiraz?'

'The Chilean or the Sonoma?' Fred asked.

'You pick.'

'Chilean.'

'Good.'

Fred nodded again, in Cat's direction. Undercover waiter. Good in a crisis. He went off to get the wine.

What was it with men? Why were they so eager to impersonate someone brave and competent and in the know?