“Ben, tell me what you think: do we need these newfangled vodkas, these Martha Stewarty concoctions with verbena, rosemary, hooey like that? Have you seen those giant billboards all over creation?”
Ben shook his head. “Hooey. Like you say.” He was loading the dishwasher and did not look up. With those dark curls and that heavy gold hoop distending an earlobe, the man resembled a pirate. Give him an eyepatch, a parrot, a treasure map, and le voilà! Resolutely, Walter did not focus on the arms, the shoulders, that perfect parcel of a derriere (speaking of treasure). He had taken home many a prime derriere from this bar, Walter had, but here was one line he did not cross: hot for an employee.
But hot—hot was not the problem anymore. Not that hot had ever, really, been a problem. Oh for the days of such an uncomplicated itch. Walter remembered the very apex of those days, five and a half years back, when he had been thrilled and amused to realize what a cornucopia he’d made for himself. It was just after the restaurant had hit its stride, the first summer Sunday of sleeves rolled high, of crisp new shorts, the first stretches of smooth skin made brown by the sun, not by some phony, viperous purple lamp. (No inauthentic tans for Walter.) Solicitously cruising the dining room and the patio out front—cruising legitimized!—Walter had had a revelation: running a restaurant gave you a free look at the local wares. And here in particular—well, the men who relished eating this way were the men Walter relished himself. None of those chalky, bare-boned boys who ate at macrobiotic cafés, places that smelled of soy sauce, sawdust, and low-rent pot. Those places were for people who planned to live forever, paying the price of pinched exuberance in everything they ate, read, and probably even dreamed. Yoga, yogi, yogurt: all to be avoided like…like sock garters, beer from Milwaukee, and flat-bottomed ice cream cones made of packing foam.
How he wished that unrequited hot were the problem. No, the problem was love. Walter had fallen…no, had somersaulted into love—a tender yet lunatic devotion to this man, this man and no other, ad infinitum. It did not matter that this was what he’d always craved (who didn’t?). He’d felt safer, however, when the craving was generic, when it was simple, bland loneliness late at night, a predictable given, and not this desperate, specific yearning. But he had not hunted it out! It had fallen quite rudely upon him, a piano let go by a busted pulley ten stories above the street where he happened to be standing. No one knew, no one would know—of that he’d been determined—for he had suspected he could wait it out, just let it fade, however slowly.
Well, he had suspected wrong. He had now turned the corner from suffering to scheming, and nothing good, he suspected, could come of it. But, once again, he could be suspecting wrong.
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE: that was what got him in trouble. As he had watched the men around him—friends, customers, neighbors—dropping not like flies (what a trivializing expression) but like soldiers in World War I (the far too numerous deaths all senseless, gruesome, way too early, so painful to witness that even remembering the lives preceding these deaths became unbearable), he had seen up close the messy complications that arose when they’d made no formal will. Lovers disenfranchised, pets put to sleep, objects of sentiment smashed or sold in acts of contentious revenge. In short, pandemonium.
Walter hated pandemonium. Take, for example, his closet. Open it and you would see an array of modest garments (yes, the occasional silk this or that, the one pair of cashmere trousers bought in a wave of despondence and now mostly shunned by association), but it was an array so orderly you’d have guessed the wearer of these garments to be a Swiss sanitation engineer or a microbiologist with the CDC who dabbled in butterfly collecting. The walls of the closet were lined in cedar, sachets of dried rosebuds suspended above to obfuscate the scent. (The drawback to cedar was that it made you smell like a Colorado forest—unfortunate shades of John Denver.)
Walter cared not for costly rugs or antiques—his furniture was new, sharp, and sleek—and he loved his dog too much to care about hairs on the sofa. Walter wasn’t anal (make that compulsive), but when he left home each day, he walked out into the world looking as much like a model as he could. Not a fashion model—though he was tall and strong, he did have that—but a role model, a model of…well, of propriety and seemliness, his Lutheran grandmother would have said. She, not his slovenly, self-destructive parents, had been his example and personal muse, and he tried to live by her principles—most of them. Like her quite correct loathing of street vernacular: “the language of stevedores and ruffians.” Not a damn or a Christ would escape Walter’s lips, and certainly not what Granna had called the Carnal Words—though in certain exceptional contexts, he did not mind hearing such words from other men’s lips.
In Walter’s kitchen, the one bit of decor that clashed with his marble counters and leather-saddled stools was a trio of samplers Granna had stitched:
Pleasant hours fly fast.
Ask favors neither of the tides nor of the wind.
I will live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man. This one was his favorite. It depicted a cross-stitched house with a red roof, a stream of blue x’s drifting like motherly kisses from the chimney, a pink-and-green rosebush like a polka-dotted golf ball, and, in the foreground, a large black angular Scottie. Did the sentiment come from the dog? You had to laugh freely at that.
One night the previous fall, after coming home late, Walter stood in his kitchen, drank too much bourbon, and dolefully contemplated the samplers—as objects, not as wisdoms. Naturally, they made him think of the past—which he had been doing already that night, grieving over what he hoped, yet again, would be the last early death of a good friend: Michael B, who’d waitered with him (on roller skates!) nearly twenty years ago at a big touristy restaurant across from Lincoln Center. Walter had gone directly from the memorial service to work that evening, thus having to endure not only seven extra hours of his funeral suit but thoughtless remarks from regulars such as “My but aren’t we looking spiffy” and even—this from a rich young twerp straighter than a Mormon Eagle Scout—“Yo, did someone die?” Of all the friends who became sick, Michael B had been the one to hang on longest, so that finally no one took his hospital sojourns too seriously, not even Michael B himself. “He’s in again,” someone would say, making a brisk round of calls. And then everybody would visit, but they’d no longer visit with great bouquets of lilies to hide their fearful expressions. No, they’d make the visits a bit of a party now. They came in twos and threes, bringing phallus-shaped cakes, obscene magic tricks, balloons with foofy children’s TV stars: Blue, Barney, that purple Teletubby who’d been outed by some clearly closeted televangelisto. Resilience incarnate, that was Michael B.
And then, a triumph, it turned out that he had hung on long enough to get the magic pills, the protease inhibitors. “Inhibitions, bring ’em on!” Michael B had cheered, raucous with relief, when the drugs began to do their thing and, for the first time in years, his body began to fill out, his skin regaining a modest glow. His appetite returned full force, and he loved to drop by Walter’s Place for lunch, eat an oozing meaty Reuben and a butterscotch sundae.
But then something backfired. His liver didn’t like the drugs or his T cells tanked; Walter hadn’t really listened to the details that Michael B so urgently explained. Walter had gone to the hospital, as always, and this time, standing mortified beneath a genital piñata, unable to look at the table where someone had blithely placed an orange lava lamp, he had known that this was the last time in for Michael B. “Almighty fuck,” he had said when he walked out of the room (H. E. double hockeysticks to Granna’s silver rule). Within a week, Michael B was in a casket winging toward the heartland. Though he had told various friends to please take various items from his marvelous collections of party clothes and snuff bottles and Japanese fans, his parents had simply shown up like a band of deaf-mutes with a U-Haul and, faster than you could strike a set on Broadway, taken the whole production away to Ohio. Good-bye to all that in the blink
of a Bible Belt eye. And his rent-stabilized apartment, the one he’d promised to pass on to Gwen? Gone with the wind (that is, after renovation, onto the open market at five times the price).
You could remember without artifacts; how pathetically superficial if you couldn’t! But Walter realized that, blessed though he was to have escaped this plague, he might not escape a car crash or an embolism or, heaven forfend, an actual piano from above. He was not without assets and treasures, not without friends and other worthy potential heirs. He had, for instance, a nephew in California, and though he did not know Scott well, the boy seemed a good enough egg. At seventeen, he played baseball and GameBoy, but he also wrote poetry, strummed a guitar, and treated Walter like a person, even a likable person, not the Strip-o-Gram Guy Who Came for Dinner.
Walter saw Scott only once or twice a year because his family lived just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco (like Paris, but with your own language and no Turkish toilets). Last visit, Scott had invited Walter to a “poetry jam” at a Berkeley bookstore rank with patchouli and bohemian dust. Walter had sneezing fits but enjoyed himself immensely among the young pierced peers of Scott (who had wisely, discreetly—on his uncle’s advice—pierced nothing more than a single ear). Afterward, Walter took Scott to Chez Panisse, along with a willowy girlfriend who weighed about as much as a dish towel and whose “thing” was turning Emily Dickinson’s poems into “soft rap.” Walter had a hard time not laughing at her earnest countercultural spiel when surely her parents owned twin Volvo wagons and a hot tub the size of his living room. But she and Scott made Walter feel weightlessly young, even fleetingly, unprecedentedly cool. After telling the teenagers numerous tales about running a restaurant (and here they were at the sine qua non of modern eateries), Scott smiled at him in that adolescently catlike fashion and said, “Dude, your life so rules.” Well, perhaps it did. Walter was charmed.
Unfortunately, you could have the rest of that family: Scott’s sister, the snooty little cheerleader (though maybe she’d straighten out yet); Walter’s supercilious brother, Werner, Prozac poster boy; and Tipi, the anorexic, mosquitoey much-younger wife (though at least his original wife).
No, Walter realized in his bourbon funk after Michael B’s sorry send-off, no by golly NO; he would not want them to inherit so much as a shoelace. The samplers brought the worst of Walter’s brother to mind when he recalled seeing Werner toss these and other mementos of Granna into a trash can (to be salvaged by Walter).
No: he would not give Werner a second chance to fling such treasures aside—or, worse, to spend Walter’s greener assets on predictable follies like that ghastly “gaming hall” he’d added to his already monstrous house or the RV he planned to buy for his very early retirement.
So then, “Which one?” Walter had asked Ben the following night, freed from his funeral suit but held in the vise of a colossal hangover. They were standing at the bar, spying on a table by the front fireplace. “The one in the sweater or the stuffy blue shirt?”
“Stuffy,” Ben answered with his customary bluntness.
The couple in question were a pair who had been coming to Walter’s Place several times a year since it opened. About Walter’s age, they looked rich, fit, obscenely well educated and, most irritating of all, perfectly matched. They’d been together for who knew how long, and every time they ate here, they talked. When Walter passed their table, he’d eavesdrop; what could they possibly talk about together with such perpetual enthusiasm? Well, they talked about theater, opera, ballet, and they gossiped with connubial glee—about people Walter didn’t know, of course, but sometimes about famous people involved in those sequined cultury things. (So they were connected too.) Never had he overheard them discussing illness or death, topics far too common at so many other tables.
Walter could already look back on this horrific era with what he believed to be an uncanny clarity for someone so deep in its shroudlike folds. He could see these recent years as a timeline: how at first no one spoke about It (or not out loud), then how everyone spoke about It but not in terms of who had It, then how suddenly everyone knew, almost by osmosis, who had It and who didn’t (and who might). Who was on the Quilt, who died fighting, who found God, who went back to Boise or Billings or hopped a final plane, first-class, to the finest hotel on Maui.
A particularly vile social phenomenon was the kind of couple who, when the topic came up, leaned just a little closer, forming a personal tepee, their unified expression this pious, phony guilt-trip look that said, Please don’t hate us because we happen to be monogamous! Or celibate. Sometimes that was the dirty secret. Couples stuck in lustless unions, maybe because of real estate, because no one would budge from the deal-of-the-century rent-controlled apartment, and then, presto, their prison became a refuge. Sexless but safe. Oh now, SAFE. What a loaded, political, euphemistic, convoluted word that one had become.
Walter was one of the inexplicably blessed—footloose but healthy—so when he felt resentful toward these couples, it wasn’t for their smug vitality. No, he envied them something else entirely: the no longer having to try so hard, no longer having to cruise with that creeping, escalating doubt, sliding down that laundry chute toward the puddled, sunless cellar of age. If he were entirely honest with himself, he’d admit that he longed, more than just about anything else, to be part of that club, the men who stood on the High Ground, snug and dry in the cozy, bread-scented kitchen.
Up There is precisely where he saw this couple at the table by the fireplace, but he could hardly despise them for their altitude, could he? He always greeted them warmly, and he knew their first names, but he had not known their professions. Now it turned out that Stuffy (Gordie) was a lawyer and a financial advisor—who, according to Ben, had become a fiscal priest of sorts, specializing in legal last rites for those who’d faced up to their imminent end. But even as a generalist, he was the best in the business, said Ben.
The next day had been one of those crisp September days that fill your lungs with virtue and resolve. Resisting superstition, Walter looked Stuffy up in the phone book and made an appointment.
THE WRETCHED SUN. Blame, to begin with, the wretched autumn sun, coming in that window and catching the maple highlights in the man’s youthful hair, herofying his jawline and gilding the curvature of a hip just as Walter stepped into his office.
“Oh hello! Why hello,” Gordie effused. “You’re that Walter. I should have put two and two together! We love your place—and if I had my way, we’d come a lot more often, but Stephen’s always trying some new kind of diet. We were there last week! I’m practically addicted to your beef bourguignon.”
Walter thanked him. “The beef bourguignon is Hugo’s, not mine. I started a restaurant because I’m a hopeless cook but love to be fed.” He told Gordie it was the bartender who’d recommended him—and they joked about that to break the ice. Walter had expected to feel unnerved at this meeting, but not in this way; somehow, all at once, Stuffy seemed outlandishly charming (yes, his flattery helped), and that day he wore something nicer, softer, less prepossessing: mossy old corduroys and a loose copper-colored shirt (you could be sure the price had been more like platinum).
Gordie sat at his desk; Walter capsized in a fat green sofa.
“Where’s your famous dog?” asked Gordie.
“At home,” said Walter. “About pets and children, you should never presume acceptance.”
“I love dogs!” Gordie protested. “We’d have one ourselves if our schedules weren’t so insane…. You’re lucky you can bring one to work.”
“Actually, I’m lucky I haven’t been closed. I’m waiting for the hygiene police to stop by and tell me I’m not exactly in Paris. Alas.”
They looked at each other pleasantly, through a narrow shaft of silence. (Our first silence, Walter reflected later on. Most people noted first fights as a landmark; Walter thought first silences far more memorable.)
Gordie asked if he’d brought his financial information; Walter plac
ed his folders on the desk. As Gordie began to page through tax returns and bank statements, Walter felt almost naked. This was a thorny business. He jumped slightly when Gordie pointed past him and said, “There’s coffee, tea, and, speaking of Paris, some great French cookies. That’s my vice—really expensive cookies.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s a pathetic vice,” said Walter.
Gordie’s laugh was one of professional nicety (Walter knew that laugh quite well; a lesson in humility, this). “Perhaps I should amend that to say it’s the only vice I’ll confess to my clients.”
“Ah. Say no more.”
Second of all, blame that wretched Scotsman from the bookstore. (Now there was a bona fide Stuffy—though Ben had christened that one Bonny, short for Bonny Prince Charlie.) When the phone rang, Gordie answered. On the speaker thing, before Gordie picked up the receiver, Walter heard enough to recognize Fenno McLeod’s distinctive voice.
“God it’s been ages, how are you?” said Gordie. “I’m sorry we haven’t been in to say hi, we’ve just—well, we were in Turin and Venice for all of July, the Berkshires in August, and now—maybe it’s just me, but the fall is still like back-to-school: too much homework, playing catch-up at the gym, that feeling like you’re about to start getting graded again. I’m with a client, but what’s up? I’d love to call back and hear about your summer.” He mimed to Walter that he would be off in a minute and swiveled his chair to face the one vast window, which looked out into the branches shading Union Square. Gusts of wind were beginning to strip away the turning leaves.