“Let me order for you,” said my patron. “I know the kind of thing they do best.”
He ordered for us both, ordered in Italian so I had a vague and mostly mistaken notion of what he had chosen for me. I hadn’t wholly relinquished the idea that he had taken me in custody (was this my last meal?) for the theft of my father’s book. At the same time, it was clear to me I was free to get up and leave if the impulse took me.
At the outset, before we had been seated, there was difficulty about my wearing my jacket (my thrift shop U.S. Army field jacket) to the table, my host suggesting that I give it to the checkroom girl. But I said I never took it off, a remark he seemed to enjoy, clearing his odd laugh from his throat.
I felt my assertion of not being hungry, which was only true the moment before it was spoken, as an obligation to self-denial. I withheld appetite, picked over my food with hard-earned indifference.
I had never been into wine, though dutifully drank whatever was put in my glass. We had red wine with the antipasto and white wine with the main dish, which was some unidentifiable meat stuffed with creamed spinach and some relative of ham.
The wine affected me like an anesthetic. The more I drank the more paralyzed I got, my conversation reducing itself to mumbles and asides.
I was supposed to be funny — it was his idea of me — and I did what I could to sustain an overrated reputation.
“If you’re really interested in a job,” he said at some point, “maybe I could do something for you.”
“As long as it doesn’t require killing anyone,” I said, a remark that struck me as extremely amusing when I made it. I laughed nervously to cover the pall of his silence.
“So you draw the line at murder, do you?” he said. “One ought to draw the line somewhere, I suppose.”
“I’m very good at drawing lines and waiting on queues,” I said. This idiocy provoked a small, disheartened laugh from my patron.
For no reason I could say, I was cutting the meat on my plate in microscopic pieces. It took ten mouthfuls, I estimated, to achieve an ordinary two or three. My host tried not to notice or not to seem to notice.
A second bottle of white wine was uncorked and my glass refilled. I emptied the glass as if it were medicine, persuaded in my sodden state that the gesture was amusing to my audience.
I could imagine the grotesque impression I was making, though couldn’t stop what I was doing, had no clear idea what it was. The job was not mentioned again in the next few minutes and I was willing to believe my host had reconsidered his offer. Just when I thought I had offended him beyond repair he handed me his card and said I was to call him whenever I was ready. Meaning ready to go to work? I didn’t ask.
I found myself calling him sir — I put the card away without reading his name — and thought that was wrong somehow (my voice had a satirical edge), though he seemed to have no objection. He called me sir in return and occasionally son. I couldn’t remember if I mentioned my name to him or even if he had asked for it. I don’t think anything I told him was precisely the truth.
“Will you have some dessert, son?” he asked.
I was still working at the meat, picking at it like a sore. “I don’t think so, sir,” I said, a parody of the polite young man. “I never know what I want until after I’ve had it.”
My host lit a cigar, glanced at his watch, drummed his fingers on the table. There was a hum of impatience in his manner, a feeling of disappointment. I knew it like the back of my hand. He felt he had made a mistake in taking me to lunch and was anxious to get on to something else.
I asked him what he did, what kind of work if any.
He waved the question away as if it were the smoke from someone else’s cigar. “I do what needs doing,” he said. The waiter, who may have also been the owner, shadowed my plate, waiting for me to turn my head.
The veal — I had become confident of its identity — had long since turned chilly, though I had some stake, or thought I had, in eating a few more pieces, a way of nullifying the effects of the wine.
“He’s finished,” my host said in the manner of a man who knew the gods by their first names. The waiter gave a sigh of relief and cleared my plate.
I mourned the loss of my uneaten meal. That was no way to treat a guest, I thought.
“Will there be anything else, gentlemen?” the waiter asked.
“Just the bill thank you,” said my host, filling my glass with what remained of the second bottle of white wine.
I drank slowly this time, pretending to savor the wine I could no longer really taste.
I caught his glance when I looked up. He seemed to be studying me. “What kind of job did you have in mind?” I asked. I yawned, felt weighted with tiredness.
The old gentleman asked with undisguised distaste if I was going to be sick — my head was on the table or close enough to it to offer that suspicion — and I heard myself answer, “Wouldn’t think of it.”
He raised himself to his full height, paid the check and seemed to leave the restaurant, but then he was standing over me again. I had the idea he had gone around in a revolving door. “I can’t leave you here like this, son,” he said.
He held out his hand and when I realized what he had in mind, I took hold and rose to my feet. Muffling a belch, I preceded him in a snaky line to the door. The waiter, who seemed to have nothing better to do, followed in our wake, forming a small procession. He was carrying something on a plate and it struck me that it was my gun, that it had fallen from my jacket and he had rescued it. “Where’s he going with that?” I asked the old man. Then, wanting to make sure of things, I shoved my hand in my pocket and brought out the gun for the briefest of airings, my father’s novel dislodged in the process. The gun had been there all the time.
When I recovered the book I stuffed it in a different pocket of my field jacket. There were some shocked glances in the restaurant but no direct mention was made of the pistol. What could my host have possibly thought? I offered neither acknowledgement nor explanation.
“You have a visitor,” the landlady said the moment I came through the door.
I never thought to ask who it was, went up the stairs carrying Mrs. Chepstow’s eyes on my back. My pockets were stuffed with the day’s loot.
I called down to her. “Mrs. C, I don’t want anyone in my room when I’m not there.”
The woman sidestepped complaints like a halfback, seemed able to disappear through one door or another at whim.
The door to my room was shut and I knocked at it before entering, my other hand embracing the gun in my pocket.
My visitor — it was odd how I mistook who it was — got up from my bed and poked her head forward to kiss me on the cheek. It was Astrid not Isabelle. She looked radiant and I almost supposed myself the occasion for it. The room — I hadn’t noticed it at first — had been fixed up a bit; there were yellow flowers in a blue vase on the rickety end table. My dirty clothes, mostly underwear and socks, had been moved into some discreet obscurity. It was not what I wanted, the improved-upon squalor, but I thanked her for her pains. She had appropriated the bed and I sat down in the room’s one chair which she had moved from one odd corner to another in an excess of zeal. The room was no less ugly for having been improved, its full-blown tackiness compromised by genteel aspiration.
I looked around the room and wondered how anyone who didn’t hate himself could live in it, then I walked around as I sometimes do when I’m alone.
She winked at me from my bed, her hands behind her head, asked if she was keeping me from doing something I had to do.
The entire room took on the scent of her perfume, its own peculiar anonymity. Was I wrong in thinking she was wearing more of it than usual? I wanted her gone, though also felt rewarded by her uninvited visit.