“What do they say? How should I know what they say, they’re not there yet for me to hear.” She thought a moment. “They say they’re going to Stelli’s.”
“So?”
“A genius,” she said.
Stelli’s was a success from the night it opened. Her Sunday night freeloaders, most of whom had invested from $500 to $5,000 in the restaurant, showed up not only for the opening but several nights a week. She never hired a publicist, but got in the columns without professional assistance. And why not? The most interesting people in New York were regulars at Stelli’s, and spent their most interesting evenings in conversation at her bar.
She drew writers, of course. They’d been the core of her Sundays, and they were her favorites, not just because she respected their work but also because they had the best conversation. It was important for them to be original. An actor would find a story that worked and use it over and over, delivering it a little better each time. But it was the same shtick, and if you’d heard it once, that was plenty. A writer, though, felt compelled to think of something new.
She got actors, too, and liked them, if only because they were so determined to be liked. And they were decorative, too, and drew the eyes. But she also got politicians, both local and national, and a small international contingent from the UN. She didn’t get the Wall Street guys, or the crowd from Madison Avenue, and she didn’t get the ladies who lunched or the pinky-ring cigar smokers. But she got a few of the more sophisticated cops and the hipper gangsters, and an occasional Met or Yankee. And lawyers, of course. Everybody got lawyers.
She learned how to keep the help from stealing and her suppliers from cheating her. She learned how to avoid serious health violations in the kitchen, and how much to schmear the inspectors to overlook the less-than-serious ones. She refined the menu, dropping the items that nobody ordered. She made money, and by the end of the first year she’d paid back her backers, and six months later had paid them back double. She invested her profits in CDs and T-bills, and six months before her lease was up she bought the building. Now nobody could raise her rent and nobody could make her move and Stelli’s could go on being Stelli’s forever.
Such a pretty face. She put on a few pounds every year, just a few, and she was resigned to it, most of the time. But once, not long after she’d exercised her option and bought the building, she got inspired and went on an Oprah-type diet and lost a lot of weight. She didn’t shrink all the way down to a size three, but she did get to be the size of a normal person, and everybody oohed and aahed over her.
And she discovered that, with the extra flesh gone, she didn’t have such a pretty face after all. Maybe the observation had been true when she was a girl, but since then her features had matured in an unflattering fashion, and she had a big nose and a big mouth, and the face that looked back in her mirror, the face that appeared at the top of this new almost-slender body of hers, looked like it ought to be peering over the parapet of Notre Dame. She looked like a fucking gargoyle, and for this she was eating salad with no dressing? For this she was passing up pasta?
She put the weight back on, and then some, and she felt a whole lot better, and never again thought about taking it off.
Now, on this Friday night, she sat in her custom-built seat with the first of the four or five Chardonnay spritzers she would consume in the course of the evening, greeting her guests as they arrived, with smiles for all and kisses for a few. Her tables were all booked, except for the two she’d hold back in case a cherished regular arrived hungry without a reservation. (Once a Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist, a Sunday salon alumnus and $5,000 backer, had gotten off a flight from the Coast and come straight to Stelli’s, and all her tables were taken. “Hey, it’s all right,” he’d insisted. “I’ll just sit at the bar, and you know what I’ll do? I always have martinis with a twist, but tonight I’ll have them with olives.” She’d served him a full meal at the bar, and started a trend. Now several of her regulars ate at the bar on nights when they came in by themselves. But she always held back two tables, just in case.)
A smile, a nod, a kiss. The out-of-towners got nice warm smiles, too, because their money was as good as anybody else’s, and for all she knew so was their company. Half her regulars had been out-of-towners once, until New York got in their blood and became a part of them even as they became a part of it.
Two men in sports jackets. One she’d seen a few times recently, a cop or ex-cop, and if you gave her a minute she’d come up with the name. “Jim,” she said, “it’s good to see you.” And his companion, a familiar face, damn good-looking, nice clothes, and the minute he gave her a smile she placed him. “Fran! You look terrific, and where the hell have you been keeping yourself? I saw more of you when you were living in Seattle.”
“Portland,” he said.
“Same difference. It’s great to see you, Fran, and you, Jim. I hope you gentlemen made a reservation...”
“Two at eight,” Fran Buckram said.
“That’s easier than eight at two, which is what I had the other night. Or would have had, if I hadn’t told them to get lost. Go to Madrid, I told them. They eat late there, you’ll feel right at home. They thought it was a restaurant, they wanted to know how to get there. It’s in Spain, I said. Just walk to Paris and take a right. Philip? Be sure you take good care of Jim here, and the commissioner.”
“Here I was telling you how to find the place,” Jim Galvin said, “and she greets you like the prodigal son. ‘Take good care of the commissioner.’ ”
“ ‘Take good care of Jim and the commissioner.’ ”
“I gotta say I’m surprised she could come up with my name. It’s not like I’ve been coming here that much.”
“She’s good. Next time she’ll know your last name, too.”
“How do you know she didn’t know it now?”
“Either way,” Buckram said, “it would have been Hello, Jim. But then when she handed you off to Philip it would have been Take good care of Mr. Galvin.”
“And the commissioner.”
“Well, titles are for life, as far as the public is concerned. You run into Clinton, you’re not going to call him Bill.”
“How ya doin’, Mr. President? Except not everybody gets that treatment, Fran. It’s still Mayor Koch and Mayor Giuliani, but how about Dinkins? And it stopped being Mayor Beame ten minutes after Koch got sworn in.”
“So I’m the commissioner for life, is that what you’re saying?”
“Unless you get to be something else that trumps police commissioner.”
No, he wasn’t going to have that conversation again. “The mix is what makes this place work,” he said. “I started coming here after I got my gold shield, not all the time but every couple of weeks. You remember a wise guy named Teddy Kostakis? We had him for something, I forget what, and he rolled over and was gonna make all kinds of cases for us. And we brought him here one night, we’re feeding him, we’re buying him drinks, and he’s feeling like a pretty important guy, like a celebrity. And it turns out Teddy’s one of those guys, the alcohol messes with his volume control. More he drinks, louder he gets.”
“There’s a lot of guys like that.”
“And they’re usually sitting at the next table, but not this time. And here’s Teddy, telling his stories so they can hear him out in the street, and you can’t get him to pipe down. Now this is a nice place, you know that—”
“Sure.”
“And they get a decent crowd, but more often than not there’s a couple of made guys in the joint, and if they’re hearing what he’s saying, and if they’ve had as much to drink as he’s had, well, I don’t mind that much if Teddy gets shot, but I’m sitting right across the table from him, and whatever misses him could hit me.”