And no small talk even at dinner in one of the hotel’s restaurants. The menu her muse:
“Oh, look,” she said, “look at the menu!” They were in the Penrose Room at the top of the old building with its view of the Rockies beyond a solid wall of glass. “Feel it. The paper like a certificate of stock. Blue chip. If you look close you can see the tiny colored threads that run through it like a precious aspic of lint on money.”
“I can look close but I can’t feel it,” Ben said.
“Look at the cursive font distinctive as signature, the prices like distinguished addresses.”
“My hand.”
“Oh, Ben,” she said, “it’s as if printing costs determine the range of one’s appetite and fix it forever. Movable type and the destiny of hunger. When this menu was designed, it was designed once and for all. The chef and the man from graphics in consultation. Preordained, don’t you see, by what would look good on the document, for that’s what such a menu becomes — a document — legal and binding. Yes. A contract, if you please. ‘What do you do best?’ the graphics man must have asked. ‘Decide now, because you can’t change your mind later. The cost of this thing is like putting out a magazine.’ And he would have to have told him. Don’t you see what it means? Image and printing costs are responsible for the tradition of mediocrity in American restaurants.”
“But if the chef is doing what he does best—” Ben said.
“And how long must he do it? Chained to a years’ old assembly-line expertise, he must finally get bored, the quality has to suffer. How can he experiment? Where can he try out new recipes?”
“The food’s supposed to be very good here,” Ben said.
“Oh, Ben, don’t be naïve. Idiom only is informed. ‘Stop,’ it tells us, ‘where the truck drivers do.’ Do you suppose a truck driver’s palate is more knowledgeable than a rich man’s?”
“But you said—”
“It’s because they don’t usually have printed menus in such places. A mimeographed sheet shoved behind a hard clear plastic, and tucked like a snapshot into corner mounts in a photo album. Yes. And the blue-plate special in blue. You’ve seen him, surely you of all people, Ben, with your seventy thousand miles a year, you’ve seen him, the owner of the diner or the cook at the truck stop up on the last stool at the counter an hour before closing with his stencil in the typewriter and his hunt and his peck, doing tomorrow’s menu.”
“Usually such places the food is lousy.”
“The food, perhaps, the principle no. I don’t know this for a fact but it’s my guess that the Michelin people rarely list restaurants where the menus look like the Magna Carta.”
“Try the Rocky Mountain Rainbow Trout,” Ben said.
She was looking off in the distance. Ben followed her glance. Apparently she was studying a table of seven people near the western wall of glass.
“Never so much the family,” she said, “as when sitting together in a restaurant, the group leavened by an outsider, the daughter’s boyfriend or the son’s pal from university, say. A grandfather there, a father to pick up the check, a younger son ten. It’s the simultaneity of ease and showing off which makes the effect work.”
“You’re an expert on atmosphere,” Ben said. “But if you want to know, it’s the simultaneity of generations which does that.”
“What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”
“I wanted to tell someone,” he said. “I wanted to tell someone what’s in store for me, and all you do is give me Significance drill.”
“You told me your symptoms. You gave me Gibberd’s prognosis. It’s very hopeful.”
“I want my remission back,” he said and burst into tears.
If she understood she chose to ignore it, unless the fact that she walked on his left — his right hand was the paresthetic one, his right arm the numbed one — both her arms wrapping his in the doggy stance of a woman without insights, like a gum chewer or a teenager window-shopping with her date. If he had looked into her face at such moments he would have seen it scrunched, beautifully cutened, her cheek high up on the sleeve of his sport coat and her eyes closed. If such cheerleader conditions were meant to make him feel the letters bloom on his jacket, her efforts were wasted. He felt mocked, a jackass old man fifteen years her senior. (Her Senior, yes.)
They walked around the lake while she continued to chin herself on his left arm.
“That’s the ice rink,” he said. “They train for the Olympics in there.”
“I was just thinking,” she said.
“What?”
“Do you remember the menu in the Penrose Room?”
“Qh, Christ, Patty.”
“No, really. Do you?”
“Yes, sure, but—”
“The Gothic typeface.”
“What about it?”
“I was thinking about the masthead on The New York Times.”
“TheNew York Times.”
“Well, that’s Gothic. Many newspapers use it. That’s because it looks like Hebrew. All newspapers are a sort of Scripture. Gothic type must have evolved from monks trying to duplicate the look of the sacred texts.”
“I thought we might watch them,” Ben said.
“What? Oh. All right.”
Next to the auditorium was a sort of annex where the skaters limbered up or worked on figures which they could study themselves performing in mirrors along the entire length of one wall and the width of another. The room, rather like the practice room in a ballet studio, was the length of a bowling alley and perhaps seven lanes deep. Ben and Patty went up to the long glass spectator windows and looked in.
There were only three skaters working out in the practice room, which, with its thick ice flooring and the mirrors everywhere reflecting it, would have to be very cold, it seemed to Ben, unbearably cold. All three were girls. They wore leotards and their strong slim legs in the rich thermal nylon were the color of graham crackers or the crust on white bread. One girl began suddenly to spin, her momentum accelerated by her arms, which she drew slowly in toward the sides of her body until they were pressed so tight against her that she seemed literally to be supporting her twirling weight by the points of her elbows. The elbows should stop her, he thought. It seemed in defiance of some physical law that her body should continue its furious coil while her elbows held her so tightly. Ben could not tell whether her eyes were open or shut in the blur of her propulsion, but he guessed that they must be open or the mirrors would be pointless.