This was Allison, so far as I yet understood. And then one day, after I was done with my lunch, she simply walked over to me with a cup of coffee, her footsteps brisk and without hesitation, and said, "So, Mr. Wyeth, you would appear to have a lot of time on your hands."
I checked her dark eyes. "That's true."
"You strike one as unencumbered."
"Unencumbered, yes. Unburdened, no."
"Well, you do seem to like it here," she said after a moment's consideration. She bent close to me and poured sugar and milk into my coffee without being asked. "Assuming you don't mind," she added as she gave the coffee a stir with the spoon.
"Not at all. Perfect. Thanks."
"Well-" She stopped stirring. "I know how you like it."
"You do?"
"Yes, Mr. Wyeth. I notice things."
"You can call me Bill."
"So, where were we?" She tilted her head. "Oh, right, 'Unencumbered, yes. Unburdened, no.' "
"Yes," I said. "But that's no secret."
She blinked, perhaps purposefully. "And what is?"
That stopped me. "You probably know better than I do."
She shifted her weight, one hip to the next. "I just wondered why you come here each day." There it was- the point of insertion into the other's life. Once that happens, you can't go back. "Of course, we're glad to see you," she added.
"I hope I'm not your only conspicuous patron."
"Oh, please," Allison sighed. "You should see how many different crazy people come in here."
I made some small noise of concurrence, noting at the same time Allison's nervous red fingernail digging against the wool of her trousers.
"There's one kind of person we need more of, though."
"What's that?"
"Flirters."
"Flirters?"
She looked at me deadpan. "Even though you would think."
"What would I think?"
"You would just think that in New York City there would be more people who could actually flirt." Allison cocked her head, mouth open, daring me for a response.
"Terrible," I agreed.
"Worse. It's unbearable!" she answered. "One feels so abandoned."
I could only smile down into my plate.
"You still haven't answered my implicit question."
I lifted my eyes. "Which was?"
"We know you are unencumbered, but we don't know if you are a flirter."
"True," I said, "but we do know the exact opposite of that."
Allison appeared pleasantly confused. "The opposite-?"
"We know," I began, keeping her eye now, "that you are a flirter, but we don't know if you are unencumbered."
"Well, yes," Allison said, catching up, shrugging away my cleverness, "but that's as it should be."
"Oh?"
"But thank you, anyway."
"For-?"
She bent over the table close. "It was very nice wordplay."
"It was all right," I agreed.
"Are you usually so good at- wordplay?"
I just stared into her eyes. "All right, I give up," I said.
"Oh, don't. Not yet, Mr. Wyeth."
I offered her my hand. "As I said before, I'm Bill."
"Very pleased," Allison said, shaking it lightly, her hand cool and small and experienced, "by the chance encounter."
And with that, Allison excused herself and whirled away to deal with a presumptive crisis in the kitchen. It had been, I reflected happily, a silly little chat, a witty suggestion of what might follow. Oh, I liked her. She liked me, we both knew it, but who knew what it meant? Maybe it was friendship, maybe it was benign, maybe it was prelude to great pounding sex. Maybe it was a lot of things. The city offers you possibilities. Whether you accept them is another matter.
So we began to talk, or mostly Allison did, telling me each day in a low, amused voice as she marched by that "the straight busboys are fighting the gay waiters," or "I have to go fire my druggie waitress," or "a woman vomited in the ladies' room and won't come out." Occasionally she pointed out the celebrities who'd arrived that night, or the woman with two limos waiting outside, one for her, the other for her dogs, or the man who could eat three steaks. It was a huge show, and she was running it. Dozens of employees, hundreds of patrons, money flowing everywhere. But although each night at the restaurant constituted a unique surge of calamity and exhaustion, the place was notable for what was constant, too, and I could see that Allison pondered its larger theatricality. As in any human drama, foolishness announced itself to the room, probity slept peacefully at night, weakness beckoned to strength, and lust bought drinks for loneliness. Night after night, Allison, perched near the maitre d' stand, say, or turning the corner to the carpeted stairs leading to the party rooms, would notice one woman or another, or in groups of two or three, arrive late at the bar with only one intention- to find a man. Some would be successful, while a few looked like they might end up in a trombone case by the morning. Many nights Allison tilted her head toward one man or woman or couple like a handicapper at the racetrack, and whispered to me, "Watch this one, Bill. Give him about an hour, I'm telling you." Her suspicion rarely went unrewarded. The waiters had to separate men and women who fell upon each other in the rooms upstairs, or they asked a woman to rebutton her blouse, or they lifted a drinker to his feet after he had somehow fallen to the floor.
Allison would have to attend to these little disasters, and as I became witness to her work, saw what she did all day, this put us in a kind of intimate proximity. She felt known by me, and I began to understand that despite dealing with dozens of people, and behind those efficient-looking eyeglasses, she herself was lonely. She lived, she confessed, in an opulent apartment, her living room windows opening north on Eighty-sixth Street, directly at another apartment house, but from her westerly dining room she could look down on the rolling meadows of Central Park. The place had been left to her by her long-widowed father, a banking executive, and she'd moved in after he died with a sense of foreboding, because who really wanted to live in the huge apartment of one's deceased father? "Especially the wallpaper, and the smells and everything," she told me. " So depressing." But in time she'd come to love the spaciousness of the place, as well as the attentions of her father's old neighbors, many of whom took a parental interest in her. The rooms were comfortable, and in Manhattan the body craves comfort against the hard edges of curbs and cars and faces, and Allison was no exception.
Within a few weeks we were talking daily, usually after the lunch rush. She'd sit down and tell me about one or the other men in her life, and in general they were confident, intellectual types, witty and accomplished in all the right places, yet somehow insufficient. Something about them was minor, she confessed to menever their achievements or romantic attentions or wallets- but something else, something hard for her to describe. Finally, of course, we are all minor, every one of us, but there was something in Allison that discovered this in men. If I hadn't liked her so much, I might have said she was peevish, a bit particular, streaked with a dark skepticism, even. Either she was overpowering the men or undermatching herself, I thought. But I saw a few of her dates when they met her at the restaurant and they seemed decent enough guys, even to me. In time I wondered if I saw a pattern in which Allison met a respectable man, let herself be taken to dinner or the theater, then quickly slept with him- once. Only once. As if by design. Soon she was on to the next one. What did this mean? "It would appear you're not a husband-hunter," I said.