Chapter 15 #2
Because it was fun, the shadow of depression whispers in his ear, in a voice so much like his own it’s hard to tell the difference.
Because it was fun and you felt comfortable and you let your guard down, didn’t you?
And now it’s all ruined. It’s like I’ve always told you: Better not to risk it in the first place. If you don’t try, you can’t fail.
Ben sighs, and gets back on the subway, and rides it to his home stop.
He walks the few blocks to his apartment and pauses on his building’s slightly pitted stones stairs, about halfway up.
It’s just a few more steps—it’s cold out here—he should cook something, or do some of his dishes.
He doesn’t have to get sucked into a spiral of despair if he goes up there.
It’s not as though it’s the apartment creating that.
He should go in, and he’s going to. Any second now.
After three minutes, he puts his bag down.
After five minutes, he sits down next to it and pulls out his phone.
It takes about twenty minutes for him to really start feeling the cold; it’s nice, in a strange way.
Grounding. Hard to think about anything else, which, right now, is welcome.
He puts his phone away and hunches over himself, past the point of thinking he should go inside.
At some point, surely, he will, the miasma of his mood failing against his basic survival instincts…
but he’s not there yet. He has time left to sit here and shiver, in the blissful, blank void of being too cold to sustain any of his more heated emotions.
After thirty-six minutes, a sharp, familiar voice behind him demands, “Well, Benjamin? Are you going to be a gentleman and help an old woman down the stairs, or do you plan to sit there as an obstacle for me to clamber over? Perhaps I could give breaking my other hip a try; might be nice to have the full titanium set.”
“Mrs. C?” Ben is already scrambling to his feet as he gasps this, staring at her in shock. “But… why… You haven’t left your apartment in—”
“Seventeen years, darling, give or take,” she says, and stares up at him severely. “Well? Are you going to help me down or not?”
Automatically, as if she’s puppeting him, Ben offers her his arm, which she takes as he stammers, “But… you’re an agoraphobe—”
“I am no such thing.” Mrs. C says this mildly, as though she’s not offended, just correcting him.
“I’ll grant you, I’m nearly one—functionally, I might as well be—but it’s not that I’m afraid of the outside world.
Let a bus hit me, as far as I’m concerned; it’s been an interesting life, and I don’t have any regrets.
” She sighs, letting go of him as they reach the sidewalk.
“I just can’t bear to go to all the fuss anymore.
It’s been years since I’ve seen the point. ”
“I know how that is,” Ben says, his mood enveloping him again as he stares glumly down at the sidewalk.
“No you don’t!” Mrs. C raps her cane—cherry wood with a carved lion’s head at the top and, Ben’s always thought, an oddly masculine choice for her general aesthetic—hard against the ground. “You’re, what—twenty-three? Twenty-four?”
“I’m twenty-eight, actually,” Ben says, dry.
“Oh, psh, same thing,” Mrs. C says, waving a hand.
Ben notices she’s wearing rather a lot more glittering jewelry than usual, as well as her best mink coat and its matching hat.
“You’re too young to go giving up on life; it’s unseemly.
Wasteful. Look at you, with all your healthy organs and working joints!
Sitting out here freezing to death like you don’t even appreciate still being able to bend both your knees.
I won’t have it, you know. You’re coming with me. ”
“I’ll come up in a minute, Mrs. C, I promise,” Ben says, not meaning it.
“Not upstairs, Ben,” says Mrs. C, as though the suggestion that she might want to return to the apartment she has refused to leave for nearly two decades is asinine. “I am out. Therefore: We are going out.”
Then, to Ben’s absolute amazement, she steps up to the curb, lifts two fingers in the air, and hollers, “TAX-AAAAAAAAAAY,” with the lung strength and commitment of a much younger New Yorker, if one was dropped here via time machine from a different era.
It works immediately, a yellow cab pulling up next to them before Ben can so much as pull out his phone to suggest a ridesharing app, and she turns to him, arching a brow.
“Well?” she demands. “Are you going to help me in or not?”
Ben, seeing no way around it, does so. When she is safely tucked inside the cab, she makes and holds direct eye contact with him, pointing at the seat next to her with a firm, unyielding, gnarled finger.
Helplessly, he shuts her door, walks around to the other side, and climbs in, rolling his eyes when she pats him on the leg like he’s a little dog.
Before he can say it, the cabbie asks the question on his mind: “Where are we headed tonight?”
“Lillian’s,” Mrs. C says, grinning. “And step on it.”
“Lillian’s?” Ben demands, as the cabbie nods and lurches back into the flow of traffic.
“Like, the steakhouse? Mrs. C, listen, it’s not that I fault your taste, but—it’s Lillian’s!
It’s one of the most famous restaurants in the city!
It’s Saturday night! And the holidays! There’s no way there’s going to be a table free; they’ll never seat us—”
“He’s right, you know,” the cabbie says, in congenial tones. “Not for nothing, but if you don’t have a reservation, you’ve got a better shot of eating on the moon than at that place tonight.”
“I think,” Mrs. C says, patting Ben’s leg again, “you should stop trying to tell an old woman her business, hmm? And you”—she fixes the cabbie with a fierce glare—“have been hired to drive, not to opine. We would like to listen to some light music, and keep the conversation to a minimum. I haven’t had the chance to observe this city in some time, and I would like to do it in peace, if you don’t mind. ”
The cabbie, a man in his mid-fifties, makes amused eye contact with Ben in the rearview mirror.
It could not be clearer that he thinks Mrs. C is Ben’s grandmother, and not seeing the point in breaking the illusion, Ben makes wincing, apologetic, grandsonly eye contact in reply.
She might as well be his grandmother, honestly; she’s more involved in his life than either of his own ever were.
Daniel’s mother had died in a car accident a few months before Ben was born, and while Lucia’s mother, Alessia, was alive until Ben’s late teens, she never left Italy once from birth to death.
Consequently, Ben met her three times, and all three of those times she had looked him up and down and said what seemed to Ben to be a paragraph in Italian, which his mother had always then summed up as, “She says she’s glad to see you,” before hastily changing the subject.
He’s probably due, is the point, to be lightly humiliated at one of New York City’s oldest and most revered restaurants by forcibly following the whims of a stubborn old lady. It’s something to do, anyway; it’s keeping him occupied.
But to his amazement, when they arrive at the steakhouse, Mrs. C stalks right up to the host stand and demands a table for two.
And when, unsurprisingly, the host sneers down at her and suggests she try making a reservation next time, she smiles at him like he’s given her a birthday gift, one she’s been secretly hoping for.
“Young man,” she says, leaning close and letting a note of crackling, grandmotherly kindness slip into her voice, “I think, if you were smart, you might pause for a moment here. You might say to yourself, this little old lady seems awfully confident, doesn’t she?
And then you might consider calling up the owner—or getting tonight’s manager, perhaps, if you don’t know how to reach the owner yourself—and letting him know that DiDi Collins is here?
Just a suggestion, dear. We’ll be happy to wait. ”
Ben stares at her. The host also stares at her. Then, slowly, he holds up one finger, places a little card on the desk that says, We Will Be Back to Assist You Shortly, in ornate script, and steps away, muttering darkly to himself.
Three minutes later, he returns, muttering now firmly silenced, flanking someone who Ben would guess is the floor manager, based on her clothing, headset, and general vibe.
Walking with her is another woman who looks to be waitstaff.
He braces himself to be told that the reason multiple people have come to speak to them is so they can be escorted out promptly if necessary, in order to avoid disturbing the other guests.
His mouth drops open slightly when, instead, the floor manager zeroes in on Mrs. C like a homing pigeon and bursts into a huge, fake smile. “Mrs. Collins, it is an honor. I’m Jackie, and I could hardly believe it when—”
“Let’s not make a fuss, dear,” Mrs. C says, smirking at Ben.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, you see, it’s that if anyone finds out I’m here tonight, I’m going to have to talk to them, and I can’t be bothered.
You can keep a secret, can’t you, Jackie?
And find us a nice table, out of the way? ”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Collins,” Jackie says, and, to Ben’s absolute astonishment, begins leading them back through the restaurant. “It’s all ready for you now, if you’d like to walk this way?”