Chapter Twenty-Six #3
Nelson thought about all the bullies and jerks he’d encountered over the years.
“The world is so disorganized,” he said.
“It drives me crazy to see someone throw an aluminum can in the trash when there’s a recycling bin two feet away.
But what qualifies me to complain about the terribleness of humans?
I do all the things I hate, I can be wasteful and uncaring; it’s only that when I do it, I’ve always got an excuse, and I just assume everyone else doesn’t care. ”
He hadn’t meant to say so much—it simply slipped out. Nelson was always aware that when he spoke, his clients expected to derive value. He was never able to blurt his thoughts; everything had to be weighed, to justify his fee.
The lemon cake arrived. “Did you make this?” Nelson asked. Gina nodded, and he took a bite. “It’s incredibly delicious,” he said, and found he wasn’t as embarrassed as he usually was when giving an effusive compliment. In fact, he wasn’t embarrassed at all.
Later, Nelson would look at his watch and discover an hour had passed.
During his conversation with Gina, there had been no great revelation; it was more a pleasant conversation, one that took little effort on his part, the way he might converse with his favorite cousin over brunch.
He searched for Joan, locating her by the entrance.
She was smiling, and he was surprised to see lines around her mouth, as he still thought of her as a young woman.
It would be nice, Nelson mused, if the café were open for many years.
Then you could visit those hosts who knew you earlier; they could remember you in the way of old friends.
So. Was this it? Was this what Joan wanted?
Though he’d enjoyed conversing with Gina, Nelson couldn’t decide if it—whatever “it” was—was enough to sustain a business.
He couldn’t decide if there was enough to draw him back, or if it was like being seated next to someone at a wedding reception where you have a pleasant enough evening, but don’t care to keep in touch after.
It was enough. The café wasn’t perfect: there was the issue of the furniture, which didn’t fit the ambiance; the chairs and tables didn’t seem like permanent residents.
It took Joan some time to figure out the food as well (the menu would never make much sense; it would always be a collection of baked goods and sandwiches and Joan’s favorite Asian dishes).
There were also customers who visited for the novelty and never came back; customers who came hoping to fall in love and have love returned.
The café’s first week of operations, Joan had to eject two men who came in drunk and a woman who tried to grab a host’s crotch.
The female hosts, at least in the first months, were free of any sexual advances; this was accomplished via close management from Patty as well as the chef, Gina, who said she possessed a special sense for perverts.
“They usually look ordinary” was Gina’s statement on the matter.
“You’ve got to look for those who look deliberately ordinary. ”
Joan recalled enough from her hostess days at Lotus Garden that she was able to manage the café’s opening and closing. She also hired well, or rather Patty did, and Joan was generous with salaries and benefits. And so they hired more hosts, and more customers came.
The following month, Leonard received a call from a liquidator he regularly did business with, concerning an estate.
It was rare that Leonard’s contacts worked with estates, as typically the collection from a single person was sparse and scattered.
This had been an unusual case, however, of a woman who’d collected a certain style of table made in the 1950s, designed and manufactured by an Italian company.
The tables, which were constructed of cast bronze aluminum, came in a variety of lacquered-top finishes.
The woman had hoarded the tables, purchasing piece after piece, which she’d kept first in her home and later in a storage unit.
When she died, her children had not wanted even one of the tables, the same as how they had not wanted her paintings or letters.
All the children did want was her jewelry, which they quickly flipped to a consignment shop in St. Helena.
The rest they called in a liquidator for, to carry away.
“The tops aren’t all the same color,” Leonard said when he brought Joan to inspect the tables. “So the aesthetic may not appear entirely cohesive.” But secretly he hoped she took the lot; he had grown fond of the pieces and didn’t have another client he thought would require this quantity.
Joan examined the tables. The tops were slabs of white and black and bronze and green and azure and yellow. In the back, she spotted a brilliant crimson. “One woman bought all of these? Why?”
“Obviously she was a fan of the design. What led her to buy so many, I have no idea.”
Joan thought she might understand. There had been times when she’d been tempted to gorge on beauty like this—if she happened to be in a particularly depressed period and found a coat or dress she liked, she’d had the urge to gobble up every version or color, to multiply her pleasure.
She tried to imagine the tables in the café and whether her customers would find the colors jarring.
Or perhaps they would grow attached to a table: I always have my conversations on the blue, they might say.
But was that childish, the way Lee and Jamie used to fight over the purple place mat at dinner?
Though lately Joan had the feeling that people her age were reverting back into little children: ditching their spouses for new loves, learning to fly airplanes and getting drunk in the morning.
Personal gratification was all the rage.
“You’ll have to get chairs that match,” Joan said finally. “For continuity.”
“Yes, yes!” Leonard said. “I’ll find the perfect ones.
” He felt pleased that Joan had agreed, since he had not expected her to.
And Leonard did find chairs—he had them custom-made, off a vintage French design of dark curved wood.
The chairs’ soft lines offset the modernity of the tables, and they were smooth and comfortable to sit in for long periods.
Leonard was proud of the chairs and would reproduce them for other clients, but his admiration for them would never exceed his admiration for the tables.
In the future, whenever he visited the Satisfaction Café, he would feel a frisson of pleasure upon seeing them, as if they were a family he’d kept from falling apart.
Six months passed. Spring came and with it, rain.
Joan wrote a letter to Nelson, who was on an extended trip to Europe.
He had written to her first, a postcard from Lausanne, where Adam was taking a course at the design school, saying he hated the food.
You would hate it too, he wrote. The only Chinese place is six miles from the city center, and all they serve is Peking duck.
Nelson was going to Düsseldorf next, and he didn’t know if the food there would be any better.
Joan went to Ranch 99 and purchased shrimp chips and rice crackers and then visited the Indian grocer next door, where she asked the cashier for his favorites.
She brought everything to Kinko’s for shipping, as she wanted the package to arrive by the time Nelson was in Düsseldorf.
There was a short line to the cashier. The woman directly in front of Joan, maybe a decade older, wore a yellow dress and was talking to herself.
“Now I have to mail these,” the woman murmured, “and then I have the cards, and I need a few more of those envelopes, and if I have time maybe I’ll go to that coffee place, the one over on San Antonio, and pick up some of those cookies for… ”
Joan closed her eyes. Something in the woman’s voice; it was so smooth and melodic. She tapped her shoulder. “Excuse me?”
The woman’s name was Adele. “It’s a special kind of café,” Joan explained once they were finished with their packages and she and Adele outside. “I’m looking for people who like to speak to other people.”
“Oh, how interesting, ” Adele said. She seemed to understand the concept or at least did not seem perturbed by it, as people sometimes were.
Adele was a health care executive with a busy schedule, so she did not have time to work at a café, she explained.
Besides, she enjoyed her job. “But I’d like to come visit,” she added.
“Oh,” Joan said, “please do!”
Never one to idly chat at a school pickup, to make friends at dinner parties, to organize the neighborhood barbecue, Joan now found herself falling in love all over the place.
Just walking down the street, she would encounter two people in conversation, the friends laughing in such synchronicity that Joan would have to stop and marvel that such compatible souls had found each other.
She would see an old Chinese man walking his dog and carefully scooping its waste into a bag and think: Is someone praising him for cleaning up?
It wasn’t necessarily something people of her generation knew to do, pick up after their pets.
Was he receiving credit for being a good citizen of the neighborhood?
While earlier she’d relied on Patty for the café’s hiring, Joan became a seasoned recruiter herself.
She found a slightly snotty academic, a postdoc in economics who could speak for long stretches to recently retired men; Joan also hired a stand-up comic, Bobby Henderson, who could be outrageously funny but whom she had to be careful not to overschedule, as Bobby could lapse into sullenness when tired.
She even found a candidate to bring to fruition her idea of a third-party assessment of attractiveness, though after user testing Joan modified the service to include only positive feedback.
Pierre had been a casting assistant on Hollywood films, and his IMDb spanned The Forever Promise to Demon Scream 5.
Your posture is so elegant, Pierre told his clients.
You have electrifying eyes. There is a leading-man quality to your jaw.
At the year mark, Patty came to Joan. She said that since Joan was doing such a good job managing the hosts and customers, she wanted to focus on back-end operations.
“Don’t you like your job?” Joan asked.
“Sure,” Patty said. “It’s just I want to learn something new.”
“Are you tired?”
“Nope,” Patty said in an insulted voice, although she was tired—she was over seventy now.
Her back hurt in places it didn’t before, and managing the front meant a lot of standing.
And yet Patty could not contemplate retiring.
Without the rhythm and purpose of work she felt uneasy, bloated with time and adrift within the day’s many hours.
“We can try it,” Joan said, and Patty set off.
She possessed a seemingly endless appetite for administration and, in her new role, tracked the café’s energy usage and the cost of ingredients and maintained a list of furniture in need of repair.
In December, after reviewing their prior year’s tax returns and discovering their accountant had missed basic deductions, Patty bought a textbook on accounting and asked Joan if she could file the café’s taxes the following year.
The IRS would give Patty plenty to obsess over; in the agency’s instructions and forms, Patty felt she had all the work she could possibly wish for.
Often when Joan left at night, Patty would be at her desk. “Shouldn’t you go home?” Joan asked late one evening.
“I’m fine.” Patty didn’t look up. “There’s so much to do, and they keep changing the damn rules.”
“Who are they?”
“Everyone,” Patty said. “Everyone is changing the rules.” She had assumed a gruffer persona in her new position and yet Joan knew in her heart that Patty was content.
Joan knew it because she knew Patty, the same as she knew all her staff and many of her customers.
Only a few years earlier Joan could not have conceived that she would be bone-tired at the end of each day but not wish for any other existence.
That she would believe, ardently, that she had found her life’s work.
Not that everything which came before wasn’t important, Joan thought.
I would have wanted all of it, the good and the bad.
After all: pain is necessary. Loneliness is necessary.
For the first time in a long while, Joan knew she was truly satisfied, and like all parents who are finally happy, her most ardent wish was that her children could be happy too.