Chapter 16 Sir #2
Tuesday Brandon came to the desk at eleven with his sunglasses pushed up into his hair and stood a step back from the wood, at a counter he expected to be served across. Marco was beside me with the day’s sheet. Romeo was asleep on the corner of the desk with his tail across the tray.
“Who’s in charge here?” He looked past both of us, up the stairs, for somebody taller. “I need the owner. Or the manager, whoever handles dinners. It’s about Thursday.”
Marco set his pen down parallel to the edge of the sheet. He didn’t look at me.
“I’ll see the manager is informed, sir.”
That was all. Not a flicker toward me. A year of rechecking my paperwork for a mistake, “a foreigner over the staff” said to Rosa in front of me at this same desk, and now he stood at my shoulder and left one thing out of a sentence for me, and enjoyed it exactly as much as Marco enjoyed anything.
“Informed.” Brandon set his phone on the desk. “Okay. Then let’s not lose anything in translation. Katie.” He looked at me for the first time, at my hands, where the pen was. “You’ve got a pen. Take this down.”
I took it down.
The corner terrace, the one out over the water, and the sunset side of it, because he’d walked it that morning and it was the only table worth having.
Candles, real ones, he’d been in places with the electric kind.
“Whatever fish is the expensive one.” He said the expensive one and not the good one, and the fish that cost the most in Pietro’s kitchen wasn’t his best, and I wrote it down as given.
The good wine. He’d know it when he saw the list, so bring him the list and skip the speech.
“And the desk girl serves.” He said that part to Marco. Then to me, in the warm voice, the one that could go cold before it reached the end of a sentence: “Katie knows how I like it.”
I wrote that down too. Desk girl serves. The pen didn’t slow.
“You get all that?”
“Every word, sir.”
He nodded, satisfied with the desk as he’d been satisfied with the brass and the tablecloths. “Good. It goes well Thursday, there might be something in it for you.” He picked up the phone. “For old times.”
“The house doesn’t take tips at the desk, sir.”
He was already turning, and he took it for thanks. He had the phone at his ear before he reached the gallery, and his voice came back off the glass, and I didn’t sort out the words.
Marco reached over and moved Romeo’s tail off the tray. Neither of us said anything.
Pietro’s kitchen at noon smelled of stock and the onions he did first and complained about every day of his life. He was at the long table with his sleeves back, taking the bones out of something, and he didn’t stop for me.
I gave it to him in Italian, the whole order, the corner terrace, sunset side, candles in the glasses, the fish, the wine from the list, the service. Then the part that wasn’t on my pad.
“The fish. Not the expensive one. The one you’d cook for Donna Rosa.”
He looked up at that. A cook who’s fed a woman as long as he’s fed her knows which fish that is without being told, and he went back to his bones and said it would be braised, and he’d have it on from noon.
“Thursday’s guest is the one from June.”
He knew which June. Everybody in the house knew which June. The knife stopped. He grunted, as he did at a delivery man who’d tried him with soft tomatoes, and the knife started again, and that was the whole of it. I went back to the desk.
The sheet was where Marco had left it, squared to the corner.
Under the last dinner booking, in his hand, the upright schoolroom hand of a man who’d learned his letters with a ruler on the desk, it said Bella Vista, Thursday, corner terrace.
Underlined once. Not twice. Marco didn’t do anything twice unless it was my paperwork.
He was at the far end of the desk with the post, and he said nothing about it. I said nothing about it. I put the sheet in the tray.
Pietro came along the gallery with a towel over his shoulder. He didn’t leave his kitchen at that hour for anyone, and he didn’t come all the way to the desk now. He stopped at the gallery door.
“From noon,” he said.
Wednesday the sun got to the end of the terrace before lunch did.
By half past one the awning had drawn its shade back off the last two tables at the rail, as it did every day in June.
Julie sat at one of them in full sun, a glass of white going warm in front of her and nobody across from her.
The ice around the bottle had gone to water. The bread hadn’t been touched.
I did the terrace at lunch as I did it at dinner, once through with the jug, so nobody at any table had to ask twice. Six tables were eating. A couple from Bern who’d been with us a week had the fish and had stopped talking to eat it.
Brandon was in the gallery, behind the glass, phone at his ear.
He walked the length of it and back, and his free hand cut the air, his move for a man on the other end who’d said a number he didn’t like.
Whatever he was saying, the glass kept. Out here it was water against the pilings and forks on plates.
She didn’t wave. She lifted two fingers off the cloth an inch and let them fall, and I went over, because that was the job.
The dress was silk again, the kind that shows where you’ve been sitting, and the sunglasses were the big ones, the airport ones that cost more than a night in the Bella Vista.
She was too hot, and her hair had started to stick at the temple.
She asked me to move her. Not to another table, just her, out of the sun, the way you’d ask somebody to move a lamp.
I moved her. I picked up her glass and her napkin and carried them two tables in, under the edge of the canvas, and pulled the chair out for her.
She took her time getting up. She came and sat and put her bag on the chair beside her, so that nobody would, and stretched her legs out into the aisle where the plates went by.
The line of the shade fell across the cloth an inch past her glass.
Behind me a waiter stepped around her feet with two of the veal and didn’t slow down.
Then she took the sunglasses off. She folded them and set them on the cloth and looked at me as she’d looked at me over the risotto at my table in Chicago, as if I were about to say something funny.
“You could’ve made a scene,” she said. “Last June. You didn’t.”
“The shade moves at three. I’ll have them move you again.”
“He said you’d never fight for anything.”
“The fish or the veal?”
She looked at the lake. It was flat and bright and not doing anything for her. She looked at Brandon through the glass, going the other way now, the hand still going, and he didn’t look out. She looked at the lake.
“It’s boring here, Katie.”
“The veal’s better today,” I said.
She turned the sunglasses over on the cloth, once, the way you turn a card you’ve already seen.
“Do you hate me?”
I let the second happen. I didn’t put anything in it, and I didn’t look away from her while it went by, and she watched it go, the sunglasses folded on the cloth between us.
“The veal.”
She picked the sunglasses up and put them back on, and behind them she was whoever she was again.
“The veal,” she said.
She leaned back, and the perfume came across the table with her.
The same one. Heavy and warm, and the tobacco under it, bitter, the one from my own dining room.
It had come down over Maddie and me in a doorway a year ago and beaten the chlorine on both of us.
I stood with my hand on the back of the empty chair and waited for it to do that.
It didn’t do anything. My throat stayed open. Perfume, and too much of it for lunch.