The restaurant is busy for a Tuesday night. Come January, it won’t even be open Tuesdays. But it’s bustling tonight. The holidays will do it, and the snow. It’s the first snow of the year and it’s a light snow, entrancing, every flake twirling, slow motion, six points intact, to the ground, and there vanishing as if by sleight of hand, lending the asphalt a satiny sheen, a tuxedo-and-top-hat luster. All over the West Village, people sift out of brownstones and wander along the convoluted streets and alleyways. They stick out their tongues, blink wet eyelashes at each other. “Careful,” people tell each other, “it’s slippery,” and they hold hands.
In a month or less, a snowy night will hurt business. People will be sick of it by then, the dirty crusted humps of it blocking the curb, the slushy brown ponds of it endlessly sopping their skin. In a month or less, they’ll be sending out for pizzas and Chinese and Indian and Cuban and eating at home, alone, in their overheated apartments, sock-feet up on coffee tables, sitcoms on their TVs. Like last year. But tonight nobody remembers any of this.
“Wally. Number seven never got the rabbit appetizer. Can you take it off?” Justine, the new waitress, hands over the check and flits off to take a drink order, and Wally James turns from the window and the streetlamp-lit flakes. This is the first night he’s come in to work since Ann’s fall, and he’s more appreciative than usual of the restaurant’s rhythms and tempos. Tiny, textured dramas play themselves out in the corners of his eyes, in the weave of dialogue around him. Now he goes to the register and vanishes the rabbit. Only he and Nuncio, his maître d’ and manager, can delete an item since the system’s been computerized. He delivers the new check to table seven himself.
“How was dinner?” He’s a comfortably compact man. His stomach protrudes firmly under his beet-colored wool sweater, and a neat laurel of gray-brown curls frames an otherwise smooth pate.
“Very good.”
“Excellent. The woodcock was excellent. I never tasted it before.”
“Thank you.” People say it often, that they’ve never before tasted an item on his menu. “I’ll tell the cook.” Wally himself had never tasted game until they began developing the menu. The restaurant’s specialty is also its name: Game. It had been Alice’s idea. Seven years ago, when Ann was nine. “We can hang old rifles on the walls,” Alice had said, remembering the Maine fishing-and-hunting camp of her childhood. “We can have daisies and clover in paper cups on the tables. Everything can be unfinished pine. Knotty. Hand-hewn.” Game had been Alice’s idea, but she’d meant it as a gift to him, a way to liberate him from his job in city planning. They’d paid for it with her sudden inheritance, which they always referred to as her sudden inheritance, like a plot device in a drawing-room comedy.
The bells on the door ching, and three more people flock inside with a gust of sparkling air and a shaking out of scarves. Glowy faces and eyeglasses steaming up. The restaurant is romantically lit by the fire in the big stone hearth, by oil lanterns on each table and mounted on the walls, and by scores of tiny pomegranate-colored lights strung in the storefront windows. Nuncio, with his long sideburns and pistachio ruffled tuxedo shirt, greets and seats. The door opens again. Nuncio tells them there’s a wait. A moment later, he catches Wally’s eye and smiles: he’s having fun. There is in Nuncio something of the perpetual fourteen-year-old. He even looks fourteen, sort of, when he smiles: full of an innocent’s cockiness. They appreciate the momentum and moods of the restaurant jointly, Wally and Nuncio: it’s theater as much as supper.
Game is small; it’s on the crooked part of West Fourth, the little scorpion-tail end of it, where it rears up like an avenue and starts intersecting other streets. On either side of the storefront windows hangs a swag of red velvet, something Wally only recently added. Alice would never have approved; it doesn’t fit the original conceit, but to Wally it feels right, framing the world inside the restaurant as something apart, something created.
Wally goes back behind the bar and fills Justine’s drink order. Lamplight polishes the beer he pours, and pools in the amber scotch. Plates of roast pheasant in pancetta are borne out of the kitchen high on Peter’s palms. Peter is the other waiter working tonight. A ballet dancer, he walks like a very suave duck. Justine laughs her raucous laugh with table eleven. Faintly, on the stereo, French horns. Game, though it should make him sad, its tenuous theatricality never quite enough to erase Alice’s absence, almost never does. Wally picks up the phone and dials home.
“Hello?” Ann sounds groggy.
“Hi. It’s Dad. How are you feeling?”
“Okay.”
“Did I wake you?”
“No. It’s snowing.”
“I know. Pretty.” She would be seeing it in the light off their balcony. “Okay, you were sleeping, weren’t you? Go back to bed.”
“No, it’s okay. My math teacher was here today.”
Peter comes to the bar and says, “A Bass and a cranberry with seltzer and lime,” and Wally nods and gets out two pint glasses and says into the phone, “Good. Was that good?”
“Yeah. She’s coming back next Wednesday. Are you crowded?”
“We are, actually. A little crowded.”
“That’s nice.” A yawn distorts the second word.
“Okay, Anatevka.” A nickname from when she was five and decided her name was too short. “I’m just calling to say hi. I’ll be home late.”
“Okay.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, Dad. I’m fine.”
He hangs up, picturing her alone on the debris-strewn red couch, her increasingly blighted kingdom these past few days. The visiting nurse will have been by since he left for work, and Willette and Emil, two of his oldest friends, will have brought Ann supper and shared it with her, and Carla, their neighbor down the hall with the pit bulls and heart of gold, will have checked in on her way back from walking the dogs. He tells himself all this. It would be untruthful not to admit that he’s also relieved to be back at work tonight. Ann’s accident has thrust him and his daughter into closer and more continuous proximity than they’ve shared since she was in diapers. Well. He immediately pictures the look Alice would give him upon hearing that claim. All right: closer and more continuous proximity than they’ve shared ever. He bows mentally. But a certain amount of distance is good between a father and daughter. Especially with no mother at home. Wally has perhaps never been as angry at Alice’s being gone as he has been these past four days.
He delivers the beer and the cranberry spritzer and stands schmoozing a few minutes with table one, a ruddy couple from South Africa, it turns out, who are eager to know whether he’s ever tried ostrich on the menu, whether he’s ever hunted at a game park, whether he’s ever tasted grubs. Yes, no, and no. They’re clearly disappointed he’s not going to engage in some blustery one-upmanship with them (Well, have you ever wrestled an alligator? Ever shot a charging elephant? Here, let me show you my scar . . .), but then he draws them out, lets them regale him with a couple of their own escapades, which is what they wanted anyway, and leaves them to their drinks diffused and charmed.
Nuncio, who has been eavesdropping, gives Wally a private salute—two fingers curling an imaginary handlebar mustache—then swivels to hold open the door for some exiting customers. Whatever he says elicits a laugh and a retort, and then he laughs, appreciatively, and waves goodbye. He is a gentle and laconic flirt. Sometimes he shakes hands with customers as they’re leaving. Later tonight, when the last people are finishing dessert, Justine will climb on a bar stool and massage his shoulders. Later still, when Justine and Peter have totaled out and the cook has gone home to his wife and new baby in Washington Heights and the dishwasher is taking out the garbage and mopping the kitchen and putting the mats back down, Wally and Nuncio will sit at their back table with cocoa and scotch, respectively, and talk for a while in the closed restaurant. They’ve had little manly crushes on each other for seven years; they always will.
Now a trio of young women comes in, chatting animatedly while Nuncio swats snow off their shoulders. One of them is holding a flute case, and one is holding an armload of blue delphiniums. Justine leads with her hip through the kitchen door, plates of venison burgers balanced up her arms. “Hot stuff, hot stuff!” she whispers to herself like a mini–circus barker. Outside the window, framed by Game’s velvet drapes, a couple across the street breaks into a momentary tango, and a sloe-eyed greyhound lifts its pale, elegant leg to urinate against a tree trunk. Everything—he has resolved to believe this—conspires to make Wally James happy.