Patrick ascends toward the world’s number one restaurant on an escalator, its scrolling steps heavy with tourists, inside the marbled shopping mall of the Time Warner Center.
The tourists wear bright rucksacks, windbreakers and sneakers. Patrick has on a lightweight charcoal suit but no tie, because an hour earlier, when he received confirmation of the lunch, he went through his closet examining the necks of his shirts and discovered all of them frayed where recently he de-collared each one of them with kitchen shears. He picked out a blue-and-white Bengal stripe and tidied the loose threads with nail scissors.
Breathing slowly through his nose, he tries to untangle his thoughts and worries he will mistime his dismount from the escalator. When he sees the restaurant door across the narrow space of the fourth-floor gallery, he worries that he doesn’t know under which name the reservation is held. And then he worries that these minor worries are only a distraction from what he should be worrying about most of all. That this meeting is probably a sham, not a life-changing event at all. That in all likelihood TribecaM is someone in PR who wants Red Moose Barn to promote spray cheese.
As he nears the restaurant, the mall is transformed into an avenue of orchids and bay trees and when he enters through the heavy antique door (shipped over from Jean-Jacques Rougerie’s village of Crain, he has read), he is greeted by a man in a black suit standing at a slender lectern.
Mr. McConnell, welcome to Le Crainois. Mr.… uh … your dining companion is seated already. Is there anything you’d like me to take for you?
Patrick pats his pockets. No, thank you, he says, looking at his greeter’s black silk tie, feeling the absence around his own neck.
Another man appears. Good afternoon, Mr. McConnell. My name is Frédéric, I’m the maître d’ at Le Crainois. Would you like me to show you straight to your table?
They move down the corridor, through a beige bar, on toward the dining room. Patrick has noticed a unique rate of ambulation among the staff in the world’s finest dining establishments—the precise velocity at which a koi carp drifts from sunlight to shadow.
Frédéric says something in a friendly tone that Patrick fails to take in as he tries to spot TribecaM in the dining room ahead. What does he look like? Patrick wonders, having already felt a small sense of disappointment when the man at the lectern revealed the gender of his lunch companion.
How did you know my name? Patrick asks the maître d’. The man at the front knew it as well, he says.
Sometimes images are available, says Frédéric. Whenever that’s the case, we like to familiarize ourselves with our guests before they arrive.
Images available? says Patrick.
Online, for example, says Frédéric. And then he adds, Your photo of the sorrel soup was mouthwatering.
There are only a dozen tables in the dining room, its color scheme of browns and creams peppered with tubs of greenery and sculptural twigs. Patrick follows Frédéric past a long window that forms one side of the room, several floors above Columbus Circle, the statue of Columbus on his pedestal dominating the view, surprisingly paunchy when seen at eye level. Central Park fans out beyond the statue, its paths and trees overfringed with a hazy line of tall buildings.
Frédéric leads them around a pillar. Patrick doesn’t know how he will be able to eat, feeling as if the contents of his breakfast are lodged up against his breastbone. He tries to shift the obstruction, swallowing hard as he arrives at a secluded table set in its own glade with its own private stretch of window, the face of the man seated at the table obscured by the wine list, a leather book as big as an atlas, Patrick almost starting to laugh as the mounting sense of this lunch-tease begins to feel preposterous.
And then the wine list is lowered, unveiling a face that Patrick recognizes in an instant, even though it has been twenty-six years, the eyes as insistent as the last time he saw him. Columbus, Central Park, New York—everything beyond the window a haze at the end of a vertiginous drop. There is only his face, Matthew, and the air smelling faintly of pine.