Tonight, New Year’s Eve 2008, they are going to the Red Monkey for dinner. The same as every year, it was Julian who chose the restaurant, made the reservations, arranged that they get a decent table. A freelance food critic, Julian writes for some reasonably popular magazines, although his reviews are most often sidebars, and he doesn’t always get a byline. Nonetheless, he is afforded what he calls a personal relationship with hotshot chefs and gatekeeping maître d’s. That he gets paid in pennies for his efforts is irrelevant because Lydia, his wife, is rich. No one in Lydia’s family, going back three generations, ever had a job. Instead, they sat on boards for ballet companies and small museums and they studied things like Chinese brush painting and Sanskrit, and Lydia, holding fast to family tradition, is on the board of an off-Broadway theater that does interpretations of plays by Chekov and Ibsen, and she does a lot of Pilates.
The Red Monkey, Julian had reminded them, is a known restaurant, which left Bunny no choice, as far as she could help it, but to put the word in air quotes. “Known.” A relic from the era when like-minded uber-snooty restaurants were, for all intents and purposes, closed to the public, until without warning or explanation, poof! over, so over, but the Red Monkey held on. Although hardly what it was in its ’80s heyday—for example, the phone number is now listed—The Monkey, as Julian calls it, remains sufficiently attitudinarian that to score a reservation for New Year’s Eve means that you are famous, in the New York way of famous, which means you’re not necessarily someone recognized on the street, but in certain circles, your name is “known.” That, or else you know the chef.
Albie can’t imagine this dinner being anything but difficult. At best, difficult. At worst, a scene. A scene. He tries to reason with his wife. “Four hours of sleep? How could you possibly enjoy yourself on four hours of sleep? You’re going to be exhausted.”
“I want to go.” Bunny enunciates each word emphatically. I. Want. To. Go.
“But why?” Albie asks. “Why do you want to go?”
“Because they are our friends, and dinner with them is a New Year’s Eve tradition.” She, who mocks tradition, scoffs at family rituals, hides away in closets from time-honored practices—such a statement is practically aphasic in its incomprehensibility. Even Bunny knows it is a crackpot response. “And I’m trying to be normal.”
Albie wishes he could tease her, tell her to give it up because she’ll never be normal. He wishes he could say that he loves her just as she is, but he’s not sure if it’s true; not as she is, not as she is now. Instead, he suggests, “Maybe later you can take a nap.”
Last year, midway through their New Year’s Eve dinner, Bunny, impatient and desperate for a cigarette, got up from the table saying, “Excuse me. I need my fix.” With Albie’s sports jacket draped over her shoulders, she braved the cold for a Camel Light. In the relative quiet of the out-of-doors, relative to the clamor and clatter of the restaurant, it was with the clarity and intensity of hyperrealism that she was struck by a thought: I cannot stomach those people. It was an uncomfortable thought because, except for Stella—Stella who was like a sister had she been able to choose a sister, a sister she loved—those people were her closest friends. It did not feel good to acknowledge that her closest friends were people she could not stomach. But that wasn’t quite right. She did like them. She did. It was only that she wished she liked them more. She wished she liked them a lot. Done with her cigarette, she ground out the remains with the heel of her shoe, and readied herself to return to the restaurant to rejoin her husband and their closest friends for dinner on New Year’s Eve.