On weekends, the entrance to the Popover Café on Amsterdam Avenue is jammed with people listening for their names. You have to weave through the narrow spaces between bodies to reach the hostess stand. I’d done that once before, on another day, in other company, but the wait for a table was too long. Gary, did you make a reservation? Gary? Gary?
The outside of this restaurant, with its checked window curtains, is modeled after a homey coffee shop in a small country town. On the inside, it’s a sleek red-and-black bistro with the hallmarks of every other popular brunch spot in the city. A book-sized reservation list, servers forearming platters of cream-sauced eggs, a waiting area crammed with pointy elbows, pricked ears, and darting eyes. A stagnant rage is reserved for those already seated, and a fresh hell-fire fury for each person who approaches the hostess stand.
Some tall lady with her hands on her hips stands between Gary and me, intentionally taking up space. I watch him talk with the hostess through the triangle in her arm. She is showing him a clipboard, and he’s nodding. His smile is the shape of a croissant. The room smells of sweet, flaky dough. A hundred conversations braided together sound like one, a breathless monologue spoken by an alien in his alien language. No way we’re getting a table.
Gary looks over at Emma and me, chucks his chin up, and signals with two fingers to follow him. He’s got it all figured out.
We follow, believing we’re being shown the bathrooms or maybe a back exit. But the hostess places three menus at a four-top and Gary pulls out a chair. He seems pleased as he settles in, but unforthcoming. If he explained his magic tricks, then they wouldn’t be magic.
A waiter comes by and places a puffed pastry the size of a knuckled fist on each of our plates. In a ramekin on the table is a smooth, creamy scoop of strawberry butter. We dig it out with tiny knives and smother the steaming hollow insides of our popovers. Gary holds his pastry in one hand, but doesn’t crack it open yet. Instead he watches, nodding, as I cram my mouth full of sweet, crusty bread. He wants to know what I think. Is it as good as he promised? Willy Wonka, I think when I look at him.
With an arm slung loosely around the back of his chair, he sinks into his seat sideways. His long legs, crossed at the ankle, extend beyond our table, creating a booby trap for waiters to trip over.
We talk about movies. Gary loves movies and so do I.
“Gary, tell us the ending of The Crying Game!”
Nope, he can’t do that. It’s a secret.
“Come on, please?”
Later.
“Gary, I saw Alive.”
“The cannibal movie?”
“Yeah, it’s a true story.”
“Did you see the part when they eat their friends?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t as scary as I thought it’d be.”
“Anyone see Body of Evidence?” Gary’s eyebrows rise mischievously.
It’s a Madonna movie so it’s supposed to be sexy. In October, her book, Sex, came out. The books came wrapped so you couldn’t look inside. But there was a display copy in a music store by my house. I paged through the black-and-white photos, waiting for someone to scold me, but nobody did. There was a picture of her nude on a highway. A blond Marilyn Monroe wig on her head and a black strip of hair between her legs. In another photo, Vanilla Ice pressed into the side of her breast with his thumb. His diamond watch hung loose on his wrist.
Body of Evidence. It had the sound of a grown-up movie, like Final Analysis. Double Impact. Basic Instinct. Fatal Attraction. Always a combination of words that imply both legal proceedings and shadowy bedroom scenes. In the trailer for the movie, Madonna crawls over a courtroom table. Adult sex is so serious in the movies, catalyzed by murder or a grueling life-or-death trial. The men are always strong, battle-hungry, defiant in the courtroom—their only weakness the sight of an untrustworthy woman in a negligee. The act itself, the woman always on top of the man, turns heroes into hostages.
“I want to see Groundhog Day,” I say.
“What about Falling Down?”
I saw it with my parents. It wasn’t like other Michael Douglas movies. There was no sex. Only guns. He played a man on a rampage through Los Angeles, enacting his own brand of justice. An antihero, my mother had called him when, in the end, we learn his violence was all an attempt to get to his daughter’s birthday party. The hero-hero was a cop with my father’s mustache, who was about to retire when he heard of an armed vigilante.
Gary knows the actor who played the cop. He’s played tennis with him before. Great guy.
After Gary pays the bill, Emma and I are ready to get back in the car and head home, but he has one quick errand to run. We groan, we protest, but we’re going anyway.
“Didn’t I take you to the Popover Café?”
Yes.
“Didn’t I manage to get us a table?”
Yes.
“Now it’s you girls’ turn. Come on, that’s how it works.”
The windows of the shop where Gary takes us are covered by black curtains. If there’s a sign above the door, I don’t notice it. Inside, it’s a bakery, a glass-cased museum of chocolate figurines, glistening braided bread, pastel-glazed cakes and cookies. It cracks open older memories of other bakeries, walking into a kaleidoscope of unknown flavors and having to choose just one thing, the decision informed not by experience, but pure magnetism. What colors do you most want to taste? What reminds you most of your favorite things?
Everyone knows Gary. He is talking to the lady behind the bakery counter. She wears her hair in a head scarf ironically, and has dark brown lipstick and an iron-on baby tee. The way Gary is leaning down with his elbows on the display case, paying attention to her, bothers me. She tosses her head back and laughs at whatever he’s saying. Why the hell did he bring us in here?
Emma is standing at the display case on the other end of the shop. “Look.” She points to a selection of chocolates. “Penises,” she hisses. Right in front of us is a row of pointy chocolate statues mounted on two small hills. We look at each other and cover our mouths to catch the noises. I point to a row below the chocolates: challah bread in the shape of vaginas. On closer inspection, all of the pastries behind the glass are shaped like genitalia or nude statuettes or couples naked and intertwined, bulging chocolate veins.
Emma’s face is pink. I’m covering my mouth so it doesn’t explode.
Gary is at the door holding a cake box. He’s ready to go.
“What’s so funny?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say. I’m trying to read his expression to see if he recognizes the mistake he’s made, going to a bakery like this instead of a normal one.
We are standing in front of the display case so he doesn’t see what’s inside it. And now we are following him out the door.
“Something’s funny,” he says. “What is it?” But he’s smiling, like he knows.
When I get home, I don’t tell my mother what I saw. Gary was testing our maturity. It was a privilege to enter an adult space without being chased away, to not have to listen from another room while they cackled, to join them in their conspiracy. I was not about to lose that privilege by acting like what I saw was a big deal. And it confirmed what I already believed: The realm of adults, when they’re not around children, is more perverse than they let on.
I’ve seen the newsstands’ plastic-wrapped magazines tucked inside their slots. Their names in fluorescent bubble writing—Juggs, Bazooms, Screw—as cartoonish as candy wrappers. I’ve passed Chippendales on First Avenue, and learned that although it bears the name of two Disney characters, it is not a place for children. I’ve seen a woman in a licorice bikini on a birthday card in the adult rack of the stationery store, before being shooed away by the store clerk. And now this, a whole bakery of sex. This is the secret adults don’t want us to know: They are just children with sex. It is not at all like the movies where they move slowly in the shadows between satin sheets. When we are not around, they gorge on candy and comics and dirty jokes, just as we do, only more so. There is nothing mature about their desires. Their mouths are rimmed in chocolate. They writhe in whipped cream. They fuck like Willy Wonka.
And Gary let me see. He didn’t shoo me away. He wanted me to know their composure—their rules and manners—are all lies. They tell us no, and they do worse. They even eat sex.
A Valentine from Gary Wilensky sits on top of our mail pile. It’s mine, so I take it into my room and study it for secret messages. Some kind of code, a private joke, an authentication that suggests this index card was designed specifically for me. But it’s just a bunch of red stamps for little kids—teddy bears and Mickey Mouse. Gary’s face is a red stamp, too. On the other side of the card, there’s a telephone number for his tennis-tip hotline. And his address. And my address. And that’s all.