Shortly before the incident in the restaurant Santorini this was how things stood.
“Talk to me, Hal,” Jan Resnick was saying. “Why won’t you please just talk to me?”
Hal Reese sat looking out the window into the bright New York City night and pedestrians passing, headlights passing, delivery boys on old beat-up bikes pedaling against traffic, his body at an angle only slightly facing her. His legs were crossed and his left foot tapped impatiently into space. The left foot wanted to go somewhere. The right was rooted to the floor. There was food on the table, lemon chicken for him and stuffed grape leaves for her. Roasted bird and fallen leaves.
As yet they hadn’t touched it.
He drank his scotch. By now her coffee would be tepid. She hadn’t touched that either. Jan watched his head turn to track a pretty brunette in a white tee-shirt, tights and headphones. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have minded his watching the brunette. Now suddenly everything he did seemed to frighten her.
“Three years, Hal.”
“In December. It’s only August.”
“I put you through school for godsakes.”
“You made the cash, sure. I put myself through school.”
Even through the fear and sadness it galled her.
“All our expenses. The rent. Everything. On my feet all day, just like this poor kid you just snapped at over the goddamn fish.”
“I told you. You’ll get half the back rent and half the bills. I’ve already figured it. You want the amount? The fish was overdone.”
He sounded bored to death with the whole thing.
Bored with her.
Just like that.
The announcement had come out of the blue right there in the restaurant not half an hour ago. They’d ordered and then he told her. He’d be packing over the weekend. He’d be leaving Sunday morning. He was sorry.
He didn’t sound sorry.
They’d fucked just the night before. Jesus!
He was leaving her for another woman, of course. Hal would always have to have a woman. Somebody to take care of him, mother him, flatter him, fuck him. He couldn’t stand to be alone. Jan even knew who she was. Liddy Krest, trader for another firm, she couldn’t remember which. They’d met a few times at parties. Jan had found her cold and somewhat abrasive but forgave that right away. It would not be an easy thing to be a woman on the floor of the Stock Exchange. It was pretty much a man’s world and the competition brutal.
Her eyes blurred over. She’d started to cry again. She reached across the table. Touched the back of his hand.
“Hal, look at me. Look at me.”
She wanted him to see the pain, to gaze into the pain.
To see what he was doing.
He wouldn’t.
“Hal. Please. Don’t do this.”
The restaurant was busy. She wondered if anyone heard the desperation in her voice. Heard and found her pitiful. She was begging. She wondered if passers-by could see it on her face through the plate-glass windows that boxed their corner table. Had she known this was coming she might at least have picked a place less exposed to strangers.
Hal might have picked one for her.
He hadn’t. He didn’t care.
How could that be?
She’d thought he’d always care.
They’d talked marriage. Children.
He stared out the window at all the passing faces.
Jan Reznick allowed herself the tears.
Diane Farrell wasn’t having the best of nights behind the bar.
Though she’d sure as hell had a whole lot worse.
A few years back she’d worked for this mob-connected joint down in Little Italy. Walked into the office one night to get change for the register and found the owner in his swivel chair behind the desk getting a blowjob from a waitress. Her boss made change from the cashbox. The waitress never missed a beat.
The same night some asshole puked into his beer.
It was that kind of place.
Then another night they’re packed, roaring, and she’s on with this girl Susan, absolutely useless as a bartender but pretty enough to draw the wiseguys like hounds on a rabbit and Diane’s down at the end of the bar mixing drinks for the tables when suddenly Susan starts screaming. She turns and sees eight of the boys as her boss calls them—gold chains, open shirts and hairy chests, Atlantic City blondes on their arms, the whole bit—out of their chairs and beating hell out of this little Mexican delivery boy, just a kid. Chairs are flying. Tables falling. Women screaming.
Somebody calls the cops. And the cops arrive so quickly you had to figure they were just waiting for something to happen in this joint. One of the boys ducks behind the bar, hands her a pistol, says hi I’m Tommy or whatever and tells her that if she’s asked, she’s to say he’s worked here for months, just another bartender. She’s shaking so bad she can barely get the pistol hidden down into the ice. The cops question her and she says she saw absolutely nothing, she was busy, she missed the whole thing but they don’t believe her, they take her ID and threaten her with arrest for withholding evidence until finally she’s so damn scared she’s sobbing. At which point the cops back off, take a few more names and leave.
Tommy or whatever his name is pulls his gun out of the ice and kisses her. Shoves his tongue down her throat. His breath is worse than Godzilla’s.
Thanks, babe.
About a gallon of Absolut later she finally gets rid of the taste of him.
She’d had worse nights, oh yeah. But this one was bad enough.
First of all nobody in the whole damn place was tipping. You’d think it was the day after Christmas or something, when nobody’s got a spare cent to their name. This, just two nights after she’s moved into a new apartment, with a month’s rent up front, a month’s rent security and a month’s rent to the agent. Not to mention Con Ed, Manhattan Cable, Bell Atlantic and the movers. Then around seven-thirty some business-type has four tequila sunrises and while she’s down at the espresso machine he waltzes out the door. So she’s twenty dollars out-of-pocket on this joker.
She’s practically working for free here.
Then there was just the mood of the place. On any given night it’s usually the manager who creates the mood among the employees and that was definitely the way it was here tonight. Theodoro had walked in a few minutes late at about quarter after five with what appeared to be a hard-on for whoever he laid eyes on. Busboys, waiters, everybody. With Theo it happened sometimes. Nothing was right. The linen wasn’t folded correctly. Place settings were crooked. There were spots on a tablecloth. Tonight Lindsey had forgotten to fill a bowl of sugar packets on a table at section three. You’d think she’d stood up on it and started dancing on the thing.
And all Phil did was to talk to her across the bar for a couple of minutes about the Yankee game. Theo had reamed him a whole new asshole for that one.
“Get your section down! Stop hanging around! Stop the bullshitting! You get paid to do a job, do it!”
God!
A couple of minutes. Where’s the harm?
Even one of the cooks got a piece of him about an hour ago. Usually the cooks were exempt from that. You didn’t want them to screw up the food sort of accidentally-on-purpose. But that didn’t stop him tonight.
Theo was on the rag bigtime.
She felt bad for all of them and especially for Phil. Like it was partly her fault for encouraging him. It was true Phil seemed to have a thing for her and wanted to talk at every opportunity. He was a shameless flirt but he was harmless and it was still early for godsakes. They hadn’t been busy at all at the time. Plus Phil’s section that night was section two. Only eight doubles, sixteen place settings total and only one table then in use. A pair of old ladies sipping martinis. He wasn’t the greatest waiter in the world but he wasn’t the worst either. He could handle a couple of old ladies.
But Theo’s barking at him had unnerved him.
Around eight-thirty word got to her through Lindsey—who everybody knew was dating the guy—that Phil had spilled oil on a customer. A woman’s pink leather jacket no less. Which meant he’d have to pick up the tab for her dry cleaning. A pink leather jacket? Who in the hell wears pink leather anyway?
Around nine he dropped a plateful of moussaka.
Luckily there was nobody under it.
Everybody heard it shatter.
You could see that Theo was livid. But by then the restaurant was busy. He wouldn’t have time to get on Phil’s case for a while.
He had to smile nice for the customers.
But Phil wasn’t going to be doing any more flirting with her tonight, that was for sure. It was too bad, really. Phil was from Tennessee and his accent was sweet. She thought he was cute in a soft, boyish way. And Diane wasn’t any kid anymore. She didn’t mind him flirting with her at all. As for Lindsey, she didn’t seem to care one way or the other. She guessed they weren’t that serious.
She poured a draft of Amstel Lite for one of the suspendered-and-power-tied yuppies toward the front of the bar who would probably not tip her either and thought how it would be nice to go home to her boyfriend Steve and have an Absolut and lie down with him and make love on their brand-new mattress and maybe unpack a box or two or maybe not.
Instead the night droned on.
It was hard to look at the woman facing him over John’s shoulder and just as hard not to. It made him think of what he must have looked like that final night with Greg. He guessed that gay or straight, heartbreak was heartbreak.
It was written all over her.
He watched her reach across the table and had to look away.
“There were a whole bunch of us back then,” John was saying, “most of us living within about ten blocks of each other up here. James and I’d been lovers back in high school, we went back that far. But then there was his new lover and my new lover and his old lover and all these people we’d met. A lot of them theatre people because of James—actors, costume-makers, directors. Louis played trumpet for some Broadway shows. Alan was an off-off-Broadway playwright. But there were also a lot like me in the healthcare business. Speech therapy, P.T. And we used to complain about how awful conditions were in these various facilities we were working in.”
“I know,” Danny said. “Before my mom died, for a while there I was shopping around for a place for her. With the osteoporosis she couldn’t live alone and we didn’t think we could afford a full-time nurse at the time. Everything I looked at was so fucking depressing.”
He was swearing too much. He made a mental note to watch it. He’d only slept with John once and dated him twice before that. But it was enough to know that John Walters hardly ever swore. And probably didn’t care for it much. John was a little old-fashioned. He liked that.
You’re already half-hooked on the guy, he thought. Watch your mouth.
John nodded, adjusted his Calvin Klein glasses and sipped his Heineken. “Yes, but your mom was out in New Jersey. You think the places you saw were bad, you should see some of the ones in the City. Anyway a bunch of us were talking one night. Back then it didn’t look like any of us were ever going to make any real money to speak of—this was way before the boom in healthcare—so what we decided was, when retirement-time came around, we’d pool whatever cash we did have and buy this big old house somewhere out in the boonies and by then the various healthcare people would have made all these connections so we’d staff the place ourselves. Take care of ourselves. A communal thing. We’d call it Queen’s End.”
The waiter was a sandy-haired kid with bright blue eyes and beautiful skin who didn’t look old enough to be serving drinks. He saw them laughing and smiled.
“Can I get you folks another round?” he said.
“Sure,” said John. “Same thing?”
“Same thing. Dewars rocks for me and a Heineken. Thanks.”
The waiter moved away.
“Queen’s End. That’s a hoot. You still going to do it?”
John sighed. “So many people have moved away, you know? We’ve lost touch. It’s kind of sad, really. We were a pretty neat bunch I think. Smart, talented. Who knows? We might have even made it happen.”
They laughed again. One of the things Danny Martino liked about John was his laugh. It had an honest sound. The way his father used to laugh before the cancer. Before his mother’s bones became brittle as glass.
Beyond him the woman put her hands up over her eyes. Her shoulders were shaking.
“God, I hate to see that.”
“See what?”
“The woman behind you. I think her boyfriend or her husband or something just dumped her. I noticed her a while ago. She’s crying.”
“What’s he doing? The boyfriend.”
“Just sitting there. Unless I read the body language all wrong he really couldn’t give a shit.”
There he was, swearing again. He shook his head.
“Men, huh?”
“Yeah. Men.”
“You should do it.”
“Do what?”
“Queen’s End.”
John smiled.
They could never know what it was like.
And Theo wasn’t about to tell them.
At home on his island of Thera he’d waited tables himself. If they thought the work was hard here they should try it at an outdoor taverna on the slope of a mountain. In summer the tourists were like a biblical plague of locusts, a blight on the land—the Americans impatient, the Germans imperious, the Australians drunk and sloppy. Tips were poor, the British in particular were cheap bastards. You bussed your own tables. You were overworked and understaffed and the hours stretched on forever.
He was grateful to his cousin Tasos for bringing him to this country and giving him first a waiter’s job and now this one—he had two sisters and an aging mother he would like to bring over himself one day. He was saving for that. No drinking, no carousing. His bank account grew steadily. But the work came at some personal price too. In his painstakingly written letters to his cousin he’d lied about the extent of his command of the English language. That was one thing.
By island standards it was good. Here it was just passable. He’d become aware of that right away. So had his cousin.
To his credit Tasos refrained from shipping him back on the next available flight. Theo promised to study and he did study and his ears were always open for some new word or phrase. His problem, of course, was with the American vernacular. Words were often absent from his Greek-English dictionary when he went to look for them and he was not about to reveal to anyone for whom English was their first language that he did not know the meaning of shitcanned or wasted or don’t get your balls in an uproar.
Tasos and he agreed that dignity was important. Santorini was a dignified restaurant and would stay that way. As would its management. So he suffered his deficiencies in silence and continued to read and study.
He knew that in general he wasn’t liked here. There was something stiff in his manner. Part of it was his language problem, he knew. In some infuriating way he felt inferior to his staff, to these Americans in their twenties, just children really—he, Theodoro Vassiliades, a grown man of thirty-two. It was humiliating.
He knew he was often short with them. He knew he had a temper. Like tonight. The subway had been late again and usually he reckoned that possibility into his travel-time, but this time he’d neglected to do so. So yes, he was short with them though he knew he shouldn’t be, that this was counterproductive. But they were born with all the advantages of knowing nearly from birth the most powerful language in the world. He doubted that one of them knew a word of Greek that was not on the menu and even those they managed to mispronounce frequently. Theo was quick to correct them.
But another part of it was simply his own nature. He had always been reserved, even on Thira, even as a boy. In that he was like his father. He had not had a woman, for instance, until he was twenty-five. And then the experience was so disheartening he did not even try to have another until over a year later.
His reserve had always made him lonely.
Here there was no one. He’d tried with American women, god knows. But something about him always seemed to put them off. After one date, maybe two, they’d lose interest. Perhaps when he did talk he talked too much about his homeland, his island, about growing up there and the sunny days and the nights full of stars. Perhaps they thought him hopelessly unsophisticated, hopelessly sentimental. Thus, in the American vernacular, a loser. He’d noted that men here had an insouciance and an edge to them, some fundamental ease and toughness of manner both of which angered him because they were postures he could not begin to muster. So did many of the women. Not all but some.
This one, now. Lindsey.
He’d yelled at her earlier over the sugar packets. He shouldn’t have.
Scolding was not the way to charm an American woman, even one as young as Lindsey. She’d been glowering at him ever since.
Her pale brow would knot, the pretty blue eyes would flash.
It made him both sad and angry.
He watched her hand out menus to a table of three he’d just seated, two young men and a woman. They were smiling. She was smiling. Then she said something which made them laugh. She laughed too.
He had not made anyone laugh for a long time now.
The door opened and a couple stepped in. He guessed them to be in their forties. Well dressed, attractive. The man had all the poise and grace of a successful American male and Theo simply couldn’t help it—he resented the man on sight.
“Good evening, sir. Good evening, madam.”
“Could we have one over by the window?”
“Certainly, sir. Right this way.”
He led them to station two and smiling, pulled out the chair for the lady.
The sandy-haired young waiter’s smile did silent battle with his frown as he handed them the menus. Guess he’s having a rough night, she thought.
Evelyn Wolper opened hers and glanced it over. Dolmades. Spanakopita. Taramasalata. Moussaka. Calamares. The waiter asked them about drinks and Kenneth asked for their best red Greek wine. Right away, sir, said the waiter and moved away.
Kenneth picked up his own menu.
“Okay,” he said. “Previews of coming attractions. Where do we start?”
She smiled. “God, I am so glad we’re doing this. You won’t be sorry. You’re going to love it there.”
“I believe you. But what do we order?”
“I’ll go easy on you. Start with the mixed warm meses. We’ll split them. You’re going to love the kefthedes, I think. Then if I were you I’d go for the chicken lemono or the souvlakia.”
“Souvlaki I’ve had.”
“Then try the chicken. It’s roasted on a horizontal grill and basted with lemon, oil and herbs. Mostly mint and oregano. It’s delicious.”
“What about you?”
“I haven’t had moussaka in ages. It’s good here. I’ll give you a taste. That and a small Greek salad, I guess.”
“Feta?”
“Feta. I can’t believe I’ve finally gotten you to try Greek food.”
He shrugged. “Meat and potatoes man.”
“The chicken comes with potatoes.”
“I noticed that.”
They put down their menus and she reached over for his hand. He gave hers a squeeze and smiled.
“Two and a half weeks. In my favorite place in the world. I can’t believe it. No phones, no clients. Thank you, Kenneth.”
“You’re quite welcome, Mrs. Wolper.”
“It is a second honeymoon, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is. And you know what? Now that I’ve gotten used to the idea, I might just be as happy about this trip as you are.” He shook his head. “How about that?”
“How about that.”
The waiter arrived and poured the wine. Kenneth swirled, tasted and pronounced it fine. He filled their glasses. They didn’t even bother letting go of each other’s hands while he was pouring. It felt almost as though they were kids again. She remembered that the waiter had been frowning and smiling, both, when he greeted them. She glanced up and read no expression on his face at all now.
He simply poured the wine.
A young couple got up next to them and moved away. She saw the waiter glance at the table, at the tip on the table, and watched the frown reappear again.
They placed their order. The waiter said thank you, scooped up his tip and turned toward the kitchen.
“Athens is a bore,” she said. “One night in the Plaka and then we’re out of there. Mykonos first, and then either Thira or Criti.”
“Criti?”
“Crete.”
“I’ve got to read up on this.”
“Yes, you do. Be a change from all those briefs, won’t it.”
He sipped the wine. “Yes it will. Damn,” he said. “This really is a decent wine.”
She smiled again, a secret smile. This was right. This was going to be the perfect spark to a slightly tired but still affectionate marriage. She’d known it.
Back home in Athens, Tennessee, Philip Auton had not been one known for anger. Quite the opposite. The good-looking, intelligent son of a successful pharmacist and a respected registered nurse he’d always had it easy—so it was easy to be easygoing. With family, with friends and especially with women. In high school plays he always got the lead and more often than not the leading lady. Same thing in State College.
His more private private life was his own business and thus far still that way.
New York was a whole other thing.
New York was a series of brick walls.
He got good parts in bad showcases that nobody came to see unless you counted the asshole families of playwright, director, cast and crew. More a circle-jerk than professional theatre. He got callbacks for commercials. One for a soap.
He got a job as a waiter. A fucking waiter.
Oh, you’re an actor? So what restaurant you work at?
The old joke wasn’t funny. Not one bit.
He got lucky on a sublet from an acting buddy down on the Lower East Side. But even that was going down the tubes by the end of summer. His buddy was returning from stock in Massachusetts. So Phil was already searching around in every spare moment for something he could somehow possibly afford. What he’d seen was sure not encouraging. Probably he’d wind up in some hole down on Avenue A, the ass-end of nowhere, at the rate he was going. Or worse, he’d have to go back to his smug little town with his tail between his legs and get a job with his father.
He’d thought maybe Lindsey would help, that maybe they could move in together. Her place was just a few blocks north of the restaurant. He could walk to work. Would have made at least that part of his life nice and cozy. He’d broached the subject just the night before over beers at the World Cafe.
No way, she said. Fucking’s one thing. But living together? I’ve seen your apartment, Phil. No offense but you’re a slob. Unh-unh. Not in a billion years.
He didn’t know what the hell to say to that shit so he paid the tab and walked on her.
Then all day today she’d frosted him.
Like he’d offended her by even asking.
Bitch.
Between her frosting him and Theo mouthing off to him earlier—fucking him up especially royally since he’d been working up to asking Diane, who’d moved just a couple days ago, if maybe she could use a roommate—he was already major pissed off by the time he spilled the olive oil on the blonde bitch’s pink leather jacket. Even more pissed off dropping the moussaka. Seeing it there splattered all over the floor in front of him his brain started buzzing like a tuning fork, he had to will his heart to stop racing.
It looked like something he’d seen as a kid in the woods in good old fucking Athens, Tennessee.
All in all he was having one hell of a night. Theo kept watching him like he was afraid he’d steal the cutlery. It was weird because he was an actor and should have been used to people watching him but this was different.
It was like Theo was willing him to screw up again.
Well dammit, he wasn’t going to. He didn’t want this cracker-ass job but god knows he needed it. He hated needing it but he did and that was that.
Lindsay and Theo, they could both go fuck themselves.
The greasy little Greek prick wasn’t even an American.
Smile, he thought. Work the room. You know how.
You always do.
He was thinking all this and washing his hands in the men’s room after taking his leak and zipping his fly, gazing at himself in the mirror and smiling and judging he looked fine, just fine, that nobody would know how pissed he was, nobody would guess a thing. The tips were going to fly. When he walked out into the restaurant again the old bag lady was just coming in off the sidewalk, headed toward his station.
From the bar Diane saw her sit at table five just beyond the pair of men who were far too good-looking to be anything but gay and adjust the pair of overstuffed dirty shopping bags at her feet. Theo was seating a party of six at station four, pulling together a pair of tables so that his back was to the woman. Theo hadn’t noticed.
Lindsay had and she was wondering if Phil might be needing some backup. She was breaking up with him, sure, any day now, there was something too childish and self-centered about the guy, even more than you’d expect from an actor but they worked together and that was no reason to leave him high and dry with the problem of the old lady. She hesitated, watching the two men and an oriental couple two tables away register first the stink of her and then the actual presence behind them. The middle-aged couple directly beside her put down their glasses of red wine and were trying not to stare. Lindsay worked her way through the tables and got to Phil’s side just as he was asking her, red-faced but politely, if she had any money to pay for whatever it was she’d ordered. With that the woman stood up and began to scream. She instinctively backed away.
“You think I got no money? Fucking sonovabitch! You ask them if they got any money? You ask them?” She swept the room with her arm.
“Fucking cocksucker per-jidice shit-eatin’ motherfuck whore-fucker! You ask them?”
By then Theo was moving fast across the room and other than Phil murmuring something, trying to calm her, and the woman’s hoarse screaming you could’ve heard a pin drop, every eye in the place was on them as Theo stepped up behind him and Phil reached out to take her by the arm and that was when she shoved him. He wasn’t expecting that and neither was Theo and they both fell back into table six, hit it hard and slid to the floor. The bottle of red wine the couple was drinking flew off the table and exploded like a bomb at the two gay men’s feet. The woman’s half-full glass jumped into her lap. The man’s glass was in his hand and he must have involuntarily grasped it harder because the stem snapped and suddenly the man was bleeding.
Diane grabbed a clean linen napkin, ducked under the counter and hurried over.
By then Theo’d recovered. He was up on his feet and hustling the woman, still screaming cocksucker motherfucker but offering little resistance now, out the door. Phil got up and stood there looking stunned. Lindsay was attending to the woman, dabbling at the wine stain on her skirt, unaware that the man was bleeding. In fact Diane got to him just as the wife noticed.
“Oh my god,” she said.
“Here, let me wrap this around it. Let’s get you into the men’s room.” The wound was between thumb and forefinger and looked deep. She wrapped the linen tight and got him to his feet. The man was turning white. His wife got up and followed them. Diane turned to Lindsay.
“There’s a first-aid kit in the desk upstairs in the office. Get it.”
Lindsay nodded.
One of the two gay men was using a water-soaked napkin on the cuff of his once cream-colored pants leg when Theo returned for the bag lady’s filthy shopping bags. The man was smiling in a good-natured way and shaking his head as though to say, hey, it’s New York City, right? Theo saw Phil doing nothing, just standing there. He hefted the foul-smelling bags and shot him a look.
“Goddammit, Phil. Help the man. Get him some seltzer. Get a mop for godsakes or call a busboy or something. For god’s sake do something!”
What Phil did actually do surprised everybody.
There were two glass coffeepots, regular and decaf, both almost full, on burners at the waiter’s station.
Phil’s ears were ringing. He could feel the blood pounding in his head. Somebody had knocked him down. Somebody had shouted at him. Somebody had frosted him. Somebody was bleeding.
He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream.
He picked up the pots of coffee and walked back to station two. The faggot was still bending over dabbing at his pants leg but he got the other one, the one without the glasses as he swung the decaf in a wide arc yelling refill, folks? in his best and loudest stage voice, splashed the other faggot in the face so that he screeched and fell into the puddle of wine on the floor but the one he really got was the arrogant-looking prick who’d complained about the fish, him and his mousy girlfriend, got them so bad they both fell back off their chairs, the guy falling through the plate-glass window out to the sidewalk and he watched with fascination as a slab of glass as big as the table they’d been sitting at slid free of its metal sash like a see-through guillotine and damn near separated the cocksucker’s head from his body.
People in the other sections were screaming right along with him, some weird choral music and mobbing the doorway so that Theo had to push his way through, Theo looking scared and furious but coming at him all the same the stupid fuck and he could hear the cooks yelling in Greek and Spanish and heading for the back door as he whirled and smashed the pot of regular against the left side of Theo’s head but then didn’t even wait to see him slide and fall. He leaned over the service counter to the kitchen and it was as though the cooks had left the cleaver sitting there just for him just for his own personal use, his personal favorite weapon of choice so he headed toward the men’s room, Lindsay the first one curious about the all commotion outside so that her head was the first he used it on bye bitch and then he had to tug the damn thing free of her which was not the way it was with the doggies and kitties back in Tennessee, more difficult than that and by the time he got it out of her fallen body they were on him, all of them, the bleeding guy and his wife and even Diane for god’s sake even her so that he got only one more swipe in across the belly of the guy’s wife so good and so goddamn deep that he was watching her guts spill out of her even as the guy’s bloody fist descended and everything went suddenly black.
Hours later when it was over, when the ambulances had pulled away and the cops were finished and the busboys had mopped up the blood, when the glassier had patched the window with plywood and the gawking crowds were gone Diane was left alone at the bar waiting for Tasos, owner of the place and poor Theo’s cousin, to come in from Westchester and assess all the damage.
The bottle of Absolut kept her company. The bottle was her buddy.
She drank and considered that she’d gotten to know the people in station two better than she’d ever wanted to.
She hadn’t held out much hope for Mrs. Wolper but the medics felt differently. She’d make it, they thought. He hadn’t managed to slash through any organs. But the Wolpers were going to have to put off their trip to Greece for quite a while. Danny Martino’s burns were not serious and his friend John Walters had escaped the entire episode just by watering down his pants leg. Likewise the Japanese couple, who’d done some fancy ducking. Hal Reese had died flooding the sidewalk with arterial blood. Jan Resnick’s burns, cuts and bruises were stunningly lucky and superficial and would heal though she wasn’t so sure about her heart. The woman had come completely unglued by the loss of the guy. She guessed they must have had something pretty damn special together.
Theo was badly cut and burned but he’d live.
Lindsey had been twenty-two years old. Diane had liked her.
She sat drinking her Absolut and thinking about Phil’s last words to her just as the cops led him off to the squad car. Some weird shit about them sharing an apartment together.
She thought about her apartment. What she owed. The tips she didn’t get tonight.
She lit another smoke and thought about the mob joint down in Little Italy.
Almost wondered if they were hiring.
Thanks to the folks at the Aegean,
especially David and Carolyn.
~*~
When I was a kid in high school Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey made a big and lasting impression on me and I’ve used his notion about the co-mingling of the fates of various strangers twice. First in The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard which even mimicked Wilder’s title and here in “Station Two.”
New York bars and restaurants are excellent places to observe people and their body language—which often tells a story pretty clearly—and poor Jan and her bastard lover Hal were based on one such observation over nearly half an hour.
—JK