Elaine’s is a haven for writers. You know how insecure and timid we writers are. The great thing about Elaine’s is the safety. For instance, I’m safe from the food. Every other place in New York seems to be specializing in some horrible gustatory fad: Tibetan dirt salads or Provençal escargot sorbets. God help us if Manhattan restaurateurs ever discover the anthropophagite entrées of the New Guinea highlands. But Elaine never serves me a fish that isn’t dead yet or a Bolivian guinea pig terrine. In fact, at Elaine’s I’m safe from physical excitement of any kind. Elaine realizes that we writers live our whole lives on paper in the sincere hope of never having to live them anywhere else. There are no fistfights. And anyone who’s seen Elaine slamdunk a paparazzo is unlikely to start one. There is no “pickup” nonsense. If you go home from Elaine’s with someone, you’re probably married to her—or anyway someone you know is.
I’m safe from romance and adventure at Elaine’s. And, more important, I’m safe from literature. Writers attract bores the way booze attracts writers.
I spend ten hours slicing at a Gordian knot of a book chapter, and then I get cornered by the counterman at Starbucks who went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and wants to discuss mimetic distance and objective correlatives. At Elaine’s people know better. They’re writers themselves. They know what to say. They say, “How much was the advance?”
I should have gone into the time-share vacation condominium business with Uncle Ned. But Elaine doesn’t think so. She takes writers seriously; she respects me for being one. I suppose she’s been wrong about other things in her life, too, but it’s great that there’s one place where I’m safe from being thought of as, mainly, a failed time-share vacation condominium salesman. And no matter how much money Uncle Ned makes, he won’t be able to get a good table at Elaine’s—unless he buys the movie rights to my book.