either presidential candidate. In my country, not yours. You don’t have a president. You have that man with the weak chin who has the wife everyone says is so beautiful although I don’t see it. Tell me, Mr. Crutches, don’t you think I’m more beautiful than what’s-her-name?” She struck a pose, tilting her chin up, laying her left hand on the back of her head, and smiled, showing teeth that were nearly perfect save for her right upper canine, which had a small chip in it.
Edward Everett had no idea what she was talking about. “I’m sorry, but—”
“Perhaps madam and sir—”
“Mademoiselle,” the woman said with a surprising fierceness.
“Mademoiselle,” the maitre d’ said, giving a clearly obsequious smile. “Perhaps you would be more comfortable in our less formal dining room. I can have someone escort you there.” He lifted a finger and almost immediately a bellhop stood beside the woman. “I am afraid we cannot accommodate mademoiselle and monsieur,” the maitre d’ said. “Perhaps you can show them to the Salon de Jardin.”
“Certainly,” the bellhop said. He was a squat man with what Edward Everett’s mother called a “drinker’s nose,” the cartilage thick, the skin red and pockmarked.
“We’re not—” Edward Everett tried to say.
“Are you throwing us out?” the woman said.
“Please, madam.”
“Moiselle. Mademoiselle,” she said.
The maitre d’ gave her another obsequious grin. Edward Everett wondered if he was deliberately taunting her.
“I have never—” she said.
Behind her, a half-dozen people waited for the maitre d’: a mother and father and two well-dressed sets of twins, the boys in navy blazers with gold buttons decorated with ships’ anchors, blond hair in crew cuts that matched their father’s; the girls in black-and-white polka-dotted dresses, their hair held back in identical polka-dotted ribbons.
“Maybe we’d …” Edward Everett said, nodding toward the bellhop.
“Yes, sir?” the maitre d’ said to the family behind them, Edward Everett and the woman in the silver dress already in his own personal past tense, his hand on the clip securing the velvet rope to its stanchion in anticipation of another acceptable party.
“Dr. Whitson and family,” the man said, stepping forward and around Edward Everett and the woman.
“Yes, Dr. Whitson,” the maitre d’ said.
“Sir?” the bellhop said to Edward Everett, one eyebrow raised in invitation.
He followed the bellhop to the smaller dining room, although he knew where it was. “Two for dinner,” the bellhop said to the hostess seated behind the desk at the entrance, reading a paperback romance novel.
She sighed, closed the book after folding down a corner of the page she was reading, slid off her stool, plucked two menus from the desk and walked off into the dining room, not even waiting for any sort of acknowledgment from either Edward Everett or the woman who was, inexplicably, following him and the hostess toward a table in a far corner. She seated herself in one of the chairs while Edward Everett maneuvered himself into the other, laying his crutches on the floor and nudging them under the table.
“War wound?” the woman said, shoving the stainless ware off the napkin folded on the table in front of her and laying the napkin on her lap.
“I’m sorry,” Edward Everett said, “but—”
“Look,” she said. “You were going to eat alone. I was going to eat alone, and …” She gave a little shrug, closing her eyes. Edward Everett couldn’t tell, but it seemed she was trying to suppress tears. She took in a deep breath and opened her eyes. “We don’t have to talk. Hell, look at most of the rest of the couples here: they’re not talking.”
Edward Everett glanced around the dining room. At one table, a man made notes in a pocket notebook while the woman with him sorted through her purse as if she was looking for something, laying keys and wadded tissue on the tabletop. At another table, the woman looked up from her plate expectantly toward the man, giving him a small smile. In return, he briefly glanced at her and then looked down at his lap.
“It’s fine,” Edward Everett said, and opened the menu. He felt uncomfortable sitting with the woman; she was older than he was by clearly more than a decade and, although he told himself he would never see any of the people in the restaurant again and would, at this time the next day, be back in Ohio, he hoped they didn’t think he and the woman were a couple: perhaps mother and son, or older sister and younger brother, but not together.