Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,51
cowboy smoker.
‘That’s how I look.’ He tries to strike the pose.
‘You look nothing like you.’ There’s a woman at a three-top who’s watching him. He is good-looking, with those eyes and thick copper whorl of hair. I lower my voice. ‘Does that happen a lot, people recognizing you?’
‘Not enough,’ he laughs. ‘Around here occasionally. I mean right here. This block. Maybe the next. Go to Central Square and forget it.’
The hostess emerges through the velvet curtain and shows us to a table. It’s round, wood, no cloth, no flowers. Instead of a candle there is a small lamp with an old-fashioned chain. The setup and breakdown here must be so fast.
‘So, you’ve seen the photograph but haven’t read the book?’ Oscar says.
It catches me off guard. ‘I’ve been planning to get to the library.’
‘Oh, the library. That will boost my sales.’
A waiter appears, lifts our glasses away from the table to pour water into them, tells us the specials. He’s older than Oscar. He’s been doing this kind of work for decades, you can tell. He tells us the rack of lamb comes with yardlongs and a gentleman’s relish.
Oscar lifts his head. ‘Who’s writing this menu, Hugh Hefner?’
I cringe. This is not the kind of career waiter you want to mess with. But the guy cracks up. His laugh is loud and fills the small room. It takes him a while to compose himself. ‘No one has said anything all night. It was killing me.’
He leaves us to contemplate the menu. I see him go to the back and tell another waiter what Oscar said. At the table next to us an old man’s sweater slides from his chair to the floor and Oscar gets it for him and they have a small exchange about the bottle of wine on the man’s table, which was from Australia, where Oscar lived for a year it turns out.
The waiter comes back, and Oscar orders mussels for us to share and the sea bass. I order the grilled shrimp and the tagliatelle. I ask him to fire the shrimp app with the mains. He nods and leaves and Oscar says, ‘Listen to you, speaking the native language.’
I ask him about his boys.
He reaches for my hand and traces a finger along the inside of my wrist. ‘You have the softest, most velvety skin.’ After a while he says, ‘My boys are well. They know I am seeing you tonight. John can still get very frothed up about your mini golf boast.’
He’s not much of a drinker, and I like that. We each have a beer then switch to water. The mussels arrive, smelling of vermouth and shallots.
‘I saw your friend Muriel Wednesday.’
I’ve been avoiding the topic of the Wednesday night group. Silas might have been there, and that was strange. And just the word ‘Muriel’ made my stomach turn over.
‘What? Did you two have a falling out?’
‘I gave her my novel four days ago.’
‘You didn’t give it to me.’
‘After your freak-out in the arboretum? No, I did not.’
He laughs like he totally forgot about that. ‘I was a freak. I’m sorry. Have you heard anything from her?’
‘Nothing.’ A fresh round of anxiety floods in, the voltage amped up.
He nods, opens a mussel. ‘All these writers you’ve gone out with,’ he says. ‘Any of them famous?’
I shake my head. ‘Just you. In a two-block radius, at least.’
Our entrées arrive. The man at the next table gets up to leave with the rest of his companions and examines Oscar’s sea bass, whose head is lolling beyond the edge of the plate.
Oscar tips the fish’s eye up toward the man. ‘Irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through lenses of old scratched isinglass.’
‘Bishop,’ the man says. ‘The great master of disaster.’ He’s old enough to have been her contemporary.
‘Indeed’ says Oscar.
‘I hope you and your little girl have a lovely evening,’ he says and shuffles off to his friends, the women adjusting their silk scarves with gnarled fingers.
Oscar leans toward me. ‘Did he just say, “little girl”?’
‘I think so.’
‘My little girl?’
The waiter comes up and asks how everything is.
‘Well, my fish is dead,’ Oscar says. ‘And she is not my little girl.’
The waiter laughs. He seems to want to linger as I did at brunch that day. I ask for more Parmesan to get rid of him.
When we’ve finished, he takes our plates and brings us a chocolate torte and a mango sorbet. ‘Compliments of the chef. He’s an admirer of your work,’ he says