Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

Each night the tables filled by six-thirty, and soon I noticed the clientele mostly comprised men eating on business, seven out of ten, anyway. The women could be divided into two groups: the younger ones making their first or second or eighth time around, walking stiffly and with only half-hidden anticipation, and the not-so-younger ones, who by the very fact of their presence had stopped counting just about everything, including tonight's drinks. The men came in more ages and gradations, or so it seemed to me, perhaps because there were many more of them, or because I studied their variety in search of my old self- that optimistic fellow, that happy minivan- as well as versions of my former future self, the Bill Wyeth I would now never be: fifty, settled into the law firm, drinking coffee with Judith each morning, perhaps taking a second or even third child to school, richer every year, each August spent in the shingled house on Nantucket. And those former selves, future and past, were there- by the dozen in truth, sweating through their oxford cloth shirts after the second drink, fiddling with their handheld devices and cell phones, young enough to fear their hairlines more than their hearts, old enough to have seen pals get knocked off the high end of the seesaw. Always drilling for the hidden streams of cash running through the city. Sexed up with ambition, but worried that their penises, like a volatile tech stock, might be subject to sudden performance downgrades. I heard a lot of jokes and saw plenty of smiles, but mostly the talk was reducible to money, the laughter mortgaged, the ambition presold. These were men who were prosperous and in demand, loved by women and children, men who possessed life insurance and clean underwear. Mostly Republicans except when they agreed with the Democrats. Knowledgeable about the interest rate cycle. Oil changes every three thousand miles. Retirement plan well funded. Irony well funded. Safe- just as I had been.

The manager of the restaurant, a tall dark-haired woman in glasses named Allison Sparks, tolerated me at first because I was a minor yet constant revenue stream, always willing to sit at Table 17, the worst one in the place, a two-seater against the far wall, almost touching the clanking plate-warmer. Within the smoky stage of the steakhouse, Table 17 lay in the deepest shadows, and if the patron sitting there added nothing to the frisson of the atmosphere, he couldn't detract from it, either. Allison Sparks, who I estimated to be about thirty-five, had managed the place for a long time, and knew all its slow zones and dead spots. I liked her and I watched her from afar, and I confess that she was another reason I returned each day, usually in a suit and tie. Yes, I might as well confess from the start that had I not found Allison's manner so alluring- her rustling, long-legged efficiency as she went by, her perfumed busyness- things would have been very different- for me, and for others, in some ways worse, perhaps, and in many ways better.

How and why a woman is beautiful keeps changing as I get older, for I tend to notice aspects of women that I didn't as a younger man, and in my twenties, say, I wouldn't have described Allison as beautiful. But she was. Not in her separate parts, perhaps, but in the whole of her. What I felt most was her confidence, her relentlessness, her drive to have things her way and no other. She seemed full of humor and fury and sexual need. She arranged people, fixed problems, came to decisions. She checked her watch and kept her back straight and made sure no lipstick was smeared on her teeth. The steakhouse had hundreds of regular patrons who returned at varying intervals, and she knew all of them, often remembering their favorite drink and how they liked their steak done; the place was her stage, and she, not the chef, its true star. Dressed in a conservative blue suit and often carrying a clipboard affixed with wholesalers' wine lists or vendors' bills, she ran the place with absolute authority over everyone, including the owner, a sunken, liver-faced man in his eighties named Lipper who came around once a week in a wheelchair, shook hands indiscriminately with the staff, fondled a waitress or two, drank a glass of Merlot, and was wheeled away by his nurse. He trusted Allison to wring every last cent of profit out of the joint, and she did.

She also welcomed me because I was agreeable with the staff, tipping always and well. When a new waitress or busboy was hired, Allison pointed out the diner at Table 17, explaining that I was a regular, a regular regular, often eating lunch and dinner there over six hours, and missing only one or two meals a week, not including the Monday lunch, when the restaurant was closed for cleaning after the weekend. My pile of newspapers and obscure volumes were to be tolerated, they were told, and within a few months my presence at Table 17 became one of the invisible verities of the place. Even when I was not there, I filled the space with my absence. Waitresses and busboys came and went, were hired and fired, but always I was present at Table 17 for lunch and often dinner, appearing to anyone glancing in my direction for the first time as a reasonably prosperous lawyer or businessman, not someone with little better to do. Indeed, I knew how odd it was that I ate there so often, and from time to time I forced myself to miss a meal, if only to appear not to be utterly rooted to the place.

But I was, and beyond my uncomfortable interest in Allison and my enjoyment of the surroundings, I wonder what pressure kept returning me through the heavy front door. Nothing that I later found, nothing that would both make and undo me, was yet perceptible. So I am describing, I suppose, my progress into the heart of things- the incremental movement from newcomer to insider, from observer to actor. In the beginning, however, all I did was sit at Table 17 and make affable chitchat as necessary, watch Allison march past, swinging her clipboard. I found that after a drink or two I was able to forget how much I missed my son and wife- a mercy. I didn't intend to get to know anyone or become involved. I just wanted to be around people. Each day, sitting at my very own Table 17, I'd start with a Coke-no-ice and the soup du jour. There were times when the restaurant quieted and for an hour in the late afternoon I was the only patron. But so regular was my appearance that I disappeared, forgotten while the waitresses sat down and gossiped and the busboys changed the tablecloths. I found these moments peaceful. I had achieved privacy but I wasn't alone. With the merest indication of my eye someone would hurry over to inquire what I wanted, but otherwise I was left alone. Did I make use of this time? Did I read the history of civilization or compose a symphony? No, no, and all no. Yet I was content, in a miserable way; I was not whole, but a collection of fragments, waiting, you could say, for the unexpectable, for something to happen.

Sunk in the shadows, then, I watched, and there was a lot to see. The secret flirtations of the waitresses- with the clientele, the waiters, and each other. I saw a man wolfing down his dinner jump as if struck in the back by a spear, then topple, already dying, facedown onto his plate; I watched a saucy little woman lean forward and slip the watch from the wrist of her date, a drunken fellow whose tongue hung out in anticipation; I heard any number of men being fired over lunch, and when the actual phrase arrived into the conversation ("need to go in a new direction" was popular, as it suggested noble quest and brilliant navigation) the man being let go cut his eyes away or slumped in dejection, and always I felt sick for him. One night I noticed a woman of fifty quietly scissor a man's shirt to ribbons; I saw the denture-worriers and potato-droppers, the bone-gaggers and spoon-inspectors, the toothpick-suckers and pill-arrangers. I saw a rat-sized dog leap out of a woman's purse and lick her fried calamari, I saw a man dab a napkin in his gin and tonic to clean off his hearing aid. And passing around and through them all were the food runners, short squat men, most of them Mexican, who didn't talk or smile, just toted tray after heavy tray to the tables with faces of stoic resignation, like laborers in a mine digging gold they didn't get to keep.