Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

Allison's problem, of course, was the restaurant. Running it was an enormous, addictive job, requiring very long days. The customers, the waitstaff, the cooks, the suppliers- each population was distinct in its demands. Allison arrived at 8 a.m. and, except for a few hours off after lunch, rarely left before 9 p.m., or until the dinner shift was running smoothly, a moment that often never came, for what was happening in the dining room was only part of the larger spectacle. On a slow afternoon she invited me through the swinging kitchen doors and into the labyrinth beyond. The restaurant had two enormous kitchens, one for meals, the second for pastries. The steaks arrived on rolling steel platforms from the butcher's room, where they had been trimmed and sized, and were forked onto long flaming grills by sweating, hassled chefs who addressed the waiters and busboys as "fuckhead" and "Mexico." The waitresses were called "kittycat," or "lovelips," which they hated. But it went with the territory.

Below the kitchen lay supply rooms and prep stations. The hallways were narrow, as on a ship, and pipes ran low overhead, red for fire, yellow for gas. Allison swung open a thick, insulated doorand I was surprised; it was the meat room, where dozens of sides of raw beef hung on hooks under a blue light, dated and stamped with wholesalers' marks.

"Don't want to spend the night in here," I muttered.

"I guess I'm used to it."

The room was cool but not cold, and we stepped inside. The enormous red carcasses- marbled with fat, headless, halved, rib cages sawed through, legs severed above the hoof- seemed aware of us through some essential mammalian affinity. The dead meat, soon to be transubstantiated into money and laughter, would also be revivified, of course, would become warm flesh again, this time human.

The room was controlled for temperature and humidity, Allison explained, so the steaks would dry-age to perfection.

"Who decides when it's time?" I asked, studying the back of her neck, so close that I could easily lean forward and kiss it.

"I do."

The room was small, the ceiling low, and we were alone.

"It's quiet in here," Allison said, turning, keeping my eye.

I nodded. Take her in your arms, I thought, do it now.

"Bill, something happened to you, didn't it?"

I wasn't ready for this, and the strangeness of the room amplified the power of the question. "Something happens to everyone, I think."

"Of course," Allison said softly. "I just wondered."

I took a breath, let it go. "I was a pretty high-powered real estate attorney, in one of the city's best firms. I was married, had a son. Then something happened, yes. Now I'm alone. I'm the guy you see every day."

Allison nodded, as if I'd confirmed something. "You want to tell me-?"

"Do we really know each other?"

"You see me almost every day."

I thought about it. "I don't usually talk about it much, Allison."

"I'm sorry. Shouldn't have asked."

But I had liked the intimacy of the moment. "I remain conversant on other topics," I said with more energy. "Okay?"

Her playfulness returned. "I'll get it out of you, somehow."

"You will?"

"Even if I have to go to extreme measures."

"That doesn't sound so bad."

"It isn't."

I asked her to continue the tour, so she did. Next came the produce walk-ins, filled with chopped vegetables ready for salads and quail eggs stacked by the dozen. All the supplies came in through sidewalk doors. I couldn't tell where we stood in respect to the Havana Room, whether it was above us or beside us, or if its location was what somehow made the room restricted. But I saw nothing unusual, just pipes and ceiling tiles and rough wiring. I was eager to ask Allison about the Havana Room, but suspected I'd learn more if I didn't.

"Then there's upstairs," she said.

"Oh?"

She meant the second floor, which housed three big private party rooms. The largest had a piano and seating for sixty, and was often used for corporate gatherings, wedding dinners, and the like. The second, also large, was furnished with better sofas and favored by married, middle-aged women for social events. The third room, considerably smaller, was rented almost exclusively by Wall Street men at night. This was where the strippers worked. The limit was twenty-five men. The more men, Allison told me, the more problems they had, and sometimes the stripper would run out of the room having been bitten or plundered in some indecorous way. "What does she expect?" Allison asked.

I followed her to the third and fourth floors, which contained furniture storage, an accountant's office, a main office where Allison worked, and employee locker rooms. Along the way I counted three dozen security cameras, and when we paused in the main office, I watched six black-and-white television screens cycle through their respective views of all that I had just toured, as well as views of the main dining rooms, the bar, every cash register, and even the street outside. I realized that Allison could watch people from her office, including me. Was the Havana Room similarly monitored? I studied the cycling screens but didn't spot any room I hadn't seen before.

"Well, that's it!" said Allison, perhaps noticing my interest. "Except for Ha's penthouse, which we can't see."

"Ha?"

"Yes," said Allison. "Ha. You know Ha."

"The handyman."

"Yes. The only man I completely trust." Perched above the bright inferno of the restaurant, Ha lived in a tiny room on the top floor. No one knew exactly where he came from or just how old he was, she said, and no one who depended on him insisted on being informed. He may have jumped off a ship in Seattle, he may have walked over the Mexican border. What was known about Ha was that he could fix anything- broilers, air conditioners, meat slicers, any of the restaurant's twenty-six refrigerators, the freight elevator, the washing machines, fire alarms. "He's quite brave, too," Allison added.

"Brave?"

"Absolutely." At night, she said, Ha navigated the dim catacombs of the restaurant by touch; one evening years back, after the night porter had left, a thief jimmied the sidewalk doors and crept in. Ha, lying on the kitchen floor wiggling a gas line, heard the intruder and surmised his route toward the kitchens. Immediately he darkened the narrow hallways, turned on the lights in the liquor walk-in, and waited. The intruder lurched along the hallways, drawn to the brightness like an insect, and when he scurried into the cave of expensive booze, Ha swung the door shut, secured it with a length of metal pipe, and called the police. Allison adored him, and believed, I think, that he was more spirit than man.

"He's the only one who has my cell number," she joked. "The rest of them can't have it."

"How do your sad supplicants call you, then?"

"They can look me up in the book." We took the stairs down to the dining room. "Actually, there's a new guy these days," she admitted. "Not that it's necessarily going anywhere."

I watched her bounce down the steps in front of me, and felt better for having not declared my affections for her in the meat room. "Go ahead and tell me, just to make me jealous."

"Well, you know I don't eat breakfast at home." Allison sat down at one of the back tables and I joined her. Two busboys were vacuuming at the other end. "I have breakfast at this little place on the corner near my apartment. You'd think I wouldn't want to be in a restaurant, any kind of restaurant, but I like this place- and my apartment is kind of big and drafty, you know, kind of empty, even though I love my kitchen, so I go to this little place, and have an egg and toast, something to get started." Her voice was animated, excited by the story, and she'd already forgotten our intimate moment in the meat room. "So I was minding my own business, just sitting in my booth, reading the newspaper, when this big man sat down next to me with his newspaper, and he was wearing this beautiful suit, very conservative, and I said to myself, Well, okay, I might be having a little bit of a problem."