T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

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I was late for work that day — I work lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, then come back in at five for my regular shift — but it was slow and nobody seemed to notice. A word on the hotel: it’s a pretty little place on the European model, perched at the top of the tallest hill around, and it has small but elegant rooms, and a cultivated — or at least educated — staff. It features a restaurant with pretensions to three-star status, a cozy bar and a patio with a ten-million-dollar view of the city and the harbor spread out beneath it. The real drinkers — university wives, rich widows, department heads entertaining visiting lecturers — don’t come in for lunch till one o’clock or later, so in my absence the cocktail waitress was able to cover for me, pouring two glasses of sauvignon blanc and uncapping a bottle of non-alcoholic beer all on her own. Not that I didn’t apologize profusely — I might have been eleven years late with my thesis, but work I took seriously.

It was a typical day on the South Coast, seventy-two at the beach, eighty or so on the restaurant patio, and we did get busy for a while there. I found myself shaking martinis and Manhattans, uncorking bottles of merlot and viognier, cutting up whole baskets of fruit for the sweet rum drinks that seemed to be in vogue again. It was work — simple, repetitive, nonintellectual — and I lost myself in it. When I looked up again, it was ten of three and the lunch crowd was dispersing. Suddenly I felt exhausted, as if I’d been out on some careening debauch the night before instead of sitting in front of my computer till my eyes began to sag. I punched out, drove home and fell into bed as if I’d been hit in the back of the head with a board.

I’d set the alarm for four-thirty, to give myself time to run the electric razor over my face, change my shirt and get back to work, and that would have been fine, but for the computer. I checked the walnut clock on the mantel as I was knotting my tie — I had ten minutes to spare — and sat down at my desk to have a quick look at Peep Hall. For some reason — variety’s sake, I guess — I clicked on “Living Room Cam I,” and saw that two of the girls, Mandy and Traci, were exercising to a program on TV. In the nude. They were doing jumping jacks when the image first appeared on the screen, hands clapping over their heads, breasts flouncing, and then they switched, in perfect unison, to squat thrusts, their faces staring into the camera, their arms flexed, legs kicking out behind. It was a riveting performance. I watched, in awe, as they went on to aerobics, some light lifting with three-pound dumbbells and what looked to be a lead-weighted cane, and finally concluded by toweling each other off. I was twenty minutes late for work.

This time it wasn’t all right. Jason, the manager, was behind the bar when I came in, and the look on his face told me he wasn’t especially thrilled at having this unlooked-for opportunity to dole out cocktail onions and bar mix to a roomful of sunburned hotel guests, enchanted tourists and golfers warming up for dinner. He didn’t say a word. Just dropped what he was doing (frothing a mango margarita in the blender), brushed past me and hurried down the corridor to his office as if the work of the world awaited him there. He was six years younger than I, he had a Ph.D. in history from a university far more prestigious than the one that ruled our little burg, and he wielded a first-rate vocabulary. I could have lived without him. At any rate, I went around to each customer with a smile on my face — even the lunatic in tam-o’-shanter and plus fours drinking rum and Red Bull at the far end of the bar — and refreshed drinks, bar napkins and the bowls of pretzels and bar mix. I poured with a heavy hand.

Around seven, the dining room began to fill up. This was my favorite hour of the day, the air fragrant and still, the sun picking out individual palms and banks of flowers to illuminate as it sank into the ocean, people bending to their hors d’oeuvres with a kind of quiet reverence, as if for once they really were thankful for the bounty spread out before them. Muted snatches of conversation drifted in from the patio. Canned piano music — something very familiar — seeped out of the speakers. All was well, and I poured myself a little Irish whiskey to take some of the tightness out of my neck and shoulders.

That was when Samantha walked in.

She was with two other girls — Gina, I recognized; the other one, tall, athletic, with a nervous, rapid-blinking gaze that seemed to reduce the whole place and everything in it to a series of snapshots, was unfamiliar. All three were wearing sleek ankle-length dresses that left their shoulders bare, and as they leaned into the hostess’ stand there was the glint of jewelry at their ears and throats. My mouth went dry. I felt as if I’d been caught out at something desperate, something furtive and humiliating, though they were all the way across the room and Samantha hadn’t even so much as glanced in my direction. I fidgeted with the wine key and tried not to stare, and then Frankie, the hostess, was leading them to a table out on the patio.

I realized I was breathing hard, and my pulse must have shot up like a rocket, and for what? She probably wouldn’t even recognize me. We’d shared a beer for twenty minutes. I was old enough to be her — her what? Her uncle. I needed to get a grip. She wasn’t the one watching me through a hidden lens. “Hart? Hart, are you there?” a voice was saying, and I looked up to see Megan, the cocktail waitress, hovering over her station with a drink order on her lips.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, and I took the order and started in on the drinks. “By the way,” I said as casually as I could, “you know that table of three — the girls who just came in? Tell me when you take their order, okay? Their drinks are on me.”

As it turned out, they weren’t having any of the sweet rum drinks garnished with fruit and a single orange nasturtium flower or one of our half dozen margaritas or even the house chardonnay by the glass. “I carded them,” Megan said, “and they’re all legal, but what they want is three sloe gin fizzes. Do we even have sloe gin?”

In the eight years I’d been at the El Encanto, I doubt if I’d mixed more than three or four sloe gin fizzes, and those were for people whose recollections of the Eisenhower administration were still vivid. But we did have a vestigial bottle of sloe gin in the back room, wedged between the peppermint schnapps and the Benedictine, and I made them their drinks. Frankie had seated them around the corner on the patio, so I couldn’t see how the fizzes went over, and then a series of orders came leapfrogging in, and I started pouring and mixing and forgot all about it. The next time I looked up, Samantha was coming across the room to me, her eyebrows dancing over an incipient smile. I could see she was having trouble with her heels and the constriction of the dress — or gown, I suppose you’d call it — and I couldn’t help thinking how young she looked, almost like a little girl playing dress-up. “Hart,” she said, resting her hands on the bar so that I could admire her sculpted fingers and her collection of rings — rings even on her thumbs—“I didn’t know you worked here. This place is really nice.”

“Yeah,” I said, grinning back at her while holding the picture of her in my head, asleep, with her hair splayed out over the pillow. “It’s first-rate. Top-notch. Really fantastic. It’s a great place to work.”

“You know, that was really sweet of you,” she said.

I wanted to say something like “Aw, shucks” or “No problem,” but instead I heard myself say, “The gesture or the drink?”

She looked at me quizzically a moment, and then let out a single soft flutter of a laugh. “Oh, you mean the gin fizzes?” And she laughed again — or giggled, actually. “I’m legal today, did you know that? And my gramma made me promise to have a sloe gin fizz so she could be here tonight in spirit — she passed last winter? — but I think we’re having like a bottle of white wine or something with dinner. That’s my sister I’m with — she’s taking me out for my birthday, along with Gina — she’s one of my roommates? But you probably already know that, right?”