Nam Le - The Boat

He's right, though. I'm sitting in the private wine room at Picholine trying to pull myself together. My daughter hasn't arrived. Our table's the only one there — I called in a favor. The sound of the restaurant wafts through the hallway — low voices, laughs, the tinkling of glasses — the place, recently renovated, seems a lot cheerier than I remember. An odious young man is attending me. He's got so much gel in his slicked hair it pulls his face back tight. Traversing the harried catwalk of the front room I noticed him eyeballing my outfit; I'm at one of the most overpriced joints in town and still this kid-waiter makes me feel overdressed.

For starters, I order the crab salad with the grapefruit gelée, the spiced squab pastrami and the sea-urchin panna cotta. Then I remember Apelman's advice. The Leech might take offense if I don't wait — Brits being sensitive about things like that. How sensitive are they, though, to punctuality? I bark at the waiter and cancel the order. He smiles as though I've just made his day. For a second I'm worried his face might crack.

Half an hour later, I tell him to check the restaurant, both rooms.

"Under what name?"

"Kozlov," I tell him. Her mother's maiden name. When he comes back I tell him, "Or Sharps. Jason Sharps."

I hear a rowdy burst of laughter from the main room. When Gel-head trots in again, I tell him I've changed my mind. I'll order a bottle of red wine. I'm in a wine room, for God's sake! As I drink the room shrinks around me. It feels damp now, and smells — it smells like the inside of a janitor's closet. It smells of sickness, of dripping fluids, of saturated tissues. Forty minutes late. Fifty.

My body feels alien to me. I don't know it at all, I want nothing to do with it, I disown it. There's something inside me and it's dying — not me. So this is how it feels. Betrayed by your own body. I'd thought she lived most of her life on the surface of her skin but she'd found a way to get beneath, my Olivia. She'd discovered the flesh was hollow. I flew into a jealous rage. She left me. I begged her to come back. Who picks up a smack habit in their thirties? I thought. After fifteen, sixteen years together- wanting for nothing. Well, wanting for something, obviously. She blamed her body and so did I. She quit time and time again and then, at last, the time came when she didn't need to quit anymore.

More than an hour late. I signal for a second bottle. I know Gel-head's smirking behind his mask. I want to smash it in. I've been getting like this lately: irate at people I don't know.

"Would you like to reorder any appetizers, sir?"

No, he's a good kid. Just doing his job. I shake my head, lean over to squeeze his arm — give him some man-to-man contact — but he skips back, bumping against the wire mesh screen of a bookcase-like cabinet. The dust-rimmed clinking of a hundred bottles fills the room. He freezes, gapes at me — untrained to deal with the moment — then scuttles out.

Don't get me wrong, I like kids — Olivia was thirty years younger than me. I even wanted to have some with her. The problem is there are just too many of them. You can't throw a brick on this island without concussing one. I wish I had more restraint. But I can't help but hate how they look at me, how they don't look at me, I hate their interchangeable bodies, their mass-rehearsed attitudes, their cars that look like boxes, like baseball caps, like artificial enlargements, their loud advertising, their beeps and clicks and trings, I hate how they speak words as though they're chewing them, how they assume the business of the world revolves around them — how they're right-and how everywhere this cult of youth, this pedamorphic dumbing-down, has whored beauty-duped, drugged, damaged, pixelated it and everywhere turned it to plastic.

I'm almost done with my second bottle. All this alcohol will do wonders for my piles. Ninety minutes. Gel-head comes back in and delightedly hands me a cordless phone.

"Henry?"

As with her call last week, I feel as though I've stumbled upon the middle of something. Her voice is slow, sleepy, warm with music. Nothing like her mother's. I'm surprised, anew, by its power over me.

"We're really sorry. We've been trying you at home all afternoon." I'm untrained to deal with this; I say nothing. After a long pause she says:

"We're sorry. We can't make it to lunch. We hope you haven't been waiting." "I've been waiting ninety minutes."

The line goes muffled and the sotto voce whispering starts. In the background I can hear the vague strains of a string instrument warming up.

"I'm really sorry. It's just, with the concert — "

More hushed coaching. I look around, as though to ground myself outside her voice. Candles have been cleverly hidden in secret niches and the room glows and twinkles the colors of wine: ruby, amethyst, burgundy, bronze..

"We thought maybe it's best to leave this to another time."

"You don't want me to come?"

"Henry."

She can't hang up. I can't let her. I look around. How did I end up in this flinking dungeon?

"I don't mind paying. If it's money — "

"The show's sold out," she says quickly.

"Just a drink, then. I'm close by."

"Henry, I'm not sure I'm ready." I recognize the tone instantly. It belongs to the witch. I know I should stop but I can't.

"Tomorrow. There's a place in the EastVillage. No, the WestVillage. We'll have breakfast."

I hear activity on the far end of the phone line, then a muted thud, then an English-accented voice:

"Elise doesn't want to talk to you right now."

"Fuck you," I say playfully.

"Well, that's that," he says.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm a bit emotional."

"There's no need for that language."

He's right, I think. The Leech is right. I try to remember what Apelman told me.

"Family is family."

This shuts him up. So I say it again. It doesn't come out quite right the second time.

"You're drunk," he says.

"Hey, genius. Genius — can you put my daughter back on?"

"You're in no state to talk with her." There's a scuffing sound, which I recognize as the universal prelude to hanging up.

"Hey!" Clear air. I frantically search for something to say. "I've got cancer. Tell her that. Press release for you, Mr. Manager: C-A-N-C-E-R. Of the ass. Got that?" "I've had about enough — "

"Hey! Wait!" I'm screwing this up but I know there's something I can say, something perfect, something that will smooth over the past, pucker open the future. What would Apelman say? It's always been like this. It's always been me who's had to ask forgiveness.

"I'm hanging up."

"And a lot of money," I blurt out. "You know that, right, Leechy? Half a million bucks for a cello, right? There's plenty more where that came from. I bet you'd like to manage that, wouldn't you, once I'm gone? Leechy boy? Hey?"

He hangs up.

***

I WISH I HAD MORE RESTRAINT. I wish they'd taught it at school, or even before that, when I was still learning things. I shouldn't have quaffed those two 1989 Bordeaux. Let myself attempt full sentences on the phone afterward. At the least, I should've restrained myself from waiting so patiently, so long, for the two of them. Mostly, I wish I had the restraint to stop myself from doing what I'm about to do.

I throw a wad of cash on the table — Gel-head's lucky day — then go back and count it, peel back a few notes. No sense in losing one's head. Hobble through the twisty, curiously grungy hallway, through the mauve-colored, chandeliered restaurant, dodging cheese carts and briefcases, then outside. The sky's overcast. I opt for walking, give myself time to sober up. Cool down. I limp through the southern chunk of Central Park, a tuxedoed booze-breathed cripple among the mass of tourists, families and couples. Children look at me strangely. Everyone else looks away. It's crowded as hell. Then I remember — Columbus Day weekend.