Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

“Well?” she asked.

“Beyond my powers.”

“Call Waikiki?”

“Assholes.”

“Well, shit,” she said. She stirred her yolk with a fingertip. Behind her, Phil gagged with indeterminate authenticity. “Give me a few minutes.” She fished her phone from her purse and took it out to the dining room, still holding her steak in her other hand. That’s when I noticed she was wearing the same blue dress from the night before, and that in places it was rumpled. This immediately enraptured me at the same time it put a knot of discomfort in my gut. I pictured her nudging her high heel off with her bare opposite foot and collapsing on her comforter, saw the light creases in the exposed backs of her knees. I saw her getting up in the morning next to a hairy-backed mound of snoring husband, tugging her hem down, and washing off yesterday’s mascara. It felt, more than anything, like the dirty excitement of stumbling in on her changing.

She returned, saying she’d talked to some friends at Overlook in San Francisco, and that if we went up tonight they could give me a tutorial and even some spare parts. “We?” I said. “You’ve got to keep the restaurant open.”

She checked something on her phone. “Twelve in the reservation book. So probably, what, twenty, all night? You realize that’s a loss.”

“We’ve already done half the prep,” Phil said, laying his knife on the countertop.

“Paid holiday,” she said. “You really want to complain?” Lupe wiggled her eyebrows at Phil. Then, holding my gaze, Iris said, “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

Lupe and Phil looked at each other, and then at me, as if this were a terribly ill-advised offer. If they hadn’t, I don’t think I would have accepted.

We left Fresno in a car that fit only the two of us. Her Mercedes felt like a whole different animal than my old GMC, a thoroughbred compared to a mule. I was driving so she could cancel the night’s reservations, and, I suspect, so she could watch me enjoy it. As we burned up the 99 and then west to Los Banos, I prayed all the highway patrol officers were still in church. Meanwhile, Iris chatted for twenty minutes with everyone from the list. They were all regulars, all the heart of a struggling downtown revitalization effort. Most of them owned their own hip but unprofitable businesses there and benefited from the circle of support. The mayor was on the list too, and the president of the junior college. I imagined they would feel relief at their Sunday off, and pictured them secretly, guiltily chowing down at the Olive Garden in the eastern sprawl. At the end of all those calls, she had one more to make.

“Frank,” she said. “The rotator is broken, and I’ve got to head to San Francisco for some parts”—“no, closing for the night”—“yes, big trails of black smoke; turn it on during the day and we’d have pictures all over the web”—“honey, you can’t just turn an escalator into stairs”—“tonight, but probably late.” The voice she used with him sounded like something out of musical theater. She signed off with kisses and closed her phone.

“In that case, he’ll play an extra round of golf.”

Frank was one of the developers building predesigned lofts downtown. Rather than actually converting the abandoned industrial spaces we had, they were pouring and sealing new concretefloored apartments with exposed ducts and piping. But his actual money was from new housing tracts on the outskirts of town in all cardinal directions, projects that were still ongoing, continually increasing the sprawl, the sprawl. Iris surely knew all this, but she never revealed whether she’d found the penance of his downtown investments, including the restaurant, adequate, and I had my suspicions. Like many wealthy men, he indulged the artistic fancies of his wife, though her art was in trying to make Fresno a genuine city. Like most people accepting patronage, she could not help resenting it.

As we passed some invisible boundary, the smell of a dairy infused the car.

“Thank God we’ve got the top up,” I said, “though I’m not sure how much difference it makes.”

“I kind of like it. It’s an authentic smell.”

“Authentic cow shit.”

“I like lots of bad smells. Skunk, old fruit.”

“How about the smell our rotator is making?”

“No. No burn smells. That’s human, inauthentic.”

“By that logic, your restaurant smells worse than a dairy.”

I didn’t mean for this to come out barbed, but it did. I could tell I’d wounded her, and she looked away for a minute before she responded.

“Did you know that revolving restaurants are completely out of style? Before us, the last time one opened in the US was 1996. Top of Waikiki got a new one because Hawaii is time-locked. Blended drinks, cocktail umbrellas, floral print. Style doesn’t matter.” I told her I didn’t know how much it mattered in Fresno, either. We might not be time-locked, but we were so far behind the times we might as well be. Trends migrated to Fresno like poor retirees. I was trying to be conciliatory, to make the case for Apogee fitting Fresno, but her expression made it clear how badly my attempt was going.

“It’s lonely, isn’t it?” I asked. “Believing in Fresno, believing that you can change its vision of itself.”

She put her hand on my leg.

“Sure it’s lonely,” she said. “What isn’t?”

She had me there.

We sped along the highway like bandits until the traffic in San Jose stopped us cold. Iris was able to get out and fold the top down in the middle of the carpool lane. This kind of gridlock on a Sunday afternoon was a bit bewildering. In Fresno, the only Sunday traffic happened in clusters around the bigger churches at 9 and 10 a.m. Things were different, I surmised, when you had a place people wanted to go. Creeping up the peninsula like that, half a mile at a time, should have been excruciating. In places where the freeway paralleled pedestrian paths, we could only watch with envy as people walking their dogs outpaced us. But here on the coast, we didn’t need speed to get the wind in our hair. The sun was warm. The air was cool, and it had a bit of the ocean in it. We could see out to the bay, see the little triangles of windsurfers drifting across the dark water. Being stopped for all this was just fine.

She’d asked me earlier what wasn’t lonely.

I thought, but didn’t say: this isn’t.

The woman who greeted us at Overlook wore aggressive bangs and a dress that probably cost a month’s rent. She seemed to be one of those people who only exist in the great cities, with the looks of a model, the style of the rich, the unblinking attitude of the young. Though my age or younger, she was the general manager of a glitzy restaurant in a cultural capital, a person whose résumé you imagined printed in gold ink. She introduced herself as Cherise. From the way she and Iris shook hands, it was clear that this friend wanting to help her out was actually a stranger on the other end of a business transaction.

We’d ridden up in glass elevators, looking out over the garden atrium of a twenty-story luxury hotel. The restaurant was no less impressive, with a glittering granite front desk, hanging light fixtures that must have been individually polished, and a dining space that even with twice the tables we had seemed less cluttered.

“Look how beautiful it all is,” Iris said. “If I had a whole staff like Nick, I believe we could manage something like this. He’s the lieutenant who keeps everything running. I’m just sort of a figurehead. Nay,” she laughed, “a mascot.” As Cherise led us on a quick tour of the restaurant, Iris continued to sing my praises in a way that was cloying and embarrassing and made me feel like I was touring a college campus with my mother. I blushed, but Cherise smiled at me like she believed every word.