No, Rivera was my only true work buddy, perhaps my only true buddy anywhere — even Vinay, my whiskey-loving dining friend, had decamped to Los Angeles. In all my time in America I had not received a single social call from those I’d designated as my London friends; and neither, it’s true to say, had I called them. With Rivera, I made an effort. I phoned and e-mailed him repeatedly but, as far as getting to meet him was concerned, without success. It wasn’t long before he stopped responding. Then I heard he’d moved back to California, where he’d grown up, and then Appleby, who was something of a rumorer, was fairly sure he’d gone down to San Antonio to work for an oil company. But nobody knew one thing or another for a fact, and the moment came when I realized that Rivera had joined those who had disappeared from my life.
I suppose it was this kind of upset, together with that winter’s more rhythmical miseries, which drew me into the comforting routine, on those days when I had extra time on my hands, of lingering over breakfast at the Malibu Diner, a restaurant one block east of the hotel. The Malibu was run by Corfiotes — to be exact, by people from an isle off Corfu — and sometimes I would be engaged in conversation by one of owners, a fellow with heart trouble who read Greek newspapers because, he told me, after nearly thirty years of living in America he was still foxed by the Roman alphabet. The owner’s son-in-law had an ex-brother-in-law, and it was this man, a fellow in his late fifties named George, who was my regular waiter. He had a little mustache, a black vest, and a red, clean-looking face. My dealings with George were limited by the very depth of our mutual understanding: he automatically brought me scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast and liberally refilled my coffee; I tipped him heavily and without comment. The one fact he disclosed about his life was that he had not long ago become divorced and as a consequence was as happy as he’d ever been. “I can smoke now,” he explained. “I smoke five packs a day.” The most remarkable thing about the Malibu was the mirror that covered the entire wall of the back room and duplicated in its glass the whole interior of the diner, with the strange result that newcomers were subject to a powerful temporary illusion that the back room did not actually exist and was no more than a trick of reflection. This unsettling misapprehension perhaps contributed to the relative scarcity of customers at the rear of the diner, where I came to regard a particular table as my own. There were a few other repetitive presences. Every Saturday, people prone to extreme credit card debt and other forms of improvidence convened at the very rear of the restaurant to discuss their squandering ways and give one another encouragement and support. My most constant dining companions, though, were the blind people who lived in a special residence up the street (A VISIONARY COMMUNITY was inscribed on the frontage) and bravely ventured outdoors with white sticks scratching ahead of them, which is why I came to think of my neighborhood as the quarter of the blind. Most days two or three unsighted persons — women, almost without exception — would find their way to one of the tables near to me and order huge, complex breakfasts. They ate indelicately, fingering sunny eggs and lowering their faces to the food. My favorites among them were two fast friends, a black woman and a white woman, who both wore bobble hats and swayed from side to side like sailors as they walked. The white woman, in her sixties and the elder by at least ten years, still had a fragment of vision: she examined the menu as if it were a diamond, raising it an inch from her left eye. The black woman, who moved with one hand held fast to the elbow of her consort, went about in utter blindness. When she stretched open her eyelids with her thumbs, yellowish eyeballs turned in the sockets. The two of them always conducted a cheerful, intelligent conversation that I would listen to quite contentedly for an hour or more on those weekends when I had nothing to do. It was during one such session of eavesdropping that a woman I didn’t recognize stopped at my table and asked me, in an English accent, if I had once lived in London.
She was a woman of around my age, with pale brown skin and large eyes made a little mournful by the shape of her brow.
“Yes, I have lived in London,” I said.
“In Maida Vale?” she said.
I was about to say no, and then I remembered. About eight years previously, just before I came to know Rachel, I’d stayed at a friend’s flat in Little Venice while workmen painted my new place in Notting Hill.
“For about two weeks,” I said, smiling involuntarily.
She smiled back, and in smiling became distinctly pretty. “I thought so,” she said, wrapping her coat tighter about her. In a polite tone, she went on, “We once shared a cab. From…” She named a nightspot in Soho. “You gave me a ride home.”
I remembered the club well — it had been something of a haunt of mine — but I didn’t remember this woman, or having shared a taxi with anybody like her. “Are you sure?” I said.
She laughed. Not without embarrassment, she said, “You’re called Hans, right? It was an unusual name. That’s why I remember.”
It was my turn to feel embarrassed, but most of all I was amazed.
Although she never took a seat, the woman and I talked for a few minutes longer, and it was very easily agreed that she would drop by one evening. She had, she said, always been curious about the Chelsea Hotel.
If I feel able to state that I didn’t give the matter any further thought — that I wasn’t planning anything — it’s because, a few evenings later, when the house phone in my apartment rang and Jesus at the front desk told me I had a visitor called Danielle, I had no idea what he was talking about. Only at the last second, as I went to answer the cough of my doorbell, did it occur to me who the visitor might be — and that I’d never gotten around to asking her for her name.
I opened the door. “I was passing by,” she said, and mumbled some further statement. “If I’m intruding…”
“Of course not,” I said. “Come in.”
She wore a coat that may have been different from the coat I’d first seen her in but had the same effect, namely to make it seem as if she’d just been rescued from a river and blanketed. My own getup was shabby — bare feet, T-shirt, decaying tracksuit bottom — and while I changed, Danielle wandered around my apartment, as was her privilege: people in New York are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they’re invited to step into. In addition to the generous ceiling heights and the wood floors and the built-in closets, she undoubtedly took in the family photographs and the bachelor disarray and the second bedroom with its ironing board and its child’s bed covered by a mound of wrinkled office shirts. I imagine this answered some questions she had about my situation, and not in an especially disheartening way. Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing. But of course not every woman is interested in this sort of refurbishment project, just as not every man has only one thing on his mind. About Danielle, I remember, my feelings were no more specific than a pleasant anxiousness. She hadn’t caught me, obviously enough, at a very erotic moment in my life. I had never been much of a pickup artist — a few ghastly encounters in my twenties had seen to that — and the alternative prospect of a euphoric romance not only exhausted me but, in fact, struck me as impossible. This wasn’t because of any fidelity to my absent wife or some aversion to sex, which, I like to think, grabs me as much as the next man. No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity’s enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle’s supposedly unique trajectory — a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story.