“My little number cruncher.”
“I’m not making any sense, am I? Three point one oh five. Wait a minute, that’s wrong.”
“It sounds kind of all right to me.”
“St. Martin’s bid two point four, right? Plus fifteen percent — well, I’m not going to figure it out, but it doesn’t come to over three million dollars.”
“You’re right about that, and I’ll explain over dinner. And it’s your birthday, bubbeleh, so where would you like to go?”
“We could go to a diner and it would feel like a celebration to me. I haven’t been out of the house.”
“You haven’t? Literally?”
“I took a walk yesterday, down to the corner and back. And the other day I went out for a beer. To the Kettle of Fish, if you can believe it.”
“Isn’t that where...”
“That’s where. It felt weird walking in there, but that was me. Nobody else seemed to notice, and this one old fart said I hadn’t been around lately, had I.”
“I know where I’m taking you. At first I thought it should be someplace like Le Cirque or Lutèce, or maybe Union Square Café—”
“Any of those would be great.”
“—but this isn’t about food, this isn’t about putting on the Ritz. This is about going out in the world in triumph.”
“Meaning?”
“Stelli’s.”
“God, I haven’t been there in ages.”
“Is it all right? Because if it’s not—”
“No, it’s perfect. What time?”
“Nine o’clock? We’ll make an entrance. Can you hold out that long?”
“I’ve got a sandwich in the fridge. If I get hungry between now and then I’ll work on that. Let me see, Stelli’s. I guess I’ll take the One train to Eighty-sixth and catch a crosstown bus, or am I better off...”
“Very funny. Take a cab, you funny man. You funny rich man.”
fifteen
Estelle Safran, known to one and all as Stelli, sat on her stool at the corner of the bar nearest to the front door. It was indeed her stool, and it was not only reserved for her but had been designed and built for her. It was larger than the others, to accommodate her girth, and had a power switch, rarely used, that would raise or lower the seat several inches.
She weighed, well, none of your business, and stood five foot three in flats, which were all she ever wore. Honey, if I wore heels, I’d make holes in the sidewalk. Her round face was capped with a pile of unconvincing blond curls, and her eyes, always elaborately framed in mascara, were a startling guileless blue.
She’d been a chubby child who grew fatter in her teens. Such a pretty face, her mother’s friends said, and it was a phrase she would hear or overhear for years. Such a pretty face, and isn’t it a shame...
Diets hadn’t worked, and Fat Girl Camp hadn’t worked, and by the time she graduated from the High School of Music and Art she had said the hell with it. At Cornell she hung out with the writers and the theater majors and got a reputation for a savage wit and a deft hand in the kitchen. She wrote ten short stories and two-thirds of a novel, played Tony’s wife in a student production of A View from the Bridge, and realized she couldn’t write and she couldn’t act, and, more to the point, she didn’t really want to do either. What she wanted to do was hang out with people who did — and maybe whip up a little something.
She somehow knew that a man would come along who loved her for herself alone, loved her in spite of her weight, and she met the guy shortly after she graduated and married him four months later. Unfortunately he turned out to be a spoiled child-adult, a mean-spirited emotional cripple who’d picked out a fat girl so he could feel superior to her, secure in the knowledge that she’d never leave him, because where could she possibly go? She divorced the son of a bitch in less than a year, kept the apartment, and started having an open house every Sunday.
Friends and their friends would start to turn up around four in the afternoon, bringing a bottle of wine or whiskey, and there’d be nuts and homemade party mix to nibble on, and around seven she’d go into the kitchen and bring out big bowls of pasta and salad. Everybody ate, everybody drank, and everybody talked at once, and at midnight she threw out the last hangers-on and went to bed.
Monday mornings she went off to work, and when she came home the apartment was always immaculate, every dish and glass washed and put away, the floors vacuumed, the kitchen gleaming. That was her one indulgence, having someone clean up for her on Mondays, and it was worth it. Her shrink had suggested it, when she’d said for the tenth or twentieth time how she hated cleaning up afterward. Then hire someone to do it for you, he’d said, and for years she would say that therapy was worth every penny, if only because it got her to hire a housekeeper.
But that was only half of it, because the shrink made one other suggestion, and this one changed her life. She was working the fifth or sixth in a long series of pay-the-rent jobs, currently handling phone orders for an East Side florist, and complaining about it, not for the first time. “I need a career,” she said, “instead of a fucking job. But what? I can’t write, I can’t act, my degree’s a bachelor’s in English, what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“What do you enjoy?”
“What do I enjoy? Having people over, listening to them talk, and watching them eat. That’s great if you can live on the half-bottles of booze they leave when they go home. I’ve got two cupboards full of open bottles and a job that makes me want to vomit.”
“You’re running a salon,” he said.
“And if this was Paris in the twenties, they’d write books about me.”
“Add an o.”
“Huh?”
“Change the salon,” he said, “into a saloon.”
She knew instantly that he was right, and told him that he was brilliant, a genius. She only wished she was thin and gorgeous so she could take off her clothes and show her appreciation. When she left his office she phoned her employer and quit, then went to work finding the right location and lining up backers.
Neither proved difficult. Her apartment was in Yorkville, in one of the big prewar apartment buildings on East Eighty-sixth, and she figured that was where they were used to coming on Sunday nights, so why not stick with it? Besides, she wanted to be able to walk to work. It was a pain in the ass getting in and out of the back seat of a cab.
She found the perfect spot, a restaurant that had gone under when the owner retired and his nephew took over and ran the place into the ground. Her lawyer negotiated a lease with a clause that gave her the option of buying the building anytime during the term of the lease. She made phone calls as soon as the lease was signed, looking for backers, and the first person she reached said he’d always wanted to own a piece of a restaurant, and he’d put up fifty grand.
But she didn’t want a partner, didn’t want to owe important money to anyone. Five, she told him, was the maximum she would take from any one person. And he wouldn’t own a piece of the place, she’d own all the pieces. If the place was successful, he’d get double his money back. If it went in the toilet, well, he could afford to lose five thousand dollars, couldn’t he?
She raised all the money she needed, and on her terms, and the next time she saw the shrink she told him again that he was a genius, and she had one more question. What the hell should she call it?
“What do people call it now?”
“It doesn’t exist yet,” she said, “so nobody calls it anything.”
“On Sundays,” he said, “when they’re getting ready to go to your apartment, your salon, where do they say they’re going?”