“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.
“Is your repairman from the company or an independent contractor?” I asked Cherise as we approached the center of the restaurant.
“Oh, these motors aren’t so complicated. I give them a knock myself when I need to.”
She flipped up a grate, revealing stairs like those that led down to New York City basements. “Well,” Iris said, “I’m useless at this kind of thing. Why don’t you go get a look, and I’ll see about our hotel room.”
“Hotel room?”
“Look outside. It’s getting late.”
A swatch of pink sky was visible in the doorway to the dining area, through which Iris disappeared before I could protest. Cherise offered a knowing smirk, but did me the kindness of letting it go quickly. At the bottom of the steps there was room to stand without crouching, and we simply walked back to the motor and stood next to it.
“The first thing to know is that all rotating restaurants are basically the same. Some different details, but it’s like in geometry with circles and equilateral triangles. What’s the word?”
“Similar.”
“Every restaurant is similar. Different size, same technology.”
She couldn’t stop it while anyone was dining, but she opened different compartments and explained in great technical detail how it worked and what could go wrong. I surmised that the old bearings at Apogee were binding and forcing too much torque from the motor. She agreed. They had a spare set of bearings, she said, that “my lady” could buy. How strange it was, Cherise in her elegant dress and her stylish makeup and me in my Sunday second-best, down there in that industrial compartment, a refined dining room only six feet above us. It felt like a scene from a movie.
“I’m not above poaching a resourceful employee,” she said as I followed her back into the dining area. “I can’t create an assistant manager position, obviously. But start as a waiter, show your stuff, you’ll move up quickly. You know the biz: lots of turnover—come on, you’ve got to prefer San Francisco to Fresno.” Her glance around indicated that I should do the same. The sun had set while we were underneath the restaurant, and the city had been illuminated. Straight in front of me, the towers and scalloped cables of the Bay Bridge looked strung with Christmas lights. Far to my left, the same was true of the Golden Gate. The Transamerica Pyramid and the other skyscrapers around us were all lit, no blighted buildings blocking the view. It was beautiful.
“I’ve got family in Fresno,” I said.
“Everyone has family in Fresno. Clackamas is my Fresno.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s not a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Leave it for now, call me when you want to take it.”