“Any time. Any time at all.”
I ate at the Jockey Club in the Ritz Carlton, just south of the park. The bell captain looked at me funny when I walked through the lobby and down the stairs to the restaurant, but the hostess saw me to a table and acted like it was a pleasure. I picked the most expensive thing on the lunch menu.
While I waited for the food I played with the controls on my watch and watched the other patrons to see how they were dressed and how they acted in a fancy restaurant. There were fresh flowers on each table and the waiter brought hot rolls and butter automatically.
I didn’t have much experience in restaurants—not since Mom left. She’d tried to do more than show me how to eat with my mouth closed, but I was self-conscious.
When the food came, I only ate half of it. There was too much of it and I wasn’t too hungry. The news program had upset me, made me paranoid again.
I tried to pay the waiter when he brought the bill, but he gently corrected me. “I can take this up to the cashier for you, if you wish, or you can just pay on the way out.”
I said I would do that and thought for a moment how he’d guided me without making me feel stupid. If it had been my father he would have said, “Pay the cashier, dip-shit. Don’t you know anything?” The difference was considerable. I left the waiter a twenty-dollar tip.
Paying for a fifty-dollar lunch seemed unreal, just as buying the watch earlier seemed a game. It was like playing with Monopoly money, like playing make-believe.
What would you do, Davy, if you were rich?
I’d be happy. I walked across the street and into Central Park, green and lush, and somehow alien in the middle of all the concrete and steel.
Well, I can try.
I met Millie during the intermission of a Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It was my sixth time to see it. After paying the first time, I just popped to an alcove at the back of the mezzanine five minutes after eight. The houselights are off by then and I would find a seat without any trouble. If it looked like someone arrived late and was headed for my claimed seat, I would bend down as if to tie my shoe and jump back to the alcove. Then locate another empty seat.
I don’t mind paying, but I often don’t decide until after curtain time that I want to see it. Then the box-office attendant will waste my time trying to get me to buy a ticket for another night. Too much trouble.
This was a Thursday-night show and the crowd was surprisingly heavy. I was pressed against the balcony railing drinking overpriced ginger ale and watching the lines at the bathrooms.
“And what are you smiling about?”
I jerked my head around. For a moment I thought it was one of the ushers about to evict me as a gate crasher, but it was this woman, not much older than me but apparently over twenty-one—at least, she was drinking champagne.
“Are you talking to me?”
“Sure. Maybe that’s presumptuous of me, but in a crowd this dense, intimacy is a foregone conclusion.”
“Well, yes it is. My name is David.”
“Millie,” she said with a vague wave of her hand. She was wearing a dressy blouse and black slacks. She was pretty, wore owl-like glasses, no makeup, and had her shiny, black haircut long on top, then tapering in to the neck. “So what were you smiling about?”
I frowned “Oh … I guess I was feeling a little superior, not having to wait in line. Does this temporary intimacy extend to talking about bathrooms?”
She shrugged. “Why not? I’d be in line myself, but I ducked out in the first act. I’ll probably have to do it again later. What’s your secret? Bladder of iron?”
I turned red. “Something like that.”
“Are you blushing? Wow, I thought teenage males talked about bodily functions continuously. My brothers certainly do.”
“It’s hot in here.”
“Yeah. Okay. We won’t talk about excretory functions anymore. Any other taboo subjects?”
“I’d rather not give you any ideas.”
She laughed. “Touché. You a local?”
“Sort of. I travel a lot, but this is home for now.”
“I’m not I’m here for a week of the touristy stuff. Gotta go back to school in two weeks.”
“Where’s that?”
“Oklahoma State, majoring in psych.”
I thought for a moment. “Stillwater?”
“Yeah. I guess you do travel.”
“Not to Oklahoma. My grandfather went to school there, back when it was Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical.”
“Where do you go to school?”
“I don’t. Haven’t the aptitude.”
She looked over her glasses at me. “You don’t sound particularly stupid.”
I blushed again. “I’m just taking my time.”
The lights began dimming for the second act. She finished her champagne and dropped the plastic glass in the trash. Then she stuck out her hand.
I took it. She pumped it twice firmly and said, “Nice talking to you, David. Enjoy the rest of the show.”
“You too, Millie.”
I cried during the second act. Sweeney’s wife, who’s had her child stolen away from her and has been driven mad by rape, is revealed to be the mad, dissolute street beggar/ prostitute, but only after Sweeney kills her when she witnesses the murder of her rapist, Judge Turpin.
The first time I saw this scene I decided I didn’t like it. I went away, in fact, with a very negative impression of the show. It was only after I found myself examining the face of every bag lady on the street to see if she was my mother that I realized why I didn’t like the scene.
Still, I didn’t stop looking at bag ladies and, after a while, I started returning to Sweeney Todd.
I skipped the finale and jumped to Grand Central Terminal. It’s one of the places you can find a cab late at night. I stuck my hand out and this black man, perhaps twenty-five and raggedly dressed, jumped out in the street “Cab? You need a cab? I’ll get you a cab.”
I could have walked to the regulated taxi stand on the Vanderbilt Avenue side, but what the heck. I nodded.
He stuck a chrome police whistle in his teeth and blew it, two sharp piercing blasts. Down the block a cab pulled over two lanes and pulled up. The black guy held the door for me. I handed him a bill.
“Hey, man. Two dollars to get a cab. Two dollars.”
“That’s a ten.”
He stepped back, surprised. “Oh. Yeah. Thanks, man.”
I had the cabbie go back across Forty-fifth to the theater where Sweeney was showing and had him park it on the curb. I stood on the sidewalk, one foot still in the cab, and fended off people who wanted the cab. “I’m picking