Chapter 6: At the Chelsea Restaurant

My boyfriend and I decided on a late evening dinner down in Chelsea – to a restaurant we know that served an excellent veal scaloppini for me, and for my boyfriend, he would be having the filet mignon, as he hadn’t eaten a good cut of steak in a while. We both left our loft around nine o’clock and caught a cab into the heart of Chelsea, not far from the well-known Chelsea Hotel that had been completely restored and remodeled in recent years. The evening was cool and dry with a slight breeze that tickled my cheeks and hair, and I really felt that I had finally arrived at what life was supposed to be about for a recent college graduate – a loving, committed boyfriend, a good job in advertising, a loft in the East Village where we shared our bed, and now a cool evening where we could dress up for a change and walk hand-in-hand down Seventh Avenue. It felt regal to put on a skirt. We could even see a star or two up in the sky despite the tall skyscrapers and many lights that kept the city eternally aglow.

The restaurant, we liked to think, was the perfect place for us. It was the type that had cloth napkins, Spode silverware, a decent wine list, and well-dressed people who were also on the younger side and starting their adult lives just like we were. We would leave the restaurant well before they dimmed the lights, as we no longer drank and danced so much as we did when we were undergrads in college. We had moved on, because it was our disposition to do so. But at night, by the time I’d be cozened up to my boyfriend in bed, the restaurant would attract a more fashionable crowd. But we were fortunate enough to have moved on.

When we had been shown our seats upon entering, we ordered a nice bottle of Italian wine with some bread and olive oil for starters. I then noticed that there was this one man at the middle of the bar who didn’t seem to belong there. For one thing, he had a dark complexion, which was somewhat unusual for the restaurant, but not totally outrageous. But what’s more, he looked like an immigrant almost, not only because of his foreignness but also because of his clothes. While trying to remain tailored properly to his body, his sports jacket was too tight on him, and therefore ill-fitting. He was an overweight man approaching obesity, and he had this depressed, haggard look on him that in no way matched the ambience of the restaurant. He looked like a character who had just walked off the studio set of an old movie, like a Fatty Arbuckle, an Oliver Hardy, or a Lou Costello. I actually found him quite amusing at first, because he sat on his bar chair as immobile as a stone, and he ordered beer after beer after beer. He drank pints of Amstel Light.

When our meals came, my boyfriend and I discussed some family matters. His sister was getting married to an investment banker, and his grandmother would be celebrating her ninetieth birthday up at the family’s farm in Vermont. We would be taking the train, he said. And yet every so often, I would look beyond his shoulder and check on my project, this man I had been monitoring. By this time he tried to start a conversation with the woman tending bar. She was exquisite, by the way, and was the type of girl who would one day find herself working on Union Square. But she still had the job of serving her other customers, and so every attempt the man made at having some sort of dialogue with the woman, who had now become the object of his affections, I should think, failed miserably. She smiled at him when he spoke, and for some reason, he talked about the things you’re never supposed to talk about in bars, namely politics and religion, and this woman, who probably wasn’t interested in anything remotely connected to the gravity of the topics he discussed, had to stand there and take it all.

Soon his voice grew louder every time she came by to serve him. I overheard him talking about women and their nature, the daily newspapers and what they had printed, political conflicts in third world countries, and the supposed sorry state of American literature. She was flabbergasted and had to move away from him frequently just to avoid talking to him. But she did return every so often to serve him his pints of beer. Soon after, though, she would quickly move to the other side of the bar, finding relief and comfort in the other customers who hopefully didn’t talk about the same frightful things. And the man looked on quite jealously as she paid more attention to the others and not him.