The Rose Garden (32 page)

Mees Katie was sitting as she always sits, facing toward the door, so that she could jump up when the customers came in. She often sits alone at the table for one by the street window, a huge window partly curtained in colorless gauze, and when there is a rush on, she stands in the arch that leads from the front room to the back and watches both rooms. She never sits at the bar. Tonight she was sitting beside a lady I have never seen at the Étoile before, a very wide, stout, elderly lady whose elaborate makeup—eyes, complexion, and mouth—looked as though it had been applied several days ago and then repaired here and there as patches of it wore off. Her hair was dyed gold and curled in tiny rings all over her head, and her face and neck were covered with a dark beige powder. Her face had spread so that it was very big, but her nose and mouth were quite small, and she had enormous brown eyes that had no light in them. She had put on a great deal of black mascara, and blue eyeshadow. The shadow had melted down into the corners of her eyes and settled into the wrinkles. She was all covered up in a closely fitted dark blue velvet dress that was cut into a ring around her neck and had long tight sleeves that strained at her arms every time she lifted her spoon to her mouth. She was eating pears in wine, and she ate very carefully, looking into the dish as she chose each morsel. When she wasn't attending to the pears, she watched the man sitting opposite Mees Katie, and she listened to him, and Mees Katie listened to him,
and he listened to himself. His name is Michel, and he never stops talking. He has something to do with importing foreign movies, or with promoting them, and he is always busy. He is always on the run, going in all directions. He never finishes his dinner without jumping up from his chair at least once to dash into the back room, where the telephone is, to make a call, and it is always an urgent call. If the phone is busy, if there is someone ahead of him, he stands waiting impatiently in the arch between the two rooms, looking importantly about him, and when he has finally gotten into the telephone booth and put his call through, he keeps the door open until he is halfway through his conversation. His voice can be heard all over the restaurant until suddenly there is a little clatter as he shuts himself away with his secrets. He has a very high, harsh voice, and he twists each word so that only half of it sounds like English. Leo makes fun of him. Once, when Michel had pulled the phone booth door shut on himself, Leo called from the bar to Mees Katie, who was sitting at a table with some people, just as she was tonight, “Michel is talking with the weatherman again,” and Mees Katie looked annoyed, although she smiled. She gets impatient with the Étoile, and with the people there, and especially with Michel, because he pesters her, but she has a kind heart, and she is always polite.

Michel always comes into the restaurant alone, looking for company, and once in a while when there is no acquaintance he can join for dinner he sits by himself. When he is alone, all his animation dies away and he looks old and tired. He has a very broad dark face, with loose wrinkles, furrows, running up and down it and overlapping its outline. His forehead is high, and he has kinky coal-black hair and a neat, thin mouth. When he sits at his table with nobody to talk to or to pay any attention to him, he looks deserted, as though he had been brought to the restaurant and left there by someone who had no intention of coming back to
claim him. Alone, he is morose and dignified, as though humiliation had taken him unawares but had not found him unprepared. On nights like that, when he knows he is doomed to solitude, he stands at the bar with his drink, sweet vermouth, until his dinner is brought, and then he goes to his table and sits down very deliberately and shakes out his napkin very fussily. He places the napkin across his lap and folds it closely around him so that his jacket hangs free of it. He always wears a double-breasted suit, and a waistcoat. When the napkin is safely in place, he picks up his knife and fork and sounds all the food on his plate and looks severely at his green salad. Then he cuts off a piece of meat and places it in his mouth and begins to chew it. While he is chewing, his knife and fork lie on his plate, and his wrists rest against the edge of the table, with his hands limp, and he chews patiently, looking as proud and as indifferent as though he were facing a firing squad.

I think he must have had dinner alone tonight before I came in, and after dinner moved over to join Mees Katie and her acquaintance, the elderly painted lady. There was nothing, not even a glass of water, in front of Mees Katie and nothing in front of Michel, but the elderly lady's part of the tablecloth looked as though it had been thoroughly occupied by several different dishes before her pears in wine were brought. Mees Katie looked very tired. She has a lot of acquaintances, most of them inherited from her mother, and I suppose the elderly lady was one of them. Mees Katie has an attitude she falls into when she is being officially companionable. She sits with both elbows on the table, with her right hand placed flat against the side of her head and her left hand, with the fingers curled under, and turned down, supporting her chin. The right hand always holds her head up, while the left hand is ready to rise against her mouth, as though the polite attention she wants to give people calls for modesty from her, and for as complete a concealment of her own personality as she can manage. Tonight, as she

listened wearily to Michel, her hand hid her mouth and her eyes were fixed on Michel's face. She is often bored, but as a rule she can escape from her entanglements by jumping up to greet a customer or to give an order to the waiter. There was no easy escape for her tonight—the Étoile might as well have been snowbound for all the coming and going there was. It was very quiet. Three men sitting at the last table in the bar were talking quietly, but the only voice really to be heard belonged to Michel, and Mees Katie kept her eyes fixed on him as though she feared she might fall asleep if she stopped watching him. She has extraordinary eyes, small slanted brown eyes that are filled with light, brilliant eyes of a transparent brown in which the color recedes, not growing darker but growing more intense, so that the point of truest color, the source of all that light, seems very far away, and perhaps it is for that reason that Mees Katie's expression always seems distant, no matter how close her face is as she bends down to answer a question or to whisper to some customer she knows well. Suddenly the elderly lady finished her pears, and she laid down her spoon and smiled, a small, mild, accustomed smile of pleasure, and she turned to look at Mees Katie, and Mees Katie yawned and was shocked at herself

“Oh, I am sorry, Michel!” she cried. “Excuse me, Mrs. Dolan, but I am so tired tonight.”

Michel emerged from his monologue to see that he was in danger of losing his audience, and he looked over at Leo and called excitedly for cognac, cognac all round.

“Oh, no no no, thank you, Michel,” Mees Katie said. “No cognac for me, thank you very much.”

But Mrs. Dolan was delighted. She removed her lips from the edge of her coffee cup, which she was holding with both hands, and for a minute she looked like the perky little person she must once have been, who knew that at the mention of a drink a girl
brightens up. “Well, thank you very much,” she said to Michel, who had begun to stare at her with alarm. “I believe I will.” She had a very loud, rusty voice, and after regarding Michel with approval she turned to Mees Katie. “Have a drink,” she said. “A little cognac will settle your stomach.”

Mees Katie laughed in a horrified way. “Oh, my stomach is all right,” she cried, and she called to Leo, “M. Leo,
deux cognacs, s'il vous plait.
”

Mees Katie is tall and slender, and she moves very easily and quickly. She went to the bar and took the little tray with the two cognacs from Leo and handed it to Robert, who had come running from the end of the bar. Then she walked quickly away, through the bar and through the dim dining room, and pushed open one of the doors leading to the kitchen and went in there and stayed a few minutes. When she returned she was very brisk in her beaver hat and her beaver-lined coat. She said goodnight to Michel, who had become very glum, and to Mrs. Dolan, and to the old Frenchman at the bar, and to me, and she motioned Leo to the end of the bar and spoke a few words privately to him as she pulled on her gloves, and off she went. As she talked with Leo she stood sideways to the bar, and looked through the window, and a minute later, watching through the window, I saw her go past, walking carefully on the dangerous sidewalk, with her hand up to hold her hat against the wind. She and her mother have an apartment where they have lived for many years, far over on the west side, near Tenth Avenue. Leo also watched her through the window, and when she disappeared he stayed where he was and continued to watch. There is a big open garage across the street that has pushed itself through the buildings and now is open at each end, making an arcade and therefore a vista—you can see a little section of the Forty-eighth Street scene from this window here, and the people walking along there, who almost never turn their heads to look over in this direction, seem very far away, and they
seem to be walking faster and with more sense of direction than the passersby immediately outside the window. Tonight was so blurred and wild you could see nothing much except movements of struggle out there, but Leo continued to watch. The back of Leo's head is perfectly flat, and his skin is putty-colored, but more white than gray or beige. His features are thick and fleshy and very clearly defined, the nose a wide triangle, the upper lip a sharp bow. His eyes are small and blue, and his half smile, for he never smiles right out, is always accompanied by a deliberate glance in which suspicion and interest are equally mixed. Sometimes the interest becomes dislike. He is vain. He is slow-witted and not handsome, and he is past sixty and a bit fat, and yet he wears the pleased, secretive expression of a man who has always gotten along very well with women. After a while he abandoned his survey of the window and moved along to speak with the old Frenchman. They spoke in French. The Frenchman objects to hearing English spoken at the Étoile, and he becomes very irritable when English-speaking strangers try to strike up an acquaintance with him. The three men at the end of the room left their table and moved across to that end of the bar and called for drinks. They were irresolute. They were marooned in the city for the night, and they had taken rooms at the Plymouth Hotel along the street, and they wanted to be entertained without becoming involved, and the evening was going flat on them. They had come to the Étoile for dinner because they often have lunch there and always imagined it to be a place where interesting people came at night—show people, artists and writers, people like that, or at least French people who would sit and stand around and talk excitedly as they did in the movies—but there was no one worth watching or listening to, and tomorrow night they will drive home to Larchmont with a disappointed feeling that they will translate as knowledge—New York City is just as dull as anywhere else when you have nothing to do.

Michel was still talking, but warily. The last thing he wanted
was to be left alone with a strange woman, and he felt it was no compliment to him to be seen drinking with a Mrs. Dolan. He hadn't touched his cognac. She took a businesslike sip from hers and set the glass back on the table. She had stopped listening to him, and now she was sizing him up. A smile kept coming and going on her face—it was her contribution to the conversation and her acknowledgment of it. But she was considering, or ruminating, and a little trick occurred to her. She smiled and put her finger against her lips as though Michel were a child who was talking too much. Michel stopped talking.

“Do you come here much?” Mrs. Dolan asked him. It wasn't much of a question, but it was too personal for poor Michel. He began to answer her, and then instead he jumped up and clapped his hands to the sides of his head. It is the gesture he makes when he remembers an urgent phone call, or when he has to run out of the restaurant on an urgent errand. Mrs. Dolan stopped smiling, but she showed no surprise or embarrassment. She simply looked at him. He had to run out on an urgent errand, but he would be back in ten minutes.

He always returned to the Étoile after these errands, but Mrs. Dolan didn't know that, and it was clear she did not believe him. She went on looking at him. In his excitement he knocked his chair back, and it fell against the edge of my table. He turned ungracefully and caught the chair and straightened it, using both hands. “Pardon, Madame,” he said to me, gaily. He looked me in the eye and smiled at me. He was triumphant, or at least relieved, because he was managing to break away from Mrs. Dolan, and he was glad of the diversion, of the fallen chair, because it made his getaway seem easier, but he would have smiled anyway, challenging me or challenging anyone to ignore him. When he smiles, his dark, even teeth remain tightly closed because he must always remain on guard and must always show that he does not fear the
snub he watches for. I said quickly, “It doesn't matter at all,” and I was glad I did because, although he had already begun speaking to Mrs. Dolan again, he turned and nodded to me, and I knew I was forgiven for the sin I had not committed, of not recognizing him.

Then he bustled to the coatrack, beside where I was sitting, and began wrapping himself up in his warm clothes—his warm fur-collared overcoat and his fur hat and his big gloves. Mrs. Dolan watched him as indifferently as though he were a stranger who had chanced to share her table on a train journey, and, as she might in a train, she turned her head from him to look at the view, in this case the bar, Leo, the old Frenchman, and the three exiles from Larchmont. Leo had a dour expression on his face as he watched Michel, who looked happily back at him and then looked at Mrs. Dolan and saw he had lost her attention. He called to her, “You will wait? You will be here? You will not run away?”