All the Old Knives Read Free Page B

counter. Aware of the spectacle, he gives me an embarrassed smile. “First day on the job, sorry.” Which makes me like him, just a little bit.
    He slides over what proves to be a tannin-heavy Chardonnay from deep inside Carmel Valley—Joullian Estate—in a glass foggy with chill. Beside it he places a dish of macadamia nuts, then winks, still embarrassed, before heading off again. In his place a wall-length mirror gives me a full view of the restaurant.
    What did I expect? Certainly not this.
    It makes me think of a depressed evening a month or so ago, after returning from my final night with Linda, a new recruit from California. She was attractive and fun, smart and witty, yet at the end of the night, as I dressed and watched her smiling at me from under the sheets, I knew that this was the end of it. So, like the man I wish I wasn’t, I pretended otherwise, kissed her nose and returned to my empty apartment and began to drink heavily. I turned on the television and, flipping through the channels, stumbled upon a dramatization of a Christopher Reid poem, The Song of Lunch .
    Sitting here waiting, I can’t help seeing myself in that story of a man still stung by love, meeting his old flame for lunch at their old haunt,”Zanotti’s.” That poor sod imagines that time changes nothing—neither in himself nor in their restaurant. Instead, he gets the modern whitewash, a reimagined Zanotti’s, not so unlike Rendez-vous, where I’m faced with
    Origami ceiling aglow
    like a Cubist thunderstorm,
    ominous over white
    reflective surfaces,
    apple-green chairs
    (minimalist for your discomfort),
    and dustless, machine-washed
    wine glasses.
    Polished and peeled
    monochrome wait staff
    attend to every desire,
    except those not
    on the single-page menu.
    A married couple, neither half younger than sixty, has settled at a clinically white table to read menus off another laminated card. He looks grouchy yet resigned; she has a permanent smile affixed to her face. I bet he’s a cheater on the golf course, and I’ll lay odds she brews an incredible iced tea.
    The Siemens weighs heavily in my pocket, but I try to ignore it and focus instead on what I expect from this night.
    What do I know about Celia Favreau, née Harrison? First of all, despite Vick’s doubts, I do know that she’s no longer mine. Five years without a word. Five years building a life in this leafy utopian outpost. Carmel, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was a temporary residence for writers and artists, who set up camp and roomed in primitive cabins along the white beach. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 an influx of homeless bohemians pushed the locals into finally taking city building seriously. The town’s history is associated with famous writers—Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Robinson Jeffers—but I doubt those old artists would be able to afford a meal in the town it’s become.
    She came here to make a life with Drew Favreau, a GM manager who’d spent half his working life in Vienna before retiring at fifty-eight. They dated a mere four months, then he popped the question. The relationship confused her friends—an older man with no particularly apparent charms, while Celia’s charms were apparent to everyone, particularly to the long line of young men she’d used and abandoned during her first three years in Vienna, leading up to our year together. A few years ago, Sarah Western told me that when she pressed for explanations Celia became vague and unconvincing. She wanted to stop running around, she claimed. She wanted to sit still. “A woman like her doesn’t settle down,” Sarah told me. “For Celia, stasis equals death.”
    So what was the answer? Because of our history, and because of the way I felt, I wasn’t in a position to ask directly, but her friends pressed her, and their opinion finally settled on that catchall of midlife