The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  The manager of the restaurant, a tall dark-haired woman in glasses named Allison Sparks, tolerated me at first because I was a minor yet constant revenue stream, always willing to sit at Table 17, the worst one in the place, a two-seater against the far wall, almost touching the clanking plate-warmer. Within the smoky stage of the steakhouse, Table 17 lay in the deepest shadows, and if the patron sitting there added nothing to the frisson of the atmosphere, he couldn't detract from it, either. Allison Sparks, who I estimated to be about thirty-five, had managed the place for a long time, and knew all its slow zones and dead spots. I liked her and I watched her from afar, and I confess that she was another reason I returned each day, usually in a suit and tie. Yes, I might as well confess from the start that had I not found Allison's manner so alluring— her rustling, long-legged efficiency as she went by, her perfumed busyness— things would have been very different— for me, and for others, in some ways worse, perhaps, and in many ways better.

  How and why a woman is beautiful keeps changing as I get older, for I tend to notice aspects of women that I didn't as a younger man, and in my twenties, say, I wouldn't have described Allison as beautiful. But she was. Not in her separate parts, perhaps, but in the whole of her. What I felt most was her confidence, her relentlessness, her drive to have things her way and no other. She seemed full of humor and fury and sexual need. She arranged people, fixed problems, came to decisions. She checked her watch and kept her back straight and made sure no lipstick was smeared on her teeth. The steakhouse had hundreds of regular patrons who returned at varying intervals, and she knew all of them, often remembering their favorite drink and how they liked their steak done; the place was her stage, and she, not the chef, its true star. Dressed in a conservative blue suit and often carrying a clipboard affixed with wholesalers' wine lists or vendors' bills, she ran the place with absolute authority over everyone, including the owner, a sunken, liver-faced man in his eighties named Lipper who came around once a week in a wheelchair, shook hands indiscriminately with the staff, fondled a waitress or two, drank a glass of Merlot, and was wheeled away by his nurse. He trusted Allison to wring every last cent of profit out of the joint, and she did.

  She also welcomed me because I was agreeable with the staff, tipping always and well. When a new waitress or busboy was hired, Allison pointed out the diner at Table 17, explaining that I was a regular, a regular regular, often eating lunch and dinner there over six hours, and missing only one or two meals a week, not including the Monday lunch, when the restaurant was closed for cleaning after the weekend. My pile of newspapers and obscure volumes were to be tolerated, they were told, and within a few months my presence at Table 17 became one of the invisible verities of the place. Even when I was not there, I filled the space with my absence. Waitresses and busboys came and went, were hired and fired, but always I was present at Table 17 for lunch and often dinner, appearing to anyone glancing in my direction for the first time as a reasonably prosperous lawyer or businessman, not someone with little better to do. Indeed, I knew how odd it was that I ate there so often, and from time to time I forced myself to miss a meal, if only to appear not to be utterly rooted to the place.

  But I was, and beyond my uncomfortable interest in Allison and my enjoyment of the surroundings, I wonder what pressure kept returning me through the heavy front door. Nothing that I later found, nothing that would both make and undo me, was yet perceptible. So I am describing, I suppose, my progress into the heart of things— the incremental movement from newcomer to insider, from observer to actor. In the beginning, however, all I did was sit at Table 17 and make affable chitchat as necessary, watch Allison march past, swinging her clipboard. I found that after a drink or two I was able to forget how much I missed my son and wife— a mercy. I didn't intend to get to know anyone or become involved. I just wanted to be around people. Each day, sitting at my very own Table 17, I'd start with a Coke-no-ice and the soup du jour. There were times when the restaurant quieted and for an hour in the late afternoon I was the only patron. But so regular was my appearance that I disappeared, forgotten while the waitresses sat down and gossiped and the busboys changed the tablecloths. I found these moments peaceful. I had achieved privacy but I wasn't alone. With the merest indication of my eye someone would hurry over to inquire what I wanted, but otherwise I was left alone. Did I make use of this time? Did I read the history of civilization or compose a symphony? No, no, and all no. Yet I was content, in a miserable way; I was not whole, but a collection of fragments, waiting, you could say, for the unexpectable, for something to happen.

  Sunk in the shadows, then, I watched, and there was a lot to see. The secret flirtations of the waitresses— with the clientele, the waiters, and each other. I saw a man wolfing down his dinner jump as if struck in the back by a spear, then topple, already dying, facedown onto his plate; I watched a saucy little woman lean forward and slip the watch from the wrist of her date, a drunken fellow whose tongue hung out in anticipation; I heard any number of men being fired over lunch, and when the actual phrase arrived into the conversation ("need to go in a new direction" was popular, as it suggested noble quest and brilliant navigation) the man being let go cut his eyes away or slumped in dejection, and always I felt sick for him. One night I noticed a woman of fifty quietly scissor a man's shirt to ribbons; I saw the denture-worriers and potato-droppers, the bone-gaggers and spoon-inspectors, the toothpick-suckers and pill-arrangers. I saw a rat-sized dog leap out of a woman's purse and lick her fried calamari, I saw a man dab a napkin in his gin and tonic to clean off his hearing aid. And passing around and through them all were the food runners, short squat men, most of them Mexican, who didn't talk or smile, just toted tray after heavy tray to the tables with faces of stoic resignation, like laborers in a mine digging gold they didn't get to keep.

  And there was this: If you sat there night upon night, as I did, you noticed that on particular evenings— perhaps once a week— Allison Sparks made a subtle pass through the dining room, stopping for a few words with certain of her regular male patrons. Very few words, to be sure, followed by a nearly imperceptible nod or knowing gleam in her eye. Each fellow appeared pleased to have been selected. At most Allison would speak with fifteen men in one evening, spacing out her contacts over an hour or more so that it'd be difficult to notice a pattern. Unless, like me, you dined alone and made a point of watching for it. I confess my jealousy when Allison bent to whisper in the men's ears, her red lips close to their cheeks, her dark eyes glancing up to check the room and then back into theirs, as if she'd never looked away, crinkling her warmth, privately sealing the deal, whatever it was.

  These same patrons tended to linger at their tables as midnight drew near, long past signing the credit card receipt, and after a furtive glance at their watches, perhaps followed by a last swallow of dessert wine, they stood up and eased almost secretively over the creaking boards toward a small, unmarked door to the extreme left of the foyer, quite mistakable as leading to a coatrack or service closet, and kept closed. Affixed to the door was a tiny brass plate, and on particular nights a yellowed card appeared in this plate; on the card was typed a modest instruction: PLEASE KEEP DOOR CLOSED. When the card appeared, the room was found to be unlocked, and the men entered, pulling the door shut behind them. Table 17, so far to one side of the dining room, afforded me a direct if distant vantage on this quiet transit, and on the infrequent nights when the door opened, I saw that no unusual noise or light escaped. The patrons appeared to step down and to the left, and whatever brightness reached their faces came from below, finding only the undersides of their jaws and noses while so darkening their eye sockets that it was as if each man had just pulled on a mask of his own face. Naturally I wondered what went on down there. Were the persons entering any different from the others who stayed in the main dining room or at the bar? Not at first glance. Not necessarily.

  But over time I could say with reasonable certainty that the men passing toward the doorway were undeniab
ly prosperous, as I myself had once been, and in particular understood themselves to be still on the upside of the evening. Despite ample food and drink, there was more to learn or wager or steal. During my now wrecked law career, I'd spent quite a bit of time with such men. Their eyes seemed dilated with the conviction that Manhattan was an existentially transactional machine— one person's fate went in and another's came out. Well dressed, rocking on their heels perhaps, tapping a finger against a pant leg, they were eager, these men, they possessed unspent energies and wanted something new, something more. Something dangerous, perhaps. And it was not about sex, not directly, or not primarily. The city was full of call girls and strippers and escorts and bar-stalkers, there for the buying and the flying, and anyway, many of the men passing through the doorway kissed their wives or girlfriends goodbye at the foyer, promising to be home in a few hours. But I could not be completely certain of their fidelity, for several times I saw a lovely, unattended black woman carrying a blue suitcase enter the restaurant and proceed directly to this same wooden door, as if acting on previous instructions, and after Allison nodded wordlessly at the maître d', she was always let in.

  "What's down there?" I asked a waitress one night when the card appeared on the door.

  "The Havana Room?" she said. "It's sort of a special arrangement."

  "You mean by reservation?"

  "Not exactly. Almost, kind of."

  This made no sense to me. Perhaps she didn't actually know. "What do they do in this room?"

  She shrugged. "I've heard some things, but I don't believe them."

  "Have you ever gone down there?"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "Only a few members of the staff are allowed. Ha, mostly."

  "Ha?"

  "He's the old Chinese guy? You've seen him. Bald? The handyman?"

  Yes, I had seen him, I realized, slender and stooped with a big Adam's apple and bloodshot eyes, somewhere between sixty and eighty years old. Usually he went by holding a wrench or a piece of tubing. But still I didn't understand. "Is there any reason I can't go into this Havana Room?"

  The waitress looked around to see if anyone was watching. "It's sort of restricted," she said quietly.

  "So I can't just stand up right now and walk in?"

  "They'd ask you to leave."

  "Why?"

  "Because it's totally private." She looked at me, perhaps with pity, then lowered her voice further. "You're supposed to, like, know somebody."

  I nodded. Of course. After all, I didn't know anyone. I had no business, I had no connections, I lacked even a decent operative lie— the one we all need.

  * * *

  Was it inevitable that Allison Sparks and I would fall into conversation? No. Or yes, definitely. She felt me looking at her as she passed back and forth through the restaurant, I'm sure, just as I felt her awareness of my arrival each day, her sidelong contemplation of my books, my solitude. We didn't smile at each other; rather we nodded, as if in silent agreement that although the interest was mutual, the moment was not yet ripe. Of course, I tried to hide my attraction to her, for I had no reason to hope that she felt any toward me. Yet I noticed that she made sure I received very good service at Table 17, and I made a point of never sitting anywhere else. People have such ways of communicating, of course. It was simply a matter of who would speak first, and when.

  In the meantime I quietly studied Allison Sparks, and, having encountered many people in my work, imagined that I knew something about her. New York has many avenues to success, but there's a particular kind of young woman who sails upward through businesses (ad agencies, weekly magazines, real estate offices, big restaurants) that are naturally frenzied and unstable. Because she is well organized, industrious, and initially modest, such a young woman reassures those around her; other women feel she is attractive because of her personality, and older men— older than fifty-five, say— see in her a respectful and attentive daughter. So she prospers— at first. And she dates, although often the men are too weak for her and she discards them. Within a year or two her title changes and she has more responsibility, only to find that the parameters of her job now include conflict and neurotic personalities. For a while she tries to deal with these challenges with kindness and tact, yet finds that these strategies often don't work. By now she has identified superiors whom she considers allies and those she does not. She becomes more interested in the end, as opposed to the sweet-voiced means. Is she ready to admit this to herself? Not quite. Meanwhile she becomes adept at all the forms of workplace intimacy, with older men, younger women, people on the phone, and so on. She learns to use her voice, to be playful, teasing, affectionate. She can manufacture energy or humor as necessary, as well as disinterest or rank fury. These qualities of manipulation begin to help her score important successes. She makes money for the operation, she solves problems. The younger women in the business look up to her, but the men of the same age have started to realize that they must compete with her. Her natural ability is intimidating, especially as it seems she is often one step ahead of them in anticipating some small, essential detail. About twenty-nine now, she is at a crucial developmental moment; she is about to plateau or become extremely successful. If she has been working very long hours, the years of toil and loneliness have started to harden her. Men have come and gone; there'll always be another, she thinks. Like a good movie— sooner or later. A year goes by. She senses that the younger women could fear her. Another year passes. She has learned to negotiate aggressively for her raises. She begins to change the stores where she shops and to spend money on luxuries and services that make her feel better, that soften her private suffering. She starts to travel alone, not minding that she will appear available— because she is. The spectrum of men with whom she spends time lengthens on one end. She will see older men, in part because they are more patient listeners, but even more so because they have secrets of survival, invisible techniques of power that she wants to master. Is she ready to admit this to herself? Of course not. But she is no longer ashamed to say she is interested in men for their position, their connection to the greater ganglia of wealth and influence and information. The available males now fall into three rough categories for her: handsome boys who are poor, often less intelligent, and surely self involved; barracuda-men in their early forties, usually divorced, who might already be lying about their ages by a year or two; and, lastly, the moguls, small and large, who are now rich enough to die. They are ever more grateful for basic things: untroubled digestion, hair in most of the expectable places. They know they have only ten or twelve good years left. Our woman, nearing thirty-five, sees that the few remaining husband-types are having a rather good time with women ten years her junior. She tells herself she doesn't hate them. She tells herself she needs no one.

  This was Allison, so far as I yet understood. And then one day, after I was done with my lunch, she simply walked over to me with a cup of coffee, her footsteps brisk and without hesitation, and said, "So, Mr. Wyeth, you would appear to have a lot of time on your hands."

  I checked her dark eyes. "That's true."

  "You strike one as unencumbered."

  "Unencumbered, yes. Unburdened, no."

  "Well, you do seem to like it here," she said after a moment's consideration. She bent close to me and poured sugar and milk into my coffee without being asked. "Assuming you don't mind," she added as she gave the coffee a stir with the spoon.

  "Not at all. Perfect. Thanks."

  "Well—" She stopped stirring. "I know how you like it."

  "You do?"

  "Yes, Mr. Wyeth. I notice things."

  "You can call me Bill."

  "So, where were we?" She tilted her head. "Oh, right, 'Unencumbered, yes. Unburdened, no.' "

  "Yes," I said. "But that's no secret."

  She blinked, perhaps purposefully. "And what is?"