He is seated at the best table. His mother’s table for twenty years, until a decade ago when her trips to the city decreased. At first, George thought he’d inherited the table, as for a long time the ma
î
tre d’ ushered him to it, expecting CeCe’s return; he doesn’t often get it anymore. He feels lucky to have it without a reservation today. Without his watch, he’s forgotten it’s not yet noon. He’s not in the habit of looking to his phone for the time.
“But do you remember
why
ours is the best table?” she’d asked, the second time she brought him.
He was small, holding her hand. “You walk in the middle of the room. Everyone sees you and says hello.”
“And because it’s in a corner. We can see everything from here. Look, dear, not by staring, but through the mirror, yes? Madame Daudet hadn’t gotten the relation of the table to the mirror right, but I corrected that. Go, stand over there. Over there. Look how you can’t see my face in the mirror, but I can see yours.”
She’d required such a table. Her social network, webbed and twined, her finger in so many pots. She’d take her Wednesday lunch alone before going to the theater and have ten different visitors by the time she was drinking tea. To young George, on the rare and dismal occasions she brought him, her ringed hand remained stretched over an iced plate of cucumber and roe or celery r
é
moulade to be kissed or shaken, palm down, through the entirety of the afternoon. Rarely does anyone approach him, though he likes the place and comes all the time. Such is the thinning of the blood, the dwindling market of inheritance.
This morning he’d learned that neither the Metropolitan Opera nor the New York City Opera will consider
The Burning Papers
. He can’t believe it. He’d sent an e-mail to Mr. Fielding, general director at the Met, and another to Mr. Peterson, the artistic director at New York. In the last five years, he’s administered project-specific grants to both institutions through Hud-Stanton; they know George attends each season’s productions. They know of his continued, if unsuccessful, efforts to increase the Somner Fund’s modest annual contribution. He’d attached his just-finished libretto and Vijay’s score with real confidence, noting his team’s search for rehearsal space and talent and how he’ll open in a small venue, as a showcase, for a limited run, early as January and no later than spring; that when the time comes, he trusts they will attend his humble production any night they like. It will give them an idea of why
Papers
should be developed for one of their great stages.
Inexplicably, there was no reply. He’d checked and checked and checked his in-box, until on the pretext of discussing their Hud-Stanton funding he lured them separately to lunch. They were both complimentary. How they admired the work! They couldn’t believe (both men shook their heads, one over a salad of nasturtium and sheep’s cheese, the other over a strip steak) he’d been writing all these years. They had no idea.
Give me a few more weeks,
they each said.
They both called this morning. As if they’d consulted each other. Wished
Papers
the best of fates. If only they didn’t have obligations to their budgets and schedules and boards and subscription holders. If only public acclimation to innovative work weren’t so slow, so arduous, especially within the opera community. “Remember how hard it was for Mozart to find a stage in Salzburg,” Fielding said. “Remember how the Academy chided Debussy for courting the uncommon interval,” Peterson said.
George hands his umbrella to a busboy, orders from the waiter, asks for a newspaper to be brought to his table, receives it. He breaks his roll and brushes the crumbs to the floor. He starts when the phone in his pocket rings. Aleksandar.
“Yes, I called. Seven times? Listen, they’re not considering it. Too
radical
, basically. I’m at lunch. Come meet me … A revised budget? I’m not surprised. Well, I’m a little surprised. I don’t care! We’re not quitting and we’re not cutting corners. We’ll show them. Why don’t you come down here and … Brooklyn? Yes, that’s far.”
He nods without looking as the waiter transfers a Dover sole from a sizzling copper pan to his plate, fillets it in two strokes, and wheels the cart away. The meuni
è
re is left in a silver boat above his knife.
The waiter—ancient, in a white coat, a napkin over his wrist—returns and presents a bottle of wine. “For the fish.”
“For the fish.” George hadn’t ordered any wine. It is not embarrassment he feels, exactly.
He eats and drinks and rustles through the
Times
. He puts his pen to the newspaper’s margin:
UH posture hunch despair whn learns falsely accused of crimes
* * *
There is so much about Aleksandar George likes. He likes that Aleksandar wears a wide, bright paisley silk headscarf folded low across his forehead, above a pair of black glasses. To George, this looks ridiculous and thus artistic. He likes that Aleksandar’s fee is so high. He likes that Aleksandar’s family fled Dubrovnik during the Croatian War of Independence and ended up on Coney Island; he likes how Aleksandar reconciled himself to his new city and to his brutal unwelcome at PS 225 through American musical theater—starting with
Oklahoma!
—and that musical theater lead him to opera, a journey backward, to sounds invented back across time and the Atlantic, back to the grandfather of the musical. Aleksandar agreeing wholeheartedly with George that musicals are light and foolish by comparison. He likes the flat hint of rudeness in Aleksandar’s tone when he answers George, followed by a swerve to the friendliest of commiseration, a pattern George thinks might be Croatian, might be theater, might just be Aleksandar. Last time they conferred, Aleksandar said, “But this with the sexy ladies is not meant to be comic? What I am hearing from you is that it isn’t—not even satire?” Tipping his paisley head from side to side. “Okay, not for making funny, you. The desert in the set mock-ups is yellow. You like that? No, me neither. So obvious. You’re right. We hate it. I’m going to get rid of it for George. You have the good eye.” He likes that Aleksandar is young—very young to have such expertise. Early on, once they settled on a retainer, Aleksandar said, “George, at first I thought you were a terrible person. Then I reread the libretto and I cried. You lift the veil of power! You show us the one percent future! From four to seven in the a.m. I could not get up off the floor of my apartment. The floor of my apartment is vile, vilest in the middle of the night. I’ll never get so close to it again. Can you believe me?”
George writes,
harem costume—massproduction logo/tattered spandex/primarycolors/logologo
, nodding as the waiter refills his glass. He draws a costume on the editorials page but it comes out as two blobs and a line, and he runs out of space before he can get to the legs. The wine is gone. He waves away dessert. He doesn’t want to go back to work. Not today. He calls Iris and leaves her a message:
“Bunny, let’s spend the afternoon together. Have the car service bring you. Or hop on the train, it might be quicker. Call me when you’re close.”
He hangs up, pays, and fast as that he’s pushing his way across the street. He enters the purple and silver spaceship of a boutique hotel, reserves a room, slides the key card into the disapproving slash below the knob, plunks down on the white bed, turns on the television, orders more wine and something called lobster three ways. His phone rings.
“You’re on your way! When you get into town tell the driver—”
“I’m hosting an open house, dummy.”
“Today?”
“The Weils’s weekend place. Uptick in people selling their weekend places, you know that.”
“You can’t reschedule?”
“Are you kidding? I’m here already.”
“What time are you done?”
“After this I’ve got a block of apartments we’re doing rent-to-own. Nellie rolled it out last month. Remember? The one we got five signatures in an hour? I told you all about it.”
“You sound like Audrey. That thing they called her in the beginning. What was that?”
“Temp-to-perm.”
“Which apartments?”
“Condos in town behind the supermarket. And a few units at Kingsgate.”
“Didn’t I read a local-crime something happened there?”
“Evergreen Terrace? I’m in the middle of town. The condos start at two-fifty. You’re thinking of when those kids stole the shopping carts from the parking lot and threw them in the woods.” She sighs. “I have to go or I won’t get this place straightened up.”
“But, no one’s having lunch with me. My second lunch.”
“Are you for real?”
“Come on, we’ll have fun.”
“George, this is my job. A job means you have things to do that affect other people, so you show up and do those things the best you can. And you assume your partner will understand that.”
“All I mean is—this is fun,” he says with a weird force. “Fun, fun, fun!”
“You’re being a jerk.” She hangs up.
He falls back into the bed. It feels good. He pulls the sheet over himself without taking off his shoes. His shoes are wet from stepping in the gush of rainwater and runoff, sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts streaming into a grate in the curb in front of the hotel. He watches two sloppy ellipses appear, gray ghosts of his feet. This slight rebellion, he decides, is the point of hotel rooms.
She
has
changed, in the last year, he thinks, with a rolling, blacking self-pity. Bolder every day, because of him. Good! Fine! But shouldn’t he get a little credit? The happier he makes her, the freer she seems of him. Doesn’t seem fair. Used to be he could do no wrong. She’d sounded—impatient.
There is a knock at the door.
“Yes!” he calls out. A bellman wheels a sumptuously arranged table to the center of the room. “Three! Someone’s made a mistake. I ordered lobster
five
ways. Don’t bother, it’s too late.”
The bellman thanks him and leaves. George drinks and picks at the chilled pink jelly he assumes is the premiero of the trio and watches the news on mute over the wet lump of his feet. The headline—a singer’s helicopter missing in the Grand Canyon, the camera panning the banded crater, rain streaking the lens. An international story next—what country, he doesn’t catch—fire, the black and wicked skeleton of a car, ash in the air. Next, Manhattan, a camera following a plump, silk-suited man and his lawyers through the press and up the courthouse steps, their jaws set.
If his helicopter went missing in the Grand Canyon, it would not be on the news. He considers the hotel porn but declines. It would force him to admit to himself that his plan—vital, spontaneous—has slipped into failure like a coat loosened from its peg.
He wants dessert, maybe a stiffer drink, something with lime. He puts his jacket back on and heads down to the cavernous dining room, lit by a series of crystal chandeliers like drooping onyx earrings. The carpet hushes the room. He sinks into a plush chair. In Manhattan it’s only in a hotel, a place for people from other places, that you sit among so much fabric while you eat. The room is mostly empty: one table with what can only be a mother and daughter, waiting for lunch in silence, another with two men he guesses are finance, women, maybe escorts, on either side of them. A group of tourists, pointing at each other’s menu.
He orders a Scotch and regrets it. He doesn’t want Scotch, he wants company. He pulls out his phone and asks to be put through to Bob Barrow-Woods. It was Bob who looped his arm over George’s shoulder and took him out for drinks when he got engaged, and it was George who took Bob out when after all that time he and Martha announced they were having twins.
“Bob, hey, I’m in town and I’ve—I’m supposed to be meeting with some guy from the Preservation Society … Yeah, no. I’ve been waiting for an hour. Guess they don’t want that grant so much after all. Unbelievable. At a hotel. I’m jammed in by tourists … No, the one across from the church, on Fifth. Come and have a round. What are you on today, pharma?”
Bob’s voice is so loud George holds the phone away from his ear. “Today? Fucking forevery. I’m looking at that IPO you said you didn’t want to bite on. Guess what? None for you. That’s what you get for pretending to know shit. Next time, listen to Bob! Hey, whatever. Watch it tank tomorrow. Then all these shits I work with—that’s you, Big Frank, you heard me—will be out on the ledge, jackets flapping in the wind, counting the little people on the street below through the void between their shiny shoes. I mean, what the fuck, right? Hey, weren’t you going somewhere? A little vacation? Shit, I remember. The old mama—not vacation. Sorry. I’m a jerk.”
“My wife just called me a jerk.”
“I love your wife. I mean it. No, I’m trying to tell you, man, I really love your wife. Hold on a second. Gretchen, shut it down out there. Pretty don’t give you the green light to talk over my call, does it?… Seriously? We’re out of—not even a Tylenol? George, as my friend, it hurts me that you don’t consider how hard I’m working, like I can drop it all to drink the day away with you.”
A woman’s laughter, and the line disconnects.
After staring at the periwinkle ultrasuede wall beside his table for an hour, George is ready to settle his check when Bob appears, slicking his wet hair off his big forehead, waving for a drink.
“Earnest George,” Bob says, “you thought I wasn’t coming? Don’t know when a man’s joking. Fucking pouring out there too. Asshole.”
And before he’s removed his coat he’s on some art he wants to buy—a Warhol lithograph nobody knows about—shit, a shit-fucking, genuine, one-run Black Marilyn that’s been languishing in a demented old lady’s Brighton Beach rent-a-cube—and another piece at a gallery in Chinatown that took eight years to make and is thick as barbecue sauce, the artist painted thousands of coats, some real OCD shit, built up three dimensions, built up a house out of house paint for the love of God, it makes him cry, and why isn’t George getting it, he can tell George is not getting the breathtaking poignancy, whatever, you’re the music guy, I guess, and they know how to make a martini here, you should see the face you’re making, like the goat that ate the poison toad and what, are you loaded? Oh, no, what are you,
sad
? No, no, no, we’re going to fix you right up, you’ll see.