Single white female

4

Allie was optimistic after her breakfast with Mayfair. He'd been all business, which was a relief. He looked like an aging lothario in his tight double-breasted suit and matching tie and handkerchief, his just-so hair style that was too young for him. Time held at bay by ego. But except for what might have been a few exploratory remarks, he'd stayed on the subject of the computer system Fortune Fashions wanted Allie to set up, and they'd had hours of involved and fruitful discussion. It was nice to know she didn't have to worry about Mayfair in that regard, sex being an occupational hazard.

The account was a rich one, and when final payment was made, Allie's monetary problems would be solved for a while. Meaning she'd no longer be financially dependent upon Sam; she wasn't sure why that dependency bothered her, but it did. Perhaps because she was emotionally dependent on him, financial dependency as well left her with nothing.

Just before eleven o'clock, when she'd parted with Mayfair outside the restaurant, the clouds had drifted away and the sun had transformed gloom into light and hope. A dictatorial Hollywood director couldn't have ordered it improved. Why not believe in omens? she'd thought, watching Mayfair wave to her from his cab as it pulled away.

Still buoyed by fate falling right, she wandered around for a while, window shopping. Then she strode from the subway stop to West 74th through the rare and sunny September day, her light blue raincoat with the white collar folded over her arm.

She realized she was hungry. The breakfast she'd had with Mayfair was delicious but hardly filling. That and a cup of coffee this morning with Sam was all she'd had so far today. I need fuel, she told herself.

She stopped in at Goya's, a restaurant on West 74th three blocks from the Cody Arms. It was a large place with an ancient curved bar and a plank floor. A faded mirror behind the bar reflected shelves of bottles and an antique cash register. The waiters and waitresses all looked like hopefuls waiting for their big break in show business, though some of them were over forty. All wore black slacks and red T-shirts with GOYA'S stenciled across the chest. Allie hadn't been in there before, but she immediately liked the rough-hewn and efficient atmosphere. If the food was good and the prices were right, she knew she'd come back, maybe become one of the regulars.

She ordered a chef's salad and allowed herself a Beck's to celebrate the way things were going with the Fortune Fashions account. Then she thought about how she and Sam would celebrate when he came home that evening. Sam. Scheming and ambitious as he was in business, he never resented her successes. Liberated man meets liberated woman.

When the waiter brought her salad, she realized he looked familiar. But she didn't ask where she might have met him. Possibly she'd passed him on the street often when he was on his way to or from work at Goya's. New York was like that; people making casual connections over and over, not really recognizing each other because their memories' circuits were overloaded. So many people, an ebbing and flowing tide of faces, movements, smiles, frowns. Pain and happiness and preoccupation. Good luck and bad. Bankers and bag ladies. All in a jumble. Millionaires stepping over penniless winos. Tourists throwing away money on crooked three-card-monte games. The hustlers and the hustled. A maelstrom of madness. A world below the rabbit hole. If you lived here, you took it all for granted. My God, you adapted. And, inevitably, it affected mind and emotion. It distorted.

This man, the waiter, was in his mid-thirties, with one of those homely-handsome faces with mismatched features and ears that stuck out like satellite dishes. He wore his scraggly black hair long on the sides in an effort to minimize the protruding ears, but the thatch of hair jutting out above them only served to draw attention. The impression was that without the ears to support it, the hair would flop down into a ragged Prince Valiant hairdo. He was average height but thin, and moved with a kind of coiled energy that suggested he could probably jog ten miles or wear down opponents at tennis.

When he came back and placed her beer before her on the table, he did a mild double-take, as if he thought he knew her from someplace.

Then he nodded and went back to the serving counter to pick up another order, probably trying to remember if she'd been in Goya's before, and what kind of tipper she was.