Hatched (15 page)

She offered to take Steve’s coat, but he refused, and instead draped it onto the back of the chair. “That’s strange,” she thought, “for a coat like that.” She arranged his table, moving quickly but silently to the server station to pick up the menu and wine list, then returned. As she did so, another man entered the bar and walked directly over towards her.

“I am Tom, here to meet . . .” He motioned towards Steve, who was now seated and staring forwards.

“So this is the first guest,” she thought, as she stealthily accompanied him to Steve’s table. She pulled the chair out for him and offered to take his coat, which was equally gorgeous, but in this case it was well-worn, like the dark skin of its owner. She eyed Steve as she fussed with the newly arrived guest’s jacket, helping to liberate this large man of this outer layer. In so doing, she revealed a rugged core and not-so-faint indications of his sculpted muscles.

He turned to thank her, and she had a flash of sudden recognition. This “Tom” was the mystery man, the man in black who occasionally met Jessica at the front of the restaurant. She had only seen him at a distance and was now assaulted by his animalistic presence.

Jessica appeared, in his presence, in a different light. She felt a wave of desire and jealousy. She returned to task, as Tom turned back to Steve. She thought the jacket was beautiful and unique, as it gave way into her arms. She guessed it was a vintage-style cut, but it was clearly custom made, a fact she confirmed when seeing the simple signature of the designer in the place where a retail item would have had its label. She held it close and moved towards the coat check.

“Steve!” she heard the newly arrived guest expulse. “Steve, fucking nice to see you, Steve!”

“They are clearly old friends,” thought Tina, and she turned to witness Steve rise to greet Tom with surprising warmth.

“Tom. You look good.” The two of them sat down.

“This new arrival is equally intriguing,” ruminated Tina, “and rich.” She subtly brought the warm coat to her chest. The smell of lamb’s wool lining and kid leather was intoxicating; it seemed to reek with the powerful scents of a formidable body. She thought Tom looked as exotic as his friend, but was even more difficult to place. He was part African, or maybe African American, but he also looked Hispanic, or Filipino? She approached the cloakroom closet, hung the jacket up on a heavy, wooden hanger, and then returned to the table. The two men were deep in conversation, speaking on something that seemed to be of great importance. She drifted away, busied herself with adjacent tables, fussing over napkins and the placement of glasses, but never let her gaze stray from their direction for long. After a few minutes, she returned to their side. Tom was gazing at Steve, mid-thought, and he let her stand there as he ruminated.

“Come on, Steve, don’t give me this. We don’t have to wait anymore, it’s out there. Christ, we could oversee the fucking operation with a bloody iPad.”

“So sorry, gentlemen!” They looked over to Tina, simultaneously. It wasn’t clear to her whether they’d wanted her to be party to their deliberations, but familiar with the constant occupational hazard of social awkwardness, she forged ahead. “Can I offer either of you a drink?”

The two men looked at each other briefly, and then back at her. Neither offered a reply, but instead looked at her intently.

“I am your maître d’, and my name is Tina.” She inadvertently turned towards Steve, who responded by glancing downwards at the table. She continued. “Your server, Elizabeth, will be with you shortly, but I can get you started if you wish.”

“What do you drink, Steve? Oh Christ, sorry, does it still turn you from yellow to green?”

Steve blushed, rather crimson in fact, and Tom laughed. Steve looked a little self-conscious, and so, feeling as though he should offer some explanation perhaps, Tom looked straight at her, his eyes flashing.

“We used to be roommates in college, and this guy had his first binge with me and some other friends. He had,” he turned towards Steve, “what, one beer?”

“One sip.”

“One sip!” he smiled broadly, revealing a row of gleaming teeth framed on his dark complexion. “Maybe, Steve, it was a large sip?” He grinned in Steve’s direction. “Tina, I thought he was going to
slip
into a coma!”

“I’m more tolerant of some liquors now,” Steve said to Tina, almost apologetically. “Do you have any porto?”

“Of course they have port, Steve.” Tom looked towards her.

“Sorry, Tina, my friend Steve clearly hasn’t heard much about this place.” He turned to his friend. “Steve, they have port, but it is derived from the egg of a rare Australian bull’s testicles. Isn’t that right, Tina?”

Tina smiled, showing him her own pearly white teeth.

“I’m not so sure about the testicles part.” She smiled politely and blushed slightly. “The list of portos begins on page twenty-three and continues to page twenty-six of your wine list,” she said, subtly reaching for the menu and advancing the pages forward.

“Do you have Quinta do Noval?” asked Tom, before they even came to the porto section.

“We stock a bottle of the 1962 Quinta do Noval,” replied Tina, without hesitation. She knew that because it was the very best year of the very best bottle they had. And she mentioned it first because she knew that these clients could afford it.

“Two, please,” said Tom.

“When will Ted arrive?” asked Steve.

“What time is it now, four thirty? He should be here by five thirty. You should be passed out by then, Steve. I’ll fill him in.”

It was Steve’s turn to blush, and in so doing bore the same complexion, nearly, as Tina. Tom thought about the strange connections that linked Tina and Steve across time and space: they both had flawless skin, and were both nearly hairless, except for their eyebrows, their gleaming black hair, and an inevitable soft tuft of pubic hair. It was probably as unlikely that Steve would grow facial hair as Tina. And there was something remarkably similar about the shapes of their eyes. Tom brought himself back to the task at hand and looked to Tina.

“And what should we eat with that, Tina, caviar? Scrambled eggs?”

“I have a small entrée of caviar, served with fresh egg bread.”

“For two, please, Tina.”

Tom turned back to Steve. “Okay?”

Steve seemed oblivious, and so Tom turned back to Tina and winked.

“When he gets here, Ted will probably want to order everything on the dinner menu, so we might wish to start modestly.”

Tina acknowledged the message about the forthcoming guest, and then withdrew, motioning as she did so towards Elizabeth, blonde, buxom, beautiful Elizabeth. There were lots of clients who frequented Fabergé Restaurant regularly on Elizabeth’s account alone, and who tipped accordingly. Tina, sensing a revolt amongst the other servers, decided to pool all of the tips together, and then divide them up equally. She knew that Elizabeth pocketed more than her share by not declaring the full extent of her bounty; but she also knew that the gross intake amongst the servers was double what it had been prior to her arrival, so it was only fair that she should bring a little more bacon home to placate her anxious, insecure husband.

Someday soon Elizabeth would cheat on her poor man, if only to punish him for his insecurity. On that day, she would pay him back for having suspected her for all those days and months and years of silent recriminations for acts for which she was innocent. She’d wonder why it had taken her so long, and then she’d descry the fact that those rushed torrents of passion weren’t worth the arguments, and didn’t justify the betrayal. The cycles of life, passion, and fertility, the production of eggs, and the wilting of desire, and then resurrection in the form of new life, fertilized by the decaying shells that encase my tender self.

Chapter 13

Tom and Steve were now in intense conversation, or was it negotiation? Fabergé Restaurant was no stranger to backroom, dining room, and even bathroom discussions, contracts, and betrayals. Deals, deals, deals. Tom was animated, Steve, very cool, but very serious. He was used to Tom making the pitches, it’s what he did, it’s what he had done since their time together as undergraduates. But this time it was more serious than the usual fare. Ever since Steve had met Tom in college, where they shared a dormitory apartment and, later on, one floor of a small house, he had admired Tom’s enthusiasm. But he also knew that it had all been too easy for Tom, and that he was now looking to make it all feel real.

Steve observed Tom intensely; it had been a long time since they’d been together like this. He looked African American, like his mother, but Tom’s father was actually from the Philippines, a small town called Meycauayan, where jewels had been mined and jewelry fabricated since the late Stone Age. In the sixteenth century efforts came to be focused on precious jewelry, culminating with a large diamond trade. Tom’s father, who was known as Rommel, was born and raised on a sizeable property there, and had known since childhood that people in that region were involved with jewels, and especially diamonds. He didn’t land up exploring the lucrative world of diamonds and jewels, though, despite his substantial inheritance and the value of the land upon which he’d grown up. Instead, he came to be charged with the responsibility of raising Tom, single-handedly, after Tom’s mother had died during complications in childbirth. As a result, Rommel, who was destined to become a major international dealer of precious stones, instead withdrew from the marketplace altogether. For a long time there was speculation as to what he had done with the huge storehouse of goods he had inherited, but years of silence quieted the banter amongst traders, and it was assumed that the stock had been liquidated somewhere along the way, and Rommel, heretofore a major player on the scene, would never re-emerge as a force in the market.

Steve knew Tom’s story well and always thought that its details accounted for Tom’s obsessions, including the obsession that led him to Fabergé Restaurant. Rommel had met Danielle in a restaurant after a day of negotiating sales for rough-cut diamonds, during one of his then-frequent trips to the head office of his company in Atlanta. It was a case of the proverbial “love at first sight” for both of them. They had but five days together, but they carried on an extensive correspondence subsequently, and Steve had even read some of it because of the very few objects Tom had from his early years in the Philippines: a package of his parents’ words and a pile of letters wrapped up and tied with some kind of stems from plants indigenous to Meycauayan. It was through the words they’d shared, and the vision that each held of those precious days together, that Tom’s parents came to be committed to one another and plans were made for a life together.

On Rommel’s return trip to the US, eight weeks after meeting Danielle, he learned that Danielle had taken ill, too ill to travel. And in the course of the routine exam, the doctor pronounced that she was in the grip of a nefarious infection that had recently been identified as being the result of a class of viruses emerging in the face of heavy use of prescription-strength antibiotics. As a child, Danielle had been given heavy doses for recurrent ear infections that upset her sleep and caused her to miss school for prolonged periods, sometimes a week or more at a time. They eventually subsided, although she was regularly inflicted with flu-like symptoms that seemed ever more difficult to treat with regular prescription medicines. And so a childhood affliction, probably minor in its implications, had become an adult problem with rather serious consequences, as Danielle found herself in need of ever-stronger antibiotics to treat ever-more-frequent bouts of the flu.

Tom had spoken to Steve about his parents’ romance as though it was the very picture of ideal love, the kind of love that occurs when two people know as certainly as they’d ever known anything, that they were meant to be together.

“This I, too, will find someday,” Tom would tell Steve.

Steve never doubted it. The story that Tom recounted to Steve was that when Rommel had met Danielle, who was working as a hostess in a chic Atlanta restaurant, she was in a phase of perfect health, and as a consequence was perhaps a little more open to a handsome foreigner’s advances, and a little more beautiful than usual, which in Tom’s mind could only be explained with reference to Homer’s Helen of Troy, Yeats’s Maude Gonne, or Dante’s Beatrice, the women he’d met in the course of the liberal arts degree that helped teach him such things. Rommel and Danielle went out together on the very night they met, after she accepted, in the course of his paying the bill, an invitation for a drink after her shift. They slept together on the following evening, and he was impassioned to distraction during the rest of his trip. Very little business was conducted, despite his intentions. A lot of love was consumed, however, and Rommel returned home to Meycauayan entirely consumed by the passion, the lust, and the excitement that she provoked in him.

Danielle, as it turns out, felt exactly the same. Tom told this story as though to justify his own precociousness, his notorious sexual proclivities, and his infamous audacity. Strange how the principles and the parameters of our behavior is dictated by our parents, Steve had once suggested to Tom, on an evening following a course on Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics. Tom had thought that funny, and the two of them had continued to (mis)use this label, applying it to all sorts of experiences they had in college, and beyond. Principles became the lust that Tom had when he’d go out at night, parameters the range of beauty represented by the women he’d encounter. Principles were the array of inner abilities Steve drew from for his coveted tennis game, parameters the player he’d challenge in order to represent same abilities.

Tom’s narrative about his parents continued, repeated regularly to his roommates, in those quiet hours between wakeful restlessness and sleep. With Tom’s father back in Atlanta, and the prospects for his mother joining him back in the Philippines rather bleak, they both felt that they needed to solidify their plans. In particular, since Rommel wasn’t slated to return to Atlanta for another few months, on account of important negotiations for substantial sales of some of the diamond inventory that he’d inherited from his father, they made plans to marry quickly. This would ensure that the child would be legitimate, and that they’d be able to secure legal status for him, or her, in the US. All worked out to plan, and Rommel was able to come back to Atlanta regularly. Danielle’s health improved, and the pregnancy, if anything, seemed to give her radiance and heightened desire for Rommel. Their lovemaking was nearly constant through all of the visits, and right up to the end, when, after a particularly exciting afternoon under the blaring sunlight of a July day, her water broke.