project/valet-story

That was how I found myself sitting opposite Emeline in a greasy red booth, both of us shivering under the diner’s fluorescent lights. As with most 24/7 establishments, the Silvercrest was home to a rotating cast of chatty winos, junkies in sandals, and insomniacs pondering their fifth cup of joe. A heroic waitress zinged between all of us, her sleepy smile like a lighthouse beam. She didn’t need a notepad, she remembered everything. Her name tag said LORI. She reminded me of Cookie, in that nothing could faze her. When she found someone nodding off in the unisex bathroom, she nudged him awake and said gently, Not here, honey. She escorted the man out the door, then delivered two slices of lemon meringue pie to a juiced-up couple in the corner. I watched them feed each other bites of pie, giggling like chosen fools. They poured mini bottles of whiskey into their coffee mugs, their legs tangled together under the table.

[...]

How different was she, really, from us girls at the club? She was the late-late shepherd of broken hearts, enabler of appetites, a cushy female presence to distract us from decay. If she was good at her job, she remembered her regulars’ names. She didn’t get naked, but we watched her ass just as hungrily, tracking her movement from table to table. Come to me, we thought, increasingly desperate. It’s my turn now. See me. Come back. It was her job to feed us, an angel in stretch pants. The difference was that the strip club was dark and the diner was bright, alarmingly so. At last, she approached me and Emeline.

Nice for an afternoon—but too strenuous a business to incarnate some guiding star or even an exotic fish for a floundering millionaire. Has she missed her calling? She recalls backing out of a very attractive offer two years ago: a yacht, villa in Nice, apartment in Paris. Wanted her to fly to San Francisco with him. Took her three days to realize the futility of it. Sorry now? But then other things wouldn’t have happened. As for the tyrannical rich man who was usually on the other side of fifty, that too was impossible in the long run—and anything over a day ran into a long run or just a waste. No, it was just too much trouble to comply with an assured, vain man’s whims, or revolt, or get around him—that was the kind of patience Sophie knew she didn’t have. It naturally occurred to her that she might use a floundering rich man for her ends, indeed this was mostly on her mind. It wasn’t so much a question of the means; it wasn’t at all a moral problem, but simply that if you’ve set your heart on going to Rome, the Shanghai Express won’t get you there. You’re better off walking. The Shanghai Express might be great fun, you might fall in love with a station master, it could make you forget about ever wanting to go to Rome, revolutionize your life or be just an adventure. All this was possible but it wouldn’t get her to Rome.

Sanity depends on order. Within a month of leaving the Hotel Caiette and arriving in Jonathan Alkaitis’s absurdly enormous house in the Connecticut suburbs, Vincent had established a routine from which she seldom wavered. She rose at five a.m., a half hour earlier than Jonathan, and went jogging. By the time she returned to his house, he’d left for Manhattan. She was showered and dressed for the day by eight a.m., by which point Jonathan’s driver was available to take her to the train station—he repeatedly offered to drive her to the city, but she preferred the movement of trains to gridlocked traffic—and when she emerged into Grand Central Terminal she liked to linger for a while on her way across the main concourse, taking in the constellations of stars on the green ceiling, the Tiffany clock above the information booth, the crowds. She always had breakfast at a diner near the station, then made her way south toward lower Manhattan and a particular café where she liked to drink espresso and read newspapers, after which she went shopping or got her hair done or walked the streets with her video camera or some combination thereof, and if there was time she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while before she made her way back to Grand Central and a northbound train, in time to be home and dressed in something beautiful by six p.m., which was the earliest Jonathan would conceivably arrive home from the office.

She spent the evening with Jonathan but always found a half hour to go swimming at some point before bed. In the kingdom of money, as she thought of it, there were enormous swaths of time to fill, and she had intimations of danger in letting herself drift, in allowing a day to pass without a schedule or a plan.