Bob at the Plaza (5 page)

They turned around at my “hi,” and David walked over to introduce me. “Alex, this is my friend Roz, the writer I mentioned. If you ever need a pourer, she’s up for the challenge.”

“Great to meet you,” Alex said, reaching for my outstretched hand. A large, muscular man, bald head shiny with sweat, with a huge graying walrus mustache. “I hear you two have some fun plans for tonight.” His blue eyes twinkled.

“Oh, nothing fancy, just dinner at the new Greek restaurant in Southport. We haven’t been there before, so I wanted to try it,” I said.

“My wife and I ate there a couple of weeks ago.  Make sure you taste the spanakopita, the spinach pie. My wife loved it, and she’s a great cook. Did you know the restaurant is BYOB? David, why don’t you grab a bottle of riesling from the front room when you head out for dinner. I’d give you one of these”—he gestured at the newly bottled wines surrounding them—“but the wine really should open up in the bottle for a little bit before we start drinking it.” Alex glanced at the clock. “I have to get going or I’ll be late for that Chamber meeting. Dave, can you close up here?”

“Sure, no problem,” David said, walking to the end of the truck loading dock and lowering and locking the metal bay doors.

Alex grabbed his coat and turned toward the door. “See you tomorrow, David. Nice meeting you, Roz, and you two have fun tonight.” He winked and ducked through the tasting room door.

“Alex seems nice,” I said, picking new bottles of wine out of their cases to study labels while I waited for David.

“He’s a great guy. As far as I can tell, Alex knows just about everything about grapes and wine. His wife, Sue, runs the tasting room. I’ve learned a lot working here with both of them.”

“Do they have children?”

David answered as he shut off the lights. “Two kids—grown—who live out on the West Coast. I know Alex and Susie want them to come back and run the winery, but I’m not sure how that’s all going to work out.” We left the processing area and navigated the dim tasting room. “Let’s pick up that riesling from the cooler. It’ll be perfect with dinner in a little bit. I’ll have to remember to tell Sue tomorrow so she can update the inventory.”

Twenty minutes later we were sitting in a red leatherette booth at the bright, cheerful Greek diner with our riesling chilling in a nearby ice bucket. Four-inch-high pies decorated a tall glass case placed strategically by the front door, close to the cash register. Ten pages long, our laminated, oversized menus offered exotic delights I’d only dreamt of in my snowbound home. Oh, how I’d missed Greek diners! A long-time devotee of spinach pie, I knew what I wanted without even looking at the menu. I started telling David about my lakefront project while he selected his meal and concluded with, “Stan’s going to help me with the biggest rocks, so I don’t think I’m taking a chance at hurting my back again.”

David stared at me for a moment and then reached for his wine. He sipped meditatively then said, “You know, Roz, there are probably other ways to solve the high-water problem. And first, I’ve got to say that I’m not really sure you’ll have a problem. Don’t forget, your house has been there for twenty years, and it’s still standing. This won’t be the first time it’s seen high water.”

“I know, I know,” I protested, “but I can’t just sit there and do nothing. I wake up in the middle of the night and hear those storm waves pounding on my shore and I can’t get back to sleep. Every day the water eats another inch or two of shale. I have this image of the lake slowly seeping into my house, with fish swimming around my kitchen table.” I paused for a moment, horrified at the picture I’d painted. Then I continued, “Have I ever told you one of my mottoes?”

David grinned. “The one about ‘It’s always an adventure in Roz-ville?’”

“Well, I guess that one would relate here, wouldn’t it? But I was thinking of another motto: ‘Leave no worry unworried.’”

David’s grin broadened. “I’ve seen you put that one into effect, what with all your fretting about how you’d pay for Manhattan. Once you get your teeth into a worry, you are kind of like a small dog with a big bone.”

“It’s genetic.” I sighed. “I think I inherited all this worrying from my grandmother.”

“Anyway,” David said, “getting back to reinforcing your lakefront, I could probably think of one or two guys who might be willing to fill sandbags and get them to your house. I have a friend in the volunteer fire department. I could call him and see if they could do something.”

“If they could do something, they should probably help Stan first. He’s closer to flooding than I am, and he could use a hand.”

“He’s got a son nearby, doesn’t he?”

“Aaron. He’d have to come up from Corning, though. It’s a ways off.”

“The roads are clear now, so that wouldn’t be a big deal.”

“I suppose,” I admitted, reluctant to yield my point.

“But you’re on your own. I know Stan will help you, and I’ll stop by whenever I can get away from the winery, but even with three people, reinforcing close to one hundred feet of lakefront is a huge amount of work. Even if you worked on it full-time for weeks, you might not get it done. Let’s face it, Roz.” He looked at me. “Neither one of us is twenty-one anymore.”

“I’m trying to think of it as fresh air and good exercise,” I mumbled.

“Good exercise?” David looked at me quizzically. “It’s also a really good way to hurt your back and get pneumonia.”

“Wow. You’re a fountain of positivity tonight, David.” I gulped an over-large mouthful of wine. “I’m going to give working on the lakefront a shot for a few days. I’ll be outside in the fresh air instead of cleaning closets. At least it’ll be a change of pace.”

I could see him mentally shaking his head, but he only said, “I’ve promised Alex I’d be there for the rest of the bottling this week, and I think he’s going to try to do last year’s pinot, but I’ll help you whenever I get a chance. Anyway, I thought we were here to celebrate your tax refund.”

“You’re right.” By this point the wine had kicked in a bit and I felt mellow and thoughtful, pondering our earlier phone conversation. “Isn’t it strange, the way things work out sometimes? I stressed and worried for weeks about how I’d get the money for that weekend and—
plunk!
—the Universe just drops the answer in my lap with no real effort on my part. That kind of miracle never happens to me.” I swirled my wineglass in tight circles on the slick Formica tabletop and continued, “Then there are times when the littlest thing you say or do brings your whole life crashing down around your ears, and you had no idea anything would happen.”

“Okay.” David glanced at my glass of wine, obviously trying to gauge how much I’d had to drink. “Like what little thing, for instance?”

“Well”—I thought for a minute—“I took one two-week vacation in eight years, and I lost my job because of it.”

“There must be more to it than that,” David responded, shocked.

“No, not really. It was kind of a perfect storm of horrific timing. I’d worked fifty hours a week for this company for almost twenty years. The last six of them I’d earned my MBA at night, and I was completely exhausted. On top of that, my sister had an awful time with cancer and she’d been hospitalized several times. I took a few days off and went home to be with the family a couple of times when that happened. After she died, and I finished my MBA, I decided I needed to take my first two-week vacation in years. I had plenty of vacation time accrued, but my timing sucked.” David’s eyes never moved from my face as I continued.

“My company had hired a new outside director a couple of levels above me, and he began his job while I was out. This new director had a sidekick he liked to work with, and the only way he could bring the sidekick into the company was by getting rid of an existing manager. Someone told me, months later, that the new director said of me when he started, ‘If we can do without her for two weeks, we can probably do without her entirely.’ So in the next round of lay-offs, they let me go. After almost twenty years.”

“Oh, hon.” David reached for my hand. “Jeez, I had no idea. Did you fight it? Did anybody stand up for you?”

“It happened in a ‘right to work’ state, so my lawyer said the company could get rid of anybody anytime. ‘They can fire you if they didn’t like your earrings this morning,’ is the way he put it.  Rumors of additional lay-offs scared everyone, so none of my coworkers wanted to make waves about me. I can understand it. Everybody was terrified of losing their job. I hated the whole situation, but I could understand it. Anyway”—I shook my head to clear it—“I just mentioned that example to show how you can do the littlest thing, like take an approved, much-needed vacation, and bring your whole world crashing down. So maybe it makes sense that, once in a while, the Universe compensates by dropping a gift in your lap for no reason.”

David continued holding my hand, stroking it with his thumb. “You’re something else, Roz. On the surface you’re all busy and happy and nutty and underneath . . . wow.”

“Ahhhhh, everybody’s like this. ‘Tears of a Clown,’ especially when I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine. It’s really good wine, by the way,” I said, emptying my glass.

My comment started David talking about his overtime tasks at the winery, and eventually our dinners came. Just delicious. It had been years since I’d eaten such excellent spinach pie. We passed on dessert, and when our decaf arrived, David launched into his surprise.

“You’ll never guess what I bought today,” he said.

“Your new grape vines?”

“Nope. Two tickets for
Anything Goes
on the Thursday night of our Manhattan weekend. Friday was sold out.”

“Oh, my gosh, David. How wonderful! I’ve read such good reviews of that show, and I’ve always wanted to see it!” I jumped out of my seat, ran over to David’s side of the booth, threw my arms around him, and gave him an enthusiastic kiss, much to the amusement of our fellow diners.

“And,” he continued, beaming, “I’ve made us some reservations for a nice dinner beforehand, at the Algonquin Hotel.”

My arms dropped slowly to my side. “The Algonquin? What made you think of the Algonquin?”

“Is that a problem? I thought you mentioned it from your Christmas trip to your sister’s. Didn’t you like it? That restaurant is very close to the Broadway theaters and it’s one of those historic hotels you’re always talking about.”

“The Algonquin is fine,” I said slowly. “It’s lovely. You just surprised me, that’s all. How thoughtful of you, David.” I gave him another kiss, slid out of the booth, and went back to my coffee. “This trip to Manhattan will be so wonderful. I can hardly believe we’ll be there in only a few weeks. Between
Anything Goes
, the Big Apple opera Stacey’s got lined up, my tea at The Plaza with my roommates, and singing at Carnegie Hall, I can’t imagine a better weekend.”

“I forgot about the opera,” David said. “That’s included in our package, right?”

“Yup. Just like the boat trip after the concert. We’re really getting good value for the money. It’s going to be so much fun.” I finished my coffee and searched the room for our waitress and a refill.

“I’m looking forward to the boat trip, but I’m a little iffy about the opera. Which one is it?”

“I know it’s one of the standards.
Carmen
, I think. It’s somewhere in our paperwork.”

David took my hand again. “What I’m looking forward to more than anything is spending some nice relaxing time with you when I can focus on you and nothing else.”

I stroked his hand softly. “I’d like that,” I said as I smiled at him. “Although I’m not sure how much free time we’re going to have that weekend. It sounds pretty packed.” The waiter dropped off our bill, which I snatched, breaking the mood. “Nope, remember I’m treating. We’re celebrating my tax refund.”

“Okay, okay, okay. I wouldn’t dream of fighting you on that one.” David held up his hands in mock defeat. “We’d better get going. I’ve got another five a.m. bottling call tomorrow morning.”

“Those rocks aren’t going to throw themselves into a wall either, so I’d better get going, too,” I said, shimmying over the booth’s plastic cushions.

“Remember, just keep telling yourself it’s fresh air and good exercise.”

“Yeah, right.”

After a few minutes of good-nights by his truck, we drove our separate ways, David, to settle into the well-earned sleep of the just, and me, to toss and turn all night thinking about the Algonquin.

How can I explain this? Short version: I had already planned on visiting the Algonquin during my Manhattan weekend. Long version: I hoped to find Bob there, which wouldn’t exactly be easy to explain in the middle of dinner with David. I knew, based on my last weird visit to the hotel, that Bob had some attachment to it. Our working theory was that he had once been some kind of participant in the Algonquin Round Table, a collection of bright young writers, actors, critics, and artists back in the Roaring Twenties. We’d never exactly pinpointed Bob’s original identity because of his spotty memory and the stacks of badly organized paper files in the afterworld. But if there was one place in the world where I could hope to run my ex-ghost to ground, it was the Algonquin. I had already planned to visit the hotel, come hell or high water. (‘High water.’ Huh, interesting. Talk about Freudian slips . . .)