The Receptionist (5 page)

Other restaurants—in which we had migraine-free lunches—included the Cortile, running between Forty-
Th
ird and Forty-Fourth Streets in the building next door to the
New Yorker
offices. Chosen mainly for comic relief, or to avoid inclement weather, the Cortile was a most unconvincing attempt to re-create a Creole establishment. At the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, there was a wonderful backroom Italian restaurant called something like Casa Roma on West Forty-Fifth Street toward Sixth.
Th
is place was so seductive, its menu so glorious, its waiting staff so European in its quiet deference and efficiency, and its atmosphere so conducive to long talks and gustatory pleasures that my lunch hour when we ate there invariably stretched to two hours instead of one. After that place, too, closed, much to our sorrow, we began to substitute an old French restaurant, Pierre au Tunnel, which Joe liked because it served tripe and brains, the mammalian equivalent of the repellent, squishy dishes of vaunted Red Devil memory, or an equally old Italian restaurant, La Strada, in the West Forties farther over toward Eighth in the theater district. I would drink Lillet at the French restaurant and Punt e Mes or Martini & Rossi at the Italian place before the glass of red or white wine Joe encouraged me to have with our entrée, so those Friday meals were full European midday breaks.
Th
ough the food at virtually all the places Joe chose (the utilitarian Cortile excepted) was excellent and we took it and the pleasure it gave us very seriously, the real feast of these occasions, for me certainly and, I like to think, for Joe, too, was the accompanying talk.

What did we talk about?

Mostly we talked about death. Books, of course, but they, too, were mostly about death in one way or another. It was extraordinary, really, how many of our meetings took on the aspect of a wake. We were both solemnly and merrily celebrating and commemorating death in so many of them. On the surface it might be the death or the doom and impending death of the pub we were in or the restaurant we were in or the part of the city we were visiting. At bottom it was the death of our fathers that drew us together. Joe touched me forever by tracking down my parents’ phone number in Minnesota and calling me on the day of my father’s funeral. In Joe’s case, he thought of his father’s actual death as a second death, their falling-out over Joe’s leaving the family tobacco and cotton farm to come to New York having been the first. Arrived in the city, young and grieving for his absent father, Joe had formed a close attachment to a crusty Italian fisherman, Tony Fabriziano, as I shall call him, patriarch of the Fulton Fish Market. In the late 1970s that bond, too, was threatened.
Th
ough it clung on for a few more years, the Fulton Market had already received its death sentence, and by then his old friend Tony had died under the strain. In that double death, Joe found his subject. He realized it was of this, he told me, that he had been trying to write for years—weaving into a seamless whole the passing of the old South, symbolized in the death of his father, and the passing of the old port-and-market New York, symbolized in the passing of Tony Fabriziano. A grand subject, a subject with scope and ramifications that he was willing to follow through all its twists and turns until he could not only capture it, render its sights and sounds and smells and voices, but redeem its sins, reconcile its contradictions, and elevate it like a host to heaven in praise of the Lord. Oh, Joe, what a cross you constructed for yourself, and how you crucified yourself upon it!
Th
e first ten years were the relatively easy part—it had taken Joyce seven years, and more, to write
Ulysses.
But as the first decade moved toward a second and as the notes in the drawers of his desk remained notes and refused to shape themselves into manuscript, watching it happen and listening to the note of suppressed panic in Joe’s voice as he tried—and he could only occasionally bring himself to try—to talk about it, I began to catch a glimmer of what it was about his choice of subject that was defeating him. I didn’t know I’d caught it, and I wouldn’t know until my own struggles toward articulation would bring me face-to-face with it that it was his congenital shyness and reticence about himself and his own depths of feeling that were getting in his way.

On the one hand there was the difficulty of his trying to write two books into one. He wanted to do justice to subjects as stubbornly unmixable as oil and water; the cotton and tobacco fields of North Carolina would never smell right in the fish and saltwater and concrete and brick of Lower East Side New York. It was as if Joyce had tried to write a day in Dublin
and
a day in Trieste. Even Joyce did not try that. And those who have succeeded in moving back and forth between two disparate settings, in time and space, have done so in the frame of an epic novel held together by one consciousness. By tackling the work in journalistic terms, leaving himself out, he was depriving himself of a literary character in whom he would invest authority, the authorial point of view, a literary persona to be the teller of his tale. It was as though Joe were trying to write
War and Peace
without Pierre,
Th
e Great Gatsby
without Nick Carraway,
Great Expectations
without Pip,
You Can’t Go Home Again
without Eugene Gant. Most nearly a parallel of all, he was attempting
Remembrance of
Th
ings Past
without the youthful Marcel to register it. And however skillfully Joseph Mitchell was attempting to do it, it was defeating him, and he knew it and he couldn’t do anything about it.
Th
at was painful to witness. And it is more painful still to bear witness to. Yet the story is not without its poignancy or its heroism, and there was, in the late-in-life revival of his work and his reputation with the publication of
Up in the Old Hotel,
a Pyrrhic victory of the sort that Joe’s “graveyard cast of mind” and his predilection for black comedy must have relished.

Sadly for me, by that time I had morphed into Joe’s next Zoë. He was exquisitely polite, but my encounters with him, rare in the years after I left New York, dwindled at last into an awkward drop-in or two. Our final meeting was an accidental encounter in the post office on Forty-
Th
ird. How painful to see in his eyes, and to hear in his stammering, apologetic tones as he spoke to me, the death of the beau ideal I had been and the onslaught of the bête noir I had become. Yet another death, and this one I would be commemorating alone.

But before we entered that long winter of our discontent with each other, there was many a springtime day. One afternoon as we left La Strada after our Friday lunch, Joe became fixated on a vine running up one of the poles holding up the canopy over the restaurant’s entryway. “Wh-why, I do believe th-this is a fig tree!” He often stammered when he was excited about what he wanted to say. We stood for some time as he fingered it, looked closely at it, from near and from a little farther away, stepping perhaps three feet back in order to see it from top to bottom. “
Th
e Italians, you know, believe the fig to have aphrodisiac powers.” He glanced meaningfully at me without a trace of prurience in his glance. He was disinterestedly interested in the aphrodisiac powers of the fig. Or their reputedly aphrodisiac powers. He plucked a leaf from the cleanest, most hidden, lushest part of the twining plant, sniffed it, and rolled it in his fingers as appreciatively as a Wall Street financier might have sniffed and rolled a leaf from what was to become a hand-rolled Cuban cigar. Joe offered it to me, saying “S-niff that! Isn’t that—mamm-arvvelous? F-ffeel it! A rough texture, almost like fffine ssandpaper!” I sniffed and rolled and felt and marveled. “You know, ssome people believe ZZ-Zacchaeus was s-ssitting in a ff-fig t-tree as he spoke to the C-Christ.” Now we were in an area Joe truly loved. He liked nothing better than to combine the sacred and the profane, the mind and the body, the way Yeats had noted the seat of love being so near the seat of excrement in the human structure—a sure sign of intention for their interweaving on the part of the Creator.

As we progressed on our slow perambulation back to the office, I stuffed the fig leaf into the pocket of my raincoat. It was a coat I very much admired, a terra-cotta trench coat in which I looked particularly well, I imagined, with the collar up around my face and my hands stuffed in its deep pockets. I formed the habit of taking out the fig leaf and replacing it in the pocket after I had had the coat cleaned. I kept that coat for years, and when at last I brought it out of the closet to send it to the thrift shop, I stuck my hand into the pocket to remove any personal items, and the dried fig leaf—long since bereft of its odor but redolent with memories of Joe—came out and nestled in my hand.

Th
e religious nature of our meals together sometimes approached moments of Joycean epiphany. On one occasion I recall especially, Joe and I were seated in the curve of the red banquette in the rear of the street-floor dining room of the Teheran. As our food arrived, I was intensely involved with the talk Joe and I were having; at the same time I was keenly aware of the flavors of the dolma and the lamb croquettes that were the restaurant’s signature dish.
Th
e spices of the lamb and the silky texture of the grape leaves and the bite of the dry white wine and the excitement of our finding exactly the right words of praise for the story we were considering (I think it was Joyce again, that gritty symbol of reality in
Dubliners,
“Clay”) combined into a wondrous fifth substance that seemed to take place in another dimension.

Th
ose were “highs” for me, but I mustn’t neglect my equally keen awareness that Joe’s customary psychic place was more likely to be de profundis, or, as he called it, his “graveyard cast of mind.” It was no accident that his writing in the years just before the writer’s block shut him down altogether dwelt on the bottom of the harbor and the rats who lived there as in a watery grave. I found deeply emblematic of his depression over the block Joe’s admiration for a story of Kafka’s called “
Th
e Burrow”—a story of relentless gloom involving a rodent enmeshed in a series of underground tunnels from which he neither could nor wished to escape. Only my esteem for Joe sustained me to see “
Th
e Burrow” through to the end of one complete reading. It has been beyond my power ever to look into it again.

It was at another lunch at the Teheran that Joe gave me some cherished praise for a story I had written while a freshman at the University of Minnesota. It was a thinly disguised fictionalization of something that had happened to me when I was eleven and living with my family in a trailer on the West Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach, California. I spent a good deal of time alone in those days while my mother and father cut expenses at the restaurant they were running by waiting on tables and covering the cashier desk themselves. In the way lonely children have of latching onto surrogate families, I had begun to spend time with a boy about my own age in his family’s apartment on the first floor of the modest apartment house in front of our trailer’s mooring place. Jerry and I played game after game of Monopoly, and I called my story “Monopoly.”
Th
e climax of the action came with our discovery on the kitchen floor one evening of the convulsed body of Jerry’s mother, a suicide. My idealization of Jerry’s as the perfect family, the family I did not have, was shattered. But the story, of course, projects the devastation onto Jerry.
Th
e passage that Joe praised, and to which he alluded often in our later lunches, evidently possessed merits of which I had no inkling. It described the desolation of the vacant lot next to the rear of the apartment building, where police discovered an empty container of rat poison—a particularly gruesome and caustic way for the dead woman to have induced her own end.
Th
e passage figures in the story as a metaphor for Jerry’s mother’s real life. But it was the vacant lot that so enchanted Joe. He never let me forget that lot and how much he admired my depiction of it.

Th
e day came—we were again in the Teheran—when a literary figure arose in our discussion about whom we disagreed.
Th
e year was 1974, the figure was E. L. Doctorow, and the work was
Ragtime.
It had just come out, and I praised it as wildly and playfully original, a work of genius. Joe saw it as totally false from start to finish, the work of a charlatan. Inwardly I quailed at finding myself in dispute with a man whom I considered my mentor. I was appalled at the precarious limb on which I suddenly found myself perched; in my nervousness I started to babble about the five parts of Cicero’s rhetoric by which to measure the merits of a work—
dispositio,
elocutio
,
memoria,
pronunciato,
and
inventio
—even going so far, though I had never had a lesson in Latin in my life, as presuming to give the terms in Latin. Not content with this display of rank pomposity, I said that furthermore, it was this last trait, invention (something told me to pronounce it “in-WHEN-tio”) that nobody else seemed to be doing any longer and that had so impressed me about
Ragtime.
I told myself I was doing this for Doctorow, but I was just too damned scared to say it was me saying it for me. It may have been the first tiny rift that would eventually demote me from my position as hallowed Lady of the Literary Lunch to a second Zoë.

As the years went on and I became more the horn-
rimmed academic than the Scandinavian princess (or the blond babe) of his dreams, my meetings with Joe became ever fewer until they were reduced to the occasional espresso. When Sheila McGrath entered his life, they ceased altogether. Sheila was the office manager, a striking woman with thick auburn hair, which she wore in a single braid. I had been very close to her at the time of my father’s death—she had just lost her father, too, a well-known figure in Sheila’s home in Saint John’s, Newfoundland. We had several nights of scotch and Tony Bennett (the album he made with Bill Evans) and told each other the story of our dads. Sheila’s gift for dry humor must have been a good fit for Joe’s graveyard cast of mind. So I thought there was something poetic and right about it, as if he had moved from “
Th
e Dead” of
Dubliners
to find a companion for his own version of
Finnegans Wake.