Three-Martini Lunch (35 page)

A
t first I only read Miles's pages in small doses. I think I put it off a little because I didn't know if it was his diary or what and if it turned out to be terrible stuff I knew I would feel awkward about that when I went to return the composition book. But the stuff Miles had written in the café that day had been all right and it just so happened these pages were pretty decent, too. Right away I saw the stuff had merit. Some of it needed small adjustments here and there and as I read I marked those places for Miles's benefit, trying to be helpful. Criticism is a form of true help even though not everybody can see his way clear to this all the time. It occurred to me that by doing Miles this favor and marking down my suggestions for improvement I might have a second shot at an apology.

If I am being honest, then I will tell you I had a second motivation in reading and marking up Miles's pages and that was to distract myself from my impending lunch-date with My Old Man. I was confident in the novel manuscript I had mailed to him at Bonwright but there was just something about the old bastard that always got my hands to turn all clammy.
This meeting at Keen's would determine my future—everything had been building towards it—and to think about that fact alone was a little like trying to stare directly into the sun. You had to look away and I found that focusing my attention on Miles's composition book was a good way of doing this.

It was tricky marking down my criticism at first because I wasn't entirely sure what I was reading. It seemed like a memoir at times and at other times it seemed like war fiction. A lot of it was about being in the war and I was surprised at the vivid portrayal of various battles. At first I thought Miles had a strange and unruly imagination, but then I recalled what his little brother had said when he had run into the coffee shop and asked if Miles was going to read to him some more about their father, and I understood better what it was I was likely reading and I respected the writing all the more for its authenticity. I'm all for imagination but if you ask me Hemingway had it right when he said there is no substitution for true-life experience and that you should write what you know. I don't want to hear about the war from some phony who never went to the front lines and I don't know why anybody else would, either. Anyway, I knew that wasn't the case with this manuscript after I pieced together that the war bits were probably Miles rewriting his father's stories.

Overall, there was a real narrative in it, too, and that excited me. The story was two-fold, because some of it consisted of his father's anecdotes from the trenches—about what it was like to be hungry and tired and not have any socks, all the while ducking mortar shells and carrying guys whose legs had been blown off through a veritable rat-maze and that sort of thing—and the other part of the story was about Miles and about what it had been like to grow up thinking your father was a kind but doddering and decrepit old man, only to find out later he had been noble and brave and a war hero. The first part was gripping in its retelling of dramatic events but the latter part had a kind of unflinching honesty about it and this was where Miles's writing was at its truest and strongest. He wove
together the father's war scenes and the son's scenes at home with his cripple of a father very well and you could see a sort of modern portrait of a father and son emerge. Naturally there was a sense of sadness and culpability in discovering he had underestimated his father, and Miles had a graceful way of diffusing the sentimentality of the story that served him very well.

In any case, I had a good time reading Miles's pages and it even got so I looked forward to the part of my day where I sat down to read his work. One thing about reading the pages of another novice writer is that you can learn a lot by studying the parts they get right and the parts they get wrong. Having grown up with an editor for a father I could easily spot the flaws in Miles's writing but at the same time his work was often very good and in a lot of ways he had developed strengths that were opposite my own. I don't remember when I started copying passages from his pages over into my own notebook, but at some point I began to do this as a way of dissecting what was good about Miles's technique as a means to learn these qualities and adopt them for myself. I would copy out a few of Miles's passages by hand and then I would type them up on the typewriter.

When I reached the typewriter stage, I made little edits to improve the plot and I changed this-or-that detail to make the story more personal to me. For instance, I changed the young man and his father from being Negroes to being white, because it seemed more authentic and more in keeping with what Hemingway said about writing what you know and I was wise enough to understand at that phase in my career I was too green to write from my imagination of what it was like to be a Negro. In any case, all of this rewriting was very good practice. When I reread the pages I'd typed up and saw how nicely Miles's story was shaping up under my expert eye I felt my confidence return and I began to feel hopeful again about what My Old Man was going to make of the manuscript I'd sent him.

“Have you been using the typewriter?” Eden asked me one day when
she noticed the typewriter ribbon looked pretty beat up. I told her I had but that it was no big deal.

“You know I'm willing to type for you,” she reminded me.

“That's all right,” I said. “I'm working on something new and I think typing it up myself is helping things along. And besides, it's good exercise for me: I wouldn't want to forget how to punch the old typewriter anyhow. You know, some guys compose on the typewriter. Their sentences just come straight out their heads and into type-print and soon enough that'll be me.”

I couldn't tell her about what I was typing because I didn't want to explain about how I'd gone up to Harlem to see Miles. I was still disappointed that it hadn't gone as I'd pictured it would and that things with Miles were still tense. In any case, for now she knew nothing about any of that Miles business and she smiled at me from across the room, happy I was feeling creative again and that I'd gone back to writing while I waited to hear back from My Old Man about the novel I'd sent him.

“All right,” she said. “Let me know if you need me to get a new ribbon.”

“I will,” I said.

F
i
nally the day for my lunch with My Old Man arrived. The weather was beginning to turn cold in earnest just then and as I roamed the streets of midtown on my way to Keen's, half the people I passed looked chilled and stiff in their fall jackets and the other half looked warm and stuffed, bundled into their bulky winter overcoats. The city was electric with the energy of late fall. Cold bluish light filled the narrow triangle of Herald Square and pigeons stalked around in jerky, pointless circles pecking at bits of discarded paper. The air was laced with the peculiar sweet yet burnt smell of roasted chestnuts.

I was the first to arrive at Keen's and the maître d' walked me through the dark wood-paneled dining room to my father's usual table under a grim portrait of a man in a wig who must have been important to New York in some way back in the day and who looked like George Washington but was not George Washington. I'd woken up with a strong case of nerves that morning so I'd decided to walk the whole way up from the Village and I'd smoked a bit of tea during my walk and now that I was sitting
down it really started to hit me. The tea was doing a number on my head and I sat there lost in the beautiful blankness of the white tablecloth until I looked up and saw My Old Man crossing the room towards me.

“I've never known you to be early.”

“Ah, yes. Well, no one's perfect,” I said. I don't know why I said that, but it seemed like a witty thing to say at the time, but as soon as I said it I could tell neither of us knew how I had meant it. I was beginning to think maybe I'd gone a little overboard on the tea, which started to panic me because I thought my father would see it in my eyes and I'd be busted for sure. I had doubted he would smell it because Keen's was very famous as a place where men went to smoke pipes and all around us men who had finished with their lunches were lighting up. I realized I was getting paranoid and needed to calm down. I reasoned with myself that there was nothing I could do about it now except to play it cool and anyway My Old Man seemed significantly less interested in my eyes than he was in the menu. He put on his reading glasses and disappeared behind the enormous rectangle of oversized card stock.

“Don't you have that thing memorized by now?” I asked. “And anyway, isn't the point that everyone orders steak here?” I was trying to be jolly and I'd said it in a jokey way and meant it as a friendly comment, but for some reason My Old Man wasn't in a very good humor that day.

“They have different cuts,” he said. “And don't be insolent, Clifford. If I'm looking at the menu, it's for a reason. Trust me, with all the reading I do for a living, I don't go around looking to read things for no reason.”

I hadn't expected him to snap at me like that and I could see no source for it, but it shut me up pretty good for the next few minutes. I wondered if I wasn't going to be getting bad news about the draft I'd given him. But I told myself this was just my paranoia talking and that I needed to calm down and let the lunch unfold. I was dying to cut to the chase, but after our exchange about the menu it would've been terrible to bring the
subject of my pages up. And I knew enough about My Old Man to let him be the one to bring it up first. Besides, it was better to get to him after he'd had two or three martinis and not a second earlier.

I waited patiently while our lunch dragged on. At that point the tea really
had
made me lose all sense of time and it seemed like ages before our steak came and then another century before the creamed spinach we'd ordered finally showed up, but luckily the waiter was very attentive with the martinis and they came one after another in generous-sized glasses with lots of green olives. By the time the dessert cart rolled around, the tea had all but worn off and had been thoroughly replaced with a gin buzz. I ordered bananas Foster. They brought out the bananas and we looked on while a waiter poured rum over the top and lit it on fire and then dumped the whole thing over vanilla ice cream. I don't know why I ordered it. I usually don't like bananas; I think I just wanted to see the fire. Besides, I had a sweet tooth from all the marijuana I'd smoked and I didn't want to be sitting there nervous with nothing in front of me while My Old Man smoked.

As a general rule, My Old Man never ordered dessert at Keen's. Instead he handed over his little membership card and the waiter sent someone up to fetch down his pipe. They were funny when they brought out people's pipes. They always put it on a silver platter and draped a purple napkin over it, and then when they got to the table they whipped the napkin off like they were performing some kind of magic trick. This made me laugh a bit because it wasn't like the guy being presented with the pipe was ever surprised by what was under the napkin; he owned the damned thing, for crying out loud. I wondered if they had ever brought someone the wrong pipe, because then it really
would
be a surprise.

In any case, they brought out My Old Man's pipe and pulled off the purple cloth and he picked it up and proceeded to light up.

“About your pages,” he said, leaning back and puffing on the pipe.

“My submission. The novel draft,” I said, not so much to correct him as to remind him how big my ambitions were and how seriously I was taking things.

“Yes,” he said. I waited while he puffed some more. “I'll be frank . . . it's half-baked at best.”

“Well, of course,” I said. “It's not finished yet.”

“Hmmm.”

“The point is the potential.”

“I agree,” My Old Man said. “The point is the potential. And I have to tell you, Clifford, I'm not entirely convinced it has that.”

My mouth fell open. “No potential?”

He shook his head. “I don't see it.”

I blinked at him or at least I think I blinked at him but the combination of having smoked a lot of tea and having been unexpectedly ambushed probably meant I only sat there wide-eyed and staring.

“There,” he said affably. “Now I've gone and said it and we can get on with our afternoon. You know, I'm just as uncomfortable about this as you are, Clifford—perhaps even more so. Fathers don't like to have to be the bearer of such news.”

“No potential?” I repeated.

“I can tell you're disappointed, but it's time you took it on the chin like a man.”

“You're . . . you're jealous,” I said with sudden revelation. “You wanted to be a writer when you were my age but you didn't cut it and now you can see I've got the balls you haven't.
I'm
the one who's a writer!”

All at once his hand struck the table with a violent slap and his voice turned mean as hell. “Insult me all you want, Clifford, but I've built a successful career on being able to tell a writer from a beatnik, and I'm sorry to be the one to say it, but no, Clifford, you're
not
a writer, and you should face the very real possibility you never will be.”

“Well, gee, Pops. Don't beat around the bush because you're worried you might hurt my feelings.”

He said nothing and instead smoothed the tablecloth and began glancing furtively around the restaurant and I could tell he was trying to determine whether anyone he knew had witnessed our argument.

“Thanks for the swell lunch,” I said, and put my napkin on the table and walked out. I had tried to deliver the line with dignity and disdain but it came out sounding like the kind of sarcastic comeback a spoiled brat would dish out.

•   •   •

I
'd been looking forward to Keen's for the better part of a week and now things had gone completely pear-shaped but that wasn't even the worst of it, if you can believe it. After I left My Old Man, I went straight down to the Cedar Tavern and ordered up some god-awful Wild Turkey and once Mitch, the bartender, had poured it for me I told him he might as well leave the bottle. He shot me a look of pity but didn't say anything, only left the bottle on the bar and I promptly took it over to a booth in the corner and hunkered down, ready to drown my sorrows.

The funny thing about the Village back in those days was everyone was always barhopping and if you were a Village kid and you sat around the same bar long enough you would eventually see all the other Village kids as they made their rounds. Sure enough, after I'd been drinking for a while, in walked Bobby and Pal and with them I noticed Gene and another fella. It was a gloomy day and I was kind of hunched up low in a booth, and they sat in another booth right behind me and never saw me.

I was in a foul mood of course and already drunk to boot so I wasn't exactly eager for company and I took a minute before getting up to say hello. I heard Gene's friend ask him about how Gene was making out with
The Tuning Fork
. My ears perked up. My father had belittled my novel
draft, but there was still the story that had run in
The Tuning Fork
and I figured I had that to my credit, at least.

“It's difficult to say,” Gene answered the other fella. “The copies I put out around the Village were all snapped up but part of the point in creating the journal was to get the attention of the publishing houses and see if I couldn't influence their taste here and there.”

“It was a very nice-looking issue,” Pal said, in typical Pal fashion.

“Yeah, it was nice-looking, and the content was top-shelf,” the friend said. “Except for that terrible piece by that one fella.”

“Which one?” Gene asked.

“The Hemingway imitator. Some sort of terrible prep school drivel about a guy and his girl at a baseball game. I don't know why you took it.”

“I know . . . but there was a reason for that,” Gene said. “The guy who wrote it is Roger Nelson's kid.”

“You mean Roger Nelson, the editor at Bonwright? His son?”

“Cliff,” Bobby chimed in. “His name is Cliff.”

“Oh, that's right,” Gene said, nodding to Bobby and Pal. “You two are buddies of his.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. I waited for him to really give it to old Gene, but when he continued all he said was “But, say, you were wasting your time if you wanted to get to Roger Nelson through his son. Cliff and his old man are like cats and dogs.”

“I didn't know that when I took the piece,” Gene said, “or I wouldn't have taken it. I thought if I printed Cliff's story his father would be sure to read it, and even if his son was a hack he might see some of the other fellas' work and they'd get exposure that way.”

I waited a few minutes for Bobby—or even Pal, though Pal was not known for confrontation—to really lay into Gene and tell him where he could go, but as the conversation moved on to other subjects I realized I was waiting for nothing. Bobby wasn't going to defend me and neither was Pal and maybe this was because all the while when they were telling me
what a swell guy I was and how they believed I would someday be a writer if I kept at it, they hadn't believed in me after all.

Talk about kicking a fella while he's down. I sat there not moving and barely breathing as they talked and drank until finally they pushed off to the next place.