Gotham Diary:
No Turns
16 January 2014
It was my plan to stay at home yesterday, and not to go out, but in the afternoon, Kathleen called to say that she’d be working late, and grabbing a bite at the office — and would I mind picking up a prescription at Duane Reade? At first, I rather did mind, just a little, because I should have to change into outdoor clothes. But I rallied quickly. I would pick up the prescription, mail a few letters from the post office, and then treat myself to a fried chicken dinner at Jackson Hole. Amazingly, Jackson Hole had survived the onslaught of Second Avenue upheaval associated with the construction of the new subway station, even though it was only a few doors away from the south entrance, currently a covered-over hole in the ground about seven storeys deep.
Had survived. When I reached the restaurant, it was dark, and its windows were papered over. Yet another casualty.
I turned around and walked back up Second. A new restaurant has opened in the space formerly occupied by Elaine’s. Well, according to Time Out, it opened in August, but I didn’t notice, even though I pass the place every time I go to the local hardware store. (This is why walking has ceased to be very interesting. When I’m in motion, my neck locks my view onto the pavement. To see what’s going on around me, I have to stop and turn. People often ask me if I suffer back pain, and I’m happy to say that I don’t. But the price is not inconsiderable: in my spine, there are no moving parts.) When I did notice the new restaurant, a few weeks ago — wouldn’t you know, Ray Soleil and I had just been to the hardware store, and it was Ray who noticed — it didn’t seem to be open, although I could see people through the windows. It turns out not to be open for lunch. It’s called The Writing Room.
Once again, I looked through the windows. Even at six-thirty, the place seemed to be packed. And there was a loud bar buzz, as if everybody knew or was getting to know everybody else. Maybe the old Elaine’s crowd had magically reconstituted itself. I never set foot in Elaine’s, and the same may go for the new place. If it’s open only in the evening, it’s probably not my kind of place, no matter how enticing the menu (buttermilk fried chicken). It’s very possibly a virtual club, open to the public but patronized by regulars who, again virtually, own the place. I don’t want to talk to strangers when I go out for dinner. I want to eavesdrop.
So I walked back a few steps to Café d’Alsace, which had been my fallback from the moment I’d shed a final tear for Jackson Hole. I sat in the back, because the restaurant was very dim and I wanted to read; in the back, there was just enough light. In a nearby corner, a man and a woman sat side by side. I didn’t get a look at them when I sat down (see above), but I was harpooned by the woman’s voice. She did not speak especially loudly, and I couldn’t make out much of what she said, but she modulated her voice so expressively that I felt that she was giving a performance. For a long time, the man seemed only to mumble unintelligibly. The woman, from what little I comprehended, appeared to be worldly-wise, even a tad cynical. What was her relation to the man? It was clearly not a romantic one; nor, however, did she seem to be talking to a business associate. And why did I take a dislike to her tone? Where there might have been friendliness, there was something else.
I ought to have had the steak tartare, but I asked for a burger instead, something that do only rarely, because they’re always — burgers at good restaurants — such big, juicy messes. There could be no thought of reading through dinner after all. Once I closed my book, I could give my entire attention to listening in, as if to an eccentric radio show. I certainly couldn’t see any better. I could not take a quick glance at the man and the woman; to see them, I should have to turn my entire upper body in my seat. Hardly unobtrusive! Had I been more curious than I was, I’d have staged a visit to the loo. But it was more fun, really, to work with my ears.
I was almost startled to hear the woman ask, “And what do your in-laws think about it?” Aha! She was his mother! Suddenly her trilling laugh, the Amanda Wingfield shade of which I had found annoying, made sense. I could hear his voice better now — it was nothing like his mother’s, but then he wasn’t being a mother, and she very definitely was. She was offering her wisdom while trying to respect his space. At one point, she said that something or other was “all tax-deductible,” with the assurance of an accountant that a friend might have found belittling. Her questions weren’t needling or pointed, but they seemed feinted, as if she were more concerned with how her queries were received than with the actual answers. I waited for something to be said that would disprove my hunch, but nothing was. No note of discord was struck. When the man and the woman got up to leave the restaurant, they passed in front of me, and he was, roughly, a bigger version of her, and definitely a generation younger.
There were so many unanswered questions! Did mother and son often have dinner alone together, or was this a special occasion? (I inferred that relations with the daughter-in-law were not unnaturally cordial.) Did either of them live nearby? (Something was said about books being on sale wherever they were going, so it may have been to a reading, although they were still at table at seven o’clock, which is when most Barnes & Noble events begin.) Did one of them live far away, in another part of the country? (They did not seem to be East Coast natives, although I can’t tell you quite why I say that — more manner than accent.) What did the mother do, aside from mothering? And the son, what did he do? Most of all, what was the woman like when she wasn’t alone with her son?
Was I right about any of this? It couldn’t matter less! One of the greatest pleasures of city life is letting other people’s lives take shape from dribs and drabs of evidence, and the best evidence is talk. Talk can be as entertaining as a play. To be honest, it usually isn’t, largely because people so infrequently pay attention to what the people around them are saying. Woody Allen has devoted his cinematic oeuvre to the demonstration of this cruel truth.
It’s unlikely that I should have overheard such a conversation at Jackson Hole. Decked out to resemble a Fifties diner (compleat with vintage gas pump), Jackson Hole was too loud, even without customers. The staffers were always yelling at one another in Spanish. It was not the sort of place where a mother and son would have had dinner alone together.
It was, it was not… It is not. It is no more. I don’t know about the other branches of Jackson Hole (there are quite a few, including one that’s visible from the Grand Central Parkway on the Queens end of the Triborough Bridge), but I expect that it’s just the one near us that closed, and that it closed for the same reason that so many other restaurants have closed. It occurred to me, as I walked up Second Avenue toward The Writing Room/Café d’Alsace, that the subway planners had made one terrible mistake: they had privileged automobile through traffic at the expense of every other kind of street life. Second Avenue ought to have been limited to local traffic from 97th Street to 63rd, with only the buses allowed to slip through. This would have put a stop to my favorite bugbear, the truck traffic that’s all about getting to Long Island without paying bridge tolls. Had Second Avenue traffic been limited, the sidewalks could have been left intact, instead of being shaved to strips barely wide enough for two people to pass. How ironic it is that a major mass-transit project should have had such a deadly impact on local businesses in the interest of preserving automotive normalcy. Future generations will laugh us to scorn.