Cafe Boulud.
It's a restaurant - a few high heeled, excruciating, my feet are bloody (literally) little mermaid swords, blocks from my friend's house and so we walked, a rapier in the groin a step, first to the Carlyle Hotel where we sat in Bemelmen's Bar.
I love this bar. I met my old (as in 30 years ago) boyfriend who used to work at the UN here, waiting in another kind of agony for him to turn up, which he eventually did after 30 minutes. This time time round it's just me and my friend, both nursing warmish vodka martinis (don't they know they have to be ice cold and steaming like liquid nitrogen?) and chewed the fat of our marriages. Or rather I chewed the fat, the gristle and sucked the marrow out of the bones of my marriage, not to mention the salt off all the chips, the cheese straws and the macadamia nuts, while she listened and nodded, and didn't eat any of the snacks.
By the time we left I could hardly feel my lips, or my feet, so the drink had a medicinal affect and allowed me to walk into the restaurant upright with a smile on my face, but even so, New York is a city where nobody ever catches your eye if you look like me - the gaze doesn't rest but glides over you unseeingly like a swipe with a cloth from a disinterested maid - well it does on the Upper East Side anyway. Fat and fifty merge into a cloak of invisibility but there are more people wearing it than I remembered. I sat between my two dinner dates, dazzled by diamonds on fingers and ears and swapped caustic comments about men and life, like the three wise monkeys – Eat-no carbs, See-no carbs, and Fear-no carbs. I was ‘fear-no’ having eaten all the bread... There was something chocolatey for dessert but I can't remember more than that it tasted nice as I was so exhausted that it was all I could do not to let my face fall into the plate. The walk back, still painful, but mercifully short, was fuelled the thought of bed so that managed to arrive back at the house without carrying my shoes which I immediately threw back into the suitcase. I will never ever wear the dratted things again.
Manolo you can kiss my ankle.
The next day I met an old friend whose face was the first I saw when I arrived in New York, and his apartment in Park Slope in Brooklyn the first place that I heard Sarah Vaughn and Betty Carter and Charlie Parker, sitting in the window of his place on Eighth Avenue, watching the street walk by. He had a black and white apartment and a black and white marriage, and a decidedly gray life, and it was he who took me around Manhattan and showed me China Town and Little Italy, Greenwich Village and The Empire State Building. It was he who ate shrimp sandwiches with me on 7th Avenue, he who took me to see a rerun of Woody Allen's Manhattan in the cinema there, and who sat with me until 2am drinking Grand Marnier in the bar on the corner. We walked up Fifth Avenue and down Madison, we took the D train into Manhattan to go dancing and when it broke down, we got stuck on the bridge until 4am so that we arrived in midtown in time to have breakfast with hookers in a brasserie that is now a fancy, shmancy restaurant. So this man is, and always will be, New York to me. When he was busy, I pretended I went sightseeing but in fact Manhattan intimidated me without his hand to hold, and after one trip to the twin towers and Wall Street, I stayed in Brooklyn and walked in the park, or went to the Museum, or hid in the pagoda in the Botanical Gardens where I wrote my diary in the rain, then went back to the apartment when everybody had left and spent the day reading.
So he's sitting opposite me now. He still looks the same though he has a dusting of icing sugar on his shaved head, and instead of an oiled Abercrombie and Fitch physique, a tiny stomach that he points out to me before I've even sat down. To me, he's still New York. He's limping from serious back surgery and I'm just limping. If we're playing body poker, I can see his stomach and double it and raise him an ass and two boobs but I don't think he really sees me at all, so it doesn't matter. I see the past, and he just sees someone that comes to the city now and again, and he keeps away from nostalgia the way you do a rabid dog, walking quickly away from it so it doesn't have a chance to bite you.
We eat. We play a sort of conversational game of draughts, each of us simply mirroring the other's moves. I tell him about my kids. He tells me about his kid. I ask about his relationship. He asks about mine. I tell him what I have been doing and he tells me what has been doing. I talk about my book and I need Windolene to buff up his expression. I get the check. It's $63, $75 with the tip.
We walk out of the restaurant, or at least I walk and he hobbles a little until he shakes the stiffness out of his leg, he takes my hand like he used to do almost thirty years ago and, unlike the rest of me, that's one part that still stays the same size, and feels tiny in his big bear mit as the fingers interlace with mine and curl up like a clam shell.
But we don't go far. Instead of walking through Manhattan in the early hours of the morning, we make it to the end of the block in the middle of the day. On Sixth Avenue he flags a cab and hugs me. then kisses me goodbye. I wave at him out the window but he's met someone on the street that he knows and he's smiling at him. But I wave anyway.
The cab down town cost $18 and $15 to ride back to the house. I write it in my little account book - but you can't put a price on memories, which are priceless, according to the Mastercard advert.
Well yes you can - and this one was $108.
But still sort of priceless.
