Small Town

“I know where I’m taking you. At first I thought it should be someplace like Le Cirque or Lutèce, or maybe Union Square Café—”

“Any of those would be great.”

“—but this isn’t about food, this isn’t about putting on the Ritz. This is about going out in the world in triumph.”

“Meaning?”

“Stelli’s.”

“God, I haven’t been there in ages.”

“Is it all right? Because if it’s not—”

“No, it’s perfect. What time?”

“Nine o’clock? We’ll make an entrance. Can you hold out that long?”

“I’ve got a sandwich in the fridge. If I get hungry between now and then I’ll work on that. Let me see, Stelli’s. I guess I’ll take the One train to Eighty-sixth and catch a crosstown bus, or am I better off...”

“Very funny. Take a cab, you funny man. You funny rich man.”

fifteen

Estelle Safran, known to one and all as Stelli, sat on her stool at the corner of the bar nearest to the front door. It was indeed her stool, and it was not only reserved for her but had been designed and built for her. It was larger than the others, to accommodate her girth, and had a power switch, rarely used, that would raise or lower the seat several inches.

She weighed, well, none of your business, and stood five foot three in flats, which were all she ever wore. Honey, if I wore heels, I’d make holes in the sidewalk. Her round face was capped with a pile of unconvincing blond curls, and her eyes, always elaborately framed in mascara, were a startling guileless blue.

She’d been a chubby child who grew fatter in her teens. Such a pretty face, her mother’s friends said, and it was a phrase she would hear or overhear for years. Such a pretty face, and isn’t it a shame...

Diets hadn’t worked, and Fat Girl Camp hadn’t worked, and by the time she graduated from the High School of Music and Art she had said the hell with it. At Cornell she hung out with the writers and the theater majors and got a reputation for a savage wit and a deft hand in the kitchen. She wrote ten short stories and two-thirds of a novel, played Tony’s wife in a student production of A View from the Bridge, and realized she couldn’t write and she couldn’t act, and, more to the point, she didn’t really want to do either. What she wanted to do was hang out with people who did — and maybe whip up a little something.

She somehow knew that a man would come along who loved her for herself alone, loved her in spite of her weight, and she met the guy shortly after she graduated and married him four months later. Unfortunately he turned out to be a spoiled child-adult, a mean-spirited emotional cripple who’d picked out a fat girl so he could feel superior to her, secure in the knowledge that she’d never leave him, because where could she possibly go? She divorced the son of a bitch in less than a year, kept the apartment, and started having an open house every Sunday.

Friends and their friends would start to turn up around four in the afternoon, bringing a bottle of wine or whiskey, and there’d be nuts and homemade party mix to nibble on, and around seven she’d go into the kitchen and bring out big bowls of pasta and salad. Everybody ate, everybody drank, and everybody talked at once, and at midnight she threw out the last hangers-on and went to bed.

Monday mornings she went off to work, and when she came home the apartment was always immaculate, every dish and glass washed and put away, the floors vacuumed, the kitchen gleaming. That was her one indulgence, having someone clean up for her on Mondays, and it was worth it. Her shrink had suggested it, when she’d said for the tenth or twentieth time how she hated cleaning up afterward. Then hire someone to do it for you, he’d said, and for years she would say that therapy was worth every penny, if only because it got her to hire a housekeeper.

But that was only half of it, because the shrink made one other suggestion, and this one changed her life. She was working the fifth or sixth in a long series of pay-the-rent jobs, currently handling phone orders for an East Side florist, and complaining about it, not for the first time. “I need a career,” she said, “instead of a fucking job. But what? I can’t write, I can’t act, my degree’s a bachelor’s in English, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“What do you enjoy?”

“What do I enjoy? Having people over, listening to them talk, and watching them eat. That’s great if you can live on the half-bottles of booze they leave when they go home. I’ve got two cupboards full of open bottles and a job that makes me want to vomit.”

“You’re running a salon,” he said.

“And if this was Paris in the twenties, they’d write books about me.”

“Add an o.”

“Huh?”

“Change the salon,” he said, “into a saloon.”