Small Town

She knew instantly that he was right, and told him that he was brilliant, a genius. She only wished she was thin and gorgeous so she could take off her clothes and show her appreciation. When she left his office she phoned her employer and quit, then went to work finding the right location and lining up backers.

Neither proved difficult. Her apartment was in Yorkville, in one of the big prewar apartment buildings on East Eighty-sixth, and she figured that was where they were used to coming on Sunday nights, so why not stick with it? Besides, she wanted to be able to walk to work. It was a pain in the ass getting in and out of the back seat of a cab.

She found the perfect spot, a restaurant that had gone under when the owner retired and his nephew took over and ran the place into the ground. Her lawyer negotiated a lease with a clause that gave her the option of buying the building anytime during the term of the lease. She made phone calls as soon as the lease was signed, looking for backers, and the first person she reached said he’d always wanted to own a piece of a restaurant, and he’d put up fifty grand.

But she didn’t want a partner, didn’t want to owe important money to anyone. Five, she told him, was the maximum she would take from any one person. And he wouldn’t own a piece of the place, she’d own all the pieces. If the place was successful, he’d get double his money back. If it went in the toilet, well, he could afford to lose five thousand dollars, couldn’t he?

She raised all the money she needed, and on her terms, and the next time she saw the shrink she told him again that he was a genius, and she had one more question. What the hell should she call it?

“What do people call it now?”

“It doesn’t exist yet,” she said, “so nobody calls it anything.”

“On Sundays,” he said, “when they’re getting ready to go to your apartment, your salon, where do they say they’re going?”

“What do they say? How should I know what they say, they’re not there yet for me to hear.” She thought a moment. “They say they’re going to Stelli’s.”

“So?”

“A genius,” she said.

Stelli’s was a success from the night it opened. Her Sunday night freeloaders, most of whom had invested from $500 to $5,000 in the restaurant, showed up not only for the opening but several nights a week. She never hired a publicist, but got in the columns without professional assistance. And why not? The most interesting people in New York were regulars at Stelli’s, and spent their most interesting evenings in conversation at her bar.

She drew writers, of course. They’d been the core of her Sundays, and they were her favorites, not just because she respected their work but also because they had the best conversation. It was important for them to be original. An actor would find a story that worked and use it over and over, delivering it a little better each time. But it was the same shtick, and if you’d heard it once, that was plenty. A writer, though, felt compelled to think of something new.

She got actors, too, and liked them, if only because they were so determined to be liked. And they were decorative, too, and drew the eyes. But she also got politicians, both local and national, and a small international contingent from the UN. She didn’t get the Wall Street guys, or the crowd from Madison Avenue, and she didn’t get the ladies who lunched or the pinky-ring cigar smokers. But she got a few of the more sophisticated cops and the hipper gangsters, and an occasional Met or Yankee. And lawyers, of course. Everybody got lawyers.

She learned how to keep the help from stealing and her suppliers from cheating her. She learned how to avoid serious health violations in the kitchen, and how much to schmear the inspectors to overlook the less-than-serious ones. She refined the menu, dropping the items that nobody ordered. She made money, and by the end of the first year she’d paid back her backers, and six months later had paid them back double. She invested her profits in CDs and T-bills, and six months before her lease was up she bought the building. Now nobody could raise her rent and nobody could make her move and Stelli’s could go on being Stelli’s forever.

Such a pretty face. She put on a few pounds every year, just a few, and she was resigned to it, most of the time. But once, not long after she’d exercised her option and bought the building, she got inspired and went on an Oprah-type diet and lost a lot of weight. She didn’t shrink all the way down to a size three, but she did get to be the size of a normal person, and everybody oohed and aahed over her.