Lucking Out - James Wolcott [50]
After a screening we would often decamp to a restaurant where informality, elbow room, and a tolerable decibel level made animated conversation possible.
“Let’s go for a drink, like civilized people,” Pauline would say.
One favorite destination was Un Deux Trois on Forty-fourth Street, where you could doodle and write on the paper tablecloths with crayons like carefree Picassos. The downside of Un Deux Trois was that it could get too loud when the theater crowd made like an anvil chorus, laying on the gusty laughter and drowning our nifty comebacks to each other as soon as they left our mouths. So it was usually to the Algonquin that we mended, which was conveniently across the street from the Royalton, where Pauline stayed when she was in town. Before its Ian Schrager–Philippe Starck minimalist makeover in 1988 (ah, those waterfall urinals), after which the staff was costumed in sleek-fitting ninja black and the dining room became the unofficial commissary for Condé Nast (with Tina Brown queen-beeing it at one of the power tables), the Royalton had a history of being a haven for New Yorker writers who couldn’t afford rooms at the Algonquin. Robert Benchley, a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, maintained a small suite at the Royalton. (And Pauline, as I recall, only stayed at the Algonquin when the Royalton was full.) We favored the Algonquin not for its Round Table lore but because of the unpretentious, unobstructed open-airiness of its main room, with its islands of couches and tiny tables with bells attached to summon a waiter. Or at least that was the wishful idea. It was William Shawn, whose delicate stomach restricted him to a regular diet of warm milk and shredded wheat, who had immortally said with a sigh: “You ring and ring, but no one ever comes.” So Samuel Beckett! Pauline was less orphaned, one or two of the waiters greeting her with a kindly “What can we get for you, Miss Kael?” but there were times when the button would be pressed and the bell wouldn’t sound, as if the ringer had been removed. This, too, added to the existential tone. If anything, service was even more Samuel Beckett–ish in the Blue Bar, which was then a small, dark cove located to the right of the main entrance, so dark that it was difficult to see the James Thurber drawings that hung on the walls even after one’s eyes adjusted to the mole light. It was a room that seemed to be designed for bourgeois adultery befitting a Cheever or John O’Hara story, and Pauline mentioned spotting a prominent literary critic nesting in the corner with a woman not his wife who later became his wife after the woman who had been his wife got wise and cut the cord. In the Blue Bar there were no table bells to ring, leaving you sitting stranded, making little hand wriggles to attract the attention of waiters who struck neoclassical poses at the bar like chipped pieces of statuary, to borrow an image from the novelist Anthony Powell. Once drinks did arrive, however, a sense of sanctuary unknotted all tensions and concerns, the outer world kept at bay.
But the Blue Bar was most suitable for only two or three conspirators at best. So let us imagine that the main room of the Algonquin has couches to spare, enough to accommodate a squad of us assembling to talk about the movie or, if the movie was hopelessly humdrum, to chat about everything else, or nearly everything. In my memory, one topic