Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [18]
—I’d be happy to buy any silver mine you’ve got, I said, taking out a cigarette.
—Next time, you’ll be my first call.
Tinker reached across the table to give me a light and then set his lighter down on the table beside his plate. Exhaling, I pointed to it with my cigarette.
—So what’s the story there?
—Oh, he said, sounding a little self-conscious. You mean the inscription?
He picked up the lighter and studied it for a moment.
—I bought it when I got my first big paycheck. You know, as sort of a gift to myself. A solid gold lighter engraved with my initials!
He shook his head with a wistful smile.
—When my brother saw it, he gave me hell. He didn’t like that it was gold or that it was monogrammed. But what really ticked him off was my job. We’d get together for a beer in the Village and he’d rail against bankers and Wall Street and jab me with my plans of traveling the world. I kept telling him I was going to get around to that too. So finally, one night he took the lighter out into the street and had a vendor add the postscript.
—As a reminder to seize the day whenever you lit a girl’s cigarette?
—Something like that.
—Well, your job doesn’t sound so bad to me.
—No, he admitted. It’s not bad. It’s just . . .
Tinker looked out on Broadway, gathering his thoughts.
—I remember Mark Twain writing about an old man who piloted a barge—the kind that ferried people from a landing on one side of the river to a landing on the other.
—In Life on the Mississippi?
—I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway—over thirty years, Twain figured this man had shuttled back and forth so often that he’d traveled the length of the river twenty times over, without leaving his county.
Tinker smiled and shook his head.
—That’s what I feel like sometimes. Like half my clients are on their way to Alaska while the other half are on their way to the Everglades—and I’m the one going from riverbank to riverbank.
—Refill? the waitress asked, coffeepot in hand.
Tinker looked to me.
The girls at Quiggin & Hale had forty-five minutes for lunch and I was in the habit of being in front of my typewriter with a few minutes to spare. If I left right then, I could probably make it. I could thank Tinker for the lunch, jog up Nassau, and catch the elevator to the sixteenth floor. But what would the latitude be for a girl who was usually prompt? Five minutes? Ten? Fifteen if she broke a heel?
—Sure, I said.
The waitress filled our cups and we both leaned back, our knees knocking due to the narrowness of the booth. Tinker poured cream in his coffee and stirred it round and round and round. For a moment, we were both quiet.
—It’s churches, I said.
He looked a little confused.
—What is?
—That’s where I go when I want to be alone.
He sat upright again.
—Churches?
I pointed out the window toward Trinity. For over half a century, its steeple had been the highest point in Manhattan and a welcome sight to sailors. Now, you had to be in a diner across the street just to see it.
—Really! Tinker said.
—Does that surprise you?
—No. It’s just that you don’t strike me as the religious sort.
—I’m not. But I don’t go during the services. I go in the off-hours.
—To Trinity?
—To all sorts. But I prefer the big old ones like Saint Patrick’s and Saint Michael’s.
—I think I’ve been in Saint Barth’s for a wedding. But that’s about it. I must have walked by Trinity a thousand times without stepping inside.
—That’s what’s amazing. At two in the afternoon there’s nobody in any of them. There they sit with all that stone and mahogany and stained glass—and they’re empty. I mean, they must have been crowded at one point, right?—for someone to have gone to all that trouble. There must have been lines outside the confessionals and weddings with girls dropping flower petals in the aisle.
—From baptisms to eulogies. . . .
—Exactly. But over time the congregation has been winnowed away. The newcomers set up their own churches and the big old ones just get left alone—like the elderly