Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [7]
And that’s when he came into the club.
Eve saw him first. She was looking back from the stage to make some remark and she spied him over my shoulder. She gave me a kick in the shin and nodded in his direction. I shifted my chair.
He was terrific looking. An upright five foot ten, dressed in black tie with a coat draped over his arm, he had brown hair and royal blue eyes and a small star-shaped blush at the center of each cheek. You could just picture his forebear at the helm of the Mayflower—with a gaze trained brightly on the horizon and hair a little curly from the salt sea air.
—Dibs, said Eve.
From the vantage point of the doorway, he let his eyes adjust to the half-light and then surveyed the crowd. It was obvious that he had come to meet someone, and his expression registered the slightest disappointment once he realized that they weren’t there. When he sat at the table next to us, he gave the room another going over and then, in a single motion, signaled the waitress and draped his coat over the back of a chair.
It was a beautiful coat. The color of the cashmere was similar to camel hair, only paler, like the color of the bass player’s skin, and it was spotless, as if he had just come straight from the tailor’s. It had to have cost five hundred dollars. Maybe more. Eve couldn’t take her eyes off of it.
The waitress came over like a cat to the corner of a couch. For a second, I thought she was going to arch her back and exercise her claws on his shirt. When she took his order, she backed up a little and bent at the waist so that he could see down her blouse. He didn’t seem to notice.
In a tone at once friendly and polite, showing the waitress a little more deference than she was due, he asked for a glass of scotch. Then he sat back and began to take in the scene. But as his gaze shifted from the bar to the band, out of the corner of his eye he saw Eve. She was still staring at the coat. He blushed. He’d been so preoccupied with looking over the room and signaling the waitress, he hadn’t realized that the chair he’d draped his coat over was at our table.
—I’m so sorry, he said. How rude of me.
He stood up and reached over to retrieve it.
—No, no. Not at all, we said. No one’s sitting there. It’s fine.
He paused.
—Are you sure?
—As sure as the shore, said Eve.
The waitress reappeared with the scotch. When she turned to go he asked her to wait a moment and then offered to buy us a round—one last good turn in the old year, as he put it.
We could tell already that this one was as expensive, as finely made and as clean as his coat. He had that certain confidence in his bearing, that democratic interest in his surroundings, and that understated presumption of friendliness that are only found in young men who have been raised in the company of money and manners. It didn’t occur to people like this that they might be unwelcome in a new environment—and as a result, they rarely were.
When a man on his own buys a round for two good-looking girls, you might expect him to make conversation no matter whom he’s waiting for. But our smartly dressed Samaritan didn’t make any with us. Having raised his glass once in our direction with a friendly nod, he began nursing his whiskey and turned his attention to the band.
After two songs, it began to make Eve fidget. She kept glancing over, expecting him to say something. Anything. Once, they made eye contact and he smiled politely. I could tell that when this song was over she was going to start a conversation of her own even if she had to knock her gin into his lap to do it. But she didn’t get the chance.
When the song ended, for the first time in an hour the saxophonist spoke. In a deep-timbred, could’ve-been-a-preacher kind of voice he went into a long explanation about