The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [184]
I looked behind us across the restaurant, and saw that some sort of squabble had erupted at the hostess’s podium, for the time was upon us (in fact it was more than a quarter past us, because they were late), and it seemed that the real Mr. Burton Miller, party of two, had arrived, and everyone involved was miffed to learn that two imposters had been dining in his name for the last hour. With ceremonial closure Leon yanked out the napkin tucked into the neck of his doublet for a bib, threw it in a contrivance of disgust across the table and rose to leave. The hostess was now clacking toward us at an angry clip, with a face betraying much vexation with us.
“Come, Bruno,” he said, “let us away from here,” and I followed him as he pushed through the flapping waiters’ doors and into the steam and gleam and clamor of the kitchen. The chefs looked up from their work in faint surprise, then returned their gazes to the food they were busily preparing. Waiters scrambled in and out of the doors in pulses of steam; spoons and pots and ladles dangled from their hooks in the ceiling. Leon led me down an aisle, past the rows of stainless-steel cabinets and counters. We slipped out through the kitchen door into an alley, escaped onto the street, and melted into the crowd on the sidewalk. A few blocks later we descended again down the tile steps to the subway and boarded a train that took us up through the city, out of the darkness, across the water and over the Bronx toward Leon’s home.
Leon lived in a place called City Island. The commute time to City Island from the heart of Manhattan was well over an hour, but, he said, the rent was cheap. City Island is, in fact, an island, cleverly squirreled away off the far northeastern corner of the Bronx, in the westernmost nook of Long Island Sound. Here’s how to get there, because if, like Bruno, your uncommonly slight stature prevents you from being deemed physically capable of piloting an automobile, you must rely on public transportation and your feet. It involves five stations. (One) If you’re coming from Manhattan, board a northbound 6 train and ride it all the way to the end of the line; the 6 emerges into the daylight from its burrow somewhere in upper Manhattan and on raised tracks continues to snake its way north, crosses the river, and turns sharply eastward along a sweeping roller-coastery curve that briefly offers passengers a panoramic vista of the city on one side of the car and the water crisscrossed with bridges on the other, seen through plastic windows that are thickly engraved in pen, pencil, coin, key, and knife with a palimpsest of graffiti, with words and signs, with the insignia of all things sacred and profane, religious symbols jostling for space among lewd questions, posed anonymously and anonymously answered, hypertexts overscrawling urtexts, vandalism in myriad languages, written and crosswritten in all the nattering tongues of Babylon. (Two) Get off at Pelham Bay Park, last stop. (Three) Fumble through turnstiles and down stairs until you reach the street, where you will turn to your left and see a bus stop. (Four) Board the Bx29 for City Island, which will take you on a journey through Pelham Bay Park, around several traffic roundabouts and finally across an ornate bridge oxidized with age into a picturesque mint green; you will pass beneath an arch that welcomes you with a big sign to City Island. If it is nighttime then you will see from the bridge a seafood restaurant that advertises itself with a giant neon lobster who suffuses the darkness with a satanic red glow and is shakily duplicated in mirror symmetry on the surface of the water below him; this massive crustacean stands on his tail and holds one