The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [167]
Atley squinted and leaned against the table. “Come on, come on, come on—what do two people who have money do all day?” he whispered. That was when Billy kissed me, which made it look as if what we did was make love all day, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe it was part of some act Billy was putting on because he’d already figured out what to do about the birthday. The waiter was opening a bottle of champagne, which I guess Billy had ordered. I knew very few facts about Billy’s ex. One was that she really liked champagne. Another was that she had been in Alateen. Her father had been a big drunk. He’d thrown her mother out a window once. She’d gone back to him but not until she’d taken him to court.
“I’ll tell you something,” Atley said. “I shocked the hell out of one of our summer interns. I took him aside in the office and I told him, ‘You know what lawyers are? Barnacles on a log. The legal system is like one big, heavy log floating downstream, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Remember every time one of those judges lifts a gavel that it’s just a log with a handle.’ ”
The cork took off right across the restaurant. We all looked. It landed near the pastry cart. The waiter said, “It flew through my fingers,” and looked at his hand, as surprised as if he’d been casually counting his fingers and found that he had seven of them. We were all sorry for the waiter because he was so shocked. He stared at his hand so long that we looked away. Billy kissed me again. I thought it might be a gesture to break the silence.
The waiter poured champagne into Atley’s glass first; he did it quickly and his hand was shaking so much that the foam started to rise fast. Atley held up his hand to indicate that he should stop pouring. Billy punched Atley’s hand again.
“You son of a gun,” Billy said. “Do you think we don’t know it’s your birthday? Did you think we didn’t know that?”
Atley turned a little red. “How did you know that?” he said.
Billy raised his glass and we all raised ours and clinked them, above the pepper mill.
Atley was quite red.
“Son of a gun,” Billy said. I smiled, too. The waiter looked and saw that we had drained our glasses, and looked surprised again. He quickly came back to pour champagne, but Billy had beaten him to it. In a few minutes, the waiter came back and put three brandy snifters with a little ripple of brandy in them on the table. We must have looked perplexed, and the waiter certainly did. “From the gentleman across the room,” the waiter said. We turned around. Billy and I didn’t recognize anybody, but some man was grinning like mad. He lifted his lobster off his plate and pointed it at Atley. Atley smiled and mouthed, “Thank you.”
“One of the best cytologists in the world,” Atley said. “A client.”
When I looked away, the man was still holding his lobster and moving it so that it looked as if it were swimming through air.
“The gentleman told me to bring the brandy now,” the waiter said, and went away.
“Do you think it would be crude to tell him we’re going to leave him a big tip?” Billy said.
“Are we?” I said.
“Oh, I’ll leave the tip. I’ll leave the tip,” Atley said.
The waiter, who seemed always to be around our table, heard the word “tip” and looked surprised again. Billy picked up on this and smiled at him. “We’re not going anywhere,” he said.
It was surprising how fast we ate, though, and in a little while, since none of us wanted coffee, the waiter was back with the bill. It was in one of those folders—a leather book, with the restaurant’s initials embossed on the front. It reminded me of my Aunt Jean’s trivet collection, and I said so. Aunt Jean knew somebody who would cast trivets for her, to her specifications. She had an initialed trivet. She had a Rolls-Royce trivet—those classy intertwined Rs. This had us laughing. I was the only one who hadn’t touched the brandy. When Billy