The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [79]
The fish of the day was Alaskan halibut, and that’s what she chose. After many years as a vegetarian, she’d been persuaded by a nutritionist to regard fish as a vegetable. At first she worried it would be the culinary equivalent of a gateway drug, and in no time at all she’d be cracking beef bones and sucking out the marrow. So far she hadn’t progressed past fish a couple of times a week.
It was around eight when Gary showed us to our table, and maybe an hour later when we said no to dessert and yes to espresso. It’s rare for her to have coffee, especially late in the day, and my surprise must have shown in my face. “It could be a long night,” she said. “I figure I’d better be awake for it.”
“I can see how much you’re looking forward to it.”
“About as much as you are. It’s got to be like a wake without a corpse. Except last night would have been the wake, so what’s this? The burial?”
“I guess.”
“I always thought the Irish wake made a lot of sense. Pour down the booze until you can think of something good to say about the deceased. My people cover the mirrors, sit around on hard wooden benches, and stuff themselves with food. I wonder what it was like last night.”
“I’m sure he’ll tell us.”
We finished our coffee, and I signaled our waitress for the check. Gary brought it himself. How many years had we known him? How many years had we been coming here a couple of times a month?
It seemed to me that neither he nor the restaurant had changed. He always looked as though something reminded him of a joke, and the light in his blue eyes hadn’t dimmed any. But his beard, still hanging from his long jaw like an oriole’s nest, showed some gray now, and his age showed at the corners of his eyes. And it was a night to notice such things.
“I didn’t see you last night,” he said. “Of course I didn’t go over until we closed up shop here. You’d probably headed for home by then.”
“That would be—”
“The big fella’s place. You’re friends, aren’t you? Or have I got it wrong, as I so often do?”
“We’re close friends,” I said. “I didn’t realize you knew him that well.”
“I don’t, not really. But he’s part of the neighborhood, isn’t he? I doubt I’ve been in Grogan’s a dozen times in as many years, but I made sure I got there last night.”
“Paying your respects,” Elaine suggested.
“And watching my neighbors take advantage of the open bar. A sight guaranteed to raise or lower your opinion of the human race, depending where it was to begin with. And, you know, being present for the end of an era, and isn’t that the most overused phrase at our command? Every time a sitcom’s canceled, someone proclaims it the end of an era.”
“And once in a while it is,” she said.
“You’re thinking of Seinfeld.”
“Well, yeah.”
“An exception,” he said, “that proves the rule. As is the shuttering of Grogan’s Open House. A fixture in the local landscape, and soon enough the building will be gone and no one will remember what used to be there. Our town, forever reinventing itself. I heard they made the owner such a good offer that he was willing to risk Mr. B’s wrath for selling the building out from under him. And I also heard that Mick owned the building, no matter whose name might be on the deed.”
“You hear lots of things,” I said.
“You do,” he agreed. “I’m pleased to report that the era of hearing things is still going strong.”
For longer than I’ve known him, my friend Mick Ballou has been the proprietor of Grogan’s Open House, a Hell’s Kitchen saloon at the southeast corner of Tenth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. The place began as a hangout for the neighborhood hoodlums, or at least that segment thereof who pledged some sort of undefined allegiance to the man himself. In recent years it has attained a certain degree of raffish respectability, even as the neighborhood has gentrified around it. The new people who’ve moved into refurbished