Upgrading (3 page)

“Collins. Hello, nice to meet you.”

“Good evening, welcome,” says Mario, warmly. We shake hands firmly. I am obviously the only one who is embarrassed. The waiter, who has been standing behind the maître d’ takes us to a little table in the corner of the room which must be one of the best in the restaurant. Probably “her table.” The place is kitted out in royal blue with white chairs and a black and white tiled floor. I begin to feel scruffy—my clothes are quite smart, I suppose, but they sort of look like they have been worn before. Everyone else looks like theirs have just been taken off the rack. Or hand-made earlier that day. Also, unlike me, everyone else looks tanned and foreign.

And rich.

“What would you like to drink?” Marion asks as she looks across the restaurant. I look back to see another waiter, standing by our table nervously.

“Scotch with ice?” I suggest to him.

“A Manhattan,” says Marion. “Mario knows how I like it.”

The waiter disappears and there is a pause. I begin to feel quite proud to be in this smart restaurant with a beautiful older woman. And she is beautiful with her large eyes, flawless skin and that look of contemptuous elegance. Just then she finishes scanning the room and suddenly I panic that I am not earning my money. She does look beautiful—but bored.

“You said you’d had a really bad day?” Oh good start, fuckwit! I’m sure she’ll want to relive it all over dinner.

“Did I? When?”

I panic again. “When we were talking … before?”

“Oh, yes. Just the usual bunch of assholes fucking things up.”

“Oh, dear.” Pathetic! I start to dig my thumbnail into my hand under the table as a punishment for being such a fool.

I try again. “How long have you been in London?”

“Erm, let me see. Oh, a few years,” she says, looking bored rigid.

“I went to New York the year before last. It was … great.”

“It’s OK.” She takes her drink out of the waiter’s hand and tests it while he looks on terrified. It seems to measure up. Then she says, “What will you eat, Andrew?”

I am actually quite hungry. She suggests I have
tagliarini alla crema
with slivers of white truffle because I have never had it before and then steak because a young man of my age needs red meat. She has “just a salad” followed by “this shrimp thing.”

“Nice restaurant,” I say, trying to sound grateful, enthusiastic, impressed with her choice.

“Well, it’s convenient,” says Marion.

“Sure,” I say, knowingly. Yes, well, it’s not that nice, is it, actually? I pick up a black olive from a little bowl the waiter has given us but manage to lose control of it at the last minute and it completely disappears off the face of the earth. “What’s your, er, favourite, erm … restaurant …?” Where the hell is it? I’m relieved to see that I haven’t smeared olive oil down my tie or left a dark, greasy mark on the brilliant white, starched tablecloth but where the hell is the little fucker? “Er, in New York?” I finish, discreetly continuing my search.

Marion breaks a bread stick slowly.

“I often go to the Four Seasons for lunch. I quite like Le Cirque. They do good seafood,” she says. She pauses and then narrows her eyes slightly as she peers across at my jacket. “It’s actually gone down your sleeve.” She smiles gently. “Now, what are the chances of that?”

We talk about London and the weather and a bit about politics, for some reason. I make all the running to begin with, thinking that I’d better try and earn my fee after my disastrous performance with the olive. She looks uninterested for most of the time and only takes any interest in me when she is taking the piss: asking about media sales, about Reading, about my “roommate,” about my work as a “gigolo.” She asks whether I have a girlfriend and looks unsurprised when I say “No.”

“Had one before?”

“Yeah, a few.” I’m just a bit insulted.

“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting you were a virgin,” she smiles. There is a pause. That sex thing again. I’m trying to think of something clever to say that implies in an understated way that I’m actually highly proficient horizontally.

Instead all I say is, “No.”

She insists I have some pudding and orders me
zabaglione
, which she helps herself to a couple of times, sticking her licked spoon back into the warm, sweet, alcoholic mucus and occasionally pushing mine gently but firmly out of the way. But then she refuses to eat any more and just watches me finish it.

I find myself wondering how old she is. She must be fifty. Mind you, my mum is fifty-something and she doesn’t look as good as Marion. On the other hand, my mum is not rich and exotic. People in Belgravia don’t necessarily age less than people from Reading, just differently. She becomes quite flirtatious and laughs unexpectedly a few times, asking me to say what I look for in girls and telling me that I am quite good looking, really. “Nice teeth,” she says, “for an English guy,” and dabs her immaculate mouth with an immaculate starched napkin.

By the time we leave at eleven-thirty I feel that I have entertained her a bit and probably performed quite well, once I relaxed. The air outside is warmer than the air-conditioned restaurant but there is a bit of a breeze.

She takes my arm in her hands and says, “Shall I send the car away? We can walk from here.”

“OK.”

“Goodnight,” she says apparently to no one and then from across the street I see the headlights of the BMW flash an acknowledgment before it moves off. She puts her head on my shoulder. Christ, I am making progress here suddenly. Progress towards what, though? I’m not on my way back from the pub with a twenty-year-old. We walk along in silence for a while and I’m wondering whether we’ll end up having sex. Does she want to? Do I want to? Could I? Fifty? If her body is as good as her face then … yeah, why not? I’m just hoping she can’t read my thoughts in some way when I see a small group coming towards us. They are talking and laughing loudly.

“Irena,” calls Marion.

“Marion, daaaarling,” says a woman in a heavy foreign accent. She and Marion miss kiss and then ask each other how they are and reply “Good” in unison.

“Irena, this is Mr. Andrew Collins. Andrew this is my best friend, Irena.”

“Pleased to meet you.” She holds out a hand and at the last moment I decide to kiss it rather than shake it. I do the same with an older American lady standing next to her. The women laugh.

“He’s charming,” says the older woman to Marion. I shake hands with Irena’s boyfriend who has an unnecessarily long Italian name and with the American woman’s husband whose name is Moose (or is it Mousse?) for some reason. While Irena and Marion chat the rest of us look on, laughing and agreeing like an appreciative audience.

Finally Irena says, “Vill heff larnch next veek.” She smiles girlishly as she says goodbye to me.

“Sweet girl,” says Marion as we walk away. “Thick as pig shit. She is doing the old ‘I live just for my kids number’ at the moment because her first husband wants to get custody. Since she got dumped by him she has had to make her own living. I mean she’s taken up with that slimy gigolo Bernardo, but he has no money, not serious money, anyway, so last month or something she launched her own range of cosmetics. You know, the kind of things office girls wear. Staten Island secretaries. What do you have here? Girls from Reading or something? Anyway, it’s called ‘Irena.’ And now her public relations people want her to call herself just Irena, not Irena Trountz, you know, to push the perfume. So every time she signs a visitor’s book or a credit card slip she has to put a little TM after her name.”

“Really?”

“Oh God,
kidding!”

As we walk up to the front door it is opened by the South American girl who is now in a dark green uniform. I wonder if she has a different one for each time of the day, or seasons of the year or just Marion’s moods.

“Any messages, Anna Maria?” Marion asks her, throwing her Chanel bag down on the settee. Anna Maria hands her some little cards which Marion flicks through and hands back to her then she disappears.

“I’m going to have a brandy,” says Marion, walking over to the drinks cabinet.

“Great,” I say. My heart is suddenly racing. This is it. She is on for it after all. I’ve been watching her more closely since we came back. She does have a pretty good figure and the food and wine have made me feel relaxed. I realize that I’m entering the hinterland of horniness. She might be older but she
is
gorgeous. She clatters around in the drinks cabinet and then comes back with one glass and an envelope the same colour as the cards with the disregarded telephone messages.

“Here you are,” she says giving me the signed credit card slip. “I really enjoyed it.” Enjoyed it? I haven’t given it to you yet. “I’ll call you again,” she says, kissing me on the cheek. “Make sure the door’s closed properly when you leave,” she adds, looking down at a magazine, before picking it up and walking towards the stairs.

v
inny yanks my arm to one side and tries to get his foot between my legs.

“Piss … off,” I hiss, sweat gathering on my forehead but he just laughs and elbows his way in front of me. I fall across the work units and he lands on top of me, sending an empty wine bottle and a pile of magazines slithering onto the floor. We both pause in anguished silence for a moment but the wine bottle doesn’t break on the lino so I grab the back of Vinny’s neck and then yank him away by his arm. He gasps but doesn’t let go. Instead he finally manages to get in between my legs, lifts his foot and gives a good kick. There is a satisfying splat as the ball hits the far wall of the kitchen.

“Y-e-e-e-e-s. Two one, two one, two one,” he sings above the roar of the imaginary crowd and performs a mini lap of victory round the room. I wait a moment before kicking it back into play. There is more banging from downstairs and this time a shout of protest. Vinny pulls down the corners of his mouth and winces. Then we both laugh.

“Sorry,” I shout half-heartedly. Seeing Vinny still listening intently, I take my chance and boot the ball down the other end of the room. My aim is perfect—it hits the window frame. A couple of inches either way and it would have crashed straight through—again. That’s the key to Indoor One Aside Footy: precise ball control.

“Bastard. I wasn’t ready,” says Vinny.

“Well you should have been, mate.” He looks despondently at me and begins to walk away. But I know this one, so I move up field and get ready in defence. Sure enough, he has turned the ball round with his toe and is lining it up to score again. Except that I’m in the way. He smashes into me and tries to barge past.

“Since when did this turn into rugby?” I ask.

“Since I got bored of football,” he says, picking up the ball. We both have an equal grip on it and so I push my shoulder into his chest. We struggle for a moment and suddenly Vinny stops moving and gives a faint cry. The colour has drained from his face. His body goes limp. He swallows with difficulty and then lets out a breath. I release the ball and look at him intensely.

“What’s the matter?” But before I’ve even finished the sentence he has rushed forward and placed the ball on the “touch line” at the bottom of the far wall.

“Bastard,” I say, trying to get it back again. The phone rings. Still panting I crawl over to the table and answer it.

“Andrew?”

“Yeah?” I gasp, between breaths.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, sorry, I’ve been playing football.” I turn round and see Vinny trying to spin the ball on his head. It immediately slips off onto the draining board and takes a couple of saucepans and the colander with it. There is more banging from downstairs. We both yell with laughter.

“Listen, she wants to see you again,” says the voice from the phone. I sit down and wave at Vinny to shut up. “She likes you, mate,” says Jonathan, half proud, half jealous. “When did you first see her? Two nights ago?”

“Er, yeah, that’s right. Tuesday.”

“OK. Look, give her a ring now, she’s at home. Well done, superstar.” I can almost hear him wink down the phone. He gives me Marion’s number again and once I’ve got Vinny out of the kitchen I ring her. She asks if I’m free for lunch the next day.

“Sure,” I say excitedly. Wrong answer. There is a pause.

“Don’t you want to check your schedule?” she asks.

“What?”

“To make sure you’re free then.”

“Er, I know I’m free,” I say. “Just had a cancellation, actually.” Beautiful. But she laughs. “Lucky me. Why don’t you come to mine for a quarter of one.”

I leave the office at 12:25 p.m.—late as I can. Friday is supposed to be a quiet day in our office but somehow it never is.

“Where are you off to?” asks Sami, crossly.

“Colonic irrigation.”

“Urgh, Andrew, you are gross.”

“That’s why you love me.”

Sami’s expression changes. “If you’re going down there can you see if they’ve got a packet from me, I’m expecting something,” she says seriously. Either she has gone mad or Debbie, our martyr of a boss, is standing behind me. I assume it’s the latter.

“Yes, of course,” I say looking cross-eyed at Sami. I turn round and sure enough Debbie is handing out some memos. I smile meekly and piss off.

It’s grey and stormy outside but a cab comes along almost immediately and I manage to grab it just before two senior suits from upstairs. Probably not a good career move but frankly, I really don’t care at the moment.

The cab gets to Marion’s in ten minutes and shortly after that I am sitting in the BMW with her. She is wearing a dark-blue Chanel suit and carrying a Prada handbag.

“Good morning at the office, dear?” she enquires sweetly.

This makes me laugh. “Lovely.”

“I don’t know how you do it. Sitting in a dreary room with all those dreary people, waiting to get fired.”

I don’t know whether to agree so she’ll pity me and feel the urge to take me away from all this etc. etc. or to show some youthful pride and defend my dead-end job and my dead-end life. In the end I just say, “Neither do I.”

Which is probably nearer the truth.

The car sweeps up to Ciccone’s in Mayfair. In one move the driver leaps out and puts up an umbrella against the unrelenting rain. A split second later he is opening the door to Marion. She seems mildly irritated—perhaps he wasn’t quick enough or perhaps there was too big a gap between umbrella and car. The driver leads her to the door and comes round to pick me up. But, feeling slightly embarrassed about sitting there like an old woman, I’ve already set off before he arrives. We walk into each other like last night and this time both apologize gruffly.

When I get into the restaurant, soaked, the maître d’ is sympathizing with Marion about the awful British weather. He is immaculately dressed in a heavy pinstripe, double-breasted suit and salmon-pink Hermès tie. He has whipped off the horn-rimmed half-glasses which he was using to read the
Herald Tribune
and is now giving her his full attention.

“Angelo, this is Mr. Collins.” She gestures towards me. Immediately Mr. Ciccone gives a slight bow and shakes my hand. I wonder if he is amused and intrigued by my presence but, of course, he doesn’t give anything away.

“Your table is waiting, signora,” he smiles and leads us into the restaurant. It is plush, spacious and silent. It smells of money. As we sit down I glance around quickly. There are a few suits talking quietly or nodding with interest, a beautiful dark-haired girl eating in silence with an enormous grey-haired woman and two old dowagers both obviously slightly deaf, attacking huge Italian ice creams with furious concentration, as if they were performing brain surgery on their worst bridge enemies.

A waiter asks if we would like anything to drink, his heavy Italian accent bulldozing through the English consonants. Marion orders a glass of champagne and so I do too. Then she looks at the menu, her brow furrowed more in contempt that concentration.

“You should have the calves’ liver,” she says.

It seems like a reasonable idea, so I nod.

“No, wait, it comes with that awful polenta shit—you know, like corn meal mush?”

“Oh, OK.” Feeling brave, I suggest spinach and ricotta ravioli and then
osso bucco.
She thinks for a minute and then agrees. Immediately an older waiter appears and takes our order, nodding approvingly.

Marion is searching for something inside her tiny handbag so I look around the room again. Some of the suits are now looking at pieces of paper. I can overhear the others on a table next to us. Two English businessmen are listening to a German colleague. He is telling them in clear but heavily accented English about how he can drive to his apartment in a leisure complex near Kitzbhul on a Friday night if he leaves the office at about 3 p.m. and he can ski and then drive back late on Sunday night, having had a weekend of skiing and winter sports which is like having a holiday and if anything urgent happens over the weekend he has a fax and email in the apartment and so he need never be out of touch with the office. The English guys, bored out of their palm pilots, nod, smile and raise their eyebrows with feigned interest and enthusiasm. They’re obviously trying to sell to him.

Marion, still searching in her bag, is talking to me.

“Sorry?”

“What was it you said you did again at your office?”

“I sell advertising space in a newspaper.”

“Is that good?” she asks, still ferreting in her bag.

“Erm … well …” I say to the bag.

“I mean, good prospects?” she asks, finally re-emerging.

“It could lead to other things.”

“That figures, most things could lead to other things. I meant is the salary good—but obviously not otherwise you wouldn’t be working for your friend.” She grins wickedly.

“Jonathan? No, exactly.”

“Did you go to school?” she asks, making a bridge of her fingers and resting her chin on it. Fortunately I realize that she is talking about college.

“Yes, I did Business Studies at Warwick … University.”

Marion says, “Well, that sounds useful.”

“I suppose it could be.”

“Mind you, I think men learn about business in the real world, not cooped up in some school room. My father went to Harvard and they taught him things but he always said the best classes were the ones on Wall Street.” I nod, just like the suits on the next table. “He said he got to be CEO of his firm by what he learned in the job not in class.” She smiles. “I think you’ll find the same.”

“Probably,” I say, drunk with flattery. Not only is she referring to me as a “man” and comparing me to her father but suggesting that I could become CEO which, as everyone knows, means “boss” in American. “Did you grow up in New York?” I ask. Pleased to have this opening question, Marion watches the waiter serving her salad with theatrical skill and then begins her life story.

She was born, the eldest of four, in Manhattan, in a quiet street just off Park Avenue in the east eighties. Her father worked on Wall Street while her mother devoted her time to the children. Her two brothers went to Harvard and then Westpoint and have now followed in her father’s footsteps, working for investment banks. Her sister married a highly respected doctor and lives just a few blocks from her mother. They have two little daughters, the sweetest things you’ve ever seen, one of whom is named after Marion.

She, however, has not been so lucky in marriage. Her first husband was considered a great catch in New York society at the time. Edward Gordon was from an old Connecticut family which owned land all over the States and Canada and had interests in everything from oil and minerals to sugar and cotton. Their wedding at St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue was the happiest day of her life and all the society magazines were full of it. People stood on both sides of Fifth Avenue to watch and wish the young couple well.

They moved into a large apartment on Park Avenue and began the rhythm of their married life: the office for him, lunches, bridge and fund-raising events for her. Parties, dinners and balls for both in the evening. She was happier than she ever thought possible, she says, biting a bread stick.

But after a few months she noticed a change in Edward. He seemed preoccupied, irritable, secretive. One day she called him at the office to suggest they dip out of the party they were supposed to be going to that evening and have dinner, just the two of them, at home. She would have the cook prepare his favourite food. But his private line rang unanswered all afternoon. Finally his secretary picked up and explained that Edward was in a meeting. Marion didn’t mention it to him but when she called a few days later, the same thing happened again. In fact, every time she tried to call him at the office he wasn’t there and his secretary couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her when he would return. She didn’t want to challenge him, not wanting to cause a scene.

“And, I suppose, not wanting to learn anything nasty,” she explains, running her finger around the rim of her champagne glass.

After this had been going on for some weeks she confided in her mother who told her not to worry, there was probably some rational explanation.

But she
did
worry and she became ill with it. When he asked her what the matter was the only thing she could say for some reason was that she was pregnant. She waited anxiously for his reaction. But he just poured himself a drink, apparently completely uninterested in the news. “Aren’t you pleased?” she asked. “We’ll be late for dinner,” was his reply.

So one morning, she took a taxi down town to Wall Street and sat at a table in a diner opposite her husband’s office. She waited there all morning drinking coffee. “If he makes you that unhappy, he ain’t worth it,” said the waitress at one point. Marion was just wondering whether she ought to forget the whole thing when she saw Edward walk quickly out of the office building. She got up and left too, her heart thumping all the more because of all the caffeine inside her.

He hailed a cab and got in. She looked around for one but there was none to be seen. Suddenly, across the road she saw that an old man had flagged down another cab. She dashed through the traffic and begged him to let her take it—it was a matter of life or death. Obviously concerned for this distraught young woman, he let her. She thanked him and asked the driver to follow Edward’s cab which, fortunately, was stuck at the lights.