Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (15 page)

As for the waitstaff, they were either oblivious to what must have seemed like an odd pairing or incredulous and vaguely dis
approving. My enhanced status in the kitchen, especially, did not sit easily with servers who had been working in the Dining Room for years. Deane thought the whole thing was hysterical and teased me about it relentlessly, often making off-color remarks as he breezed by me in the kitchen. Belinda thought Leo was a dead end. There was something about him, she main
tained, that was just not right.

Belinda, however, was more concerned with her own prob
lems than my romantic wanderings. She’d had quite enough of the Dining Room and its politics. Carol had given her a number of pink slips already for various infractions and she was on the verge of being fired. Belinda was very resourceful. Within weeks of my first date with Leo, she was hired at an upscale Italian restaurant in a small, fashionable shopping center. She left the Dining Room without so much as a day’s notice. I missed her sorely.

My relationship with Leo heated up, fueled by the fact that he was only visiting and would shortly have to return to Col
orado and take care of business there. He owned a house, he told me, and managed a restaurant besides. He also told me that he had a couple of ex-wives, both of whom he was still on good terms with. He took me out to dinner frequently and we spent several afternoons sitting by the river, drinking up the last warm days of an Indian summer. He offered to buy me a new closetful
of clothes and I turned him down. He was definitely coming back for me, he said. I was too good to let go. I was precious. A rare jewel, or something similar.

When Leo went back to Colorado, I was devastated. Despite my better intentions, I had managed to get myself entirely wrapped up in him and our little romance. I was also quite con
vinced that despite his protestations to the contrary, I would never see him again.

With Belinda and Leo gone, the Dining Room quickly became unbearable. No longer a complete novice, I had become comfort
able with the more exacting aspects of fine dining. Belinda had taught me well. I was able to open a bottle of wine with as much panache as she and I was even overcoming my fear of being blinded by flying champagne corks. I could balance the large trays on my shoulder with ease and I could fold napkins with the crisp
ness of origami. However, I could never get used to the Dining Room patrons. Deane had been completely correct in his descrip
tion of them. They seemed like an extremely embittered lot, despite all their money. They were very demanding, besides, and truly regarded us as if we were a somewhat lower form of life. I had many customers who never so much as looked at me when I stood at their table. Others repeated their orders to me several times, slowly and loudly, as if my brain were limited and needed the extra time to process this complicated information.

Besides all of this (which would have been bearable if the payoff had been big enough), they were bad tippers. There was no cash in the Dining Room, since all the patrons were members of the club. At the end of the meal, the diner had only to write in the tip and sign the check. I saw some of the worst tips in my life scrawled on those checks. In fact, a standard rule of thumb was that the wealthier the guest, the lower the tip. As a final insult, all the tips were added directly to our regular wages, so the whole lot was taxed at a much higher rate. I hadn’t paid
much attention to this in my early days in the Dining Room because I was busy learning what I’d said I already knew, and then I was busy creating my own kitchen drama with Leo. With that behind me, though, I began noticing that I wasn’t making very much money, after all, and I really didn’t care for the people I waited on.

With Leo gone, too, Carol stepped up her efforts to make life miserable for me. She scheduled me for weeks of double shifts and broke up my days off so that I never had two in a row. I sensed that she was waiting for a reason to write me up, and I knew a confrontation between the two of us was inevitable. I got tired just thinking about it.

I shared my complaints with Belinda, whom I still saw fre
quently. Belinda was really enjoying her new job and told me that she was making much better money than she had in the Dining Room. All I had to do was say the word, she told me, and she’d arrange an interview with her manager for me. I told her I’d think about it.

Leo called me infrequently from Colorado. When I told him about the oppressive conditions in the Dining Room, he offered to speak to Hans on my behalf and arrange for me to interview “upstairs.” The thought of working in the club’s food and bever
age office with Carol was totally repugnant. I told Leo to forget it.

“Well, it won’t be long before you’re out of there,” he told me. “I’m coming to take you away from all of that.” He went on to tell me how we would travel around the world together, spin
ning a tale that I couldn’t believe but wanted to hear anyway.

Leo showed up in the Dining Room a couple of weeks later. I was working a Fantasy, and Deane came up behind me, covered my eyes with sweaty hands, and led me into the kitchen. “Guess who’s here?” he said.

“Hi, little girl,” Leo said, laughing. When he leaned over to embrace me, there was a smattering of applause from the chefs
behind him. As for me, I had become a believer. Leo had come back for me. He might as well have ridden a white horse right into the Dining Room.

Leo was a little more subdued than he had been a few weeks before. He had a lot of business to attend to back home, he said, and he was feeling the pressure. He was prone to migraines and had to leave the kitchen a couple of times to lie in a dark room until they subsided. He assured me that after he was finished with his job for Hans, we’d make plans to take off and start our lives together. So, although I was unhappy to see him go when he left again for Colorado, I was convinced that he would be back very soon.

Never one to wait patiently, I wanted to call Leo and discuss our plans, but I found that the number he’d given me was dis
connected. I held on for a couple of days, expecting him to call me, but my phone remained silent. I called directory assistance to find a new number for him, but they had no listing for anyone by his name. A slow, insidious panic began forming in my brain. Belinda shook her head and Deane clicked his tongue. Their advice was to forget about Leo before I discovered things I really didn’t want to know.

After three weeks with no word from Leo, I did something I can only marvel at now. I called Hans, as if he were a buddy of mine and not my boss, and asked him if he had a working phone number for his friend Leo. It took Hans a few minutes to figure out who I was. Hadn’t Leo talked about me? I asked him. Did he know that Leo and I were seeing each other? Hans remained silent for several seconds after I delivered this information. I felt myself break out in a sweat. When Hans spoke again, it was in a tone that indicated pity, annoyance, and a mild disgust all at the same time.

“Didn’t Leo tell you that he was married?” Hans asked me.

“Married?” I echoed.

“He has a baby son,” Hans went on. “Leo Jr.”

“But he can’t have children,” I said. “He was injured in Vietnam.”

“Leo,” Hans said patiently, “was never in Vietnam.”

I’m still not quite sure how I managed to get through the rest of the conversation. I didn’t hear anything else Hans said until he finished by saying, “I’m sorry,” and hung up.

The only thing that remained clear to me after my phone call to Hans was that I would no longer be able to work in the Dining Room. The humiliation alone, with everybody knowing what a fool I’d been, was reason in itself to quit immediately. I called Belinda and asked her to arrange the interview she’d offered to get me. When I told her about Leo, she was compassionate, never once telling me that she’d told me so. She did offer to try to track Leo down so that I could exact an appropriate revenge. It was tempting, I told her, but what I really wanted was to bury the whole episode and never see the inside of the Dining Room again.

It took Belinda two weeks to set up an interview for me with her manager. During that time, I tried to keep as low a profile as possible in the Dining Room. I was sure that every time I turned my back I could hear snickering from Thelma, Agnes, and Ethel. What was almost worse were the looks of quiet pity I received from Rosemary. The cooks began treating me as if I were a recent amputee, staring at me out of the corners of their eyes but careful not to say anything that might upset me. Possibly the worst reaction, however, came from Tracy, who said he’d heard “something” about what I’d “been going through” and really wanted to help. Would I like to get together, say for drinks at my place? I told him I’d have to take a rain check.

Carol (had she been tipped off by Hans?) started scheduling me in the Men’s Bar and the Card Room, where I made only a fraction of the already paltry tips. I had been removed from my Fantasy shifts. When I asked her about the scheduling changes,

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Carol told me that my work performance had declined and that

I’d have to work my way back to the Dining Room.

I gave notice.

My interview with Belinda’s manager was very brief. I fell in love with the small, busy Italian restaurant right away. The wait
ers and waitresses looked to be closer to my own age, and what’s more, they actually seemed to be having fun. He looked at my résumé and said, “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t really need any servers right now, but Belinda’s given you a glowing recommen
dation. I’d have to squeeze you in on lunches to start. Would that be all right?” I hastened to tell him that it would be. “And the thing is,” he went on, “you’ll probably be able to move to dinners pretty quickly if you’re as good as Belinda says.” He looked at my résumé again and smiled.

“You’ve got great experience,” he said.

I never heard from Leo again. Over time, my memory of him took on the quality of an unsolved mystery. I can’t say I learned nothing from the experience. On a small scale, I realized how important it was to have a good relationship with the chef in any restaurant. This was knowledge I carried (sometimes to extremes) with me to every subsequent waitressing job. More subtly, I would never again fall for the kind of approach Leo used. Trust was not such a simple thing, after all, I thought, and the world was obviously filled with Trojan horses.

At the very least, Leo had allowed me to throw myself head
long into the type of real-life experience I’d been waiting for since my Yellowstone days. In fact, I’d gotten so caught up in this new real world, I’d forgotten that I had come to it, in the beginning, to generate enough “authentic” suffering and wisdom to make me a better writer. Aside from several spirited journal entries, I produced hardly any writing during my months in the
Dining Room. I wouldn’t realize until later that the time between experiencing an event and effectively processing it can some
times be quite lengthy.

I continued to see Deane after I left the Dining Room, but our visits became less and less frequent until we were meeting for coffee only once every two weeks or so. Some of the wind seemed to have been let out of his sails and he said that he missed me in the Dining Room, that things were just incredibly boring there without me. Laughing, he told me that Lisa and Tracy were expecting a baby, Rosemary had been named manager of the Card Room, and that a member had actually keeled over at the table. “See what I mean?” he said. “Nothing like what
you
managed to get into.” He winked at me. To his credit, he never mentioned Leo by name, even jokingly. For someone who con
sidered almost every personal tale fair game, this probably required great restraint on his part. He, too, was becoming tired of the Dining Room politics and planned to quit.

The last time I spoke to Deane was two years after I left the club. He had quit working altogether to stay home and nurse Bill, who had developed brain cancer. There was a deep sadness in his voice, which he tried, unsuccessfully, to cover by making his usual sarcastic quips about human nature. For several rea
sons, I wasn’t in a position to offer much comfort at that point. Instead, I found myself talking about how difficult my own life had recently become.

“You’ll manage,” Deane told me then. “If there’s one thing that’s certain it’s that you’re a survivor. I can tell you that.”

“That’s probably true of both of us, isn’t it?” I said.

“Maybe,” he said softly. I arranged a time to meet Deane for coffee and told him I was really looking forward to seeing him, but because of pressing obligations for both of us, the meeting never took place. This is something I’ve always regretted because, soon after, we lost touch completely.