Failure
Antony smiled. He smiled because he was angry. He was angry because he had failed. He had failed because … well, he did not know why. Everything had seemed to be going so well, and everything had flown apart too recently to begin making sense of it. “Angie,” he said. “When are we expecting them?”
“Ten minutes, Tony,” came a voice from the empty storeroom, out of sight. Its owner had met Antony when she was 20, when he took her order for veal parmigiana in a Florence restaurant. She was in Italy to study, at least nominally, but of course one must also have a good time. So she did, alongside several classmates similarly eager to do youthful things in their youth. Two of them were with her that day, sipping and laughing their way through the youthful afternoon, tossing heads and drinks back, eyeing the staff to see in whose direction they should flash radiant smiles. But their enthusiasm did not match their manners, and when Antony glided up to explain the freshness of the specials, he was met with a small litany of petty complaints. The umbrella did not shelter the whole table, the ice watered down the drinks, why were the slices of warm bread so hard to separate. Angie was embarrassed for her friends, began to protest, began to apologize, but the waiter was smiling — not with the strained grimace of a man who is paid to be cheerful, but with an easy, bemused friendliness that brooked the irritable, but not irritation. She could tell (she said to herself) that he was at least a little frustrated, but the expression was still not a mask. It must, then, however strange, be the expression he wore when angry.
Complimentary drinks featuring less ice, fully sliced loaves, a properly positioned umbrella, two courses, desserts, a plate of mints and a hefty split tip later, and she knew her reading was correct. Two moments of eye contact, a mutual eye-roll directed at her companions, the ruse of a purse purposely left behind, a swift turnabout alone back into the restaurant, a formal (or was it informal now that she was not a patron?) introduction, an exchange of addresses and a promise to dine together later, and she discovered something else: When pleased, before breaking into a grin, he would frown — only slightly, more on one side of his mouth than the other, eyebrows just raised, as if to say, “well, this is not so bad, is it?” On a man of means or perhaps an art critic the look might have bespoke snootiness, but on Antony it seemed an open acknowledgement that the good fortune now before him was unexpected, he did not deserve it, and he would do his best to honor it. And honor it he did, from lunch to lunch to dinner to walk to talk to visit on visit to dance to first dance. Often he appeared surprised, and always he appeared happy to be so.
The men arriving soon were also a surprise, but not happy. They came to collect his signature, to collect the property that was no longer his, along with what little value it still retained. The restaurant he had started after Angie graduated, started from nothing as they had, the menu that always listed veal parmigiana, the staff that always included his own lightly frowning (or wryly smiling as the case may be) face, all of it that was once so popular and now so irrelevant — it would become someone else’s, or resold or liquidated or demolished. It did not much matter to Antony in which form destruction came. Even were the walls to remain, and the commissioned oil paintings stayed hung upon them, the idea of the restaurant was dead; consigned to memory, where fantasy, nostalgia and regret join, separate and dissipate like wisps of smoke from the candles that had glowed at each woodworked table. No, he thought, it does not much matter. The pain was not financial anyhow, or at least not catastrophically so — the restaurant’s erstwhile success had allowed Antony and Angie to lay up a modest store for themselves, and really if worst came to worst their children would care for them. Indeed, even now they had prematurely offered to do so. But Antony had smiled and politely declined.
“They’re nearly here, dear,” said Angie. It distressed her to see him realize the restaurant’s time was up. Blame it on the fading neighborhood, the rising cost of food, stingier customers, evolving tastes, who knew. Certainly not Antony. He had first cooked in the wild hope people would like to eat what he cooked. When they did, he frowned slightly and continued to cook, then leased a building and hired staff and trained them to cook too. Why ask why the people were pleased? Why ask a bird why it sang — probably it would not know, and if it did, you still could not control its warbles. So he cooked with ingenious ignorance, with no thought of investigating what customers wanted and giving it to them. The people ate and were happy — that was all. Today, presumably, they were still happy, but they were eating somewhere else.
Therefore it was over, and Antony smiled. Angie saw, saw it more often now, and knew it was not bitter. Whether in berating the self as punishment for decisions ill-made, or grimly glaring at the world in reproach for thwarting good intentions — always bitterness imagines what is not, and judges what is against it. As idol or demon, contingency rules the mind. But Angie saw something else — a simple (if cheerily chagrined) wonder at the workings of chance and his part in them. He seemed akin to a child who spins a color wheel and laughs to see it stop at red; perhaps red is a favorite, perhaps not, but that is not the point. The spinning, the waiting, the slowing and suspense and revelation and spinning again — that is the point. The proverbial turning of fortune’s wheel produced in Antony a similar response. Not that he believed in fate or lacked any sense of control, but it was in the moments when he clearly had none that the inescapable humor of his own small struggles was revealed. All may be vanity, but this is much easier to see when chuckling ruefully over the ruins of well-laid plans. So Antony smiled when he heard a knock at the door, and warmly greeted the men on the other side.
