“YOUR TABLE is ready, sir,” says the wrestler.
“Good. Fine. Good,” says Matthew. As they walk off he mutters to Belinda, “Is it just my imagination, or has sir become a sarcastic remark?”
On the way to the table, Matthew begins to get to get an idea for an angle on the place, an approach for BW to take in the review. Here it is: Despite all the effort put into making the place up-to-the-minute, there’s a kind of reactionism visible in the glorification of an old-movie sense of style and in the adoration of the low-tech gadgets of the past. In the bar there is an old neon-encircled clock, and conspicuously atop the little lighted table where the reservation book is kept sits an old telephone, with no dial, just like the phone Matthew’s mother had at home when he was a boy. The wonderful thing about that phone was that whenever Matthew lifted it an operator spoke from it and said, “Number, please,” and she was always there, at any time of the day or night. It was like having someone else in the house. Sometimes, when Matthew’s mother was at work downstairs, in the secondhand shop she called Lydia’s Antiques, he would lift the receiver just to hear the operator’s voice.
“Look at that,” Matthew says, “that old phone. We had one like that when I was a kid.”
“A classic,” says Belinda. “That odd matte finish they had. It always seemed worn-looking, as if it had once been shiny, but the polish had worn off. It was almost porous — probably absorbed the sweat from people’s hands. Those phones give me the creeps, really. They always remind me of Dial M for Murder.”
Matthew doesn’t point out that this phone has no dial. Since shortly after Liz left he has been trying to keep himself from correcting people.
“Yeah,” he says. “Or Sorry, Wrong Number. There is something sinister about those phones, isn’t there? Something very film noir. Oh, that’s good. That’s good. I can use that. Film noir. They’ll love it. Remind me.”
“Do you want me to write it down?”
“No, no, no. No notes. No notes. I’ll probably remember it anyway.”
Belinda looks at Matthew for a moment, deciding whether to ask something, and then she does. “What were you like as a boy, Matthew? When you had a phone like that? What were you like?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Normal. I don’t think much about that time. I didn’t have much fun as a kid. My mother was a widow. We didn’t have much money. It wasn’t a great childhood.”
He looks at the menu.
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🎧 418: “Your table . . .”