“SO, I WANT TO SHOW YOU how a little insight can be dangerous. I watched Renée, and Renée watched me. I think she did a better job, because I didn’t know just when she was watching me, but I’m quite sure she knew when I was watching her.” A knowing smile came to her lips. “I didn’t quite have the surveillance game down yet,” she said. “However, from my amateurish surveillance of Renée, I began to see what seemed to be a secret of Sunrise Cove. No, that’s wrong. I collected impressions that would later lead me to understand the secret of the success of Sunrise Cove, and particularly the Tropicale Grill.”
“And what was that secret?” I asked, in my role as student.
“We were selling, and the customers were there to buy, not just food or service or a drink or a place to stay but an atmosphere.”
“Something as intangible as light falling through colored glass,” I suggested.
“Yes.”
“The time that the customers spent there, a section of their lives, one stretch of the thread that trailed behind them as they blundered through the labyrinth, even if it was just the length of a dinner, would be tinted a tropical hue.”
“Whew—better make that next drink coffee, boy,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Renée knew that secret better than anyone else, and she also knew that you can make a big success of yourself by giving them just a little more than they’re looking for—what they expect plus a little surprise, a lagniappe. It’s not much of a secret, I guess, the sort of thing you ought to realize right away, but it escaped me. I saw it, as I said, but I didn’t understand it until I entered my thinking phase, after I moved into this house and began living alone and talking to myself.”
We exchanged a private smile.
“What she gave them as a bonus was a welcome. She made them feel welcome. That’s all. I didn’t realize what she was doing. I just thought that Renée seemed awfully familiar with the customers. She acted as if she knew them, or at least recognized them.”
“Acted.”
“Yes, that was the operative word, but I didn’t realize that. I was watching Renée, not the people she was dealing with. I didn’t notice what she noticed about them. It might be something in the way they carried themselves, an awkward hesitation when they first entered the room, or maybe a frightened look on their faces—”
“Not naked fear, of course. Perhaps the fragile crust of a forced heartiness.”
“Yes, something like that would give them away. She noticed it, and she could read them. She knew that they all, in a thousand individual ways, wanted her to take care of them, make them feel all right there, at that moment, and for the rest of the evening. I didn’t see all the subtle stuff. I didn’t notice the differences in the way she treated different people. To me, it looked like one thing: a kind of breezy familiarity. At first, I wondered how she could possibly know so many people. I thought all her friends were coming in to give the Tropicale a try, but then I realized that I was seeing her give the same sort of treatment to people I knew, Babbingtonians, and then I realized that it was a performance. I didn’t understand yet how good a performance it was, or just what the lines ought to be, or how to internalize the performance, assume it, so that it didn’t seem to be a performance at all, things that Renée had learned over years of practice and observation—”
“—things that would be useful to you in the future.”
“Oh, yes, but at the time I saw only the surface of the act, and the surface looked like easygoing familiarity, and I said to myself, ‘I can do that.’ So easygoing familiarity was what I served to the people who came to my tables. And of course I laid it on too thick.”
[to be continued]
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