Caroline's Daughters by Alice Adams Page A

interest.
    Additionally, for Fiona, the very making of the reservation was odd: she took the call herself, for the very simple and stupid reason that she was passing the phone when it rang and inexplicably, inexcusably, no one else was near it (“Can’t someone answer the fucking phone?”). And so, of course, in the voice of some underling, not “Fiona,” Fiona answered the phone. And she had a very strange, strong sense that the person on the other end, the person billing himself as Roland Gallo’s assistant, was in fact Roland Gallo himself—orelse maybe a complete impostor: it is possible that no one will show, that happens, and you can’t ask “Roland Gallo” to reconfirm. In any case it was a very odd exchange, enough to make Fiona seriously wonder for at least a full minute what will happen at 9 tonight. If anything.
    The rest of the reservations are more or less routine, the usual mix of people whom Fiona knows or whose names she recognizes. Quite a few regulars, including some hard-core patrons who are there a couple of times a week. (This is a pattern that Fiona knows from experience won’t last: the group will move on almost in a body to whatever is trendiest next, and go there twice a week. Fiona is perfectly prepared for these predictable defections, she tells herself.)
    As always, there are several people on the list whom Fiona has never heard of, although it always pays to check very carefully, just in case she should have heard of them. Some hot New York playwright, for instance, whose fame has not yet travelled across the Rockies. But the truly unknown have usually reserved a long time in advance; right there is a tipoff to their lack of fame.
    Fiona’s office is strictly speaking not that at all. Her big desk and most of her files are up in the penthouse, in fact in her bedroom, discreetly hidden. However, the smallest downstairs dining room, the one requested for most private dinners (the one that Roland Gallo has requested for tonight), this pretty pink-toile room is preferred by Fiona herself and by her staff as Fiona’s office, and it is there that she receives certain business callers, has certain appointments.
    This afternoon there are two such: the first with her lawyer, the second with a young woman who wants an interview, Fiona has forgotten for what, and she can’t for the moment find wherever she wrote it down.
    Actually the young man who arrives very promptly at 2 is not Fiona’s lawyer but an associate from that law office. The young man is lean and tan, obviously a tennis-playing type, in his new Wilkes suit and with his too-new Mark Cross brief case (not much imagination working there). He wants to talk about a new restaurantthat just started up in Petaluma, and it is called Fiona’s. Of all the unlikely names to find duplicated in Petaluma, as the lawyer remarks.
    He goes on about this at some length. Petaluma Fiona’s is also in an old house, several stories divided into small rooms. Kitchen in the basement. He quotes some specialties from both menus—similar use of goat cheese, radicchio, chanterelles, monkfish and yellow peppers. Pausing, he laughs. “And that Fiona is even a tall thin blonde with very long hair.”
    â€œUnlike any other thirty-three-year-old women in northern California,” Fiona cannot resist saying. “In the middle Eighties.”
    Only slightly abashed, the young man then delivers his punchline, or, rather, his punch paragraph. It is fairly long.
    There was such a case quite recently, he tells Fiona. A restaurant opened up down in San Bruno, called The Nob Hill. (“Pretty funny right off, don’t you think? The Nob Hill, in San Bruno?”) Named of course after the one and only San Francisco restaurant, The Nob Hill. Well, those guys apologized all over the place, offered to change the name, et cetera. But Roland Gallo would not let them off the hook, he kept right after