Answered Prayers

III

LA CÔTE BASQUE

Overheard in a cowboy bar in Roswell, New Mexico… FIRST COWBOY: Hey, Jed. How are you? How you feeling? SECOND COWBOY: Good! Real good. I feel so good I didn't have to jack off this morning to get my heart started.

"Carissimo!" she cried. "You're just what I'm looking for. A lunch date. The duchess stood me up."

Black or white?" I said.

"White," she said, reversing my direction on the sidewalk.

White is Wallis Windsor, whereas the Black Duchess is what her friends call Perla Apfeldorf, the Brazilian wife of a notoriously racist South African diamond industrialist. As for the lady who also knew the distinction, she was indeed a lady—Lady Ina Coolbirth, an American married to a British chemicals tycoon and a lot of woman in every way. Tall, taller than most men, Ina was a big breezy peppy broad, born and raised on a ranch in Montana.

"This is the second time she's canceled," Ina Coolbirth continued. "She says she has hives. Or the duke as hives. One or the other. Anyway, I've still got a table at Côte Basque. So, shall we? Because I do so need someone to talk to, really. And, thank God, Jonesy, it can be you."

Côte Basque is on East Fifty-fifth Street, directly across from the St. Regis. It was the site of the original Le Pavillon, founded in I940 by the honorable restaurateur Henri Soulé. M. Soulé abandoned the premises because of a feud with his landlord, the late president of Columbia Pictures, a sleazy Hollywood hood named Harry Cohn (who, upon learning that Sammy Davis, Jr., was «dating» his blond star Kim Novak, ordered a hit man to call Davis and tell him: "Listen, Sambo, you're already missing one eye. How'd you like to try for none?" The next day Davis married a Las Vegas chorus girl-colored). Like Côte Basque, the original Pavillon consisted of a small entrance area, a bar to the left of this, and in the rear, through an archway, a large red-plush dining room. The bar and main room formed an Outer Hebrides, an Elba to which Soulé exiled second-class patrons. Preferred clients, selected by the proprietor with unerring snobbisme, were placed in the banquette-lined entrance area-a practice pursued by every New York restaurant of established chic: Lafayette, The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle. These tables, always nearest the door, are drafty, afford the least privacy, but nevertheless, to be seated at one, or not, is a status-sensitive citizen's moment of truth. Harry Cohn never made it at Pavillon. It didn't matter that he was a hotshot Hollywood hottentot or even that he was Soulé's landlord. Soulé saw him for the shoulder-padded counter-jumper Cohn was and accordingly ushered him to a table in the sub-zero regions of the rear room. Cohn cursed, he buffed, puffed, revenged himself by upping and upping the restaurant's rent. So Soulé simply moved to more regal quarters in the Ritz Tower. However, while Soulé was still settling there, Harry Cohn cooled (Jerry Wald, when asked why he attended the funeral, replied: "Just to be sure the bastard was dead"), and Soulé, nostalgic for his old stamping ground, again leased the address from the new custodians and created, as a second enterprise, a sort of boutique variation on Le Pavillon: La CôteBasque.

Lady Ina, of course, was allotted an impeccable position-the fourth table on the left as you enter. She was escorted to it by none other than M. Soulé, distrait as ever, pink and glazed as a marzipan pig.

"Lady Coolbirth…" he muttered, his perfectionist eyes spi

She consulted me, a glance, and said: "I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let's have something that takes forever. So that we can get drunk and disorderly. Say a soufflé Furstenberg. Could you do that, Monsieur Soulé?"

He tutted his tongue—on two counts: he disapproves of customers dulling their taste buds with alcohol, and also: "Furstenberg is a great nuisance. An uproar."

Delicious, though: a froth of cheese and spinach into which an assortment of poached eggs has been sunk strategically, so that, when struck by your fork, the soufflé is moistened with golden rivers of egg yolk.

"An uproar," said Ina, "is exactly what I want," and the proprietor, touching his sweat-littered forehead with a bit of handkerchief, acquiesced.

Then she decided against cocktails, saying: "Why not have a proper reunion?" From the wine steward she ordered a bottle of Roederer's Cristal. Even for those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can't refuse: Dom Pérignon and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze, a chilled fire of such prickly dryness that, swallowed, seems not to have been swallowed at all, but instead to have turned to vapors on the tongue and burned there to one damp sweet ash.

"Of course," said Ina, "champagne does have one serious drawback: swilled as a regular thing, a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable. Remember Arturo's breath, bless his heart? And Cole adored champagne. God, I do miss Cole so, dotty as he was those last years. Did I ever tell you the story about Cole and the stud wine steward? I can't remember quite where he worked. He was Italian, so it couldn't have been here or Pav. The Colony? Odd: I see him clearly-a nut-brown man, beautifully flat, with oiled hair and the sexiest jawline-but I can't see wbere I see him. He was a southern Italian, so they called him Dixie, and Teddie Whitestone got knocked up by him-Bill Whitestone aborted her himself under the impression it was his doing. And perhaps it wasin quite another context-but still I think it rather dowdy, u

The Cristal was being poured. Ina tasted it. "It's not cold enough. But ahhh!" She swallowed again. "I do miss Cole. And Howard Sturgis. Even Papa; after all, he did write about me in Green Hills of Africa. And Uncle Willie. Last week in London I went to a party at Drue Heinz's and got stuck with Princess Margaret. Her mother's a darling, but the rest of that family! — though Prince Charles may amount to something. But basically, royals think there are just three categories: colored folk, white folk, and royals. Well, I was about to doze off, she's such a drone, when suddenly she a