Mary and O’Neil

“No,” Mary said.

The woman handed them menus, single sheets of heavy paper written by hand. “Now, these are not menus in the typical sense,” she explained. “Think of them instead as maps of what’s to come.”

While the woman stood beside their table, Mary and O’Neil looked the menus over. Five courses were listed: an appetizer, soup, salad, entrée, and dessert. The descriptions were lengthy and contained many ingredients that neither of them recognized, or recognized as food. The salad, for instance, contained pansies. There were no prices on anything, but the entire meal cost fifty-five dollars per person.

O’Neil handed his menu back to her. “Say, what’s upstairs?” The stairs were blocked off by a velvet rope, like a forbidden wing at a museum. A brass plaque hung from the rope with the word Private engraved into its face.

The woman smiled neutrally. “Storage,” she said.

Their courses arrived, each more bizarre than the last: grilled oysters in raspberry sauce, a watery yellow broth flecked with bits of bitter mushroom, the promised salad of endive and pansy. The endive was served as a single wedge-shaped head, laid at an angle across the plate, with pansies scattered carelessly over it, as if dropped from a great height.

When the woman had left them with their salads, Mary leaned across the table. “Maybe we should just tell her. They might be interested, you know.”

O’Neil speared a pansy with his fork and chewed it, grimacing. “What would I say?” he asked. “‘Thank you for making your pretentious food in my boyhood house’? You know, if my parents were alive, I don’t think they’d even eat here? Though it’s sort of a moot point, because if they were, they’d be living in it.”

“You can’t be sure,” Mary said. “They might have moved. Retired, maybe. Gone off to Florida.” They would, she knew, be somewhere in their late sixties.

O’Neil took a long drink of water and frowned. “Trust me,” he said. “They’d be here.”

Mary didn’t answer. The chef and the woman-his wife, Mary guessed-were obviously trying, and how were they to know that their place of business was, in fact, a tomb of memory? Mary had once been back to visit the house where her family had lived when she was very small. This occurred during an uncertain period in her life, the year after college, when she was working as a barmaid in the Mi

Why had he done it? In Mary’s experience many people claimed to have epiphanies when nothing of the kind occurred-insight filled you slowly, like sips of water from a cup-but that is what happened to her, parked in front of the pink house. Her father had wanted her to know that he loved her, of course, but also what such love as his contained: that it was made of iron, and could work without ceasing or rest. Though he lacked the words to say this, he wanted to tell her it was all for her, everything he did in the world; whatever happened in her life, there had been one such person. She knew this, as she also knew that the pink house was a monument to this memory; that was why she had come. She hadn’t knocked on the door, or even gotten out of the car. The house was inside her, that place in her heart where she was still a tiny girl, and to enter it would have stolen this feeling from her.

Mary reached under the table and found O’Neil’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not really so bad to be here,” O’Neil said. “I only wish the food wasn’t so weird. I wanted you to have a nice meal.”

They managed to eat a respectable amount of salad before the entrée arrived: braised medallions of venison with cranberries and lemongrass, served on a bed of buckwheat couscous. After the pansies it was surprisingly good, and they ate hungrily, even O’Neil. By this time it was after ten and most of the other tables were empty. O’Neil began to talk freely about his memories of the house and the town, as he had not done since they’d arrived the day before. The stories he told were happy, and Mary understood then that part of his pleasure was his invisibility-it had been that way for her-and he would neither tell the owner who he was nor try to go upstairs. And yet she knew that was what he truly wanted: a few moments alone, in his old room.

They were the last to leave the restaurant. Outside, the winter sky was hung with a dense tapestry of stars. She waited until O’Neil was buckled in before she a

O’Neil looked at her with a puzzled expression. How, she wondered, could he possibly fail to know what she was about to do? “The motel is only five minutes.”

“I don’t think I can wait,” she said, and got out of the car.

She found the dining room empty, as she had hoped. Their table had already been cleared and laid out with clean linen and silverware for the next night. From the kitchen she heard the sound of pots clattering in the sink and ru

The hallway was dark, but as her eyes adjusted she saw five doors, all closed. There were three bedrooms, she knew-O’Neil had given her the basic layout-plus a bathroom and a linen closet. Cardboard boxes were stacked along the wall, and at the far end of the hall she saw a small table with a telephone on it. It was an old-style rotary phone; probably it had been there since O’Neil was a boy. She had already guessed that the chef and his wife lived up here. Turned around in the darkness, Mary had lost track of which door was which, but she guessed and opened the second one on the left.