A Writer's Life (20 page)

After relocating himself permanently in Miami in the mid-1980s, he would meet and marry a wealthy divorcée who was a designer of flashy fashion (best known for her crystal rhinestone sweatshirts), and Pascal would also find financing for several new restaurants in and around Miami Beach—Villa Pascal, Pascal's Pascal, and, among others, La Voile Rouge (The Red Sail), which he named in honor of La Voile Rouge in Saint-Tropez, a topless beach club where he had begun his career as a teenage waiter.

Meanwhile, the New York restaurant at 206 East 63rd Street that bore his name, if not his presence and interest—the Bistro Pascal—had gone out of business in July 1983. I had patronized it once or twice after Pascal had sold it, and I assumed, since there was little else to recommend it, that it had remained open for two and a half years because it satisfied the hunger of its tax-shelter partnership for write-offs. Then, in the late summer of 1984, after the Bistro Pascal floor space had been vacated for about a year, my friend Nicola Spagnolo learned about it—and, over the angry and anguished reaction of his wife, Linda, he decided it would become the locale of his forthcoming Gnolo.

“Linda says the place has bad karma,” Nicola told me over the phone in the fall of 1984, five weeks before Gnolo's scheduled opening. “I made the mistake of letting her see the place before we fixed it up.” I later learned from Linda that she had gone several times to 206 East 63rd Street while it was being renovated and repainted, pleading constantly with her husband and his partners to cancel their plans, to annul the lease and thus avoid the financial disaster that she foresaw there.

“What do
you
know about restaurants?” Nicola had asked with irritation after she had interrupted one of his meetings with the decorators.

“I'm telling you, I have premonitions about this place,” she said.

“Well, why don't you go upstairs and get a job with the fortune-tellers on the third floor?” he responded, adding, “Look, I've been in restaurants all my life, and you
don't
know what you're talking about.…”

While it was true that she could not articulate her trepidation, it was also true, as she explained to me, that she had never been more sure about anything in her life: Her husband was headed for a fall, and she had sensed this almost immediately after her initial visit to 206 East 63rd. Although it had been a sunny afternoon as she and her husband had stepped out of the taxicab, the old brick building itself was overcast in the shadows of the high-rises; and while he and his workmen gathered around the bar to examine the floor plans, she wandered off by herself through the aisles of the dust-covered dining room, which was dimly lit by low-wattage bulbs and was reflected murkily in the smoked-glass mirrors left hanging by the departed souls of the Bistro Pascal. All around her were upturned chairs stacked atop tables, crate boxes filled with plates, and, on the upper rung of a wooden ladder, a white telephone with its cords cut. No amount of remodeling or renovating would alter her low opinion of this place, and what also bothered her was what she had seen outside—the sun-blocked sidewalk, the scarcity of shops, the sterile architecture of the modern buildings that lined the street, and the reckless pace of the speedy motorists heading west along Sixty-third Street toward Third Avenue; one of them had nearly crashed into the back of the taxicab that she and Nicola had ridden in on their way here. Unlike her residential area in the East Eighties, this part of Sixty-third Street lacked neighborliness, and, as she asked herself, how could her husband expect to establish a successful restaurant on a one-way street that was a motorists' speedway and was unappealing to pedestrians?

She had questioned Nicola about this on the way home, but he had paid little attention. He insisted that 206 East 63rd represented a rare opportunity, and he reminded her that many of New York's most appealing restaurants existed in unappealing neighborhoods. He recalled that
when Elaine Kaufman introduced her place on Second Avenue near Eighty-eighth Street, it was said that she would fail because it was in a remote and run-down area, along a heavily trafficked one-way street. He also pointed out that a family-style Italian restaurant called Rao's had prospered for more than eighty years in
Harlem
. It is not the
neighborhood
that influences the fate of a restaurant, he instructed his wife, but, rather, the
neighborliness
of the restaurant, the welcoming personality of the owner, and the romantic aura exuding throughout the premises while dinner is being served. Yes, Linda had agreed, but what if that romantic aura is star-crossed or jinxed? What if there is something inherently
wrong
with 206 East 63rd Street that no restaurateur can fix?

“Oh, she won't let up,” Nicola told me on the phone a few days before Gnolo's opening. “Linda's Jewish, but she sounds like those Italians I grew up with and left behind in the Old Country. They were always seeing the dark side, always having bad premonitions. Except for people like Linda, the Italians are the most pessimistic people in the world.”

“Yes,” I said, “my father used to say that,” explaining that in his part of Italy the people are so concentrated on the possibility of adversity, are so spooked by the idea of this powerful spirit of misfortune, that they have a name for it. They call it the
Jettatura
. It is their “patron saint” of bad luck. It is the prophet that nobody prays to, that everyone loathes, and that remains omnipresent in their lives.

I was probably telling Nicola more than he wanted to know, but since he did not interrupt, and since I myself was not so emancipated from my Italian heritage to risk debunking the stature of the
Jettatura
, I related more of what my father had told me about this odious spirit. It had risen to prominence during the Dark Ages in southern Italy, evolving out of medieval Catholic mysticism, and it easily perpetuated itself through subsequent centuries marked by plagues, earthquakes, droughts, famines, barbarous invasions, and other abominations and vexations that gradually established a gloom-ridden, amulet-addicted society that dreaded nothing more than more of the
Jettatura
.

“Okay, enough of this crap,” Nicola finally said, cutting in. “It's all nonsense. And I won't let you or Linda mess up my head with this stuff.”

“That wasn't my intention,” I said.

“I don't care,” Nicola said. “I'm in America now, and I couldn't care less about your
Jettatura
, or Linda's Jewish
Jettatura
. All I know is that within a few days I'm opening up my new restaurant on Sixty-third Street. And everything's going to be great.”

W
HILE IT LACKED THE FLAMBOYANCE OF THE INTRODUCTORY
party to Le Premier that I attended in 1977—a black-tie event where most of the guests arrived by limousine—the first-nighters who went by taxi or on foot to Gnolo in early December 1984 were, in my opinion, a less trendy group of restaurantgoers, who were beyond being dictated to by food critics and who, having a long-standing relationship with Nicola Spagnolo going back to his days at Elaine's, would now support him in his quest for a bright future in this darkly shadowed building at 206 East 63rd Street.

Nan and I had a good time at the opening of Gnolo. I was particularly impressed by how cheerful Linda seemed to be, smiling as she stood next to her husband near the entranceway, welcoming more than one hundred old friends and acquaintances. Nicola could barely contain his excitement, vigorously shaking hands and often kissing people on both cheeks; and yet, energized as he undoubtedly was by the surrounding goodwill and merriment, I doubted that he would ever allow himself to be carried away by excessive confidence and repeat the mistakes that Robert Pascal had previously made at 206 East 63rd Street.

Shortly after Pascal had opened Le Premier in 1977, someone had stolen the restaurant's name plate from the front of the building, signaling the beginning of Pascal's identity problems at this address. He gave the impression not only that his establishment aimed to please the city's epicureans and the beautiful people but that it was probably beyond the appreciation and means of the neighborhood's residents. He was also presumptuous in labeling Le Premier a top-notch restaurant
before
the food critics had gotten around to judging it for themselves. In his opening-day advertising he boasted that Le Premier was “the finest restaurant on this side of the Atlantic,” and he pointed out as well that the second-floor dining area was “designed to cater to the tastes of only 500 preferred customers,” who would have access to the reservation manager's unlisted
phone numbers. When these preferred customers started going to Le Premier, they usually did so in limousines driven by chauffeurs who were used to double-parking and waiting for hours while their employers had dinner. This caused much congestion, of course, inciting endless horn honking from other motorists backed up in traffic jams and disturbing the dwellers in the apartment buildings, prompting their angry calls to the precinct house and their growing disenchantment with the existence of Le Premier.

But the crowd that Robert Pascal catered to—the perk-privileged CEOs, the international financiers, the jet-setters whom he could flatter in any of four languages, and regularly did—also required the reassurance that they were dining in the right place, and when the
New York Times
critic condemned the restaurant, they abandoned it. I felt sure that the Gnolo crowd would not have reacted in this manner; they were more intellectual, more independently minded, more like the customers Nicola had gotten to know at Elaine's. If Mimi Sheraton had written that Elaine's served the worst food in New York and that rats were running loose in the kitchen, I doubt that she would have drawn away a single customer. In fact, I recall reading a news article in the
Times
about Elaine's being cited for violations by New York City health inspectors, and that night every table was occupied.

The decor of Gnolo was as simple and basic as that at Elaine's, although Nicola refrained from adorning his beige-colored walls with photographs of writers or other people he had first met at Elaine's. He did not want to hear again from Elaine Kaufman's attorney. The opening of Gnolo in late October was sooner than Nicola might have preferred, since not all the remodeling had been completed. But at the suggestion of one of his partners, he pressed the workmen to get the place ready for the holiday season in the interest of drawing diners from among the Christmas shoppers and also to make Gnolo available for the office parties that some of his partners' acquaintances in the business world had promised to hold on the second floor.

The pre-Christmas opening turned out to be a very profitable decision. The restaurant was filled to capacity almost every night, being patronized frequently by many of Elaine's regulars, including myself; and Nicola's wife, Linda—who could gauge the restaurant's success because she kept the books—was ready to forget her premonitions and concede that her husband seemed to know what he was doing. By mid-December, however, a week or so before Christmas, Linda was not so sure. The first of what would be a number of unfortunate incidents occurred when a drunken man, while attending an office party on the second floor, toppled through
the open door of the dumbwaiter—which was in the process of being rebuilt—and came crashing down through the chute onto a tile counter in the first-floor kitchen. He broke a few bones and damaged his spine, and on the following morning his attorney informed Nicola of an impending lawsuit for negligence.

That night, the holiday spirit was further dampened when a Gypsy fortune-teller on the third floor, after turning on her bathtub water, forgot about it and left her apartment to do an errand. During her prolonged absence, the building's side-wall staircase resembled a waterfall, and as one of Nicola's soggy-shoed waiters banged loudly on her locked door, water began to stream down from the second floor onto the first floor of the restaurant. As the moistened customers in the main dining room hastened from their seats, hollering and gesturing, a kitchen worker who did not understand English activated the fire alarm and sprinkler system, and so torrents of additional water were released, forcing everyone outdoors, including Nicola and Linda. The arrival of the fire trucks on Sixty-third Street led to mile-long traffic jams, much horn honking, residential unrest, and, subsequently, the eviction of the Gypsy fortune-telling family, which had been occupying the third floor at night illegally. The cost of the many unpaid-for dinners was probably the least of Nicola's expenses, since he lost considerably more as a result of having to close Gnolo for several days while the damage was dealt with, depriving the restaurant of what was left of the holiday business.

In the interim, Linda tried to encourage her husband in his desire and efforts to overcome these deterrents. The walls were repainted in brighter colors. Newly bought modern-art posters replaced those that had been ruined. The chairs that had been broken by the exiting crowd were repaired or replaced. When Gnolo reopened in January 1985, most of the usual crowd of customers returned, but not with the ongoing fidelity that Nicola had anticipated. He confided to me that he was now more guardedly optimistic about his restaurant's chances to succeed.

One night in late January 1985, after Nicola and Linda had returned to their apartment from Gnolo, they found their fourteen-year-old son feverish and trembling from what would soon be diagnosed as meningitis. The boy underwent days of intensive care at Lenox Hill Hospital, followed by weeks of recovery at home before returning to school. Since he had occasionally helped out as a busboy at Gnolo, Linda saw this as additonal evidence of her earlier apprehensions, and from this point on she refused to appear in the restaurant, doing Gnolo's bookkeeping in the apartment. Nicola told me that he and Linda were now quarreling constantly, that she was threatening to leave him if he did not say good riddance
to the restaurant; but he, in turn, demanded to know:
What's my next move if I sell out? Until this place succeeds, who'd want to buy it? And where do I find another restaurant to run? Am I supposed to go crawling back to Elaine Kaufman and beg her for a job waiting tables? Or stop in at Elio Guaitolini's new restaurant and ask this man, who had worked under me when we both worked under Elaine, if I could now work under him? Or return to the Eighty-fourth Street place that's named after me and ask favors from my expartners, who'd always thought I couldn't succeed without them?