A Thousand Pardons (6 page)

“The guy who used to have your job quit to go back to school,” Mona finally told her. “He didn’t have nothing to do either. But if Harvey doesn’t hire someone to take his place, that’s like admitting that the business is shrinking.”

Then one morning Harvey came in on time for once and called all three women into his office. “I think we may have something here,” he said. “I went out to Brooklyn last night to have dinner with my son, and the two of us ordered out for some Chinese. Any of you ever heard of Peking Grill?”

Mona and Nevaeh nodded sagely. “There’s one up in the Heights,” Nevaeh said.

“Right,” Harvey said, “there’s like eight of them. Anyway, we call and ask for a delivery, and they say no. No? They say no, we can’t, because our delivery guys are on strike. But you’re still open? I say. Sure. So Michael and I walk three blocks to Peking Grill, and we have to cross a god damn
picket
line to get in, and inside it’s empty except for one guy who’s sitting alone at a table and
crying
, for Pete’s sake. Sobbing. He’s the owner.”

“Disgusting,” Mona said.

Harvey glanced at her curiously but then went on. “So someone is apparently trying to unionize the deliverymen at all the Peking Grills, which I would think would be difficult because pretty much everyone
who works there is illegal, but nevertheless. They are picketing the owner not only for a wage hike but for back wages for all the years they say they were underpaid. I ask him if he’s had any calls from the papers, and he says yes, just that day, from somebody at the
Post
. He hasn’t returned it yet.”

He sat back in his chair. “So I sense an opening here,” he said. “For us. For us to intervene.”

Mona and Nevaeh just went on nodding, but Helen, who couldn’t help herself, said, “On which side?”

The two women shot her an angry look, and all of a sudden Helen understood that they weren’t really following any of what Harvey said either but had just settled on nodding as the quickest way to get through these enthusiasms of his and back to their desks. Harvey, though, looked delighted and indulgently thoughtful, as if he were only pretending to think through a question for a student’s benefit, even though someone of his intelligence would have known the answer instinctively. “Well,” he said, “the deliverymen don’t really have much of a public image problem, do they? I mean, they risked their lives to get here, they’re being paid about two dollars an hour, they’re sleeping Christ knows where. Everybody already sympathizes with them. In New York, they do, at least. If we were somewhere in flyover country, they’d have a posse out for these guys, but hey, this is Manhattan. Whereas this owner, who came here in exactly the same circumstances but then had the temerity to actually succeed, to make himself a millionaire—his name is Chin, by the way—he’s being portrayed as the villain, he’s the one with the story that needs to get out. He’s the one in need of our expert services. Which is what I convinced him of last night while we ate some very delicious chow fun.”

Helen Googled Chin and, sure enough, most of the references to him were scathing. She was printing out a few of them—Harvey disliked having links sent to him—when he opened his door and tried to beckon her into his office without the other two women noticing. “Mr. Chin and I are having lunch today at the Peking Grill up on Seventy-eighth Street,” he said when she came in. “I’d love it if you’d come along. You don’t have to do anything but take notes. But I think it
would be useful if he saw that we’re, you know, an operation here, that he wouldn’t just be putting his business in the hands of one old Jew who likes Chinese food.”

They arrived at 11:30, which seemed early for lunch but was probably scheduled with an eye toward minimizing the presence of picketers; indeed there was only one sullen young Chinese man sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk who lifted his head and glared at them as they walked past him and the row of locked, scarred bikes.

“Mr. Chin,” Harvey said. Chin sat by himself at the table closest to the kitchen, his hands in his lap. “My associate, Helen Armstead,” Harvey said as he sat down and looked around hopefully for a waiter with a menu.

“You say you help me,” Chin said without looking up. “How you help this? Nobody come. Nobody call for delivery. Sixty percent of our weekday business, delivery.”

“Well, it is a little early for the lunch trade,” Harvey said encouragingly. “Though I confess I didn’t have much breakfast myself.”

“Fucking liberal Upper West Siders,” Chin said abruptly. “They get hard-on for anybody say they oppressed. Guess what? I was oppressed too! I came here with nothing. Same province as all these guys. Only difference between me and them is that I work hard instead of complain and I make something of myself. What you supposed to do here, right? But do they congratulate me, respect me? No. I’m the bad guy now. Some fat bitch with a stroller call me a fascist.”

“Well, that’s a term that gets thrown around a lot,” Harvey said. Chin looked up at him then; his lips began to quiver, and he put his napkin to his face and started to cry again. “Here’s the thing,” Harvey went on, his calm voice at odds with the panicked darting of his eyes back and forth between his weeping client and Helen, as if expecting her to know, by virtue of being a woman, how to comfort this wounded man whose hardships and resentments she could not possibly guess at. “What you just told us? You’ve got to get that story out there. You’ve got to tell people who you are. This isn’t just some management-labor dispute. You are an authentic American success story. You need to let us fight back, take the moral high ground from these jealous, petty, self-entitled
people who would cut you down, and correct the injustice of the way you’ve been portrayed by the other side. Right, Helen?”

“No,” said Helen.

Harvey fell silent and stared at her in wonder, and, a moment later, Chin lifted his eyes and did the same. Helen had stunned herself as much as them. She hadn’t planned to say a thing. She felt what she was about to say coming over her, moving in her, before she understood what it was, and with an air of total conviction she began saying it so that she could hear it too.

“What is the goal here, Mr. Chin?” she said.

He looked at her confusedly.

“To get people back at these tables?” she prompted him.

“Yes,” he said. “To get people back into the restaurant.”

“Then here’s what we do. We apologize.”

“For what?” Mr. Chin said, bristling a little.

“America is the greatest country in the world,” Helen said. “When there is an honest dispute between worker and boss, you humbly put your trust in the wisdom of the courts, which are the people’s instrument. I mean, that’s what’s going to happen anyway, right? The whole thing is probably on its way to court already, and you’ll have no choice but to abide by that decision. So you might as well make it seem like your idea. In the meantime, you only want to be fair. You only want to be a good American and give your countrymen the same opportunity you had, the opportunity to earn what you yourself have earned. We will put you on the front page of the
Post
and the
News
and on local TV.”

“What will I say?” Chin asked.

“You will say that you are sorry,” Helen said. “You will not defend yourself. You will not contest any particular charge, because contesting it is what allows people to keep talking about it. Without getting into specifics, you will apologize, and ask your customers and the people of New York for their forgiveness. And they will give it to you. They want to. People are quick to judge, Mr. Chin, they are quick to condemn, but that’s mostly because their ultimate desire is to forgive.”

Chin and Harvey regarded each other submissively. Able neither to
agree with her nor to challenge her in front of a client, Harvey pretended somewhat absurdly that this speech had brought the meeting to a satisfying end, and ten minutes later he and Helen were riding back downtown in shocked silence. She had no idea anymore what had come over her. She wondered if she had done the seemingly impossible and gotten herself fired from a job where no one expected her to do any work at all. Harvey, who hadn’t even gotten any food out of the meeting, wouldn’t so much as make eye contact with her, though in truth he seemed less angry than disoriented and embarrassed, as if he had climbed into the back of the cab only to find a stranger already sitting there. He went straight into his office and ordered out for lunch, and Helen borrowed Mona’s old Rolodex and started working the phones. The story was still fresh enough that she found takers everywhere she called. At four o’clock, staring at Harvey’s half-closed door, she called three different Peking Grills until she found Mr. Chin again and ran down the list of every media outlet that wanted to hear what he had to say. Over the next two days she sat in his eye line at every interview, just out of camera range but close enough to remind him of his commitment to repent. That weekend the picket lines were still active, but business was up to about two-thirds of what it had been before the lawsuit; customers asked so often if Mr. Chin himself was there that he took to traveling to all eight of his locations every night, just to shake hands with the diners and have his picture taken with them and thank them for coming back. Two weeks later the lawyers for the deliverymen settled out of court for $38,000 with no admission of liability. In return for a raise, they waived their demand to unionize. Mr. Chin celebrated the return of delivery service by going back to 1991 prices for a night, 1991 being the year he arrived in America. Business was so enthusiastic the deliverymen made more in tips that night than they had ever seen before.

Though Helen’s own name was naturally left out of the newspapers, Harvey’s was mentioned once or twice, and a few of his old colleagues called to congratulate him. One even used the phrase “teachable moment,” with which Harvey was very taken. Over the next three weeks they picked up four new clients, a bonanza by Harvey’s
standards. When Peking Grill threw itself a twentieth anniversary party at their first location, in Murray Hill, Helen spent the day pitching the event to various papers and freelance photographers and then put on a dress and accompanied Harvey to the restaurant. Chin made a special toast to the two of them, in the midst of which he began crying again.

Harvey, after a carafe of complimentary white wine, began to talk himself up a little too. “I must say,” he told Helen, “I haven’t lost my touch. Not a lot of people would have hired you, you know. But I know people. I can spot talent. And now we are reaping the benefits. You have brought new life to the whole enterprise.”

“To your genius,” Helen said with a laugh, clinking glasses with him.

“You have brought new life to me too, actually,” Harvey went on. “Because after all, I am the enterprise. The enterprise, c’est moi. What I am saying, in part, is that you look quite stunning all dressed up like that.”

She laughed again, then stopped. “Harvey?” she said. “Are you coming on to me?”

“It’s been a long time,” he said, “but I think so, yes. I have a friend who keeps a suite at the Roosevelt. You probably shouldn’t be driving home to Westchester, after all.”

She put her glass of wine, which was only her second, down on the nearest table and stared at him, flattered and amazed, but mostly disappointed. “You’d do that, Harvey?” she said. “After everything you just said, you’d risk the business by sleeping with an employee?”

He waved grandly. “Business, life, life, business,” he said. “I have no use for people who draw the distinction. It is all one. It should all be one. No?”

There was no real danger in the air. Laying her hand gently on his forearm, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “You’ve revitalized my enterprise too,” she said. “But come on. Let’s not be kids about it. You don’t need to get laid to celebrate every good thing that happens. Anyway, I have a daughter at home, and it’s a school night. Just promise me you’ll go to that suite at the Roosevelt and have a good night’s sleep and I will see you at work tomorrow.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “I shall,” he said. “But if you think this is all just about horniness or euphoria or whatever, it’s not. You are a remarkable, remarkable woman. Joanie would have agreed with me.” Helen, though she hadn’t heard the name before, did not need to ask who Joanie was. Harvey said his farewells to Mr. Chin and his wife and went outside to hail a taxi on Third Avenue to take him up to the Roosevelt. In the cab, though, with the windows rolled all the way down, he was feeling so good, so awake, that he redirected the driver west, toward his office. He picked up his car from the attendant at the underground garage across the street from the Empire State Building and headed out of town toward the house in New Paltz, even though he’d turned off the oil burner and drained the pipes three weeks ago; Joanie had never minded the cold, but since her death he’d closed it up for the winter a little earlier every year. He crossed the Henry Hudson Bridge and left the city. He drove with his window down, listening to the crickets at the stoplights, feeling the invigorating change in the air. On the Taconic he fell asleep and the car sped straight through a turn and down a short embankment, turning over once and landing upright on its tires. He was killed instantly.

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