Innocent Spouse (19 page)

“Does that mean he’ll drop the price back down?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

Though we now had a deal, Jeanne wasn’t finished. As encouraging as she had been about buying the house, she now felt she needed to remind me of the negatives. “Well, you know it doesn’t have parking. It may not have quick resale value. It’s only two bedrooms. The kitchen is not great. The rooms are small,” she said. I was confused.

“Yesterday it was all about the great garden, the charm, the beautifully finished rooms. What happened? Now it’s all bad?”

“It’s my job to make sure you’re aware of the negatives,” she said.

“Don’t be a buzz kill,” I begged. “I love the place. We’re going to have a home!”

Our good friend and Spencer’s godfather, the actor and comedian Harry Shearer and his mother, Dora, were visiting Washington from Los Angeles. We went to a Latin restaurant downtown and celebrated my good fortune with tapas and margaritas. At least I did. Harry, as always, stuck to wine.

My beeper went off. It was George Valanos. Right away I called back, worried that something had happened to the deal. “Congratulations,” George said. “We’re sitting in the garden having some wine. Do you want to come see your new house?”

Yes. We all did. When we got out of the cab, we took a moment to stand in the street and stare at what would be our new home. I was still stunned I’d pulled it off. George and Frederica led us to the garden where two other guests were having a glass of wine. It was a lovely September night. Crickets chirped in the bushes and tall trees. There was a full moon. The garden was beautifully lit from above and below.
When I looked back, the house was glowing from within. I was glowing, too. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

Pride, personal pride, was something I had not felt in a long time, but I took deep pleasure in getting that house. While booking people like Nicole Kidman and George Clooney for an interview with Larry King was fun and a professional coup, I took no personal satisfaction in it. It was my work. Nor was there anything I’d done at Nathans that I was particularly proud of. The restaurant produced mostly an abundance of fear and confusion. Finding a house and making the deal—putting a roof over our heads—boosted my ego and made me feel capable. Maybe I could take care of us on my own.

When Harry, Dora, and I left the house that night, I stood in the street and took one more long look. “You did good, Carol,” Harry said.

To myself, I said silently, “Dear God, Please,
please
let us find peace and happiness here.”

George and Frederica asked if we could delay the closing date until after the first of the year. This was good for me because I needed to get the other property sold before we moved. Also, I had to sell a lot more furniture and other things and get myself organized. Downsizing is a lot of work.

“May I suggest a date?” I asked.

“Sure, what’s good for you?” they asked.

“How about February 1?” I replied. That would be the first anniversary of Howard’s death. This way I could make that day not about what we had lost but about what we gained—a house of our own.

F
RED
T
HIMM OF
the Palm had recommended a new bookkeeper for Nathans and on his word I hired Connie, who, dramatically, was the spitting image of a younger Peggy Lee; her hair was a big bouffant of blond and white and her hands were delicate, with long, beautifully painted nails—red, always red, like her lipstick. Her build was broad and strong, her demeanor world-weary, and she didn’t take crap from anyone. While she came across as all hard and no soft, we got along just fine. I especially liked having another woman in the office, where we worked side by side, going over the books. The new books. The books she put together and that now gave me an accurate picture of my business—all the numbers Fred said I needed to know. The debt astonished me, but Connie was unfazed. “Everybody in the restaurant business carries a lot of debt,” she said. “That’s just how it is.” I asked Connie to teach me about the numbers. Nobody could sugarcoat them anymore. I wanted only the truth—no matter how painful, and, believe me, it was painful.

Maybe it made me an oddball as a restaurant owner, but I wasn’t comfortable with debt. I knew I was dense where numbers were concerned, but because I was dense I knew it was best for me not to buy what I could not afford. That way I wouldn’t get in trouble. It was an unsophisticated point of view, I was learning, but it was within my comfort zone. I was also comfortable with rules. Not all rules, but most rules. And I was beginning to understand why the bar business attracted the kind of people it did—people, like my husband, who didn’t like any rules. He had very few of his own and those he had he had made up along the way. The standard was to string debt out as long as possible, play by whatever cockamamy logic seemed to fit, and, most of all, not get caught. But Howard did get caught. Then he died, leaving me with the consequences.

After consultations with Fred Thimm and Paolo, friends who owned businesses, and Connie, I tried to institute some belt-tightening measures and management organization. I honored Fred’s earlier tutorial, which denied me the “fun stuff”—a paint job, decorating, and the like—to focus instead on fixing what wasn’t working and to keep a lid on the money. We did a much-needed revision of the menu. When I first inherited the place, we had offered the same specials night after night, and half the time the waiter would say they weren’t available. It felt like a diner on the skids rather than a glamorous pub at the best corner in the city. There was a load of waste. The food costs were outrageous. It would have been one thing if the food was superlative, but after trying everything on the menu during many dinners at booth 26, my opinion was that much of what we served was tired, lacked focus, or was too ambitious. The customers seemed to feel that way, too, because most nights the dining room was only half full. I hoped the new menu would make a difference.

The menu was still northern Italian but cut down by half. We axed items that were rarely available or that never sold. Everything that was popular and sold well was still there. We couldn’t lose the famous lobster fettuccine, a platter of house-made fettuccine noodles drenched in a creamy, rich Alfredo sauce and topped with steaming hot lobster fresh out of the shell. It was one of our most popular dishes. There were couples who became engaged over lobster fettuccine and who returned to have it again as they celebrated their anniversaries or their son’s or daughter’s birth or graduation from college. I liked that. When the new menu was done I was enthusiastic.

Right away, however, Doug wanted me to know that he wasn’t pleased. “We’re getting a lot of grief about the new menu,” he said.

“People don’t like change,” I said. “Especially at the corner pub.”

“Some customers say they didn’t think it needed to be changed.” We were at our desks in the basement office. He didn’t look at me when he talked.

I looked directly at him. “And others say they like it, Doug. We’ll have to tough it out. The old menu had too much waste. We need to do this.”

To any member of the staff who would listen, I said, “If we don’t make changes we won’t stay in business.” We tightened up the schedules
and continued to cut back on overtime. While the high-turnover waitstaff, most of them college students, now treated me as less of an annoyance, the longer-term employees—behind the bar, in the kitchen, managing the floor—still considered my changes to be meddling. Whatever anyone wanted to call it, I had no choice. Nathans was a rusty ship, dead in the water. I had to fix the broken engine and props, crank ’em up, and get the thing going again. I didn’t want to be aboard, but I desperately had to get it to dry land without sinking and avoid the enemy warship, the IRS, just over the horizon.

I was painfully aware that I was not winning over all of the staff. Perhaps if I could approach the business with a more obvious sense of humor, or more charm, or if I hung out at the bar and drank with them, bought everyone shots … but that wasn’t me and experience had taught me that false bonhomie generally fails. They wanted Howard. They wanted payments under the table, the pink checks. I wasn’t the fun one, the charming one, the generous one with the easy money. I was the one left holding the bag, stuck with having to save the business and their jobs. The colorful outlaw had died and they got stuck with a dull schoolmarm. What they wanted most of all was for everything to be the way it was. The sad truth, though, is that Nathans never was what it was. I’d been forcibly awakened from that dream. The others also had to see their dream of the old Nathans for what it was: a dream.

Again, with the guidance of Fred, Paolo, and Connie, my new rules were straightforward, the rules most office workers take for granted. Managers who worked four-day shifts now had to work five-day shifts. Staff meals were no longer free but offered at a 50 percent discount. Vacation time had to be requested in writing and not taken at will. A manager had to be on the floor at all times when meals were being served. An office manager would be hired to oversee the delivery of food and beverages, bill paying, and other routine work, to free up managers to work in prime time. The general manager—that is, Doug—would be expected to be on the premises on Friday and Saturday nights. For the sake of the cash flow, paychecks would now come out every two weeks instead of every week. And so on. Nothing very startling to anyone who’s ever held a job but something in the nature of an earthquake to those who for a long time had been enjoying the freewheeling ways of the old Nathans.

I required all managers to show up for the weekly managers’ meeting. We would institute more staff training, especially courses on wine and food. I would design new uniforms for the staff. We would replace the worn and tattered fabric on the walls in the dining room. We would get new lampshades and curtains. I would buy the flowers from a wholesaler and do the arrangements myself. I suggested we try some wine specials and perhaps a discounted “early bird” dinner.

Last but not least, there was the challenge of Doug and his pay. I followed Fred Thimm’s outline. “Pay the rent, pay the IRS, pay the lawyers, pay the staff, pay the bills, pay me.” Fred and Connie gave me a tutorial on how managers are typically compensated. Then I met with Doug to tell him how I planned to change his pay formula. He had been getting 1 percent of the gross, but if Nathans was to stay afloat and all of us were to keep our jobs, that had to be changed immediately to 10 percent of the net after “my objectives are met,” paid on a quarterly basis. That still sounded pretty good to me.

“What are your objectives?” he asked.

I repeated Fred Thimm’s mantra: “Pay the rent, pay the IRS, pay the lawyers, pay the staff, pay the bills, pay me.” He shrugged.

For the next couple of days I labored on a memo that I intended to put on Doug’s desk. I wanted him to know that we were all in this together, and that if he continued as general manager he had to help sell the new policies and procedures enthusiastically to the staff. I wanted a happy staff and that comes from candid management, a job well done, and the pride we could all take in having a roomful of customers who liked the food, the service, and the surroundings. It seemed simple enough.

I folded the memo, slipped it into an envelope, and set it in the middle of his desk. It was still there unopened the next morning and the next afternoon, set aside on a stack of papers.

“Doug,” I said, “I actually wrote that with the intention that you would read it.”

He looked up. “Yeah, I’ll get to it.”

“If only you could turn him,” Fred Thimm said on the phone. “I keep thinking at some point he’s going to wake up and get on board. But what does it take? I thought by now he’d be thanking you for keeping him on the payroll.”

“Fred, he views me as an impediment. He sees me as competition! I don’t know what to do. He thinks I want his job. He thinks I enjoy this work.”

“Have you had a heart-to-heart with him?” he asked.

“More than one. But he always ends up pissing me off. He loves to tell me, over and over, ‘If Howard had lived and I had died this place would have closed in a week.’ ”

There’s more than one way to let a new boss know you don’t like her policies, and at Nathans they sprung a new one on me. Someone cut the rat screens in the basement. In the rat universe, that’s the same as hanging up a neon sign with the words
OPEN HOUSE
. As the building was more than one hundred years old, rats had made various holes in the basement walls that we routinely covered with industrial strength rat screens. One day the early shift prep staff noticed lots of signs of rats, and then more signs of rats and more and more and more. Doug poked around and discovered all the screens had been cut. He seemed frankly surprised and said he would investigate.

It freaked me out. I sat in the basement for hours each day. I didn’t like to think of rats scurrying around my feet. But worse, why would anyone have cut the screens? Was the staff sending me a message? It was not only bad for me but for everyone who had a job at Nathans. If the health department were to come in, which they did randomly and often, Nathans would be shut down on the spot.

Doug asked around but said he’d learned nothing. Later, when I was in the office alone, Arnoldo, the day chef, tentatively poked his head in and asked to see me. Could we go outside? We stood on the sidewalk by the kitchen door on busy Wisconsin Avenue. Arnoldo, like all the kitchen staff, was from El Salvador. Because he was the oldest and the most experienced, the other men in the kitchen—many of them in their early twenties—deferred to him. He was quiet, proud, and hardworking. Nathans was his day job. He worked at another restaurant at night. I never had a problem with Arnoldo. Still, he seemed supremely uncomfortable to be talking to me.

“Mrs. Joynt, I’m afraid this business was done by some of the boys,” he said. I knew he was referring to the young dishwashers. “I am very sorry and embarrassed.”

“Why would they do that, Arnoldo?”