I’m dropping y’all s to beat the band. But on an FOB or in the kitchen of a fancy New York restaurant you wouldn’t know where the hell I was from. Trager’s cadence I can get pretty much with a little tinkering, and as for the gestures – there’s a hand roll, a head tilt, he’s big on eye contact – I just have to remember to include these, to space them out, and to not overdo it.
But it’s not as if there’d be consequences if I were to fuck it up. I’m alone here. I’m in a tiny bathroom. I’m looking in a mirror. No one’s watching. No one can hear me. In fact, there’s probably a clinical element to this, but who cares? As pathologies go, you’d have to consider it fairly benign. And it’s definitely making things a little easier with Kate. Maybe focusing so much now on Trager, on this strange likeness, this alignment, has quietened something in me, my anxiety, calmed the outward ripples of it. We’re not talking yet, not the way we should be – the elephant is still in the room, but he’s slouched in the corner and seems a little sedated. Kate and I are both busy, okay, we’re both working hard, and there’s a rhythm to that, sometimes a lulling one. But I’m also less tense, and therefore probably less in tense to deal with.
Anyway, time passes, and, inevitably, something starts to bother me, to gnaw away at my equanimity. Why is it that Teddy Trager and Nina Schlossmeier don’t show up at the restaurant any more? I can’t understand it. I take every opportunity that arises to scan the whole dining room and I even finally get to have a quick look at the bookings database. This happens one morning when I’m in the office. Stanley is outside, pacing the corridor, arguing with a supplier on his cellphone. I’m near his desk and see what’s on the screen, so I very discreetly scroll back through a few weeks of bookings. It’s only a matter of a minute or two, but I’m pretty sure I see Trager’s name all of three times, which is precisely the number of times I’ve seen him from my prep station in the kitchen – twice with Nina Schlossmeier and once with that pair of paunchy, middle-aged fucks, one of whom might have been Doug Shaw.
In one way I’m relieved to find this out. It means I haven’t missed anything, but it also means that Trager isn’t exactly a regular. Maybe he won’t be back for months. Maybe he’ll never eat at Barcadero again. Then something so blindingly obvious occurs to me that I have a hard time understanding why I’m only thinking of it now.
Teddy Trager – I’m assuming – exists independently of Barcadero. He goes to other restaurants. He has an office. He walks around. He interacts with people. He lives somewhere. So if I want to see him again, why does it have to be through the pick-up window of the kitchen where I work?
And, of course, it doesn’t.
With this in mind, I go back over all the web searches I’ve done on Trager, but this time with a slightly adjusted focus.
*
According to one website, Paradime Capital is a stalwart of New York’s Silicon Alley, which apparently isn’t a geographical location any more but a state of mind. Anyway, they’re based in Midtown, in an office building on Sixth Avenue somewhere in the low fifties. I track down the exact address with a quick search. Not surprisingly, Trager’s personal address is a different matter. There are references to his several ‘homes’, but nothing specific, no giveaways.
And what do I do with this information?
To begin with, nothing. I delay and vacillate, but it doesn’t take me more than a couple of days to reach the conclusion that either I forget about the whole thing and move on or I take some kind of action.
So the day after that I leave early for work and get an F train to 57th Street. The morning is sunny, and traffic is flowing along at an unhurried pace. I walk south for a few blocks and pass some of the vast corporate monoliths that line this part of Sixth. At
But it’s not as if there’d be consequences if I were to fuck it up. I’m alone here. I’m in a tiny bathroom. I’m looking in a mirror. No one’s watching. No one can hear me. In fact, there’s probably a clinical element to this, but who cares? As pathologies go, you’d have to consider it fairly benign. And it’s definitely making things a little easier with Kate. Maybe focusing so much now on Trager, on this strange likeness, this alignment, has quietened something in me, my anxiety, calmed the outward ripples of it. We’re not talking yet, not the way we should be – the elephant is still in the room, but he’s slouched in the corner and seems a little sedated. Kate and I are both busy, okay, we’re both working hard, and there’s a rhythm to that, sometimes a lulling one. But I’m also less tense, and therefore probably less in tense to deal with.
Anyway, time passes, and, inevitably, something starts to bother me, to gnaw away at my equanimity. Why is it that Teddy Trager and Nina Schlossmeier don’t show up at the restaurant any more? I can’t understand it. I take every opportunity that arises to scan the whole dining room and I even finally get to have a quick look at the bookings database. This happens one morning when I’m in the office. Stanley is outside, pacing the corridor, arguing with a supplier on his cellphone. I’m near his desk and see what’s on the screen, so I very discreetly scroll back through a few weeks of bookings. It’s only a matter of a minute or two, but I’m pretty sure I see Trager’s name all of three times, which is precisely the number of times I’ve seen him from my prep station in the kitchen – twice with Nina Schlossmeier and once with that pair of paunchy, middle-aged fucks, one of whom might have been Doug Shaw.
In one way I’m relieved to find this out. It means I haven’t missed anything, but it also means that Trager isn’t exactly a regular. Maybe he won’t be back for months. Maybe he’ll never eat at Barcadero again. Then something so blindingly obvious occurs to me that I have a hard time understanding why I’m only thinking of it now.
Teddy Trager – I’m assuming – exists independently of Barcadero. He goes to other restaurants. He has an office. He walks around. He interacts with people. He lives somewhere. So if I want to see him again, why does it have to be through the pick-up window of the kitchen where I work?
And, of course, it doesn’t.
With this in mind, I go back over all the web searches I’ve done on Trager, but this time with a slightly adjusted focus.
*
According to one website, Paradime Capital is a stalwart of New York’s Silicon Alley, which apparently isn’t a geographical location any more but a state of mind. Anyway, they’re based in Midtown, in an office building on Sixth Avenue somewhere in the low fifties. I track down the exact address with a quick search. Not surprisingly, Trager’s personal address is a different matter. There are references to his several ‘homes’, but nothing specific, no giveaways.
And what do I do with this information?
To begin with, nothing. I delay and vacillate, but it doesn’t take me more than a couple of days to reach the conclusion that either I forget about the whole thing and move on or I take some kind of action.
So the day after that I leave early for work and get an F train to 57th Street. The morning is sunny, and traffic is flowing along at an unhurried pace. I walk south for a few blocks and pass some of the vast corporate monoliths that line this part of Sixth. At
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