A few weeks ago I met a woman for a drink at Daniel. This woman I had met a few weeks earlier, exchanged numbers and said we'd get together. As is usually the case in Manhattan something always pops up with me, then something popped up with her and time elapsed. However, she called me and said we'd do it this week for sure. That we'd meet at Daniel. I love Daniel, I love how it intimidates people and hence keeps away the riff raff, I love the ceilings that they couldn't change when they remodeled the interior because they were protected by law. I love the French staff, the revolving doors you have to walk through to get in, the fact that it was the old Mayfair hotel and the nights of pure debauchery that must have been spent there. I love that it is two blocks away from my home and how if you are the right person (as I guess I am) you can sit at the bar in jeans and a t shirt and not draw stray looks.
But I don't love it when a woman wants to go there for a first meeting. Daniel is expensive. It is well known. And when a woman first meets you and asks to go there she is either: Used to playing in a league where men make my salary in a day OR just a total money chasing tart. I don't think there is any other in betweens...at least for a first date.
It was only drinks so it wasn't going to run too pricey and she was attractive enough that the suits at the bar would be envious so I said why not. I threw on my favorite jacket, a pair of Berluti monk strap shoes I had just shined, greasy old jeans soiled from working on the Porsche and made my way to blocks up to 65th and Park.
When you walk into Daniel you are accosted with smiling faces of the staff behind which is always suspicion. Meandering over to the bar where an empty seat stood on the south side I heard a Hotel Costes track come through the speakers. I ordered a Sapphire up with a twist as I do and have on every spot on the globe no matter how remote and Francois produced a fine one to say the least. Staring at the lights behind the bar and an old wasp at the far end with too much Chanel on this Eels song came on.
Immediately I dispensed it as hipster trash. But like the gin flowing through my veins warming my soul on this cold night the sounds made their way into my ear boring a hole into my brain and meshing with the alcohol in the soul. I loved it. The simple lyrics better than the Dark Lady sequence of a Shakespeare sonnet. The one track electric guitar standing in civil disobedience to everything Phil Spector proclaimed. This song's lyrics remind me of Springsteen's "I Wish I Was Blind" in their lamentation and despair and Springsteen is of course a Titian master.
Everything blended into a slow motion haze even when a glance at the steps reveled her, smiling and proudly strutting towards the bar. An open seat on my right she put her bag down and leaned over to kiss me as I stood and buttoned my jacket. She was bundled up in fur and a white dress that hugged her hips and made a silhouette "S" up to little saucers, a thin nape exposed and dark hair that fell by the wayside carelessly. The song ended and we began talking. Another song began. And again another song, another drink until it was time to walk her home in the frigid Manhattan air to her place a block away. Too long because of the cold, too short because I didn't expect an invite up.
And I never did and never will because it just wasn't there. I never wanted to be that guy for her and I knew that almost before I even agreed to show up in the first place. What a simple pleasure it was to watch her walk towards me with this track in the background setting the scene in an already beautiful place surrounded with all the visceral stimuli imaginable. A simple pleasure for some other guy to experience, to never let her down and tell her everything she ever imagined to hear those longs nights when she wasn't wasting her time with a man at Daniel and laid in bed wondering were that one really was.
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