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SECOND SITTING There must be a hired staff of five hundred: cooks, waiters, busboys, dishwashers, bar- tenders, cocktail waitresses, hatcheck girls. A scribe keeps the tally, no doubt scratched in cuneiform on a clay tablet: a palm-court orchestra, a steel band, a jazz quintet; torch- singers, a troupe of professional mummers, exotic dancers and the backstage dressers who help them pin their hair and fit their wigs and spray their athletic bodies with glitter; disc jockeys, sound-and-lights techies, gaffers running cables and shunting TV monitors so that everyone can see the faces and hear the voices of the toastmaster, the comedian, the senator, the high priest whose libation is offered to the ecumenical divinity who is supposed to smile upon these goings-on. I wander through the maze of crowded tables where gentlemen wipe sauce from their lips and shove their chairs back while their ladies—propped on their elbows—gesticulate with fans or solitaires or lacquered nails or cigarettes. Among the securely powerful or young and hopeful, I find a folding chair and carry it from one table to another, but when I find a place-setting—its lobster salad already wilting—the space has been usurped by visitors from other tables. I came without a partner and am hungry. At such a banquet big-bellied Captain M. would have sashayed down the staircase naked but for his kingfisher-feathered mask. The dance-floor would have opened like the Red Sea, and the diners would have risen to say, ""Here's a place, My Lord. Please honor us." I shoulder through to the room where the servers stand, their platters and chafing dishes almost empty: a nub of prime rib, a desultory scattering of chicken cordon bleu . Only one server is still at work, a dark-skinned mariner. As I stare at his griddle, he sees my loneliness, and when he says, "Some fish, sir? Remember me, sir? My name is Joe," I want to shake his white-gloved hand. He lays on my plate a plump Dover sole and is about to lift its fillets with his spatula. I tell him, "No. I prefer to bone it myself." "Very well, sir." I carry my plate to the almost-deserted Club Room, set it on a Boulle writing desk and sit in the tufted-leather chair. Beyond the Dover sole, the ormolu-mounted inkwells, the uncurtained plate-glass window, the city lies like a field of glow-worms mirroring the star-scattered sky. A boy again, I follow my father's instructions. First, remove the crisp fringe of fins that edge the fish; then, draw the knife down the length of the spine and slip it under each fillet. Now I eat, and my father watches. When I lift the tail, all of a piece the bones peel off to show the white flesh glistening underneath. At such a time, both gourmet and anatomist, I don't give a damn for Captain Midnight, who says, not heeding his father's teaching, "I just don't fool with fish. All right?"
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