Tony Borassca’s Neapolitan Bistro

Okay. I know what you’re thinking. Borassca? But isn’t that—

YES. A name synonymous with fine Italian dining. An intimate setting. Candles galore. Rustic elegance. Frescoes of classy naked broads galavanting amidst a panoply of happy sagging vines and white marble rubble.

No, you think, smugly, I feel like I remember reading—

UH-HUH. You remember reading rave reviews about the ambiance, Ernesto Calabrese’s tactful piano renditions of Sinatra songs you’ve heard a million times before, you remember the praise of Antonio Carmine Borassca’s revelatory Spaghetti All’Intestino. And if you’re a pessimist, you remember the murders, the gypsy curse and that haunted mosaic made of painted human teeth.

YAWN. No thanks. Too morose. As a consummate optimist, I’m only interested in writing fluff. Fluff like the delectable bone marrow mascarpone you’ll find in every self-actualizing bite of Mamma Borassca’s tiramisu.

So, this story will be fluffy. Sweet. If anything it’s a rom-com and it starts over a bowl of greasy clams and a few ice cold Peronis (in glasses).

Travis was in rare form on this particular night. Not quite drunk enough to wax rhapsodic about the war, but well in his cups. “I just don’t know how you could think that the sinking of the Titanic wasn’t an inside job. White Star was itching for publicity and that captain wanted Billy Zane dead.”

Mel put a sympathetic hand on his. “Travis, Billy Zane wasn’t on the actual Titanic.”

“Bullshit.”

I looked around warily. One didn’t swear at Tony Borassca’s. It simply wasn’t done. Luckily everyone else was too engrossed in their meals or public displays of lustful affection to notice.

Mel, not knowing the time honored rules of etiquette at TB’s simply set Travis straight on the facts.

“It’s not bullshit. It’s the fucking truth, babe. Look at his Wikipedia—right here—William George Zane, Jr. is an American actor—blah, blah, blah—here! Died of cholera on May 9, 1899. See? He couldn’t have been on the Titanic.”

“Huh. Well, fuck me. Who was I thinking of?”

“Jennifer Garner?”

“Yes! God, what would I do without you?”

Mel shrugged and took a swig of her flavorful Italian beer, burped endearingly, rolled her eyes. “Probably write more horror.”

Travis was a horror writer—a good one—and an asshole. We hadn’t known each other long, but we had been assigned seats next to one another at our origami club (we’re both crane purists) and realized we didn’t hate each other completely.

My wife Eleanor wasn’t a fan of Mel (or Travis for that matter), so I typically came to our double dates with my mistress, Trish.

Trish was born after 1990 and she claims to have cried after reading Travis’s emotional tour-de-force, Maria on the Moon. She’s a Motto diehard, but as Travis and Mel were enjoying a moment of quiet mutual appreciation, Trish was attempting to give me an over-the-trousers hand job and failing miserably. I decided to interrupt her.

“Trish, do you know anything about Jennifer Garner?” I asked, immediately regretting the particular question. She responded with a look—crestfallen…and a bit pissed.

“Why the fuck do you always do this, Peter? You know I’m not some goddamn simp for—“

“Honey. Language…”

“—history podcasts. I don’t have your tolerance for pompous boredom. So fuck you and fuck Malcolm Gladwell too! And if you ever try to embarrass me in front of Grand Theft Motto again, I swear to FUCKING GOD I WILL—”

“Trish, language,” I hissed. It simply wasn’t done. People were looking. Starting to stare. “Trish—laugh—please.”

“Get fucked Peter. Laugh? Get absolutely fucked. You fucking laugh.”

Travis uncomfortably made eyes at the menu. Furrowed his brow. Suddenly keen to avoid the awkward emotional drama unfolding. He missed what Mel didn’t.

“Peter…what—what are they doing?” Mel whispered.

A dozen pairs of once loving eyes now stared sharply. Their jaws moved, jittery, somewhere between a chatter and a mimicry of silent speech. Poor blindly livid Trish. One didn’t swear at Tony Borassca’s. She knew that.

“Ma’am…” One of the waiters had appeared, some freakishly tall rail of a man looming over Trish. Travis lifted his eyes with a disconcerted frown, then returned to the menu. Mel looked to be trying to follow the direction of the stares.

“Ma’am, I am afraid that you have breached decorum.” The giant waif put a hand on Trish’s shoulder and she seemed to register her faux pas. “We have rules here.”

“Oh, fu—uh—funny!” Trish tried to cackle, faltered as the waiter returned a sympathetic sigh.

“Too late for all that. I’m—I’m sorry. But let’s us try and make this civil for the other patrons. Okay?”

Trish looked to me for help. I couldn’t give it to her. She’d broken a rule. An important one. No swearing. And fuck did she look out of sorts.

“Wait, make what civil for the other patrons?” Mel cut in. “What are you doing with her?”

“Mel, it’s fuh-fine,” Trish stammered. “I broke—the rules.”

The waiter looked over his shoulder. Back to the red double doors that led nowhere good. Not the kitchen or the bathroom. Somewhere else.

“Agh—man—Mel, do you have any Advil? I just got the worst headache.” Travis was unprepared. My fault entirely. I should’ve warned him.

Mel reached for her bag and winced before she’d had the chance to check. “Oh. I just got one too. What the hel—“

“Hello! Is it me you’re looking for?! Cause I wonder where you are! And I wonder what you do!” I tried to save Mel with Lionel Richie. She looked pained and utterly baffled. And as I stopped singing, satisfied that I had averted another hapless fuck up, the patrons turned their eyes to me. And all at once, in chilling herdlike unity, bleated, “more!”

Fuck. I reprised the song, shuddering through the chorus as Travis and Mel clutched at their temples and Trish wept.

“I THINK IT’S TIME WE GO SEE TONY!” the waiter shouted over the din of Travis and Mel’s agonized moans, the patrons’ rising hiss, and Ernesto Calabrese’s jazzy accompaniment to my caterwauling.

Trish stood slowly. Her legs shook and her eyes spoke a silent plea to no one in particular.

“Tell me how to win your heart, for I haven't got a clue.”

The lyrics I sang seemed painfully glib. I tried not to meet her gaze as she stumbled away at the waiter’s insistence. The red doors seemed to shiver at her approach, licking light from the air around them. She was whimpering as her hand met the tufted leather, as she pushed. I couldn’t look. But a moment later she was gone.

A moment after that, a deluge of happy chatter fell upon the restaurant, knives clinking on China plates, quiet chuckles, normality. For everyone but Travis and Mel.

“What just happened?” Travis asked, slapping the side of his head as if dislodging the memory of pain. “I feel like I blacked out.”

“What is this place, Peter?” Mel rasped, plainly more collected than her fiancé. “Where the fu—um—where the heck is Trish?”

“She’s…fine. Ish. She’ll be back at least.”

“Will she? Because she didn’t seem too okay with going through those—wait—where are the doors?”

I glanced over at the mosaic where the doors had been seconds before—a dour portrait of the Contessa di Nondormire, Lucrezia Borassca, her features hauntingly delicate for being made of painted human teeth.

“Best not to think too much about it, Mel. Just be satisfied that you’re going to eat the best white truffle gnocchi this side of the—“

“No!” she snapped. “There’s something wrong with this place. Jesus, it’s like one of Travis’s stories. Doors don’t just become paintings of women.”

“Mosaics,” I corrected, unhelpfully.

“What? Okay, mosaics. Whatever.” She shouldered her purse. “Travis, we’re going.”

Travis stared at Mel absently. “I—I think that waiter was Tom or Jacob or whatever. Deco. He’s another writer on Reddit.”

“Nobody cares about some writer that nobody cares about, Travis. I’m going. Eff this place.”

“Fresh parmigiana?”

Mel shrieked, kicked away from the table. A voice had come from underneath it. The accent—not quite American, but not Italian either. Mel lifted the (beautifully supple off-white) tablecloth and grimaced.

“Who are you? And how did you—no—you know what? Nope. I’m not getting involved with whatever this is. I’m leaving. Peter, I’m saving a lot of angry swear words for you tomorrow. Travis?”

Travis frowned. “The front door is gone.”

“What?” Incredulously. “Wha—how? PETER!”

I just wanted a pleasant evening. Everyone else was having a good time. Making out across the table over the searing heat of elegant candles, animalistically lapping zuppa from bowls, gently swaying to the same two bars of Sinatra’s My Way played over and over again. Okay, maybe everything was horrifying. But the food was…amazing.

“Everything‘s fine Mel! Travis, put down that clam fork! Please guys, if you just go with the flow, the restaurant is fine. Great even. And look—Trish is back. Yay. She was just hiding under the table. Classic Trish.”

Mel gave the woman a wide berth as she rose from the table.

“Peter, this brand-ambassador Morticia Addams is not Trish.”

“Mel, it is.” I tried to assure. “Hiya Trish! Mel—smile. Please.”

Travis followed my lead. He smiled. Wide. “I get it,” he said through his teeth. “I’m in a coma or something. This is a dream. Deco is a waiter. Greta is Trish now. Mel is normal enough, so she must be with me in the hospital. And Peter…I don’t think I know you. I don’t recognize you. Not really. And the only memory I have of you is the two of us making origami cranes at an origami club.”

Mel’s face cycled through a riot of emotions. But she settled on perplexed. “An origami…club? Is that a thing?”

“It is,” I offered. “Of course it is.”

“No it’s not!” Mel didn’t seem convinced. “And why is new Trish—“

“Greta,” Travis corrected. “She’s genuinelygrim on Reddit.”

“Grim Greta, fine. Why is she so quiet? Is that another horror thing?”

“Doubtful,” Genuinely Trish replied. “But you never know.”

I tried to smile. For their sakes. And I felt for Mel—I did. Tony Borassca’s wasn’t for everyone, but it had the best dim sum outside of Guangzhou. Didn’t it? My internal narrative began to feel untrustworthy, fuzzy, like, like—um—

“We heard that someone is having a birthday!” the waiter belted.

He was back with what looked to be an ice cream dish garnished with arugula. A raven haired stranger at the end of our table sulked beneath a richly feathered birthday hat as a dozen other strangers lifted phones to capture the moment. What the fuck was happening? Had we always been at a banquet table? I couldn’t remember. But I definitely couldn’t remember the cheery people seated around it.

“It’s Daria!” Travis shouted. “Birthday girl! Birthday girl!”

“I told you I just wanted an arugula salad,” the birthday girl said, eyeing the peculiar dessert. “Is it possible to have one person in this place listen to me?”

Laughter. Exuberant funniest-joke-of-your-life laughter began to pour from—no one. Suddenly no one was smiling. But live studio audience guffaws still echoed off of the walls, dying slightly as one by one the heads turned toward me. Hungry eyes regarding me with malicious curiosity. Then the waiter was standing beside me. Humming a tune.

Hello by Lionel Richie. Slow discordant melody lifelessly covering the silence like an oily film. I couldn’t remember what any of it was about. I was lost, palpably aware of the tightness of the room—and the absence of doors.

“What is this place?” I asked. “I don’t—I don’t think I know who I am.”

Travis (that was his name right?) put his arm around the waiter’s shoulder. New Trish stared ruefully beneath a tidy curtain of bangs, eyes black, hollow. What did they want? What did they want? WHAT DID THEY WANT?!

“We wanted you to keep singing. We asked for more. You forgot your etiquette. You let us down…”

Travis and the waiter were both glaring, eyes fixed intently somewhere below my chin. Neither were speaking. None of them were…and yet the voice continued on.

“You think too much. You should enjoy yourself. Feed the expectations of the room. Laugh.”

No. I didn’t want to laugh. I wanted to scream. Scream at the foreignness of all the faces, the nauseating wrongness of everything. The candles on the table were all too sweet, cloying cheap vanilla and cinnamon. The frescoes were at once frenetic and dull, sloughing from the walls in curdled drips, pleasant scenes becoming violent and grotesque. And underneath it all was—nothing—not blackness or whiteness; the absence of anything. It hurt my eyes to see it, hurt my head, blooming pain, fierce and clawing at my temples. I wept. Whimpered pitifully.

Why weren’t any of them helping me? Why were they all just watching me? Static, dead things pretending at life? I closed my eyes. Hid from it all. Why—

“Jordan.”

I realized that the waiter’s humming had ended as a new voice slid into the ringing silence.

That voice—old Trish?

“Jordan.”

Who was Jordan?

“Jordan, can you read the second line for me again?

The voice was suddenly my entire existence. A vestige of the familiar. Or a lie? Was I Jordan?

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Read the second line. Read? Okay. I opened my eyes.

Blurry letters in the dark. “Um…R H N J Q R D A M?”

“Pretty dang close, Mr. Grupe. So, I think we can leave your prescription there.”

“Thanks,” I said, my mind compulsively clinging to etiquette.

Mr. Grupe…I guess that made me Jordan Grupe. Huh.

“Yeah. Of course. And before you were talking about…dinner?”

Was I? Dinner did seem familiar. “Yeah. I guess I was.”

“Oh. Playing it cool, now, eh? You know, we do sunglasses too.”

“Um…”

“But yeah, I’d love to go to dinner,” she said lightly. “I hear Tony Borassca’s is nice.”

“No! I mean, I don’t think—“

“Olive Garden?”

The name conjured wasps swarming fresh entrails, the endless vertigo of the edge of a bottomless well…another horror, another no.

“Sörry, pasta just seems so heavy. Existentially, I mean.”

The flirty voice in the dark giggled.

“Okay, something light then…hmmm…Tommy’s Taffy?”

“Perfect.”