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Years
by James Salter always traveled with him and he invariably packed
The Chateau
by William Maxwell. Thus insured, even Christmas could be endured.
    On the big night itself, he ordered room service and avoided the paper hats and festivities in the terraced restaurant. His suite had a wraparound veranda with shade and a view. It was on the top floor of a low-built plantation house that looked over the swimming pool. He was awake at 6:00 and would watch out for the early morning swimmers and then shortly afterwards the chair-baggers with their territorial towels and paperbacks. In earlier, less affluent times, he would have been one of them, but now he was, quite literally, above such stratagems. He stayed on his deck all day, going down only for meals.
    Guests were assigned tables on the terrace for the length of their stay. The positions, once negotiated, were guaranteed. The terrace, as is the way of these things, had its own Siberia and Golden Mile. In general, the tables around the dance floor were considered prime, under cover but close to the water. Henry, who preferred to sit at the back, had been greeted like a man who wants to pay full price at a clearance sale and had been escorted with much ceremony to a despisedtable. From there, he could watch his fellow guests, even if he could not always hear the quiet crooning of the nightly cabaret turn.
    One night, Ken and Daphne, an English couple, paused at Henry’s table to exchange greetings. Their recap of the day’s weather had hardly started, before it was cut short. Henry followed their gaze across the floor and saw that their usual front-row table had been given to newcomers.
    “Oh dear,” Daphne said. “We’d better see if we can sort it out.”
    He watched them go off to do battle at the captain’s desk. Ken had twisted his ankle playing tennis and arrived at the desk, like a late-comer at an accident, envious of those that had been there from the start.
    An inquest was in progress, apologies, a mistake had been made. The captain and four Barbadian waiters clustered around the couple. And then, above the chatter of the diners, above the soft lilt of the bandstand vocalist, came the echo of an older order, the voice of less egalitarian times, the throwback tones of Ken—“Then why the fuck did you give the table away?”
    “Ken, that’s enough. Stop it, stop it, now!”
    Daphne grabbed Ken’s arm and pulled him off to an available table, one row back.
    The singer went on singing, the waiters dispersed, no obvious signs of agitation, but harm had been done. Not to the waiters, whose calm indifference remained intact, but the rumpus had damaged Daphne. Her standing in the dining room had been undermined by Ken’s tantrum. A recent graduatefrom the school of humiliation himself, Henry admired her courage as she smiled and nodded at her new neighbors in the second row, but when the sommelier was dismissed by Ken with a sulky “Same as usual”—it was one misdeed too many and she picked up her bag and left the room.

    Henry recalled an airport, long ago. They had been returning from a holiday in Portugal and Nessa and Tom had been assigned seats twenty rows behind him. He had kicked up and made the girl at the check-in cry. Finally, they had been offered three seats together, but Nessa had refused to accept them. She had sat in the back of the plane with a baffled Tom.

    He returned from Barbados on Thursday, the day before New Year’s Eve. He had been asked to the big thrash at the Dome, but had made his excuses. Two of his clients were major sponsors and before his retirement he had sat in on many planning meetings. He had not found them stimulating. The project had needed a presiding genius, a dictator. As it was, there were too many bosses, too many scared people running around trying not to give offense. Instead of the trip to Greenwich, he intended to spend the evening watching television and to be in bed by 11:00. He had long since stopped