LEONARD KRIEGEL
107
with this woman. "Maybe you'd like something more to eat, Alicia?" he
asks. The old man might be taken for the father of the good-looking
woman. Thinking of that pleases him. He has no children. "Some
dessert? Maybe you ' d like a slice of the apple pie. They got real good
apple pie here, or a piece of Danish, maybe."
"I'm fine, Willie," the woman says, coffee cup still suspended in
front of her handsome face.
"I just thought, you know. A ham and cheese and a cup of coffee..
. ." The old man shrugs. "Not a big luncb, is it?" The old man does not
look at the good-looking woman he now wishes people would take for
his daughter. He is sorry he never had children. He is sorry he never mar–
ried. The old man's eyes are on the light beige coffee cup the good–
looking woman holds in front of her and then his eyes nervously shift to
the front of the store where the Greek owner is sitting behind the cash
register, staring out at the avenue.
The Greek owner is in his early fifties . He has been in America for
nineteen years and has owned this New York coffee shop for the last
eight. He is also the Greek owner of a two-family wood-frame house in
Astoria, Queens, where he rents out the back as a separate apartment
with its own entrance and kitchen. He rents it to a smiling Pakistani and
his silent wife and twin infant daughters. The Pakistani's wife speaks no
English and when the Greek owner meets her coming out of the house
she rushes past him, eyes cast down on the Astoria pavement.
The Greek owner lives in the front of the house with his small dark–
haired wife who talks but who will never lose her Salonikan accent.
Their two grown children live with them, a son who is studying to be a
pharmacist at St. John's, who runs around with too many girls and plays
loud music the Greek owner hates and grudgingly helps out at the coffee
shop on weekends, and a daughter the Greek owner thinks is very
beautiful who plays the piano well enough so that she can study at
Julliard, where at this very moment, she is rehearsing an especially difficult
Chopin etude under the watchful gaze of a Hungarian professor who
would like to fuck her.
But the Greek owner of the coffee shop is unaware of the Chopin
etude and the Hungarian professor who wants to fuck his daughter. He
stands behind the register on this cold afternoon in mid-January and he is
not thinking about his Pakistani tenants in Astoria or his small wife and
her Salonikan accent or his college boy son at St. John's who cannot
keep his cock between his legs or his beautiful daughter who is playing
the piano for some Hungarian at Julliard. He is thinking that it is two–
thirty in the afternoon and another lunch has come and gone and it has
