Free All the Time in the World by E. L. Doctorow Page A

carelessness and comparing herself badly, a provincial, maybe smart enough in the cafés of eastern Europe, and a star at Borislav’s, but here a poor relative. Ramon felt sorry for her.
    Leon had kept himself fit in prison. His short-sleeved jersey showed his biceps. His head was shaved and he wore stylish black-rimmed glasses. He was elegant and had a self-assurance that Ramon could imitate only in moments of conscious effort.
    When the party went into its loose-limbed, heedless phase, loud with stoned laughter and drunken appreciations, the music pulsing through the acrid atmosphere, Ramon decided that it was time to leave.
    Jelena was already out the door when Leon said, Ramon, if you want to, my sense is that it is possible.
    Why?
    She told me that you never smile.
    So how does that mean anything?
    It means that she observes you. I told her that she should give you something to smile about.
    That is very unlikely.
    I told her how smart you are, how you could read at the age of four.
    Oh, sure, that will certainly help. She is indebted to me for a thousand dollars. I haven’t seen any of it.
    Leon laughed and gave Ramon a big hug. Ah, my brother, maybe you are not so smart after all.
    AFTER THE NIGHT AT LEON’S , Borislav’s restaurant with its dark furniture and thick carpets and red velvet drapes and amateur paintings seemed to Ramon unforgivably tacky. Yet working the same room with Jelena, doing the same thing at the same time, gave him a feeling of being home. And now he regretted bragging to her about what an independent person he was, with his uncompromising values. The truth was that Leon had seen him through four years at City College. And neither did this life he had drifted into have anything to do with values. He had felt restless, with only a vague ambition to make films, and gripped with a kind of wanderlust, though he had not wandered farther than Brooklyn. He’d gotten off the El one day when the sun shone in the window. It seemed to him a different light here than you had in Manhattan. He walked around and found sand in the streets and here and there a trace of a trolley track in the worn-out concrete.By and by, he came to the beachfront. The air was fresh, gulls rode the breezes, and Ramon felt unaccustomedly at peace in the wind-buffered sun with the blue seawater in his eyes. This feeling stayed with him as he wandered back into a local business district and saw the sign in Borislav’s window: DISHWASH IS WANTED . He liked that locution, suggestive of a foreign tongue, and so he walked in and become a dishwash, only to rise to busboy, waiter, and married man.
    THEN CAME THE NIGHT that Borislav closed the restaurant to the public. Tables were pushed together, new linen was laid out, as well as cut-crystal glasses that Ramon had not seen before. A strange man arrived and strode into the kitchen. Jelena looked at Ramon in surprise, though Borislav, as well as his shrew of a wife, in a fancy dress and with her face made up, were clearly expecting this. He is the chef of this evening, Mrs. Borislav said. Ramon saw the chef’s imperious glance as he looked over the kitchen and the help, including the cooks. The chef shook his head in disapproval, then turned to Borislav and began giving orders.
    The dinner party for which the entire restaurant had been reserved turned out to have just fourteen guests, all men. Apparently they liked a quiet room. Borislav had excused the staff for the evening, except for Ramon and Jelena. When Ramon began his service, with bottles of sparkling water, conversation stopped and a man at the head of the table looked at him. Ramon felt Borislav’s hand on his shoulder and heard his somewhat deferential voice saying, in its mouthful language, that the boy was okay because he was just a mestizo who didn’t understand a word—which Ramon, of course, understood, because the look he’d got from the head man and the jovially responsive voice of Borislav provided all the