30
At Raygar’s
a play in one act
by
J.S. Green
Copyright 2014 by J.S. Green
At Raygar’s
Scene One
(A closed restaurant after hours. This is a middling-to-high fancy
restaurant—no fast food. Indirect lighting glows in the corners.
The bar is in the background, a brass and oak
affair, crowned with high rows of bottles and indistinct crystal.
RAYMOND stands at the bar, in profile facing stage-left,
reading over a supplies order sheet. He looks to
be in his late fifties, salt-and-pepper hair, white pinstriped shirt
with no tie. He wears brown leisure slacks. NORA is seated
at a dining-table cleared for work, in the foreground. She is about 35, slim,
pretty, her hair in a honey-blond bob. She faces the audience at center-stage
and is closer to the audience, her back to Raymond.
Nora has a laptop open in front of her. There is a high pile
of small papers at her left elbow. She picks one
up and reads it, types on the laptop, then puts it in a small pile
at her right elbow: She is doing the restaurants receipts.
Raymond shakes his head in exasperation and slaps the order sheet down
on the bar. Nora winces at the slap but continues her work.
Raymond lifts a glass full of red wine and takes a sip. Then walks to where
Nora sits and looks down at her, behind her back.
As she listens to him she gazes straight
forward, as if searching in the distance.)
RAYMOND: They ordered too much ribeye again. I told them in the
kitchen but they did it anyway. Like last year when we had to write off
four hundred dollars worth of meat. I told them—you’re over ordering,
February is the slowest month. But they did it anyway—Gar did it.
Gar told them to order more than I said.
He thinks he is the genius of supply…Ha! What do you
say when we have two-hundred pounds of rotten meat and a carnivorous
mob out here pounding on the tables!
(He bangs his fist on the table Nora is working at.
She is startled and cranes her neck to look up at him.)
NORA: He’s your business partner, Raymond. I just work here.
RAYMOND: You work for both of us.
NORA: But you’re my favorite.
RAYMOND: That means that Gar is your least favorite. There’s only
two of us. Is that how you feel, Nora?
(She raises a receipt in the air, waving it in Raymond’s general
direction.)
NORA: Is that a ‘six’ or a ‘five’ ?
(Raymond steps over to her and steadies her wrist gently.
He bends over and squints at the receipt.)
RAYMOND: Call it a six. Six is always better than five.
(He paces off to stage-right. He will continue pacing.)
NORA: Except when your ordering cases of meat.
RAYMOND: Ahhhhh! You mean when Gar is barging into the kitchen and
causing them to over order because Gar is soooo smart. Gar studied
inventory management at school. Even though when we bought this
place it was understood that the kitchen would be my turf, because I
have a little thing called forty years in the restaurant business.
While Gar was writing novels no one wanted to read and drinking
his way to higher enlightenment, I was in the trenches! From dishwasher to
line cook to waiter to Food and Beverage Manager at the Tradewinds.
I know how a restaurant lives and breathes and….
NORA: Dreams?
RAYMOND: The point is I came up in the ranks. While Gar just waltzes in—
NORA: But he was sous-chef at Mario’s for five years.
RAYMOND: Ohhhh, Mario’s is overrated. I don’t like the way they marinate
everything. What are they hiding? Marinade disguises a flavor.
They marinate corn, for God’s sake.
NORA: Maybe they over order it and they want to hide its rottenness.
RAYMOND: Just like Gar hides his rottenness. But not from me.
Not from us, right Nora?
(Nora holds both hands up in equivocation.)
NORA: Hey, I’m not taking sides in that little war going on in your head,
Raymond. I get along fine with Gar. You know I watched him demonstrate the
new crepe grill for the guys on the line—he’s really good!
The way he just knows when to turn the crepe. I asked him and he said,
you can’t really really teach it, it has to be learned.
(Raymond goes back to the bar and takes another gulp of wine.)
RAYMOND: He doesn’t even know what makes for real dining
splendor. Well I do! It takes years of trial and error—
NORA: Raymond! ‘Dining splendor’?!
(Raymond holds the wing glass in his hand, taking sips when Nora speaks.)
RAYMOND: Gar is always trying to show how much smarter than me he is,
because he knows that he is not better. Gar has an inferiority complex
and he tries to make up for it with crepe grills and…big piles of meat…
You’d think he was the first guy who ever tossed a crepe. I can do
crepes, I can! Nobody asked me—
NORA: I’m asking: why does it bother you that Gar is talented?
RAYMOND: Talent is overrated. I’ll tell you what bothers me:
When I have to make frantic phone calls at five o’clock on a Friday
to fill dining room shifts because Gar left four people off the evening
schedule that was his responsibility to make. Four people!
NORA: I remember that night. We cleared forty-two hundred that night.
RAYMOND: Only because I hustled to get a good wait staff—
NORA: No. Gar’s pastry guy was the big hit that night.
The word went around the tables: Try the baklava. And it was Gar’s recipe,
he worked with the pastry guy. That brings a lot of them back to our door,
Raymond. People remember; they tell their friends,
they come back for more. Here, I’ve got the numbers—
RAYMOND: (Loudly.) I got my own numbers!
One: The key to a well run business is good scheduling.
Two: Supply is a matter of demand. Three: You can’t learn something
that can’t be taught. It all adds up to Gar sticking his nose where it
doesn’t belong.
(Nora lifts a paper from the table.)
NORA: Ever since that night our Friday-Saturdays have averaged 17% higher
than in the six months before.
(Raymond takes a deep drink of wine.)
RAYMOND: You make me dizzy with those numbers. I stick to the basics.
They’ve served me well and will see me through.
(He lifts the wine bottle and pours himself another.)
NORA: Served you well…until you met Gar. You didn’t want to hire
Gar’s pastry guy. You said it was a waste of money. You two had a big argument
over it, I remember you were standing right there.
RAYMOND: (Slams wine bottle down on the bar.) I’m still standing here!
NORA: Gar has helped us, Raymond. That means he has helped you,
if you could just see it. You needed his start up share. You wouldn’t even
own Raygar’s if you hadn’t met Gar.
RAYMOND: You mean if you hadn’t introduced us. And vice-versa, by the way.
NORA: (Puzzled) Vice-versa? Like, you introduced me to Gar?
RAYMOND: No, like the money. Gar wouldn’t own this place either, without the
seed money I put in.
NORA: But his was more.
RAYMOND : (He freezes.) How did you know that?
NORA: It gets around, Raymond. But you also put in your forty
years of restaurant experience—
RAYMOND: It gets around?
NORA: What’s wrong? I haven’t told anyone, Raymond.
RAYMOND: What’s wrong? You mean every dishwasher in this place knows
that I am not…equal?
NORA: Equal?
RAYMOND: (Waves his finger for emphasis.) The deal I signed
with Gar says that profits are exactly 50/50
and management duties are exactly 50/50. So, yes, he may have
put in a little more up front, but I am just as much the boss…
It is written that I am the boss.
NORA: It is written? Like in the Bible?
RAYMOND: (Passionate. A note of despair.) Gar can’t cheat me out of that.
I’ve got it in writing that this is my place.
NORA: Gar is a smart business man, Raymond. You need to listen to Gar and—
RAYMOND: And I might learn something? Are you telling me my business?
NORA: Yes.
RAYMOND: No!
NORA: It’s my job to tell you your business.
RAYMOND: What’s my job? You know everything. Tell me.
(Nora stops working and looks straight ahead.)
NORA: To listen. To think. To act.
(They are both silent. Raymond rubs the side of his wine glass and gazes
into the red liquid. )
RAYMOND: I am thinking.
(Nora turns away from the laptop and turns toward Raymond, without
standing up.)
RAYMOND: I listened. And now I’m thinking.
(Nora follows him with her eyes nervously.
Raymond paces in front of the bar, left to right.
He stops to take a gulp of wine at intervals.)
RAYMOND: I have listened to Gar. Way late at night, when I’m tossing in bed,
all alone, since my separation. (He looks intently at Nora.) Or should
I say, separations. Oh, I have heard Gar and listened and
listened to that lispy, fake-modest voice, always pretending to be so shy.
I listened when he deliberately humiliated me in front of those food writers from
the Gazette. After I was cracking a lot of jokes, trying to get them to like me and
Gar says to them, ‘Raymond’s such a relief after a hard day. And he keeps the
kitchen so clean.’ Like I’m a clown and a janitor and the writers laughed at it,
laughed at me, when they had just sneered at my jokes. And their review made
it seem like Raygar’s is totally his baby and my name was mentioned a total of
once, like a piece of furniture. When this place was all my idea!
And I just sat there and took it because the review of Raygar’s was favorable,
even though for the wrong reasons. Because I care about this place. And it is my
baby and he is trying to take it away! I worked forty years and he is trying to
take it away from me. I have listened to him and I think it, I can feel it:
He wants to cut me out of my own place. That would
kill me, Nora. Gar is trying to kill me!
(Raymond is panting. Nora looks into space with a tortured expression.
Raymond leans on the bar and snarls bitterly.)
RAYMOND: And night-after-night I think about it,
and I think and think. But I have not ACTED! No! Not yet.
(Nora is visibly shaken. She hesitates in her chair, then stands up and
walks to Raymond. She stands close to him).
NORA: Don’t, Raymond.
(They are both silent. Raymond rubs his wineglass.)
NORA: We’re going to clear twenty-eight ten tonight.
RAYMOND: The proof is in the receipts, right Nora? (He gulps down his wine.)
NORA: Where else would it be?
RAYMOND: You’re standing within hugging distance of me.
NORA: I am always close to you, Raymond.
RAYMOND: You don’t seem like it now. Do you still believe in me, Nora?
Or am I just a silly old dream to you now. Just a feeling that got used up.
NORA: (Hesitantly) I am still doing your numbers, Raymond.
RAYMOND: And numbers are real.
NORA: But it’s more than just that.
RAYMOND: Yes, it’s more than numbers—it’s not just amounts. It’s flavor.
Flavor. Taste. This is a restaurant. Taste becomes a conviction. Taste is a
belief. Do you believe in me Nora?
NORA: I don’t disbelieve in you Raymond.
RAYMOND: You mean you don’t spit me out.
NORA: We had a good love together Raymond, you and me, back then.
Now, I’m awake, in the present. But I’m still standing here, still close to you
in another way.
(He paces away from her.)
RAYMOND: So I can hear your voice in my ear. So I can hear you telling me
how Gar is good for me. Gar will make us all rich with the new taste that he brings.
Gar is the future. Am I just the past? What am I, Nora?
NORA: (She steps back toward her table but remains standing.)
Raymond, you’re my friend. We need each other. We’re a team.
RAYMOND: (He reaches out his hand to her.) We?
NORA: (Nervously.) All of us. Raygar’s. Everything. All of it.
RAYMOND: It? (He drops his hand and looks at the floor.)
It. But I’m talking about me, Nora.
NORA: Me too
RAYMOND: What am I doing? It was all my idea. But what am I doing now?
Am I just the compliant dope who sits at a desk doing routine paperwork,
smiling at the customers, organizing the busboys, while the smart people do all the
real work. Gar creates a glittering palace and I’m just the doorman?
An overpaid doorman…Nora, should I be ashamed
of the money I’m making? You’re the one who counts it.
(He lifts his bottle of red wine and pours into his glass.
Nora steps over to him quickly and reaches for his wrist. She stops the pour.)
NORA: Slow down, Raymond. What are you talking about? What is
this river of crap coming out of you about being ashamed of money?
(She rests her hand on his wrist for a few seconds.
They look expectantly at one another. Suddenly Raymond
breaks out laughing. Nora lets go of him. She looks perplexed.)
RAYMOND: Ha! I really had you going there, didn’t I. (He finishes
pouring.) Doorman…Ha! You’d think I was coming unhinged…
NORA: So you’re really okay now?
RAYMOND: Sure. I work in a palace. Shamelessly. Ha!