Are We Pleasing You Tonight?
- Alan Bray
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read

Frederick Busch’s short story Are We Pleasing You Tonight? concerns the owner or manager (it’s never clear which) of an upscale restaurant who is working on a particular night as the restaurant’s Maître-D. He is the story’s narrator. Like Ralph the Duck, it is also written in the first person and uses the simple past tense, implying the story is being looked back on. In the course of the evening, this narrator, Peter, seats an elderly woman, her son and the son’s wife. Two things out of the ordinary almost immediately create a story. First, the elderly woman announces that her family is having the dinner to mark the birthdate of her deceased husband. She would like to have a fourth-place set in his honor, a request Peter agrees to. Second, the woman’s daughter-in-law looks exactly like the photo Peter saw that morning in the Wedding Announcement section of the New York Times (the story was set and written in the days of print newspapers, the year 2000). The photo he saw was of the daughter of his ex-wife—not his daughter, someone else’s—and she looked just like her mother, now deceased, and her mother looked just like a woman whom Peter had loved before getting married.
Whoa!
As was true in Ralph the Duck, either one of these conditions would be auspicious set-ups for a dramatic story. A dinner party being a celebration for a dead person, whom the living pretend is present, a man coincidentally seeing a woman who resembles his ex-wife’s daughter, his ex-wife, and a former love, a ghost of a ghost, as Peter says. They are good dramatic situations, yet they require a story.
What happens when the two set-up situations are combined?
The first thing is to consider the beginning. The title itself, Are We Pleasing You Tonight? begs several related questions. Who is being or not being pleased? Is the widow’s family pleased—is she? Is Peter pleased? If they are pleased, or not, why is this?
Don’t worry, we’ll start answering these questions soon.
How? Why?
Stop it.
The story’s first line is: “We were very busy, and the rooms were loud.” There follows a paragraph that establishes the narrator as part of the staff of a busy restaurant on a particular night when a party with reservations comes in “early.” This is the elderly widow, her son and his wife. “I looked away from the wife because she was the same bad news I’d been receiving all day.” So we have a narrator whom we get a sense of as being immersed in chaotic work and under pressure. And the enigmatic observation that he can’t look at a customer because she’s “the same bad news” he’d been receiving all day. So his day has been full of bad news, but we don’t know about what or about the connection with the woman. Does he know her? He also notes “The son walked with his head down, as if she embarrassed him (his mother), or as if he embarrassed himself. That’s a choice right there, isn’t it? How you call it is who you are.” The narrator could see the son as embarrassed by his mother or as embarrassing himself. Interesting. I think we have our old friend the implied author speaking here, no? You are defined by your choices, he tells us. The way you look at things says something about you. But Peter doesn’t choose yet.
Another wrinkle—Peter reveals that he is a military veteran who was in charge of a unit unloading war dead. (presumably from Vietnam). “I had supervised the unloading of cargo planes filled with the horribly dead, the routinely dead, the accidently dead, and the dead who’d been murdered by people under their command. Service is service.” Here, it would seem the narrator, Peter, is equating the handling of the war dead with “handling” the restaurant’s patrons. Thus, as he is used to such things, he has no problem with the request to set a fourth-place for a dead person.
But he is “having a bad night and…a bad day” another clear statement of the state he must transform from. A portion of this malaise is due to problems in the restaurant, a waiter getting high, a new kid making salads. But another portion is due to his having seen the wedding announcement of his ex-wife’s daughter, which reminds him of Tamara, his long-lost love. While he is seeing the wedding announcement—that morning—there is apparently another woman with him who misunderstands his disturbed state, thinking he is saying good morning to her. The narrator thinks: “It wasn’t you, Dottie. It was the one I loved. It was the daughter of the one I loved. It was dead people. That’s my job: meet ‘em and greet ‘em.” Of course, this suggests a less than solid connection with Dottie—a casual fling perhaps? Again, this speaks to his “bad day,” best B.
Here, he again equates his experience handling the dead with something else—handling his feelings about past loves and a failed marriage. In the story’s present, he insists on serving the party of three (or four) himself. He could have avoided them but is drawn to more contact.
The widow and her son and daughter-in-law have placed two photographs of the deceased at the empty table setting—another disturbing connection with the narrator seeing the Wedding Announcement photo that reminds him of the dead. He notes that the daughter-in-law isn’t exactly the same as the other women: “Nevertheless, how is that for extracorporeal life? Most nights, you sell food and drink and it’s deposited in verifiable flesh. Here, in twelve hours, I had seen two ghosts, and one of them ate a steak of swordfish…at a table one quarter of which was occupied by somebody dead.”
We are hurtling toward a climax. All the pieces are in place, all the particular circumstances that make this evening and this party of four remarkable. Let’s stop there and continue next time, trying to answer those questions we began with.
What does Peter choose? Are you embarrassed by who and what you’ve chosen to be around you or are you embarrassed by yourself?
Till next time!
Comentarios