It’s only 3 o’clock now,” Grelich said. “God forbid that your famous philosophers should have to sit anywhere else. We’ll be out of here long before they start their discussions.”

“Our customers are used to seeing them here,” the waiter said. “I am Jakob Leiber and I am here to serve you.”

The talk was general for a while, with one after another relating incidents of their day. From their conversation, Ritchie got an impression of an older New York, filled with old law tenements, push carts, micvahs, and study rooms for young scholars. He wondered if they weren’t talking about a New York of a hundred years ago, not today.

In the taxi down Second Avenue he had noticed the Hispanic food stores, perfumeries, lunch counters and laundries. What once might have been a Jewish neighborhood had become a Hispanic barrio or whatever they called their slum neighborhoods.

He commented on this to Esther. She told him, “Everything’s changed. I’ve heard Ratstein’s only stays open because of the support of some wealthy Jewish mafia types who live in New Jersey and need a place for lunch on their trips into the city.”

“That reminds me of this movie I saw,” Ritchie said. “There was this Jewish mobster and his daughter, and this other mobster, a young guy, falls in love with the first mobster’s daughter and goes back in time to kill the man who became her husband but didn’t treat her right. I forgot how they got the time machine, but it seemed pretty logical at the time.”

“Did he get the girl?” Esther asked.

“Sort of. But there was a complication.”

“There’s always a complication in invented stories,” Grelich said. “But life isn’t like that. Life is terribly simple.”

“I don’t agree,” Ritchie said, recognizing Grelich’s propensity for climbing out on an unstable premise and inviting someone to knock him off. “I was writing a story about a similar situation—it’s an old theme, you know—and all I found were complications. Christ, even my complications had complications.”