by Alison Pace
“The salmon?”
“Yes”—he nods—“with the Coulis of Roasted Tomatoes and Raspberry Vinegar Dressing.” He pauses, perhaps for a gulp of air and also to take a sip from his glass of water. Meredith sits politely in her chair and listens to him read to her from the menu in a festival of emphasis, “Swiss Chard Leaves, Squid Ink Tagliatelle.” She listens to the very long version of the Seared Foie Gras with its accompaniments, Rosemary Apple Puree and Armagnac Sauce, and onward to the Maine Day Boat Lobster with the White Asparagus and Sweet Peas. And she tries (really she does) to look patient, and interested. And as she listens, at one point she’s even able to hear beyond Josh and only hear the details of the dishes. It’s this, she thinks, food, prepared so lovingly, so perfectly, so exceptionally, that makes so many things worthwhile. And maybe that’s exactly what people mean when they say things like, If nothing else, it’s dinner. It’s not about the dinner being free of charge, it’s just about the dinner.
As she listens, she thinks that the food at Bouley has always been so exquisite and maybe now that she thinks of it, she does prefer it to Babbo. Listening to the menu, looking across the table at Josh, she is seized so suddenly with a fleeting but almost overwhelming wish about her future meals. She wishes not that she could eat so many of them with Josh, but that she could eat them at Bouley.
Josh’s next declaration, “I’ve had the Pennsylvania All Natural Chicken Baked in Buttermilk with Seasonal Rapini and Mitake Mushrooms,” snaps her out of her reverie, and she stops thinking about a world in which every night was spent at Bouley, but rather thinks, Oh, have you? She has to remind herself that tonight, she’s not reviewing. She’s not judging. And she shouldn’t judge Josh. She should only, like Stephanie said, see what happens.
“And it really is outstanding, so maybe we should both get that,” he says, and even though she just reminded herself not to judge, to be open-minded, to see what happens, she can’t really see why she should do that. For a moment she can’t think about the chicken or anything else. For a moment, all she can think is, You broke up with me. And you told me that it was because I wasn’t smart enough or ambitious enough or thin enough. He’d called it fit, not thin, but he’d actually said that. Of course she hadn’t forgotten that, but she’d thought for all the time she’d missed him, maybe she could have, by now, forgiven that. Only now she’s not so sure.
“I think I’ll have the venison,” she says, trying to maintain an adventurous eater’s emotional distance from any thoughts of Bambi.
Josh purses his lips. Josh, it seems, does not care for venison. “I don’t care for venison,” he says, “though I’d be interested to try the Sliced Almonds, Grilled Radicchio, Quince Puree and—”
“Great then,” she says, “you can try some of it,” and he purses a little bit more, and she can tell he’s a bit taken aback by his soliloquy being so rudely cut off. She would like to ask him, out loud, Were you always like this? She thinks that if she were to actually ask him this, he would nod and say quite seriously, I believe so, yes.
The waiter is here now, as is the bread. Meredith has never, in her entire career of eating, ever had bread that came anywhere close to comparing to the bread at Bouley. It is, she feels, beyond comparison. It is, and she truly believes this, perfection.
“Will you be enjoying the wine pairing with your meal?” the waiter asks. Meredith thinks she sees the glimmer of recognition in his eyes.
Josh says, “No,” right away, and Meredith thinks that she would have liked the wine pairing. Though, the wine pairing takes the dinner from one hundred and fifty dollars per person to two hundred and forty. No matter how unaccustomed she is to paying for her own dinner (a close second would be how unaccustomed she is lately to having someone across the table from her buy her dinner) she’s well aware how extravagant, how very over the top a price tag on a meal like this is.
“I’ll have a glass of the Cabernet, please,” she says, thinking it will go well with the venison. She looks up, across the table at Josh, and smiles. He smiles back. She still finds him, his salt-and-pepper hair (very straight and maybe thinning a significant amount more than it used to be), his gray eyes and fine features, so handsome. She watches the way he takes a piece from his bread, the subtlety of his movement, the delicacy of his hands that always seemed aristocratic to her, and still do. She imagines she’ll always think of him as handsome and something about that makes her feel a little bit tricked. She wonders if he missed her. Not now, not from whatever it was that led him here, to Bouley, but when it was over, when it was done, for three years, the years she turned thirty-one and thirty-two and -three. She wonders if he missed her during the years that she got noticed and recognized and published and promoted until she got the call from The NY (and it was, she thought, the best phone call she had ever answered on the first ring) and she got so busy that it started to hurt when she wasn’t. Did he miss her then? And she wonders if she asked him, if he’d be honest, if he’d say, No, I didn’t miss you then. It wasn’t until recently. She wonders if having an important job at an important magazine, as important as The NY, is what makes her no longer not smart in his eyes, and no longer not ambitious, and that’s why he’s here.
This isn’t a night to judge, not food or Josh, she tries to remind herself again. It’s a night just to enjoy and experience, to step back and see what happens. See what happens. It has never been her special skill. She smiles and savors the perfection of the food that is brought to them, the presentation perfect, the timing without flaw. And it’s not until they’re more than halfway through the hot Valrhona chocolate soufflé that she realizes with absolute certainty that she doesn’t miss him anymore.
As they are leaving the restaurant, they pass a couple, sitting at a table right by the archway that separates the maître d’ station from the dining room. It’s not the best table in the room by any means, but they look happy; the woman, especially, she looks very happy. She’s very thin, petite, and she’s wearing an intricate, delicate, top: black silk, spaghetti straps with sequins arranged all across the front. She leans forward and Meredith sees that the spaghetti straps tie together at her neck, in a bow. Meredith imagines the straps being untied later, in just one quick motion. She imagines herself as the type of woman who wears strappy, shiny shirts that say, Look! rather than always wearing ones that say, Don’t.
They walk through the vestibule and are completely enveloped for a moment in the soft, sweet smell of the fresh apples that line every inch of the wall space, and Meredith says to Josh, “Thank you.”
When they are standing on the street, the apple smell somehow still surrounding them, Meredith takes another look through the dome-shaped windows, one last look at all the Valentine’s Day diners still enjoying the last of their meal. It’s so beautiful, every single thing. Her eyes refocus in the window, and then instead of being focused through the glass, she catches her reflection. She sees Josh in the reflection also, standing next to her, holding her hand, and she thinks maybe it’s a bit presumptuous of him to be holding her hand. Or maybe, holding someone’s hand after you’ve just bought her dinner at Bouley isn’t really a lot. But that’s not what stops her, not what stops all her forward motion, everything racing around in her mind along with the apples she can still smell, and the chocolate soufflé she can still taste. What stops her, what puts it all out of her mind, is what she sees when she looks at herself. It’s the first time in a long while she’s been out to dinner without wearing a disguise, and there’s something about that that makes it so much worse.
Earlier, inside Bouley, she had worried that someone might recognize her, dining out without a disguise. And here, now, only a few hours later, she doesn’t quite recognize herself.
She sees someone so much bigger than the person she thinks of when she thinks of herself. She sees someone who looks so much worse than she could have ever thought of herself. And she hates what she sees. She wants to look, and to be able to see accomplished, competent, driven.
She sees lumpy, she sees looming, she sees so much more than she wants. It is only right here, right now, that the word substantial has become a bad one. She wants to look and to be able to see herself and think any number of things, but all she can think is, That can’t be me. She has told herself so many times that it’s a job requirement to indulge, to have everything. But it didn’t prepare her.
She turns away from the reflection, but she lets the image linger in her mind, because she does things like that, because when she has made a career out of judging everything else, it is quite impossible for her not to give herself a hard time, too.
She’s facing Josh now, and he smiles. She thinks he smiles a lot. Maybe it would have been different if they’d gone somewhere less romantic. Like the Modern. Even though the Times only gave it two stars, Meredith actually thinks they were so off the mark about that. She thinks it’s beautiful and elegant and special, but she would never describe it as romantic. It’s one of her favorite new restaurants in New York, and she wonders if that must speak volumes about her.
She smiles back at Josh, and she thinks that smiling itself has almost lost its meaning. When she looks at him, it’s true: he’s still the guy who left her. He’s the guy who told her, it wasn’t him, it was her, who said in the spirit of honesty, because he thought honesty was so important, that he thought she wasn’t ambitious enough, and not successful enough, that she could be smarter. She could be more interested in politics, and international affairs, and she could be more fit and maybe take up running. He worried that she used to smoke when she was in college and when she’d lived in France and that she’d go back to that should times ever turn tough, as smokers often do. He’s the guy who left. He really left, he moved to Philadelphia to be a lawyer there, even though it seemed to Meredith at least that there were plenty of opportunities to be a lawyer in New York. And everyone told her that would make it easier, that he was in Philadelphia. But it didn’t, not for a long time.
“Do you want to come back?” he asks her, and he means his hotel, the Plaza Athénée, a hotel she has always thought of as beautiful. When she looks back on this night, it’ll probably be true that he was talking about more than the hotel. She doesn’t let herself look in the window again, at the reflection, and she looks right at him. She thinks that the people who really hurt you, who really truly left you with a hole in your heart, that maybe they kind of have to stay that way, as the people who left you, that maybe they don’t get to come back.
“I don’t know,” she tells him.
“Why not just see what happens?” he says. See. What. Happens. Apparently, it’s all the rage. And the only answer she can think of is that she doesn’t want to. She wishes for a moment, for longer than that, that she’d known this all along, that he would come back, even if it was three years later, and that when he did she wouldn’t want him. And she wishes she knew this not because it would have made any of it a victory, it has nothing to do with victories, it just would have made it so much easier.
“No,” she says, “No, Josh, I don’t think I do.”
And he nods, thoughtfully, and looks right at her and says, “I can understand that you might be ambivalent.” She wonders for a minute if she should just go back to his hotel with him, and sleep with him, and then bow out gracefully (though of course the bow-out would be perhaps slightly less graceful than had she not just used him for sex). She can see that there would be some merit in that, there not having been any sleeping with anyone for longer than she’d care to admit. But, no, she thinks, it would do more harm than good. And she longs for a moment to be the type of person who’d just go back with him and not think twice about the repercussions, and she longs for the moment after that just to be with him, and she imagines that’s exactly what he means by ambivalent.
“I don’t think,” she says, meeting his gaze, a gaze she thinks she’ll try to remember as steely, “I don’t think ambivalent is the exact best word.”
And he doesn’t seem compelled to argue, or at least if he is compelled, he doesn’t. He only nods and he hails her a cab and they say goodbye really quickly like they’ll see each other two, three weeks from now, the next time work just happens to bring him up to New York. Saint Patrick’s Day maybe.
It doesn’t take long at all to get home; it seems actually like it has taken a lot less time than it usually takes to get all the way up, from all the way down in Tribeca. Meredith nods at her doorman, heads up twelve floors in the nondescript elevator, to her nondescript floor. She turns the key in her door, and once she’s inside she smells her hair conditioner, Frederic Fekkai Technician Conditioner for Dry, Damaged, Color-Treated Hair. Her hair isn’t any of these, but she really likes the smell. And the smell, it has a way of lingering in her apartment after she’s washed her hair and she likes that, too. She’d washed her hair tonight, wanting to be sure it looked nice for Bouley, for Josh, right before she left.
Before she even takes her coat off, she fishes her iPod out of her bag, and puts it in its Bose iPod dock. She hits Play, and the song she’s been listening to a lot lately, the Perishers’ “Trouble Sleeping,” starts to play.
“I’m having trouble sleeping,” fills the room, and Meredith thinks how, lately, she really has. She listens to a line or two more, just standing there, still in her coat, her keys still in her hand, her eyes on her cuticles, until the line when the Perishers implore whomever it is they are singing to, to leave. She slowly takes off her coat and lays it over the back of her couch: purple velvet, sectional, from the 1960s she thinks, stunning.
For a long time after Josh had left she’d recorded every rerun of The West Wing on the Bravo channel—they aired all the time—and she would watch an episode each night before she went to sleep and it was because she missed him, because she’d always felt that on his better days, Josh reminded her of Josh Lyman, White House deputy chief of staff. Not Bradley Whit-ford, the actor who played him, but actual Josh Lyman, as if he really existed, as if he were indeed an actual man. And for perhaps even longer, she thought that it wasn’t really going to happen this way, that really, it couldn’t and that in the end it would all work out. She’d move to Philadelphia, too, and they’d live in a townhouse, and she’d review restaurants there, because there were so many good restaurants in Philadelphia, some of the all-time great ones, even. Le Bec Fin so often popped into her mind.
Meredith turns and heads into her room. She gets undressed in the dark, gets her pajamas from the hook on the back of the bathroom door, and brushes her teeth, quickly, unconscientiously, in the dark, too. She splashes water on her face, and feels a tiny twinge, because she knows she’s just asking for a breakout by not fully washing off her makeup, but she doesn’t want the light on, and she thinks maybe she’s just too tired. And she’s too aware right now that no matter how busy you are, no matter how completely you fill up every day, you can’t fill it all up. There’s always time left at the end of it to feel lonely.
She pulls back her covers, and gets under them. She reminds herself that in the end, what actually happened was that The West Wing got canceled, and Le Bec Fin lost its fifth star.
five
what would jennifer do?
Stephanie is sitting in their office, on her side of their desk. “Our desk” is what they called it. And before that, when they first saw the white brick house on Linwood Avenue, with the beautiful front porch and the open downstairs, they’d referred to the small room in the front as “our office.” “This room, here,” they said smiling, standing in its doorway, “it can be our office.” When they’d found the great partners’ desk at an estate auction in Far Hills, they said, “Look at this fantastic desk, we should get it for our office.” And when their partners desk arrived, at their new house, they’d placed it in their office, right under the window with two matching chairs from Pottery Barn on either side. They added their laptops, their papers, their things.
Even after Stephanie had left her job in PR and no longer had any work to bring home,
even after Aubrey carried his laptop down to his workroom, where it remained, with all his papers and God knows what else, on what was turning out to be a permanent basis, Stephanie had continued to think of it as “our desk.” Even now that it is only her laptop, her papers, her things, even now that his side of the partners’ desk looks extremely empty, glaringly so, especially in the mornings when the sun glints across its surface like a spotlight, she still calls the desk “our desk.” She still calls the office “our office.” She thinks that even if it is not reality-based, it is important to continue to call them that. She thinks that maybe somehow it could help.
Stephanie startles slightly, snaps back to attention as she hears the familiar rustling through the baby monitor, the one that precedes Ivy’s waking up. Through the monitor, Stephanie can see Ivy stirring. A fist slides into view over her little face and is just as quickly gone. Ivy. She is so beautiful, even through the baby monitor that lends a green pallor to her skin. The convex angle of the baby monitor makes Ivy look as if she were looking through a peephole, the kinds they have in the doors of apartments, as if Ivy is just a guest visiting, coming to the door of the apartment she and Aubrey had on Seventy-third Street between Columbus and Central Park West. Aubrey loved that apartment, because of the outdoor space (he had a grill) and the close proximity to the park.
And you would think, wouldn’t you, that if those were the things that were among his favorite things about their apartment, that he’d be so happy here in New Jersey. They still have a grill. And what are the suburbs about really other than outdoor space? Are they not just one great land of proximity to the park? But Aubrey is not happy in New Jersey. She wonders if he would have been different, less catatonic, less subterranean, less completely changed, had they moved instead to Connecticut.
