It was early in the evening and the staff was still setting up as we sipped at our rosé and cooled our elbows on the marble tabletop. A little boy drew at a long wooden farm table across the room while the grown-ups discussed which oysters had come in and which cheeses to write up on the chalkboards hanging on each wainscoted wall. Every so often, the little boy held up a drawing for their glowing critique.
“I could own a place like this,” André said, surveying the room. I rolled my eyes.
“No, really, I like how simple the room is. Just mismatched tables and stools and a wall of bottles.” We looked around, like potential buyers, adding a console here, a meat slicer there.
“I’ve always thought that would be cool,” André said a little while later. “To have kids who grow up in your restaurant.”
“Yeah. They stop by after school for a snack….”
“And do their homework while we set up….”
Like all discussions of the future, the conversation began in the abstract and quickly became about us. By the time we left the bar, we had conceived a small business and two children, two to four years apart.
“Would the health department allow a dachshund?”
“French bulldog.”
“Whatever.”
And still, after conversations like these, I itched for a moment alone to see what 2040 had to say for herself.
The more I read, the more real she became. When I rode the subway, I scrutinized the faces of every attractive woman. Depending on my mood and the book I was reading at the time, she wore go-go boots, pumps, running shoes, or jeweled slippers. I thought of her as I put on my socks. Did hers have holes on the heel like mine? I thought of her when I witnessed, in horror, a renegade roach skitter behind the refrigerator. How often did she mop her floors? I thought of her when I forgot about the water on the stove and ruined yet another pot. When I ran out of things to say or talked too much, when I was too flippant or too serious. And also when I got the hiccups, when my feet cracked, and when I spotted a shadow of a double chin in the mirror. She haunted me in the middle of the night when I became convinced that my teeth were yellowing by the minute. When my mascara smudged, as it did most days. As I obsessed about 2040, I chewed my lower lip until it became pocked. When I drank something particularly tannic, the spots darkened into a deep purple and stayed that way for days. She, I had to believe, had never encountered such a plight. Did she have manicured nails or well-chewed ones like mine? What about pudgy palms? Did she ever order badly or play music long out of style? On the subject of plants, did she understand the fickle temperament of the rosemary, could she coddle a ficus, and tame the vicious spider? Did her hair stick up like the Little Prince in the mornings? She probably never snored. Did he know that?
When André disappeared from view, I wrote even more elaborate fantasies in my head. Their names crowned the guest lists for the newest restaurant openings. They spent André’s nights off in secret wine bars or eating takeout in bed. She, of course, wearing spiked heels. On nights we didn’t work together, I called as soon as I finished. When he answered, I listened for voices in the background. When he didn’t answer, I left a casual message and then took a cab back to Brooklyn, ready to tell the driver to turn back around. As I sat staring at my phone on these long rides, I wondered how I, the queen of independence, had become a slave to another.
We still on for Wednesday?
Not anymore, I thought to myself, before hitting delete with a smug cock of the head. Then I proceeded to panic. What if he looked in his trash? I clicked on it and found 2040’s cheery little message crowning the list. What if I just erased the whole trash? No, that might arouse serious suspicion; better to remain calm and hope it would go unnoticed.
At work, when I saw André talking to anyone in the salon, I made it a point to take that route to the bar. One day, he stayed especially long, laughing and chatting with two women seated on the couch closest to the dining room. He stood at the win dow, his dark suit framed by dark sky and tiny lights. He barely leaned on the window ledge, his arms crossed to reveal the glint of the silver cuff links I liked, the ones shaped like the quill of a pen. A brunette faced me, but her friend sat obscured on the opposite end. The way the back of the couch curved meant that all I could see was blond curls, her hand reaching to squeeze André’s arm, and the crossing and uncrossing of tall black boots. That had to be her.
The image of those boots stuck with me for days and I decided that it was time to take a stand. Like a pioneer with a flag, I would claim my man! The irony of my territoriality was not lost on me, but my competitive nature overrode any head-hanging and lesson-learning that might have been appropriate. A few nights later, André and I headed to a little bistro uptown. It was the only place serving croque madame at two o’clock in the morning.
“I don’t want you to see anyone else,” I blurted out as soon as we sat down.
“Can a brother get a drink first?” André pretended to be annoyed, but he was grinning.
“What’s so funny?”
“Leigh was just asking the other day whether we had had this conversation.”
“Oh, really.”
“Yeah, she says you’re late. This usually happens in the first three months.”
“You were living with someone for the first three months.”
“No need to get competitive.” When the waiter cruised by, André ordered a beer for himself, a glass of champagne for me, and a croque madame.
“Did you want anything?”
“No, I’ll eat yours.”
I waited to continue the conversation until we had sustenance before us. When the food arrived, he took a bite and looked at me, carefully, while he chewed.
“So?” I prodded, getting back to my original question, or to what the question implied.
“So, okay,” he said with his mouth full.
“Okay meaning you are not dating anyone else or okay meaning you heard what I said?”
“Okay meaning I’m okay with that.”
“No one else?”
“No one else.”
That was easy, I thought suspiciously, but only time would tell. Time and 2040.
ELECTION DAY WAS coming up and we scheduled our days off together. André hadn’t registered to vote, and I chastised him all the way to the public school down the street where I voted. It was one of those bittersweet late fall days, and after I had cast my hopeful ballot, we wandered around the neighborhood for a while in search of lunch.
“Let’s see a movie!”
“What do you want to see?”
“How about Sideways?”
As it turned out, this wine-themed movie would shape our destiny. Never again would we serve Merlot. André would have to reorder all of the Pinot Noir, and I would discuss the film at eighty percent of my tables. When I became weary of the topic, I would summon my compassion, telling myself that they ordered the Pinot because they too felt thin-skinned and misunderstood. Because we did not yet know its implications, we enjoyed the film and then headed home to hear the election results on National Public Radio. At first the nation seemed to have regained its sanity. But as more results came in, I began to despair.
“I blame you,” I said, glaring at André.
“Whatever. Voting in Texas is just as pointless as voting in New York.”
I was too depressed to argue. Eventually, we abandoned all hope and traded NPR for Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. I tried to imagine that reality ended at the edges of my couch. It was just André and me and the occasional autumn leaf blowing into the window. We talked for hours, filling each other in on the last twenty-odd years of our lives. And then after a slight pause, André said, “You know, I could have told you I loved you a long time ago.”
Such nimble retroaction. He put a Republican Congress to shame.
“Ditto,” I responded.
So that was settled. We turned the radio back on just to see if we had missed a miracle. We hadn’t. I think it’s safe to
say you’re in love when the apocalypse is near and you couldn’t be happier.
BUT THE NEXT day, 2040 announced that she was wearing leather pants.
I was now in a bind. Things with André appeared to be moving along nicely; it was hardly an opportune time to admit to reading his e-mail, let alone calling 2040 from a pay phone on Sixth Avenue.
“Do you really want to get back into another long relationship?” I asked one night, hoping to inspire a confession. “You just ended one. Don’t you want to go and sow some oats or test the waters or play the field or something?”
“Chef, I don’t have time for that anymore.”
When I probed a little more about why things ended with Leigh, he had a vaguely complimentary response.
“It’s kind of like I came up for air and found what I didn’t know I was looking for.”
It was only later, when I was alone, that I started wondering exactly how much air he had taken in. Clearly, I wasn’t going to get anything out of him. I’d just have to keep reading. And work toward leather pants.
“Who are you?” André demanded when I refused an ice cream cone a few weeks later. “The woman I fell in love with never said no to ice cream.”
“The woman you fell in love with could also stand to lose a few pounds.”
“Are you kidding? My prenup is going to have a weight minimum. You lose a pound, I dock you.”
Yup, this one was worth fighting for.
* * *
• A TIP •
The table is always bigger and quieter on the other side of the restaurant.
* * *
• underlings •
sOMETIMES, WHEN Ihad a moment’s pause, I looked out over the dining room at the sculptural desserts, the woven silver breadbaskets, the elaborate napkin fold, and wondered how something as simple as eating had come to this. There’s an essay in David Rakoff’s second collection called “What Is the Sound of One Hand Shopping?” in which he ridicules the excesses of his adopted society (he was born in Canada). In this particular essay, he skewers the staff, clientele, and earnest, self-important philosophy toward food and farming of a certain restaurant in northern California—which might as well be the French Laundry or Per Se. And he does it in such a way as to implicate anyone who has ever bought imported water or sea salt. Both of which, he observes, we subject to “the kind of scrutiny we used to reserve for choosing an oncologist.” I will agree that on the one hand, obsessive attention to dining, ingredients, flavor combinations, and food politics does reflect excessive time and resources in a status-obsessed society. On the other hand, many of our children think chickens have fingers. Is a tasting menu more extreme than artery-clogging, diabetes-inducing fast “food” we barely taste as we’re careening down the highway doing eighty?
I often thought of the contrast, and the absurdity, of rattling off the names of the cows that produced the milk used to make the butter while standing in the concrete jungle of New York City. This was the same butter that changed color with seasons I assumed still took place somewhere. I, too, was amused when I heard the man who raised sheep in Pennsylvania explain that the secret to his tender, mild lamb was listening to the animals. Did he not hear them when they were pleading for their lives?
The society to which Mr. Rakoff refers makes a brand out of anything it values. “Heirloom,” “sustainable,” “organic,” and “local” are labels that have become just another form of branding in a label-obsessed society, complete with a low-end line at Wal-Mart. As evidence of this trend, the Per Se menu reads like a fashion magazine, only instead of the cut, color, and designer, we had the cut, color, and farmer. Potatoes weren’t potatoes, they were pureed purple marble potatoes from Mr. McGregor’s garden. Cavendish Farms quail, Snake River Farms beef, Four Story Hills veal, Hallow Farms rabbit, Thumbelina carrots, Pink Lady apples, and wild arugula were similarly gussied.
But when it comes to food, I’m as label-conscious as my mall-going girlfriends across the river. When I lovingly prepare breakfast for my future children, I’d at least like to know that I served them Monsanto-engineered cornflakes with rBGH-infused milk, diazinon-sprayed strawberries, and irradiated bananas. That way, I know who to thank for their food allergies, prepubescent breasts, autism, and leukemia. I have to believe that the more curious we become about our food, the better off we’ll be.
In the meantime, while waiting for global change, I decided that I wanted to meet some of the restaurant’s purveyors so that I wouldn’t feel like such a fake at the table, so that I would actually understand where the food came from, who raised it, and why it was worth so very much. There was plenty to choose from, but my first thought was visiting the heirloom ducks we started to see on the menu in the fall. When I asked Corey for a contact number, he rolled his eyes.
“It’s not a petting zoo, you know.”
My other choices included a farm that raised milk-fed chickens (from powder, not a bottle), a family (whom I’d served and loved) who grew oysters near Cape Cod, an organic farm out on Long Island run by a chef, and a rabbi who foraged for watercress and ramps upstate. One project I found particularly interesting was a special beer and cheese pairing arranged with a dairy in Vermont. The dairy, Jasper Hill Farm, was run by two brothers new to the cheese-making field. The Per Se pairing consisted of a beer brewed by a friend of theirs and the pungent Winnemere, a raw cow’s milk cheese bound in spruce bark and washed with the same beer. The beer was called Agatha, which is, I believe, where the confusion began.
Somehow, in the proverbial game of telephone, the information became slightly distorted and the staff understood the cheese to have been made from the milk of a single cow by the name of Agatha. A single-cow cheese. I had heard of single-bean coffee and chocolate, but never of a single-cow cheese. What was next? Single-nest eggs? Single-stalk brussels sprouts? One night during Winnemere season, André left work shaking his head.
“Chef, I have a story for you. But first I need to get out of this suit. And then I need a drink.”
Apparently, a VIP from the food sector had been scheduled to come in for dinner and the kitchen wanted him to try the Agatha/Winnemere pairing. The restaurant had just run out of the beer, so André sent a coffee server down to the wine storage facility in Chelsea to pick up a six-pack. This was how important this table was. They enjoyed champagne and extra canapés and the famous host seemed to be a jovial sort, but when it came to the cheese course, the meal went sour.
“At first I thought he was just joking when he started flipping out, so I played along,” André told me. “But he refused to eat the cheese. He just kept shaking his head and saying ‘Absurd!’”
Eventually the gentlemen’s guests, André, and the captain realized that the guy was truly incensed by the concept of a single-cow cheese. They quickly arranged a different cheese-and-wine pairing. But André couldn’t wrap his head around it. What had he been so upset about?
Always a sucker for scandal, I decided that I wanted to meet Agatha and see if I could track down the VIP. Meanwhile, I would get out of the city for a weekend and gorge myself on cheese. As a lover of all cheese, the stinkier the better, I have been excited, and a little perplexed, by the boom in domestic artisanal production in the last ten years. There are now luscious examples to be found in Louisiana, Texas, and the great cheese state of Connecticut. Places like Vermont that have always been known for dairy are teeming with small producers.
Jasper Hill Farm is located in Greensboro, Vermont, in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom. When their cheese was on the menu at Per Se, this information was posted in the breezeway, along with a taste profile, and everyone found the name “Northeast Kingdom” to be terribly amusing. If only they knew the irony—that the majestic name actually described one of the poorest, most untamed parts of Vermont. The kind of place where school might as well be canceled on the first day of hunting season. André and I flew up on the last flight out of JFK one Saturday night after he got out of work. We flew into Burlington, t
he largest city in Vermont, at about forty thousand, where my mother had recently bought a little house. I’ll leave the back door open, she told me over the phone.
The next morning we got up early and drove our rental car out to the farm. Thrifty car rental gave us a PT Cruiser, a car I always found dippy. I prepared André to be ridiculed by my brother, who is very selective when it comes to certain brands and lifestyle choices. He disdains, for example, most small dogs and Jet Skis. Sam has a deal with his two best friends from college that if any of them ever gets a minivan, the other two have the right to bump him off with no warning. So, in our little PT Cruiser, André and I sped past the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury and on through Mercedes-infested Stowe. We traded ski condos for dilapidated farmhouses and trailers, pink triangles for yellow ribbons. After an hour or so, we stopped trailing Subarus with bumper stickers like “Compost Happens” and “Breast-feeding: Anytime, Anywhere” and other random acts of crunchy kindness. A call-in radio show devoted entirely to yard sale announcements took a station break to advertise an outdoor event called “Grills Gone Wild.” Cows manicured a pasture of abandoned farm equipment, which stood stoic and rusting like a sculpture garden.
When I called for directions, Mateo, one of the two brothers who runs the farm, told me to turn right at the light. Which light? There was only one. We kept following the directions, involving Laundromats and police stations, but no street names, until the road became dirt and the houses farther and farther apart. Finally, we pulled into the driveway and down a slight hill to a barn attached to a house that looked like it was evolving slowly. It was a hot day and the two dogs who came to greet us were dusty from rolling in the cool earth in the shade of the barn.
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