We may not have dined together at Per Se and we certainly weren’t celebrities, but André and I had the universal shame thing down. We didn’t need a daytime talk show to reveal the fragile underbellies of our souls, though our triangulation, deceit, and penchant for drama might have landed us a spot if we had been so inclined.
It was New Year’s and we were taking our first vacation. The restaurant would close for a week, and most of our colleagues had bought tickets to places like Thailand, Italy, and Sweden months before. By the time André and I got around to planning our trip, the prices had gone through the roof. Finally, a friend offered her place on the beach in Puerto Rico and we found a cheap flight on JetBlue. It didn’t matter where we went, really; we just needed a break.
The other major event was that Leigh had decided to leave New York. I imagine that living in a small studio with one’s ex, in a city one hates, while working an uninspiring and low-paying job provided a pretty miserable existence. When we got back from vacation, she would be gone. I had a hard time hiding my relief from André.
We did practically nothing in Puerto Rico. We shared papaya in the mornings and thick, dark coffee. During the day, we sat on the beach and took walks without a destination. In the evenings after dinner, we drank Spanish wine and lounged in the hammock. It was perfect.
“To surviving the year,” I said, holding up my glass.
“I’ll drink to that,” André responded.
I lay in the hammock while André sat at a little table in the courtyard, smoking a cigarette. I was a bad influence. I smoked one solitary cigarette a day, usually after work or in my window in Brooklyn. Now André, the nonsmoker, was racing through the pack and, apparently, relishing the experience.
“Chef,” I began, interrupting his reverie.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been reading your e-mail.”
It sneaked up on me, this spontaneous confession, and I immediately panicked. Here’s where he puts out his cigarette in silence, I thought, and walks to the bedroom to pack. Or maybe he kicks over a table or dumps me out of the hammock onto the concrete. I had never seen him angry, although he had alluded to his temper. This was why he kept rubber bands around his wrist. Snap before you snap, was the theory. But I encountered none of this imagined rage. Instead, he looked right at me and smiled.
“I know.”
I put one toe down on the cold concrete and set the hammock off rocking again.
“You’ve been reading it for months.”
I swung in midair and waited for him to go on.
“At first I was ticked off,” he explained, reaching for another cigarette. “And then I thought about it. Every one of my girlfriends has turned into a jealous psycho-bitch. It has to be something I’m doing.”
We sat in silence for a while.
“So who is she?”
“Who is who?”
“You know who I’m talking about.”
It was her mother’s van we had driven to Vermont. It was she who sat in the salon in those tall black boots. She, I had to assume, owned a pair of leather pants.
“Was there anyone else?” I figured that I might as well get it out of the way now.
“A few, but nothing serious.”
Well, at least I no longer had to feel quite as guilty about Leigh. Strength in numbers and all that jazz. But the knowledge that he had been seeing half of Manhattan made me wonder, with not a little anxiety, just how big a blind spot I was working with.
“And then the dust settled, chef,” he went on, “and you were left standing.”
Before reloading, I took a moment to savor the image of myself looking improbably good in chaps, with a revolver spinning around each forefinger.
“So why didn’t it work?”
“We wanted different things.”
“Yawn.”
“Okay, she told me on our first date that she wanted to get married and have babies.”
“To you?”
“No, not to me. Christ!” He sensed my rising panic and veered the subject to more general terms. “That’s the thing about you New York women. You pretty much say what you want right up front.”
“Really? Did I do that?”
“I could tell.”
SOMEWHERE IN THAT conversation, life became very quiet. I had stopped narrating. When I looked at André, I saw the man sitting across from me, not his e-mails, his disappearances, the friends he kept to himself, or the calls he took in another room. This was my evidence: André in San Juan, smoking a cigarette, sitting across from no one else but me. And the little voice inside my head that was whispering to be patient.
“Are you ready for this?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I answered without hesitation.
“I’m a hard person to love.”
I sat under the weight of his comment for a moment, wondering what he meant.
“I can do hard,” I answered. “But I can’t do unfaithful.”
“Deal.”
* * *
• A TIP •
If you want to change the majority of the components in a dish, you might consider choosing something else.
* * *
• city love •
aFTER WE LANDED in New York, André and I went back to our own apartments to drop off our things, but planned to rendezvous later. I arrived at the restaurant before he did, as usual. After a few minutes, I spotted him just outside the door, on his cell phone.
“That was my mother,” he explained when he came in, scooting onto a stool. “I told her I was meeting you and she said ‘Wasn’t one week enough?’”
André’s mother sounded like someone I would prefer to have on my side, if possible. If she and Leigh were close, as I suspected, this was not likely to be the case. After overhearing a conversation between André and his mother, I began to wonder if he had told her anything at all. Our little beach house in Puerto Rico had been gloriously quiet, so quiet that when she called one morning, I could hear the whole conversation from across the room.
“What are you doing down there?” she had asked. He an swered that we had been spending a lot of time at a little coffee shop across the street eating octopus salad, that we had dinner last night at a place right on the beach, and that we were planning on walking to Old San Juan later.
“Honey, that’s a whole lot of ‘we’s,’” I heard her say. “And I know you don’t speak French.”
As we sat at the bar and toasted our return to the city, I considered the extent to which our life might change now that it was just the two of us. Would he introduce me to his mother? Would I meet some of his wine friends? After seeing each other for seven months, I felt as if we were just beginning.
Maybe because I was excited by this new beginning, I dreaded going back to long shifts at the restaurant. I had become spoiled by our unscheduled week by the beach, going to bed early and sleeping late, uninterrupted by meetings, e-mails, and calls about reservations and purchase orders. Luckily, we had a few days to readjust while the restaurant revved up for the new year. The silverware needed unwrapping, the glasses had to be polished and put back in their pristine rows, the steam-cleaned chairs carried back into the dining room, and the carpets and couches in the salon realigned on the newly polished bronze floor.
At the end of one of these days, André invited me to his apartment for the first time. About a block from his house, it struck me that I really had no idea what his life looked like. I had never seen his shower curtain or snooped in his refrigerator. Was he the type to fold his sweaters and arrange them by color or did he pile them in his closet, along with the rest of his wardrobe? As we walked down his tree-lined block, past brownstones and six-figure cars, I began to pay close attention. He stopped in front of a tall brick apartment building, steps away from Central Park. Nice address, I thought to myself.
“You have an awning?” No one I knew had an awning, or at least no one I spent much time with.
“And a doorman in the evenings.
”
I loved my little place in Williamsburg, but my grimy, industrial street was a far cry from Central Park West. All I saw out of my window were warehouses and the thick forearms of the old woman across the street who sat in her window all day, occasionally leaning out to spit. André, on the other hand, lived in the land of the pedigreed dog and the space-age stroller. He could probably see the Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park from his window, or even the Hudson River. I watched as he strolled casually through his mirrored lobby and pressed the button for the elevator. It didn’t light up. This is what André’s life looks like, I thought to myself. Someone will fix that button without his having to call or withhold his rent. These are André’s neighbors, I thought as I studied the faces on the elevator. They probably work for firms of some sort and spend their days trading and merging and consolidating things. My neighbors used “freelance” as a verb. When we reached the fourth floor, I followed André down the hall and observed him putting his key into the lock on the door of apartment #402. He opened it and motioned for me to enter.
The apartment was literally the “coziest” apartment I had seen in my eight years in New York. It was the size of my dorm room in college—and that had bunk beds out of necessity. There was barely enough room to walk between the thick wooden frame of his beige futon and the piles of wine books stacked against the opposite wall. The floors were bare, the white walls were bare. In fact, the only thing close to decoration was a tie rack on which hung a rainbow of ties. His kitchen, which was about three steps from the edge of the futon, had little more than a pot, a frying pan, and an unopened can of breadcrumbs. But the four-star sommelier did have chilled Cava in the mini fridge and two Riedel champagne flutes.
“Here’s to a new year,” André said, holding up his glass.
“And to surviving the last,” I answered as we clinked glasses.
I sat cross-legged on the futon, so as to conserve space, marveling at how much time I had wasted worrying about what my own life looked like. When André came to my place, I always wondered if he noticed my unvacuumed carpet, my overflowing bookshelves, and my refrigerator, which was filled with nothing but condiments. But at least I had owned a vacuum, a few bookshelves, and a full-size refrigerator. André fed an unmarked video into a TV/VCR the size of a toaster. It appeared to be a European soccer match and, from the short shorts, I put it somewhere around 1983. While he watched, I explored the rest of the apartment, namely the bathroom. There was a pea green toilet, a pea green tub, pea green tiles, and a clear shower curtain with sage green mold.
“You hate this, don’t you?” André called, meaning the game.
“No, I really love the Cava.”
“Come on,” he said, shutting off the television. “Let’s go to the diner.”
His apartment did have the ideal location: the park in one direction and a twenty-four-hour diner in the other. Unfortunately, I had my doubts about the diner. In my opinion, a good diner must pass three tests. First, it must have more booths than tables. Second, the patty melt should be revered; I should not have to specify rye or choose a cheese. Most important, a chocolate milkshake must be made with chocolate ice cream—not vanilla with chocolate syrup—and it has to be served with the remaining shake in the silver blender cup in which it was made. I learned as a child that diners that skimp on that extra serving of milkshake should not be trusted. When I was young, diners were a place of worship, perhaps because the hamburger (later replaced by the superior patty melt), fries, and chocolate milkshake my parents allowed were like manna to a child who grew up on rabbits raised out back, potatoes from the garden, and homemade carob-chip cookies.
This judge gave André’s diner a three. I penalized it for its slim selection of booths, its patty melt (shamefully flanked by white toast), and its meager and anemic chocolate shake in which I could not even stand a straw upright. Still, like André’s micro-studio and our rocky start, I was determined to make it work.
EVENTUALLY, SERVICE AT Per Se began again in earnest. André and I went back into hiding, resuming our routine of restaurant-related dialogue with whispered subtext. Often, at the end of the night, André sidled up and asked, “Red, white, or bubbles?”
My wine selection would determine our late-night snack. Red could mean a home hot dog taste test. An off-dry white might inspire a little cheese. André liked to pair sparkling wine, or “bubbles,” with the ten-ingredient fried rice we had delivered.
My life, which had revolved around my job for the last year, began to take place before and after Per Se. This might have been due, in part, to a new ease in the restaurant. With the review season well behind us, the dining room staff settled into a rhythm. My relations with the women backservers and runners were beginning to thaw, and I felt like I finally understood how to communicate with the chefs. Theoretically, I could now relax and perform the job I had worked so hard to learn.
One day, when it was my turn to come in early and iron, I decided to bring my iPod to help pass the time. I suspected this was against the rules, as I had never seen anyone but André wear headphones in the restaurant. His little bald head bobbing in front of his computer screen was a fixture in the office. Opting not to consult the two-page ironing procedure sheet to confirm the rules, on went the earphones and Johnny Cash pulled up a chair. In the starched and still dining room, his gravely drawl felt out of place. And suddenly, so did I. My shirt felt stiff, my tie too tight. The candy cane striped socks hidden under my black pants and the one silver bracelet inside my cuff were no longer enough. I wanted fire engine red hair and both arms loaded with the swath of silver bracelets André called my “body music.” I wanted to swear and talk politics freely, eat Gray’s Papaya hot dogs on the street and diner fries in a booth and disappear for days without telling anyone. When I began ironing the tables in the window, I looked enviously at the people reading the paper by the fountain. Shoppers hailed cabs. Across the circle, the ice cream truck held court—mercifully muted by the thick glass between us.
Any minute the other captains and backservers would begin to trickle in, carrying stacks of white plates and trays of silverware. I would slide my headphones into my jacket pocket and go in search of the flowers that we kept in the cool wine cellar overnight. After family meal, we would convene around the fireplace for the meeting, as we did before each service. The expediting chef would go through the three menus, describing lesser-known ingredients and techniques. After this, we’d be expected to ask questions. Inevitably someone would bring up something obscure just for the sake of asking. There was one captain who seemed to revel in subtle manipulation by pitting the chefs against each other. On days when he worked a double, he often asked a question at lunch, for example the base of a certain sauce, and then asked the same question at dinner. If two chefs answered differently, he would raise his hand again.
“I was just asking,” he would say with concern, “because we were told at lunch that it was made with a veal reduction.”
I could never quite understand what he got out of this, except perhaps a slight feeling of misplaced authority and the chance to see a chef squirm.
There was another character who gave great performances in meetings. This gentleman, Craig, was the sweetest, most devoted of servers, willing to do anything for his tables. He made them tea if they had a cold, rifled through the chocolate room to find the peanut butter truffle they craved, or ran to the maître d’ stand for spare eyeglasses or a pashmina. Guests loved him. Chefs, on the other hand, found him infuriating because his questions always came from left field and often at exactly the wrong time. The rest of us loved comments like his apartment looking “like a homeless person lived there” or the table that kept him running all night by “drinking water like it was vodka.” One day we were serving tripe as a first meat option. Most of the staff knew that was stomach, but up went a hand in the front row.
“Now, Chef,” Craig asked, “exactly what kind of fish is a tripe?”
J.B. blew up and then lau
nched into an epic lecture about product and professionalism. Poor Craig never lived it down.
The chefs had their own ticks and personalities in the meetings. Corey sped through the menu so fast that on weekend mornings, the sleepy staff could barely keep up. J.B. demarcated the size of smaller ingredients by placing the tip of his thumb on the fleshy part of his ring finger or pinky. A marble potato, for example, put his thumb just above the joint. When a dish had “a little heat to it,” he fanned his mouth as if simulating a Cherokee war cry. When Corey moved to Napa to become the chef de cuisine at the French Laundry, he was replaced at the pass by a chef we all adored, Chris L’Hommedieu. Chris’s approach was more relaxed than any of the other chefs. When the managers put pressure on him to quiz us on the menu, he chose questions that, in a game of Jeopardy!, would be an easy $200.
The wine team followed the chef with a list of items we were out of. Sometimes they suggested wines for each course, sometimes they called on captains to make suggestions for a pairing. Certain captains were better at this than others. I, as you might imagine, was not one of the better ones.
If André ran the meeting, he went easy on me, asking me to pair something with the dishes we had seen thousands of times, like the Oysters and Pearls or the foie gras torchon. Sometimes he asked me about a wine we had just tasted the night before. Often he slipped in little inside jokes, commenting on how hard it had been to get out of bed that morning, taking a poll on whether people turned the heat down at night (I did, he didn’t), asking if anyone had seen the movie we had just watched. Just when the managers started to look peeved, he would segue effortlessly into a wine-related topic. When it was our turn to ask questions, I tried to get him back.
Service Included Page 17
