John made a quick chopping motion with his hand. “Forget it. It’s taken care of. Just enjoy your evening, gentlemen.” And with that, the throng parted for him, and he was gone.
What followed was unquestionably the greatest meal of my life, a nonstop parade of off-menu dishes. Our waitress, she of the tiny ukulele, reappeared to explain that these were the first fruits of a “new concept” Francisco and John were working on. A chickweed salad in a goat’s-milk yogurt dressing, garnished with lemon zest, aged gouda, and blueberries. Seared Japanese cuttlefish heads, kind of like calamari, only served with nectarine nectar, purple basil, and jalapeño instead of cocktail sauce. Wagyu beef carpaccio dabbed with caviar on a bed of gooseberries and watercress. Not everything was so out there. There was a simple plate of house-cured prosciutto that was unlike any I’d ever tasted—“creamy” was the word that came to mind. Most remarkable of all was just a bowl of corn kernels mixed with a bit of basil, scallion, and tomato. It would be a cliché to rave about the sweetness, even more of a cliché to say Francisco had captured the essence of corn. So let’s just say I would have traded all my Wagyu and caviar for Elliot’s bowl. I briefly considered plucking the last kernel from his beard.
He said, “Now imagine this dish made with corn grown up the block, planted and picked by kids from the neighborhood.”
I tried to imagine it, but I was having trouble. Corn grown on a roof in Bushwick couldn’t possibly taste this good, could it? Here was a simple, perfect thing, created to provide a moment’s enjoyment with no need for analysis or ambivalence and then… gone. The idea that I could be a part of a process so elemental was frankly overwhelming. I knew I should just savor the moment, but the overachiever in me was ready to take over.
“How much?”
Elliot barely looked up from his plate. “Don’t worry. John said he was taking care of it.”
“I mean the farm.”
He looked like he wanted to pinch my cheek. “All business. That’s why you and I are the perfect team.”
“Just give me your back-of-the-napkin estimate.”
He let his head bobble slightly from side to side as if he were rolling the numbers around in there. “Depends. To do it right? It’ll take an upfront investment, for sure. At the same time, if we want this to be a model program, it has to cost-effective.”
“And what about us? Do we get paid?”
“We’re professionals, aren’t we? We’re the ones who are going to be doing all the work.”
I let Elliot’s tone, his cool confidence, sink into my gray matter.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “John wants this thing to be sustainable. You can’t even say the word ‘farm’ anymore without adding the word ‘sustainable.’ How can a farm be sustainable if the people working on it can’t make a living?”
I did a quick calculation. “So we’re talking six figures. Two hundred?”
“Maybe more, but yeah, that’s a good goal.”
“And how much time do we have?”
“Well, growing season starts in April. Drop dead for seeds in the ground is sometime in May. So four, five months or we have to wait till next year, and I know John isn’t going to want to hear that.”
“Four months?” I was already halfway out of my seat. “I’ve got to talk to Tricia. Now.”
“Hold on.” Elliot reached across the table to stop me.
I stopped. He laced his fingers behind his head.
“I heard something about a cheese course,” he said.
Save the Chickens
Tricia got home about an hour after me, still in her purple scrubs, hair pulled back with a rubber band. She was a vet, and I often envied the straightforwardness of her work. It’s not like she was rolling around, Eskimo-kissing puppies all day; all those hours on her feet took a toll, and most of the critters she dealt with wanted nothing to do with her and her Vaseline-slicked finger. At the same time, she didn’t have to question whether keeping people’s treasured dogs and cats alive was a worthwhile way to make a living. She provided a service her community needed. Whereas I had spent many a Sunday representing Team Viv in a politically significant walkathon or preparing talking points for a last-minute presser, wondering if any of it made a difference to anyone at all.
Tricia always heard me out when I needed to vent, but she didn’t feed my doubts. I’d been working for Vivienne since we got together, and as far as she was concerned, it was a respectable, decent-paying job, maybe even a prestigious one, looked at in a certain light. For all I knew, her acceptance of me was conditional on my remaining a go-getter with a promising career in politics, an upstanding professional with a city pension plan, vested after an unfathomable thirty years. Which is to say, I had no idea how she would react to what I had to tell her.
As she ducked into the fridge for a beer, I let her know I had to call Elliot in an hour.
“Don’t you two ever get enough of each other?”
I let her settle down next to me on the couch and drape her legs across my lap. Rubbing her feet, I laid it all out for her, just as Elliot had for me. She listened without commenting, winding her hair around her hand, her eyes tired but attentive. When I was finished, she took a thoughtful pull from her beer.
“Do you think it can work?”
“Elliot likes our chances.”
“But what about you?”
I gave myself a moment to consider. “There are a bunch of details to work out, but we’ve got a lot going for us. Contacts, expertise, the restaurant everyone’s talking about.”
“Charm and good looks.”
“Am I crazy to want to do this?”
“Because you’ve never even kept a house plant?”
My face fell. Tricia set her beer on the floor and squeezed my knee.
“Sorry. You’re not crazy to want to do something different. You’re not.”
“This could be a whole new start for me. If you’re on board…”
Tricia cocked her head to the side. “Why wouldn’t I be on board?”
“I don’t know. It’s a risk. There might not be a steady paycheck for a while.”
She shrugged. “We’re not in any rush to have a kid. The landlord won’t even let us get a dog. If you want to take a risk, I’d say now’s the time.”
“No summer cabin in the Catskills.”
“We’ll kick it here. Summer in the Slope.”
“I may not be around much. They need me to be super hands-on.”
She slung her arms around my neck. For a second, I thought she was going to say, “And so do I.” What she actually said was, “You’re not having a midlife crisis, are you? Because that would be a little ahead of schedule.”
“A little?”
“So you’re not?”
“I honestly don’t think that’s what this is.”
“Because if you really want this, you’re the one who’s going to have to make it happen.”
“It’s about time I made something happen.”
“Then I say, go for it. I want you to be happy.”
What can you say about a woman like that? I reached for her waist, but she pulled away.
“Don’t you have work to do?”
Elliot picked up on the fourth ring. I could make out “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” in the background.
“I’m in,” I said. “What do we do now?”
Elliot enunciated thickly. It was that phase of the evening. “I think it’s time to deploy our secret weapon.”
“Our secret weapon?”
“We have an advantage no other baby nonprofit could even dream of.”
He waited for me to catch up.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”
“Got to keep it in the family, right?”
Vivienne. She was our secret weapon.
* * *
Vivienne wasn’t lying when she told the MTA chairman the offers were pouring in. Every pol who still had a future in the city wanted her to chair their re-
election committee. She was the board member of every museum and hospital’s wet dream. Her late husband’s law firm wanted her on the payroll to help with some business they had before the city. But Elliot and I could offer her something none of her other suitors could: the chance to stay connected to her favorite staffers, the feisty comers who, in her own words, kept her young. It took more to convince me she should be our rainmaker than to convince her.
“A farm?”
We were in her district office on 93rd Street, packing up boxes of beer koozies with her name on them. The koozies had proven to be undesirable campaign swag on the Upper East Side. Vivienne herself never quite wrapped her mind around the idea that people drank beer straight out of the can.
“Like with chickens?”
Elliot aimed a pair of finger guns at her. “You want chickens, Viv, we’ll get you some chickens.”
“Did I say I wanted chickens?”
“The kids would probably go crazy for chickens.”
I looked up from an old leaflet—the top ten most dangerous intersections in the district. “Let’s save the chickens for Phase II.”
“And why Brooklyn?” Vivienne asked. “If we did it right here, we could probably use whatever’s left in the discretionary fund.”
I don’t know, I thought, maybe because there aren’t as many people deprived of fresh food on Park Avenue? I let, Elliot, the Viv Whisperer, give a more diplomatic answer, involving proximity to Rita’s.
Vivienne narrowed her eyes. “Never heard of it. Will, I thought you said there was no Rita’s Pizza.”
“I said there was no Vinny’s Pizza.”
Elliot spun a koozie on his finger. “Isn’t there a Vinny’s in the Village, near St. Mark’s?”
I gave him the sign to drop it. Like a cell phone signal on the subway, Vivienne’s attention was not to be squandered.
“Have you found a location yet?” she asked.
Elliot explained that John knew most of the landlords in the area and was looking into some of the nearby warehouses, but nothing was set in stone.
Vivienne pecked at the screen of her phone. “What we need to do is talk to Arthur and Barbara.”
At first, all I heard was that mellifluous “we.” Vivienne was in, which meant we were officially in business. As she found what she was looking for in her phone and held it up to her ear, it occurred to me she might actually be calling the aforementioned Arthur and Barbara right then and there. In Vivienne’s world, a quick phone call to a friend was usually enough to make things happen. I figured I’d better ask who Arthur and Barbara were. Elliot, of course, already knew.
“Arthur and Barbara Schlosser. Founded the Begin to Win Charter School. One of the pioneers in the city.”
Vivienne covered the phone with her hand. “I helped them get it off the ground. I’m sure they’ll be interested.”
I summoned Elliot to an impromptu strategy session with a tilt of my head. He ambled over to where I was standing beside a life-size cutout of Vivienne and slung an arm over its corrugated shoulder.
“Is this a good idea?” I whispered.
“The Schlossers are loaded. And they owe Viv. Sounds good to me.”
“I wasn’t picturing a charter school.” Elliot had conditioned me to blame charters for siphoning off the brightest kids and most with-it parents, hastening the downward spiral of neighborhood schools.
“I wouldn’t call Begin to Win progressive,” he said, “but it could be worse. No uniforms, no silence in the halls. And if we partner with a charter, we can steer clear of Tweed.”
He had a point. Vivienne’s position as head of the education committee had made her a go-to critic of the bureaucratic death star that was the Department of Education. Vivienne may not have seemed like a natural ally of the teachers’ union and parent activists, but she got along better with them than the swashbuckling b-school grads Bloomberg had installed at Tweed. To her, they were the political equivalent of nouveau riche. To them, her long history of service meant nothing. Elliot somehow managed to buddy up with the enemy, drinking with them after even the nastiest hearings, but collegiality only went so far, and if we were to partner with a regular public school, the DOE, out of sheer pettiness, might asphyxiate us with red tape. Best-case scenario, they would let us do our thing and then bogart the credit.
Still, I was suspicious of Begin to Win. I didn’t want to be a naysayer, but Vivienne and Elliot needed adult supervision and that had always been my job.
“Is Begin to Win even in Brooklyn?” I asked.
“Pretty close to Rita’s, actually. Do you know where the old Pfizer factory is?”
I didn’t, though I’d lived in Brooklyn for several years.
“It’s on their property,” Elliot said. “Near Woodhull Hospital and a bunch of projects. Marcy, Tompkins…”
I nodded, but I couldn’t actually picture it. My working knowledge of the Marcy Houses came entirely from Jay-Z songs.
“Aren’t we supposed to be serving the community? The kids are probably bused from all over the city.”
“Fifty-fifty local and bused, if I’m not mistaken. Anyway, the farmers market can be the community piece.”
“Racial-ethnic mix?”
“Respectable. And get this, Begin to Win is co-located with a public school…District 75.”
Elliot said this last part slowly, with raised eyebrows, clearly expecting a big reaction, but all I could do was blink back at him. I knew “co-located”—it wasn’t uncommon in Bloomberg’s New York for charters to share a building with traditional schools—but I was drawing a blank on District 75. Elliot rolled his eyes.
“District 75…as in special education. We’re talking about seventeen-year-olds in the fifth grade.”
“But wouldn’t that put us back on the DOE’s radar? I thought we’re trying to keep our distance.”
“We’ll already be in the building. If we can make this work with a respected charter school and come up with an awesome curriculum for special ed, we’ll have the DOE eating out of our hand.”
Vivienne waved her phone for attention.
“We’re on. Arthur and Barbara want to meet with us tomorrow.”
Elliot extended his fist for a celebratory bump. I obliged, but my mind was already swarming with logistical considerations.
“I don’t think we can invite them to the office. Misuse of public resources.”
Now it was Vivienne’s turn to roll her eyes at me. “Duh. I told them we could do it over dinner. At your friend’s restaurant.”
Elliot looked like he’d touched a staticky doorknob. “You sure, Viv? Rita’s may not be the Schlosser’s speed. Pretty hipster.”
Vivienne lowered her glasses. “Elliot, please. Arthur and Barbara have a standing reservation at every fashionable restaurant in town. They practically live at The Waverly Inn. They even have a table at Rao’s.”
How to explain the concept of the hipster to someone like Vivienne? I could barely put it into words at all. More of a know-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing. Then I remembered our intern, Kat, with the granny glasses and the tattoo of crows flying up her arm.
“Picture a roomful of Kats,” I told her.
“Cats? In a restaurant?”
“No. Kat, the intern. A roomful of people like her.”
“Who?”
Never mind, then. Actually, I couldn’t say for sure Kat even was a hipster. I remember seeing her get excited about the new Harry Potter movie and thinking she was kind of a dork.
“You know what? It’s fine. It’s perfect. Rita’s is an experience. They can tell their friends about it.”
“Just make sure you have your pitch down,” Vivienne said. “With people like this, you only get one opportunity.”
With one meaty hand still draped over cardboard Vivienne’s shoulder, Elliot laid the other on mine. “We’re on it. Will and I will talk tonight and jam through a quick one-pager.”
It was happening now. I had a date to ask an old ri
ch couple for their blessing to start my new life.
* * *
Elliot and I were already waiting at one of the few private tables squeezed in along the wall when Vivienne and the Schlossers arrived at Rita’s by town car. The place was crammed and roaring as always, and when she first entered, Vivienne took a step backwards as if hit by a physical force. She was wearing some kind of voluminous black shawl and diamond earrings. The Schlossers, on the other hand, were a little more Century Village than Park Avenue, Arthur in a nylon windbreaker, Barbara a cable knit sweater, both in cream-colored slacks. You’d never peg them as real estate billionaires, at least not immediately. On second glance, the total ease with which they strolled into a room where they obviously did not belong was pretty telling.
Elliot and I stood to greet them. I was wearing an oxford and tie but had decided against the full suit. I was easing into this new, make-my-own-rules existence. Elliot appeared to be wearing the same clothes as yesterday, though really, who could tell?
Barbara raised her iPhone and slowly pivoted on her heels, taking video of the room. “Well, will you look at this. Other than graduation day, I’ve never seen so many people together out here. Right, Arthur?”
Arthur scratched his nose. “Peter Luger, maybe.”
“You’re crazy. There’s never a crowd at the bar at Peter Luger. Not like this.”
“I told you, it’s so stimulating working with young people.” Vivienne presented me and Elliot with a sweep of the hand, as if we were a dinette set on The Price Is Right. “They know things.”
Arthur shook my hand solemnly, Barbara distractedly. She was on safari, captivated by this rare glimpse of the native wildlife in their habitat.
John was at our side before we’d even settled into our seats. Elliot made the introductions.
“Welcome to Rita’s, guys. If you don’t mind, our chef has a special menu in mind for you. So if you just tell me what you want to drink, we can get started.”
Vivienne and Barbara decided to split a bottle of Sancerre. Arthur ordered a beer, and Elliot followed suit. I said I was fine with water. Like I said, still easing in.
In the Weeds Page 3
