The restaurant was austere and beautiful, just as Harry had said, like the polished interior of a carved box.
“How’re things shaping up?” Camille asked, turning to him. She gestured politely for an additional sake, told the bartender they’d put themselves in the chef’s hands with the omakase menu, and then poured the wine for him, a gesture that struck Britt as strangely gracious and old-fashioned. On her right wrist was a wide band of matte silver, in her ears what appeared to be liquid platinum drops that shivered when they toasted with the sake cups. He watched her full lower lip pillow against the pale green of her cup as she drank.
Britt sipped his sake, which was smooth and as light as rice paper. “It’s getting close,” he said, “but I can barely tell whether that means we’re ready or just that it’s going to happen anyway. The friends-and-family’s in a week, so I guess we’ll know then.”
She smiled. “You make it sound as if you’ve never done this before,” she said.
“I have, but it’s been years. It’s probably like bringing a baby home from the hospital—you remember the overall sensation of frenzy and exhaustion but none of the specifics. And to do it well, it’s all specifics.”
“If it helps, I’m not concerned,” she said. “I can’t wait, to be honest. Linden needs something new—something just, I don’t know, relaxed but interesting. I’m never interested anymore when I go out. Present company’s other establishment excepted, of course.”
Britt looked around. “I’m interested,” he said. “I’m interested in this place. How’d you choose it?” It wasn’t really fair, he knew, to try to tease out the nuances of her friendship with Harry, but he found it impossible to resist.
“Harry came upon it somehow—I think he met the chef at Mack’s. And I kept meaning to try it, but this is the first I’ve managed it. It’s not easy to think of a decent place to take another industry person, you know. I was hoping it was under the radar enough to interest you.”
“Well, good job,” he said. “It’s pretty far under. Kind of risky, them hoping to sustain it long enough to bring in people through in-the-know chatter.”
“You think that’s what they’re doing?”
“I’m just guessing. Then again, maybe they did a whole PR blitz and I just missed it. Harry and I’ve both been a little underwater for the past few weeks.”
Camille hesitated. “He seems pretty frazzled. I know it’s typical, but is Harry having a rougher go of it than most people?”
Britt said, “He does seem a little nuts, I admit. But I don’t think he’s ever had to work in quite this way before.”
“Not even on the island?”
“Yes, but not with quite the same level of responsibility.”
Now the first dishes were placed before them: translucent folds of fish, an ivory bed of rice, a gemlike cluster of caviar. They went silent as they ate. Britt chewed very slowly, thinking how heavy and oily so much food was compared to this faint salinity, this silky firmness, the succulent, dainty pop of fish eggs against the palate.
When the mouthful was gone, they sipped their sake, not looking at one another. Britt decided not to speak, just for a moment. He sensed where this evening could go, how easily he could push it in that direction, and the fact that already he was doing so. Camille’s relentless polish, the shining surface of her companionship, didn’t give him much purchase on how she truly felt about anything.
They could talk about restaurants, about where they lived and where they’d grown up, what she liked of her profession and what she hated, what Winesap was doing and how Stray was progressing, and then they would kiss on the cheek again at the end of the night and really that would be it, because there was nowhere else to go from there. The fresh clarity of the plate before them had had a bracing effect, made it all seem so dull and familiar.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to ask you out,” Camille said.
Britt looked at her, startled, and was mercifully distracted when the chef placed two fresh plates before them: a crescent of coral shrimp, a golden thread of beaten cooked egg, a spear of scallion.
“Shouldn’t I be the one apologizing?” he said.
She took a delicate bite of the shrimp from her chopsticks. “Why, because you’re a man? I spent a lot of time with Harry this fall—it was probably on me to let you know whether that meant something or not. So no, I don’t think you need to.”
“Did it mean something?” Britt asked lightly. Her eyes were more golden-brown in this room, Britt saw; the fine velvet of down along her jawline glowed in the light of the bar. A faint burst of lines creased at the corners of her eyes as she smiled. She was gorgeous but not flawless, her nose with its touch of a downward curve, her disproportionately full lower lip, the faint tang of alcohol on her breath from the sake. And yet at such close range she made him sweat suddenly, the fantasy of her dismissed and replaced with this woman, whose skin was olive-toned and as silky as polished wood, who was looking him frankly in the eyes, and whom he realized he did not know at all.
“It did, a little,” she said. “But not now.”
THEY WERE STILL DINING while a number of other tables appeared, dined, and departed, which solved the question of whether this chef knew that Britt was a fellow industry person. Not that the man ever directly acknowledged it. During a tiny slurp of fresh oyster, a meaty, rosy octopus slice, and a selection of different fish that at first looked the same but were revealed to have an array of subtle but absolutely clear differences, they watched the chef, who somehow seemed to accomplish a great deal without moving a lot. Britt waited for the telltale glance out among the tables, a natural scan to see how full the place was, what more might be needed as the night progressed, but this never occurred. The chef’s silvery eyes stayed on his workstation until he placed a dish before someone with a brief, formal nod.
They were finally reaching the high point, the toro itself, and were on a third glass of sake. Why didn’t Britt live on raw fish every day of his life? At least on every date. It was lightening and energizing; he could have gone for a run. He could have lifted Camille, who was nearly as tall as he was, without even trying.
“So who would you be having dinner with if not with me?” he asked.
Camille smiled. “On a Sunday? Probably my friends. You’ve seen them at the restaurant. Or one of an array of impressionable young men I keep in a stable. Or I’d be cooking something wonderful for myself and not sharing.”
“Are you a good cook?” He had always pegged her for a noncook. She seemed to dine out too frequently for someone who enjoyed cooking.
“I am,” she said. “But I’m greedy. I used to live with a guy who liked pasta with littlenecks, but not as much as I did. And they’re expensive, you know. So I always made linguine with clams when he was out of town, but with the same amount of clams as if I were cooking for two.”
Britt laughed. “That is greedy.” She shrugged, smiling. “Where’d the guy travel to?”
“He went overseas a lot. He was in computers. For a while he did a lot in developing countries, trying to get things up and running.”
Wonderful. The only thing that would have made Britt look worse in comparison would have been Doctors Without Borders.
“I wasn’t going to ask you about your work,” he said, “except that I really do want to know.”
She cast a sideways glance at him. “I love my work,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I want to talk about it?”
Britt colored. “Because it’s the same thing you get asked on every date, I imagine.”
“True.” She took a swallow of sake, then shifted in her chair to face him. “But that’s the game, isn’t it? It’s why we’re here.”
“Okay. Let’s play the game. Tell me how you ended up here. The city, I mean, not dinner. We grew up here, so I never stood a chance, but you’re from somewhere else.” Britt often presented himself as a hometown boy, though he did not view himself this way and would have been insulted if anyone else re
ally did. He had spent time in other cities; he’d traveled. He believed he had simply ended up here as a matter of chance.
“I grew up outside Philadelphia,” she said. He noticed that she did not ask him why he knew she was not a local. “I spent some time in New York, worked in a few restaurants, worked as an assistant to a restaurant consultant—that was how I got into this. I couldn’t handle the restaurant hours, to be honest. Once I got a taste of having my nights and weekends off, I couldn’t go back.”
“That is the problem. You have to love the craziness more than you hate the hours.”
“You obviously do,” she said. “Right? Tell me now if you actually detest your job and your life. Tell me why you opened a place in Linden and not in a bigger city.”
“Leo asked me. That was where he was opening a place already. For a long time I was just doing the job where the job was. But I started to feel like there was a real point to this, to showing that you can live well here. I feel like we’re part of the reason. I guess if you want to live on thirty acres of woods, this’ll never be good living for you. But you know, if you want the amenities of a bigger city with a little less bull, Linden might be that one day. And I’m not trying to provide a restaurant that’s okay for Linden—I want to run an objectively great restaurant.” Britt paused, surprised to find himself declaiming at such length. He didn’t know if he had ever quite articulated his feelings this way, but it felt very true.
“I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “I came out here as a commuter, just trying not to go bankrupt on real estate, but I like how it’s starting to change. It’s as if you can feel the ground shifting.”
The chef set out two square white dishes in his prep space, nodded at them, and disappeared behind a door. Camille uncrossed her legs and leaned forward on the bar, resting on her forearms. Her hair draped over her collarbones, her smooth shoulder peeking through. Britt reached over and hooked a skein of her hair in one finger, lifted it, and let it fall behind her back. She glanced down at his hand, as did he. He hadn’t planned the gesture. He only wanted to see her clearly. For a moment they looked at each other, and then Camille smiled quickly, as if filing it away.
The chef reappeared, carrying a piece of pale fish. The other tuna they’d been served had been dark and richly colored, a gleaming garnet so firm it barely drooped when lifted between their chopsticks. But this was completely different. The chef’s posture had even changed slightly; he held the plate a touch farther from his body than he had done before, his chin lifted just slightly. He turned toward the back of his workspace and brought out a fresh knife. When he began to slice the fish, it quivered as it parted for the blade. Its paleness wasn’t the translucence of the raw hake or flounder; it was pale the way foie gras is pale, a saturated richness. Britt wondered if anything else would go on the plate at all.
Camille said, “Harry told me about a place in Japan his friends went to, where they sat by a window beside a little park. And once they’d ordered, the restaurant let kittens loose outside the window, to play for the guests’ amusement.”
Britt laughed. It was exactly the sort of detail Harry managed to pick up. “I’m lucky he hasn’t ordered a gross of kittens to play in King Street. So, listen. How’d you start coming to Winesap?”
“I let the clients choose. They like Winesap, and Hot Springs, and that old-school pasta place. Berlucci’s.”
“I’m sorry,” Britt said. “You shouldn’t have to eat at that place. They parboil all their pasta and then finish it in the microwave.”
Camille looked dejected. “I figured it was something depressing like that.”
“What d’you think of Hot Springs? We’ve known the owners for years, in a grudge-match kind of way.”
“The desserts are very good,” she said, “but sometimes Barbara scares the crap out of me.”
The chef now approached them with a plate in each hand, then placed the plates before them with an air of grave finality. Britt gazed down at the white plate and the unadorned pink fish centered upon it, feeling both excited at the climax of the meal and regretful that this was all ending. He remembered Harry calling the toro sea heroin, and looked up into the chef’s lupine eyes with a faint chill of apprehension. Certainly he was about to taste something he might not taste again. That was the problem with such a place: once you’d had toro like this, fish like this, you developed a taste beyond your means.
“This looks amazing,” Britt told him, “but now I’m sorry we’re almost done.”
The chef nodded, lifting one shoulder in acknowledgment. His expression suggested faint sympathy for the plight of two people about to taste an elusive and expensive form of glory, as well as a certain brusque acknowledgment that life ends, meals end; get over it.
They stopped speaking as they took the first bite. In Britt’s mouth the rich fat melted almost instantly, as if the protein had been netted together only by prayer or memory. They barely chewed; they merely let the fish disappear.
After a moment, Camille murmured, “You could eat this through a straw.”
Neither said another word until their plates were empty. As they ate, they watched the chef return to the fish, wrap it smoothly in plastic once more, and disappear behind the door again, carrying the knife he’d used to slice it.
“I bet he never uses the same toro knife twice,” Britt said. “He’s probably burying that.”
Camille was looking around the empty restaurant. “I don’t think anyone else was served that fish,” she said. “Did you see it before?”
Britt felt a faint glow of pleasure. It wasn’t pride so much as gratitude—maybe this guy had his own reasons for bestowing such a thing on certain people; maybe he had no idea Britt was in the restaurant business and simply liked the look of him.
A moment later, he thought about this again and almost laughed. So this was how the customer felt, how easily this was accomplished. He’d known it, of course, but he’d forgotten how effective it was to be on the receiving end of such treatment. And what treatment: the privilege of being served an extravagantly expensive meal, for which they would pay, of course, honored to be thought capable of it. Britt figured he could learn a thing or two from this silent chef.
They declined anything further. What were they going to do, follow up that heavenly, obscenely precious finale with some green tea ice cream? Even though it was probably delicious.
He was waiting for the check, inwardly dreading it now that the distraction of the food had ended, when a server set a wooden plate before Camille, on it a credit card receipt anchored with a polished stone. “Oh, you didn’t,” he said.
“Of course I did—I’m the one who asked you,” she replied, signing it. “Britt. You should know this trick.”
“I forgot it,” he said wonderingly. How could he have forgotten? But he was also thinking that this was the first time he’d heard her say his name. The sound of it in her voice was a dull hot thud to the chest, as if he’d been eyeing her, unseen, from a distance and she’d suddenly met his gaze, having been aware of him all along.
Part 2
CHAPTER 12
LEO WAS EARLY. HE CIRCLED the block several times instead of ringing the doorbell before eight and was rewarded by a lengthy, suspicious look from a guy out shoveling his driveway as Leo passed him for the third time.
Eventually he pulled into the driveway, where he hadn’t been for years, not since the grand pig feast Thea had hosted when she was still married to Bryan. The light was on in her kitchen and he could see her moving back and forth before the window, putting dishes on shelves and closing cabinet doors.
He had asked her only last night, presenting it as a professional outing to check on Stray’s friends-and-family night, to support their coworker and his brother, and to extend a hand to Harry as well. He’d oversold it a bit. They’d been upstairs at the restaurant, finished with the dinner shift, Thea back in her civilian clothes, tired and shiny-faced while downstairs the last shift of servers be
gan straightening the dining room.
The night they’d seen each other at Mack’s, Leo had walked her out to her car and stood beside it, one palm flat on the hood, while she threw her purse into the passenger seat and turned back to him, her pale face lit with expectance and uncertainty. They’d felt like old friends and also like people on a first date, some strange blend of both.
He’d found himself more at ease than he’d ever been in Thea’s somewhat taciturn presence. When Thea had appeared in the entrance at Mack’s, looking startled by the thud of the door she’d just pushed open, her scuffed boots planted far apart as she’d surveyed the room, he’d known this was the last place she wanted to be. He was touched, because she was there because of the job, which was at least partially because of him.
As they’d finished their drinks and eaten their eggs and walked out into the crisp night air, Leo had felt the darkness of the past few weeks lift. The fretfulness and the unfocused discord that had infected every aspect of his day were just gone, soaked up by bourbon and a meal and by Thea’s obvious pleasure at being cooked for and catered to. Alone with her in the kitchen, he had felt reckless and lighthearted, as if nothing he did could fail.
But by the time he’d walked her to her car, he’d come down a bit—they were back out in the quiet familiar neighborhood, the night was over, and they’d return in the morning, the spell broken, and have to work together again. So he just smiled and stepped back so she could close her car door.
The next day he’d braced himself for Thea to be dour and puffy from a night too late and too relaxed. Maybe he even wanted her to be less attractive in the morning, for all evening long, he’d wondered why he’d never noticed Thea’s essential prettiness, the delicacy of her mouth and the fine point of her nose, the mink-brown tips of her un-made-up lashes, and it would certainly be easier if he had just been tipsy. But the next day she wore her hair in a bun that showed the tender hollows behind her ears, the arch beneath her cheekbones. At staff meal he’d strained to hear her voice at the other end of the table, and when he went into the kitchen to get more coffee, he’d caught a glimpse of her demonstrating some filleting technique with a branzino for Suzanne and Jason, one hand resting on the silver skin of the fish while the other guided a thin, sharp, glinting knife along the spine, all grace and mastery.
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