The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

by Dana Bate

  “Jay, this is Hannah Sugarman,” he says, pushing me forward by the small of my back. “Hannah, Congressman Holmes.”

  Congressman Holmes breaks into a smile and reaches out his hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Hannah.”

  I shake his hand, my palms slick with sweat. “Nice to meet you, too.”

  “Hannah works over at the Institute for Research and Discourse,” Blake says.

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” the congressman says. “They do good work over there. Who do you work for?”

  “Mark Henderson.”

  “Sure, sure, sure. Mark Henderson. Monetary policy, right? And isn’t his daughter Emma getting a PhD in American history from Yale?”

  “I—yes. Wow. Good memory.”

  Congressman Holmes smiles. Then he turns to Blake. “Hey, make sure you get Susie up to speed before you take off. Jim will take over once I get to Tampa.”

  “Will do,” Blake says.

  The congressman heads back into his office, and Blake slips into the windowed minioffice behind me. He leans over the desk of a young blonde, whose straight hair is pulled into a tight ponytail. They gesture back and forth at each other, nodding their heads and exchanging stacks of paper. Finally Blake emerges from his office and sighs.

  “Okay,” he says, loosening his bright blue tie. “Let’s go.”

  He escorts me down the long, marble hallway and out the same entrance I used earlier, and as we walk down First Street, he shimmies out of his jacket and throws it over his shoulder.

  “So you and the congressman are on a first-name basis, huh?” I ask as we saunter across C Street.

  He grins. “We keep it pretty casual.”

  “And how does he feel about your ANC run?”

  Blake shrugs. “He gets it. He knows you have to get your start in politics somewhere. But he’s also glad being a neighborhood commissioner wouldn’t require a lot of my time. It’s a pretty lowkey commitment.”

  I head for the Metro entrance, but Blake grabs me gently by the shoulder and steers me toward a parking lot across from Cannon. “Easy, there,” he says. “I drove today.”

  “Oh.” I grab my sunglasses from inside my tote. “Where are we heading?”

  Blake scrunches his lips together and wiggles them from side to side. “Not sure yet, actually. Haven’t made up my mind. I think I’ll make the decision on the fly.” He grins. “We’ll see what inspires me.”

  Great. That’s just the answer I was hoping for.

  Somewhere past the Air and Space Museum we have a change in course. As we zipped down Independence Avenue, I figured he was heading back to Dupont Circle so that we could shop at Whole Foods or one of the stores in our neighborhood. But then, suddenly, Blake veered into the left lane at the corner of Seventh Street, indicating he planned to head south instead of north, and that’s when I knew the plan had changed. To what, exactly, I could not say.

  “Uh, so Blake. Care to tell me where we’re going?”

  He turns to me and grins. “You’ll see.”

  Blake rounds the corner onto Seventh Street and chugs past the Federal Aviation Administration in his shiny white Volkswagen SUV. I’ve always thought this was one of the least attractive parts of the city. Most of the federal agencies hover around Independence Avenue between Second and Fourteenth streets, and it looks as if God shit huge cement blocks from the sky, and this is where they landed. Each building takes up an entire city block, and there is little else around them. I cannot imagine why Blake is taking me this way.

  We continue through the agency wasteland, where we pass the sweeping, concave curvature of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which, with its pale concrete facade and repetitive rows of dark square windows, looks like a cross between the Watergate and the Starship Enterprise. I don’t think I’ve ever driven past this building before, and I officially have no idea where we are—not in some sort of metaphysical “where is anyone in this world?” way, but in the very physical sense of “I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where we are in the context of this city.”

  “Blake. Seriously. Where the hell are we going?”

  Blake smiles and says nothing. We ride across the overpass above I-395 and follow the curve of Seventh Street around a bend until we reach the intersection with Maine Avenue, at which point I can see a series of small boats in the distance and a sign for the Southwest Waterfront. A pale blue roof looms just above the tree line, with Zanzibar Nightclub scrawled across the top in bright red cursive letters.

  Blake speeds across Maine Avenue and turns right onto a small road called Water Street, which is sandwiched between Maine Avenue to the right and the city’s southwestern waterfront to the left. As we crawl along Water Street, we pass a ramshackle series of run-down restaurants and shuttered buildings, none of which seems to be open, and I cannot help but feel as if I’m starring in some mobster movie, where Blake is taking me down to the waterfront to put a bullet in my head before tying me in chains and dumping me in the river. It is clear I need to watch fewer Sopranos reruns online.

  We bump along the narrow road until we reach a bottleneck surrounded by more run-down buildings and shacks, and my confusion is supplanted by the unnerving sentiment that something is very, very wrong. The small hovel to my left looks as if someone constructed it from warped baking sheets and jungle gym pieces, and I have seen a total of two people since we turned onto Water Street. Unless these passing minutes are meant to be my last, this strikes me as an unfortunate way to spend a Friday afternoon.

  Blake maneuvers the car through the narrowed opening at the end of Water Street and pulls into a small parking lot, which opens up to a series of shops, with people milling along the sidewalk. I am relieved to see signs of life. I am also thoroughly confused.

  As Blake rolls his car into a parking spot, I peer through the front windshield and spot a vast sign for CAPTAIN WHITE’S SEAFOOD CITY perched atop a steep turquoise roof, the white block letters punctuated by metal replicas of crabs and lobsters and shrimp, each of which is approximately the size of Blake’s car. Smack in the middle of the sign sits an enormous image of a bearded sailor gripping an old-fashioned spoke steering wheel.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say.

  “What?”

  I study Blake’s face and recall all the times he has used the phrases “ahoy” and “going overboard” and “anchors aweigh.” Now we are at some sort of fish market, in front of a huge image of a bearded sailor. And, apparently, I am the only one in this car who sees the humor in any of this.

  “Never mind,” I say. “What is this place?”

  “The Maine Avenue Fish Market. I figured you’d never been.”

  He figured right. In three years of living in Washington, I have never even heard of this place. Frankly, even though there are fifty state-named streets across the city, I never encountered Maine Avenue before today. The location’s novelty does not, however, explain our reason for being here.

  We hop out of the car, and immediately the stench of raw seafood slaps me in the face. “Lovely,” I say, covering my nose with my hand.

  Blake sticks his buttonlike nose in the air and takes a deep breath. “You don’t like it?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Yeah, I guess most people don’t. But I love it. It reminds me of my dad.”

  “I’m not sure how your dad would feel about that …”

  “It would probably make him smile.” Blake’s cheeks flush, and that’s when I remember his father is dead. Well done, Hannah. “We used to go fishing all the time when I was growing up,” he says, rolling up his shirtsleeves. “We called ourselves the Fischer Men.”

  “The Fischer Men—wow. So many things about you are starting to make sense …”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing …”

  “Hey, Fischer Men is a lot better than some of the names my dad got called in the navy. Apparently Fischer was an easy target for dirty puns. Althoug
h the Fischer Men do like a good pun now and then.”

  “You don’t say …”

  Blake smirks and gently elbows me in the side. “Anyway, I saw you had some seafood on your shopping list for the party, so I thought I’d take you here as a little surprise. Given how much you like to cook, I thought you might get a kick out of it.”

  We wind our way past one of many seafood shops, and at this first one, the seafood sits on ice below foot level, with a bunch of men standing in the pit behind the seafood and shouting up at passersby to ask what they want. No wonder Blake asked what I was wearing earlier. Some of these fishmongers would have an X-rated view if I’d worn a skirt today.

  The combination of seafood and commotion reminds me of the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, which I visited a decade ago when my parents dragged me across the country for the World Trade Organization meeting. While they were off talking about trade imbalances and domestic subsidies, I snuck off from our room at the Crowne Plaza and hopped on a bus down to the fish market. The place was a cook’s dream come true—fish everywhere, all different kinds, right off the boat. I’d never seen anything like it.

  I spent an hour strolling around the market, watching the fishmongers toss slick, silvery king salmon across vats of ice while shouting back and forth to each other over the bustle of the crowd and the drifting guitar music. I bought a tub of cooked Dungeness crab as a souvenir, not fully appreciating the mechanics involved in transporting fresh seafood on a five-hour flight across the country. When my parents spotted the container in our hotel minifridge, they—not without justification—thought I’d lost my mind, but I told them Pike Place offered such a staggering selection of seafood that I had to buy something. Unfortunately, my parents forbade me from bringing fresh seafood on an airplane, and I was forced to wolf down what I could before throwing the rest of the container in the trash.

  This place on Maine Avenue lacks the energy of Pike Place, and it’s definitely grungier than Seattle’s famous market, but they carry an extensive selection of seafood, everything from whole snapper to grouper filets to octopus, and every kind of shellfish, including live lobsters and crabs.

  Blake leads me over to Captain White’s, and I survey the shrimp and crab’s legs. “You’re sure this stuff is fresh?”

  “Well, I should be honest,” he says, lowering his voice and turning his back to a tattooed fishmonger who looks eager to make a sale. He comes in close and whispers in my ear. “Most of the fish is trucked in from Maryland. And some of it’s frozen. But it’s still pretty good, and for the amount of seafood you have on your list, you can’t beat the price.”

  Blake calls over the tattooed man and points to the extra-large shrimp. “We’ll take ten pounds of those guys, and five pounds of the oysters over there.”

  I point to the jar of shucked oysters. “Why don’t we buy the shucked kind? I don’t need them in the shell. I’m cooking them anyway. It’ll save me time.”

  “Aw, come on. Fresh is the only way to go.”

  “Are you planning to shuck them for me?”

  He bites his lip. “How about this—you cook with the jarred oysters, I’ll do my own thing with the fresh ones. There’s nothing quite like a freshly shucked oyster.”

  “Fine.”

  Blake calls to the tattooed man. “Make that three pounds of the oysters in the shell, and a jar of the shucked oysters.”

  “And throw in four pounds of squid,” I add.

  Blake offers me an approving grin and then turns back to the fishmonger. “Whoa—hey, we don’t want any of the shrimp with the spots on them. Or the milky eyes. Put those back. Only the fresh ones.” The fishmonger nods, scoops out the objectionable shrimp, and tosses in some fresher ones.

  “Someone knows his seafood,” I say.

  He shrugs. “What can I say? I’m more than just a beautiful face.”

  Blake surveys his order and hands the man a wad of cash.

  “By the way,” he says, “all this cash reminded me—I checked it out, and when it comes to catering my party, it’s totally legal for me to pay you.”

  Frankly, I’d forgotten it might not be. That’s probably because the finer points of what is legal and what is not no longer seem to enter the calculus of my daily behavior.

  We trudge back to the car, weighed down by about twenty pounds of seafood. Blake opens his trunk and lifts off the lid to an enormous blue-and-white cooler, which is nestled among a bunch of red-and-white fishing rods, a rusty tackle box, a pair of beat-up Adidas sneakers, and a set of jumper cables. We dump the food in the cooler, seal it up, and hop back in the car. Blake pulls out of the parking lot and slowly turns onto Maine Avenue.

  “Three more places I want to take you,” he says.

  He flicks on a compilation of ’80s tunes and skips forward to a song by Flock of Seagulls, and as he starts crooning the lyrics, his wildly off-key tones filling the car, I realize this day is going to be even weirder than I thought.

  CHAPTER

  twenty-eight

  After Blake stops off at a cheese shop in Alexandria and a butcher in Arlington, he pulls into the parking lot of a wine emporium in McLean, fist-pumping all the while to Def Leppard. Considering this is a man I should, theoretically, be avoiding, I somehow have managed to spend more time with him over the past week than I have with my parents over the past three months, and the hours of quality time show no sign of abating.

  “Didn’t we just buy wine the other night?” I ask.

  Blake sighs. “Yeah, I know. But I checked my liquor cabinet last night, and it looks like one of my buddies put a serious dent in my supply of port and scotch.”

  Port. And scotch. The port and scotch Rachel and I forgot to replace. Shit.

  “Oh. I see.”

  “It’s weird, though, because I haven’t had friends over in months, so I’m not really sure when someone would have drunk all my booze. But between work and the ANC election, I’ve been operating on very little sleep for months, so who knows. Anything is possible.”

  I smile uncomfortably. “Isn’t it always?”

  We hop out of the car, and Blake points his finger between the wine shop and an ABC liquor store across the street. “Want to stick with me, or divide and conquer?”

  We have been shopping for more than two hours. I do not need to prolong this day any longer. “Let’s split up.”

  “Cool. If you run across the street to the ABC and find the scotch, I’ll grab some port over here and meet you.”

  Blake heads one way, and I dart across the street to the liquor store. Once inside, I wander down the aisles, searching for the shelves housing the whiskey and scotch. I can’t believe Rachel and I forgot to replace his booze. How could we be so stupid? As if he wouldn’t notice both bottles were empty. Then again, I managed to leave a container of homemade ice cream in his freezer with the name SUGARMAN on it. Stealth is not a personal strength.

  I scan the display and spot the bottle Rachel and I used at each of our supper clubs: the Macallan eighteen-year scotch. I pluck the bottle off the shelf, and as soon as I do, I notice the price: $149.95. Holy shit.

  “Hey, how did you know Macallan is my favorite?”

  I turn around and find Blake standing directly behind me, his lips curled into a playful smirk. “Lucky guess,” I say.

  He grabs the bottle from my hand. “Hey there, high roller. The eighteen-year?”

  Isn’t that what he already owns? I’m so confused. “Not okay?”

  “No, it’s fine. Just a little pricey, that’s all. Eighteen is what I have at home, but I got it as a gift for my birthday last year. I usually buy the twelve-year if I’m just buying it for me.”

  Great. Now I feel even worse. “Then let’s buy that instead,” I say. “It’s cheaper.”

  Blake waves me away with his hand. “Nah, don’t worry about it. I’m just bitching. It’s not your fault someone drank my booze.” He smiles. “The eighteen-year tastes better anyway. I shouldn’t skimp on your first c
atering gig.”

  He hands the bottles to the cashier, grabs his wallet, and drops his credit card on the counter.

  I am pretty much the worst person alive.

  We get back to Blake’s house around six-thirty, and I help Blake unload what feels like one thousand pounds of groceries into his kitchen, finding space where I can in his already overstuffed refrigerator. As I unload the last of the seafood, Blake rubs his hands along the granite countertop.

  “You hungry?” he asks.

  “I could eat,” I say, a statement that is true both now and always.

  “Any interest in sharing a pizza? I could eat a whole one on my own, but I probably shouldn’t.”

  I stuff a bag of shrimp between two bottles of Dogfish Head Ale and shut the refrigerator door. “Um, I don’t know …”

  What I really want to do is call Jacob and have him (a) apologize for not calling me and (b) offer to come over and make out with me. I also do not relish the idea of fostering a friendship with the one man I should be avoiding.

  “Aw, come on,” Blake says. “Don’t make me eat a pizza all by myself. Do it for my waistline.”

  I sigh. “Yeah, okay. Pizza sounds good.”

  Blake leaves to pick up a pizza from Pizzeria Paradiso, the only place in Dupont Circle to get authentic, Italian, wood-fired pizza, and I plop down on his living room sofa and let my back meld into the soft leather cushions. What the hell am I doing? With every passing day, I manage to dig myself into a deeper hole. I can’t become friends with Blake. Friends don’t lie to each other and sabotage each other’s political careers. Friends don’t steal each other’s liquor and use each other’s kitchens without permission. I shouldn’t even be here. I should be out somewhere fun with Jacob. I should be getting laid.

  Whatever. Jacob will call me when he’s ready. In the meantime, I need to get my head in the game and prepare for tomorrow night. This party will be my first nonsecret, paid catering gig, and as such, I can’t afford to make any missteps. If I play this right, I could get requests for other events, and soon I could have enough buzz around my name to start my own company. Then I could quit my job and cook anywhere for anyone, without worrying about who might find out. I wouldn’t have to use my landlord’s house. Behind his back. While he runs for neighborhood commissioner and pays me to help with his parties.