The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

by Dana Bate

  “Answer me,” Blake says. “How long has this been going on?”

  Before I can answer, a young woman with cropped strawberry blond hair taps Blake on the shoulder. I recognize her as one of the guests from the dinner tonight. “Excuse me,” she says. “Are you Blake Fischer?”

  He frowns. “Yeah.”

  “The Blake Fischer who ran for Dupont Circle ANC?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I’m a blogger for DCist. Is it true you were running The Dupont Circle Supper Club out of your house?”

  Blake glares at the blogger and then at me. “I don’t know. Was I?”

  My lip quivers. “No,” I say. “I was.”

  The blogger stares at Blake. “But that is your house, right? You live here?”

  Blake sighs. “Could you leave us alone, please?”

  Her eyes dart back and forth between us. “Sure. Whatever.”

  She grabs her iPhone from her purse and begins tapping into it as she walks away, and Blake buries his head in his hands. “What a nightmare.”

  The firefighter approaches the top of the stairway and waves Blake inside, telling him they’ve extinguished the fire in its entirety. I motion for Rachel to stay outside and proceed to follow Blake up the stairs, even though I’m pretty sure he wants to vaporize me at the moment. I almost wish he would.

  Blake runs his hands over the top of his head as he takes in the damage to the kitchen. “Jesus,” he says.

  A thick miasma of smoke hangs in the air, and the smell of scorched matter permeates the room. The formerly white cupboards are all a grimy gray, bespattered with streaks of black ash and soot. The ceiling, too, is dark and dingy, and the knobs to the stove top have all melted into the counter.

  “The damage actually isn’t that bad,” the firefighter says. “Your stove top being in the middle of the room and all, none of the walls caught fire. The blaze was mainly confined to the breakfast bar area.”

  Blake snorts. “Oh. Hooray. Fantastic.”

  The firefighter shrugs. “Hey, buddy. I’ve seen worse. You lucked out. Nothing your homeowner’s insurance shouldn’t cover.” He turns to me. “But you, ma’am, need to be more careful in the kitchen. Deep frying is no joke.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, sir,” Blake says. “She won’t be cooking here ever again.”

  Blake escorts the firefighters outside, leaving me alone in the kitchen to stew in my own anxious juices. What can I say or do to possibly make this okay? I need Blake to understand how deeply sorry I am—how awful I feel for lying to him, how terrible I feel for setting his kitchen on fire, and, above all, how much his companionship has meant to me over the past few months and how much I don’t want to lose that.

  Blake returns a few minutes later, his black bow tie undone and hanging around his neck and his tuxedo jacket folded over his arm. His sleeves are rolled up around his elbows.

  “Blake, I’m so sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “I—I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way,” I say, wiping the splotches of soot off my face.

  He sneers. “What, you didn’t mean to set my kitchen on fire?”

  “No—I didn’t mean to use your house at all. I just … everything spun out of control.”

  “How, exactly?”

  I clear my throat. “Well … my friend Rachel and I planned to hold a supper club out of my apartment, just to see if I could do it, but then the apartment flooded, and since you gave me a spare key to your house …”

  “Hang on,” Blake says, interrupting me. “Let me get this straight. You and your friend decided to run an unlicensed restaurant out of my basement—my basement, which I own and happen to let you rent. And when you ran into a problem, you decided it was okay to move the whole thing upstairs into a part of the house you don’t pay for, using a bunch of furniture and kitchenware that isn’t yours.”

  My throat tightens. Recited out loud, the scenario sounds even more absurd than it did in my own head. I stare at Blake, biting my lip to keep it from quivering. I can’t believe I let this happen. All along, I knew I was doing something wrong—something profoundly dishonest—and yet I kept doing it anyway. What was I thinking?

  “I …” My voice cracks and shakes. I am on the verge of losing it. I take two breaths and try again. “I …”

  “You what?” Blake says.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Blake goes silent and stares at the ground. Then he looks back up at me and fixes his gray eyes on mine. “You lied to me, Hannah. To my face, for months.”

  “I know, and I am so, so sorry. I feel awful.”

  “Why, because you got caught?”

  “No,” I say, my voice shaking. “Because I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to turn my house into a speakeasy. Didn’t you realize what this could do to my career? Did none of those conversations we had mean anything to you?” He shakes his head and looks up at the ceiling. “All those weekends I was away, I’d get excited about coming home because I’d think, ‘Maybe I’ll run into Hannah. Maybe I’ll have an excuse to talk to her again.’ And the whole time, you were running a borderline illegal operation out of my house.”

  “Blake, I didn’t mean to—”

  “I stuck out my neck for you, Hannah. I got my friend’s aunt to look at your application for L’Academie. I wrote you an unsolicited letter of recommendation. I took you to fucking Bistro du Coin so that you didn’t have to spend last weekend alone. And what did you do for me? You sabotaged my political aspirations and lied to my face.” He tosses his jacket over his shoulder. “I can’t believe I let myself care about you. What a fucking joke.”

  Blake turns his back to me and starts to walk out of the kitchen. “Blake—wait!”

  He turns around and locks his eyes on me. The whites of his eyes are pink and glassy. “What?”

  “I’m … I’m so sorry. What can I do to make it up to you?” Blake stares at me and says nothing. “I care about you, too, Blake. Please, what can I do? Tell me what I can do.”

  Blake lets out an exasperated sigh and heads back down the hallway. “I don’t give a crap what you do,” he shouts back at me. “Just leave my keys on the counter and get the hell out of my house.”

  CHAPTER

  forty-two

  It’s official: I’ve ruined everything.

  I now have no job, no boyfriend, no supper club, no income stream, and an ex-friend landlord who hates me. And, on top of all that, my parents keep leaving me increasingly agitated voice mails, messages to which I cannot reply due to all of the factors listed above. As one might expect, I am completely freaking out. What am I going to do? This is a problem no amount of carrot cake or brisket can solve.

  And now Blake is gone. Gone.

  The morning after the fire, I banged on his door, holding a container of honeycomb ice cream in one hand and my checkbook in the other, but he didn’t answer and hasn’t answered in the seven days since. Not that I should be surprised. The story of Blake Fischer and The Dupont Circle Supper Club has made the rounds, first appearing on the DCist blog and eventually making its way into the Metro section of the Washington Post. I try to comfort myself by pointing out that the story appeared on page three, below the fold, but I know Blake won’t take any comfort from that at all, not in the digital era. According to the article, he is stepping down as neighborhood commissioner.

  The article also said he has left town while on “temporary leave” from his job on the Hill, which explains why he hasn’t answered my repeated knocks on his door or any of my phone calls. If he loses his job because of what I’ve done, I may never get over it.

  Strangely, the articles make precious little mention of me, even though I am the buxom hostess in question, which makes the situation doubly unfair. Blake doesn’t deserve this humiliation. This fiasco is entirely my fault. But if there is a way to make amends for what I’ve done and set things ri
ght, I don’t know what it is.

  My only choice, I decide, is to return to the message I began composing the day the Post article came out, and so the Saturday after the fire I flip open my laptop, and I write:

  Your article about Blake Fischer and The Dupont Circle Supper Club [“Dupont Commissioner Goes Down in Flames,” Nov. 16] portrays Mr. Fischer as a willing participant in the supper club’s underground activities. This is not the case. As the sole proprietor of The Dupont Circle Supper Club, I ran the operation in Mr. Fischer’s house without his knowledge, on weekends when he was visiting the home district for his employer, Congressman Jay Holmes (D-FL). Every aspect of the supper club, from its conception to its implementation, was my doing, and mine alone. Mr. Fischer knew nothing about it until I set his kitchen on fire last weekend.

  Though I realize this will have little impact on the public’s perception, I feel it necessary to mention that Blake Fischer is one of the most upstanding, inspiring people I’ve ever met. He cares passionately about making his neighborhood and community a better place and lives his life with guts and integrity. He is also very kind. It would be a disservice to the Dupont Circle neighborhood and the city at large to punish him for my own misguided actions. He deserves better.

  Sincerely,

  Hannah Sugarman

  I skim the letter two times, and then, satisfied with my mea culpa, I click SEND and forward the message to the Washington Post.

  Tuesday morning, the Post prints my letter. I sign onto my e-mail, hoping for a response or acknowledgment from Blake, but to my dismay, he hasn’t written. Neither has anyone else.

  What surprises is how much I want Blake to write—how much I want to know how he is doing and where he is living and whether he thinks he could ever forgive me for what I’ve done. But I haven’t seen or heard from him in more than a week, and I’m beginning to think I may never hear from him again, except in some sort of legal eviction notice.

  I do, however, hear from Rachel, who calls Tuesday morning as soon as she sees the Post. “I saw your letter,” she says. “Why didn’t you mention me?”

  “I didn’t see the point in ruining both of our lives. Blake was my landlord, not yours. This one is on me.”

  “But that’s a lot to lay on yourself.”

  “Maybe, but you actually have something to lose—you’re applying to Johns Hopkins, you have a boyfriend, you have a job. I, on the other hand …”

  Rachel sighs into the phone. “Well, thanks. I just hope you’ll be okay.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I say.

  “Any interest in meeting up for a cup of coffee before I take off for Thanksgiving?”

  I glance down at my T-shirt and raggedy Adidas pants and wonder if, with a little makeup and styling, I can manage some sort of quasi-athletic, postcollegiate student look. I decide I do not have the energy to try.

  “Nah. Thanks, though. Are you leaving today?”

  “Yep,” she says. “What about you? Are you going to your parents’?”

  I let out a protracted sigh. “Not sure. They’re still trying to get out of my aunt’s thing in upstate New York. They’re supposed to let me know tonight whether I should buy a ticket for Philly or Buffalo.”

  “Thanksgiving is, like, two days away. Aren’t you nervous there won’t be any tickets left?”

  “Right now, that’s the least of my worries.” I wander into the kitchen and pour some Puffins into a bowl and drizzle them with a little milk. I don’t want to talk or think about my parents right now. “How are things at the office, by the way?”

  “Less fun without you. But not all that different. Mark is still crazy. His new research assistant is totally confused and overwhelmed. Millie is still the same pain in the ass. The usual.”

  I freeze with my spoon in my mouth at the mention of Millie’s name. “Has Millie mentioned the party at all?”

  “Ugh, don’t get me started,” Rachel says. “Ever since that article appeared in the Post, she has been freaking out. So has Adam, apparently.”

  In a sad commentary on my current mental state, hearing this news makes me unexpectedly happy. I picture Adam’s and Millie’s faces when the fire alarm went off and they spotted the flames erupting from the stove—how panicked they looked, the way the two of them slinked out of the house without trying to help, content to let me and the kitchen burn to a crisp. Millie sees everything as a competition, but if Adam is as spineless as his actions that evening imply, dating Adam is one competition I’m happy to let her win.

  “What else is new? How is Jackson?”

  “Dreamy as ever,” she says. I can feel her blushing through the phone. “We both sent in our Hopkins applications, so fingers crossed.” She pauses. “Any word from Blake?”

  I shovel a spoonful of cereal into my mouth. “Nope. Nada.”

  “Not even an eviction notice?”

  “No. Thank god.” My phone beeps, and I pull it away from my ear: MOM CELL. I groan. “My parents are calling on the other line. I’ve been avoiding their calls all week. I should take this.”

  “Do they know about the supper club?”

  I let out a hoot. “Are you kidding? They’d both go into cardiac arrest. After shitting themselves. I haven’t even told them I left NIRD. Like I’d tell them I nearly burned down my landlord’s house while I was running an underground supper club.”

  “O-okay,” she says, in a tone that suggests my behavior is totally insane—which, I will concede, it most definitely is. “Well, you better get that call. Talk to you soon.”

  I hang up with Rachel and answer my mom’s call, deeply dreading this conversation. “Hi, Mom. What’s up?”

  “Hannah? Where are you?”

  I clear my throat. I should tell them the truth. I will tell them the truth. Just not now. I’ll tell them … at Thanksgiving. Which, admittedly, is only two days from now. But I feel strongly that those two days will make all the difference. Why? I couldn’t say. Probably because I’m a big, fat coward.

  “I’m … at work,” I say. “Where are you?” There is silence at the other end of the phone. “Mom?”

  “You’re at work? Where?”

  I swallow hard. “IRD. Why?”

  “Well that’s funny. Because right now your father and I are at IRD, sitting in Mark’s office. And from what he tells us, you don’t work here anymore.”

  And just when I thought my life couldn’t be any more of a mess, Murphy’s Law rears its ugly head and shows me, yet again, there are an infinite number of ways for the universe to fuck my life, and it appears nature is hell-bent on exploring each and every one of them.

  CHAPTER

  forty-three

  In some cruel twist of fate, my parents decided it would be a fun surprise to visit me in Washington and bring Thanksgiving to me, since they so desperately wanted to get out of Aunt Elena’s ridiculous dinner. I cannot imagine why they thought this would be a good idea, but I’m guessing it has something to do with their complete lack of understanding when it comes to me and what I might consider a “fun surprise.” Admittedly, if I’d sucked it up and discussed my unemployment with them weeks ago, I wouldn’t be in this position. Hindsight, twenty-twenty, blah blah blah.

  My parents ask me to meet them at the Tabard Inn in Dupont Circle, a request I cannot decline because, well, they’re my parents and they drove all the way to DC and I am a big, fat, lying liar. I throw on a gray wool sweater and a pair of black pants and hustle down Eighteenth Street toward N Street. I scurry up the front steps to the Tabard Inn, a small, independent hotel sandwiched between a series of row houses on a narrow, tree-lined street. A tall man in a suit holds open the glass-pane door to the inn, and I inch my way through the lobby. The hotel’s restaurant is tucked in the back of the hotel, and that is where my parents plan on meeting me.

  I scan the restaurant for my parents, but they haven’t arrived, so I park myself next to the broad stone fireplace in the lobby. The fireplace roars with orange and yellow flames, and I
secretly wish they would leap from their stone confines and consume me, so that my parents will not find me here. I clench my fists, jamming my fingernails into the squishy pocket of flesh along the bottom of my palms, squeezing tighter and tighter with the hope that I won’t feel anything because this is all a dream. My parents aren’t actually in Washington. This is not really happening.

  But my palms sting and itch, and with each breath I fill my lungs with the smells of burning wood and baking bread. And when none of the patrons around me morphs into a goblin of the night, I know for certain this is all very real indeed.

  My breath shortens, and I suddenly feel as if the walls of this room are closing in on me and there is no air in the entire building. What am I supposed to tell my parents? That I quit my job? That I told the head of HR to shove my statement up her ass? That I’ve spent the past few months hosting an underground supper club out of my landlord’s kitchen and almost burned down his house two weekends ago? Yes, I’m sure all of that will go over well. Forging my own path in the face of their disapproval has never been my strong suit, and instead of feeling strong and sure of myself, I now feel weaker than ever.

  My parents walk into the lobby and spot me standing by the fireplace, their faces painted with confusion and worry. As my mom draws close, she reaches out and folds her arms around me, pressing my face into her chunky wool cardigan as her fluffy bob tickles my forehead.

  “Oh, Hannah,” she says. And then, “What the hell is going on?”

  And so it begins.

  “Maybe we should sit down before we talk about this,” I say.

  “Yes,” my dad says, raising his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “That sounds like a good idea.”

  We settle into our table, and right away a few former colleagues recognize my parents and stop by our table to say hello. The Professors Sugarman offer artificially light and cheery responses, as if nothing—nothing at all!—could possibly be wrong. The last thing they want is for other people to witness their daughter’s complete meltdown.