Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  “Americans consumed over seven hundred million gallons of wine last year,” Izzy told the room. “That’s, like, the equivalent of almost four billion bottles. And yet wine is the one beverage, the one beverage out there, that requires a special tool to open. A special tool that only one out of every three kitchens has. I say, ‘Corkscrew that!’ Wine isn’t supposed to be about points and scores. And I don’t really think it should be about collecting and aging. Nine out of every ten bottles are drunk within six days of purchase. I can tell you you’ll enjoy that Silver Oak you’ve been saving a lot more in your glass tomorrow night than you will keeping it buried away in your cellar for millennia. Wine’s not a big mystery. It’s a journey. You’ve begun a journey tonight. It began here. But tonight is not where it ends.”

  While we applauded, the houselights returned. Izzy stepped down from the dais to meet the growing multitude accumulating to confer with her. The chef followed behind. I stood on the periphery, back along the bank of windows. When the room had emptied out, Izzy came over to me. “I hope that wasn’t too boring,” she said.

  “No,” I replied. “Not at all. In fact, I thought it was quite fascinating.”

  Chef Dominique appeared with his and Izzy’s coats. He handed me hers, and I helped her into it. “Well, Peter Hapworth. You must be hungry. Why don’t you join us?”

  “Really?” I looked at Izzy. “I mean, you know, if it’s all right. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. She leaned toward my ear. “We can get a drink later, too.”

  “So, we go, then,” Chef said.

  “Wollensky’s?” she asked.

  I couldn’t tell if Izzy had directed the question to me or to Chef Dominique, but I replied anyway. “Sounds good to me.”

  We trudged in the cold along Wacker, across the bridge, to Smith & Wollensky, which sat in Marina City and overlooked the river. I followed Izzy down the stairs to the grill below the expensive steakhouse, and revolved inside.

  The place was packed. People with domestic beer bottles and mixed drinks were double-parked at the bar, watching the White Sox game from one or both of the screens. They talked, laughed, ordered more cocktails from the bartenders who never seemed to stop moving, and occasionally cheered on the baseball players. All the tables thrummed with conversations and the clinking of silver and glassware. I watched a fraternity of similarly sized and shaped servers, smiling tightly, emerge from the kitchen with a slam and a creak of the swinging door. They ported to the martini-sodden an endless parade of charred steaks and tall burgers beside heaps of fries and salads and plates of mashed potatoes and creamed spinach. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten in a restaurant that wasn’t a campus food stand.

  A manager quickly came over and greeted us. “Miss Conway, Chef, step up, step up. Right this way. Sorry to keep you waiting. We just finished setting your favorite table.”

  As much as I tried to pretend this was just a typical Friday night, it was still surreal. I was out, on a chaperoned date of sorts, with a celebrity. First dates were strange enough. The goal always was to pretend like the sudden juxtaposition of two strangers was the most ordinary, comfortable pairing in the world. But when your first date was with someone who was on television, and when there was another man at the table alongside you to oversee the proceedings and make sure you weren’t a psycho stalker, there was little mistaking the situation for an everyday occurrence. Still, I enjoyed being here with Izzy and Chef Dominique. Somehow we made an effortless trio—then, anyway.

  Izzy scanned her menu and selected a burger. “Rare,” she said, after the waiter inquired how she wanted it cooked. When it was my turn, I asked for the same. I figured the unusually low degree of doneness and choice of Swiss cheese instead of my cafeteria customary American would win me culinary sophistication points with Izzy and also with the chef.

  “When did you first become interested in wine?” I asked. “It’s not exactly something you can major in at college.”

  “When I was six,” Izzy said.

  Chef Dominique laughed. “Tell him, tell him,” he said.

  “I grew up in Carbondale, Illinois,” Izzy began. “Three hundred and thirty three miles south of the city, population twenty-five thousand. And the people who raised me weren’t wine drinkers. They knew one beverage for all occasions: beer. Football games, summer barbeques, weddings, wakes, birthday parties, Saturday nights, Monday nights, Tuesday nights. Beer, beer, beer. Classy, right? But at parties, our neighbor Shirley refused to partake. Absolutely refused. She said ladies only drank wine. My dad—my foster dad—Ernie ran a liquor store, so he’d always have something for her. This wasn’t sophisticated wine, by any means. We’re probably talking Bartles & Jaymes.”

  “I think that’s how a lot of us first got to know alcohol,” I said. The chef squinted at me.

  “So, anyway, there was this one Super Bowl Sunday and Ernie had brought home these peach-flavored wine coolers. And I remember looking at the bottles and thinking this sounded like the most delicious drink I’d ever heard of. I snuck one out of the six-pack in the refrigerator, went off to my room, and had a sip. Well, as you can imagine, I didn’t find the peach pie I was expecting, but instead discovered something that tasted . . . pretty unpalatable. Still, though, I couldn’t get it out of my head that the label said ‘peach.’ Who’d drink this and taste that? And what was wrong with me that I couldn’t? I didn’t pick up wine again for quite a few years, but I guess you could say the curiosity always stuck with me.

  “I’ve worked in restaurants since I was sixteen. It’s, like, the only world that’s ever made sense to me. So, after I got waitressing down, I started attending staff trainings about wine. I memorized the lists and could recite all the descriptors better than anyone, but it took me forever to figure out how the other servers were getting all these peaches and apples and blueberries they said they were tasting. I was thinking very literally and just didn’t understand it at all. I was like, ‘Do they put peaches and bananas and blueberries in the wine?’”

  I smiled and nodded, miming my sympathy for the uninitiated, but was aware as I did that until a few hours ago, I might have asked the same question. I hadn’t even realized—before tonight—there’d been a gap in my comprehension, that wine was supposed to taste like anything other than, well, wine.

  “And then one day it just clicked,” she said.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  Rallying to rejoin the discussion, Chef Dominique recited, in ascending order, the awards he and Bistro Dominique had won. The list referenced professional organizations, publications, and associations (some of which were now defunct). I’d never heard of many of them, but nodded after each as though I had. The last culinary distinction had been conferred four years prior. I got the feeling he was trying to downplay the enological accolades that Izzy had brought more recently.

  As Izzy and the chef regaled each other and me with their stories, I periodically looked at those who sat around us. I sensed they were watching our table in return. I wondered how many of the patrons at the bar, waiters, and valet parkers huddled by the door had already seen the Vintage Attraction season premiere, which, Chef Dominique had reminded me as we walked, aired tonight. It might even have been played here before the baseball game tyrannized the screens. A woman peered in our direction, silently gasped, and threw her lips and cupped hands to her friend’s ear. Was she whispering, “Oh my god, that’s her! That’s the girl from TV!”? It certainly appeared so. Were these people who recognized Izzy also sizing me up, speculating about who I was, what connection I had to a famous sommelier and her accomplished chef, what had brought me to sit at their table like this? These were the very same concerns that, if I allowed myself to sober up, would have perplexed me, too.

  I was full after half a burger. I usually ate like an ascetic and subsisted on mo
nastery fare devoid of garnishes and seasoning, bowls of oatmeal or condensed soups, peanut butter sandwiches on dry whole wheat. My former student and occasional paramour Talia, a vegan, occasionally made me Trader Joe’s boxed organic mac and soy cheddar, which I’d become oddly fond of (both the product and the gesture). This sudden shift to brioche and ground beef and mayo and ketchup and lettuce and real cheese was an embarrassment of richness. On an adjunct instructor’s salary, it made sense to eat out as seldom as possible, but I wasn’t about to pass up the invitation tonight. When the check came, I didn’t want to seem like I couldn’t afford a share.

  I dug out my moldering billfold and reached a gold American Express, largely unfamiliar to me, despite its bearing my name. My parents had opened the account for me when I graduated from the University of Chicago. They hadn’t cancelled it and had been quietly paying the bills ever since. I only allowed myself to accrue charges in truly dire emergencies befitting a consummate bachelor of arts, like a foundering Craigslist Casual Encounter, or dining with a television celebrity. “We have the same card. It’s a sign,” Izzy said. She randomly followed with, “Do you speak Spanish?”

  “French,” I said. “I took French, through college, not that I have much to show for it now. I started in third grade. I had to choose between French and German, and my father thought French would be much handier in restaurants.”

  Chef Dominique seemed to find this very amusing, possibly even trenchant. “You can say that again,” he said.

  Izzy said, of the chef, “He’s from Alsace, which was, at one point, part of Germany. We’ve never actually been able to get him to tell us when he was born, but depending on the occupation”—she put her hand on his shoulder—“Chef, you could be German and serving even more sauerkraut at the bistro.”

  “Nous disons ‘choucroute,’ Sommelier. Choucroute. I’m no Sherman.”

  “We can Pinot Gris to disagree.”

  “That’s good,” I told Izzy. “Did you just come up with that?”

  A large woman, moving sideways and wearing what appeared to be a running suit underneath an unzipped fur coat, came over to the table. “Excuse me,” she said, “I hate to bother you while you’re having dinner, but you’re Isabelle Conway.”

  Izzy, gradually looking up from her unfinished burger, and Chef Dominique both nodded. The chef grinned proudly.

  “My name is Nancy Podolsky.” She and Izzy shook hands. To Chef Dominique she turned and said, “Nancy Podolsky,” and they touched palms. I thought it was funny that she kept repeating her full name. “Yes, honey,” she said to the ceiling. It was then I noticed she had a Bluetooth headset affixed to her ear. “I’ll make sure they have barbeque sauce, and horseradish sauce for the fries, which I shouldn’t be having anyway, and can you just wait a second? I’m standing, yes, I’m standing right in front of her.” She lowered her head, setting her sights back on Izzy, whose building exasperation subtly revealed itself only in the rigidity of her mouth. “Can you say something to your biggest fan?”

  “How, um . . .”

  Did this Nancy Podolsky woman really expect Izzy to put her diseased earpiece into—

  “Here, wait.” She slapped a button on the headset, and the device screeched. The noise startled several of those at the table adjacent, but Nancy Podolsky was, it seemed, steeled to the terrible sounds. “Okay, Byron, can you hear me? It’s on speaker. Yes, honey, please. I hear him. Can you hear her, honey? Okay, it’s okay.”

  Izzy tried to put in, “I think you have to—”

  “Just say something,” she barked at Izzy. Her bald haughtiness was surprising. Chef Dominique straightened his back.

  Izzy took her napkin from her lap and began to fold it into rectangles and then squares. “Hi there,” she said, in the theatrical voice that she used when speaking from the dais at the club tonight.

  Nancy Podolsky ripped the Bluetooth out of her ear. It started emitting a series of unrelentingly high-pitched error tones. “Disconnected,” she huffed.

  “Well, I’m sure—”

  “Okay, okay, how about this. How about a photo?” She drew her cell phone out of her coat pocket.

  Izzy rose and asked me to take the picture of them standing in a narrow space that had opened in front of the bar. Amid the mortifying stares of those both chary and intrigued dining around us, I agreed, feigning cheerfulness. “How do I—”

  “Just press the button that looks like a camera. And then hold down the round button in the middle when it looks good.”

  Chef Dominique sighed. I was the only one to turn in his direction. He took the cocktail straw he’d transferred to his water glass and blew air through it.

  “Are you her publicist?” Nancy Podolsky then asked me.

  As Izzy’s wine got warm and burger cold, I snapped the digital shutter a couple of arbitrary times and returned the phone. Nancy shook her head, as though displeased, after assessing my shots. “Not the best lighting, but I guess it will do.” It wasn’t my fault she was trying to use a shitty camera phone for a photo shoot in a basement restaurant.

  I suggested a retake, but Chef Dominique shook his head. “She wants a picture with Sommelier, she should pay for it.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” a waiter interjected, too quietly to be effective, before sidestepping away.

  Nancy Podolsky bleated, “I know, I know. How about an autograph?”

  “Sure, but I don’t have—” Izzy looked at Chef Dominique for assistance. The only thing he offered was thinly veiled scorn.

  “Here, in my purse. Here,” Nancy said.

  She produced a ballpoint pen, and Izzy grabbed one of the unused cocktail napkins on our table. The woman received the autograph Izzy handed her, as though a subpoena.

  “That’s great, honey, but, I don’t know, could you maybe write something funny? Something about wine. Ooh, I know. I know. How about ‘I’m drinking Champagne and you’re not’? That would be so terrific.”

  “Except she’s not drinking Champagne,” Chef Dominique growled.

  Izzy’s eyes begged him not to make this even more unpleasant than it had to be, but Chef Dominique, it was quite obvious, really wanted to tear into this woman for some reason. “I think you’ve wasted enough of her time,” Chef Dominique said then. “How about you just get the hell out of here?”

  Izzy appeared horrified. “Look, if you want me to—”

  The manager shouldered in, handling ameliorating take-away packages. With an affected flourish, Nancy Podolsky snatched the brown and white paper bags from him and stomped off.

  “The mediocracy drives me crazy,” Chef Dominique said to the manager, who smiled wanly and turned away. Mediocrity? The chef took a sip of water, and blotted his forehead with a corner of his napkin. After a moment, he excused himself to find the manager and speak to him.

  “Sorry about Chef,” Izzy said once we were alone. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Does that kind of thing happen a lot?” I gestured in the direction of the balled-up napkin, on top of which leaned the cocktail straw, as though a child had been recently sitting with us. The chef hadn’t even bothered to push in his chair before he left. “People coming to the table like that?”

  She shrugged and fastened a lock of hair behind her ear. “Dominique’s just drunk and being overly sensitive. He doesn’t usually mind if fans bother me, as long as they make an appropriately big deal out of him first. I just wish he’d think about my reputation before getting hysterical.”

  “You didn’t even get to finish your burger.”

  “You know what? I’ve had enough of Dominique for one night, if not one life. You want to get a drink somewhere else? Just the two of us?”

  “Yeah. Let’s.”

  Izzy and I said polite but fraught good nights to the chef in front of Marina City, and she hailed a taxi. It was only a dozen or so blocks to the bar
Izzy suggested, and we probably could have walked, yet I didn’t object. I was happy to follow along, enjoying the ride, literally and figuratively, wherever it took us.

  We chose an open table at Bijan’s by the window. Almost simultaneous to our ascent, a harried-looking Teutonic cocktail waitress presented us with menus. Izzy excused herself to the ladies’. Once she was out of the room, I illuminated my Timex with Indiglo and took an inconspicuous glance at my wrist under the table. Tempus fugit—it was already after one in the morning. I was surprised at this late hour I was still conscious. I’d subbed an eight o’clock for Berkal, my grad student officemate; taught my own classes; drank wine through the tasting and vodka at dinner; and hadn’t even once needed to mask a yawn behind a gulp of water or dissembling smile. But for most of the evening, I’d largely only needed to be responsible for a third of the conversational momentum. There was no falling asleep at the table now. Izzy and I, here, were officially on a date.

  Since deciding I needed to be on her television show in order to win her heart, I’d learned, via Google, about Izzy. I knew she was thirty-two. She had, intrepidly, moved from Southern Illinois to the city to take a job working the fine-dining floor at Bistro Dominique, a position that came with a starting salary four or five times what I picked up at UIC, even after all these semesters of parsing flawed introductory clauses and indicting generalities. Within a few years she’d seen her picture on the covers of Wine Spectator and Cellar Temperature, been profiled in a Times feature on rising young enological talent across the country, and received a James Beard Foundation Outstanding Wine Service award years ahead of many of her significantly older and more experienced colleagues on the shortlist. All of this had brought Isabelle Conway unparalleled acclaim, and made her the object of food and drink bloggers’ relentless, gossipy scrutiny. She’d want to know things about me, too. What would I share about myself?

  There really wasn’t a lot to tell. These days, I mostly taught my English composition classes, languished in my office, and drove home in the Mustang I’d had since undergrad with a seemingly bottomless pile of papers to grade. I’d Foreman Grill some chicken I’d eat alongside microwaved frozen vegetables. A glass of warm Côtes du Rhône in hand, I’d watch the evening’s Vintage Attraction rerun, recasting the day’s failures with more fruitful outcomes, not in a classroom with my indifferent students but at a dinner table, with someone else, someone who’d get me, who’d inspire me—Sommelier Isabelle Conway.