Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  Following the waitress’s departure with our cocktail orders, Izzy asked, “So, what exactly is a conceptualist?”

  It took me a bemused second to recall that I had included “conceptualist” among my other occupations when I signed my first e-mail to her this afternoon. The eventual need to define the term for a date wasn’t a surprise. My Nerve.com girls, after a couple of dirty martinis and the opening statements, when things began to slow, frequently probed for clarity the vague occupation I’d listed on my profile. I’d produce my Rhodia, the pumpkin-colored pad in which I jotted my ideas, and share my favorite entries: I Have a Beef with You: civil procedure and steakhouse. For the Hitchcock fan who has a predilection for overly salty meats: Pork by Porkwest, where even the menu comes wrapped in bacon. Rawwwwr: hipster vegan, chic raw foods, screaming Howard Dean mascot. Sushi bar-meets-strip club: Pandora’s Bento Box. Nobody in recent romantic memory had received this with anything to suggest we might be kindred spirits. “So,” one of the sharper ones once asked, “‘if you have no intention of starting the business, what’s the point? What do you hope to achieve?” I had no answer.

  This time I left the notebook in my messenger bag. “Picture a tiny space,” I told Izzy. “Like a New York bar, something you’d find in the East Village, but really concealed, hidden to keep the tourists away. Maybe like only ten tables, mostly for two people, and a bar, but with only four or five seats. And all the tables have little tea-light candles, nothing bright anywhere, everything soft . . .”

  “Romantic,” she finished. “That sounds like a perfect place for wine.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I actually came up with this one tonight, during the tasting. When you talked about the Zinfandel and the lava cake.”

  “Dimly lit, people sitting close to each other,” she prompted. “What kind of food?”

  “It’s a dessert place. Little pastries, petit fours, macarons, and hazelnut tarts.”

  “And port,” she added. “Do you have a name for it?”

  I beamed. “That’s pretty much how I always start.” Remembering the instant it came to me, a moment in which I was gazing up at Izzy’s electric performance, swirling my glass of Zinfandel offhandedly, almost finally, nearly, maneuvering with precision, brought a similar pulse. Her rapt eyes and mouth further swelled my heart. The captivated attention she paid made me feel as though she were one of the audience and I the one mesmerizing the room. “The naming is the best part,” I was able to tell her in a steady voice.

  “So, what is it called? The suspense is killing me.”

  “Monogamousse.”

  Delight and adrenaline coursed through my roughened romantic pipes, which had, until tonight, lain dry for months. Izzy began to smile, really smile, not just widening her mouth out of courtesy. Whereas my Internet dates might have privately dismissed me as being entirely frivolous, a half-wit, I had finally found someone who’d receive a performance like this and might just think I was a genius. And an e-mail had brought us together.

  “Not bad,” she said. “So many restaurants today seem to have everything but a brilliant concept behind them.”

  It was all I could do not to get up and throw my arms around her. I wanted to kiss her.

  “Wine could definitely work there.”

  “How?”

  “Dessert wine is very sexy,” she said. “I could see a delicious tawny port pairing quite nicely with that beautiful hazelnut tart. A couple of small glasses of port—and you’d only need to serve a little bit, in keeping with the diminutive charm of things—and tarts? It would be love at first bite.”

  “That’s not a bad slogan,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  “You’re really good at this,” I said, “and you’ve gotten me thinking. Not just about Monogamousse.” I pushed my drink aside, clearing a narrow space between us, and laid my hand on top of hers. I pressed with the assurance that only this much booze could instill. She looked down at what I was doing, but didn’t comment, as though I’d made no more serious of an overture than to reach for a packet of Splenda. Then she flipped her palm to touch mine. With our fingers interlaced, I stared seriously into her eyes. “How come there’s never a pen around when you find yourself sitting across the table from a wellspring of inspiration?”

  She looked away. “I’ve always wanted to be somebody’s muse,” she said.

  I paid the check. Outside at the intersection, we waited for the light to change so we could cross the street and hail a southbound taxi. It was freezing out here. I moved my toes and heels and clenched my calves to keep warm. Bouncing around amplified my buzz. We held hands now. When we became still for a moment, I leaned forward to kiss her. She pulled away.

  “Wait,” she said.

  The wind suddenly turned much colder.

  “You can’t kiss me here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look.” She turned around, to the pornographically illuminated White Hen Pantry behind us. “It’s a convenience store. That’s not very romantic. That’s not the kind of place where you want to say your first kiss happened. Right?”

  Vodka sloshed around in my stomach, climbed up my veins, and spilled into my head. I felt myself leaning and pitched forward faster than my eyes could refocus. For a moment I couldn’t see anything, only smell her coat. I aligned my hips and stood straight once again. The light for westbound traffic on Erie had changed to green, and we crossed the street.

  “What about here?” I asked. We stood before a brick building with an out-of-business restaurant on its ground floor. I moved in once more.

  She raised a hand to my chest. This was now a bit acted out by a comedy duo. “Look at the address.”

  We raised our heads in unison. 666 North State.

  “You can’t kiss me in front of six-six-six,” she said. “That definitely doesn’t bode well.”

  “I’m out of ideas,” I said. I looked up the street for taxis. A few came, but they had darkened roof lights and didn’t slow down. My teeth began to chatter from standing still, and I jammed my hands into my jeans pockets.

  “You remind me of Woody Allen. Has anyone ever told you that before?”

  I laughed. “I mostly get Jeff Goldblum, because of the hair. I prefer to think of myself as a young Dustin Hoffman, with glasses. Or Yale, Woody’s best friend in Manhattan, though I guess—”

  She tilted her head, as though appraising me. “I love Annie Hall,” she said. “It’s, like, the most romantic movie.”

  “I have it at my apartment,” I said. “On DVD. If—”

  “If?”

  “If you wanted to, you know, come over and see it.”

  “Okay, tell you what,” she said. “If we get in the cab and NPR is on, we’ll go to your place.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you can kiss me.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  I flagged down a dusty white for-hire taxi with a faded purple logo on its rear door. It lurched over to the curb so quickly that I thought it might end up plowing us down. Izzy slid in, and I followed. Idling there, we listened to the radio. Wordless African music, rhythmic with tribal-sounding drums, played. She frowned an apology.

  I realized something. “Wait a minute,” I said. “This is NPR. They have music at night. It’s World Beat.”

  “Nice try,” she said.

  “It is NPR. I swear.” I leaned forward to address the driver through the opening in the bulletproof partition. “Is this NPR?” I asked.

  “NPR?”

  “Ninety-one point five. WBEZ? The radio station?”

  “Ninety-one point five, yes, yes,” the driver said with a Caribbean lilt that complemented the instrumental.

  I grinned. “I told you so.”

  I slurred my cross streets in Humboldt Park to the driver. Izzy held up her hands for a moment in capitulati
on before opening her arms to receive me.

  And then I kissed her.

  We reached a corner market that sold cheap brewed Cafe Bustelo in miniature foam cups and the three-story brick building to which it was Siametically attached. I’d been subletting a one-bedroom on the ground floor from an associate professor on a research sabbatical. It was my first residence since my parents’ with central air, cable (illegal basic), and an in-sink disposal. I opened the door and let us inside. I began leading a brief walk around the open areas of the apartment. Izzy paused in front of the kitchen counter piled with books. At the coffee table in the living room flooded with DVDs, she picked up Annie Hall and smiled. We passed my cluttered desk in the back alcove between the bedroom and bathroom. “I have to show you my cellar,” I said. I directed Izzy again to the kitchen, where we’d begun, and opened a cabinet high above the range. I couldn’t see into it, but knew for what I reached. I took out the two dusty bottles of French wine Talia had left behind at the beginning of the summer.

  “Are these any good?” I asked.

  She ran her fingers over one label. The clearing didn’t render the text any more comprehensible than it was before. “Oh, sure,” she said, “if you like Two Buck Chuck.”

  “You know, after tonight, I think I’m ready to move on to . . . to bigger and better reds,” I said.

  “I think you are, too,” she said. “So, how about the rest of the tour?”

  “I think you may have seen everything.”

  “Not quite everything.”

  We fell into my bed and were greeted by a fusillade of high-, medium-, and low-pitched squeaks and screeches. Izzy cracked up. I, susceptible to late-hour giddiness, emitted several gleeful measures of chromatic, staccato eighth notes.

  In the morning, we went to brunch at a spot in Bucktown I knew was trendy. We had to stand on a long queue and order at the counter. Izzy wanted muesli and fruit. The occasion seemed to merit a splurge, so I chose the peanut butter and banana pancakes. I paid for everything and we found a small table by the wall. Izzy sat with her back to the room. I picked up our flatware and napkins from a service bar and brought over mugs of coffee. I went back up for a small cup of each dairy and nondairy complement they offered, since I didn’t know what she liked. It turned out she took Splenda and nonfat milk, just as I did.

  “You know, I don’t remember the last time I . . . went out with someone who wasn’t in the restaurant business,” she said while we waited for our food.

  I had consciously avoided asking about her romantic life last night. My Google research hadn’t unearthed anyone to whom she was linked. What would I have done if she hadn’t been single? “Oh yeah?” I asked.

  “My last boyfriend was a sommelier at the bistro. Pacer Rosengrant.”

  “Is it awkward working with . . . an ex?”

  “Actually,” she said, “he’s not—I mean, he’s not at the restaurant anymore. I’ve heard he went to Las Vegas to work with this master the Palazzo owns who he convinced to mentor him.” She spoke as though informing herself for the first time, sounding a new idea out loud. “I haven’t really had time for dating since.”

  “You haven’t missed much.”

  “We’re supposed to ask each other more questions, right? Like about brothers and sisters and things?”

  “It’s a popular approach. Okay, so how many siblings do you have?”

  “None,” she said. “My mother was sometimes a waitress but mostly a drunk and a drug addict and was always getting arrested. Dealing, prostitution. The DCFS took me when I was, like, one.”

  “She never got cleaned up?”

  “She died of an overdose.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “The truth is, I don’t really remember her at all. It’s weird talking about this with someone who knows me from TV. That you were an abandoned kid from a tiny town and tossed from foster home to foster home isn’t really what your big-city fans want to hear about at their window tables. Not really the kind of thing that gets them in the mood to spend two hundred dollars on a bottle of wine.”

  “Weird, as in weird-talking-about-this-bad?”

  “Weird-kind-of-nice, actually.”

  It was nice that she felt she could confide in me, but also somewhat bewildering that she’d share this much, this soon. I’d had dates who’d armored themselves in candor, in order to remain at a safe distance. But if Izzy didn’t genuinely like me, if I was nothing more than a fan with whom she’d gotten a little carried away, what was she still doing with me? She could have easily gotten out of my bed and called a taxi instead of sleeping over, or before I drove us to Milk & Honey. I got the sense that there was another meaning to all of this, something yet to be assessed in magazine advice columns. By staying with me, by revealing the unpleasant parts of her past, Izzy was doing quite the opposite of trying to pull away. She was gauging my capacity to love her.

  “I have an older sister,” I said. “She’s a criminal lawyer, in New York. Just like my mom.”

  “And your father? A professor?”

  “He’s a Freudian psychologist. Semi-retired. Which is kind of Freudian, I guess.”

  “Are you close?”

  “Not really,” I said. “They come to Chicago to visit once a year and stay in a hotel. We speak on the phone occasionally. My mother prefers e-mail. I kind of have always thought of myself as an orphan with parents. I think they never really forgave me for leaving New York and not coming back. Or for getting an MFA in fiction.” I coughed. “I have another question for you.”

  “Okay, go.”

  “What’s it like being on TV?”

  She slowly shook her head. “I don’t know whether all of this has helped my wine career, or just turned grocery shopping without a baseball hat into a major ordeal.”

  “Chef Dominique mentioned that it was his idea to start Vintage Attraction.”

  “He’s always looking for ways to publicize the bistro when covers are down. We began as kind of this low-budget informercial. I expected it would run at two a.m. a few times, nobody would see it, and that would be that. Then people started writing, calling, e-mailing, demanding more . . . Before long, we had a show for real, sponsors, advertisers, and at the restaurant, reservations filling weeks and weeks on the books. He was a television producer, and I became Chicago’s sommelier Isabelle Conway.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “The wine world is a freak show,” Izzy told me then. “I think that has a lot to do with the draw. Customers think sommeliers’ lives are so glamorous, but the truth is, we’re utterly contemptible. Standing behind the accolades and expensive vintages is a lot of unhappiness. Affairs, failed marriages, failed Court exams, abortions, lawsuits, debts, fraud charges, corked bottles . . .”

  “A few semesters ago, an adjunct in my department got fired for charging booze to the reading series account at Liquor Mart. The alias he used was Kazuo Ishiguro.”

  Her face lit up. “Remains of the Day is my favorite novel. I mean, I couldn’t explain all the metaphors, but I liked how the words stuck with you.”

  “They’re pretty much the only thing that’s ever stuck with me.”

  “I’m kind of jealous of your students,” she said. “I used to dream about going to college. I took a few classes back when I was waiting tables at the Cattle Company, but it got to be too much.”

  “I can teach you everything you need to know about literature,” I said.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “No, not really.”

  She laughed and then took a charming tone of put-on disappointment. “And to think, I was going to offer you wine lessons in trade.”

  “I doubt I could learn everything there is to know about wine.”

  “I think I could show you enough to be dangerous.”

  A waitress called our num
ber. I tottered back from the counter with our food on a perilously packed tray.

  “Hey, I have another question,” Izzy said, before we began eating.

  “Okay.”

  “How come you’ve never tried to pitch a restaurant for real?”

  When we were finished, I drove her home. She directed me to her building, and I parked the Mustang in an alley behind it. We said our good-byes. Then I leaned in to kiss her. Off and on since we’d gotten up this morning, I’d feared that what I thought had begun last night and was still going on between us had been entirely of my own drunken invention. With our lips colliding—for the first time in sober daylight—something nebulous calcified. This kiss made the concept of us as a couple real somehow.

  The sunlit sky faded quickly after I returned to the sublet. I scribbled some perfunctory comments on flimsy essay pages I’d neglected while Izzy and I were at brunch. By the time I finished, the abbreviated day had leapt into deep evening. An important hour was near. I microwaved a frozen plastic bowl purporting to contain lamb vindaloo and sat down in front of the television. From the moment Vintage Attraction came on, I was mesmerized by the likeness of the girl who, that morning, had lain in my bed. I was now seeing the program through different eyes, eyes theretofore not mine. I witnessed Izzy holding court on her set as the well-regarded famous host of the show, just as I always had, but now she also was someone real, someone whose phone number lay on my kitchen counter. At an amateurishly shot and edited commercial for a sketchy liquor store downtown on Chicago Avenue, I got the paper and held her handwriting close to my eyes. She’d been here. She’d written it. And she had my phone number, too.