Service Included

by Phoebe Damrosch

  “Right,” I answered, pausing, and trying not to laugh. But everyone else at the table cracked up, and I resumed my explanation, knowing that he knew that I knew and that he knew that I knew that he knew.

  Relaxed, confident, and relieved to be nearing the end of Bruni’s meal, I began to make the arrangements for a final surprise course. The “Michael Jackson” chocolate presentation was named after the single white glove one originally wore to pick up individual chocolates. There were six rows in total, two rows of milk, dark, and white, from which the guests were invited to select as many as they wished. Billy, one of our most knowledgeable food runners, stood across the table from Mr. Bruni with the tray, as we had discussed, so he could make eye contact and have the best view. Billy went through all thirty chocolates, explaining some of the more esoteric flavors such as verjus (unfermented grape juice), fenugreek, Chimay beer, and smoked chocolate ganache. At the end of the presentation, the guests all looked a little hesitant and overwhelmed, and I thought I might step in to offer a little guidance. After all, we had just spent quite a few hours together, everything seemed to be going along just swimmingly, why not offer a little friendly advice?

  “The question is, really,” I began, “do you want something experimental or something a little more down-home country?”

  As soon as the words left my lips, time seemed to slow like a decelerating LP. Down-home country? I had never uttered the phrase in my life. Billy, still bent over the table’s edge with his gloved hand hovering over the large silver tray, turned his head slowly toward me with a look of both horror and amusement.

  “What exactly would constitute a ‘down-home country’ chocolate, Phoebe?” Billy asked, the corners of his lips holding back his generous and familiar grin.

  I blathered for a moment about “comforting” flavors such as hazelnut, peanut butter, and coffee, and moved as quickly as I could away from the table. From that moment on, I wished on every eyelash, star, and graveyard that I would not live to see that phrase in print, even if it meant hurling myself from the highest silo or hayloft I could find.

  I DIDN’T TELL anyone about the down-home incident—not even André. He had seen the whole exchange, but was too far away to hear. André had it easy these days; his was the one department that seemed to be off the hook. Mr. Bruni himself wasn’t all that interested in discussing wine, so he either brought someone else who ordered or he left the selection to the sommeliers. Of course, the sommeliers needed to be on time and on point with their pairings, but the place was teeming with managers eager to lend a hand. The one person who was not off the hook was André.

  “Don’t leave, okay?” I said to him.

  “Chef, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

  “Because the next course is coming up and I am going to have to get the markings down, plus more bread and the glasses, and pour the wine, and I already see them plating—”

  “Would you calm down?”

  If there was one thing I admired about André, it was his ability to keep a cool head in a time of crisis. When things became heated, André was the one who ignored the commotion and made sure things got back on track. He picked up the food when the chef started hollering; he marked the table when the food was in the breezeway and the backserver was nowhere to be found; he went and got the two bottles a guest was choosing between so that by the time the order was eventually placed, both wines were sitting on the captain’s station. If there was one person I could trust to know when I needed help and when I had it under control, it was André.

  He and I had been spending more and more time together. We met after work, and when we had days off together, we fled to Brooklyn, where we were almost sure not to run into anyone.

  “So what’s the story with you and Leigh?” I asked on one of these days. We were eating brunch in Williamsburg at one of the many retro-chic diners that charge eight dollars for a side of polenta. “Shit,” a friend exclaimed one night when looking at a similar menu. “Them’s some pricey-ass grits!”

  “What do you mean ‘what’s the story’?” I was beginning to notice that André often answered a question only after repeating it at least once. Maybe it was like an anxious speller at a bee trying to buy time by asking for the word to be repeated. Then asking for its definition. Then asking for its derivation.

  “What are you doing with me when you’re living with someone else?”

  “It’s over,” he answered with a slight shrug and a shake of his head.

  “Does she know that?”

  “What do you mean ‘does she know that’? I told her it was over before we even moved to New York.”

  “So why did you move together?”

  This time he didn’t even repeat the question, he just shrugged again. When I pressed, he told me that she hadn’t wanted to move to New York at all. So far, her opinion of the city as cold and difficult had been confirmed. It didn’t help that they had few friends here. And, unlike André, she had never been a big nightlife person, so they had been spending more and more time apart. It was clear that André didn’t want to go further into it, and I let it go. This short conversation put my conscience at ease—not because I believed that it was really over, but because I now had an excuse. I could honestly look wideeyed at a potential accuser and claim innocence.

  “It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” I bragged to some friends from the old café job. “I’ll give it to the end of the summer.” We were lounging in hammocks and garden chairs behind the Park Slope brownstone where one of them lived. The hostess was half Greek and half German, so there was yogurt, walnuts, and honey as well as sausages and dark, heavy breads. The last time I visited this particular garden, the summery ankle-length dress that I had borrowed from a friend (a dramatic number featuring alternating panels of solid primary colors and floating hot-air balloons) got a little too cozy with a candle by my feet and went up in flames. I only noticed when my friend Sylvia began waving her arms and swearing in Spanish before dousing me with sangria. The high school sweetheart, who still lived downstairs from me at this point, heroically attempted to come to my rescue, but became tangled in his hammock and ended up rolling himself up in it “like a burrito,” Sylvia described later. My life was spared by a chef who, amid the hysteria, calmly wrung the flames out like a dishtowel.

  Alas, no one could rescue me from my current predicament with André. The joke was on me. At first it was funny that he had programmed my name as “Patrick” in his phone. Who cared what he told Leigh the first night he didn’t go home? I didn’t even mind the thought that he might still be in love with her. And then, suddenly, I did.

  Here I was, falling in love with a man who, for all I knew, had a penchant for infidelity. I took psychology freshman year in college; I had read Freud and Jung and Madame Bovary and half of the books in the self-help and relationship sections. I knew that it wasn’t coincidence that my parents had recently performed a drama with similar acts. With horror, I considered I was the “other woman” in this modern remake. What would Freud have to say about that? Maybe I wanted to know just how easy it was to cheat. Maybe I wanted to prove that commitment and monogamy weren’t possible, that my parents hadn’t lied when they said “till death do us part.” Or maybe I just liked to win.

  “I think you should stop seeing me and try to make it work with Leigh,” I told André in the first of what would be many hand-wringing sessions. We had met after work at a nearby pub we recently discovered no one else frequented.

  “Whatever.” He took a swig of his beer and pretended to watch the game.

  “No, I’m serious. I think we should stop seeing each other and you should really try to fix things. Seven years! That’s something worth salvaging.”

  He fixed his gaze on the television screen as I spoke, but then turned to face me. “Listen, cut the bullshit. If you want us to stop seeing each other, that’s fine. But Leigh and I are not getting back together.”

  I would come to this junction again and again ove
r the next few months. Either I refused to see André until he and Leigh had officially split and I could be sure that it was really over or I continued to see him and hoped he would straighten it out before I died of guilt poisoning.

  “You just have to trust me,” he said.

  At that point, the conversation ended abruptly. One of the sous chefs and two cooks had just walked in. While they settled into three stools and leaned around one another to see what was on tap, I took the opportunity to slip out the side door. There was Leigh to think about, but more important, there was the fact that, as a manager, André was technically not supposed to date one of the staff. The longer we could keep this under wraps, the better.

  Any reluctance I had was soon wooed and won over and we found ways to amuse ourselves in corners of the city where we would go unseen—dusty corners that Giuliani forgot to clean, corner banquettes behind pillars and plants. Perhaps the epitome of this grand posture of discretion was the night we checked into the Plaza. Rumor had it that the famous hotel was closing, ostensibly for renovation. I feared that meant closing and reopening without soul or charm. There was a simple reason for my attachment to this particular hotel: it was the setting for the children’s book Eloise. As a kid, I wore household objects as hats, just like Eloise. I made a great production out of yawning. I was also equally indulged—not by bell captains and valets (for Lord’s sake) but by my New York–born mother and aunts. I spent hours tracing the dotted red lines that charted Eloise’s scamperings throughout the hotel in which she lived with her English nanny, her sneaker-wearing turtle, Skipperdee, and her dog, Weenie. After each reading, I swore to my mother that I simply had to move there as soon as possible.

  André, who had not grown up fantasizing about ordering a single strawberry leaf and two raisins from room service, only feigned remorse when I delivered the news. He started to grasp the depth of my grief, however, when I announced that I had booked us a room on his next day off.

  The hotel was within walking distance of André’s apartment and a subway ride from mine, so there was no real need to pack. We met near work to buy a little wine and walk over together. In keeping with his usual good-natured nonchalance, André arrived in sneakers and announced that there was only one thing he needed to accomplish that day.

  “Chef, I’m going to need to get me a ham.”

  “A ham….”

  “And some mustard.”

  Absurd as this sounded, I remembered that André had made mention of ham a few days before. We were standing in the dining room, our gazes on the tables, when he described the craving. He was unusually impassioned and proceeded, throughout the shift, to disseminate the importance of glazes and nations of origin. Later in the evening, when I stopped at the bar to pick up some drinks, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one to whom André confessed his longings.

  “What’s with André and the ham?” the bartender had asked. I just shook my head.

  In restaurants, because of the many distractions, conversations often last an entire shift. A question asked when grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge is answered after clearing a table, and then commented on an hour later when inputting something in the computer. That night, ham had been one such topic.

  We walked up to Citarella, the gourmet food shop at Broadway and Seventy-fifth, and grabbed a nice, rosy round of pork the size of a volleyball and a few jars of mustard: Dijon to be safe, stone-ground for texture, and tarragon for variety. Then we bought a few bottles of wine, not knowing our mood.

  It was clear why the Plaza decided to renovate. Paint chipped from the walls, carpets frayed at the edges, and worn knobs and buttons showed their age. André looked around, unimpressed. This was far from the travel magazine spread he had imagined. To me, it was like an aging movie star, still elegant, but only a reminder of what it had once been. The gentleman at the front desk asked whether we needed help with our bags. I looked over at André, who was standing in the marble lobby beside an enormous bouquet of white lilies, holding a grocery bag. He jutted out his chin, as if to ask whether I needed something and I shook my head in return.

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  After we had found our room, nondescript and slightly stale, we put on two white robes and I told André to get comfortable. I took out my yellowed and stained copy of Eloise, the same one I packed when I moved to New York for college and in every move since, and began to read. André laughed at all the right places and when we were done, I think he had more appreciation for our surroundings. We opened a bottle of Pinot Gris, popped the mustard, and unwrapped the ham. We hadn’t thought to bring a knife, so I called room service, who brought a dull butter knife. The blade on André’s wine key sufficed for a while, but in the end we just tore it with our fingers.

  “You have to eat ham or you’ll dry up,” I told André, revising one of my favorite lines from the book to fit the occasion.

  “Everyone knows that,” he answered.

  ANDRE TOLD ME to have patience, and I didn’t have to wait long. He and Leigh had it out at the end of the summer. At the same time, the story leaked among the ladies of Per Se. Soon, when I walked into the women’s locker room, conversations stopped. I was obviously not welcome to eat dinner in the little nook where a posse of women runners and backservers often sat. If my coworkers had been any less professional, none of the guests in my station would ever have gotten their food and my backservers would have left me to fend for myself. But they performed their jobs as perfectly as they always had. The only change was that I was invisible. I couldn’t blame them. It wasn’t as if I were being persecuted for something noble or courageous.

  Leigh left the restaurant toward the end of the summer. It wasn’t going to work for all three of us to be there. She continued to live with André, presumably looking for her own place. The situation irked me more than I let on, but André and I agreed not to talk about it. I had made my point about needing to clean up whatever mess we had created in his life. He made his point about my having to trust him and the fact that he was taking care of it. In some ways, it was a relief that she knew. No more dive bars or luxury hotels for us; we were ready to paint the town.

  But first we had to get André a MetroCard. Having spent most of his first five months setting up the wine cellar, André’s stomping grounds had about a ten-block radius. He walked to work in the morning, went to the gym in the basement of the building, and walked home from work late. From what I gathered, he even spent a majority of his days off at work. Every so often he had a beer and a burger at a pub or late-night restaurant, but he took cabs to these.

  I, on the other hand, had lived in New York for eight years and was no stranger to the subway, but had always felt a little out of the loop. Fortunately, I could take comfort in my suspicion that most people who live in New York feel a little out of one loop or another. What passes for fashion in the East Village looks like a Halloween costume on the Upper East Side. When I lived in Williamsburg, the hipster uniform was something like a floral thrift-store dress dating anywhere from the 1940s to the 1970s worn over jeans or with vintage heels, or the 1980s look: thick belt, off-the-shoulder shirt, leg warmers, and Converse sneakers. But once the subway doors closed and whisked the hipster under the river, she would be bait for ridicule. Residents of multimillion-dollar lofts in SoHo might think her grungy. The reluctantly retired executive Upper East Side mother, looking out the window of her navy blue Suburban, might wonder where one even finds an outfit like that. The professor and the therapist on the Upper West Side might consider, respectively, the amount of time wasted putting the look together and what she was trying to say with it. The fact that she would even find herself in the Financial District seems unlikely, but if so, she would be a splash of color in a sea of suits. In Harlem, she would be accused of driving up the rents; and in Chelsea, the land of the big man with a little dog, she would go completely unseen. This, my friends, is why everyone in New York wears black. Think of it as a sliding-scale uniform, wit
h black Old Navy T-shirts on one end and black Prada boots on the other.

  I had been paralyzed by all of this for eight years, but things were about to change. I now had at my side the well-dressed and unfazeable André; I had extra cash for the first time in a while; and I knew how to use a fish knife if put on the spot. After years of reading about New York while living in New York, I was ready to plunge.

  On work nights, André and I were hindered by time. There were only a few restaurants still serving after I changed my last tablecloth. When we were off, the city, which had never been my friend, now put its bejeweled arm over my shoulder and smiled conspiringly. I usually picked the restaurants because I subscribed to just about every food publication out there and had a long list of places to try. But André was soon compiling his own list. For the first year at Per Se, there was almost always a chef, restaurant owner, or maître d’ from another restaurant in our dining room. Better yet, line cooks and waiters. By the end of these services, we had promised to stop in on our next day off.

  Often on our way to dinner, we popped in to say hello to one of these new acquaintances, an old coworker of mine, or a new contact of André’s. Sometimes we got out after one drink, but more often than not, a little something would come from the kitchen. It was only polite to protest, and only polite to clean the plate. When a chef sends something from the kitchen, it is often one of the best things on the menu or something new that he’s working on. After paying the check, or leaving an extravagant tip when there was no check, we set out again in the direction of dinner. But wasn’t there a new place right near here that we had heard about? We stopped there and perhaps ordered an appetizer or two. By the time we got to our final destination, we were far from hungry, but still curious. On nights like these, we usually chose to sit at the bar, where we felt comfortable ordering only a few dishes.