Bread and Butter

by Michelle Wildgen

  Thea hesitated. “Shouldn’t we stay? Make the rounds?”

  “I see we’re both here for the same reason,” Leo said. He shifted in his chair and took in the room. “But I got here a couple of hours ago and I can give you the general drift. Fiona’s too decorous to say that Donnie’s been working on a serious drinking problem and Barbara’s gotten really protective of the books. Do with that what you will. The barbecue place is going to expand its menu. They’re trying out regional variations—I think even some Kentucky mutton, if you can believe that—rather than learning to make a decent brisket in the first place. Berlucci’s is making money hand over fist despite the fact that they serve the blandest pizza crust and the soggiest pasta I’ve ever had. But they can barely fit the hordes in the door. Don’t hate me, but I kind of want to go just to see what the hell they’re doing there.”

  “Free booze.”

  “Must be. And that guy back there in the corner is doing some kind of Thai-French fusion thing, or planning to, but he hasn’t found financing, and personally I don’t think he will, because this town isn’t interested in Thai-French fusion.” Leo settled back in his chair. “Now you have what I have. I’m dying. And I owe you a meal. You coming?”

  They walked back in the direction of Winesap, the air suddenly chillier. She was warm from the bourbon, but that superheated feeling she always had after a shift at the restaurant had departed entirely. As Leo unlocked the back door she felt a flash of exhaustion and impatience. Why had she agreed? She could be on her way home by now, closer than ever to some disgraceful, salty midnight gorging instead of whatever genteel little pasta Leo was about to whip up. But, flipping on the lights, she followed Leo into the kitchen anyway because he seemed so relaxed all of a sudden, so informal and friendly, that she was curious to see what lay beneath his general veneer of crisp aloofness and the constant sweep of his gaze.

  “I’m going to cook,” he said over his shoulder. “You want to hang out?”

  “Sure,” Thea said. She hopped up on a prep table and watched Leo gather two sauté pans and a couple of pairs of tongs. It was cool in the restaurant now that the heat had automatically turned down; he still wore his leather jacket. He disappeared into the walk-in and returned with a partial baguette beneath one arm, a carton of eggs, and a block of white cheese clutched in one hand. “You wanna slice this?” he asked, proffering the baguette, and Thea jumped down and went to work while he returned to the walk-in. When he came back, humming under his breath, he had two jalapeños and a package of dried chorizo. “Don’t worry,” he said, turning on the flame beneath the sauté pans. “I’ll hardly use any of this. I’m not depleting your kitchen stocks.”

  “You’re using staff meal cheese anyway.” Thea shrugged. “It’s just food from the mouths of your workers, that’s all.”

  Leo chuckled. He swirled olive oil in one pan, took Thea’s sliced baguette, and set the slices into the oiled pan. He sliced the chorizo thinly, fingers properly protected from the blade, Thea noted, and laid the sausage in the dry pan to render. A moment later she heard the spitting sound of the pork fat, and her stomach growled audibly. Leo was now clutching a bowl between his arm and his rib cage and whisking eggs rather madly, glancing back and forth at his pans as he did. The eggs slopped onto the counter, but he didn’t seem to notice. Thea saw a pop of scarlet oil arc out of one pan, and though Leo started at the sound, he made no move to turn the heat down.

  “I’m going to lower that just a bit,” she said.

  “You’re the professional,” Leo said. He was ignoring the tongs and turning the oiled bread slices with his fingers. Thea watched, fascinated and made faintly nervous by this slapdash new Leo, as he tipped the chorizo pan over a metal dish and spooned out the sliced disks of sausage, splashing several fat drops of red oil onto the counter, before pouring the eggs into the pan and stepping back with an air of satisfaction. It was the mess that made her so tetchy, she realized, the mess combined with Leo, who had never been known to cook, standing here, cooking away in what she considered to be her kitchen. She hated sloppy cooking, but there was nothing to say about it to him—though she felt a frisson of unease and an edge of hostility lurking just beneath it, in case he left the dishes when they finished for the cooks to clean up in the morning. A lot of owners would.

  “Are you cooking the peppers?” she asked.

  “I was going to slice them over the top with the cheese,” Leo said. “Too much?”

  “Nope.” Thea let him handle the jalapeños while she shaved off a few thin slices of cheese, a mild cheddar the cooks kept on hand for baking into cornbread or slicing onto burgers at staff meal. It was just the sort of thing she would have been moved to eat if she’d been by herself, except she would have just toasted it on bread or eaten it cold on crackers, meditating on the ring of toothmarks she left in each slice as she chewed. Leo swirled his pan, tilting it to let the last soft rivulets of egg hit the hot pan, and then wordlessly reached one hand back toward her. Thea set the sliced cheese in his palm, realizing as she did that she was a little more buzzed than she’d intended to be, because she placed the cheddar on Leo’s warm skin as delicately as if it were a piece of jewelry, a hollowed, painted eggshell. He laid the cheese over the eggs, then scattered a thick layer of chorizo coins over the cheese, and finally a handful of fresh sliced jalapeño.

  “And we’re done,” Leo said. He paused, looking around frantically until Thea realized that he had forgotten where the plates were kept. She reached beneath the prep counter and handed him two.

  “Thanks,” he said. He ran a spatula down the center of the eggs and lifted a golden orange pillow onto each plate, dropping yet more paprika-stained oil onto the stove and the counter. He put several crisped slices of bread onto each plate and handed her one. “Don’t think for a second I won’t clean this up,” Leo said, “but first let’s eat,” and Thea finally relaxed. They had jars of tasting spoons on the line but no forks, yet Leo just shrugged and handed her a spoon, keeping one for himself. They spooned up egg and cheese and pepper, the cheese dripping off in strings, and ate them atop the croutons, standing side by side against the prep counter, facing the stove and chewing silently. Thea had to slow herself from gobbling. The cool incendiary crunch of the chile peppers was the only thing that held her back from tipping her plate and its savory, oily contents straight into her mouth. Leo set down his plate and poured two glasses of water, one of which Thea drank thirstily.

  “Tell your daughter I apologize for trying to kill you with a single meal,” Leo said after a time.

  Thea sighed, running a piece of bread around the edge of her plate. The meal had filled that buzzed, pleasingly hollow core in her belly and now she was good and sober again, warm and sleepy. “She can never know,” she said. “If I make this for her, I might as well buy her some crack.” Leo looked hurt. “Oh no,” she said, “I mean because it’s delicious. And because it’ll kill us both. Do you eat this way every night?”

  He shook his head. “I forget what I eat most nights, to be honest. Whatever’s served at staff meal. If I’m off, I just have something simple.”

  “Yeah, like what?”

  Leo looked embarrassed. “I really mean simple. Like once a week I make a big batch of oatmeal and then I heat up a dish at a time with some milk.”

  “That’s not a bad breakfast.”

  “A lot of times it’s dinner.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then I like sardines. I keep a lot of sardines in olive oil around and eat ’em on toast.”

  “Leo. You don’t even like food, do you?”

  He laughed. “I do, but I’m not passionate about it in my own life. When people get all sententious about flours and shit, I just want to laugh. It’s a steak, it’s not a cure for cancer, you know? But”—he raised his empty plate in Thea’s direction to emphasize the point—“I’m not here to do this badly. In here, I care tremendously that we do it right, but I’d care the same way if I were running a tattoo p
arlor.”

  Thea nodded, trying not to show her surprise. The strange part was, she respected Leo even a little more now. It was easy to be exacting about your passion. But Leo’s mania for correctness and his questing, constantly expanding business intelligence were both more innate and more cunningly applied than she had realized. He hadn’t been predisposed or groomed to be a success in restaurants; he had made himself one.

  Leo raised an eyebrow at her. She realized she was gazing at him. She looked away and said, “Well, if I’d known you were eating oatmeal every night, I would have had Jason cook you something really decadent for dinner.”

  “No way,” said Leo. “I won’t even joke about giving up that meal.”

  “Was it so good?” Maybe there was more to phlegmatic, corpse-pallored Jason than she’d thought; perhaps he’d wisely taken the opportunity to impress Leo. “What’d he do?”

  “He just did it carefully,” Leo said. “He did more for a staff meal than he had to. It wasn’t super-innovative or anything. It was just what I needed, that’s all. Thank you.”

  He turned to look at her, and Thea felt a flush rise through her cheeks. She thought of Fiona with a burst of compassion for her constant, visible shyness. Suddenly Thea was sure she had oil all over her chin. She swiped discreetly at her mouth, brushed crumbs from her sweater.

  “Well, sure,” she said. “Our cooks ought to be able to sauté a chicken, right?”

  Leo paused and looked away, then took her plate. “Right,” he said. “I’m going to clean up, okay? Give me five and I’ll walk you to your car. It’s late.”

  CHAPTER 11

  EVEN AFTER BRITT HAD GIVEN UP on her, Camille—rather uncooperatively—continued to dine at the restaurant. She showed up with a couple in their late thirties, the woman heavily pregnant and so bejeweled that, next to her, Camille’s elongated form in camel boots and ice-colored dress seemed as pure and cool as a blade of grass, a frosted twig. Britt issued a solemn cheek press and hand clasp accompanied with a faint smile. He told himself he was established, he owned two restaurants, an apartment, good scotch glasses, and real furniture. He would not vie with his little brother, not even for Camille. Besides, if she was intrigued by Harry, she must find Britt boring and staid.

  “New business?” he asked. The couple had gone ahead to the table.

  “College roommate.” She looked him over. “Are you okay? You seem a little melancholy.”

  “Probably just winter,” Britt said, gratified. He did feel a certain pleasurable martyrdom in giving up the idea of her, the possibilities of her wide mouth and long limbs. He was conscious of looking at her with a new gravity.

  “Ah,” she said. “I like to have a good cry when I feel that way. See if that helps.” And she patted him on the arm.

  HE SPENT THE NEXT DAY IN a trance of caffeine and exhaustion, interviewing servers and inventorying and rejiggering kitchen equipment with Harry before heading over to Winesap. Shelley’s suggestions about the kitchen setup had turned out to be useful, even if Harry did keep texting her about the details when he thought Britt wasn’t paying attention.

  He was in the habit of expecting a gap of weeks or even a month between Camille’s visits to the restaurant, but there she was at the Winesap bar less than twenty-four hours after she’d last been there, her hair in a loose knot and her chin propped thoughtfully in one hand. A glass of bourbon with an ice cube sat before her. Britt was tired enough and off guard enough to wonder if he was simply wrong about what day it was.

  He shouldn’t go to her. She left him feeling harried and sweaty every time, but he also knew he would not just smile and keep walking. He never quite knew what she would say to him, and he could never pass up the chance to find out.

  When she saw him, she smiled and began putting on her coat. By the time Britt reached her, she was setting a bill on the bar. She didn’t wait for Britt to say anything, just reached over and clasped his wrist as if she did this all the time, and said, “Can you step away for a minute?”

  “Of course. Are you already done?” She had never just touched him, not outside their established ritual of a greeting or farewell, and the directness of it was a shock. His skin where she was touching him seemed hypersensitive, as if he could perceive the whorls of her fingertips, each curve in the smooth pocket of her palm.

  “Oh, I’m not eating,” she said. She slid off her barstool, so close that he was newly aware of her height, the way her eyes and mouth were on the same level as his own. “Come with me.”

  He left his coat though they were headed for the door, because he didn’t want to stop the momentum of whatever she was doing. Maybe she simply wanted an escort to her car. There were people coming up the walk as they went out the front door, and she paused and waited for the door to close again before she spoke. Britt glanced behind them and realized he never saw the restaurant this way, the glow of its façade in the cold night air, the constant motion behind its lighted windows.

  “Say we kept walking,” she said. “How long before you ask where we’re going?”

  “Not long,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I’d stop.”

  “That’s good to know.” She looked around them at the building and the cars, the quiet row of houses and shops down the street. He’d never seen her in the cool silver light of the moon and the streetlamps, in which her eyes seemed leonine and deep. Britt took a step closer, glad they were not standing before a window but before an opaque wooden door. “I want to know if it feels the same way,” she said. “I needed to see you outside the restaurant—even right outside—at least once.”

  Something thrummed straight through him. Apparently he had never known what she was thinking. Even now she managed to be disarmingly straightforward without revealing much at all. He felt the dullness and exhaustion of the past few weeks slough off him like a layer of cloth.

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know how the second you step out of your usual playing field, everything feels clearer? In there, it’s your domain. And I was thinking maybe you’re just a good host,” she said. “Maybe you aren’t interested at all—you’re just polite.”

  “I’m not that polite,” he said. “And you haven’t taken me very far.”

  She smiled, a slow frank smile that seemed a reply to every part of him. “We’re just getting started,” she said. “You can go anywhere you want.”

  SOMEHOW BRITT HAD NEVER STOPPED to consider the problems of dinner—that was what a date was, a shared meal, for God’s sake. His entire living was based on it. Yet the moment she’d said, “Where shall we go?” Britt had frozen. Where should they go? He knew all too well every restaurant within an hour’s drive, and the prospect of actually relaxing in one of them seemed remote. What place had not recently gotten a halfhearted review that would lower their morale or a too-glowing one that would ensure a mob scene? What trendy new places had settled into a reliable but energetic groove, and what old stalwarts weren’t lazy, boring, or under investigation for tax evasion, which had a way of distracting from quality control? Who wasn’t doing blow with the waitresses and hadn’t paid the staff in three weeks and the purveyors in five? Who hadn’t gotten fined by safety inspectors and been forced to take a remedial HACCP class?

  Camille cut off his deliberations and said she’d surprise him, freeing Britt and also leaving him adrift. Where had he taken his last few girlfriends? He almost called Leo, thinking to have a backup in mind in case Camille wanted to go someplace beset by hovering Makaskis or other enervating issues. Leo usually thought of some offbeat place, which was part of why Britt thought about asking him, but he had been so prickly lately. Leo was trying not to show it, but he could barely bring himself to look Britt in the eye when both were at Winesap.

  And in the end Britt did not call Leo, and it did not matter. Camille delivered to him a brisk, sunny e-mail with a time and an address in a neighboring city. The address of the restaurant was unfamiliar. Britt walked up and down the street twice, marvel
ing at how a city right next door to his hometown could contain these odd little triangles and alleyways that he’d never even come across. To reach the restaurant he’d passed a street filled with Middle Eastern groceries, Indian restaurants, and Irish pubs that pumped a miasma of beer, frying oil, and burgers into the air. On his third try he finally realized that the flat, unmarked black door must be the restaurant. He gave it a tentative push and peered into a cool dark-green hallway, empty but for a stone bowl with a rounded loaf of agate in its center, water flowing continuously over it. A doorway opposite the fountain bore a Japanese character on it and nothing else.

  Inside was a narrow room painted a cool stone gray, with long polished wooden tables. Running water was audible, but he didn’t see a source. There were tables to the right and a sushi bar to the left, where Camille was already seated, in jeans and a black sleeveless top, talking with the bartender. Before her was an earthenware cup and a tiny sake bottle in a bowl. For a moment he fully expected to hear her conversing in fluent Japanese.

  “I was just thinking I should come outside and wait for you,” she said. When he kissed her cheek, her skin seemed warmer, softer, than he remembered. A flush bloomed over her cheeks, as if she’d jogged here. “You want the bar or a table?”

  The tables were half full, and another couple was at the other end of the bar. Behind the glass case housing the fish and shellfish, a man dressed in white was slicing from a great, blood-pink length of tuna. “Oh, the bar,” Britt said. “Let’s watch him work.” Not an Asian man but a white guy in his midthirties, with unnervingly pale eyes and close-cropped dark hair beneath a white cap. He nodded in Britt’s direction. So this was the toro place, the one Harry had been so excited about, with its unmarked door and its relentlessly focused menu. Britt watched with new interest as the chef chose a slab of silver-skinned fish from the case and set about slicing a fine sheet from one end with a long, even stroke. The resulting square was a translucent pearl color of perfectly consistent thickness. Next to him, Camille murmured in appreciation. The chef didn’t acknowledge any of his observers. He set about dressing the fish with scallion and nori and placed it before the couple a few seats away, never saying a word.