So, I stand there, staring into the bathroom mirror with my cell phone jammed to my ear, my blotchy, tear-stained face staring back at me. What do I want Jake to know? I have no idea. Nothing. Not a single thing comes to mind.
The thought of one’s ex moving on and prospering might be enough to cause some people to get out there and really give it a go. Make a stab at showing their exes just what a good deal they threw away. “How did I ever let her go?” they ask themselves in our fantasies. Was I missing that particular gene or something? That “I’ll show him” gene?
I groan. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Have that conversation, Mira.”
“I feel like an idiot,” I wail.
“It’s an important exercise. Brush your hair and put on some makeup. Remember what you say and how you say it, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow. Besides, it will also be good preparation for your meeting with Enid. You’re really going to need to sell yourself. Remember, feelings follow behavior, Mira. If you pretend to be relaxed and confident, eventually you will become relaxed and confident.”
“I know, I know,” I tell her. And after I hang up, I take another stab at it, although it takes several attempts before I can start the conversation without crying or looking like I’m about to. But once I get started, I find I have plenty to say, none, or almost none of it, true. I tell Jake that I’ve opened another restaurant; perhaps he had caught the review in last month’s Food and Wine? That, and I’m here in New York City to pick up my James Beard Award for my latest book, the newest collection of my food writings. I’ve even come up with a title for it: With Fork in Hand, and Tongue in Cheek: A Chef’s Guide to Eating Around the World. I also tell him Chloe is a terrific kid and that he really missed out.
By the time Renata calls back, I’m in bed, going over my review in preparation for Wednesday’s meeting with Enid Maxwell. “I swear, I thought about telling you, but Michael talked me out of it,” Renata says.
“Fine. It’s fine. I’m better now.”
“You sounded awful.”
“I was just surprised. That’s all.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was just a bad moment.”
“So, how are you? How’s Chloe? Did she get our birthday present?” Renata and Michael had sent Chloe a bottle of port, to be opened on her twenty-first birthday.
“Thanks. She loved it.”
There’s so much that I want to ask her, but I don’t know if I should. Aside from not wanting to appear obsessed, I’m really not sure I want to know when Jake’s baby is due. “So, has Jake’s baby been born yet?” I blurt out.
Renata hesitates. “She miscarried. Or at least that is what they’re telling people, or the few people who knew, anyway. It never really was public knowledge, if you know what I mean.”
“What do you mean, at least that’s what they’re telling people?”
Renata doesn’t reply right away, and I can tell she’s deciding what to say. Whether or not I can handle it.
“Well, it just didn’t make sense. The sommelier thing? She went away to do it. A four-week course in Las Vegas, with closed registration and a long waiting list. I checked. You don’t go registering for a sommelier course when you know you’re pregnant. Not unless you’re an idiot—that’s a hell of a lot of wine to be spitting out—or unless you never intended to have the baby.”
“You think she had an abortion?” I ask.
“I don’t know, Mira. All I know is that she came home from Las Vegas and suddenly they’re obsessed with this idea of the enoteca. It’s not exactly the time to be opening a new restaurant, you know. They bought this little tapas place that was going under. On Fulton Street. They moved right in and turned it around in record time.”
“Where did they get the money? Jake made it seem like they were really strapped after the Grappa buyout.”
Renata exhales softly into the phone. “First of all, why you would believe anything that man had to say is beyond me. But now that you mention it, I did hear a rumor a few weeks ago that Jake has hooked up with some serious investors, some sort of restaurant collaborative, based in Vegas.”
“Vegas? Why would they be interested in Jake?”
“I don’t know, but Tony told me that Jake is moving over to Il Vinaio, and Nicola installed a new executive chef at Grappa, who’s also from Vegas.”
“What! She can’t do that! What the hell is Jake thinking?” I yell into the phone. “That place doesn’t need Jake. Since when is tapas haute cuisine? I told you she would run Grappa into the ground, didn’t I?”
Renata is quiet.
“Well, didn’t I?” I demand.
Renata softly clears her throat. Finally, she says, “Look, cara, forget I said anything. Come on, Mira, I want to hear about you. How are you doing?”
Before I know it, it’s as if I’m back in front of the bathroom mirror, spouting the made-for-Jake lies. In fact, I barely recognize the chic, hip life I’m describing to Renata, including my foray into the world of food writing—I think I even referred to Enid Maxwell as “my editor.”
Renata is impressed. “And what about love, Mira?” she asks me. “Are you ready for that again? It’s time.”
I tell her I’ve been too busy to think about love. We hang up, but only after I have made several vague promises to come to visit sometime soon, the moment there is a lull in my schedule.
I toss my cell phone onto the bed and head to the bathroom where I splash some cool water on my face. Could it be true? Not just the part about Jake’s ceding control of Grappa to someone I didn’t even know, but the part about the baby? If Jake had reconsidered fatherhood yet again, his timing was only slightly better (or slightly worse, depending on how you looked at it) this time. With a pang I remembered Jake’s hand on Nicola’s belly as I passed them on the way out of the lawyer’s office months ago. He had seemed so proud. How could anyone—even Jake—be so ambivalent? But what surprised me almost as much was that Nicola had agreed. Even if Jake had told me that he had second thoughts when there had been time to do anything about it, I’d never have chosen to get an abortion.
Or would I? If I’d known then that I’d be making a choice between Jake and Grappa on the one hand, and a nameless, faceless baby on the other, would I have been brave enough to choose the baby? For that matter, if I were Sarah could I have made the courageous decision she did?
It’s like a spasm, sudden and involuntary. I’m standing at the foot of Chloe’s crib, watching her breathe, panic rising, as if those previously unacknowledged thoughts had assumed a shape and a form and were lingering in the darkness ready to take Chloe from me the instant I close my eyes. I lean down next to her head, feeling her sweet, milky breath on my cheek, and softly stroke her forehead. I will never doubt that I made the right choice.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that they chose to open Il Vinaio so shortly after losing their baby. Could it be that Jake believed he had to choose between fatherhood and his career as a chef? Couldn’t he have found room in his heart for both?
Maybe to be really good at either one, you do have to choose. After all, I’d made a choice, too. Just like Jake had. We’d chosen differently, and it had driven us apart.
The phone rings. I run across the room and make a dive for the bed before the second ring can wake Chloe. It’s a wireless number I don’t recognize.
“Hello?” I answer warily. It is almost eleven. No one I know, here anyway, would call so late.
“Mira, jeez, did I wake you? I hope I didn’t wake Chloe.”
“Who is this?” I whisper so as not to disturb Chloe, who I can hear stirring in her crib.
“It’s Ben. Ben Stemple. Look, I’m sorry to be calling so late, but something actually came up and I needed—”
“How did you even get my number?” I ask him.
“Aunt Fi gave it to me. Sorry about the party, by the way. I hope she gave you the message?”
“Yeah,” I say.
> “Listen, if you’re sleeping, I can just talk to you in the morning.”
“No, that’s okay. What’s up?” I ask him, sitting up in bed and adjusting the pillow behind me.
“I need some advice. Some cooking advice, actually.”
“Wow, you eat late.”
“What? Oh, yeah.” Ben laughs. “No, it’s actually for a meeting I have tomorrow morning. Do you remember those lofts I’m the plumbing sub on? Well, one of the real estate agents, a guy I know pretty well, has a client who’s a gourmet cook and wants some advice on putting in a top-of-the-line kitchen, a professional-grade stove, and something called a pasta spigot, whatever that is. Marble countertops, the whole nine yards. Money apparently is no object.”
“It’s a faucet on the wall by the stove. For filling big pasta pots.”
“Huh?”
“A pasta spigot. That’s what it is.”
“Oh.” Ben seems to consider this tidbit. Out loud. “Why not just fill them at the sink and carry them over?”
“Well, you could. But the deep pots sometimes don’t fit under ordinary faucets. And besides, they’re heavy to lift.”
“Jeez. How much pasta is this lady gonna cook? Anyway, it’s a plumbing nightmare. The water lines are all the way across the kitchen island! Good thing money’s no object.”
Ben, I guess, is a practical sort of guy.
“Hey, it’s not your money. You can charge her whatever you want. Think of it that way.”
“Yeah, I guess. Anyway, she isn’t even here yet. She’s moving here from Texas. Took some executive job at Del Monte. There’s only one unit left, at the penthouse level, and she needs to know what kinds of things will fit in the space, what she might have to add, before she makes an offer. I mentioned to Skip, my friend, that you might be able to help lay it out for her because you used to be a professional chef.”
Used to be.
“Sure,” I croak, attempting to clear the lump in my throat. “Spending someone else’s money is always fun.”
I agree to join Ben and his friend Skip for their meeting at the loft tomorrow morning at nine. I hang up the phone and lie there in the dark listening to Chloe breathe. Although it’s barely April, the attic is close, the air heavy and thick with heat. I’ll need to buy a new air conditioner soon. I open all the windows and climb back into bed, trying not to think of what Ben said about my having been a professional chef. What am I now?
When I arrive at the lofts the next morning, Chloe in tow, Ben is waiting for me in the lobby with a latte from Bruno’s and a bag full of biscotti. He’s also brought Chloe’s birthday present, a little Fisher Price peg board with a hammer and big chunky nails.
“Hey, thanks for coming on such short notice,” he tells me, handing me the coffee and fishing a biscotti out of the bag for Chloe. “This woman is hot to get this deal done. Another unit sold over the weekend, and this is the only one left. Skip will be here in a couple of minutes, but we can go on up and get started. He faxed me a copy of the wish list,” Ben says, reaching into the front pocket of his work shirt and shaking it out with a flourish.
On the way up, Ben shows me the list: a Gaggenau six-burner gas range, a wall-sized electric convection double oven, a SubZero professional refrigerator and freezer, warming tray, pasta spigot, and a built-in Jura-Capresso espresso machine; in fact she proposes a whole coffee station, including a sink with a built-in water filtration system and a top-drawer fridge for storing coffee, milk, and cream.
Three sinks in three separate areas. Ben will have a field day. The space is bigger than most traditional New York loft spaces. There’s a large, partitioned area for a bedroom and another sleeping loft suspended over the living room, which is reached by a narrow, wrought iron staircase. Because it’s a corner apartment on the top floor, there are six big, arched windows wrapping around the apartment on two sides. The walls are exposed brick, and the floor a rich, dark stained hardwood. There are some low built-in bookcases running along the back wall under the stairs, and someone has set out a couple of sofas, a comfortable-looking easy chair, and a reading lamp. Standard model apartment furniture. It’s a pretty apartment, light and airy, but the best thing about it is the kitchen, which is open to both the living and dining areas. Even without the appliances, the kitchen dominates the space. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, you can see and be seen from just about any place in the whole apartment.
“A second bedroom or a home office,” Ben calls to me from the sleeping loft. “Not bad, if you aren’t too tall,” he says, stooping slightly while trying to stand in the middle of the room.
I spread out a blanket from the diaper bag, give Chloe the peg board to play with, and head for the kitchen, where I’m joined by Ben. He pulls out his tape measure and a pad of graph paper, and we get to work. We try the stove where it’s already been roughed in, and the dimensions work, give or take an inch, which Ben assures me they can shave off on either end of the cabinetry. But the problem with a stove of this size and power is that you need a significant ventilation system, so I suggest moving it to the opposite wall, an idea Ben likes, as it means the pasta spigot will be closer to the main sink and disposal.
When Skip arrives a while later, Ben and I have a sketch to show him. Skip, who had barely given me a nod when Ben introduced us, looks at the sketch and almost instantly begins shaking his head.
“Nope, this won’t work,” Skip says.
“What do you mean, it won’t work?” Ben asks.
“Well, for starters, what’s this?” he says, pointing to the large rectangular block we’ve drawn just above the stove.
“That’s the ventilation hood for the stove. You need one for a stove this size,” I tell him, trying to sound official. After all, I’ve been asked here in a somewhat professional capacity.
“Well, that’s going to be an issue. She wants the stove on the island. She’s planning on installing a wall-sized flat-screen TV over there”—Skip points to the long wall by the foyer—“and she wants to be able to watch it while she’s cooking.”
“Well, she could put it on the island, couldn’t she, Mira?” Ben asks.
“Well, I—”
“Just nix the hood,” Skip says.
I shake my head. “You need something, and a downdraft won’t do it for a stove this size.”
Skip lays the sketch on the plywood countertop and considers it. After a while he takes the top of his pen and begins cleaning out the dirt from under his fingernails. “How much we talking anyway?”
“I’ve had some experience with professional appliances, so I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a rough estimate,” I tell Skip, handing him a sheet of paper on which I’ve tallied the approximate costs. “This, of course, doesn’t include installation, or the cost of materials for cabinetry and countertop. I know she wants marble counters, but—”
“This is just for the appliances?” Skip has suspended his excavation efforts and is now distractedly running his fingers through his hair.
“Yup. Ben can give you a rough idea of the installation costs.”
“Shit, I had no idea,” Skip says.
“Well, the good news is,” I tell him, “your client probably does. Presumably, she knows something about the brand names she’s suggested. Anybody who knows Gaggenau, knows it’s very high-end.”
“Is this $3,600 for a coffeemaker? That can’t be right! No coffeemaker should cost that much,” Skip says, pushing Ben’s sketch aside and fixing me with a withering stare.
“Look, I didn’t pick the machine. She did. That’s what they cost. Me, I get by just fine with a little stove-top macchinetta at home, but we had a Jura at the restaurant, so I know how much they cost. Most good coffee places have something similar. But you have to want to serve lots of really good coffee to justify one.”
The edges of Skip’s lips are white as he whips out his cell phone. “Okay, I’ll give her a call.” He doesn’t even say thank you.
While Skip is breaking what does
, in fact, turn out to be surprising news to his client, and Ben is trying to make an appointment with the general contractor to firm up his estimates, I give the kitchen another once over. If it were mine, I decide, I would do all open shelving, no top cabinetry. Poured and stained concrete for the counters, with a small, marble, inset pastry station. I’d keep my little macchinetta and instead use the coffee station space for a second oven with a warming tray underneath.
Chloe had been happily hammering away at her peg board, but now begins to fidget. Ben and Skip are still on the phone, so I walk Chloe around the apartment, checking out the views of the river, until my back begins to hurt. I lead her over to the sofa, a good vantage point from which to observe the kitchen. I decide that I agree with Ms. Moneybags, the stove should be on the island, but I’d angle the island in the opposite direction, toward the river view on the far wall. By going with a slim, streamlined hood, we could avoid unduly obstructing the view.
“Hey, be careful she doesn’t get anything on that sofa. It’s white, you know,” Skip whispers loudly, putting his hand over the microphone of his hands-free phone. It’s a nice sofa. Impractical for kids maybe, but it’s slipcovered, and the fabric looks washable. Much nicer than the sofa I have in storage in New York, the red mohair with a loose spring in the middle cushion that Jake and I had found on the street one day and dragged home under cover of darkness.
Skip and his client are haggling over the costs. Apparently, she hadn’t done her homework on the appliances and is balking at the cost of the professional-grade kitchen. It turns out that she has a family living in Dallas, a husband and two teenaged children, and is planning on commuting between there and Pittsburgh for the next four years, at least until the last kid is out of high school.
“Hey, you, Mary, is it?” Skip says, snapping his fingers to get my attention. “How much you figure she’d save if she decides to downgrade to electric?”
“Gaggenau, so far as I know, doesn’t make an electric version.” They do, but no real cook would want one. Soon we are down to a GE Monogram electric range and a Starbucks Barista–model espresso maker. She steadfastly refuses to yield on the marble countertops, insisting that they will look classy with cherry cabinets. “Very Tuscan,” I can hear her say, with a heavy Texas drawl. I feel like grabbing the phone and telling her that cherry is not Tuscan. Chestnut, pine, or cypress maybe, but definitely not cherry.
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