Aftertaste

by Meredith Mileti

  Tonight, because I’ve gotten here early—just a little after midnight—I’ve been able to secure a plum table in the back. I order myself a glass of Gewürztraminer, thinking, as the bright-eyed waiter takes my order, what strange lives chefs lead. By necessity and for convenience, most of your friends are chefs. Who else besides another chef would want to share a four-course meal with you at two in the morning? It isn’t that chefs are inherently more fun than nurses, or pharmacists, or off-duty cops, or other people who work night shifts. It’s just that often what you want to talk about is food. Odd perhaps, that after putting in a twelve-hour day surrounded by the stuff, you still want to talk about it, your ideas for reviving a tired sherry reduction, or a particularly innovative use of foie gras. No one besides another chef wants to do that in the middle of the night.

  A few minutes after I arrive, Tony comes in. He looks exactly the same as last time I saw him, the same leather bomber jacket, the same white chef’s tunic, the same shaved head, glossy and brown as a freshly baked brioche. Tony greets the bartender, a short, wellmuscled guy named Bob, who gestures toward my table in the back.

  “Hey,” Tony says, depositing his knife satchel on the extra chair and approaching my side of the table to envelop me in a hug. He smells of sweat and food, of tobacco and browning onions and fried things.

  “You look great,” Tony says, pulling away and studying my face.

  “Thanks. You too,” I tell him, giving his thick arm a squeeze.

  Tony waves away the menu the waiter offers him. “I want a steak, bloody, an order of fried leeks, and the blue cheese mashed potatoes,” Tony tells him. “A glass of Cab with dinner and a double Grey Goose martini as fast as Bob over there can make it.”

  “Tough day?” I ask him.

  “Aren’t they all?” says Tony.

  Over his martini, Tony fills me in. He’s been working under Philippe, who, in Tony’s opinion, is a competent cook, but will never be a chef. “Wouldn’t recognize a creative spin if it bit him on the ass. You know the kind,” Tony says, taking a hefty gulp of his drink.

  I do. Jake and I had worked for plenty of them in our time. But, given the mediocre review in the Times, and what I’m sure is Tony’s accurate assessment of Philippe’s stewardship in the kitchen, how is it that profits are up ten percent? Something doesn’t quite add up.

  “So,” I ask. “What gives?”

  Tony shakes his head. “Seriously, Mira, these guys may be fucking geniuses. First, they’ve replaced some—make that all—of the expensive suppliers. I assume you’ve heard about Renata, right?”

  I nod.

  “Eddie, too. But that’s only part of it. They’ve cut staff and pay, considerably beefed up the wine list, and added a froufrou martini bar. The markup on the wine is huge, and the martinis are exotic, interesting, and expensive. Suffice it to say, we are attracting a slightly different type of clientele. But we’re still crowded every night and booked a couple weeks out on the weekend. We are making more money than we did this time last year, so it’s not all bad, you know?”

  Not all bad? Even though Marcus and Jasper had mentioned making changes, I hadn’t really focused on precisely how those changes impacted Grappa. “Tony, how is any of that good? People can get good booze anywhere in this city!”

  Tony holds up his hands in mock surrender. “I know, I know,” he says. “Obviously, the downside is that, if steps aren’t taken to address the drop-off in food quality, we may be living on borrowed time. Which reminds me, I brought you a present,” Tony says, his eyes flashing mischievously. He reaches over to rummage through his knife case and pulls out a small Styrofoam container. “Here you go. Buon appetito,” he says, smiling. I open the container. Inside is a small portion of gluey-looking gnocchi and a handful of limp morels. “I figured if you were having any doubts about coming back, this would put you over the top.”

  I spear a a piece of gnocchi, which offers more resistance than it should. Right away I can tell, without even tasting it, that it will be too tough. “The dough’s been overworked,” I tell him, laying the untouched pasta on the edge of my bread plate. Tony picks up another from the container with his fingers and pops it into his mouth.

  “Yeah, and the flavoring is too overpowering. The morels are completely lost. It’s crap,” Tony says. “Yes, I like the restaurant syndicate concept, and the numbers are pretty hard to ignore. But in terms of maintaining Grappa’s quality, we need you back soon. You’re right; people can get good booze anywhere, and sooner or later they are going to realize that the food is no longer great. It’s already started. Some of our longtime customers are coming around less frequently. But, if you come back soon, we can turn it around. Speaking of good booze . . .” Tony drains the rest of his martini. He turns around and waves a finger in Bob’s direction. “Look, I had my lawyer review the papers from AEL. He says everything looks kosher. I’ve already put in about half of my sabbatical fund at this point, and I’m planning to invest the rest, but only if you’re in, too. What do you say? When are you moving back?”

  I hesitate. There is still so much I have to figure out. I want to ask Tony about Jake and Nicola, but I don’t quite know how. Luckily, Tony anticipates my question.

  “Jake’s pretty much full-time at Il Vinaio. He’s hardly ever at Grappa now, you know,” he says. “With the pay cuts, there’s been a lot of staff turnover as well. Freddo’s long gone. Zoe, too,” Tony says, shaking his head.

  “Zoe? We hired her right out of cooking school! She was there six years.” Zoe was one of the line cooks at Grappa, a tall, healthy-looking kid from the Midwest who worked the grill. Her kind of loyalty, not to mention longevity, was a rare thing in the restaurant business. I’d had a run-in with her shortly before I left the city. It was on one of the last days I’d worked. I was tired and stressed, and I can’t even remember what it was about; I just remember yelling at her, as she stood, towering over me, struggling not to cry.

  Tony shrugs.

  “What happened?” I ask, taking a bite out of the shaved artichoke and Pecorino salad the waiter has just set down in front of me.

  For some reason, my question has surprised Tony, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Just as I think he’s finally about to answer me, the waiter brings his steak and sets it in front of him. Tony leans back and allows the waiter to rearrange our table to accommodate the huge plate. At first, I think he’s just being circumspect. The New York culinary world is a notoriously gossipy one, and I assume he doesn’t want the waiter to hear what he’s about to say. But after the waiter leaves Tony cuts a piece of his steak and spears it with his fork. He raises it midway to his mouth where it remains, poised in midair, dripping blood.

  He still doesn’t say anything.

  “What happened, Tony?”

  “Nicola made her life a living hell. That’s what,” Tony says quietly.

  “Why?”

  “I swear I thought you knew. I figured Renata would have told you.”

  “Knew what?”

  Tony exhales, a slow, painful-sounding wheeze. “About Zoe and Jake.”

  I stare at Tony, not really understanding.

  “What about Zoe and Jake?”

  Tony lays down his knife and fork, carefully arranging them on his plate before answering me. He does not meet my eye. “They had a thing a few months back,” he says.

  The waitress sets down Tony’s second martini, and I take a sip, welcoming the burn in my throat as I digest this fascinating morsel. Six months ago, five—hell, maybe even two months ago news like this would have filled me with hope. Now, I’m not sure what to feel.

  “It was when Nicola was away. In Vegas.” Tony says.

  “What happened?”

  Tony stops eating, his knife and fork poised limply over his dish. He drops his utensils and pushes his plate away.

  “Jesus, what does Jake have that I don’t have, you know? Women going wild over this guy, I just don’t get it, but whatever. Nicola’s back about fi
fteen minutes before she figures it out. Big showdown in the kitchen. Right in the middle of service she tells Zoe to pack up and get the hell out. Zoe looks at Jake, who just stands there, his mouth hanging open like a fucking steamed clam. Zoe yells back that she isn’t going anywhere; she’ll sue their asses if they fire her. Then, Nicola drags the both of them back into the office, and they’re in there for about a half hour—completely quiet—while we’re down two cooks and the rest of us are trying to keep the line moving. It was a hell of a night. Next thing you know,” Tony says, picking up his fork and knife, “Zoe’s gone, Marcus and Jasper show up, and plans for Il Vinaio are spread out all over the back room.”

  “Where did Zoe go?”

  “I heard she went back to Chicago—probably with a nice severance package.”

  “So are they . . . okay, Jake and Nicola?”

  It’s the first time I’ve said her name, and I can’t help wincing. Tony watches me carefully. Finally, he shrugs. “I don’t know, Mira. Like I said, Jake isn’t around much. Both of them are at Il Vinaio most of the time now.” Tony leans forward and lays a beefy hand on mine. “Look, Jake doesn’t have a clue how to fix Grappa, Mira. You do. Forget about him. He’s not in your league anymore. Never was, in my opinion.” Tony wipes his mouth delicately and deposits his napkin on the table as he turns and signals for the check.

  “Come back, Mira,” Tony says.

  “I’m thinking about it, Tony.”

  chapter 30

  I spend a good chunk of Sunday afternoon going through my storage space in the basement of my old apartment building on Perry Street. Most of it is stuff that I never should have saved in the first place: boxes of old cooking magazines, irrelevant now that everything is available online; mismatched mugs and dishes; two broken vacuums; and a wardrobe of size four jeans that will never be worn by me again in this lifetime.

  There’s also a ton of Jake’s stuff.

  After the police had carted me away in handcuffs the night I discovered them in flagrante, Jake had come home and packed a single duffle bag of clothes before moving in with Nicola. At some point, I’d expected him to ask me for something, anything—his electric toothbrush, a razor, his fleece slippers when the weather turned cold—but he never did. Apparently, anything that had been in our apartment and shared by me was tainted and needed to be abandoned posthaste, like nuclear waste or anthrax-tainted stationery.

  When I finally realized Jake wasn’t coming back, I’d packed up every trace of him, his books, tools, high school yearbook, childhood photos, the boutonniere from his senior prom (he’d taken Lindsay, a mousy blonde), even his high school track jersey, half intending to put it out on the curb with the trash, but I never had the guts to follow through. At the time, the fact that he could walk away from years of accumulated memories both amazed and horrified me, but now, knee-deep in the murky basement, where, in the pauses in my work, I think I hear ominous scurrying coming from the deep recesses of the storage unit, abandonment definitely seems like the better part of valor.

  Hope invites me in for coffee around two o’clock and offers me a sandwich—bologna and cheese, which I thought nobody ate anymore—and I eat it sitting at my own dining table, which Hope has covered with a red and white plastic-coated picnic cloth. In all the disruption surrounding Richard’s accident, I’d never arranged to have it shipped.

  “I suppose you’re going to want this back,” she sighs, lifting the corner of the tablecloth to reveal a provocative flash of sleek, walnut table leg. I’ve just finished telling her about my meeting with AEL and the likelihood that Chloe and I will be moving back soon. Understandably, she’s skittish about my being back in the apartment; I know she’s afraid I’m going to want to cancel our sublet agreement.

  “I’m not sure,” I tell her. “You can keep it for a while.”

  “My subletters can’t move out before the end of the summer,” she finally says, offering me a plate of fudge stripe cookies.

  “I know,” I tell her.

  After lunch I cart the boxes to the dumpster in the alleyway. I’ve saved only the two boxes of Jake’s stuff and one box of old Gourmet magazines, thinking they might be collector’s items one day. I’ll tell Jake tonight that he has one last chance to reclaim his memories or they will be gone with the next trash. I take the stairs, trudging up the four flights to place the key into Hope’s itching palm. “Here,” I tell her, taking her hand and closing it tightly around the key. “It’s yours. Stay as long as you like,” and for the first time all day, Hope’s face relaxes into a smile.

  And I mean it. Chloe and I will find a new place to live. A pretty, light-filled apartment in a different neighborhood, a place to make a fresh start. Together, Chloe and I will find a new favorite coffee bar, a dry cleaner, a grocery store, and especially a happy day care center. I haven’t accumulated too much in Pittsburgh; other than the apartment, which shouldn’t be too hard to sell now that all the other units are taken, there really isn’t much to tie me there. My dad can visit of course, and soon Richard will be mobile again, back to his own house and his work. For the first time, I understand something like the sense of freedom Jake must have felt at walking away from everything—voluntarily—and starting over.

  I take my time heading back to the hotel, winding in and out of the streets of the West Village, scoping apartments, writing down the phone numbers of rental agencies, and taking notes on which sections to avoid. The phone rings in my bag. It’s Ruth.

  “Hey. Everything okay?”

  “Where are you? Didn’t you get our message? Can you believe it?”

  “What message?” I look down at my phone and see the tiny sealed envelope icon on the bottom of the screen. “I was in the basement all afternoon. No cell reception. I haven’t listened to it yet,” I tell her.

  “Big news. Fiona and your dad brought Chinese over to your apartment for lunch, you know, to keep Richard company, and when I dropped Chloe off there, they invited me to stay. So, we’re all sitting around eating, and Carlos and Chloe are playing on the floor, and suddenly Chloe pulls herself up on the coffee table, grabs a fortune cookie, and walks back over to Carlos. She took like, five steps all by herself, until she noticed we were all staring, at which point she fell down, crushed the fortune cookie, and started crying. But hey, she’s officially taken her first steps! Go, Chloe!”

  I stop short in the middle of Christopher Street, stunned. Chloe had taken her first unaided steps, and I had missed them. I’d worried about her being late to walk, had trekked untold miles with my fingers caught in her tightfisted embrace. But whenever she sensed I’d been about to disengage myself, she’d tightened her grasp, pulling me closer, lower, nearer to her. Now she’s done it. And I missed it.

  I can picture them all sitting in my living room watching her. Did Chloe look around for me? Did she wonder where I am?

  “Oh, shit,” Ruth finally says. “Mira, I’m so sorry. We called you right away and left a message. I can’t believe I’ve been so insensitive,” she sighs. “I guess it’s just that I’ve had to reconcile myself to the fact that Carlos sat up and rolled over and got his first tooth before I adopted him, and maybe I’ve conditioned myself into believing it’s not that big a deal. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset—”

  “No, no, it’s okay. Go, Chloe! Plus, I love the fact that she was going after a fortune cookie,” I tell her, but my voice breaks, and I know Ruth is not convinced. Neither of us is.

  “Okay, no more walking until you get home. I will glue her booties to the floor if I have to,” Ruth says.

  I hang up and then listen to the message, which is from all of them—Fiona, Richard, my dad, Ruth, Carlos screeching in the background. Richard tells me not to worry, he’s managed to capture it on video with his phone. Fiona adds that she’s going to buy Chloe her first pair of dancing shoes, and I can tell from her breathless voice and Chloe’s muffled giggles that she’s dancing with her around the apartment. Then, she presses the phone to Chloe’s ear
and says, “Tell Mama hello,” and Chloe, expecting to hear my voice, coos expectantly into the other end. Poor Chloe, who will now have to get used to my not being there for ballet recitals, school plays, orthodontist appointments, and teacher conferences because I’m too busy managing my restaurant empire.

  I’m not due at Grappa until eight, so on my way back to the hotel I stop at the grocery store and buy a half bottle of wine. I intend to soak away the afternoon of grime I’ve accumulated, not to mention the heaps of maternal guilt, while sipping a glass of wine in the tub. I’m also hoping it will relax me. I’m nervous about tonight. Not just about being alone with Jake, but about being at Grappa. I haven’t set foot in there since Jerry escorted me out the back door and drove me to the courthouse to turn myself in. I wonder if it’s possible to have some sort of post-traumatic stress reaction the instant I set foot in the place. What if I start foaming at the mouth or writhing in psychic agony?

  I take a deep breath and swallow, remembering all at once something that Dr. D-P told me early on in our therapy. It was after I first saw the blurb in Bon Appétit about Il Vinaio, and Dr. D-P had coached me through the exercise in the bathroom mirror. At our next session, she’d suggested that whenever I found myself in a tight spot emotionally, I should try to consider myself “an anthropologist on Mars.”

  “A what?” I’d asked her.

  “An anthropologist is a person—”