Bread and Butter (17 page)

“It did, a little,” she said. “But not now.”

THEY WERE STILL DINING
while a number of other tables appeared, dined, and departed, which solved the question of whether this chef knew that Britt was a fellow industry person. Not that the man ever directly acknowledged it. During a tiny slurp of fresh oyster, a meaty, rosy octopus slice, and a selection of different fish that at first looked the same but were revealed to have an array of subtle but absolutely clear differences, they watched the chef, who somehow seemed to accomplish a great deal without moving a lot. Britt waited for the telltale glance out among the tables, a natural scan to see how full the place was, what more might be needed as the night progressed, but this never occurred
. T
he chef’s silvery eyes stayed on his workstation until he placed a dish before someone with a brief, formal nod.

They were finally reaching the high point, the toro itself, and were on a third glass of sake
. W
hy didn’t Britt live on raw fish every day of his life? At least on every date. It was lightening and energizing; he could have gone for a run. He could have lifted Camille, who was nearly as tall as he was, without even trying.

“So who would you be having dinner with if not with me?” he asked.

Camille smiled. “On a Sunday? Probably my friends. You’ve seen them at the restaurant. Or one of an array of impressionable young men I keep in a stable. Or I’d be cooking something wonderful for myself and not sharing.”

“Are you a good cook?” He had always pegged her for a noncook. She seemed to dine out too frequently for someone who enjoyed cooking.

“I am,” she said. “But I’m greedy. I used to live with a guy who liked pasta with littlenecks, but not as much as I did. And they’re expensive, you know. So I always made linguine with clams when he was out of town, but with the same amount of clams as if I were cooking for two.”

Britt laughed. “That
is
greedy.” She shrugged, smiling. “Where’d the guy travel to?”

“He went overseas a lot. He was in computers. For a while he did a lot in developing countries, trying to get things up and running.”

Wonderful. The only thing that would have made Britt look worse in comparison would have been Doctors Without Borders.

“I wasn’t going to ask you about your work,” he said, “except that I really do want to know.”

She cast a sideways glance at him. “I love my work,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I want to talk about it?”

Britt colored. “Because it’s the same thing you get asked on every date, I imagine.”

“True.” She took a swallow of sake, then shifted in her chair to face him. “But that’s the game, isn’t it? It’s why we’re here.”

“Okay. Let’s play the game. Tell me how you ended up here. The city, I mean, not dinner. We grew up here, so I never stood a chance, but you’re from somewhere else.” Britt often presented himself as a hometown boy, though he did not view himself this way and would have been insulted if anyone else really did. He had spent time in other cities; he’d traveled. He believed he had simply ended up here as a matter of chance.

“I grew up outside Philadelphia,” she said. He noticed that she did not ask him why he knew she was not a local. “I spent some time in New York, worked in a few restaurants, worked as an assistant to a restaurant consultant—that was how I got into this. I couldn’t handle the restaurant hours, to be honest. Once I got a taste of having my nights and weekends off, I couldn’t go back.”

“That
is
the problem
. Y
ou have to love the craziness more than you hate the hours.”

“You obviously do,” she said. “Right? Tell me now if you actually detest your job and your life
. T
ell me why you opened a place in Linden and not in a bigger city.”

“Leo asked me
. T
hat was where he was opening a place already. For a long time I was just doing the job where the job was. But I started to feel like there was a real point to this, to showing that you can live well here. I feel like we’re part of the reason. I guess if you want to live on thirty acres of woods, this’ll never be good living for you. But you know, if you want the amenities of a bigger city with a little less bull, Linden might be that one day
. A
nd I’m not trying to provide a restaurant that’s okay for Linden—I want to run an objectively great restaurant.” Britt paused, surprised to find himself declaiming at such length. He didn’t know if he had ever quite articulated his feelings this way, but it felt very true.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “I came out here as a commuter, just trying not to go bankrupt on real estate, but I like how it’s starting to change. It’s as if you can feel the ground shifting.”

The chef set out two square white dishes in his prep space, nodded at them, and disappeared behind a door. Camille uncrossed her legs and leaned forward on the bar, resting on her forearms. Her hair draped over her collarbones, her smooth shoulder peeking through. Britt reached over and hooked a skein of her hair in one finger, lifted it, and let it fall behind her back. She glanced down at his hand, as did he. He hadn’t planned the gesture. He only wanted to see her clearly. For a moment they looked at each other, and then Camille smiled quickly, as if filing it away.

The chef reappeared, carrying a piece of pale fish. The other tuna they’d been served had been dark and richly colored, a gleaming garnet so firm it barely drooped when lifted between their chopsticks. But this was completely different. The chef’s posture had even changed slightly; he held the plate a touch farther from his body than he had done before, his chin lifted just slightly. He turned toward the back of his workspace and brought out a fresh knife. When he began to slice the fish, it quivered as it parted for the blade. Its paleness wasn’t the translucence of the raw hake or flounder; it was pale the way foie gras is pale, a saturated richness. Britt wondered if anything else would go on the plate at all.

Camille said, “Harry told me about a place in Japan his friends went to, where they sat by a window beside a little park. And once they’d ordered, the restaurant let kittens loose outside the window, to play for the guests’ amusement.”

Britt laughed. It was exactly the sort of detail Harry managed to pick up. “I’m lucky he hasn’t ordered a gross of kittens to play in King Street. So, listen. How’d you start coming to Winesap?”

“I let the clients choose. They like Winesap, and Hot Springs, and that old-school pasta place. Berlucci’s.”

“I’m sorry,” Britt said. “You shouldn’t have to eat at that place. They parboil all their pasta and then finish it in the microwave.”

Camille looked dejected. “I figured it was something depressing like that.”

“What d’you think of Hot Springs? We’ve known the owners for years, in a grudge-match kind of way.”

“The desserts are very good,” she said, “but sometimes Barbara scares the crap out of me.”

The chef now approached them with a plate in each hand, then placed the plates before them with an air of grave finality. Britt gazed down at the white plate and the unadorned pink fish centered upon it, feeling both excited at the climax of the meal and regretful that this was all ending. He remembered Harry calling the toro sea heroin, and looked up into the chef’s lupine eyes with a faint chill of apprehension. Certainly he was about to taste something he might not taste again. That was the problem with such a place: once you’d had toro like this, fish like this, you developed a taste beyond your means.

“This looks amazing,” Britt told him, “but now I’m sorry we’re almost done.”

The chef nodded, lifting one shoulder in acknowledgment. His expression suggested faint sympathy for the plight of two people about to taste an elusive and expensive form of glory, as well as a certain brusque acknowledgment that life ends, meals end; get over it.

They stopped speaking as they took the first bite. In Britt’s mouth the rich fat melted almost instantly, as if the protein had been netted together only by prayer or memory. They barely chewed; they merely let the fish disappear.

After a moment, Camille murmured, “You could eat this through a straw.”

Neither said another word until their plates were empty. As they ate, they watched the chef return to the fish, wrap it smoothly in plastic once more, and disappear behind the door again, carrying the knife he’d used to slice it.

“I bet he never uses the same toro knife twice,” Britt said. “He’s probably burying that.”

Camille was looking around the empty restaurant. “I don’t think anyone else was served that fish,” she said. “Did you see it before?”

Britt felt a faint glow of pleasure. It wasn’t pride so much as gratitude—maybe this guy had his own reasons for bestowing such a thing on certain people; maybe he had no idea Britt was in the restaurant business and simply liked the look of him.

A moment later, he thought about this again and almost laughed. So this was how the customer felt, how easily this was accomplished. He’d known it, of course, but he’d forgotten how effective it was to be on the receiving end of such treatment. And what treatment: the privilege of being served an extravagantly expensive meal, for which they would pay, of course, honored to be thought capable of it. Britt figured he could learn a thing or two from this silent chef.

They declined anything further. What were they going to do, follow up that heavenly, obscenely precious finale with some green tea ice cream? Even though it was probably delicious.

He was waiting for the check, inwardly dreading it now that the distraction of the food had ended, when a server set a wooden plate before Camille, on it a credit card receipt anchored with a polished stone. “Oh, you didn’t,” he said.

“Of course I did—I’m the one who asked you,” she replied, signing it. “Britt
. Y
ou should know this trick.”

“I forgot it,” he said wonderingly. How could he have forgotten? But he was also thinking that this was the first time he’d heard her say his name
. T
he sound of it in her voice was a dull hot thud to the chest, as if he’d been eyeing her, unseen, from a distance and she’d suddenly met his gaze, having been aware of him all along.

L
EO WAS EARLY. HE CIRCLED
the block several times instead of ringing the doorbell before eight and was rewarded by a lengthy, suspicious look from a guy out shoveling his driveway as Leo passed him for the third time.

Eventually he pulled into the driveway, where he hadn’t been for years, not since the grand pig feast Thea had hosted when she was still married to Bryan
. T
he light was on in her kitchen and he could see her moving back and forth before the window, putting dishes on shelves and closing cabinet doors.

He had asked her only last night, presenting it as a professional outing to check on Stray’s friends-and-family night, to support their coworker and his brother, and to extend a hand to Harry as well. He’d oversold it a bit
. T
hey’d been upstairs at the restaurant, finished with the dinner shift, Thea back in her civilian clothes, tired and shiny-faced while downstairs the last shift of servers began straightening the dining room.

The night they’d seen each other at Mack’s, Leo had walked her out to her car and stood beside it, one palm flat on the hood, while she threw her purse into the passenger seat and turned back to him, her pale face lit with expectance and uncertainty
. T
hey’d felt like old friends and also like people on a first date, some strange blend of both.

He’d found himself more at ease than he’d ever been in Thea’s somewhat taciturn presence
. W
hen Thea had appeared in the entrance at Mack’s, looking startled by the thud of the door she’d just pushed open, her scuffed boots planted far apart as she’d surveyed the room, he’d known this was the last place she wanted to be. He was touched, because she was there because of the job, which was at least partially because of him.

As they’d finished their drinks and eaten their eggs and walked out into the crisp night air, Leo had felt the darkness of the past few weeks lift
. T
he fretfulness and the unfocused discord that had infected every aspect of his day were just gone, soaked up by bourbon and a meal and by Thea’s obvious pleasure at being cooked for and catered to
. A
lone with her in the kitchen, he had felt reckless and lighthearted, as if nothing he did could fail.

But by the time he’d walked her to her car, he’d come down a bit—they were back out in the quiet familiar neighborhood, the night was over, and they’d return in the morning, the spell broken, and have to work together again. So he just smiled and stepped back so she could close her car door.

The next day he’d braced himself for Thea to be dour and puffy from a night too late and too relaxed. Maybe he even wanted her to be less attractive in the morning, for all evening long, he’d wondered why he’d never noticed Thea’s essential prettiness, the delicacy of her mouth and the fine point of her nose, the mink-brown tips of her un-made-up lashes, and it would certainly be easier if he had just been tipsy. But the next day she wore her hair in a bun that showed the tender hollows behind her ears, the arch beneath her cheekbones
. A
t staff meal he’d strained to hear her voice at the other end of the table, and when he went into the kitchen to get more coffee, he’d caught a glimpse of her demonstrating some filleting technique with a branzino for Suzanne and Jason, one hand resting on the silver skin of the fish while the other guided a thin, sharp, glinting knife along the spine, all grace and mastery.

At first he was determined to enjoy a harmless imaginary interlude. He’d seen owners have affairs with the staff in restaurant after restaurant. How many uncomfortable dinner services did a person need to sit through to accept the lesson, how many scrambling, understaffed nights when someone walked out after a breakup? But he also thought about the many couples who opened a place together and made a life of this.

Then last night Thea had changed out of her chef’s coat and into a sweater he would certainly remember if he’d seen it before, thin and dove-colored, wrapping snugly around her body and showing her long, narrow waist and the wings of her collarbones, and Leo thought perhaps he could have it both ways
. T
hey could go out in such an open and businesslike manner that really it was not a date at all—they could date without anyone noticing, maybe not even her.

Thea opened her front door and waved him in, her face startlingly composed and untouchable with its newly red mouth and eyes shadowed with makeup, her cheeks a matte pale pink. She said goodbye to her babysitter and tucked a hand in his arm as they headed down the icy walk to his car, and Leo reminded himself that the evening would be entirely beyond reproach, as long as he remembered not to say or do any of the things he desired.

HARRY HADN’T REALIZED HOW EARLY
this city liked to dine. He and his staff had invited friends and family for any time between seven and ten, hoping for a natural spacing, but people crushed in at 7:10 and started ordering.

At first he’d managed to look over his shoulder here and there. He saw his parents seated at the bar, watching him raptly and waving each time he turned, and he glimpsed the pale blur of Britt’s white shirt moving swiftly through the dining room among the scrum of people standing, sitting, talking across the narrow aisles
. T
hat was an unanticipated problem of a friends-and-family night; they all knew each other and kept trading bites and getting in the servers’ way. People were tilting their heads back, or they had been, when he’d last been able to look, to gaze at the massive mirror or the sprays of silvered branches fanning out of pale blue-gray vases against the brick wall. Somehow it had all come together, visually at least, and the room was a mix of rustic and elegant, warm and cool, and Harry still wasn’t entirely sure how it had been managed. Mostly Britt had done it; he’d exchanged a terracotta vase for the sleek ones the color of chalcedony, the stemware for Moroccan painted bistro glasses, the white napkins for oatmeal ones, and the ferns for more birch branches, until the clusters looked as if they’d come from Norway or a fairy tale.

Harry was moving, moving; his feet barely shifted but he never stopped reaching, turning, poking and flipping and brushing at the pans on the range to his right. On the other side of the range was Jenelle, her hair flat with sweat against the back of her neck, her thick dark brows furrowed and her thin mouth set in a line of concentration as she worked, lifting a basket of crackling shrimp and herbs from the fryer and letting it drain while she reached for a plate with the other hand. Out of the corner of his eye Harry could admire the crisp herb sprigs, parsley splayed like a doll next to the gold and coral crescents of shrimp
. T
his batch looked good, but he’d been glancing over all night and he knew the shrimp kept changing color—she was pulling them out brown, pale yellow, all over the place; the temperature of her oil dropped when she had a crush of orders but then returned to the right one after a pause, and Jenelle, he could tell, kept forgetting to allow for it. She knew it too; she kept shaking her head in a sharp little twitch of recrimination. But this plate looked good, so Harry filed it away as he got a pan of olive oil heating to crisp the socca. On the range next to the socca pan was a wide sauté pan with four duck breasts—potatoes in the oven? Yes, he wasted precious time looking, but that was better than assuming—and then he helplessly watched a ticket print with yet more duck, his perfect self-saucing duck that Britt must have told everyone about because he’d already served ten of the goddamn things and it turned out it was murder remembering the last smear of mustard before the meat came off to rest; he had a bad feeling some had gone out without it, but there was nothing to do now but push through. Jenelle was plating the shrimp in a delicate little pyramid, plucking out the parsley and setting it near the top, scattering the plate with coarse salt and handing it back toward the server station, which was just the last section of the zinc bar nearest the dining room’s back wall (guests kept crowding into the space and servers kept charming their way through, smiles dropping the moment they reached for the plates). She was already reaching with the tongs in her other hand toward the metal plate sizzling with confit that was crisping in the salamander. Hector was in the back room, prepping while he waited for the first dessert orders
. T
hey should have started the night fully ready, mise en place arrayed in its bins and perfectly prepared, but it just hadn’t happened, and so Hector was back there amid a pile of produce, knife flashing and eyes flat as coins, a disconcerting faint smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

Harry reached up and blotted his forehead with an arm and kept moving. He couldn’t hear the music anymore, didn’t know if anyone could, but there was no time to worry about it anyway. Britt would have to deal with it; that was why he was here. Harry reached into the lowboy for a little oval stoneware dish filled with baccalà; it would go into the oven to heat and finish with a run under the salamander to brown it before it was plated with the socca and lightly dressed arugula
. A
lready he disliked the monochromatic look of it. It needed more than arugula, perhaps, some piquancy, but there was no time to do anything about that. He couldn’t think of what he would do later tonight or tomorrow
. W
hat was tomorrow? There was only right now, the varying stages of the dishes before him ticking forward in his head, the mental clicking punctuated by the occasional shout of laughter or his name (he waved wildly over his shoulder in the direction the voice had come from—no idea who it was) and here and there the faint sizzle of his forearm against the rim of a blazing sauté pan. He hadn’t cooked like this in months, he was out of shape, and already his hands and forearms were dotted with burns
. A
nother mistake: he should have found a way to do a stage or two to get back in fighting form, maybe at Winesap if Leo had allowed it, which was unlikely
. W
ho had time to do that anyway? He’d been here every day for twenty hours a day, and he still didn’t know what the fuck he’d been doing with it all, only that it hadn’t been enough, it still wasn’t enough, more remained to be done, and so he just put his head down and kept it all moving, rotating his proteins off the range and into the oven and under the salamander and back out again, spiking his tickets and talking to Jenelle in shorthand about tables and dishes and ordering and firing, until at some point the night would be done, doused like a flame, and he’d breathe.

BRITT WAS CIRCLING THE DINING ROOM,
eyeing the servers, peering into the kitchen, where Hector was now working at his little minirange to fry off the hot and cold beignets, to warm caramelized pears and dulce de leche. Hector slid a square of coconut lime napoleon neatly off his spatula and onto a plate
. T
he napoleon was the only dessert from Winesap that had ended up on the menu at Stray. Hector insisted that the recipe was his and therefore he had custody of the dessert wherever he chose to take it. Nevertheless, Britt wondered if Leo, when he finally showed, would order it just to make the point.

He kept looking at his watch and at the door, but Camille was not here yet either. Her time away from him seemed mysterious and tantalizing, all those hours in which she worked or read or drank tea, had dinner with her friends and was probably flirted with and cajoled by servers and movie-ticket-takers. Since their first date, they’d met for lunch and one evening walk; they’d embarked upon an ongoing series of funny and conversational e-mails and texts, but he had so little time between Winesap and preparing for tonight that things between them felt slightly tentative. She was unperturbed; as someone who’d worked in the food world, she knew exactly what these last few days had been like. But Britt felt hamstrung anyway. He didn’t want to be apologizing already for his lack of time; he didn’t want her to have to be understanding yet. He wanted to be out with her every night, drinking sake. He wanted her lounging around his house, or around her house, it didn’t matter—he wanted them in some private interior, famished and spent, surprised to find it was daylight once again. Instead they had a teenage makeout session cut short by a text summoning him back to one restaurant or another, and one frustrating, sandwichy lunch.

But this was it. After tomorrow, the restaurant was open. It wasn’t the last hurdle by any means, but it was a major one, and he believed some focus would now be possible, and this lent the night an additional thread of excitement. He planned to get her to stick around as they finished up the service tonight, take her home to a glass of red wine. He didn’t have a fireplace, but who cared? He could set fire to something.

At the server station he paused, shaking himself out of his reverie. They still hadn’t gotten around to replacing the griddle with an actual coffee-cup warmer, so he’d had to admonish the servers to keep the griddle on low so no one got burned. That was bad enough, but now he noticed that the shelves were too high as well. All the servers, except for one or two of the men who were as tall as Harry, were on tiptoe, swiping at the dishes and glasses. The shelves would all have to be rehung within reach of people of normal height instead of Harry’s height, and it would have to be done soon.

The servers all wore jeans and dark shoes. Harry had wanted to allow tennis shoes as long as they weren’t white, but Britt knew that would end up getting interpreted in some hideous way, try though they had to find waitstaff who wouldn’t even think of owning white running shoes instead of sleek little Pumas in taupe or dark gray or chocolate. It wasn’t worth the time it would take to describe it, so Britt just said dark shoes, no sneakers, and left it at that. (Actually, at first he’d specified leather, but Joshua’s hand had shot up so he could inquire, ready for a fight, about vegan shoes, and Britt had backed off, bored already.) In their black T-shirts and denim, their messy chignons and facial hair and those awful spacers widening the holes in their earlobes, they could have been clientele but for the black aprons knotted around their sleek midsections
. T
he bartender, Travis, was the one Britt was wondering about, getting steamy and red-faced from the heat of the range so close, losing precision and overpouring
. T
his negated the whole reason the servers weren’t pouring wine at the table—with the eyes of the guest on them, servers overpoured. It was human nature.