Garlic and Sapphires (2 page)

“You can't be serious,” I say.

She nods her blond head vigorously, and the lank hair whips across her face. As she shoves it out of her eyes I notice that she is wearing a sparkly little bracelet that spells out “Jackie” in rhinestones, that her nails are covered with chipped purple polish, and that her muscled arms look as if they have carried a lifetime of heavy trays. “I am. The place I work isn't the world's best restaurant, but the boss has a standing offer of five hundred bucks to anyone who spots you. Forget anonymity. A good review from the
New York Times
is worth thousands.” She considers for a few seconds. “Could be millions.”

“But it's only June! It's three months till I even start the job.” I am truly stunned.

“I know,” she says, wagging one of those purple fingers in my face, “but if your first review's in September you've got to be eating somewhere now, don't you?” There's a certain triumph in her voice as she adds, “You see, there's not much we don't know about you.”

“What do you know?” This comes out a little more nervously than I'd like.

“Oh,” she says breezily, “ask me anything. You'll see.”

“Am I married?”

“Please,” she scoffs, “ask me something harder than that. Your husband's name is Michael Singer, he's a producer at CBS, and he does mostly investigative work. I know he won a Peabody Award last year for something he did on the Mafia and the recording industry.”

“How could you know that?” I ask.

“I told you,” she says, “we've been studying you. We all have. Didn't I say we were on the lookout for you? No critic eats alone, so that means watching for him too. Not to mention your kid. He's about four—”

“Four and a half,” I say, the response so automatic that it is out before I realize that I ought to be feeding her misinformation, not filling her in.

“At least I know you're alone on this trip,” she says a little too smugly. “That's useful.”

“They could be joining me later,” I point out.

“They could . . .” she says, considering. Then she cocks her head to one side and says, “Nah, I'd guess not. Guys don't have any patience, and in my experience it's always the woman who has to travel with the children. If Michael were coming, you'd have the kid.”

“What are you,” I ask, “Mickey Spillane?”

“In this business,” she confides, “it pays to keep your eyes open. You'd be surprised how much you can figure out about people after they've been sitting at your table for a couple of hours. It makes the job more fun. This is how I figure it: You're on your way to New York to do a little restaurant research. And maybe look for an apartment?” Her eyes meet mine as she says this, and they light up.

“Gotcha!” she says. “You are!”

I'm also looking for a nursery school for Nick, but I manage not to blurt this out. When I don't reply, my new friend examines my tray to see if it contains anything else she might desire. She seems to be waging an inner skirmish over the ice cream bar that now sits there, forlorn and alone. But she abandons the struggle to say smugly, “Well, don't think one of those big hats is going to protect you.” She studies my face, as if memorizing it, her eyes slowly moving from the long, tangled brown curls, past my thick bushy eyebrows and slightly tilted brown eyes to take in my pale skin and large mouth. At last she produces a bumptious New York smile and adds, “You're going to find that being our critic is very different from being the restaurant critic of the
L.A. Times.
We're not so easy to fool.”

“I can see that,” I say sincerely. In the fifteen years I've been a restaurant critic in San Francisco and Los Angeles, nobody has ever bothered to study me before. This woman knows a scary lot about me: I wouldn't be surprised if she knows that the
New York Times
is going to pay me $82,000 a year (a cut from what I've been making in Los Angeles), or even that CBS has been very good about letting Michael move to the New York bureau. Knowing that my personal life is now public makes me so nervous that I try to change the subject. “Please,” I say, holding out my ice cream, “take this. I need to save my appetite for dinner.”

She accepts. “No wonder you're so thin,” she says. Peeling off the paper wrapper, she looks at the ice cream before taking a bite. Mouth full, she adds, “This isn't bad. But I'd much rather have the name of the restaurant you're going to tonight. It's worth a lot of money, and I could certainly use it.”

“Not a chance,” I reply, and turn to stare at the clouds floating outside the window like great billows of Marshmallow Fluff.

“You've finished everything!” says the flight attendant when she picks up the trays. She seems genuinely surprised.

I smile up at her. “This was an educational lunch.”

“Oh,” she says, looking slightly bewildered, “I'm glad.” Piling the trays onto her cart, she adds, “People don't usually say that.” Then she pushes off quickly, as if she's afraid that I will attempt to engage in further discussion of the food.

But food is the farthest thing from my mind: I am considering my next plan of action. One of the primary requisites of a good restaurant critic is the ability to be anonymous. Clearly I am going to have to do something. But what?

Flying east, it takes four and a half hours to go from LAX to JFK. It is just long enough. By the time we land I have figured the whole thing out.

Backstory

T
his is Warren Hoge,” announced a self-satisfied voice when I picked up the phone, “assistant managing editor of the
New York Times.
” He proclaimed it proudly, as if faint trumpets were sounding off in the background.

“Yes?” I said, hoping my tone conveyed more interest than I was actually feeling. It was two months before that fateful trip to New York, and I was staring across the sad, low landscape of downtown Los Angeles, wondering how to make Easter more exciting. Holidays are a restaurant critic's nightmare, and this one, with its perennially boring brunches featuring ham or lamb, is particularly gruesome. The copy I had just produced was deadly.

“I suppose you've heard that our restaurant critic, Bryan Miller, has decided to leave the job?” the voice continued. This bland assurance that the eyes of the entire world were focused on Times Square was so irritating that I lied. “No,” I said, “I hadn't heard that.”

The voice ignored this. “I was thinking,” it continued smoothly, “that it can't be much fun for you, being a restaurant critic in the middle of a recession . . .” I dropped Easter; he had captured my attention.

The eighties hit Los Angeles like the month of March: they came roaring in, then tiptoed sheepishly out as the money stopped and the good times ended. It all happened so fast: First the aerospace industry shut its doors and the city slumped into depression. Then the cops beat Rodney King on the nightly news, exposing the racism that had been hiding behind the prosperity. The anger simmering just below the surface erupted into a furious boil. Riots were followed by floods and then fires, which spilled out across the city in an almost biblical manner. When the tide of disasters finally receded, the city it left behind was thin, brittle, dangerous, and poor.

The very rich retreated into their golden communities—into Bel Air, the Palisades, and Beverly Hills—locking the gates behind them. The valleys on the far side of the mountains swelled with fleeing people. Those of us left in Los Angeles huddled in our houses, haunted by memories of snipers shooting from freeway overpasses, looters setting fires that came creeping inexorably into our neighborhoods, contorted faces throwing rocks. Staying home seemed the safest option, and the great Los Angeles restaurant boom came screeching to a halt.

“New York is the center of the American restaurant world.” The man's sinuous voice wormed its way into my ear and I imagined him holding out an enormous, bright red apple.

I was not about to bite. “I have a job, thank you,” I said crisply. “I love working at the
Los Angeles Times.
I'm not looking to move.”

 

 

 

 

 

B
ut he wouldn't take no for an answer,” I told my husband when I got home. “When I told him I was going to be in New York in a couple of weeks for the James Beard Awards, he made me agree to meet him for coffee.”

“I'd love to leave L.A.,” Michael said wistfully.

“Don't even think about it,” I warned him. “It's not an interview. It's just coffee. I'll only be there fifteen minutes. I can't resist the chance to see the
Times
offices, but I have no interest in working there.”

“Of course not,” said Michael. “Why on earth would you want to work at the best paper in the world?”

 

 

 

 

 

F
or the next two weeks Michael issued nightly bulletins about the
New York Times
and its search for a new critic. He refused to tell me where he was getting his information, but he seemed to know everything. The paper, he said, had offered the job to Molly O'Neill, who did not want it. “Apparently,” Michael said, “she has a weight problem.” Bryan Miller was pushing one of his friends as a replacement, and the editors were being inundated by calls from critics all over the country. Michael, nevertheless, was convinced that the job was mine.

“They haven't even offered it to me,” I kept telling him.

“They will,” he said loyally. “You're the best critic in the country.” It's comforting when the people you love believe in you, but his confidence also unnerved me. When I was honest with myself, I saw that I was terrified of going to work at the
New York Times.

“There are lots of good critics out there,” I told him.

“Not like you,” he said steadfastly. “The job's yours for the taking.”

He was still repeating this mantra when I left for the airport. “Be nice when you meet Warren Hoge,” he urged.

“Mommy's always nice,” said Nicky with the uncritical devotion of a four-year-old.

Michael picked him up and cradled him in his arms. “Wouldn't you like to live in New York?” he asked.

“No,” said Nicky.

I gave him a kiss, nuzzling the soft skin of his neck. “I'm just going for coffee,” I murmured, breathing in his sweet baby smell.

“Right,” said Michael, closing the door.

B
ut I landed in New York to find the weather itself conspiring against me. It was one of those magical Manhattan springs; fresh winds were blowing gently across the island so that each time I inhaled, I breathed in the faint salt smell of the ocean. Daffodils and tulips nodded from every corner; lilacs and apple blossoms danced through the parks. On the avenues tables and chairs edged slyly onto sidewalks, promising summer. The sun poured from the sky like honey, and people threw back their heads and drank it in.

At Tiffany's the windows were filled with eggshells, cracked open, spilling diamonds. Customers strolled through fancy food stores collecting wild strawberries imported from France, Japanese beef bred on beer, hand-churned cream from grass-fed cows, and caviar by the pint. The restaurants were packed with handsome people begging for tables, and great crowds jockeyed in the museums, trying to get a better view. Marble buildings once black with soot had been polished to a shine, and the statues all over town were newly gilded. Alone in New York, I wandered the streets and allowed the city to seduce me.

 

 

 

 

 

I
made my way back to the hotel, thinking that life in New York might not be so bad. Then a sharp female voice jerked me back to reality. “This is Carol Shaw,” said the woman on the phone. “I'm calling to

“This is Carol Shaw,” said the woman on the phone. “I'm calling to give you your schedule at the
New York Times.
”

“Schedule?” I asked. “What schedule? I'm supposed to meet Warren Hoge for coffee at three.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice softening slightly, “you haven't heard.”

“Heard? Heard what?”

“About Warren,” she said. And now her voice dropped to a whisper. “He's in the hospital.”

“I hope it's not serious?” I said. “I guess we'll have to meet some other time.”

“But we were hoping you'd go see him tomorrow!” she cried. “We've planned your whole day!”

“Excuse me?”

“You start by visiting Warren at New York Hospital at nine. Then we have set up appointments for you with—” she started ticking off names. “And finally,” she continued, “you'll go to the five o'clock editorial meeting and end the day in private session with the editor, Max Frankel, and the managing editor, Joe Lelyveld.”