Vintage Attraction (12 page)

I'd hoped we could spend a few days together, but Izzy
returned
to work the next morning, and the mornings following. There were tastings to lead and talks to give. There were private dinners to host and fans to greet at the bistro. As though that weren't enough to keep her busy, she had episodes of
Vintage Attraction
to film
.
The most arduous show she described to me was a three-part series on serving wine at parties. It covered how to open a bottle of Champagne without blinding your friends. “Use a towel and rotate the bottle, not the cork,” she said. One guest wanted to know what wine to pair with heat-and-serve Costco hors d'oeuvres. Izzy's It-Tip: pour a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, the crisp acidity of which does wonders to mask the freezer burn that attends the reconstituted Bagel Bite. She also gave suggestions about how to keep tarrying party guests from sneaking into your stash after everyone else has left and availing themselves of prized bottles. “As soon as you decide a vintage should be saved rather than drunk, open it immediately.” In lieu of that, hide collectibles among the empties, where no guest would ever look. Just be careful to check the capsules before making a trip to the recycle bin. I was glad for the stories. It was heartening to see her industrious. It was also lonely without her around. Izzy often didn't return to the loft until well after midnight. I had conversations with Ishiguro while I graded papers. He and I ordered a lot of pizza.

One night I arrived home to find digital music playing on the television. Izzy was in the kitchen. She diced tomatoes on a white IKEA cutting board. When I entered the alcove, she kissed me without stopping what she was doing with her hands.

“No bistro?” I asked.

“No,” she said. She sounded rather pleased. “I actually get a night off. How about that?”

“That's excellent,” I said. I scanned the cupboard. “Do you want a glass of wine? There's a Cabernet.”

Izzy touched the bottle and clamped her lips together.

“I could put it in the freezer.” Chilling a room-temperature bottle down to cellar degrees was a trick of hers. This heightened the fruit and softened the alcohol burn, which was always sharper when wine was warm, like with vodka.

She pointed at the refrigerator. “Get the Albariño back there. That would work. We're having paella. I don't want any yet, though.”

I opened the door and retrieved the bottle. Izzy was cleaning shrimp, deep in a cooking trance. She said nothing when I poured myself a glass or when I left for the couch to laze with Ishiguro.

Even though a part of me really wanted to know, I purposely didn't ask what had happened in Carbondale, what old haunts Izzy had reconnoitered, or whom she'd seen, or what she'd done. Aside from what there was to interpolate from the footage recorded at the wine festival that would end up in a package on an episode of a cable-access TV show I'd someday watch, I'd never find out how the going back into her past and the returning to the current life she'd built from the ashes in Chicago had affected her.
I
didn't need to know. Her resurfacing—not to mention the sex with which we toasted it—seemed to suggest she was ready to begin our marriage, this new life of ours. Plus, what reason would I have yet had to think any ghosts she'd have worked to elude could provoke her from anywhere but three-hundred-thirty-three miles away? As for my own erstwhile provocations, the presence of a self-collected, affectionate, dinner-preparing Izzy made me feel even guiltier about having flirted with disaster in her absence. I didn't want to dwell on my own brief devolutive foray. There was as little sense in my dredging it up as in Izzy's. And I'd have been happy to forget the entire meeting with Talia had even taken place. Unfortunately, she was still very much in mind of it. When Joe Walsh began strumming,
ba bah ba ba baah
, the sound, as if a watch alarm, reminded me to take the note I'd found in my mailbox at school out of my back pocket.

Now Izzy added Valencia rice to the paella pan roiling on the range. She reduced the heat and arranged the prepared shrimp and clams from her
mise en place
. It was doubtful she would be able to see what I was reading from across the room. To err on the side of caution, I flattened the paper and arranged it between two pages of
Wine Spectator
ads for temperature-controlled cellars I could have installed in my basement or in the galley of my yacht. Then Izzy peered into the oven to check on the gilding of the apple tart she'd made from scratch, crust and all. Her back was to me. I read the note's text quickly. Then I folded the document back up again.

The words circled my brain involuntarily.
I can't go back to Iowa yet . . . everything seems heavy now . . . caused me to question the relationships I've had with men over the past few years . . . so what are we supposed to do? Reminisce the good old days and meet for wine again . . . or
what?

To begin to determine the “
or what?
” required me to remember everything I could about our brief dalliance. She'd been my student, my beautiful student with the wild hair. She was always dyeing it. The shades often matched the color of the paper onto which she had Charles Wilcox in the department office mimeograph her draft copies when it was her turn to present work to the group. While the rest of the class packed up their bags and filtered out of the room at the afternoon's end, she'd stay behind to talk. We could converse effortlessly. Sometimes she followed me back to the office. All of this was, outwardly, very innocuous. For a time, I diligently tried to keep her off my libidinous radar. Our relationship could have been easily explained then. That changed when I started coming to her off-campus apartment, and she to mine.

“Dinner's almost ready,” Izzy called out. “Want to set the table?”

I arranged the plates and knives and forks and water goblets and wine stems in two adjacent places on our screw-it-together-yourself (yet fashionably expensive) dinette. I was still thinking about Talia. In those months we were sleeping together, she would show up at my apartment at night. Wordlessly, she'd walk the length of my junior one-bedroom after closing the front door. She shed her clothes as she went. By the time she reached the green IKEA pullout couch or the bedroom and my squeaky mattress, she was naked. We'd share a joint after sex. I felt the situation warranted breaking the landlord's no-smoking-indoors policy. Mostly because of Talia's urging, I was moving out of the place I'd stubbornly occupied for close to a decade at the end of the semester. Then we were starving and plotting the procurement of dinner. We usually ordered cheeseless pizza from Domino's. If the mood struck, we'd get dressed and take off in my Mustang and have pancakes at the Golden Nugget. There were the boxes of pasta and packets of instant risotto she brought and affectionately heated. Once, she announced she wanted to
make
something—for me. Wary, but resigned to indulge her, I drove to the Dominick's. She picked out strange ingredients I couldn't even recognize. These were things I wouldn't have had any idea how to incorporate into a dish. I pushed the cart and said nothing. I paid for everything. We went back to my place. I carried the groceries upstairs. There she set about a long, spiraling cooking process. It ended up accomplishing pretty much everything except producing a meal. She cursed and sputtered and clanged from the start, only to give up halfway through. She claimed that the recipe she was using was faulty, and blamed the mishaps—a scalded onion, an overly salty sauce, a tripped smoke detector—on my dorm room appliances and Salvation Army dollar pots. I was left to clean everything up. She went to sit on the porch in one of my rusty beach chairs and sulked and smoked cigarettes and listened to indie rock songs on her giant white iPod. All the wasted expensive gourmet products, the produce, the organic proteins in the garbage bin made me furious. By the time I finished getting my small, inefficient kitchen back in order, seething and muttering pronouncements to myself, I was ready to throw her out. Of course then, at almost precisely the same moment I was riled enough to give her “the talk,” she came in from outside, a blue-gray cloud of Camel Light smoke trailing. She looked even more beautiful than before she'd left, with these big, mournful eyes, and all this multicolored hair, and this ghostly pale skin. She came over to me. We started kissing. All I could think about was how much I never wanted her to leave, never wanted to find myself in this apartment alone, never ever again. We kissed some more. She started to take off her clothes. Then gone were my own. We lay down, in the living room on the carpeted floor. I inserted myself, gradually and suddenly, my cock jumping the Brazilian waxed turnstile, and plunged into the subway. There, I pommeled away for as long as I possibly could. Always after the detonation I felt embarrassed that I couldn't have made it for another ten or fifteen minutes, but the profusion of sensation brought on by having my unadorned dick devoured by her relatively pristine nougat was just too much. Just too much. A porn star I was not. She smiled though, and swiped sweat from her brow, as if to say,
You're not so bad
. Before she got dressed and back into her red Jetta, she sparked another joint from my stash. I didn't object. When she was gone, I crashed into the bedroom and squeaked my way onto the unmade bed, still vaguely redolent of our fucking the night before, exhausted, delirious, and appreciative.

“This looks good,” I said. I took my seat across the dinette from my wife, a person who mere months ago was only a recognizable face on a popular television program to me.

“Sorry it took so long,” Izzy said. She removed an empty mussel shell from her bowl, but wasn't eating.

“Rough day?”

She swirled her Albariño. “You could say that.”

I played tag with saffron-tinted rice grains. It was a rare opportunity to eat without Ishiguro's scheming and cajoling for an edible fragment. He snoozed blissfully on the couch. But when Izzy's BlackBerry began convulsing and chirping on the table, he awoke right away, sat up, and stared at us. Izzy inspected the display and read a text message. “I have to go out later,” she said. She looked crushed.

“Why?”

“Put in an appearance at a dinner Chef Dominique's doing.”

“Where?”

She returned to the screen. “The Peninsula.”

“How are you going to get there?”

She seemed taken aback for a moment. “I don't know . . . I mean, I'd hoped you'd drive me, but I guess I could take a cab or whatever.”

“Izzy,” I said. “Of course I'll drive you. But that's not the point. Why does he think he can just drag you out whenever he wants? You haven't had a night off since the wedding. Whatever happened to downtime? Peace, relaxation, and the rest?”

She pointed at the ceiling. Scott and Sheryl had begun arguing. The latter was already in Sicilian hysterics. “Hardly what I'd consider relaxing.”

“So, you want me to get the car keys?” I looked with regret at our interrupted meal. After all of that intricate prep work, she'd barely had three bites of the finished product. My cultural DNA hated to see it go to waste. I could always microwave and eat the paella leftovers with the pug while Izzy was gone.

“Yeah, fine,” she said. “I'll put away Ishiguro.”

At the sound of his name, the dog jumped off the couch. He came over with a perplexed look on his face that didn't understand why someone was planning to go out at this late hour.

“Okay,” I said.

“Stop pouting,” she said.

“I wasn't pouting.”

“Yes, you were. If it's such a big deal for you to take me, I'll get a taxi.”

“That's crazy. It would cost you like forty dollars from here.”

She scoffed. “It would not.” She took her wallet from the breakfast bar. I watched her count a ten and a number of singles.

“Twenty?”

In a smaller voice, she said, “Maybe twenty.” The pug looked up at her incredulously.

“That's a lot of money so you can stay there ten minutes and then turn around and come right back.”

She pushed one of the empty dinette chairs, nearly knocking it over. “I haven't decided how long I'm going to stay.”

“I want to talk to him. I've had enough of this. I'm your husband. It's not like he's just taking you away from some . . . some boyfriend.”

“I don't want you talking to him. You'll just piss him off and then . . . then there'll be no bookings, and no money to pay for this mortgage or fill that kitchen with food.”

“You'd get more bookings without him.”

“Do you have to disagree with me about everything?”

“I don't disagree with you about everything.”

“See what I mean?”

“Izzy, I may not be able to earn what it takes to keep this household running, but you have a family, a life outside the restaurant and appearances now, and the mighty and powerful Chef Dominique needs to learn to respect that.”

It was several long moments before she spoke again. Finally, she said, “It is really infuriating when you fight me on these things. You don't know what I have to do. You don't know what goes on.”

“You're right, I don't, because you don't tell me. Tell me what I don't understand.”

“You don't know how much bullshit goes into getting these clients. Tonight he's arranging some more speaking work for me. The National School Boards Association is coming to town next month, then the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show, and the Green Party is having their national convention in Chicago in July . . .”

“The Green Party,” I said. The image of a wine tasting amidst the nomination of a candidate for president staunched my melancholy. I found a smile returning to my face.

She laughed. “I know. The funny part is that it makes more sense than at the kitchen and bath thing. What am I supposed to do? Pour wine samples from a tub?”