Vintage Attraction (20 page)

Chef Dominique stared at me until I had to look away.

“
Ecoutez
, Peter Hapworth,” he said, his voice carefully measured, “an unhappy sommelier is the last thing I want.”

“Same here.”

“So we are on the same team, no?”

“I thought we were, but you never let up. You take and take and take and it's just too much. It's just too much. She hasn't had a vacation in three years.”

“And has she wanted one? Did she come to me and say, ‘Ah, Chef Dominique, I am tired, I need to go to Martinique, may I have the time off, Chef?' No. She says nothing like this. Am I a psychic? Do I sit with the crystal ball and know what people want before they don't tell me?”

“You're not always supposed to make people ask for what they need. You're supposed to think about things and reasons why your staff may not want to tell you directly, and then make concessions so they don't have to. Appreciate their work once in a while. Have you ever thanked them? Have you been to your own kitchen lately? Do you know what goes on down there? It's a fucking sight, Chef. Your back-of-house is one of the most meticulous and dedicated in Chicago. Probably
the
most. And you have nothing but heartache to give in return.”

Chef Dominique stood up. He pushed his palm out in front of him, as if to signify he'd heard enough. “Peter Hapworth, I no have time for this. I have restaurant to run.”

“If that's what you call it,” I said. “You don't deserve this anymore. You don't deserve her. You never did. And as far as I'm concerned, you can run your restaurant into the ground without us.”

Outside ten minutes later, I was still waiting for Izzy in front of the restaurant. I stood and watched a couple moving west on Webster Avenue. The rangy boy with a small head and his narrow girl ambled without urgency. They'd likely just finished having dinner somewhere nearby, someplace casual and forgettable, like Café Ba-Ba-Reeba! They collided as they talked and came apart at the pauses. They moved as though following the momentum of their mutual desire. They were attracted to each other as it rose. They repelled when it fell. And they were oblivious to everything else around them. The night I met Izzy, I was so drawn to her. We must have resembled these two, save for Chef Dominique trailing behind us. As we moved from the Metropolitan Club to Wollensky's for burgers, I, like this guy, didn't want to stop looking at my date, even at times when not observing the road ahead could have proved perilous and maybe did. I was just that in love with her. It didn't matter if the traffic light were red or green, if keeping my eyes trained on her meant I'd end up standing in a roar of northbound cars and limos and city buses. Ardor was propelling me, steering me, but not, though I wouldn't find this out for months, protecting me.

I kept wondering where Izzy was. Like the dining room, the street was empty. Most of the card shops and boutiques had shuttered long before now. Cars drove by and I tried to time the intervals between them to distract myself. Finally, she emerged. I waved, but Izzy didn't acknowledge me as she descended the stairs.

She came to my side. Her eyes were directed to the sidewalk. I also looked down. I found there a black spot and a green bottle fragment and a pale, sticky smudge.

“He fired me.”

My heart bounded. “Because I spoke to him?”

“You shouldn't have gone to him, but it's not because of that.”

“What is it, then?” Pacer Rosengrant, lying almost naked in our bed, tangled up in the sheets and comforter that, up until then, had touched nobody else but Izzy and me and the pug, flashed before my eyes. She got caught with him in a private event space. The closed-circuit cameras trained on the cellar picked up footage of him fucking her from behind. A jealous waiter wrote an anonymous complaint.

“I voided a bottle of wine tonight for some old regulars,” she said. “The bottle was two-eighty on the list, but only thirty wholesale case price. It doesn't matter, though. He says that's stealing.”

I was aghast and turned to face Izzy. “He's that fucking cheap? He fired you over comping one thirty-fucking-dollar bottle of wine?”

“Because I
voided
it. If I'd comped it, he said that would have been one thing, but because I hit ‘void,' it's theft. And he has a zero-tolerance policy. He always has.”

“With the fucking busboys, sure, Izzy. With the fucking idiot in the coat check who pockets a handful of dollar bills from the tip snifter. But not you. You're his celebrity. He has you on fucking television. Without you, there is no
Vintage Attraction
. Doesn't he realize that?”

She shook her head slowly, as though comprehending none of this. “It's over,” she said stolidly. “The restaurant, the show, it's all over. We are no longer partners.”

I pushed forward. “Fine, so you don't work at the restaurant anymore. But how can he pull you from the show? You just began the new fucking season. He may be a mercenary, but he can't be stupid.”

“Hapworth, don't lecture me.
You
shouldn't have fucking talked to him. After your stunt, he probably couldn't wait to find an excuse to punish me.”

“He needed to be spoken to, Izzy. He's been bullying you unchecked for way too long. This is a French restaurant in Lincoln Park, not a Nike sweatshop in Vietnam. He has a lot to learn about what's fair to expect from people.”

“Well, you didn't have to be the one to teach him.” She kicked the sidewalk with the fascia of her feathered Chanel open-toe pump.

“Why didn't you just comp the wine properly? You've done it thousands of times.”

“I don't know,” she growled. “I hit the wrong fucking button. Let's say that.”

“That doesn't sound completely unreasonable. Can't you tell him it was a mistake?”

“I'm not going to tell him anything ever again.”

I couldn't believe she'd been fired. How had we
both
managed to lose our jobs in the same month? We were now as good as destitute, inextricably bound to a mortgage and a myriad of bills. Given our irresponsibly scant savings, these were bills that would soon turn into debts. The debts would suffocate us. We'd be quicksanded to a bankrupt death before the end of the year. The countdown had likely begun the moment Izzy climbed down the bistro's elegant staircase. Yet as I stood on Webster, envisioning the most dire of straits, the thought of Izzy no longer working for Chef Dominique was somehow a relief. I breathed more oxygen than I could recall having inhaled in a long time. I was light-headed.

“You're free,” I said softly.

She smiled, almost imperceptibly.

I put my arm around her shoulder. “Do you want to go home?”

She pivoted and raised a contemplative finger to her lips. “Let's get a drink.”

“Where?”

A Japanese restaurant glowed in the distance. Its neon window “We Delivery” sign pulsed a quiet yet persistent red and blue current, which beckoned us to come closer. “There.”

The warm restaurant smelled of rice wine vinegar and was empty of customers. Dour-faced Japanese children filled a four-top by the entrance to the kitchen. They chopsticked ramen out of shiny green-and-yellow bowls, looking abundantly bored and like they were counting the minutes until their parents finished up the evening's work and could take them home. We took two seats at the sushi bar. Izzy waved off the nigiri selection card and dull-tipped pencil that the annoyed chef offered. She requested the wine list. Without responding, the chef sidestepped away. A white-shirted waiter came between our seats. He proffered a faux-leather folder. In it was bound a single sheet of plastic-coated paper. Izzy sized up our options in one pass.

“Medium—no, wait, large sake. Two cups. Please.”

“Hot or cold?”

“Cold.”

The waiter bowed and shuffled whence he came.

“They serve shit when you order it hot,” Izzy explained.

“Why?”

“Because you won't taste the difference.”

“Good to know.”

Our waiter wordlessly returned with a tray. He placed the elements he presented in the empty space between us. Izzy reached for the ceramic decanter. She poured sake into the two tiny cups that accompanied it. She tried hers. I pounded mine like a shot. Then she set her cup aside and took my hand.

“I haven't been out of a job since I was, like, sixteen.”

“Izzy, you'll get another one.”

“How can you be so sure? I'm thirty-two, with a high school diploma.”

“You had some college.”

“A couple of English classes. It doesn't count.”

I grinned. “No, not for anything practical, anyway.”

“I'm a fucking has-been. When this gets out, that I got fired from the restaurant, from the show . . .” She sighed. “And who knows what
he's
going to say the reason is. He's going to make up something: I became a diva, I have a drinking problem, he caught me with drugs. Oh my god, do you know how much he could destroy me? Getting fired is nothing compared to how that fat man can wreck my reputation in the media. Who's going to want to hire me?”

“I can't believe you think anything he could say could come between you and . . . all that you've done. Izzy, you're thirty-two years old and you've built this empire. Have you seen how excited people get when you walk into a room? You made Bistro Dominique what it is. You're the reason there's a waiting list and a case of James Beard and
Wine Spectator
awards. Who led
Cellar Temperature
's ‘Top Sommeliers of the Year' three times in a row? None of this is because of . . . of him.”

She refilled our cups. “Good thing the Greeks e-mailed me directly instead of going through Chef,” she said.

“What?” The trip. “Can we still—I mean, isn't it all contingent on . . . you know.”

She rubbed her hands together. She drew her eyebrows close. “I'm still a wine professional. I'm just unaffiliated. A consultant. Yeah. That's it. I'm a consultant. And while everything may go to hell in Chicago tomorrow, I really don't think word is going to spread five thousand miles before we depart.”

I thought it wiser not to mention the Internet. “You're right.”

The sake disappeared. Izzy's despondency left along with it. I knew it was time to tell her something I'd put off far too long.

“What? You got all sad suddenly.”

“Izzy, there's something we should discuss.”

Her face tightened slightly. “What is it?”

I sensed a presence behind us. A woman was making her way over. It sped up my heart. The deranged expression on her face and the fact that she was talking to herself made me immediately defensive as she drew closer and closer to the sushi bar. My panic dissipated when I spotted the Bluetooth headset screwed into one of her ears. It returned when it became apparent that the fragments she was now repeating, “
Vintage Attraction
,” “Channel 23,” “the sommel-
eer
,” were directed at us. Izzy kept her eyes fixed on the empty sake decanter.

“Excuse me,” the woman said. She was now wedged between us. The ass of her chenille pantsuit hovered millimeters from my face. “You're Isabelle Conway, right?”

I imagined Izzy projecting an honorable mention of a smile.

When the cab driver stopped the car in front of the black wrought-iron gate, we flew forward. We had to brace ourselves against the bulletproof divider. I thanked the driver and Izzy overtipped him. He drove off before we got inside.

Upstairs, Ishiguro was in a snit. I always could tell when the pug was pissed off that we'd been gone longer than he deemed appropriate. He scampered indignantly up and down the long hallway. His nails against the cherrywood tinkled like house keys strummed on a glass coffee table. After no fewer than two laps, he deigned to acknowledge us. He sniffed Izzy, then me. He howled, sneezed, and yawned. He hadn't forgiven us exactly, but had then found he'd ended up beside a stuffed toy in the shape of a diamond engagement ring that was in need of taunting. His inconsiderate humans were now completely immaterial.

“Ishiguro, do you want to take a walk?” I asked him wearily. To say I was exhausted would have been an understatement. My eyes burned. I had a headache that choked the whole of my brain when it throbbed. I was drunker than I'd initially assessed. It wasn't the fault of the sake, strictly speaking. The amalgamation of the evening's beverages and emotions had finally caught up with me. My debilitating gestalt had also been somewhat aggravated by the frenzied body slam of a taxi ride.

Izzy had already collapsed on the couch with
The Tonight Show
, which she'd programmed to automatically capture on the DVR, and her BlackBerry. “Can you catch him?” I pleaded. She didn't answer, concentrating intently on the tiny screen. She was sifting through the e-mails and texts from purveyors and fans and bank vice presidents and production assistants she'd been unable to answer while working at the bistro. It meant tuning me and everything else around her out.

Ishiguro and I took two turns around the block. He seemed more distracted than usual as we went. He refused to move along for more than a few feet at a time. He stopped to appraise shrubs, black from being pissed on so much, and smashed children's toys. A discarded paper Subway drink cup with balled-up detritus from a consumed cold cut trio foot-long shoved into the Pepsi-sticky cavity required even more fastness of intrigue than usual. He completely ignored me as we went. I tried not to take the dog's disaffection personally.

Izzy was still where we'd left her when we got back. Now she faced the television and flipped pages of the on-screen guide. In the upper-right-hand corner, there was Jay Leno, pompous head bobbing, hands drilling the pockets of his shiny suit trousers, delivering his canting monologue. It was as annoying to behold with the sound muted as it was when you could hear the words.