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  We schmooze a while longer, long enough to finish off the wine, and almost all of the cheese. I wipe up the last of the broccoli rabe with the remaining crust of bread and tell Renata about the hazelnut biscotti, which would have been the perfect finale.

  “Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t make them, because I don’t have time for coffee and I’ve eaten far too much anyway.” Renata unties the dishcloth from around her neck and pushes her chair away from the table. It’s almost one. She probably has six or seven other calls to make before the end of her day, and I feel guilty about having taken so much of her time.

  “Thanks, Renata,” I tell her, handing her my order, to which I have added a case each of the blood orange and black cherry vinegars. “Thanks for everything. Lunch was great.” I want to say more, to tell her how much I’d needed this lunch, someone taking care of me, even in this small way. But I suspect that if I do, the conversation will quickly become maudlin and probably end in tears. Since neither of us is the mushy, sentimental type, I’m glad when she grabs me by the shoulders and gives me a shake.

  “Mira,” she says slowly, looking me in the eye, “just because Jake is a shit, doesn’t mean you have to keep punishing yourself.”

  “I know,” I say unconvincingly. Renata looks around the room, appraising the clutter, the busy box and ExerSaucer, Chloe’s empty bottles, the papers everywhere. “First thing you should do is get yourself a cleaning lady. You’re a working single mother. You can afford someone once or twice a week! Then, you’ve got to get out and be with people. When was the last time you went out to dinner, or lunch for that matter? When was the last time you had an adult conversation that didn’t involve work? Ha! Don’t answer that—I’m sure you can’t remember, anyway. Get yourself a babysitter for Saturday night because I’m making reservations for us somewhere fabulous. It’s about time you met Michael, and you ought to meet Arthur as well.”

  Arthur? But before I can even ask, Renata swings her wool merino wrap over her suit, deposits a peck on my cheek, and disappears down the hall.

  chapter 4

  Everyone loves New York at Christmas time, which is why I always feel funny confessing that I find it incredibly depressing. People are too full of Christmas cheer to be believable, never seeming to weary of the Musak renditions of Christmas carols played incessantly in every store and on every street corner, or the tourists clogging the streets oohing and ahhing over the hokey displays in the store windows. From October to January, the entire city appears to have undergone a collective lobotomy.

  It will be Chloe’s first Christmas, and this should thrill me. But the thought of putting up a tree and wrapping Chloe’s gifts, which I would then have to open alone on Christmas morning, makes me ache. I’d briefly entertained the idea of going home to Pittsburgh for the holiday, but that plan was fraught with issues too exhausting to think about for very long. Besides, the holiday season is a busy one for restaurants, and it’s too hard to take the time off. In the meantime, I haven’t made any plans for Thanksgiving either, which might be even harder than Christmas this year. Jake and I always made a big deal about Thanksgiving, inviting several of our foodie friends over for a daylong cooking and eating extravaganza.

  Renata calls to tell me we have a reservation at Le Bernadin for eight o’clock Saturday night. Prime time. She’s also taken the liberty of lining up a babysitter for Chloe. Gabriella, a friend of her stepdaughter, is only fourteen but has a certificate in infant CPR and charges fifteen dollars an hour.

  Renata had the audacity to suspect I was lying when I told her that Hope, my regular sitter, was sick, suffering an infection from her most recent tattoo. “Mira, I don’t believe you. You just don’t want to go.”

  She was right, of course. I was making this up, and we both knew it. I smile at the thought of Hope with a skull and crossbones emblazoned across one of her pudgy, middle-aged arms. “Well,” Renata says, “I’ve taken care of the babysitter for you. Now, do I have to come over to help you pick out an outfit, or are you capable of dressing yourself?”

  I groan into the phone.

  “Just promise me that you’ll wear something nice and try to plaster a smile on your face. Arthur has gone to a lot of trouble to get this reservation,” Renata says peevishly.

  “Who is this Arthur anyway?” I’m becoming increasingly concerned that Arthur is an eighty-year-old man, the only guy Renata has been able to come up with as a plausible date for me. No one under fifty is named Arthur.

  “He’s someone Michael knows. He’s writing a book on the history of culinary science that Michael’s editing. He writes for Chef’s Technique. You’ve probably read his stuff.”

  “And your husband, Michael, a man whom I have never met, thinks he would be perfect for me why? Because we both know how to use a mezzaluna?”

  “Look, Mira—”

  “Wait a minute, is his name Arthur Cole?” I ask.

  “Yes, it is. Do you know him?”

  As a matter of fact, I do. I’m a regular reader of his column in Chef’s. He’s a detail freak, writing exhaustive treatises on his search for the quintessential recipe for tuna casserole, which involves trying about fifteen different versions.

  “See, you do have something in common,” Renata says when I tell her. “Come on, this will be fun.”

  “Renata, I don’t know. I’m not really ready—”

  “Funny, Jake didn’t seem to wait too long. In fact, he didn’t wait at all.” I’m stunned into silence. “Mira, I had such high hopes for you. You started this divorce magnificently—just like an Italian woman. What has happened to you?”

  I want to tell her that I don’t feel pretty, or interesting, and that loving and hating Jake has taken up all of my available time and energy. When I don’t answer her, Renata tells me what I need to hear, but don’t for a minute believe.

  “Mira, Jake is a consummate shit, and you are a beautiful woman in the prime of your life. Come on; buy yourself something pretty to wear. And let your hair down. Men like long hair. It’s sexy.”

  I groan. “What Arthur Cole would find sexy is a really good recipe for short ribs.”

  Renata laughs. “Okay, so what’s the worst thing that could happen? We have a sublime dinner, some fabulous wine, he’s boring, and you go home. Right? Then we go to Plan B.”

  “Plan B?”

  “Eddie Macarelli.”

  “Eddie the fish guy? Eddie Macarelli is Plan B?” I’m horrified. Eddie, while an excellent fish supplier—he handles the fish for most of the high-end restaurants in the city, doubtless including Le Bernadin—is a flamboyant guy. The kind of guy who likes to make a splash (one of Eddie’s own unfortunate puns). He wears a diamond pinkie ring and talks like Tony Soprano. What possessed Renata to think we would have the slightest interest in each other?

  “Renata, I can’t go out with Eddie. We have a business relationship. I buy fish from him.”

  “So what? He likes you. I ran into him at Esca last week, and he asked about you, said he’s seen more of Jake lately. He heard about the divorce and asked if you were seeing anyone. He told me he’s always kind of liked you.”

  “I’m not divorced yet,” I tell her. What I really want to say is that I have no desire to date anyone, never mind Arthur Cole or Eddie Macarelli, and I can’t be forced. Suddenly I wish I’d had the foresight to come up with a more believable excuse. Ebola maybe, or a touch of bubonic plague.

  “Okay, okay, forget Plan B. Let’s stick with Plan A,” says Renata. “Let’s just go and have a wonderful dinner. Michael and I will bring Gabriella over to your place at seven. You can show her around and get Chloe settled. I’ll tell Arthur we will meet him at the bar at eight.”

  I’m relieved when Renata hangs up, telling myself that I’m only going because no one passes up dinner at Le Bernadin.

  When I arrive at Grappa the next morning, Jake is there, even though it’s only a little after seven in the morning. Gesturing with the knife he’s using to score the end
s of cipolline, he tells me that there’s some mail on the desk in the office I need to attend to. He then turns to me and says with a mysterious little smile that I also should take a look in the refrigerator where there’s a small package with my name on it. Not only is Jake here uncharacteristically early, but scoring cipolline isn’t the sort of work he usually does. That’s the work of the sous-chefs. He looks slightly rumpled, and I again wonder what possibly could have gotten him out of bed this early.

  On top of the stack of mail there’s a phone message from my lawyer, in Jake’s handwriting, confirming our meeting with opposing counsel on the disposition of the marital assets set for the week after Thanksgiving. Then, I open the refrigerator door, and my stomach lurches. Inside is a package wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with string. On the package is a crude drawing of a fish with huge caricature-style cheeks. Underneath the drawing is a message scrawled in an uneven hand. “Cheeks for the sweet! Dinner for two, sometime?” I’m mortified that Jake knows old “Make a Splash” Eddie wants to date me and by this bizarre courting ritual that involves leaving halibut cheeks wrapped in butcher paper in my refrigerator.

  I make myself an espresso and bring it over to the pastry station where I begin the pasta. I can hear Tony whistling in the large walk-in refrigerator as he unloads the day’s shipment of meat and eggs. I measure out the semolina and deposit it into several piles of approximately equal size on the marble station. Tony has set out a large bowl of fresh eggs and several containers of pasta flavorings, two kinds of pepper (red and coarsely ground black), lemon zest, and anchovy paste. Over the years, I’ve trained all the sous-chefs to make pasta, but I really prefer to do it myself. It’s a quiet and intense activity, a muscular workout, and relaxing, all at once. My favorite time to make pasta is in the early morning, before the full staff arrives, and before the kitchen really comes to life.

  Evening is the time Jake loves best, when, at the height of the dinner service, he screams orders and brandishes kitchen knives like a frenzied maestro. During those times there’s only room for one chef in the kitchen, no matter how large. When Jake and I first met, I thought we were perfectly complementary, my yin to his yang. That our relationship was better suited to a business partnership than a marriage is something I’ve only lately begun to realize. In a marriage, it’s the little similarities that bring you closer. Nicola is more like Jake; they are both passionate people who take up the room, who burn up the space around them, who consume you, if you let them, and then toss you aside.

  Jake approaches, sits down on the stool near the pastry station, and watches, silently, intently, as I knead the pasta dough. It’s still in the early stage, before the gluten has developed, and I can feel the fine grains of the semolina scrape at the skin of my palms.

  He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t look up. My hands have begun to tremble ever so slightly, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m working hard at suppressing an urge to strangle him or worse, grab him and kiss him. Because I’m not sure what they will do, it seems safer to keep my hands in the dough, which I know I won’t be able to stop kneading as long as he’s sitting there watching me.

  “How’s the baby?” he finally asks.

  “Chloe is fine,” I say, curtly, noticing again that Jake never calls Chloe by her name. “Totally recovered.”

  “Good. That’s good,” Jake says.

  I continue working the dough. Jake continues watching me. I sense there’s something more he wants to say, but I have no idea what it might be. Suddenly, I know there’s not much more of this I can stand. I can’t stand being here making pasta with Jake watching me, pretending that we are merely business partners.

  “I’d like to come over and see her,” Jake finally says. “See Chloe.”

  I keep kneading, unsure of what I’ve just heard. When I don’t respond, Jake says, “I know that I haven’t, ah,” he pauses, “that we haven’t worked out the details about Chloe and everything, but I won’t leave the apartment with her if you don’t want me to. I can just, you know, visit her. You can be there, or not.”

  It’s unlike Jake to be so compromising, and his tone is vaguely deferential. Could it be that Chloe’s near brush with death has caused him to reconsider his relationship with her?

  “Sure, you can visit her. She’s your daughter, after all.” I look up at him for a split second. My subtle dig has had no visible effect on him.

  “It would have to be a Sunday,” Jake says, after a pause. We’re closed on Sundays. God forbid Jake miss work to spend time with his child. So much for compromising. “Maybe in the early afternoon?”

  “Sure,” is all I trust myself to say.

  “Well, I’ll see you guys on Sunday afternoon, then,” he says, standing. By the time I look up again, he has crossed the kitchen and returned to scoring the cipolline. I listen to him whistle the theme from “Musetta’s Waltz,” wondering what all this could possibly mean.

  chapter 5

  That evening after Chloe falls asleep, I dig out the last two years’ worth of Chef’s Technique. Comfortably ensconced on the couch with a glass of Barolo, I pore over Arthur Cole’s articles, trying to get the measure of a man who makes eleven different attempts in search of the perfect spinach salad and writes, in excruciating detail, about each one.

  As a person who eschews written recipes, I don’t dwell on the obvious irony that I have at least five years’ worth of back issues of Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Saveur, and, of course, Chef’s. The more recent issues I keep on shelves in the kitchen; the rest are in carefully marked boxes, with the index of each issue taped to the box top. I don’t attempt to analyze this behavior. All I know is that it is somehow comforting to know that if I ever have to whip up some bibimbap (Gourmet, August 2004) on short notice for visiting Korean dignitaries, I can. I also know that I probably shouldn’t begrudge Mr. Cole his obsessions.

  On Saturday afternoon, during Chloe’s afternoon nap, I finally get around to thinking about what I will wear on my date and find that my wardrobe is a complete disaster. I haven’t been shopping in months, practically since Chloe was born. Jake’s drawstring chef’s pants and either a chef’s tunic or a big white shirt had gotten me through most of my pregnancy, and I had borrowed the rest, a party dress, a winter coat, and a couple of jumpers (which I hated). It wasn’t the pregnancy, though, that kept me out of the stores. In the restaurant business you learn very quickly the value and comfort of the uniform. And pretty soon it becomes a way of life.

  I finally choose a pair of black crepe pants and a black cashmere sweater. I consider heeding Renata’s advice about leaving my hair down, but somehow I don’t think long hair will be a turn on for Arthur. Someone that compulsive would surely be made uncomfortable by untamed hair. I settle for a simple chignon.

  Gabriella, with Michael and Renata in tow, arrives precisely at seven, and from the instant they step into the room, Chloe begins to cry. Her whole body stiffens as she locks me in a death grip. Michael is the one who finally takes charge, removing Chloe from me and placing her in Gabriella’s waiting arms. Then, Michael, to whom I’ve barely been introduced, gently but firmly maneuvers me out of the door and into the elevator. Once we are settled in the cab, he gives my shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

  “She stopped crying before we even made it into the lobby, you know. They do that just to torture us, a conspiracy among babies everywhere.”

  “I feel like a wretch for leaving her. She doesn’t know Gabriella and she’s not used to being left with a babysitter at night.”

  “It’s your own fault, Mira,” says Renata. “You should have been doing this months ago. She’d be used to it by now.”

  “Ha,” laughs Michael, giving me a knowing look. “They never get used to it.”

  Renata quickly steers the conversation clear of children, and we chat about what we’re planning to eat, and laugh over the fact that none of us has eaten all day in preparation for tonight. This allows me an opportunity to sneak a look at Rena
ta’s husband who, I decide, isn’t at all what I expected. For starters, he’s much older than I imagined. He looks to be somewhere in his mid-fifties, making him roughly a decade older than Renata. He isn’t a handsome man; his nose is too large and his eyes too small, but they’re a lovely blue, soft and friendly. He’s got a nice full head of dark hair, going silvery at the temples, and a small, neatly trimmed beard, black and flecked with gray. But what makes him not seem Renata’s type is that he’s a comfortable man, rumpled and slightly squishy around the edges, the sort whose preference might run toward flannel and gabardine instead of silk and cashmere. The kind of man who might own, and occasionally even wear, a sweat suit.

  Compared to the few male friends of Renata’s I’ve met on previous occasions, all of whom were younger than she, handsome, and impeccably groomed, Michael seems less sophisticated. But Renata seems different, too, softer than usual and more relaxed. She’s taller than Michael, and the way he drapes his arm around her shoulders is awkward, yet occasionally he gives her an affectionate squeeze. A trace of a giggle escapes her as he whispers something inaudible, something, I imagine, so silly and tender that I glimpse, for an instant, the girl she’d once been. Already I like Michael and think Renata’s lucky. There simply aren’t enough men who can make women giggle, or who even care to try.

  Le Bernadin is one of only a handful of Manhattan restaurants—including La Grenouille, the Four Seasons, and Café des Artistes—that has endured, almost unaltered, since its opening. Within months of its New York debut in January 1986, Gourmet magazine bestowed upon Le Bernadin and its chefs/owners, Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze, an unprecedented four-star rating, a historic event in the restaurant world. Now, a quarter of a century later, it has become one of New York’s grande dames. If Le Bernadin were a woman, as I think most restaurants are, she would be Grace Kelly—beautiful, elegant, and understated.