Aftertaste Read online

  The bar is crowded, and at first I don’t see Arthur Cole, whom I think I’ll recognize from the miniscule photograph that appears above his byline in Chef’s. Michael spots him instantly. He’s sitting with his back to the door, engaged in conversation with the bartender, probably interviewing him about how to make the perfect mai tai. When Michael taps him on the shoulder, he turns and, with one fluid movement, flips his notebook closed. “Now, Arthur, you are officially off duty tonight. You’ll make me look bad,” Michael says with a trace of a smile, gesturing to the notebook that Arthur is in the process of thrusting into his breast pocket. They shake hands, and Michael gives him a small pat on the arm. Arthur’s hair is longer than in his picture in Chef’s, and he’s not wearing glasses, which in the picture are small and round.

  “Mira, is it?” he says, turning to me and offering his hand. “It’s lovely to meet you.”

  His smile is automatic, revealing a set of even, white teeth. He’s immaculately groomed, and his hands look as if they are regularly manicured, making me instantly conscious of my own short, trimmed nails and workman’s hands, ruddy and rough-skinned, which I have no choice but to offer in return.

  Renata, who had been waylaid by a friend on the way to the bar, joins us, and Michael completes the introductions. Arthur quickly summons the bartender, and we order our drinks. I order myself a glass of Prosecco.

  “Ah, Prosecco, a wonderful choice! It’s great to see this previously little known aperitif is finally getting its due,” Arthur says excitedly. “Of course, I mean outside of Italy,” he adds, nodding in deference to Renata. “Are you familiar with this vineyard?” Arthur asks. As it turns out, I am, but Arthur doesn’t wait for me to answer. Instead, he turns to Renata and Michael and says, “Do you mind? Why don’t we order a bottle? Mira here has made a wonderful suggestion.”

  “I think you’ll like it,” I say. “It’s a wonderful vintage from a small winery in the north of Italy. In Fruili.” Why do I feel as if I’m in the midst of a job interview? “We stock it in the cellar at Grappa.”

  “Grappa?”

  “Yes, our—my restaurant,” I tell him, my tone a little more proprietary than I’d intended.

  A flicker of recognition passes across Arthur’s well-mannered face. I wonder if he’s heard something and is only now putting two and two together. “Ah, yes, of course,” he says. I can only hope that he has heard the short version of my sordid story and not the longer, assault and battery one. But, judging from his embarrassed look, and the way his eyes flit quickly toward the door, I suspect the latter. He has already decided that I’m an incalculable risk and is wondering just how quickly he can make an exit.

  “Mira, my apologies,” says Michael. “Renata has so many customers, and I couldn’t recall the name of your restaurant when I told Arthur about you.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve never eaten there,” Arthur says, with no trace of apology.

  “Well, then you must come sometime.”

  “It’s really a wonderful restaurant, Arthur,” Renata pipes in. “Mira and her ex-husband started it on a shoestring, not unlike Le Bernadin. It’s quite a success story.” I chafe at the mention of Jake, my “ex-husband,” and my leg accidentally bumps Renata’s under the table.

  I’m relieved when the Prosecco arrives and even more relieved when the maître d’ approaches us with the news that our table is ready. Arthur balances his glass of Prosecco with one hand, and rests his other hand on my elbow as we make our way to the dining room. He leans into me, veering me slightly off course and, as I struggle to realign myself, I catch him sneaking a peek down my sweater. “So, what started you cooking, Mira?”

  “My mother, actually. She was a chef.”

  “Oh? How interesting! Where did she train?”

  “In Paris,” I tell him, “at the Cordon Bleu.”

  “Really? Impressive for a woman of your mother’s generation. Where did she cook?”

  “Well, when I knew her, she cooked at home. Just for our family.” The truth was my mother had never really made use of her impressive French pedigree, something she’d always regretted. While studying there she met my father, who was in the army and on leave in Paris. She was just finishing up her two-year course in French gastronomy; they married as soon as his tour of duty was up.

  “In Manhattan?”

  “No, in Pittsburgh. I grew up in Pittsburgh.”

  “In Pittsburgh?” Arthur says, a small snort escaping him. “An unlikely place for a classically trained chef.”

  “People have been known to eat in Pittsburgh, you know,” I tell him, with a backwards glance as he pulls out my chair. The man is a snob.

  “Well, of course they do. I just meant that, well, even today, it’s not exactly the bastion of haute cuisine. Twenty, thirty years ago, forget it. In fact, can you remember the last time a Pittsburgh restaurant was featured in Bon Appétit?”

  Touché. In fact, the only time I can remember a Pittsburgh restaurant being mentioned in a national magazine was several years ago when Gourmet mentioned Primanti Brothers in an interview with Mario Batali (who’d eaten there on a recent trip and enjoyed it). For the uninitiated, the Primanti sandwich is a cheesesteak sub, served on thick slabs of crusty Italian bread and topped with very well-done grease-still-glistening French fries, coleslaw, and, if you’re really a traditionalist, a fried egg. Apparently, it has become the signature food of Pittsburgh. I do not remind Arthur Cole of this fact.

  The bread basket is presented to us—warm, crusty, French farmhouse rolls with an herb and goat cheese spread. We study our menus, considering the delights within. I look over at Renata, who I can see is already mapping out how we can best cover the most ground. This, of course, involves sharing.

  Some people are funny about that, and I’m betting Arthur Cole is one of them. You can tell a lot about a person by how liberal he is about sharing his food. That was one of the first things that had attracted me to Jake. I first met him when we were both waiting for a table at a little roadside trattoria in Piacenza. We were each overjoyed to find someone who could speak English and decided to share a table. During that first meal together he casually reached over and speared a piece of my calamari, delicately grabbing it by the ring with a single tine of his fork. It was an intimate gesture, and one that might have shocked me had I not already decided to sleep with him—which I did, immediately following dessert and espresso.

  “Oh, look,” says Michael, “fresh sardines.”

  “I’m looking at the spiny lobster with cepes risotto,” says Renata, her nose buried in the menu.

  “Imagine, pairing the most delicate of shellfish with such a strong fungal flavor,” offers Arthur, wrinkling his nose. “Interesting, if he can pull it off.” He sounds doubtful.

  The subject of our dinner conversation is the demise of the American restaurant, a not-quite-open forum conducted in sotto voce by Arthur, who has emerged from his research on culinary history finding America’s traditions wanting.

  “There simply are no traditions. Everything has been imported. There’s nothing originally American, except perhaps corn.” He waves a hand dismissively. “Not even the hamburger can we claim as our own!” he says with a sneer, as if anyone would want to.

  When no one picks up the gauntlet Arthur has so conspicuously thrown, he continues unabashed. “Why then,” he says, suddenly turning to me and folding his arms across his chest, “did your mother study in France? Why did you study in Italy? Which I presume you did because you know as well as I do that no culinary education is considered complete without an international apprenticeship.” His voice is smug, his mouth curled in a half smile.

  “Wait a minute,” I say, feeling suddenly compelled to defend American culinary tradition (not to mention my own expensive and, in my opinion, extremely comprehensive education at the Culinary Institute of America). “I studied in Italy because I cook Italian food. My mother studied in France because in the late 1960s there was no other option. But that certa
inly doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rich and varied culinary tradition in America today. Stop at a roadside barbeque in Texas, eat a lobster roll in Bangor, Maine, order a fried egg on your Primanti sandwich in Pittsburgh, for heaven’s sake!” I look over at Michael, who is humming the national anthem, his right hand on his heart, his left raised in mock salute. The moment dissolves into laughter, all of us, except perhaps Arthur, slightly embarrassed to have taken ourselves so seriously.

  Arthur, I’m uncharitably pleased to note, is sporting a stray kernel of cepes risotto on his Fendi tie. Despite expressing his initial doubts about the dish, he ended up ordering it, anyway, and then—suspicions confirmed—was loath to share all but the tiniest taste.

  We are all so full by dessert that we only order two, a tarte tatin and a cheese and fruit plate. When Arthur makes as if to summon the sommelier, Renata wrestles his arm to the table.

  “Arthur, if you order another bottle of wine, I will fall into my cheese.”

  “Yes, she gets sloppy when she’s drunk, to that I will attest,” says Michael, a small belch escaping him.

  “Are you sure? A small digestif, Michael, might be just the ticket.”

  I’m feeling slightly woozy myself, which I attribute to the wine, the rich food, and the lateness of the hour. I wonder fleetingly if Arthur Cole could be trying to get me drunk. His perfectly manicured hand is now lying mere inches from my own, his fingers slightly greasy from the shellfish. For some reason, I find this small and insignificant departure from perfection endearing. For several moments I can’t stop thinking about his hands, which I imagine on my body. Not that I want them to be—in fact, I’m quite sure I don’t. I look over at Renata, who has taken Michael’s hand and is softly running her fingers across his knuckles. This gets me thinking about Michael’s hands, which disturbs me even further. What’s the matter with me? I must be drunk.

  Arthur doesn’t join us on the way home. He lives on the Upper East Side (where else?), and we are headed to the Village. Outside the restaurant he shakes my hand. “Lovely meal. Lovely,” he says, planting a disinterested peck on my cheek. And then he’s gone.

  In the cab on the way home, Renata lays her head on Michael’s shoulder and within seconds begins to snore. “You want to know the worst thing about foodies?” Michael asks, resting his head on the back of the cab and yawning. “I mean the diehards like Arthur Cole? They have no sense of humor. My God—it’s only food!”

  Michael may be right, but that still doesn’t stop me from wondering why Arthur Cole, insufferable bore, found me so unappealing that he could barely muster a decent good night. Suddenly there’s a lump in my throat and a tingling behind my eyes. Why should this upset me? This date I hadn’t even wanted, with a guy I didn’t even like.

  “At least the food was exceptional,” Michael says, and I can feel him turning to look at me. I’m not sure I trust myself to speak. “I’m sorry, Mira,” he says softly. “But at least it’s over.”

  “Yes, I don’t think I’ll be hearing from Arthur Cole.” This I manage through tightened lips.

  “No, I didn’t mean that. If I know Arthur, he’ll probably give you a call. He can sometimes be a little slow on the uptake socially, if you know what I mean. What I meant was the date. Your first post-separation date. It’s over. That’s a milestone. Welcome to the rest of your life, Mira,” he says solemnly, offering me his hand. Suddenly, it’s as if someone has loosened the plug in my throat, and I’m crying.

  Michael pulls a wad of tissues from his pocket and hands them to me. “I know just how you feel,” he says softly, wrapping his arm around me and patting my back. I bury my face in his jacket, which smells of the evening, of shellfish, and wine, and the subtle underlying scent of tobacco. The comfort of it sucks the breath from my body. When the cab pulls up in front of my building, Michael gently disengages me.

  “Good night and thank you,” I tell him, more formally than I intended, embarrassed at having sobbed for the last twenty blocks on the shoulder of my friend’s husband, a man I hadn’t met before tonight. “I’ll send Gabriella down,” I say, offering my hand. Michael gives it a reassuring squeeze. “It will get better, I promise, Mira,” he says, gesturing to the still sleeping Renata. “Just be thankful this was only a date. At least you don’t have to read his three hundred and fifty-page treatise on the germination of corn.”

  chapter 6

  I’m out of practice. The rich food and the wine catch up with me, and I awaken at the uncharacteristically late hour of seven thirty with a touch of a hangover. This is the first time in the almost eight months since Chloe’s birth that I can remember sleeping so late. I can hear her cooing and talking in her crib, making little raspberry noises and laughing to herself. She doesn’t cry, blessed child, and I hold off getting up because once she hears me she will no longer be content to lie in her crib and amuse herself. She will want me to come in and sing her morning song, which she has lately begun to imitate, mimicking the cadence of the melody with her own little coos and squeals.

  It’s Sunday and an overcast one by the look of it, my favorite kind. I know few people who love rain like I do. Usually, rain makes me want to make soup and bake bread, to settle in and snuggle up. Maybe it’s an adaptive response to having grown up in Pittsburgh, not a particularly sunny city. I settle back into the pillows and listen to Chloe’s sweet voice and the pleasant patter of rain on the bedroom window. But there’s a knot in the pit of my stomach, which at first I attribute to the hangover. It takes me a couple of minutes to realize that today is Sunday, and this afternoon Jake is coming by to see Chloe. Suddenly alert, I sit up in bed where I can see the message light on the bedside phone blinking at me. Gabriella said there had been a couple of calls, which she let the machine pick up while she was putting Chloe to sleep. I hit the Play button.

  “Hi, Mira. It’s Jake. Just calling to confirm my visit with Chloe.” Pause. “Remember we talked about my coming over tomorrow afternoon?” There’s another awkward pause as if Jake is expecting me to answer him. I can only hope he was wondering where I would be at ten thirty on a Saturday night. “Well, I was thinking about three o’clock. I have a couple of things to do earlier in the day, but I thought after her . . . Well, I don’t know if she takes a nap or anything, but, if that time isn’t good, just, I don’t know, call me.”

  I’m still ruminating over Jake’s message—of course she takes a nap and three is prime napping time—when I realize another message is still playing.

  “. . . never call me. Where are you? Have you been carted off to jail again—which is, by the way, about the only decent excuse you’d have for not getting back to me. Your father hasn’t even heard from you. You should call him, too, you know. Anyway, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? Feel like some company?? The Steelers are playing the Jets in New York next Sunday. I can get a flight out on Wednesday, and, if you can get me a ticket to the game, I’ll love you forever. Call me, you little shit, okay?” The message ends with an abrupt click. Richard, I think, with a smile. In fact, the last time I’d talked to him had been practically from jail—it was the day of the court hearing, and I ended up crying into the phone, spilling the whole sordid story, sparing nothing. That had been over two months ago. No wonder he was miffed.

  I’ve known Richard Kistler more than half my life; in fact, he likes to tell people we grew up together, although he’s sixteen years my senior. I met him at an AA meeting I attended when I was fifteen years old. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, several stints in treatment hadn’t been able to cure my mother of a serious drinking problem, and her condition had escalated to the point of medical emergency. The transition from the sophisticated world of Parisian haute cuisine to Pittsburgh, land of pierogies, Jello molds, and Miracle Whip dips, had been an especially difficult one for my mother—one apparently made much more so by one significant complication: me. Motherhood, she often reflected in her more lucid moments, had been her downfall, sending her careening down the road to ruin
, a fifth of Seagram’s neatly concealed in the diaper bag.

  Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Favish, who, along with her posse of neighborhood Jewish grandmothers, was closely monitoring the goings-on in my family, had been the one to suggest Al-Anon to me. She’d told me in her heavily accented English that, although it was not a disease common to her people, her sister’s husband also fought the same demons as my mother. That was the way she liked to put it, as if alcoholism was an evil spirit, rash and unaccountable, who snuck up on you and took you unawares while you were minding your own business.

  Mrs. Favish dropped me off outside the Wightman School one Tuesday night in December. She’d wanted to accompany me in, but I hadn’t let her. After watching her drive away, I stood under the streetlamp smoking cigarettes purloined from my mother’s purse, trying to get up the nerve to go inside. Richard found me there, shivering in my jean jacket, and, guessing where I needed to go, delivered me to the classroom on the second floor. The real alcoholics met in the basement, and there had been a light turnout for his meeting, which, apparently, was the norm during the holiday months. Many alcoholics relapse during the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, Richard later told me. Something about the holidays made it easier to recall, and harder to resist, all the pretty good reasons they have for drinking.

  Even though I was the only kid in my Al-Anon meeting, I kept going back faithfully, week after week. Maybe it was the sympathetic faces of the members, mostly women, sweet maternal types, careful, indulgent listeners—who, just for the record, weren’t listening to me; I was a silent fixture in the meetings, an angry kid, reeking of stale smoke and cheap Jovan musk oil. Perhaps it was the idea of having a secret—I hadn’t told my parents I was going. No one knew—except Mrs. Favish.

  Probably what kept me going was Richard. Eventually we became friends. Often when my meeting got out, Richard would be waiting for me. I soon learned he’d been attending the twice-weekly AA meetings for about a year and a half. He had gone at the insistence of his lover. Although the relationship didn’t survive, by the time they were ready to throw in the towel Richard had totally quit drinking and had formed a surprisingly supportive network of friends at AA, most of them middle-aged ex-steelworkers who had, over the years, consumed a few too many Iron Cities. He claimed they put up with him because Richard’s failed love affair now left one of his Steelers season tickets unused. Still, it was a pretty amazing trick for a thirty-something, gay antiques dealer with a former taste for expensive, single malt whiskey.