Aftertaste Page 9

  I refuse to think about what Jake is doing this year and wonder instead about my father, who is presumably eating his turkey with a woman I have never met, a woman with enormous fake breasts who owns a pair of leopard pants and who might not be much older than me. I’m suddenly sure it’s a serious relationship, because you don’t just have Thanksgiving with anybody. It implies a certain level of commitment.

  My relationship with my father, I realize, is a disaster. It must be, because otherwise he would have told me about her. The doorbell rings, and I hear Richard greeting Hope and waxing enthusiastic about the delicious rolls he had for breakfast this morning. The turkey will be ready soon, and I still need to cream the onions. No time now to think about how I’ve managed to screw up my relationships with the two most important men in my life.

  chapter 9

  On Friday after Thanksgiving, when the rest of the civilized world is out beginning their Christmas shopping, I’m at the restaurant preparing lunch for what is sure to be a good-sized crowd. Spending money always makes people hungry. Hope and Richard have taken Chloe to the Bronx Zoo while I’m working. I linger a bit after lunch, hoping to run into Jake so that I can touch base on a few things, but Tony tells me he called to say he won’t be in until after five. Too late to hang around, so I call his cell, but he doesn’t pick up and his mailbox is full. I’m hoping to follow up on the items I had sent home with Nicola earlier in the week, including making sure he had phoned in the meat and fish orders for next week. Finally, I call him at Nicola’s. No one is there either, so I leave him a message.

  On Sunday morning Richard lets me sleep in. When I awake, it’s well after nine, and I can hear Richard and Chloe in the kitchen. I tiptoe down the hall to find them sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast. Richard is calling out clues to Chloe from the Times crossword puzzle in a high squeaky voice, while Chloe painstakingly picks up Cheerios between her thumb and forefinger. I’ve seldom seen Richard around children, but he genuinely seems to be enjoying Chloe, who, in my totally unbiased opinion, is an exceptionally likable child.

  “What’s a seven letter word for ‘foundation garment’? Righto, Chloe, bustier, it is!”

  I stand there quietly for a moment, taking advantage of the opportunity to observe them: Richard in his paisley bathrobe and Chloe, her delighted gaze fixed on Richard. She’s clearly over her stranger anxiety, smiling and cooing at Richard and occasionally even offering him a soggy Cheerio, which he gobbles down to her delight. I sneak up behind Richard and put my arms around his neck. “You can’t leave. Do you realize that I have not slept this late since Chloe was born? Thank you,” I whisper in his ear, planting a kiss on the top of his head.

  He pats my arm and gives it a squeeze. Then, extricating himself, he gestures for me to sit down. He brings me fresh coffee, French roast by the smell of it, along with a pitcher of warm milk. “Coffee, madame?”

  There are warm rolls with marmalade and mascarpone cheese. Chloe clamors for my attention, and Richard brings her over and then sits down next to me.

  “Why don’t you come home?” he says, pouring milk into my coffee.

  “Home? I am home.”

  “To Pittsburgh.”

  I don’t say anything for a minute. “I can’t, Richard. I have a life here. Chloe is in a great day care. I have the restaurant to run. There are a million reasons I have to stay.”

  “I’m sure there are, but probably not a single good one. You know, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pull back a bit. You’re running yourself ragged, not to mention that you’re subjecting yourself to a very unhealthy situation. No wonder you’re having a hard time getting over Jake. You have to deal with him and his betrayal every single day. Sell your share to someone else. Let Jake buy you out, whatever. And besides,” he says, buttering a piece of toast, “your money would go a lot further in Pittsburgh. You could take some time and figure out what you want to do. Be with Chloe, your dad, me.”

  I’m not sure what to say. It isn’t that simple.

  “My dad is apparently living the life of a swinging bachelor. The last thing he needs is his dumped daughter and granddaughter skulking back to him. We would cramp his style.”

  “Mira, that is not fair. You don’t even know for sure he’s dating anyone.”

  I straighten up and turn away. I’m disappointed that Richard doesn’t seem to understand that my life is in New York now. I hate it when he treats me like the fifteen-year-old girl he once knew.

  “Sorry, love, don’t mean to end things on a bad note. It’s just that you always seem to take the most difficult route and, for once, I’d like to see you take it easy.”

  Take it easy? How could Richard possibly think that going home to Pittsburgh would be taking it easy? That would be an admission of failure, not to mention a complete dead end. I’ll take the Big Apple—twelve-hour days, the stress of running a restaurant, exorbitant rent, skyrocketing day care expenses, and terror alerts—any day of the week.

  “Well, it’s something to think about,” he says, ruffling Chloe’s curls and disappearing in the direction of the bathroom. We both watch him walk down the hall, striped towel swung over his shoulder, his spicy aftershave lingering in his wake. Chloe holds out a dimpled arm, her little body straining after Richard, her eyes following him all the way down the hallway. If she could talk, I know she would say, “take me with you,” although as soon as the bathroom door shuts behind him, Chloe turns her attention back to me, with no trace of want or abandonment, almost as if he’d never been there. With an impish smile she places her fingers, sticky with marmalade, in my hair, pulling me closer in order to nuzzle my face. I once read in a parenting magazine that babies under the age of eight months or so have a hard time holding pictures of people in their minds, hence the saying “out of sight, out of mind.” It is, I think, a convenient mechanism; it keeps children from missing people, from being disappointed too early in life.

  Richard’s visit has dredged up all sorts of complicated feelings, which, owing to the busy week I have coming up, I’m hoping to be able to avoid thinking about. Not only are we previewing the new winter lunch menu at Grappa, but Thursday is also our meeting with the lawyers about final disposition of the marital assets and my next anger-management session.

  As of the day after Thanksgiving, Jake still hasn’t shown his face at the restaurant when I’ve been there and isn’t returning my telephone calls. When Jake fails to respond to my message asking him to approve the proofs for the winter dinner menu, I go ahead and send only the luncheon menu to the printer. It’s starting to seem like we’re running two parallel restaurants here, a dangerous situation, particularly in the notoriously fickle Manhattan dining world. People want consistency; they want to know that if they wander in on a Thursday evening, they can get the arugula salad they had at lunch last week. At the moment, Jake doesn’t even know what’s in the arugula salad, besides arugula.

  Just how dangerous things have become doesn’t become clear until the Monday after Thanksgiving. Arriving at the restaurant, I expect, as usual, to spend the morning taking inventory of the walk-in and unloading and stocking the week’s shipment of meat and fish. But this morning something doesn’t feel right. My vague feelings of discomfort about the management of the restaurant become all too concrete when, by eight o’clock, our deliveries still have not arrived. By five after, I’m on the phone. Clearly, something is wrong. The meat and fish are coming from different suppliers, and it’s too unlikely a coincidence that both of them would be late. Meanwhile, the prep cooks are standing around with nothing to prep, and we open for lunch in three and a half hours.

  “Hey, Mira, sweetheart, did you enjoy those halibut cheeks?” Eddie says, when I finally manage to get him on the phone. “I’m not used to having my gifts go unacknowledged.”

  I have no time for social graces, however.

  “Eddie, where the hell is my fish?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s after eight, and I don�
�t have the shipment I ordered. We open for lunch in three and a half hours, and all I have are a couple of pounds of tuna left from Friday’s delivery. What’s going on?”

  “Deliveries went out already. Shoulda been there. Hang on a minute, and I’ll check to see who had the Grappa drop this morning.” He puts me on hold, and suddenly I’m listening to “Under the Sea” from the Little Mermaid, another of Eddie’s little jokes. In a couple of minutes he’s back on the line.

  “Mira, I checked backwards and forwards, and I don’t see no order from you guys. That’s why you didn’t get anything. No order, no fish.”

  “What? I put an order in, I have a copy of it right here,” I say, rummaging through the files on the office desk for a copy. And then, I remember. I gave Nicola the orders for this week last Monday when Jake was “out sick.” She was supposed to give it to Jake. Shit. Obviously, she hadn’t done it, and that meant no fish and no meat.

  “I gave that order to Jake, Eddie! I can’t believe he didn’t phone it in. Oh, my God. That bastard!”

  “Listen, Mira, tell me what you need. I can’t promise I’ll have everything you want, but I’ll take a look, see what we got left, then put together an order, something at least that will get you through lunch. I will deliver it personally within the hour. And you can repay my saving your behind by agreeing to have dinner with me, okay?”

  I ignore Eddie’s unconcealed attempt to blackmail me into a date and barrel ahead with my order. “Give me thirty pounds of mussels, twenty-five of scampi, as much squid as you can get me, some whitefish, snapper, sea bass, and sardines—whatever you’ve got. That will get me through today, and when you get here I’ll give you an order for the rest of the week.”

  I’m too spent to repeat my outraged performance for Rob, the meat guy, because by now I know that neither he nor Eddie is to blame. But because we’re great customers, Rob agrees to rush me over some sausage, a dozen pork tenderloins, and some flank steak, which I can cook quickly, for braciole.

  I instruct the prep cooks to roll out some lasagna noodles and to start preparing béchamel in large quantities. We will resort to a couple of baked pasta entrees, flavored with meat and sausage and, depending on what Eddie sends over, a cioppino. It’s now almost nine, and my adrenaline level remains high, although a plan, of sorts, is slowly coming together. Whether it will be sufficient to stave off the pending lunch disaster remains to be seen, but for the moment, at least, the prep staff is well occupied, and I have a moment to breathe. Instead, I lock myself in the office and call Jake. He picks up on the third ring, and I can tell right away from the background noise that he’s at the gym.

  “Jake, what the hell is going on? How could you have forgotten to order the fish and meat?” It’s the first time we’ve actually spoken since that day in the apartment, but I don’t have the time or the patience to feel weird about it.

  “Mira? What are you talking about?”

  “Last week, when you were out sick, I gave her some stuff to give to you, including the meat and fish orders, and told her to have you add what you needed and phone them in.”

  “Mira, Nicola gave me the package, the menu changes and the note about Castelli Farms pork, which I did order, by the way, but there were no meat or fish orders in there. I assumed that you’d taken care of the orders like you always do.”

  “What do you mean the orders weren’t in there? Of course they were!” I scream into the phone.

  “Look, I told you they weren’t in the package. You must have forgotten to put them in.”

  “I did not forget! She must have taken them out! And I called you last week on Friday and left a message on your machine. What about that? Are you trying to tell me you didn’t get my message either? Jesus, Jake, don’t you see what she is doing?”

  “Mira, stop screaming at me. I didn’t get the orders, and I didn’t get any message. And don’t go accusing Nicola—get a grip, Mira. Why would she have taken them out? Call Eddie and Rob and get them to send over an emergency delivery. Just deal with it, okay?”

  “I’ve already called them and made arrangements to make sure that we have food here today, but Jake, this is something we have to deal with now. We can’t go on like this. If nothing else, we have to think of Grappa which, I might remind you, is our livelihood.”

  “You’re right. We are going to have to make some changes. Listen, I can’t talk about this right now.” He lowers his voice, and I’m having trouble hearing him over the piped music at the gym.

  “Jake, can’t you get down here and help me sort out this mess? I’m going to be at least an hour behind in prep, and God knows what Rob and Eddie are sending over. I could really use the help.”

  Jake doesn’t say anything, and if it wasn’t for the iron-pumping music in the background I might have thought he hung up. Finally, he says, “No, Mira, I cannot come down there right now. I’m busy.”

  “Busy! You’re at the fucking gym, Jake! And this is your fault. Nicola—”

  “I’m not going to sit here and have you insult Nicola. Nicola had no reason to remove those orders. You’re the one who screwed up, Mira. I’m done.” And suddenly he has hung up on me.

  No reason for Nicola to remove the orders? Without even trying I can think of several. For starters, it’s a quick and easy way to make me look bad. Also, she’s been around long enough to know that I’m the one who’s on when the deliveries come in and that I’m the one who’ll be sweating to organize emergency deliveries and scrambling to put together a menu on the fly. And perhaps more significantly, it forces Jake into the position of having to choose whom to believe—Nicola or me. If Nicola was feeling slightly uncertain about which way Jake was leaning, then this little tactic might just be a good barometer. What was beginning to be absolutely clear was that Nicola was willing to sacrifice the restaurant to get to me.

  When news of their affair had first spread, everyone told me it wouldn’t last. It was just a fling, not uncommon, especially for men of a certain age who are trying to adjust to fatherhood. I’d done my best to believe them, despite mounting evidence to the contrary and, until as recently as that afternoon in the apartment, had even entertained the possibility, albeit a slim one, that Jake might want to come back. But lately, I’d begun to seriously doubt that she and Jake were just a fling. She was, I feared, going to be around for the long haul. That meant only one thing. I would have to buy Jake out.

  For the next five hours I do not have another thought in my head that does not involve managing this crisis. When Eddie calls to deliver the bad news—no squid to be found anywhere in the city—I send one of the prep cooks to Dean and Deluca to check the price of squid and to make some discreet inquiries as to how much they have on hand. I throw a twenty at her and tell her to buy me half a pound so I can check the quality. The grilled calamari and spinach antipasto has been a mainstay since we opened, so paying a premium to keep it on the menu is a no-brainer, providing the quality is sufficiently high. I get one of the line guys to pull the lunch menus and type a new one that I dictate while pulling stuff from the walk-in and freezer. Today, our prix fixe menu will feature cucina poverta: polpettone alla napoletana, an Italian meat loaf; pappa al pomodoro; a ragout with sausages and peppers; and braciole (providing Rob, the meat guy, comes through in time).

  When the meat still has not shown up by ten I’m on the phone yelling at some hapless office person, although it’s just about hopeless, because, unless the meat shows up in the next five minutes, there will not be enough time to make the braciole. To cover for the fact that we were only able to buy fifteen pounds of calamari from Dean and Deluca (at an exorbitant price), Tony and I devise an additional antipasto, a ricotta and Pecorino torta flavored with hot pepper and prosciutto.

  By eleven the kitchen is a mess, and should a health inspector walk in at this moment, there’s a good chance we’d be shut down. I patrol the various stations shouting orders to clean up and wipe down, to get it together. When it seems inconceivable that we can
pull things together in half an hour, Tony jokes that we should flip a fuse or two and post a sign on the door reading, “Closed due to power failure.” For his attempt at levity, he gets jabbed in the ribs with a whisk, and I tell him he’s lucky I’m not holding a knife. I tell the staff that no dish is to leave the kitchen unless it goes by me. It is essential that I taste everything, since the majority of the food we are serving today is from recipes developed for the restaurant kitchen in the last two hours. In preparation, I chew a handful of Tums to quell the churning acid in my stomach.

  As the first entrees go out, there’s a collective holding of breath in the kitchen. It isn’t that the food we are serving is bad. I would have taken Tony’s suggestion and induced a power failure long before I served food that was seriously compromised. The issue isn’t the quality, but the fact that we are serving different food. Grappa’s signature dishes feature simple food, perfectly grilled meats, poultry, and fish, straightforward braises, and earthy flavors—a branzino delicately grilled on the bone and adorned by little besides some excellent quality olive oil and fresh herbs. Today, however, constrained by the small amount of meat and fish available, our menu is more reminiscent of Nonna’s kitchen than what our well-heeled regulars are used to.

  I’m in the midst of preparing a pesto for the fish stew when Eddie jogs through the back door and does a victory lap around the kitchen, while hefting a large bag of something over his head.

  “Yo, I got the last in the city,” he booms. “The last calamari on the island! Don’t ask me whose ass I had to kiss to get it, Mira, but baby, you owe me.” He grabs me by the waist and gives me a hug that I can’t return, even if I wanted to. Still, the calamari is a nice gesture from Eddie, who has gone to considerable trouble just to please me.

  “Thanks, Eddie,” I say, turning and giving him a tight smile. “That’s great.”