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Authors: Alison Pace

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BOOK: Through Thick and Thin
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Josh nods his head authoritatively, right after
sea salt
, beaming as if it was he who gathered every ingredient on the entire menu and presented it in such an appetizing fashion. It feels like waking up from a strange and confusing dream, as she remembers, hazily, a bit fuzzily, Josh’s disinclination toward shorthand or summary. With menus. With some other things, too. It would, she now recalls, be quite impossible for him to say, I could get the first thing, and you could get the second. She’d forgotten that.
“And then . . .” he continues, continuing also to beam with what Meredith can only still identify as pride, “I could get the Cape Cod Monkfish Stuffed with Asparagus with Jerusalem Artichoke Puree and Garlic Coconut Cloud, and you could get—”
“The salmon?”
“Yes”—he nods—“with the Coulis of Roasted Tomatoes and Raspberry Vinegar Dressing.” He pauses, perhaps for a gulp of air and also to take a sip from his glass of water. Meredith sits politely in her chair and listens to him read to her from the menu in a festival of emphasis,
“Swiss Chard Leaves, Squid Ink Tagliatelle.”
She listens to the very long version of the Seared Foie Gras with its accompaniments, Rosemary Apple Puree and Armagnac Sauce, and onward to the Maine Day Boat Lobster with the White Asparagus and Sweet Peas. And she tries (really she does) to look patient, and interested. And as she listens, at one point she’s even able to hear beyond Josh and only hear the details of the dishes.
It’s this,
she thinks,
food, prepared so lovingly, so perfectly, so exceptionally, that makes so many things worthwhile.
And maybe that’s exactly what people mean when they say things like,
If nothing else, it’s dinner.
It’s not about the dinner being free of charge, it’s just about the dinner.
As she listens, she thinks that the food at Bouley has always been so exquisite and maybe now that she thinks of it, she does prefer it to Babbo. Listening to the menu, looking across the table at Josh, she is seized so suddenly with a fleeting but almost overwhelming wish about her future meals. She wishes not that she could eat so many of them with Josh, but that she could eat them at Bouley.
Josh’s next declaration, “I’ve had the Pennsylvania All Natural Chicken Baked in Buttermilk with Seasonal Rapini and Mitake Mushrooms,” snaps her out of her reverie, and she stops thinking about a world in which every night was spent at Bouley, but rather thinks,
Oh, have you?
She has to remind herself that tonight, she’s not reviewing. She’s not judging. And she shouldn’t judge Josh. She should only, like Stephanie said, see what happens.
“And it really is outstanding, so maybe we should both get that,” he says, and even though she just reminded herself not to judge, to be open-minded, to see what happens, she can’t really see why she should do that. For a moment she can’t think about the chicken or anything else. For a moment, all she can think is,
You broke up with me. And you told me that it was because I wasn’t smart enough or ambitious enough or thin enough.
He’d called it
fit,
not thin, but he’d actually said that. Of course she hadn’t forgotten that, but she’d thought for all the time she’d missed him, maybe she could have, by now, forgiven that. Only now she’s not so sure.
“I think I’ll have the venison,” she says, trying to maintain an adventurous eater’s emotional distance from any thoughts of Bambi.
Josh purses his lips. Josh, it seems, does not care for venison. “I don’t care for venison,” he says, “though I’d be interested to try the Sliced Almonds, Grilled Radicchio, Quince Puree and—”
“Great then,” she says, “you can try some of it,” and he purses a little bit more, and she can tell he’s a bit taken aback by his soliloquy being so rudely cut off. She would like to ask him, out loud,
Were you always like this?
She thinks that if she were to actually ask him this, he would nod and say quite seriously,
I believe so, yes.
The waiter is here now, as is the bread. Meredith has never, in her entire career of eating, ever had bread that came anywhere close to comparing to the bread at Bouley. It is, she feels, beyond comparison. It is, and she truly believes this, perfection.
“Will you be enjoying the wine pairing with your meal?” the waiter asks. Meredith thinks she sees the glimmer of recognition in his eyes.
Josh says, “No,” right away, and Meredith thinks that she would have liked the wine pairing. Though, the wine pairing takes the dinner from one hundred and fifty dollars per person to two hundred and forty. No matter how unaccustomed she is to paying for her own dinner (a close second would be how unaccustomed she is lately to having someone across the table from her buy her dinner) she’s well aware how extravagant, how very over the top a price tag on a meal like this is.
“I’ll have a glass of the Cabernet, please,” she says, thinking it will go well with the venison. She looks up, across the table at Josh, and smiles. He smiles back. She still finds him, his salt-and-pepper hair (very straight and maybe thinning a significant amount more than it used to be), his gray eyes and fine features, so handsome. She watches the way he takes a piece from his bread, the subtlety of his movement, the delicacy of his hands that always seemed aristocratic to her, and still do. She imagines she’ll always think of him as handsome and something about that makes her feel a little bit tricked. She wonders if he missed her. Not now, not from whatever it was that led him here, to Bouley, but when it was over, when it was done, for three years, the years she turned thirty-one and thirty-two and -three. She wonders if he missed her during the years that she got noticed and recognized and published and promoted until she got the call from
The NY
(and it was, she thought, the best phone call she had ever answered on the first ring) and she got so busy that it started to hurt when she wasn’t. Did he miss her then? And she wonders if she asked him, if he’d be honest, if he’d say,
No, I didn’t miss you then. It wasn’t until recently.
She wonders if having an important job at an important magazine, as important as
The NY,
is what makes her no longer not smart in his eyes, and no longer not ambitious, and that’s why he’s here.
This isn’t a night to judge, not food or Josh,
she tries to remind herself again. It’s a night just to enjoy and experience, to step back and see what happens. See what happens. It has never been her special skill. She smiles and savors the perfection of the food that is brought to them, the presentation perfect, the timing without flaw. And it’s not until they’re more than halfway through the hot Valrhona chocolate soufflé that she realizes with absolute certainty that she doesn’t miss him anymore.
As they are leaving the restaurant, they pass a couple, sitting at a table right by the archway that separates the maître d’ station from the dining room. It’s not the best table in the room by any means, but they look happy; the woman, especially, she looks very happy. She’s very thin, petite, and she’s wearing an intricate, delicate, top: black silk, spaghetti straps with sequins arranged all across the front. She leans forward and Meredith sees that the spaghetti straps tie together at her neck, in a bow. Meredith imagines the straps being untied later, in just one quick motion. She imagines herself as the type of woman who wears strappy, shiny shirts that say,
Look!
rather than always wearing ones that say,
Don’t.
They walk through the vestibule and are completely enveloped for a moment in the soft, sweet smell of the fresh apples that line every inch of the wall space, and Meredith says to Josh, “Thank you.”
When they are standing on the street, the apple smell somehow still surrounding them, Meredith takes another look through the dome-shaped windows, one last look at all the Valentine’s Day diners still enjoying the last of their meal. It’s so beautiful, every single thing. Her eyes refocus in the window, and then instead of being focused through the glass, she catches her reflection. She sees Josh in the reflection also, standing next to her, holding her hand, and she thinks maybe it’s a bit presumptuous of him to be holding her hand. Or maybe, holding someone’s hand after you’ve just bought her dinner at Bouley isn’t really a lot. But that’s not what stops her, not what stops all her forward motion, everything racing around in her mind along with the apples she can still smell, and the chocolate soufflé she can still taste. What stops her, what puts it all out of her mind, is what she sees when she looks at herself. It’s the first time in a long while she’s been out to dinner without wearing a disguise, and there’s something about that that makes it so much worse.
Earlier, inside Bouley, she had worried that someone might recognize her, dining out without a disguise. And here, now, only a few hours later, she doesn’t quite recognize herself.
She sees someone so much bigger than the person she thinks of when she thinks of herself. She sees someone who looks so much worse than she could have ever thought of herself. And she hates what she sees. She wants to look, and to be able to see accomplished, competent, driven. She sees lumpy, she sees looming, she sees so much more than she wants. It is only right here, right now, that the word
substantial
has become a bad one. She wants to look and to be able to see herself and think any number of things, but all she can think is,
That can’t be me.
She has told herself so many times that it’s a job requirement to indulge, to have everything. But it didn’t prepare her.
She turns away from the reflection, but she lets the image linger in her mind, because she does things like that, because when she has made a career out of judging everything else, it is quite impossible for her not to give herself a hard time, too.
She’s facing Josh now, and he smiles. She thinks he smiles a lot. Maybe it would have been different if they’d gone somewhere less romantic. Like the Modern. Even though the
Times
only gave it two stars, Meredith actually thinks they were so off the mark about that. She thinks it’s beautiful and elegant and special, but she would never describe it as romantic. It’s one of her favorite new restaurants in New York, and she wonders if that must speak volumes about her.
She smiles back at Josh, and she thinks that smiling itself has almost lost its meaning. When she looks at him, it’s true: he’s still the guy who left her. He’s the guy who told her, it wasn’t him, it was her, who said in the spirit of honesty, because he thought honesty was so important, that he thought she wasn’t ambitious enough, and not successful enough, that she could be smarter. She could be more interested in politics, and international affairs, and she could be more
fit
and maybe take up running. He worried that she used to smoke when she was in college and when she’d lived in France and that she’d go back to that should times ever turn tough, as smokers often do. He’s the guy who left. He really left, he moved to Philadelphia to be a lawyer there, even though it seemed to Meredith at least that there were plenty of opportunities to be a lawyer in New York. And everyone told her that would make it easier, that he was in Philadelphia. But it didn’t, not for a long time.
“Do you want to come back?” he asks her, and he means his hotel, the Plaza Athénée, a hotel she has always thought of as beautiful. When she looks back on this night, it’ll probably be true that he was talking about more than the hotel. She doesn’t let herself look in the window again, at the reflection, and she looks right at him. She thinks that the people who really hurt you, who really truly left you with a hole in your heart, that maybe they kind of have to stay that way, as the people who left you, that maybe they don’t get to come back.
“I don’t know,” she tells him.
“Why not just see what happens?” he says. See. What. Happens. Apparently, it’s all the rage. And the only answer she can think of is that she doesn’t want to. She wishes for a moment, for longer than that, that she’d known this all along, that he would come back, even if it was three years later, and that when he did she wouldn’t want him. And she wishes she knew this not because it would have made any of it a victory, it has nothing to do with victories, it just would have made it so much easier.
“No,” she says, “No, Josh, I don’t think I do.”
And he nods, thoughtfully, and looks right at her and says, “I can understand that you might be ambivalent.” She wonders for a minute if she should just go back to his hotel with him, and sleep with him, and then bow out gracefully (though of course the bow-out would be perhaps slightly less graceful than had she not just used him for sex). She can see that there would be some merit in that, there not having been any sleeping with anyone for longer than she’d care to admit. But, no, she thinks, it would do more harm than good. And she longs for a moment to be the type of person who’d just go back with him and not think twice about the repercussions, and she longs for the moment after that just to be with him, and she imagines that’s exactly what he means by ambivalent.
BOOK: Through Thick and Thin
8.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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