Vintage Attraction (8 page)

“I don't think I've ever seen so many golfers in one place.”

“They just like wearing the polo shirts and khakis.”

“I guess if you break a sweat crossing from one end of the tasting tent to the other, it's kind of a sport. Oh, I was meaning to ask: what's up with those holster necklace things?”

“How else can you hold your wineglass while you have a fork in one hand and a plate in the other?” She shook her head and put the uneaten brownie half back in the basket. “Guerrilla buffet warfare.”

I laughed. “You're bad.”

“Don't tell anyone I talk like this,” she said. “I'm supposed to be grateful they admire me and support me and watch the show and everything, and I am, but sometimes it's just so—”

“Your secret's safe with me,” I said.

Her BlackBerry buzzed and she spent several interminable seconds taking in the information the screen presented.

“What is it?” I ventured to ask. “You're staring like gapers' block.”

“Oh, nothing,” she said quickly. She flung the phone onto the bed, where it landed facedown. “Just a random text.” She continued to eye the device, as though anticipating its starting to move again. “Young sommeliers. They're all freaking out about next year's master's exam.”

“How come you never took it?”

“They've been trying to get me to for years,” she said, “since the Court has so few female masters, but it wouldn't do anything for my career at this point. I don't have a problem helping candidates study, though.”

“Should you be concerned? About the message?”

“No,” she said. “Not at all.” She looked down at the BlackBerry again. It hadn't vibrated a second time. “In fact, I'm not going to reply.”

“Should I be concerned?”

“You? No. You definitely should not be. You should enjoy yourself.” She ran her hand down the buttons of my shirt. “And let me enjoy yourself before this next damn talk.”

“On today's episode of
Lifestyles of the Rich and Fermented
,” I said in Leach parody.

“Seriously, Hapworth, are you ready for this?”

“You're kind of stuck with me now.”

“What do you think brought us together?” Izzy asked. The question surprised me. “Like, do you think it was fate?”

“Do you believe in that?”

“Sometimes,” she said. She turned her head to the chandelier that loomed over us. “And other times I think things just happen.” Then her eyes came back to me. “Or is that the same thing?”

My inner English major was tempted to debate connotations, but I offered a humble shrug.

“You sit through my songs and dances.”

“I happen to think you're amazing. Though,” I teased, “that could just be an effect of Kohler's intoxicating charms.”

“It's beautiful here, isn't it? Hapworth, what if we could leave our lives behind and stay here forever?”

“Someone would probably miss us.”

“You know who I really miss?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Ishiguro.”

The Kohler Experience attendees cooed in mock deference around Izzy, but you could tell, above all, they were here to be entertained. They hadn't spent thousands merely to come learn about Spanish Monastrell and Rhone-style blends from the Languedoc, alternatives to fifty-dollar Napa Valley Cabernet that could be had at a third of the price. It created a very skewed power dynamic within the proceedings. The second presentation consisted of an hour and a half talk through a tasting, almost identical to the earlier installment. Following that, Izzy answered myriad idiotic questions. “Which wines should I decanter?” “'97 Robert Mondavi. Drink or sell? Saving a mag since my son's ‘destination' wedding—Oakville—still paying that bad boy off—it's a reserve.” Didn't foodies know how to use Google, too? Then—
then
—came another twenty minutes of autograph signing, picture taking, and a barrage of even more puerile interrogations than those given before the full room. The numerous sips I hadn't spit steeled me for the outlandishness of some propositions: “I got a whole vertical of Opus One. Screaming Eagle, Harlan, Bryant. The best. The best! And a guesthouse! Anytime you want to come down to Wichita, say the word. We'll get hammered!”

A few tarrying Window Tables, glass holsters swinging, finally shambled off elsewhere for more eating, drinking, and bragging about the depth and breadth of their basement cellars. Their purple-lipped wives followed behind with their festival tote bags jammed with trade wine spec sheets that might as well have been printed in Greek for all the use they had for them. From a phone in the empty lecture hall, Chef Dominique called for the complimentary shuttle service. Within a few moments, a black hybrid Lexus sedan skated halfway through the circular driveway at the entrance. The driver delivered us to the Kohler Waters Spa, in the Carriage House next door to the American Club, where Izzy had made a massage appointment. Chef Dominique said he was going to the sauna. I thought about wandering the town—I doubted I'd get very far beyond the hotels, as the paved walking paths were almost nonexistent—or returning to Riverbend to stare at the crimson and green and gold leaves that had fallen to the ground and scattered picturesquely from a comfortable chaise on the patio, but when Izzy suggested I join Chef Dominique, I cheerfully agreed. Even though sweating in a small airless chamber with the chef was probably just about the last thing I could have wanted to do that afternoon, I accepted the proposal because I wanted to give Izzy the impression that I was an easygoing, up-for-anything sort of guy. It was more important than my own happiness. Why would she want to be with anyone who was a drag in paradise?

I changed out of my button-down and khakis, wrapped a heavy towel around my waist, enveloped myself in a luxurious robe, and met Chef Dominique in a sensory-assaulting, epithelium-eroding tiled box. The hulking enabler of Izzy's fame and misfortune was amply frightening in the semi-nude. I struck up uncomfortable chitchat with the chef, but he did most of the talking. He didn't seem at all concerned whether or not his audience of one remained attentive—or even present—and prattled away. The balmy viscosity in the air made it increasingly difficult to see his face. Soon all I could perceive was a giant talking stomach.

“What's the meaning of life?” the stomach suddenly asked me.

“I think . . . You know, the usual things. Being able to love, to be loved, to produce something of lasting significance—”

The steam stopped flowing. Without the ambient hissing noise the heat brought, the box became alarmingly quiet. We just sat there as the air began to dry up and clear. Neither of us seemed to have any idea of what to do, whom to seek for help. Then there was a sharp, jarring clang, and a rusty-sounding rumble, and the steam began to pump in again.

“All my years of the restaurant, all of my awards, it is meaningful to me,
absolument
, but it is . . . eh, Peter Hapworth, how do I say? That is all behind me. Now I am TV producer and business manager.”

“Do you ever miss cooking?”

“Ah, Peter Hapworth. To be executive chef is not the same. You're a celebrity. All you do is hug and kiss and smile for the cameras and then you die one day. If you live like me”—he patted his belly here—“maybe one day is sooner than you think?” He chortled complacently. The amplified sounds reverberated exponentially as they bounced against the tiles.

“Izzy doesn't really strike me as the type who needs a manager,” I said. “You trusted her to run your wine program, to order and stock and sell thousands of dollars' worth of inventory every night, for years. Isn't she capable of handling her speaking engagements, now that she's off the floor, just as well? Besides, wouldn't it free you up to do other things?”

“Ah,
mon ami
, she is only the sommelier.” He snorted crudely. “And a sommelier knows wine, but not about life.”

The smugness was almost as difficult to inhale as the steam. “Isn't that kind of . . . I don't know . . . a little patronizing?”

Chef Dominique laughed again, so strongly and for such an extended duration that I was almost certain he was going to asphyxiate. Then he said he was done. We returned to the locker room.

“You want to know the meaning of life, Peter Hapworth?” he asked. I looked at him. “There is no meaning of life. That's what it means.”

An attendant reminded Chef of his own massage appointment, which, apparently, he'd completely forgotten. He excused himself, and I dried off in the locker room alone—able to breathe for the first time since I got to the sauna—changed into a clean robe, and went to wait for Izzy.

Later on, after Izzy and I returned to our room, I kept thinking about what the chef said in the haze. His caustic remarks were bewildering. I hoped it was just that something had gotten lost in translation, or that the chef—or I—was having a momentary grandiose delusion brought on by the surplus heat. This was too nice a weekend to have bad feelings.

Izzy wanted to take a shower—with me. We stood, romantically entwined, in the glass-and-marble Kohler booth big enough to rain on us in comfortable tandem. Following that, we tried out the separate Jacuzzi. We leaned against each other, a fusillade of water jets firing against our torsos. I stared at the gilded faucets and toilet handles in the bathroom. After a long soak, none of the day's—none of life's—accrued indignities seemed that outrageous after all.

The
Cellar Temperature
dinner that night had us first boarding a shuttle bus to take us deep into the dark country night. The neighboring River Wildlife private club's Lodge Restaurant was in a log cabin at the edge of a forest. There was little that hadn't been hunted on the menu. A loaded rifle rack (fortunately chained up) stood by the wine cellar to underscore the theme. The guest list included a spiky-haired, trendily suited columnist and some PR girls from the magazine in black and pink Forever 21 dresses. Also at the table were, I'd learn later, some other food and wine world celebrities: Michael Lomonaco, a genial but reserved New York chef who'd once run Windows on the World; a mixologist and redoubtable chronicler of cocktail culture with an equally redoubtable Double Windsor, Anthony Giglio; and Laura Werlin, “The Cheese Lady,” who'd published a number of preeminent domestic and imported volumes. Izzy knew them all from the festival circuit.

While plates of appetizers I didn't recall anyone having ordered appeared and moved from hand to hand, people spoke casually about the Kohler Experience, the panels on which they'd sat, the presentations and demos they'd performed, and other cities they'd visited and would visit in the coming year. I obviously had little to offer a discussion like this, and was grateful they allowed me to just listen and quietly eat and drink. I looked, intermittently, at the empty seat across from me. Chef Dominique had received a last-minute invitation to have drinks with a Food Network executive he'd been stalking, and stayed behind at Riverbend.

The entrees went down (not yet aware that the magazine was picking up the tab, I'd chosen the duck, which, for $46, was the least expensive option), and the diners began to pick and praise and offer bites of this and that to their neighbors. Servers decanted more bottles of wine and served them to us in giant glasses.

As people ate, a table-wide lull befell. The sounds of silver touching plates had superseded the conversations. Then The Cheese Lady turned and asked Izzy how long she and I had been dating. We'd anticipated this question and rehearsed an answer before we'd even gotten to Kohler: we agreed to tell people who inquired that we'd been together “going on a year.” It seemed reasonable enough a courtship duration that we wouldn't run the risk of panicking anyone with what might have appeared to be unchecked romantic impetuousness—only together a millisecond and now travel companions to boot? But Izzy, admittedly never one who lied well, stammered and unearthed the truth before I even had a chance to deliver our party line.

“Three weeks,” she confessed to The Cheese Lady. Amid neighboring gasps, she said Izzy was putting her on. Then she looked to me to correct the figure and end the gag. I couldn't, of course, and nodded.

“I've dated men for three
years
and haven't felt ready to go on a trip together,” The Cheese Lady said. She raised her wineglass to toast us. “There's a phrase that comes to mind to describe a whirlwind courtship like yours, and that's ‘holy shit.'”

After getting up late the next morning, we checked out of Riverbend, had Bloody Marys served with beer backs for brunch in a pub, and set out for Chicago as the day's sun was effusing from the Wisconsin sky. Though this time Izzy rode with me, the chef wasn't far behind us. We managed to lose him, briefly, when we turned off at a roadside shack for apple pie and cider and to admire the kitschy rural souvenirs. During this interlude, he made his own detour to a Culver's drive-thru for butter burgers and a pint of frozen custard he'd finish in the Range Rover. He was once again on our trail almost as soon as we were back on the highway.

u

Izzy continued to invite me to events in the weeks that followed. Together we went to cocktail parties and store openings and celebrations of new fashion lines at Saks. In a new suit, one of three new shirts, and one of four new ties she bought me, I sat beside Izzy at strategically placed ballroom tables at charity dinners that she also emceed. There were lunches at which she was bestowed an award. I accompanied her to receptions organizers wanted her to attend for no reason other than to “be seen.” I enjoyed these occasions, especially the ones that featured an open bar and, though they occurred more infrequently, a live band and dancing. Our pictures began to appear regularly in the scene section of the
Sun-Times
and in the about-town society pages of
Chicago Social
and
Today's Chicago Woman
, coverage essentially dedicated to regaling readers with glimpses of fantastic events most would only be able to dream of experiencing in person. It made less and less sense to photograph her with anyone else or on her own. People were talking about
us
. Someone had even updated Izzy's Wikipedia entry to reflect her new entanglement with me, Peter Hapworth, “a Chicago-area entrepreneur.” My far less sensational role of college comp teacher had been revised out of the narrative. I received a number of astonished (and some baldly disbelieving) wall posts when I linked my Facebook page to Izzy's and our status turned to “in a relationship.” “The same Isabelle Conway? The one from TV?” some of the messages read.