42

They drove in David’s rented hybrid to Maison Robert, the upscale, slightly flagging French place she used to go with her father during her vacations from Tellman Rose. It felt nice to be among adults, even if the adults in question were David and a bunch of past-their-prime-if-they’d-ever-had-a-prime academics bleached white by one too many northern Wisconsin winters. Maison Robert served as a kind of de facto Westish faculty club. Bald pates shone in the yellow-puddled lights, wire-rimmed glasses peered at the immutable black menus, snifters of amber brandy clicked against bulbous goblets of deep red wine. Pella’s oral history professor, the preposterously chic, thoroughly un-Wisconsiny Judy Eglantine, dined alone in one corner, dressed in narrow black, an open book before her. A feathery lime-green boa flopped over the opposite chair in place of a companion. Pella caught her eye and waved shyly as David pulled back her chair with his usual wooden courtesy. Professor Eglantine smiled.

David beckoned the waiter with an impatient gesture and, without having looked at the list, began quizzing him about the wines. The waiter was Pella’s age but had wispy albino-blond hair, as if the winters had aged and bleached him too. He mumbled oaky and spicy a few times. David ordered a red Bordeaux.

“How do you know what I want?” Pella said. “Maybe I’d rather have white.”

“It’s good.” David glanced up at the hurriedly approaching waiter, whom he’d already frightened into submission. “Ah, merci—la dame le goûtera,” he said, though there was little chance the poor guy spoke French.

Pella leaned back so the waiter could pour, let the wine’s oaky spices roll around in her mouth. David knew wine the way he knew architecture and Ancient Greek, the way he knew how to wire a kitchen and choose a mutual fund. She nodded at the waiter. “It’s good,” she said.

“That’s a lovely dress,” David said.

“Thanks.” It was the lilac dress her father had bought her. She had yet to wear it on a date with Mike; she and Mike hadn’t been on a date since that first night at Carapelli’s, unless you counted eating crackers in bed as a date, or watching Mike scarf down dollar pitchers at Bartleby’s.

“The color rather matches your finger,” David said. “What did you say happened?”

“I walked into a tree.”

“Ah, yes. The hazards of college life.”

David’s sense of humor was awkward and mechanical, as if he’d learned it from a book, but over time this mechanical quality could come to seem funny in itself. He seemed to be dressing better too—maybe somebody else was dressing him. Or maybe he just dressed well compared to Mike: his socks matched, and he was wearing a jacket. He was slight of frame, especially compared to you-know-who, but the jacket was new and it fit him well. The waiter appeared to silently top off her wine; she liked when that happened, because you couldn’t count how many glasses you’d had.

The table was set for four, though the reservation had been made for three. Pella hoped that when her father arrived he would invite Professor Eglantine to join them. Not only because her presence would ensure that the conversation stayed on solidly neutral ground but because Pella admired her immensely, and since attending her first oral history lecture had begun to harbor a hope that Professor Eglantine and her dad might get together. It hadn’t happened in the past eight years—or maybe it had, and ended—and so presumably never would, but she couldn’t help hoping. Professor E was just too striking and sexy, with her rare-bird eyes and that Sontag streak of pale gray in her hiply cut hair. Not conventionally sexy, perhaps—she was slight enough that you could fold her up and carry her like an umbrella—but her dad was capable of unorthodox appreciations. If there was a suitable match for him within fifty miles, this was it.

“So you’re really planning to stay here,” David said. “Shoveling slop at frat boys.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“I guess I’m not sure how else to put it.”

“Chef Spirodocus isn’t a hack,” she said. “He’s the real deal.”

David smiled that tight, tolerant smile. “I’m sure he’s a master of his craft. If he wanted to be running a first-rate kitchen somewhere, he would. He just happens to prefer making runny eggs for runny-nosed kids.”

Pella smoothed and tugged the hem of her dress. Where was her father? Why wasn’t Mike flinging a brick through the restaurant’s tinted picture window and slinging her over his shoulder to carry her away? What was all that muscle for anyway? Just because they’d had one little fight, he was going to sulk in his house and let David try to win her back? How wimpy was that? She slugged down some wine. Getting saved by men, finding a new mother—her fantasies were becoming more regressive by the second, a known hazard of being around David, who induced a strange powerlessness in her.

“I do think it’s wonderful,” he was saying, “that you want to study cooking.”

“You do?”

“Absolutely. I think much of the anxiety you’ve been suffering from these last few months has had to do with the lack of a creative outlet. No, not an outlet—a real sense of creative purpose. If you’re really through painting, perhaps this could fill that place in your life. And it would be a useful social corrective as well. All the first-rate chefs in this country are men. So many women slaving away in kitchens, so few of them allowed to be considered artists. It’s shameful.”

This was the way it had always been—everything David said so multiplicitous, so full of broad assessments and tiny recastings of truth, that to begin to dig in and issue corrections seemed petty and futile. Of course he’d believe that her “anxiety” stemmed from not painting, instead of from being married to him; of course he’d believe that her “anxiety” had lasted a few months and not the bulk of their curdled marriage. It maddened her that he still tried to cast her as an artist, when she hadn’t picked up a brush in years; the whole idea of art felt like a remnant of adolescence. Might as well call her a swimmer, because she’d once held the Tellman Rose freshman record in the 100 butterfly. The wine was good. She was drinking it down.

“Although of course I’d be disappointed if you truly gave up painting,” David went on. “You’re amazingly talented.”

“No one is ‘amazingly’ anything,” Pella said. “When have you ever been amazed?”

“I was amazed by you, Bella. By your brilliance. It was one of the chief reasons I fell in love with you.”

“We were living together before you ever saw one of my paintings. We were living together before I found out you were married. I still don’t know how you pulled that off.”

“I didn’t keep my marriage from you any more than you kept your painting from me. We were discovering each other. We were young and in love.”

“I was young,” Pella said.

“And I was in love. Anyway, Bella, my point is this: If you want to become a chef, I support you fully. But I think you should go about it in the proper way. And I’m not sure that living with your father and scrubbing pots for ten dollars an hour—”

“Seven fifty.”

“My God. Really? Seven fifty, then. Is even remotely the way to blossom as a chef. Art, academia, cuisine—whatever you choose, the only way to become the best is to immerse yourself with the best.” David, as he said this, speared a forkful of gray, weary escargot and wagged it as evidence. “I don’t have to tell you that the Bay Area has some of the best and most adventurous chefs in the world. The Asian and the European; seafood, which I know to be a particular favorite of yours; not to mention a fair amount of actual thoughtfulness about matters of sustainability and ecologi—”

“So I should come home. Why not just come out and say it?”

“I don’t think I was being terribly circumspect. You’re living amongst children, Bella. What are you going to do, wash their dishes until you’re thirty? While this country has problems you could be helping to solve.”

Pella had fallen in love with David’s rectitude, and she still found it hard to disregard. She wanted to be a good person, and that meant she should do something good with her life. Yes, from a certain vantage the Westish dining hall was a wasteland, a supporter of slaughterhouses, an exploiter of immigrant labor, a treadmill of routine and repetition and industrial foods delivered over long distances to be prepared and consumed hastily with great amounts of waste. But she felt comfortable there. Wasn’t that a prerequisite, a place to start? How could you learn anything, accomplish anything, build any kind of momentum toward becoming a good person, unless you felt at least a little bit comfortable first?

Professor Eglantine signed her check and wrapped her lime-green boa around the collar of her black jacket like a scarf. She picked up her large hardcover book, tiptoed toward the door on her five-inch heels, somehow seeming both exquisitely composed and as if the book’s torturous weight might pitch her over and pin her to the floor. Pella sent a pleading look in her direction, hoping against hope that she would tiptoe over to engage them in charming, heartfelt conversation that would demonstrate once and for all that Westish was a place where an elegant, useful life could be led, but it didn’t happen, and Professor Eglantine was gone. So much for romance, Pella thought, so much for a new mother-in-law. Where the heck was her father?

“Don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “I like doing dishes.”

David ruffled his tightly trimmed beard with his fingertips, sighed an ennui-riddled sigh meant to indicate that he didn’t much care what Pella did but wished she wouldn’t be so exasperating. “You know, if you wanted to leave, Bella, you could have done so in a slightly more civil fashion.”

“I thought it was fairly civil,” Pella said. “No flashing blades. No bloodshed.”

“Maybe mature is the word I’m looking for, then. You’re not a teenager anymore, Bella. You can’t keep running away from home every time you feel frightened about the future. Whatever the trouble, I wish you had talked to me about it. I’m sure we could have worked it out like adults. I’m sure we still could.”

Pella slugged back the rest of her wine. She was shifting into the blame-David phase of the evening. “Right,” she said. “I can imagine how that conversation would have gone. ‘Uh, David, I’m leaving you because you’re controlling and unreasonable and debilitatingly jealous. You don’t want me to work, don’t want me in school, don’t even want me to learn how to drive. So, uh, whaddya think, sweetie?’ ”

David drummed his fingers against the base of his wineglass and looked at her with oh-so-reasonable bemusement. “Bella, don’t twist my words. I didn’t want you to take driver’s ed while you were on certain medications. That’s all.”

“What medications? Ambusal? Kelvesin? What year do you think this is? Every person on the road is on something or other.”

“Those people already know how to drive. You were in a fragile state at the time. And San Francisco is a difficult place for a novice. Heavy traffic, constant changes in elevation. I thought it would be dangerous.”

“We could have gone somewhere quieter. You could have made some accommodations. But instead you used it as another excuse to isolate me. Who knows what kind of trouble I’d have gotten into if I’d had a car.”

David thrived on these arguments, his manner growing calmer and saner by the second as Pella tipped toward madness. Except of course that he was the mad one. “Bella, I’m surprised at you. When we first got married, I wanted you to start college right away, remember? And you told me that love and your art were all that mattered to you. So we decided you shouldn’t work.”

He was mocking her, throwing around these big little words—love, work, art. “That was at the beginning,” she said.

“And a fine beginning it was. Remember when I met Marietta and invited her to dinner? And we took your best piece, the big collage with the salmon colors, and hung it facing her chair? I felt like a criminal mastermind when she took the bait. That was quite a night.”

Marietta Cheng owned a gallery; she’d bought Sea-Spray for four thousand dollars, Pella’s first and only real sale. Pella had almost backed out of the deal, for reasons she couldn’t quite express, but David convinced her that though they didn’t need the money, it was important for her to establish herself as a commercially viable artist. Soon thereafter Pella’s ill feelings began. She blew Marietta’s money on vintage dresses and other long-gone trivia—she’d have been better off keeping the one thing she’d made that she actually liked.

“In the beginning you would have let me work,” she said. “But later…”

“Later you were sick, Bella. I wanted you to get well. That’s all.” He took her hands. “Look. If you want a divorce, you can have a divorce. I’m not going to dissuade you. But this”—with a flick of his eyes he took in not just the escargot and the aging patrons but the school and the town and the whole Midwest—“is not for you, Bella. You can live in the loft. I’ll rent an apartment. You can get a job at a restaurant, apply to culinary school, go about this the proper way. Who knows? Maybe someday you’ll let me design a restaurant for you.”

Shit, thought Pella. David wasn’t going to win her back—and oh what a prize she was—but he was going to destroy whatever tenuous momentum she’d been building. If she was going to enroll at Westish, she needed to believe that she should enroll at Westish, that living near her father, working for Chef Spirodocus, studying with Professor Eglantine, was the way to start to build a life. If she entertained doubts about whether she belonged here, she’d wind up back in bed, paralyzed by those doubts. The circumstances were tipped in Westish’s favor—she could enroll without finishing high school, her tuition would be free, she was already here and so far felt okay. But how could she not have doubts, what with the sad-looking entrées arriving, the slumped-over patrons departing, her father AWOL as usual, Mike off petting Henry somewhere? If tonight was a referendum on her presence at Westish, the results weren’t good. She didn’t love David anymore, but love had trained her to see the world through his eyes, and through his eyes this place was a vapid dump.

The wine was white, which meant they’d switched.

She depended on men too much, Mike this Daddy that, needing one to rescue her from the next; even Chef Spirodocus was a man, of a sort. Maybe she needed more women in her life, that was why her mind latched on to Judy Eglantine, but she’d always gotten along better with men and that was unlikely to change much here, where most of the women were younger than she and would no doubt shun her and be scared of her and call her a slut no matter what she did. Was that too pessimistic? In any case, she’d have to rely on herself.

Something buzzed. David pulled his BlackBerry out of his pocket, glanced at the screen. “It’s your father,” he said.

“So don’t ans—,” she said, but David already had. He handed her the phone.

“Pella. I’m so sorry. I can be there in fiftee—”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said chipperly. “I think you were right not to come. David and I needed to hash some things out by ourselves.”

“Really?” said her dad, not believing her.

“Really.”

“You’re not mad at me?”

“Next question!” Chipper but honest. Chipper, honest, and drunk.

“Okay… it’s not going too well, I hope?”

“That’s proprietary.” Pella could hear noise in the background—voices, a kind of clinking, faint music. “Are you in a restaurant?”

“Me?… No, no, of course not. I got waylaid by Bruce Gibbs… A president’s work and so on… Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Pella said.

It could barely have been nine thirty, but around the room checks were being paid, jackets donned. Midwestern living: the ten o’clock news and up at dawn. Pella grabbed the neck of the wine bottle, no longer willing to wait for the waiter’s invisible hand. She looked at David. “I’m sleeping with someone.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She knew he meant it: he didn’t believe her. “It’s true.”

“I don’t believe you,” he repeated. “I don’t even know why you’d say that. What about us?”

“What about us? It’s not like we’re sleeping together. We haven’t had sex in a year.”

He glared at her. “That’s not true.”

“Of course it’s true,” Pella said. “A year at least.”

“Bella. You don’t remember the last time we made love?”

Pella tried to remember. But why should she remember? They’d made love less frequently, and then they’d stopped. It wasn’t like there’d been some kind of ceremony, or even a conscious decision.

“It was Christmas Day,” David said. “The day I gave you these.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a tiny manila envelope. He undid the flap and shook out onto the tablecloth two gorgeous teardrop earrings, sapphire and platinum. Pella had never seen them before. Or had she?

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“I thought you might want to keep them. I don’t have much use for them myself.”

Pella resisted the urge to pick one up. “We did not have sex on Christmas,” she said.

David fixed her with a calm, pitying expression, the kind that usually preceded some calmly phrased suggestion—that she should calm down, or drink some water, or consider seeing someone. “Bella,” he said reprovingly. “You know I hate it when you do this.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend that you don’t remember things. As if memories were just a matter of convenience, and you could throw them away if you didn’t want them. Although why you wouldn’t want such pleasant memories is beyond me. We woke up. It was sunny. I cooked breakfast. We listened to Krebenspell’s Second. We made love. We went to dinner at Trisquette. I gave you these.” His voice was obnoxiously calm. Pella’s need for a sky-blue pill was through the roof, but she wasn’t sure where her purse had gone. She looked for the bottle of wine, but it was gone too, hauled off by the waiter with the hairless hands. She’d probably drunk the whole thing herself. David always stopped at two glasses. She’d have to be crazy not to remember those earrings, and she was clearly not crazy. Opaquely not crazy. Not not not crazy. She vaguely remembered dinner in late December, an awful afternoon walled in by the platinum sun, the bizarre creakings of Deskin Krebenspell, whom David regarded as the quote “only living composer.” No making love—no way. But people believed what they wanted to believe. She’d told David that she was sleeping with Mike, and he refused to believe it, had forgotten it instantly, because his brain couldn’t stand to know such a thing. If he wanted to believe they’d slept together on Christmas, let him believe it.

But the earrings were something else. The earrings existed. They lay there on the table. They did look vaguely familiar—no doubt they’d seen them in some boutique in Hayes Valley, and Pella had oohed and ahhed, and David, having taken note of her oohing and ahhing—he’d never been stingy with gifts—bought them before flying out here. And now was pretending that he’d given them to her before. She picked one up to put it back in its manila envelope. A nice touch, that: to hand them over in their brand-new box would make them seem brand-new. It was a classic David maneuver to try to win her back this way, by making her think she was crazy. He made her crazy, no one else. He did have good taste, though. The earring squirted from her hand and landed in her empty wineglass amid the pale grit. She should drink it, swallow it—now that would make her crazy. And it would make him crazy too.

She lifted the wineglass, clicked it against David’s, which was still half full. She met his eyes meanly, lifted the glass to her lips. Fuck Mike Schwartz was the toast that arose in her mind. Fuck Mike Schwartz, whom I live to fuck. Never too drunk to use whom. Funny that she’d thought live to fuck instead of love to fuck or like to fuck. Like to fuck would have been the most accurate, but it didn’t make much difference. David was speaking and reaching. She leaned away. She had the wineglass nearly inverted, but the earring hung up in the little hollow that led down to the stem. She tapped the glass with her injured hand. The earring rattled free and skied down the goblet’s concavity into her mouth. She rolled it around, cold metal and stone. She tested it with her teeth, slipped it under her tongue. It felt right.

“Spit that out,” David said, alarmed.

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“You could be seriously injured.”

A thousand-dollar dinner. A piece of performance art.

“You’re acting like a five-year-old,” David said. “It’s not becoming.”

“You said you had no use for them.”

“Quit performing. Spit it out.”

She showed him the inside of her mouth, like a five-year-old who’s finished her spinach: clean. When she’d gone to swallow she felt a thrill and then a fear—what if it stuck in her throat? But it was small and went down without a problem.

David looked terrified. He pulled out his phone.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m calling an ambulance. That thing will shred your intestines.”

“Oh, relax.” Pella shoved back her chair, a bit unsteadily, and walked away from the table. Relying on yourself wasn’t easy; it could involve strong measures. There were two stalls in the women’s bathroom, both vacant. She’d never really been bulimic, but it was one of those things a girl just knew how to do. The earring came up in a tide of pink wine and snail sauce. She held her hair with her left hand and fished the beautiful blue teardrop out of the toilet with her right. She went to the sink to rinse her mouth and then the earring. A wicker basket of woodchip potpourri sat beside the basin. In the mirror she looked blanched and haggard, thirty at least, but the wine was gone from her stomach and she was starting to feel better already. She wouldn’t even have a hangover tomorrow.