“I’m sorry? Fiona’s making a big deal about me?” Adrienne said. “I don’t even know her. I’ve never met her.”
“I know,” he said cheerfully. He helped himself to a steak, gave it a generous ladle of béarnaise, plopped a handful of golden fries right on top.
Adrienne followed suit. There was salad, too, a gorgeous crisp-looking salad that had already been lightly dressed with something. Adrienne mounded her crowded plate with salad, thinking about what Thatcher had said about the vegetables. Fiona picked them out before the sun was up.
Fiona! Fiona, whom Adrienne could not pick out of a crowd of two, was making a big deal about her. Adrienne needed to question this Mario person further to find out what was being said. Fiona Kemp, the reclusive genius chef, had been making a big deal all week because Adrienne was a woman. What had Thatcher said? He’d never hired a woman for the job before. Adrienne poured herself a tall glass of water then sat down next to the waiter with the blond ponytail. Mario took his dinner back to the kitchen. Adrienne felt weak, like her legs were made of baby greens. Before she got here she had been nervous to meet Fiona; now she was afraid.
No one was talking. The only sounds were knives and forks on plates, the occasional palm tapping the bottom of the ketchup bottle. Two waiters were studying the menus. The new guys. One pale and thin with a bushy head of loose curls and a weak chin, and one handsome dark-haired guy wearing two gold hoop earrings. The guy with the earrings was reading the menu so intently that he shot food off his plate when he cut his steak. Adrienne concentrated on eating carefully-one drop of ketchup on the diaphanous white blouse and… well, there was no time to go home and change and nothing at home to change into. Adrienne ate her steak, the béarnaise, the garlicky fries-did she even need to say it? It was steak frites from a rainy-day-in-Paris dream. The steak was perfectly seasoned, perfectly cooked, pink in the middle, juicy, tender. The salad was tossed in a lemony vinaigrette but it tasted so green, so young and fresh, that Adrienne began to worry. This person Fiona had a way. If the staff meal tasted this good then the woman was possessed, and Adrienne didn’t want a possessed woman on her case.
The whole thing had been too easy, she saw now. She shouldn’t be here, she didn’t belong here, but she had been swept along by her own greed and by Thatcher, who had been described in a major food magazine as “charismatic, compelling… he could talk a teetotaler into a bottle of Chateau Lafite.” He had convinced her, somehow, to take this leap. Adrienne thought it was weird that she hadn’t even met Fiona, but she’d chalked it up to the fact that Fiona was a recluse. A culinary Greta Garbo, or J. D. Salinger. Were Thatcher and Fiona married, engaged, committed, together, dating-or, worst of all, exes? She had to ask Caren. Caren who was three seats down eating a plate of only salad. Drinking, yes, espresso. Caren had advised Adrienne to keep a toothbrush and toothpaste at the restaurant. Caren knew everything.
There was soft female laughter, as jarring to Adrienne as a tray of stemware crashing to the floor. She looked around to see Duncan and the bar back engaged in quiet conversation. They looked so familiar, so at ease-the girl grabbed Duncan’s forearm when she talked. Adrienne wondered if something was going on between them. The girl was young-in college still, Adrienne guessed-she had curly light brown hair and big brown eyes. Big boobs, too, and her oxford was unbuttoned one too far.
Adrienne was one to talk. Diaphanous top… gutsy… I like it. “Diaphanous” didn’t mean transparent. You certainly couldn’t see anything. Besides, she was wearing a very sturdy, very modest beige bra. And her shoes-what, exactly, was wrong with her shoes?
Adrienne did not like the idea that while she was getting moved into the cottage, setting up her bank account, and strictly adhering to all three of her rules, someone she’d never laid eyes on was down here talking about her. News of the diaphanous top and the inappropriate shoes had probably already made it back into the kitchen. What would Fiona say to that?
Thatcher appeared, holding a flute of pink champagne. “You’re all done.”
It wasn’t a question, though Adrienne still had food on her plate, and she didn’t want to be separated from it. He nodded toward the front door. “Service starts in ten minutes. Mr. and Mrs. Parrish will be here at six. There are some other things I have to explain.”
Adrienne cleared her plate into three bins the way she’d seen others doing, though it killed her to throw food away. She followed Thatcher, who was holding the champagne out in front of him. “You liked dinner?” he asked.
“It was delicious.” This felt like a gross understatement and she wondered what words might convey the physical pain she felt at scraping her plate. “Did you eat?”
He laughed, the old karate-chop “ha!” It was a noise he made not when something was funny, she realized, but when something was preposterous. “No. I eat with Fee after service.”
Is she your wife? Girlfriend? Can someone please turn on the lights so I can see? Is this the restaurant’s last year because you’ve split up? Is the fact that I’m a woman going to be a bigger problem than you initially anticipated? Adrienne followed him silently, but not silently at all. Her shoes were making a tremendous racket against the wooden floors.
“I’m clomping,” she said.
Thatcher turned to her. “Yes. The shoes. I told you. You have to watch the way you walk. Tomorrow night, different shoes. A soft sole. Slippers or something, but elegant, okay?”
Adrienne deducted another hundred dollars from her rapidly diminishing savings for elegant slipper shoes. Fine for pants, but the dress she’d bought would look funny without heels.
“Taking this job was a mistake,” she said. “Behind the front desk of a hotel, no one could even see my shoes.”
They reached the oak podium, home to the phone, the reservation book, a Tiffany vase with a couple dozen blue irises. A shallow bowl of Blue Bistro matches. A leather cup containing three sharpened pencils and a funny-looking wine key. Thatcher held up the champagne flute.
“This is a glass of Laurent-Perrier rosé,” he said. “We sell it at the bar for sixteen dollars a glass, ninety-five dollars a bottle. This is what you’re going to drink on the floor.”
“I said, taking this job was a mistake.”
“We both took a gamble,” he said. “Please give it one night. I promise you will love it so much you will be counting the minutes until you can come back. If you don’t feel that way, then we’ll talk. But we can’t talk now. Right now, I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen, okay?”
His okays were purely rhetorical.
“I want to brush my teeth,” she said.
Before she knew what was happening, Thatcher leaned over and kissed her. Very quickly, very softly. “You’re fine,” he said. “I detect a trace of vinaigrette, but it’s really very pleasant.” He held the flute out to her, and as it gave her something to do other than fall over backward, she accepted it.
“My father is a dentist,” she said. If her father had seen what just happened-well, she could hear him now. These are not people who floss, honey. Adrienne looked at Huck Finn, the professor, resplendent in his watch and shoes, a yellow linen shirt and navy blazer. He did not seem at all fazed by what had just happened. The professor kissed me! It was really very pleasant, the kiss. This champagne is what I drink on the floor. I wear diaphanous tops and clompy shoes. He kissed me! No wonder they talk about me back in the kitchen!