Vintage Attraction (5 page)

“Wait,” she said.

The wind suddenly turned much colder.

“You can't kiss me here.”

“Why not?”

“Look.” She turned around, to the pornographically illuminated White Hen Pantry behind us. “It's a convenience store. That's not very romantic. That's not the kind of place where you want to say your first kiss happened. Right?”

Vodka sloshed around in my stomach, climbed up my veins, and spilled into my head. I felt myself leaning and pitched forward faster than my eyes could refocus. For a moment I couldn't see anything, only smell her coat. I aligned my hips and stood straight once again. The light for westbound traffic on Erie had changed to green, and we crossed the street.

“What about here?” I asked. We stood before a brick building with an out-of-business restaurant on its ground floor. I moved in once more.

She raised a hand to my chest. This was now a bit acted out by a comedy duo. “Look at the address.”

We raised our heads in unison. 666 North State.

“You can't kiss me in front of six-six-six,” she said. “That definitely doesn't bode well.”

“I'm out of ideas,” I said. I looked up the street for taxis. A few came, but they had darkened roof lights and didn't slow down. My teeth began to chatter from standing still, and I jammed my hands into my jeans pockets.

“You remind me of Woody Allen. Has anyone ever told you that before?”

I laughed. “I mostly get Jeff Goldblum, because of the hair. I prefer to think of myself as a young Dustin Hoffman, with glasses. Or Yale, Woody's best friend in
Manhattan
, though I guess—”

She tilted her head, as though appraising me. “I love
Annie Hall
,” she said. “It's, like, the most romantic movie.”

“I have it at my apartment,” I said. “On DVD. If—”

“If?”

“If you wanted to, you know, come over and see it.”

“Okay, tell you what,” she said. “If we get in the cab and NPR is on, we'll go to your place.”

“Okay.”

“And you can kiss me.”

“It's a deal.”

I flagged down a dusty white for-hire taxi with a faded purple logo on its rear door. It lurched over to the curb so quickly that I thought it might end up plowing us down. Izzy slid in, and I followed. Idling there, we listened to the radio. Wordless African music, rhythmic with tribal-sounding drums, played. She frowned an apology.

I realized something. “Wait a minute,” I said. “This is NPR. They have music at night. It's
World Beat
.”

“Nice try,” she said.

“It
is
NPR. I swear.” I leaned forward to address the driver through the opening in the bulletproof partition. “Is this NPR?” I asked.

“NPR?”

“Ninety-one point five. WBEZ? The radio station?”

“Ninety-one point five, yes, yes,” the driver said with a Caribbean lilt that complemented the instrumental.

I grinned. “I told you so.”

I slurred my cross streets in Humboldt Park to the driver. Izzy held up her hands for a moment in capitulation before opening her arms to receive me.

And then I kissed her.

We reached a corner market that sold cheap brewed Cafe Bustelo in miniature foam cups and the three-story brick building to which it was Siametically attached. I'd been subletting a one-bedroom on the ground floor from an associate professor on a research sabbatical. It was my first residence since my parents' with central air, cable (illegal basic), and an in-sink disposal. I opened the door and let us inside. I began leading a brief walk around the open areas of the apartment. Izzy paused in front of the kitchen counter piled with books. At the coffee table in the living room flooded with DVDs, she picked up
Annie Hall
and smiled. We passed my cluttered desk in the back alcove between the bedroom and bathroom. “I have to show you my cellar,” I said. I directed Izzy again to the kitchen, where we'd begun, and opened a cabinet high above the range. I couldn't see into it, but knew for what I reached. I took out the two dusty bottles of French wine Talia had left behind at the beginning of the summer.

“Are these any good?” I asked.

She ran her fingers over one label. The clearing didn't render the text any more comprehensible than it was before. “Oh, sure,” she said, “if you like Two Buck Chuck.”

“You know, after tonight, I think I'm ready to move on to . . . to bigger and better reds,” I said.

“I think you are, too,” she said. “So, how about the rest of the tour?”

“I think you may have seen everything.”

“Not quite everything.”

We fell into my bed and were greeted by a fusillade of high-, medium-, and low-pitched squeaks and screeches. Izzy cracked up. I, susceptible to late-hour giddiness, emitted several gleeful measures of chromatic, staccato eighth notes.

In the morning, we went to brunch at a spot in Bucktown I knew was trendy. We had to stand on a long queue and order at the counter. Izzy wanted muesli and fruit. The occasion seemed to merit a splurge, so I chose the peanut butter and banana pancakes. I paid for everything and we found a small table by the wall. Izzy sat with her back to the room. I picked up our flatware and napkins from a service bar and brought over mugs of coffee. I went back up for a small cup of each dairy and nondairy complement they offered, since I didn't know what she liked. It turned out she took Splenda and nonfat milk, just as I did.

“You know, I don't remember the last time I . . . went out with someone who wasn't in the restaurant business,” she said while we waited for our food.

I had consciously avoided asking about her romantic life last night. My Google research hadn't unearthed anyone to whom she was linked. What would I have done if she hadn't been single? “Oh yeah?” I asked.

“My last boyfriend was a sommelier at the bistro. Pacer Rosengrant.”

“Is it awkward working with . . . an ex?”

“Actually,” she said, “he's not—I mean, he's not at the restaurant anymore. I've heard he went to Las Vegas to work with this master the Palazzo owns who he convinced to mentor him.” She spoke as though informing herself for the first time, sounding a new idea out loud. “I haven't really had time for dating since.”

“You haven't missed much.”

“We're supposed to ask each other more questions, right? Like about brothers and sisters and things?”

“It's a popular approach. Okay, so how many siblings do you have?”

“None,” she said. “My mother was sometimes a waitress but mostly a drunk and a drug addict and was always getting arrested. Dealing, prostitution. The DCFS took me when I was, like, one.”

“She never got cleaned up?”

“She died of an overdose.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” she said. “The truth is, I don't really remember her at all. It's weird talking about this with someone who knows me from TV. That you were an abandoned kid from a tiny town and tossed from foster home to foster home isn't really what your big-city fans want to hear about at their window tables. Not really the kind of thing that gets them in the mood to spend two hundred dollars on a bottle of wine.”

“Weird, as in weird-talking-about-this-bad?”

“Weird-kind-of-nice, actually.”

It
was
nice that she felt she could confide in me, but also somewhat bewildering that she'd share this much, this soon. I'd had dates who'd armored themselves in candor, in order to remain at a safe distance. But if Izzy didn't genuinely like me, if I was nothing more than a fan with whom she'd gotten a little carried away, what was she still doing with me? She could have easily gotten out of my bed and called a taxi instead of sleeping over, or before I drove us to Milk & Honey. I got the sense that there was another meaning to all of this, something yet to be assessed in magazine advice columns. By staying with me, by revealing the unpleasant parts of her past, Izzy was doing quite the opposite of trying to pull away. She was gauging my capacity to love her.

“I have an older sister,” I said. “She's a criminal lawyer, in New York. Just like my mom.”

“And your father? A professor?”

“He's a Freudian psychologist. Semi-retired. Which is kind of Freudian, I guess.”

“Are you close?”

“Not really,” I said. “They come to Chicago to visit once a year and stay in a hotel. We speak on the phone occasionally. My mother prefers e-mail. I kind of have always thought of myself as an orphan with parents. I think they never really forgave me for leaving New York and not coming back. Or for getting an MFA in fiction.” I coughed. “I have another question for you.”

“Okay, go.”

“What's it like being on TV?”

She slowly shook her head. “I don't know whether all of this has helped my wine career, or just turned grocery shopping without a baseball hat into a major ordeal.”

“Chef Dominique mentioned that it was his idea to start
Vintage Attraction
.”

“He's always looking for ways to publicize the bistro when covers are down. We began as kind of this low-budget informercial. I expected it would run at two
a.m.
a few times, nobody would see it, and that would be that. Then people started writing, calling, e-mailing, demanding more . . . Before long, we had a show for real, sponsors, advertisers, and at the restaurant, reservations filling weeks and weeks on the books. He was a television producer, and I became Chicago's sommelier Isabelle Conway.”

“That's crazy.”

“The wine world is a freak show,” Izzy told me then. “I think that has a lot to do with the draw. Customers think sommeliers' lives are so glamorous, but the truth is, we're utterly contemptible. Standing behind the accolades and expensive vintages is a lot of unhappiness. Affairs, failed marriages, failed Court exams, abortions, lawsuits, debts, fraud charges, corked bottles . . .”

“A few semesters ago, an adjunct in my department got fired for charging booze to the reading series account at Liquor Mart. The alias he used was Kazuo Ishiguro.”

Her face lit up. “
Remains of the Day
is my favorite novel. I mean, I couldn't explain all the metaphors, but I liked how the words stuck with you.”

“They're pretty much the only thing that's ever stuck with me.”

“I'm kind of jealous of your students,” she said. “I used to dream about going to college. I took a few classes back when I was waiting tables at the Cattle Company, but it got to be too much.”

“I can teach you everything you need to know about literature,” I said.

“Really?” she asked.

“No, not really.”

She laughed and then took a charming tone of put-on disappointment. “And to think, I was going to offer you wine lessons in trade.”

“I doubt I could learn everything there is to know about wine.”

“I think I could show you enough to be dangerous.”

A waitress called our number. I tottered back from the counter with our food on a perilously packed tray.

“Hey, I have another question,” Izzy said, before we began eating.

“Okay.”

“How come you've never tried to pitch a restaurant for real?”

When we were finished, I drove her home. She directed me to her building, and I parked the Mustang in an alley behind it. We said our good-byes. Then I leaned in to kiss her. Off and on since we'd gotten up this morning, I'd feared that what I thought had begun last night and was still going on between us had been entirely of my own drunken invention. With our lips colliding—for the first time in sober daylight—something nebulous calcified. This kiss made the concept of us as a couple real somehow.

The sunlit sky faded quickly after I returned to the sublet. I scribbled some perfunctory comments on flimsy essay pages I'd neglected while Izzy and I were at brunch. By the time I finished, the abbreviated day had leapt into deep evening. An important hour was near. I microwaved a frozen plastic bowl purporting to contain lamb vindaloo and sat down in front of the television. From the moment
Vintage Attraction
came on, I was mesmerized by the likeness of the girl who, that morning, had lain in my bed. I was now seeing the program through different eyes, eyes theretofore not mine. I witnessed Izzy holding court on her set as the well-regarded famous host of the show, just as I always had, but now she also was someone real, someone whose phone number lay on my kitchen counter. At an amateurishly shot and edited commercial for a sketchy liquor store downtown on Chicago Avenue, I got the paper and held her handwriting close to my eyes. She'd been here. She'd written it. And she had my phone number, too.

A fitful, insomniac night of nonsleep followed. Groggy the next day, I read the
Times
, pretending it was a Sunday like all those in my life that had preceded it. I wanted to call Izzy, but it was still too early. She may have liked me, but I couldn't risk startling her at eleven the morning after we last saw each other. Waiting, however wrenching, would prove, in some small but significant way, that I hadn't completely lost my mind. Yet.

Late that night, my cell began buzzing. Before I checked the display, I hoped, illogically, that it was Izzy. Instead, it was her diametrical opposite, Talia. This time I'd be the one to not answer the phone.

It had been completely quiet for nearly an hour when the trill
clanged in the next morning. I was on campus, on duty—office hours—and thus required by English department law to pick up. It could have been one of my students. Though undergraduates' preferred method of communication was the grammatically indifferent e-mail, sometimes they rang up to relay elaborate excuses about the car trouble or roommate's food poisoning that had forced them to skip a previous hour's lecture. The incidence of trial depositions and relatives' sudden deaths and funerals that caused them to be late for or absent from class was particularly high when a paper was due. I hefted the receiver. Talia. She caught me.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“Are you pissed about me not calling you back last weekend? My phone died at the Riv.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Seeing Rilo Kiley.”

“Was he in my 212? The one with the orthopedic shoes who smelled like maple syrup?” She didn't answer. “The plagiarist who always agreed with you?”

“I was at a show. Indie
rock
, Hapworth.”

“Oh, right. You went by yourself?”

“I went with someone. A boy.”

“Who? Which boy?”

“No one you know. So it was late when I saw your text.”

“It's no big deal,” I said. It really wasn't anymore. “And, for the record, it was, like, three weekends ago.”

“Can we have dinner tonight?” she asked.

“Where?”

“Marché.”

“I'm not dressed for it.”

“Come on, Hapworth. It won't be too expensive. There's a three-course
prix fixe
on Mondays.”

I was silent, still thinking about my clothes.

“Okay,
fine
, dude, I'll pay,” she said. “By the way, what
are
you wearing?”

I pulled my sweater off. The blue button-down looked as though I'd been wearing it since Friday, and sleeping in it just as long, which were both true. I was only in front of students three times a week this semester, which meant I could often delay laundry, but since I was only teaching one class instead of three, there was considerably less money in the dry-cleaning budget. Things would be better in the spring—I thought—but for now I had to ration.

“My shirt has seen better days,” I said. “If I tuck it in, it should be okay.”

She laughed. “We really are going to have to work on you, aren't we? What would you do without me?”

“Probably pretty much what I always do without you.”

When Berkal came back from his 161 section, he dropped a pile of index cards likely belonging to one of his research-paper-writing Comp Two students. He unbuttoned his blazer before he bent down to pick the cards up. I quickly seized upon an opportunity I wasn't expecting to find.

“Hey, Berkal,” I said. “How was class?”

“It's Ber
quelle
,” he returned.

“Whatever,” I said. “I need a favor.”

“I'm so glad I'm not teaching this shit next semester,” he grumbled, dusting the cards.

“Hey, listen, can I borrow your blazer?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your blazer. Your jacket.”

Berkal bent his arms and showed off the corduroy elbow patches in lieu of responding.

“I need it.”

“For what?”

“To wear. To see . . . someone.”

“Be more specific or else no costume.”

Though it peeved me to have to share any of the details of my life with a colleague as undeserving as Ber
quelle
, I always ended up telling him everything. He wasn't even truly a colleague. He was a grad student with a teaching assistantship. In keeping with the rest of his GPTI cohort from the PhD program, at his classroom podiums and here in our office, he impersonated a professor, in the hopes of getting the routine down such that he could someday work an actual career out of it. When, with two shiny master's degrees still sanguine in my sock drawer, I was an optimistic adjunct (before I had a chance to discover that was an oxymoronic state), I'd done the same thing. “I have to break up with Talia,” I said.

“Yes,” Berkal said. “It's been, what, a couple of months?” He grinned tauntingly. “She might want you to move in with her.”

I let this go. “We haven't been exclusive. Anyway, I'm done with it. I met someone else the other night.”

He sat on the edge of his desk and crossed his arms. “Craigslist?”

“No,” I said stiffly. “As a matter of fact, the Internet had nothing to do with it. Maybe it had a little to do with it. I was at a wine tasting.”

“How did you end up there?”

“Do you know Isabelle Conway?”

Berkal threw his head back. “The sexy sommelier from TV? No, not personally.”

“I had a date with her.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Fine, don't believe me. So I can have it?”

The blazer, once on me, hugged my chest and stomach tightly. The sleeves hung down and covered my extended hands a little more than they were supposed to.

Berkal sized me up after I sought his opinion. “You're a college professor. Everyone expects you to be unshaven and disheveled. It's part of the charm.”

“Adjunct professor. Adjunct
lecturer
, if you want to get technical.”

“When are you supposed to see her?”

“Seven.”

“You have plenty of time.”

“Not really. I have to go shopping first.”

“For what? I thought you said she was on the Pill.”

“A bouquet. What do you think? Roses? Carnations? I can't show up empty-handed.”

Berkal rubbed the chin-end of his goatee. “You're planning to break up with this girl, and you're contemplating a botanical hand prop?”

“I'm not a complete asshole, Berkal. I just—”

He cackled. “You just what?”

“You know what I was thinking, when I was driving Izzy home?” I swirled my coffee cup, as though a wineglass.

“Izzy, as in Isabelle Conway, as in the sommelier from TV you had an imaginary date with?”

“I need this to work because . . . because I need my adulthood to begin. Look at me. I'm thirty-seven years old. I don't have job security. I'm living in a city I didn't grow up in. I'm not even committed to a real apartment lease. Don't you think it's time I was in a real relationship with someone with whom I could actually see spending the rest of my life?”

Berkal shrugged. “Good luck breaking the news to Talia.”

“She's twenty, Berkal. She'll understand.”

“She's twenty, Hapworth,” he mocked. “Precisely why she
won't
understand.”

A few hours later, and only about a mile from campus, I was hunched over a corner of the long bar at Marché. As West Loop architects in North Face jackets and entrenched lawyers strode from their loft offices with commuter fervor on the other side of the windows, I tried to select a glass of wine. The list presented a thicket of mysterious amalgamated grape variety choices Izzy hadn't talked about the other night. Sauvignon Blanc-Semillon-Muscadelle, Marsanne-Viognier, Malbec-Tempranillo—which one was I supposed to choose? I ended up with a Belvedere on the rocks. (Grey Goose, Izzy had alerted me the other night, was more appropriate for car dealers.)

Talia entered the restaurant, in a long, ruffled gossamer dress. Instinctively, I hid in my jacket pocket the green plastic swizzle stick I'd been oaring through the vodka. She made her way past the host stand and to the bar. Tension circumscribed her round, pale face and the glossy-lipped smile with which she acknowledged my wave. Her hair was down, seeming to intensify the patches of blonde, rose, pomegranate, and Northern Spy apple I'd come to know over the summer as more than simply the mottled auburn I appraised from an appropriate distance across the classroom during the spring term. The dense colors of her highlights became further magnified in the sharp light that descended from the ceiling and spotlighted the bar. Her arrival caused me to feel a surge of self-consciousness from which I wasn't certain I'd recover. While she officially was no longer an undergraduate, and I no longer her creative writing teacher, or anyone's, I was still a little frightened when we were in such close proximity. Even though we'd slept together, her eyes could still pierce mine with a rather ferocious and almost blinding blue ice.

“Can I get you something?” I asked. I turned to try to signal the bartender so I'd have to stop following the plunge of Talia's neckline to abundant breasts.

“Let's just go sit down.”

An intricate architectural infrastructure of columns that had been gessoed with decades-faded
Le Monde
front pages ensconced our table. I took the seat facing elegantly rusted shelves of baubles that filled an entire juxtaposing southern wall. Across from me, Talia cautiously—yet appreciatively—accepted the orchids I'd had sent over ahead of us. She peered into a small vent at the top of the brown paper and cellophane. “Wow,” she said flatly, though her face bore the first immoderate smile of the evening, “are you asking me to prom?” After she put them aside, we studied our menus for an overly long time. Periodically I lifted mine up, screening out my face. I felt like I was sinking, that my store of resolve was dwindling by way of a small leak. My power to steer this breakup in an auspicious direction seemed to spill out through an invisible hole in my pilling khakis. I couldn't possibly have still had feelings for her, could I? I needed another drink.

“Do you want a cocktail?” I blurted. “Or some wine?” I had hoped she'd want to order a bottle, so I could show off a little of what I'd recently learned. Then I recalled the impenetrability of the list I wrestled at the bar. Perversely, I almost wished Izzy were here to make a recommendation that would pair well with our
plats principaux
.

Talia looked at her empty glass. “I don't really want any wine. I kind of have something I should tell you.”

“I have something to tell you, too.”

But before either of us could start, our waitress was back. Talia ended up asking for a dirty gin martini with the olive juice on the side. I'd been chewing my ice and was grateful for the opportunity to order more vodka. The waitress peered in the direction of the flowers and asked, “Is tonight a special occasion?”

“Um,” I began. “We're, I—”

“I'm moving to Iowa,” Talia said. “For grad school.”

I almost choked on the cube in my mouth. “You got in?”

“Congratulations,” the waitress said.

I was so relieved, but probably looked utterly shocked.

“To you,” I toasted Talia when we lunged our glasses.

“To your glowing letter of recommendation.”

We ate with little fanfare. She didn't seem particularly taken with any of the courses we had. The vinaigrette on her pear, walnut, endive, and soy Gorgonzola salad was too salty. The dairy-free butter substitute she put on a swatch of baguette tasted tangy, slightly spoiled. Talia declined a fork of my Caesar, saying, “Dude, there's anchovy in that.” I didn't solicit her ratatouille nor offer any of the asparagus or mushrooms I'd been careful to keep from coming into contact with my salmon.

We were nearing the end of the meal when I said, “I'm really glad, you know, that”—I extended my hand, as risky a gesture as it was, across the table—“we're here. You're going to Iowa next fall, and that's—that's really outstanding. The fiction program is nearly impossible to get into.”

As I spoke, the scenes of the afternoon our harrowing flirtation materialized were indelible in my mind. It began when she'd picked me up in a salt-dusted red Volkswagen Jetta with out-of-state plates. The sedan's plush interior smelled like Crayolas. She brought us to a bagel place in a strip mall on the edge of campus. We were there to discuss ideas for her next story, if anyone happened to ask. She'd taken my hand when we left. I still could feel how my fingers felt laced between hers. Now she put her hand on top of mine and patted firmly, conclusively.

“Spring semester,” she said. “I'm starting early to take an instruction practicum. I'm moving now. I might as well, right?”

I nodded, the corners of my mouth struggling not to ascend.

“I guess we'll always have University Hall.”

My cocktail was empty again, so I lifted my water glass. “To Iowa. You'd better write your ass off.”

“I could say the same to you.”

I smirked. “I'm not a writer. That's ancient history.”

“You're not an artifact,” she said, and unfixed herself from her chair.

While she was off in the bathroom, I sent the waitress for the check. The bill was astronomical—almost half a week's salary—and we hadn't even gotten wine. I scratched in a hyperbolic tip, just in case Talia happened to open up the leather presenter and inspect the figures. She returned and saw the completed credit card receipt peering out from the presenter. “Dude.” She brought a hand to her little jaw. “You didn't have to do that.” I shrugged. “What was it you wanted to tell me before?”

“Oh, just that I wanted to pick up dinner,” I said, looking up at her. I was aware of Talia's tense shifting from present to past as I spoke. Really, it had occurred long before now. “It's getting late. You probably should get those in some water.”

She reached for the bundle of orchids, which had been languishing in the empty seat on her other side. “Hapworth,” she said, “I've had a really good time.”

“Me, too,” I said.

We stood outside, in front of the revolving door, waiting for a taxi. Talia handed me the cumbersome parcel to hold while she took a plastic Urban Outfitters child's wallet from her bag. She began wrenching free a credit card. Her averted eyes allowed me a puerile chance to check her out. In doing so, I was again put in mind of the occasion of our unofficial first date at the bagel place. The counter barista had been so transfixed by the sight of her chest her open coat and low-cut top had afforded that he delivered Talia her change
and
the cash she'd paid him for her coffee with a tremulous hand. When she said to the lanky kid with Brillo-pad hair who reminded me a lot of myself at that age, “Um, dude, I'm pretty sure
I'm
supposed to pay
you
?” it only made things more awkward. I recalled how rapidly the patches of freezer-burnt skin on the kid's face reddened, in the time he reached to recollect the pair of dollar bills she held out for him. Everything had worked out according to plan—better than according to plan, since I hadn't really arrived with a plan. I knew I'd finally found the right time to call Izzy. But standing there I also found the familiar and unfamiliar abundance of Talia's physicality eliciting a shade of incapacitation similar to that of the nerdy barista's on my own cheeks now.