Food Whore (13 page)

 

Chapter 12

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON,
T
HURSDAY
, I
REPORTED TO
M
ADISON
Park Tavern at four wearing my old Jil Sander. I was dying to wear my new clothes, but I couldn't arouse suspicion. I was looking forward to getting back to work, though transitioning from Panh Ho to Madison Park Tavern left me disoriented, a whiplash of perspective.

Jake clearly wanted to rebound from the two-­star with a vengeance. It had been nine days since the review came out. The floral arrangements had quadrupled in size and the curtains had been freshly pressed. He'd put out better silverware, which clanged on the stemware with a more crystalline, exquisite sound.

I went downstairs to the locker room to drop off my coat and purse and took a moment to absorb it all: the white-­tiled basement floor, the metal mesh lockers—­tiny ones assigned to waiters, and even tinier ones for the bussers and backservers—­the smell of sweat and food and coffee, lots of coffee. Garment bags from Calvin Klein, Armani, and Paul Smith covered the walls. Emerald had been right about all the waitstaff dressing in designer suits. Now that I had my own windfall of designer clothes, I finally noticed.

A bunch of staffers came in all at once with one of the assistant managers trailing behind them yelling, “Get moving, first seating in thirty-­five minutes. Now, now, now.”

I crammed everything into my little locker.

Carey stood in front of a mirror and smoothed out her frizzy hair with an extra-­strong hair gel. Angel wiped his sweating forehead with a festively colored handkerchief. Chad was rescheduling something on the phone, saying, “The next ­couple weeks are fucked and Monday I'm stacking interviews back to back.”

Outside, I heard Jake and Gary walking into the prep kitchen, Gary talking in unintelligible but triumphant garble like he had just landed a hole-­in-­one.

Someone had posted a picture of the new, skinny Michael Saltz on our staff corkboard, and it had already been defaced with a mustache, devil horns, buckteeth, a hairy mole, and an ax severing his skull. A grading rubric had also appeared. The waitstaff was now evaluated on personal presentation, menu expertise, client emotional intelligence, and something called “CTD.” As a new backserver, Carey barely made it onto the board, but she had the highest CTD score.

“You're lucky you're not subjected to this shit,” Chad said, nodding to the grid. Chad rated high on client emotional intelligence and menu expertise, but was below average in personal presentation and CTD. Now, I noticed he had shaved his goatee and put on moisturizer or something. He looked younger and smoother. I'd liked him better before.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Carey asked, seeing me in my daze.

“Oops, sorry. I'm just feeling out of it.” Two stars. That was big—­huge. Seeing it in writing, it felt so distant. But standing here, bumping up against the ­people it affected, I could see it was more than a grade. It was lives. I was beginning to really like these ­people, a thought that clashed with my Michael Saltz dealings. They were two sides of the same coin, always opposites, always opponents.

“You worried about the review?” Angel asked. “Nothing we can do about it now. Tonight, we kill it.”

“Yeah,” Chad said. “That shitface Michael Saltz doesn't know a thing.”

That shitface knew
some
things, I thought, stabbed with a dagger of guilt.

Then Chef Darling barged into the locker room, took out a flask, and chugged. Carey ran up to him.

“What happened, Chef?” a waiter asked.

“This shit's fucked. I'm on probation. Gary is on the warpath.”

The locker room quieted as everyone crowded around Chef Darling, asking him questions and trying to comfort him.

“Come on, Matthew,” Carey said carefully. His body radiated anger. “Don't drink any more. You'll be fine. We'll be fine,” she crooned. By now, she was stroking his leg. He had calmed down and even lowered his flask.

Then the locker room door creaked open, and Jake inserted his lightly gelled head inside. “Tia,” he whispered. “Gary and I would like to see you in his office.”

“Oh!” I said, panic prickling up my spine. Shit.

Of course they would find out. What had I been thinking—­that I'd get away with this Michael Saltz arrangement? Someone had spotted me exiting his building. Or maybe I had dropped his note. Maybe they'd read our emails. Had I been on the restaurant's Wi-­Fi that whole time?

I followed Jake down the hall and up two sets of stairs to the offices. I had never ventured upstairs and saw that the finesse and elegance of the restaurant didn't continue up there. The rug said “institutional” and the walls cracked with old, carelessly applied paint. I ran my fingers across them and realized they were hollow and cheap.

I'd been arriving at work on time, and Jake had said I was doing a good job, so they had to know about Michael Saltz. Our every correspondence rushed through my head. What would be the thing that did me in, and how could I talk my way out of it? How could I diminish what I'd done?

I had no idea who he was.

Didn't realize he'd use my words.

Wasn't thinking when I wrote back to him, and went to his apartment, and took his money.

All lies, of course. I'd known what I was doing, I realized with a thump of nausea. Ultimately, I'd put myself before ­people I liked and cared about. I could have looked out for them, but instead I'd looked out for myself.

That was bad, but was it a crime if my intentions were pure?

We passed Jake's office and I caught sight of a tube of Pringles, some paperwork, and a pile of large black binders. He had taped a picture of a woman with two tiny babies on the shelf behind his desk. Chef Darling's office was filled with books and magazines, dirty tissues, and opened bags of gummy bears—­nothing like his immaculate kitchen. The reservationist's room must have originally been a walk-­in closet, because a closet rod and shelves hovered over her tiny desk.

We continued to the only room that had any windows: Gary Oscars's office. If the dining room were a hotel lobby, Jake's and Matthew's offices would be the custodial closets, and Gary's office would be the penthouse. Gary sat at a humongous wooden desk, leaning back in an expensive-­looking leather chair.

And there, sitting across from him, was Dean Chang. Now I knew I was in big trouble. She folded her hands on her tweed pencil skirt. Jake sat down and gestured for me to do the same.

“Hello, Tia,” Dean Chang said coolly.

“Hello, Dean Chang,” I returned. I heard myself breathing and felt faint. Suddenly I wished I could have erased everything with Michael Saltz. So far, I had nothing to show for it, just clothes and secrets piling up.

“Tia,” Jake said. “We have something very serious to discuss with you.” He wouldn't meet my eyes.

But if Gary could have fired me with his stares, he would have already done it ten times over. His face was sweaty, red, and speckled. Every time he inhaled, the front of his shirt gaped so I could see bits of his undershirt.

“Tia Monroe, NYU graduate student,” Gary started. “Many ­people consider Madison Park Tavern one of the best restaurants in New York. Do you agree?”

“I agree,” I said.

“Of course you'd agree. Not that you've been to many,” he said. “How could you? You're just a twenty-­two-­year-­old girl from . . .” He looked down at a piece of paper, which must have been from my employee file. “Yonkers? How quaint. No restaurant experience. No industry connections. Tia Monroe, allergic to crustaceans and bivalves.” He jerked his gaze toward Jake. “Seriously?”

I sat up straight, waiting for the ax to come down.

“Gary, please. Don't torture her,” Jake said.

“Just tell her,” Dean Chang said, though she wouldn't look at me, either.

Gary took us in. “I don't know why we let ­people like you work in this restaurant. You're a child in a grown person's job. I cannot take children on staff. Especially wicked children like you.”

The room closed in and a cacophony of smells slammed into me—­the rottenness of Michael Saltz's apartment, the ambiguously sandy dumplings at Bakushan. I smelled gingery perfume off Dean Chang, a powdery scent from Jake's freshly cleaned suit, an odor of cigars and dark wood and leather on Gary Oscars.

Gary punched a button on his computer keyboard and turned the screen toward us. I saw a black-­and-­white movie of me talking to Michael Saltz in the basement. It was crude and pixelated, but it was clearly me.

“Would you mind telling us what is happening here?” Gary asked.

I just stared at the screen, a grainy image of me held captive by a thin man who still had such immense strength. It looked like a scene out of a cop show, where all the viewers know
this is a moment of danger.
It hadn't felt that way, but from the outside, it was obvious.

“We also have footage of you going to the basement, and Michael Saltz following you soon after.”

Dean Chang put her hand on my shoulder and I snapped away. “Tia, what happened between you and Michael Saltz?”

Jake crossed his arms, gazed at his shoes, and said nothing.

“Yes, Tia,” Gary said, “what happened? Because you have an unusual relationship with the
New York Times
restaurant critic.”

They all waited for me, their collective authority seeming like an impossibly high wall fringed with barbed wire. But in one second, my outlook changed and I tried hard not to smile.

They only had this tape. They had no idea Michael Saltz had used my words in his review. They didn't know about my visit to his apartment, Bergdorf, Panh Ho. Though the image had at first alarmed me, it was nothing compared to the truth. Gary Oscars could call me a child all he wanted, but he knew nothing.

“Tia, tell us,” Dean Chang said. “Is Michael Saltz bribing you? Is he . . . taking advantage of you?”

“Oh, that's bullshit,” Gary said, spitting at me. “She's not the victim here.”

“No, none of that happened,” I lied. “This is all a misunderstanding. I've never worked in a restaurant before and that was my first night on the job. I didn't know who he was.”

All three of them looked at one another. Dean Chang shrugged slightly, as if to say
Hey, she's got a point.

But Gary Oscars couldn't be swayed. “But you
talked
to him. For five minutes. He was scribbling notes after you spoke. What in the world were you discussing?”

“Five minutes?” I said. It had actually felt much longer than that, but of course I wouldn't let on. “I honestly don't remember what I said. Maybe he just had a random thought and wanted to write it down? I didn't say anything important. I'm just a student.”

“We realize that you couldn't have affected the reviews,” Dean Chang said, “but this is still—­”

“Insubordination,” Gary Oscars finished.

“—­not adding up,” Dean Chang continued. “Is there something you're not telling us?”

I looked at each of them. I was going to make it out of this okay, I just had to get through this conversation. “No, I told you everything.”

Dean Chang smiled, apparently relieved that I wasn't as evil as Gary had made me out to be.

My heart twisted again. It was easy to lie to Gary, someone who didn't know me and wasn't a particularly nice person. But Dean Chang and Jake were different. In this moment, they were placing their bets on me. They could have backed Gary, the path of least resistance. But they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. I was amazed and touched and guilt-­ridden. Did I deserve that kind of loyalty from them?

I was sure I didn't. I was lying to them just by sitting there silently, letting them believe a better side of me.

“You can still work here, but we'll be pulling back your hours and putting you on probation.” Dean Chang sighed. “This is your last warning. If we have another . . . breach of trust . . . then we'll have to reevaluate your graduate candidacy and scholarship. Best-case scenario, things run smoothly from here. Worst-case scenario, you'll lose the generous funding we've given you and be placed in a more structured program with traditional classes and check-­ins with an academic advisor.”

That sounded terrible. It sounded belittling, more like middle school than grad school, though grad school wasn't so great, either. They glorified it like some great privilege, but thus far, it had only held me back.

Gary leaned over the desk, his pudgy, hairy forearms streaking grease on the surface.

“This is the real world,” he said. “There are no grades or empty probationary periods. You either fucked us or you didn't. And I think you fucked us.”

Jake cringed. “Gary, there's no evidence to suggest that. We can only take Tia's word and give her a warning.”