The Blue Bistro (24 page)

Once Adrienne crossed the bridge into Palm Beach and was escorted through the gates of Mar-a-Lago, her future became clear. There was a world filled with beautiful places and she wanted to live in them all.

On the twenty-eighth of June there were one hundred and ninety covers on the book, and lobster salad sandwiches for family meal. It was seventy-seven degrees in the dining room at the start of first seating, which was abnormally hot, but Thatcher pointed out that everyone would drink more. Adrienne wore the silk outfit in bottle green that matched her eyes or so she convinced herself in the bathroom while she was brushing her teeth. When she came out to the podium, Thatcher said, “I’m sitting down at table twenty to eat at first seating.”

“What?” Adrienne said, in a voice that gave away too much. Dating only a few weeks and already her interest and fear were showing. Her mind scanned possible reasons why Thatcher would eat during first service at the most visible table in the room, instead of later with Fiona. Adrienne decided it must be Harry Henderson, the Realtor, who had been calling a lot lately with people who were interested in buying the property. Harry, she was pretty sure, was on the books tonight.

“Father Ott,” Thatcher said. “The priest. And here he is now. So you’re going to have to cover.”

“Fine,” Adrienne said.

“Are you Catholic?” Thatcher asked. It seemed like an oddly personal question to be asking fifteen seconds before work started, but among the things they’d agreed upon was that they were going to get to know each other slowly, bit by bit. Adrienne had told Thatcher the story about Will Kovak and he understood. They weren’t going to stay up all night confiding their innermost secrets then wake up and claim they were soul mates.

“Lapsed,” Adrienne said. Had they been alone in the dark, though, she might have added that the last time she set foot in a Catholic church was on the afternoon of her mother’s funeral. As she followed the casket out of Our Lady of Assumption she crossed herself with holy water and left the Catholics behind. It was Rosalie who had been Catholic—and when Rosalie died, so, in some sense for Adrienne, did God. Dr. Don was a Protestant and whenever he and Adrienne moved to a new place they shopped around for a church—sometimes Presbyterian, sometimes Methodist—it hardly mattered to Adrienne’s father as long as they had a place to go on Christmas and Easter. Dr. Don donated twenty hours of free checkups to needy kids and senior citizens in the congregation per year. It was nice, but somehow to Adrienne it never felt like religion. That, maybe, was how the Protestants preferred it.

“Hello, Thatcher Smith!” Father Ott was the tallest priest Adrienne had ever seen—six foot six with a deep, resonant voice and hair the bright silver of a dental filling. He wore khaki pants and a navy blazer. A pair of blue-lensed, titanium-framed sunglasses hung around his neck. Never in eighty-two years would Adrienne have pegged him as a priest; he looked like one of Grayson Parrish’s golf partners. Thatcher and Father Ott embraced and Adrienne smiled down at the podium.

“Father Ott, please meet my assistant manager, Adrienne Dealey,” Thatcher said.

Adrienne was overcome with shyness and guilt—she could feel the words “lapsed Catholic” emblazoned on her forehead.

“It’s lovely to meet you,” she said, offering her hand.

Father Ott smiled. “Likewise, likewise. Adrienne, you say? Like Adrienne Rich?”

“The poet,” Adrienne said.

Thatcher raised his pale eyebrows. “You’re named after a poet?”

“Not after,” she said. “Just like.”

Father Ott rubbed his hands together. “I’m starving,” he said. “But I promised Fiona I would bless the kitchen before the holiday. Shall we get business out of the way?”

Thatcher led Father Ott into the kitchen. Adrienne turned around. Bruno and Elliott were checking over the tables, lighting candles. Rex started up with “Clair de Lune.” Adrienne heard Duncan pop the champagne at the bar but since no one else had arrived, she decided to sneak into the kitchen. If a priest who wore Revos and knew about feminist poetry was going to bless the place, Adrienne wanted to see it.

When she walked in, the kitchen was silent. The radio had been shut off and all the Subiacos—including Mario, who had actually removed his headphones—were standing with their hands behind their backs, heads bowed. Fiona and Thatcher stood on either side of Father Ott as he placed his right hand on the pass.

“Oh, Heavenly Father, please bless this kitchen, that it may serve nourishing meals to the patrons of this fine restaurant. May we all serve with love and humility as your son, Jesus Christ, taught us to do. Grant us the strength and the patience to follow in his footsteps in this, and in all things. We ask this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

“Amen.” Behind the pass, the Subiacos crossed themselves. Adrienne crossed herself for the first time in sixteen years. Father Ott kissed Fiona and she said something to him quietly while holding on to both of his forearms. Then Thatcher and Father Ott filed out past Adrienne, who was hiding next to the espresso machine. As soon as they were gone, Fiona tugged on her chef’s jacket.

“Okay, people,” she said. “You’ve been blessed. Now let’s get to work.”

Adrienne kept her eye on Thatcher and Father Ott throughout first seating and even checked on them once to see if they needed anything. Thatcher smiled at her like she was a child intruding on her parents’ dinner party. In fact, she had hoped to overhear a bit of their conversation, but from what she picked up, it sounded like they were talking about Notre Dame football.

Father Ott ordered the crab cake; Thatcher the foie gras. Father Ott drank bourbon; Thatcher drank club soda with lime. Thatcher was eating and drinking in the dining room just like a regular guest.

“Is it weird?” Adrienne asked Caren. “Or is it just me?”

“He does it every year,” Caren said. “Like sometimes an old girlfriend from South Bend will come in, or one of his brothers. And the padre comes in once a summer.”

Old girlfriend?
Adrienne thought, panic-stricken. Then she thought,
Oh, shit. It’s happening.

After Father Ott left, Thatcher said to Adrienne, “Can you go into the wine cave and count the bottles of Menetou-Salon? I’m worried we’re low.”

“Sure,” Adrienne said.

No sooner had Adrienne entered the luxuriously cool wine cave and opened the big fridge—there were at least thirty bottles of the Menetou-Salon, she wasn’t sure what Thatcher was concerned about—than Thatcher came in and shut the door behind him. He lifted Adrienne’s hair and pressed his lips to the side of her neck.

They kissed, with Adrienne’s back pressed up against the chilled door of the fridge. Adrienne could hear the bussers carrying their trays into the kitchen. Nice as it was to have Thatcher close, even for a minute, she far preferred having him to herself, away from work, in her bed, in the quiet wee hours.

“This is what you do the second the priest walks out the door?” she said.

“I couldn’t help myself,” he said.

Adrienne’s second relationship was a few years after her escape from Will Novak. It took place on the other side of the world with Kip Turnbull, the British owner of the Smiling Garden Resort in Koh Samui, Thailand. That was the year that Adrienne’s father worried about her the most, and for good reason. She was twenty-five years old, halfway across the globe, working in a bikini. She lived in the queen bee bungalow of the forty bungalows at the Smiling Garden Resort, sleeping alongside her boss who had a hash problem and who cheated on her, Adrienne was sure, during his monthly pilgrimages to the full moon parties on Koh Phangan.

Kip’s biggest fault was that he was too handsome. Adrienne had been addicted to him physically, to the way he would untie the string of her bikini top at the end of her shift and make love to her on his desk in the back office. He rode a motorcycle and he had taken Adrienne for excursions around Koh Samui—to the hidden temples, to the waterfalls, to the giant gold Buddha on the north coast. He had bargained with a Thai woman at the market in Na Thon for the best papaya for a couple of bhat, then he sliced it open with a machete and fed it to Adrienne with his fingers.

Kip was older, too, ten years older, and he had told Adrienne stories about Eton and Cambridge, Hong Kong, Macao, Saigon, Mandalay. She had nothing to offer that could compare. She was provincially American, with only the gentle and studious Will Novak to claim as a past lover. She was plagued for the first time by jealousy. She wanted Kip to take her to one of the full moon parties on Koh Phangan.

“You won’t like it,” he said.

“Try me,” she said.

Kip gave in, and at the end of the month, he and Adrienne were on an old junk cruising through the Gulf of Thailand toward Koh Phangan.

It was lying on the very soft, very white sand of Haad Rin Beach that Adrienne noticed she was the only woman
around, except for four Thai girls who were offering massages for fifty bhat. The beach was packed with men—Israelis, South Africans, Germans, Australians, Danish, Americans. They were all eyeing Adrienne in her bikini, and she felt Kip’s attention tighten around her. She wanted to stay in that spot forever. Kip called one of the masseuses over.

“For the lady.” And he palmed the girl some bills.

“I don’t want a massage,” Adrienne said. “Really.”

Kip said something to the girl in Thai that made her laugh. The girl knelt next to Adrienne in the sand and started kneading her back. It felt wonderful, and Adrienne closed her eyes, trying not to worry if this was some kind of turn-on for Kip or for the other men on the beach. The girl’s hands were as soft as warm water.

Later, Kip took Adrienne to dinner. They hiked down a jungle path to a grass shack that had only three stools at a counter. “The vegetable curry,” Kip said. “I order it every time.”

Adrienne didn’t care for curries, but it would have been useless to say so. The curry she was given was mild and sweet with coconut milk, cilantro, lime. She had left the mushrooms to float in a small amount of broth at the bottom of the bowl, and when Kip noticed, he laughed hysterically.

“Eat the mushrooms,” he said.

She ate the mushrooms.

The rest of the night was a stew of paranoia and hallucinations. Kip took Adrienne back to their bungalow and somehow locked her in from the outside, claiming he had to meet some Americans to buy some hash.
When are you coming back?
Adrienne asked the already closed door.
Later, love, a little later.
Adrienne lay down on the embroidered satin bedspread. She was cogent enough to realize that the mushrooms had been drugs, and now the simplest tasks eluded her. She couldn’t get the door open. She was freezing, but she couldn’t turn down the air-conditioning. She had been dreaming of a hot bath since arriving in Thailand months earlier, and this room had a marble bathroom and a deep Jacuzzi. She turned on the water, and then she lost
time. The next thing she knew she was lying on her face on the embroidered bedspread drowning in what felt like wave after wave crashing over her.

Kip returned at three o’clock in the morning, high on six different drugs and drunk on Mekong whiskey, to find Adrienne passed out and their entire bungalow ankle-deep with warm bathwater. They left on the first boat the next morning and neither of them said a word to each other. Adrienne was mortified about the water damage (it ended up costing Kip nearly five hundred pounds) and she was livid about everything from the massage to the mushrooms to being locked up like an animal. She couldn’t deny the truth much longer: Kip was a control freak. And yet he was so handsome that when they returned to Koh Samui, and he said he forgave her, it took another month of Kip’s obnoxious demands and e-mailed pleas from her father to make Adrienne leave. She wasn’t even fully packed when Kip announced he’d hired an Australian girl to replace her.

By his own admission, Thatcher “hadn’t exactly been celibate” over the past twelve years, but there had been no one special, he said, and Adrienne decided to believe him. The only other woman Adrienne wanted to talk about as they lay in bed late at night was Fiona.

“Fiona was never my girlfriend,” Thatcher said. “I’ve never even held her hand. I tried to kiss her once when we were fifteen but she pushed me away. She said she didn’t want me to kiss her because she was dying and she didn’t want to break my heart.”

Fiona had cystic fibrosis. It was a genetic disease; Adrienne had looked it up on the Internet. Mucus was sealing Fiona’s lungs like a tomb. She was thirty-five years old, and losing lung function every year. Over the winter, she had decided to put herself on the transplant list, and that was why this was the final year of the restaurant. If she got a lung transplant, if she survived the lung transplant—there were too many ifs to worry about running a business. Thatcher had mentioned a doctor at Mass General, the best doctor in
the country for this disease. To look at Fiona, Adrienne would never know a thing was wrong. She was a pistol, a short pistol with a braid like the Swiss Miss and freckles across her nose. A pistol wearing diamond stud earrings.