I was somehow committed to, a cleavage between “me” and “them.” I was friendly with a fiction writer named Elwood, who had hunted, fished, bartended, and played U of M football—not as a walk-on but as a recruit—and I think once had stapled dollar bills to his own bare chest at a frat party. And I was getting to know Geoff, a poet who played in a band and drank all the amber liquors without getting sloppy when most of the guys in the program called it quits after two beers. He also, to my eternal gratitude, unequivocally confirmed what I had always intuited about sex scenes in novels written by older men.
“Yeah, that stuff is creepy,” Geoff said. “It’s just plain wrong.”
Whenever our director, a famous-ish and prolific writer, would publish a new book—like, every three months it seemed—Geoff would roll his eyes and smile during wine and cheese hour, and point to the page where, in all twenty-three novels, our blue-blazered director would write a sex scene and describe the woman’s nipple.
I was also relieved to meet Kate, who had as much frustration with grading the freshman papers as I did. The freshmen were poorer writers than I remember being when I was a freshman and yet expected much higher grades than they had earned—but maybe all people feel like the generations after them are depraved. Kate, who was also teaching Intro to Comp sections, held office hours across from me in the afternoons. We kept our doors open when waiting for students and chatted in between appointments.
But these new acquaintances were a year ahead of me or busy otherwise, and I didn’t see them as much as I needed to.
Meanwhile, Misty and I were working away together under the fluorescent lights, with cold smoked chicken in apricot glaze and sirloin tips in molasses black pepper sauce. The Midwestern requirement of well-done meat and well-done fish was certainly not the lowest place in catering I’d been. I’d already known the lowest and the dullest: oyster knives jammed through the webbing of your hand between thumb and forefinger, steam burns, twenty-three-and-a-half-hour days with just a thirty-minute nap on the office floor with my head on a pile of folded aprons, pack a day cigarettes, ring molds, braziers, propane torches, roulades in Saran Wrap, and shelled lobster claws dramatically crowning the seven hundred fifty martini glasses of ceviche. Misty’s catering was organized and calm, and the food was, under the circumstances, totally respectable; she smartly navigated the terrain while hewing to the decidedly unadventurous popular taste.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say I missed, but I did feel lucky to have already known some of the killer highs of catering as well as the catering brilliance that had come up in my past twenty years, because even the most extravagant events that we now catered, at the art museum or the dean’s house, were dull and unambitious. There was tremendous wealth in Ann Arbor but the charity balls and even the private wine dinners we were doing resembled tailgates, in a way, with miniature ham-on-cheddar-biscuits hors d’oeuvres and a driveway parked bumper to bumper with the most giant cars that have ever been made on earth—SUVs manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. I had been exposed to some of the most amazing things that catering presidential inaugurations, the weddings of the daughters of the uber-wealthy, and the ultra-rare concert of Barbra Streisand at Carnegie Hall can yield: edible gold leaf floating in the champagne flutes, pale green sugar glass blown into the shape of apples under a heat lamp and later filled with apple mousse, and Russian Imperial Service, in which the entire dining room is surrounded suddenly by two hundred fifty waiters—exactly one waiter per guest, each bearing one silver-domed plate—and at the signal of the captain, all two hundred fifty waiters step forward, in stunning synchronicity lift the domes high into the air to release the steam trapped by the cloche, and place the hot magret entrée perfectly in front of the guest.
That kind of magnificence—that expertness of choreography and timing—would have been dismissed as fancy. There was no customer base in Ann Arbor for handblown sugar glass. The company’s service captain was so disabled by palsy that to watch him ferry a sloshing and rattling silver tray of crystal champagne flutes around to the guests at certain black-tie events was excruciating enough and as much of a challenge as he could take on, even if some