has been in this country for more than twenty years, he has determinedly maintained an Italian accent so thick and a syntax so poor that his English is very often incomprehensible. This is not a provincialism, by any stretch, but rather a point of view.
But he decided to forgo the hour-long wait on the sidewalk at the Italian joint and came to check us out. We had been open less than a year. He looked in and saw all women in the kitchen and mostly women on the floor and, like an Italian, slowed down a minute and took a closer look in through the doors. And then he came in. And then he met and made friends with the hostess and the hostess’s girlfriend and then he made friends with my sous chef and her girlfriend, and then he fell for one of our waitresses and then another of our waitresses, and by then he kind of got swept along by the current, possibly unaware of the lesbian drift of things—or simply undetterred—until he washed up on the shores of the kitchen and landed his sights on me.
I was standing at the pass, a little too thin, drawn and pale, cooking the lamb sausages wrapped in caul fat, the rye cracker omelette with fried duck skin, the rabbit legs in vinegar sauce that he was falling truly in love with when he finally sat down to eat at Prune. And he became less casually intrigued and more seriously innamorata and came back again, quickly, and then again, and pretty soon he was actually “in love.” But with what? With whom? With the place or the person behind the place? I think he was like the teenage girl who falls in love with the drummer in the band—she loves the music, the smoke, the light show, the emotion conjured in her own self, and there at the back of the stage, keeping the whole thing running is the drummer. She decides it’s him she wants.
I can understand him. Prune was a juicy place in the beginning. The women were dolls and the wine was freely poured and an Icelandic accountant, let alone an Italian bachelor like Michele, would’ve been hard-pressed to feel nothing or indifference when eating here. Plus, the food reminded him of his mother’s in a way. He was always exclaiming, “Theees eees exactly like my motherrrr used to make.”
But I do not believe he was aiming for me at all. He was just pointing his boat toward the twinkling lights on shore. Prune was a place with so much warmth and insouciant female energy that I believe we seduced more than impressed our earliest fans. But eventually, inevitably, he bumped up against me and for some outrageous audacious reason considering we had barely met—maybe it was the monkfish liver, the trippa Milanese, the marrow bones—he lightly scratched me from the shoulder to the wrist, one long, slow, light scratch with his fingernail the long distance of the tender back part of my arm, and I, electrified, turned around to finally take a look at this guy whom I had barely registered until now. It was ballsy and accurate, that scratch; two qualities I find particularly appealing.
The timing of it was rather appealing as well as I was skidding on the rocks with my gold golden girlfriend of goldness. You can’t script these things better than they happen in real life. A year of restaurant intensity had done its destructive best on the relationship finally, as I was chronically scurrying home in the middle of service to strip us of a handful of desperately needed forks or a chair, but otherwise gone from eight in the morning until finally hauling my ass home at two the following morning. There was not a single day off, not a single one, and not a single thought not thought about the restaurant in all that time. My girlfriend, still an adamant Michigander almost three years into our city life, personally offended by overt professionalism as if it were showoff-y and self-referential to display some, herself fundamentally and philosophically opposed to vulgar Ambition, found herself widowed by mine, abruptly. Her resentments were palpable and insurmountable.
How utterly perfect, then, to meet up with an equally ambitious, hardworking heterosexual male for whom I would probably never feel much more than warm affection. How unthreatening. That scratch was not his opening gesture. He had started earlier by bringing me food at the restaurant that he