Through Thick and Thin (18 page)

It was very unfortunate when after a week of Atkins, DB Sweeney threw up repeatedly and developed a bad case of diarrhea, possibly due to the Canadian bacon she’d taken to frying, or possibly due to the pork rinds (yes, really, pork rinds, which are an Atkins-approved snack), and she’d had to take him to the vet, who was nothing at all like the vet played by Chris O’Donnell on
Grey’s Anatomy
, not in the slightest. The vet said DB Sweeney should perhaps lessen his intake of human food and had given him prescription Fantomycide, which was, he said, the equivalent of doggie Pepcid or doggie Zantac, if you will. He’d given it to her in a bottle that said DB Isley and she’d had to resist a strange and rather strong urge to tell him that DB Sweeney’s last name was Sweeney.

It was upon contemplating that it was she who had driven her mini wirehaired dachshund-Norwich terrier mix to projectile vomiting and more than a little ill-timed diarrhea that her enthusiasm for the Atkins diet began to wane. And yet, she soldiers on. (But she no longer shares her Atkins food with DB Sweeney.)

She has rearranged her reviewing schedule. She’s been drinking her coffee with heavy cream. She has found herself quite buoyed by the fact that a restaurant reviewer in New York could find steak houses to review until her cholesterol-addled heart was content, until the cows, quite literally, came home. And even though Knife + Fork is not a steak house, she feels she can persevere, can stay the course, even though last time she was here she’d been so impressed with the care that had been taken with the bread, how the charming waitress had gone to the trouble of explaining that all the baking was done right on the premises.

She has had a low, throbbing headache for the last two weeks straight. She has felt extremely fatigued, much more so than usual. She has felt a new, heightened sense of irritability for all matters not directly related to DB Sweeney or the acquisition of necessities for him (there are so many things to buy!). She has had a foul and sour taste in her mouth which she suspects might translate into the “meat breath” that was referenced in the book, along with a helpful suggestion to partake of some of the parsley surely served as the garnish on the potato (that could not be eaten) that came on the same plate as her porterhouse, rib eye, or butterflied filet. The parsley didn’t help. She has lost five and a half pounds.

And five and a half pounds is not nothing.

Her cell phone starts to ring. She stops midstride, almost teetering off her calf-colored knee-high high-heeled boots, the ones she bought knowing she would never wear in real life. Among the many merits of spending so much of your time in disguise, pretending to be someone else, is being able to buy things you’d never actually wear, because even if you wouldn’t, there’s a chance that someone wearing a wig and carrying a credit card that says either Abby, May, Emily, or Sarah would. She grabs the phone quickly (it’s about to ring twice!) and glances at the display.
Private number.
She hates that. It could be the restaurant about her reservation, so to be on the safe side, she scans her memory quickly to recall which name she used for her reservation tonight, which credit card she slipped into the front section of her wallet before she left her apartment and a slightly forlorn looking DB Sweeney.

“This is May,” she says, with sureness, with confidence.

“This is bullshit!” comes the speedy and somewhat venomous reply.

She can picture him, there behind his gigantic glass desk, the East River shimmering through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, his expensive suit, a custom-made shirt with his initials stitched under the pocket, the deliberate cuff links, the product-heavy hair worn too long, the beginnings of a double chin, the beady eyes.
Doogie,
she thinks, almost reflexively. Doogie is also known as Douglas Harris, editor in chief of
The NY
, but Meredith had determined at some point previous that calling him, mostly only in her mind, Doogie, sometimes makes his offensive and expletive-laden existence a bit easier to take/exist with/work for. She starts to tuck her hair behind her ears and then remembers she’s wearing a wig, the shoulder-length, very light blonde one, and hopes she hasn’t knocked it off-kilter. She puts her hand on her hip, mostly to keep it away from her hair, and also, a little bit to steady herself. She clears her throat quickly. “Hi, Douglas.”

“I’ve got copy on my desk. Your next two reviews. The Palm? Meredith? What is innovative or new or interesting or happening or hip or alive or now about the Palm?” he says it all very quickly, as if it is one word, one sought-after media concept,
Hiporaliveornow.
“Except for the fact that you can walk there from the office, what are you doing at the Palm, and why for the love of fucking I don’t know what are you writing a review of it?”

Meredith clears her throat, “Douglas, you’ll see that I’ve sent two reviews and the one after that is—”

“Fucking Sparks! Are you fucking kidding me? Did you get a fucking time machine and go back to 1990? Meredith, we don’t pay you to write reviews about restaurants people don’t want to read reviews about. We pay you to be innovative, to be industrious, to go to new places. And I’m reading these reviews? Did you fucking eat anything other than the steak? Because the descriptions of that are the only parts that sound remotely fucking like you. They suck.”

“I can understand that you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset,” he says, rather calmly.

Okay.
“I’m doing a survey of steak houses in New York,” she says, speaking calmly and assuredly, partly in order to convey to Douglas and to herself that calmness is always an option, and partly to irritate him. “I’m starting with the old standbys, the Palm, Peter Luger’s, etc., and I’m going to work my way up to the newer ones, to Dylan Prime—”

“Dylan Prime opened in fucking two thousand! Where the fuck were you in two thousand?”

“
And
all the way up to Craftsteak and to STK, which just opened. I thought I’d even do a sidebar of all the barbecue in the city, too.”

“I think you should think again. I think you should get over Frank Bruni’s survey of fast-food restaurants in the
Times
and stop wishing you’d done that and stop with the fucking surveys.”

“I don’t look at Frank Bruni’s fast-food survey as something I need to get over.”

“Oh, I do. But great job with your Ouest review, by the way.”

“Thanks,” she says as the world spirals around in the bizarre reality that is a conversation with her surely bipolar boss.

“But I digress. Start writing reviews of new restaurants, of ridiculous fucking restaurants, of places where readers who are hip and consumer-driven and have disposable income want to see and be seen, and give that to me and give that to me ASAP.”

“Brasserie was on my list,” she says, thinking it might mean something, might say something about hipness meeting steak. She’s always thought that if you looked at it in the right way, at the very modernist bathrooms for starters, that Brasserie could be considered hip.

“I’m not even going to justify that with a response.”

She’d like to tell him that it should be about the food. That it shouldn’t be about the swankness of the place, the see-and-be-seen qualities of a restaurant. And she believes that; her reviews have always been more about the food than about the fabulous-ness, which is a word Douglas actually uses. But she can’t really say that right now, because she hasn’t actually eaten quite enough of the food. And even though he is for the most part an idiot, Douglas does have a point.

She stands on Fourth Street, the exact same person she was two weeks ago, in the exact same dress size, living the exact same life only in a different wig, only now she has turned in sub-par work, only now she has disappointed her boss. She wonders at how much of a price did those five and a half pounds actually come. She tries not to think horrible thoughts of how maybe Douglas has just saved her from embarrassing herself and her magazine by submitting a poorly researched review of an old standby steak house even if it is a New York classic. She tries not to stress out over how much more work she’ll have to do in order to make up for all the time she has recently spent eating only protein.

“I have plenty of notes at home. I can e-mail you another review tomorrow.”

“Why e-mail? Do you know you haven’t been in the office at all for the last two weeks? What’s the deal with that?” And she thinks that along with everything else, now might not be the best time to share with Douglas the news of the joyous arrival of DB Sweeney.

“I’ve been working from home,” she says, stating perhaps the obvious, but it is, she thinks, something that might need to be stated. She has an office at the
The NY
offices, a very nice one actually, but in no way does she really have to be there. Contractually, she doesn’t ever have to go to the office as long as she gets her reviews in on time, and yes, properly. Columnists, restaurant critics especially, who spend almost every night doing research aren’t often expected to be in the office. Meredith was in many ways an exception to the rule, spending as much time as she did at her office.

Douglas doesn’t say anything. She imagines that is because Douglas knows she is completely within her contractual rights to always work from home, and maybe he’s wondering why, if that has always been the case, she’s spent such a large part of the last few years at her desk.

She pauses for a moment and wonders about that, about the why of always being at the office. She thinks it might be because except for the purple velvet sectional couch, except for the electronics, she’s never really liked her apartment. Until it was the place where DB Sweeney lived.

“Douglas, listen,” she begins again, because he’s still not saying anything. She pictures him, Montblanc pen in hand, doodling
fuck fuck fuck
all over his black leather Coach desk blotter. “I’ve got to go right now, I’m standing outside Knife + Fork, in the East Village,” she pauses, lingers right after
East Village
, she hopes the East Village doesn’t say “steak house” to Douglas, who has Manhattan neighborhoods labeled and judged and preconceived almost as much as she does. “I’m late for a reservation, so I’ve got to hang up now.”

“What’s this Knife + Fork?” he asks, ignoring any mention on her part of the conversation’s need to end.

“It’s a wonderful jewel of a restaurant on East Fourth Street. Lovely atmosphere, friendly service, fantastic prix fixe. They bake all their own bread,” she says, knowing as she does that she sounds a bit like the lead-in to a rave review, and that is her intention. She thinks she mentions the bread (with which they really do a wonderful job, presenting it on a crafted piece of butcher block, with the highest quality olive oil and a smattering of sea salt) as a silent penance for trying to write all those reviews without eating any carbs. And she thinks she’ll have to eat carbs again. She wonders if she really thought it through, if it occurred to her that dieting while being a restaurant critic would require perhaps quite a bit of integrity-compromising.

“It sounds interesting enough,” he says dismissively, and she reminds herself she likes her job, really she does. She loves her job and she can’t imagine not having it, at least not until the
New York Times
calls to tell her they are in fact very desirous of her talents, until she receives the call with an offer for a three-book deal on food, on restaurants, on cooking, until they sell the film rights and she becomes the star of her very own television show.

“Tonight’s my third visit. I can have a review for you by midday.”

“Good. E-mailed or in person?”

DB Sweeney,
she thinks. “E-mailed,” she says.

She turns back in the direction of the restaurant, envisions the imminent flipping shut of her phone—ending the call with Douglas, ending these thoughts of diet failure that again seem to be rearing their ugly snakelike heads—one quick motion that will bestow so much happiness even if it is so fleeting. Fleeting happiness, she wonders sometimes if it’s better than none at all. She’s starting to think so.

“Yeah,” he says, and she waits, and so does he, for a beat, “I need a reservation at wd~50 for Tuesday.”

“Not a problem,” she says, and he says a quick goodbye and disconnects. She flips her phone shut, noting that it did not bring quite as much satisfaction as she was hoping for; sometimes the things you look forward to don’t. She carefully adjusts her wig and sees her friend Jill standing outside the restaurant, waiting, and she hopes she hasn’t been waiting long. She hopes Jill remembers that tonight Meredith’s name is May. Usually she finds Jill a bit annoying because of a childish fascination she’s always had with cartoons.
The Lion King
often looms large in her conversations, the release of
Curious George: The Movie
was, for Jill, a very big deal. But tonight Meredith doesn’t find that as annoying as she finds it convenient. She wants to ask Jill which channels on cable are best for locating cartoons and puppets at night. She’s sure that’s the best thing for DB Sweeney to be watching, to keep him company when she isn’t there.

As she greets Jill and they enter the restaurant together, as they order their wine and their prix fixe dinners, even as she eats, even as she’s making mental notes (and one or two slyly written in her notepad) she has an eye on the future, she can see her folder on her desk, the one with the notes from her last two visits here. She can see folders from other places, too, places where she ate carbs and where she did her job well. And she thinks if she puts her mind to it, she’ll have a good review, an honest one, a real one, about Knife + Fork and if she spends some time after that, she’s sure she could even write a few carbheavy spares. And she finds herself hoping that it won’t take that long, looking through all the folders, scouring all the notes, because she’d like to be finished with it, she’d like very much to read this book she just bought, called
Beyond Fetch: Fun, Interactive Activities for You and Your Dog.