“Every modern woman’s fantasy: being an undercover beard.” Bess sighed. “My mother will be so proud.”
June looked down at Cat’s sneakers. “I have one edit. The rattlesnake takes you from Patti Smith to mail-order Eastern European bride,” she said, handing Cat a pair of black canvas Vans. “Switch and sit for makeup.”
Molly packed their handbags—a pair of neon plastic cubes—with house keys, cigarettes for Cat, wallets, and their fully charged cellphones.
“I feel like my daughters are going off to prom,” she said jokingly, looking at her two bosses. “I’m a cool mom! Call me if you need a ride! No judgment!”
Fifteen minutes later Jim drove them silently downtown to Paahtoleip?, the new Finnish toast-only restaurant on Mott Street. When they pulled up to the restaurant, Cat could make out five photographers waiting outside with bored looks on their faces; after Jim opened the door, she could hardly make her way through them while she and Bess posed against the restaurant’s painted window.
Someone held open another door for her, and she found herself inside a crowded town house that had recently been converted into a junk-shop-slash-restaurant. Editor-slash-model-slash-junk-shop-slash-urban-farmhouse, she thought, wending her way to the back through tables that were shoved so tightly together she was sure her butt cheeks grazed several faces.
Chris Spruce and Jent Brooks stood up politely as soon as they spotted Cat and Bess. The two mid-thirties actors wore matching ensembles of dark, slim-cut chinos, simple button-down shirts, and light jackets, each with three days’ worth of stubble beneath their fresh haircuts: stylish but not fashionable, poster boys for nonthreatening suburban masculinity.
The two women towered over their dates, but when she sat down, Cat kissed Chris Spruce full on the mouth as soon as their heads were even. He kissed her back dramatically. She heard cellphone cameras click around them. Mission accomplished, she thought. Maybe we can leave after our first piece of bread.
“I’m Cat,” she said. “Sorry to spring that on you, but I wanted to get it out of the way.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” Chris whispered, pulling out her chair and helping her into it with a smile. “But you should know”—his voice grew even quieter—“I am the gayest man on earth.”
“It’s true. He had sex with a man less than an hour ago,” Jent added as he helped Bess into her seat, running his fingers through his black hair. “But I’m straight and available if you’re truly into short actors.” He leaned forward with comedic suggestiveness, flipping Bess’s hand over and stroking the inside of her palm.
Both women smiled.
“I don’t think we’re shopping in that particular aisle,” Bess admitted.
“The tall ones never are unless they’re in actual poverty.” Jent sighed. “Only illiterate teenage models want to date short guys. But someday I am going to find a tall, smart, beautiful woman like the two of you who is going to let me climb her like a tree. It’ll be epic. Minstrels will sing songs about it.”
“We ordered the first ‘toast course’ for the table, by the way,” Chris interjected with a snort. “Do you girls drink?”
“Yes,” chimed Bess and Cat in unison. “What kind of wine goes with bread?”
“Traditionally I’d say that one might want a finer boxed varietal to wash down a loaf of Pepperidge Farm smeared with Miracle Whip, but maybe that’s more an ‘alone in my apartment’ kind of thing,” confided Chris. “Should we just ask which one has the most alcohol?”
“Definitely,” Bess replied, signaling to the waiter, who slithered through the table maze around them. “Red, right?” The table nodded. “Can you please bring us your most alcoholic bottle of red wine?” she asked sweetly.
“That’s probably”—the waiter looked up thoughtfully—“the ’93 Comte Georges de Vogüé, from C?te de Nuits. A lovely pinot. The black cherry is a perfect complement to the buckwheat course that’s coming up—adds some fruit to the nuttiness of the grain.”
“Great,” Bess replied. “Four glasses, please.”
Two more waiters appeared with their first course, managing to squeeze around the table and lower all four plates simultaneously as though they were dining at Daniel. “Your first course,” chirped one of them without apparent irony, “is a pan-roasted buckwheat and almond meal unleavened artisanal flatbread, brushed with quail egg whites, seasoned with house-made blackened sesame, and set in a bed of handpicked dandelion greens. Enjoy!”
The waiters disappeared as quickly as they’d managed to appear.
Cat looked down at her plate and stared at her food, dumbfounded. Nestled in the middle of a few limp leaves was…matzoh.
“Are these fucking saltine crackers?” Chris hissed to Bess. “This. Is. Not. Food.”
“I’m so fucking hungry, I don’t care,” Bess replied, cramming the cracker into her mouth. It crumbled immediately, dusting her lacy top with particles of unleavened bread. She gave Cat, Chris, and Jent a look of terrified hunger and began snatching the crackers from their plates, shoving them into her mouth like a monster. Everyone’s servings fit into her jaw in a single stack. Cat giggled uncontrollably.
The waiter reappeared with their wine.
“I see we’re all loving this first course,” he said enthusiastically, gesturing at their empty plates. A sheepish Bess covered her mouth with her hand while Cat, Chris, and Jent nodded to the waiter sincerely, trying not to laugh.
“It was amazing. Bring us five more just like that, except you can bring them all at once,” Chris ordered.
“Ooh, are we switching to the tower? Wonderful. I’ll let the kitchen know.” He winked. “It’s just like the seafood tower at Balthazar, but it’s our own grain-based version. You’re going to love it.”
He poured at what seemed like a deliberately glacial pace. Chris and Jent aren’t so bad, Cat thought, but she was so bored: bored with the elaborate presentations, bored with the showcasing, bored with her own overdetermined life. She was bored with sitting here and pretending to care for the waiter’s sake about what the waiter was so effectively pretending to care about for the customer’s sake, all because someone, somewhere in her orbit, had been convinced that this restaurant’s gimmick was worth supporting with the faint currency of her identity. She was a penny passing through a vending machine, through a thousand change dishes, tumbling through a thousand fingers. Eventually, Cat was starting to realize, someone would drop her on the ground and it would be bad luck to pick her up again. They’d leave her for the next passerby. And maybe—just maybe—she’d be kicked into the sewer before anyone spotted her.