Bitter Vintage

The tray comes at me fast and I do the sideways shuffle I've been doing for twenty years. Adam, one of the waiters, says sorry without saying sorry, just a grunt and a spin, and he's gone with his six plates of lamb.

I scowl through the pass window at Oscar.

He's at the plating station with his tweezers, adjusting a leaf. A leaf. I swear that man spends more time positioning foliage than he does cooking. He feels me looking, because he looks up, and then he slams a plate down on the counter so hard the sauce jumps.

That's how the whole night goes between us. He slams, I glare, the dining room keeps eating.

Let me set this up right. My name is Jeannie, I'm fifty-two years old, I'm the only Black sommelier I know of in this city, and I've been the sommelier at Bacchanal in Portland for eleven years. Oscar is our chef, fifty-four, been here four months, and in those four months he has remade the entire menu twice and picked fights with me about wine maybe forty times. Cole is a line cook on the sauté station, twenty-nine, a quiet kid who just wants to get through service. I like Cole. Cole likes everybody. Cole is smarter than both of us probably.

Anyway. Friday night, August, the dining room packed, the kitchen hot enough to render fat off a person. The air conditioning gave up around five thirty. By seven the stoves had won.

Table twelve ordered the duck special. I'd already poured them the Melon, a California chenin blanc that I stand behind, and Adam brings the first course back out and Oscar is standing at the pass with his arms crossed.

"Your wine is wrong for my duck," he calls across the line, loud enough that the expo cook flinches.

"My wine is fine," I call back. "Your sauce is the problem."

He comes to the window. Wipes his hands on his apron like he's preparing for surgery. "The chenin has residual sugar. The gastrique is already sweet. You're doubling the sugar and the acid dies."

"The gastrique isn't sweet, it's acidic. It's so sharp I nearly lost a filling when I tasted it yesterday. The chenin rounds it out. That's the whole point."

He stares at me. I stare back. Somewhere behind him a pan catches fire for half a second and Cole puts it out without comment.

"The sauce is balanced," Oscar says.

"The sauce is a lemon pretending to be a sauce."

Adam comes back through with his tray and I have to move again, and while I'm moving Oscar says, to nobody in particular, "The sommelier thinks acid is a character flaw," and Cole, under his breath but not that far under it, says, "I need a cigarette so bad," and that nearly breaks me. I laugh. I can't help it. Oscar hears the laugh and his jaw does the thing where it tightens, and he goes back to his tweezers.

Here's a thing I'll admit. The fighting is the most interesting part of my day.

I've been divorced longer than some of these waiters have been alive. I date. I date steadily, actually, a rotating list of nice men my age who take me to other restaurants and ask me to pick the wine and then look admiring when I do. It's pleasant. It's like being massaged by a very skilled person who you don't care about. Twenty years ago I had a thing with a wine distributor, Danny, and that was not pleasant, that was like riding a motorcycle, and I ended it because I got bored, which is a thing I do, and I've never quite forgiven myself for how it ended, but that's a different story for a different night.

Oscar is not pleasant. Oscar is a lemon.

After the duck table is handled I go back to my station and start restocking the wine fridge. We're burning through the chablis, of course we are, it's a hundred degrees out and every table wants something cold and clean. I carry bottles from the cellar rack one armful at a time and slot them in and count. This is the work I actually love, the quiet inventory part, labels facing out, everything where my hand expects it.

The trouble is the wine fridge sits next to the walk-in cooler, and the walk-in cooler is the only cold place in the building, and by eight fifteen I am standing with the fridge door open against my back just to feel the cool air on my shoulder blades.

"Jeannie."

Cole, at my elbow with an empty. "If you're going to hide, hide better. He's coming."

"Who's coming?"

"You know who." And he's gone, back to his station, shaking his head as a man who has seen this show before and knows how it ends.

I'm not hiding. I'm restocking. I have eleven more bottles of chablis to place and I place them slowly, one at a time, listening to Oscar's voice going somewhere in the kitchen, giving orders, and then the voice gets closer, and then the cooler door opens behind me and cold air rolls out and Oscar walks into it.

"We're out of the dry riesling," he says.

"We're not out. There's four bottles. You just like telling me things."

"Also true." He doesn't leave. He stands there in the cold doorway with his sleeves rolled up, forearms freckled and burned-looking from years of ovens, and he says, "The duck table sent back their compliments. They liked the pairing."

"Of course they did. I picked it."

He almost smiles. Almost. It's more like one corner of his mouth registering information. "You're the most stubborn person I have ever worked with," he says.

"Back at you, and I've been in this business thirty years. I've met stubborn. You're a monument to it."

"The sauce was fine."

"The sauce was good. The sauce would've been great with a half ounce less vinegar, and you know it, and the reason you won't admit it is because I'm the one who said it."

That lands. I can see it land. He turns to face me fully and the cold air from the cooler is pouring out around both of us and the kitchen noise goes distant, the door swings shut partway, and it's just us and the racks of produce and our breath not quite fogging.

"Why does it matter who says it," he says. Quiet now. Not slamming plates anymore. "If it's true, it's true."

"Because you've decided I don't know anything because I'm front of house and I'm a woman and I'm Black and I'm older than you."

"I decided you don't know anything because you fought me on the grenache in March and you were wrong about the grenache."

"I was not wrong about the grenache."

"You were. You were a little wrong. It happens. You could stand to let it happen out loud once in a while."

And the thing is, and I hate this, the thing is he's right. I was a little wrong about the grenache. I have not said so in four months because once I started, where would it end.

"You were a little wrong about the vinegar," I say.

"There it is," he says. "Was that so hard?"

"Yes. It was terrible. I'm shaking."

He laughs then. Actually laughs, a short surprised bark of a laugh, like it got out before security could stop it. And I look at him in the cold white light of the walk-in, this stubborn old cook who's been driving me out of my skull since April, and something shifts in my chest that I am not prepared to examine.

"We're holding up service standing in my cooler," he says.

"Your cooler."

"It's my cooler. I'm the chef."

"It's the restaurant's cooler and I have seniority."

"Over a walk-in?"

"Over everything. I've been here eleven years. You've been here four months. If you left tomorrow I'd have to be told your name."

"Jeannie." He says my name slow, like tasting it. "You'd remember my name. You'd remember it because nobody else in this building gives you a decent fight."

I should have said something then. I didn't. I stood there with a bottle of chablis in my hand like an idiot, and he looked at the bottle, and he looked at me, and the cold air kept coming, and then somebody outside banged the pass bell three times as if they were calling cattle home, and the moment went the way moments go in a restaurant, meaning it got trampled by the next ticket.

I slide the chablis into the fridge. "Table twelve needs their second course."

"Table twelve can wait a minute." He reaches past me and pulls the cooler door shut with one hand, and the click of the latch is very loud in the small cold space, and we are suddenly alone in the dark with the racks of kale and the pallets of butter and a strip of light coming under the door.

"Oscar."

"You started it," he says. "The wine is wrong fight. Back in April. You started it on purpose. I've figured that out. You were bored and you picked a fight with the new chef and I took the bait like an amateur."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I say, and my voice does something on the last word, goes up a little, betrays me completely.

"You're a terrible liar for somebody who sells for a living."

There is maybe eight inches between us. It's cold and my heart is doing what it wants and I am fifty-two years old and I know exactly what eight inches in a walk-in cooler means, I've known since the Clinton administration.

"The bell's going to ring again," I say.

"Let it ring."

"Oscar. Don't be stupid. They've got thirty covers on the book and Adam is carrying six plates of lamb on his arm right now, I watched him pick them up."

"Then he'll hold them."

"His arms will fall off."

"His arms will be fine. Jeannie." He says my name again and this time it's not slow, it's flat, like laying a card down. "Four months. Forty fights. Did you count them too, or is that just me?"

"I don't count fights. I count inventory."

"Forty," he says. "Give or take. And every single one was about nothing. Vinegar. Grenache. Whether the duck needs a red or a white. You know what I figured out standing here?"

"The duck does need a white, by the way, that one I'll die on."

"I figured out that you don't want to win the fights. You just want to have them."

The cold is working on me now, getting under my blouse, and I'm glad for it because my face is doing something warm that has nothing to do with the weather outside. "That's the dumbest diagnosis I've ever heard," I say. "And I once dated a man who diagnosed me over dinner at a Denny's."

"Danny," he says. "You mentioned him. The distributor."

"You don't get to use my dead history against me."