Honey Glaze

The menu is rigid in my hands. Embossed onyx lettering on one hundred pound seashell cardstock. It’s too full of entrees and appetizers for such a small restaurant. Lamb meatballs with a honey glaze served over hand rolled pappardelle pasta. Crusted Bronzino wontons. Pear and prosciutto salad on a bed of wild long grain rice. Red velvet ganache and rosemary sorbet. 

The diminishing sun laces through the latticed windows of Basin & Wood, veiling the mirrors on the opposite wall with webbed light. I didn’t want to come here. Ostentatious dinners elicit bad news. But Jon insisted, and I would do anything he asked. I used to be independent and self-sufficient, especially in my marriage. Then I ran into Jon at Whole Foods and nothing was the same. It probably means that I love Nolan less than I love Jon. 

Jon and I never go to nice restaurants. The bill would be too difficult to explain to his wife. We go to taco trucks and make short work of carne asada burritos. He takes me to drive through windows and we eat burgers in the car, sitting next to each other and listening to Billie Holiday. Once we ate at the hotel bar when we rented a room; that was the weekend I told Nolan I’d be in Chicago for a company-wide meeting. We didn’t sit at a table - that would have been tempting fate. Jon ordered a gin and tonic as we ate chicken tenders and laughed at the ridiculous interior design, all orbs and formless lamps. 

Basin & Wood is neither truck nor drive through nor bar. It’s cypress tables covered in alabaster linen. Rattan chandeliers pitching down from a thirty-foot ceiling. Waiters dressed in matching outfits: burgundy ties against frangible, bone-white shirts. Patrons wearing precarious dresses or loafers without socks, ankles on full and glorious display. 

I look at Jon, all soft and white. To any outsider, we could be colleagues. I don’t graze his leg with my stockinged foot underneath the table. He doesn’t look deeply into my eyes as we speak. In the beginning this was an act to fool people into thinking those two couldn’t possibly be having an affair with one another. Now it’s custom and I know he’s going to leave me. 

That’s why he brought me here, isn’t it? To soften the trauma of heartbreak with explosive expense. It’s against etiquette to wail and squall in a public place, surrounded by wealthy strangers and gilded flatware. Bad taste all around. The technique employed by so many men getting ready to wreak havoc on the life of a woman. 

I don’t deserve it just because this is an affair. 

I would leave Nolan for Jon. Jon knows this. I’ve told him over and over again. But he’s never asked, and he needs to ask. It was my only rule going into this, the only regulation I put on myself the third time we slept together at that Super 8 motel off of highway 180. Don’t leave Nolan until Jon asks you to. When Nolan proposed twelve years ago, I promised myself I would only leave him if something better came along. 

I can’t focus on the menu. The words are meaningless trifles: almond horns, raspberry foam, fowl. I glance up to see Jon staring with narrowed eyes at the table next to ours, where a young man sits alone, tenderly eating French onion soup. He ladles the spoon into the broth with hushed attention, brings it up to his pulpy lips before spilling it into his mouth with a gentle push. It’s intimate, furtive. I should look away but I can’t. No one, not even Jon, has ever handled me with the sweetness with which this man is polishing off his appetizer. 

Jon looks away, uncomfortable with the man’s eating habits, glancing back down at his menu. I tilt my head toward the waning light of the sun, the stubby corners of my eyes still on the man. There’s an ache inside me that didn’t exist before, an intoxicating burn at the edges of my lungs thrusting up into my throat. I take a sip of lemon water to quell the twinge and continue to peer at the man in an unobtrusive way. I don’t want to embarrass him. 

A woman, mid-thirties and gaunt, with a nose bulbous like a peony, walks up to the man’s table. His date, presumably. Her conservative jacket is rumpled and hanging off her skeletal shoulder; she should be dressed more appropriately for this restaurant, for the man in front of her.

“Do you know who I am?” she asks the man, humming the words through rounded teeth, a snarl playing at her thread-thin lips. Not a date, then.

“Yes,” he replies, not taking his eyes off his soup. “I know who you are.”

The woman reaches a hollow hand out and for a moment I think she’s going to slam a fist against the table, trying to get him to look at her instead of his French onion. But she slaps him. Brutal and ferocious, from right to left and his head swings back and forth in savage imitation of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. Without saying another word, the woman turns and leaves. 

Basin & Wood is hushed, all the patrons looking in the direction of the thwack and crack of the slap. Only I look away, instinct screaming at me. 

The maître d' rushes over to the site of the violence. “Sir? Sir, are you alright?”

“Yes,” the man says again, this time looking up from his dinner. “Everything is fine, thank you.”

And he presses his spoon into the soup.

People begin to gradually look away. Before long it’s as if nothing happened. Laughter strikes out from the back of the restaurant. An elderly couple inquires about the bill. The man continues slurping. 

“Do you know what you want?” Jon asks, examining his menu as if there will be a test on it at the end of the meal. 

“Sorry?” The slap is still reverberating in my chest and stomach, and I can’t think about food right now. “Oh, I don’t know. Go ahead and order for me.”

I’ve never asked him to do this before but he nods his head and beckons the waiter over from his position adjacent to the kitchen doors. 

“I’ll have the rack of lamb, mid rare, and the lady will have the bacon-wrapped figs with plum dressing.”

“Very good, sir.” 

It’s not what I wanted.