Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“Ah-ha!” She started to wag a finger at Mina. “I want them to pilfer. I want to have beautiful expensive ashtrays that are distinctly of this place and I want them to be coveted and stolen. I want rich, sophisticated grown men to sneakily put them in their pockets. I want movie stars to stuff them into silk bags, scattering ashes all over pockets and purses. I want to give them the exotic thrill of a purloined thing. In fact, we won’t sell them, at no price. People want them, they have to pilfer, they have to sweat. They’ll become the most impressive objects on people’s coffee tables. We won’t say anything, neither discourage or encourage, but simply let them play out their own self-dramas.”

Mina had to admit, Lorene was sort of a genius about people’s desires. Secret ones. She was on constant reconnaissancefrom behind the blue shades, watching everyday gestures closely, seeing the longing that creates protocol and the need to break protocol. And this made her disdainful, manipulative, and very successful.

“Wait, here, take one of these,” and Lorene offered her an obnoxious American cigarette, self-consciously retro in its packaging. Mina sniffed at the offered cigarette. “Look, don’t raise your eyebrows, doll, they were out of my usual,” she said and put the cigarette in Mina’s mouth. Lorene occasionally called Mina “doll,” which Mina found she enjoyed, oddly enough, quite a bit.

“So here you are, ready to smoke your cigarette. You put it in your mouth. I light it for you, you nod at me. Great. Having a cigarette lit for you is pleasant,” she said.

“Not if you are chain-smoking,” Mina said.

“Exactly, doll, which is why we need to have service people who are attentive but not overly so. What I mean is, the first cigarette must be lit for the customer without fail, but not the others unless it appears the customer is waiting at all for such behavior.”

“I’m with you on that,” Mina said, now taking a long drag.

“Take notes,” Lorene said. The winding smoke gave Lorene a George Hurrel Hollywood perfection.

“Right, go ahead,” Mina said, unmoving.

“It also follows that the ashtrays should be dumped by a server, not automatically, because people like to be waited on, just as they like to have their cigarette lit, et cetera. That’s why they came in, let us not forget, to be waited upon. However, there is the shame at smoking so often and the customer wants to indulge unnoticed and there is the embarrassment of the service person constantly coming by and changing the tray andthe horrible moment when our poor, shamed customer apologizes to the server for the bother his addiction and weakness is causing her.”

“Awful,” Mina shuddered, “so?”

“Well, Mina, we don’t change the ashtrays until there are two butts, which is against my service rules, but since we are talking serious smokers here, and that rule was designed to cut out any judgment call on behalf of the server about the relative dirtiness of ashtrays and avoiding the long slide into casual grotesque nonstandard service, that uncrossable slippery-slope line that in this case we alter slightly, and then—”

“Yes, yes.”

“We choose the most quietly subservient and inoffensive but highly attentive and observant servers, ones that are nearly invisible in their comforting perfection, angelic and flawless and gloriously impersonal.”

“You mean beautiful Japanese women.”

“Precisely.”

Vanity and Vexation was the fourth establishment in Lorene’s high-con restaurant group, Pleasure Model Enterprises. The first was Food Baroque (originally called EAT/NOT EAT, but didn’t catch on until given its less prosaic moniker— Mina herself wanted it called Food Fascism, or “Eating,” but that was a little too too, even for Pleasure Model), which initially might seem to be a sort of health food restaurant, but Lorene called it an eccentric-diet-tolerant eating environment, a gourmet restaurant that would adapt to virtually any dietary restriction; in fact, Food Baroque would plan a delicious four-course meal complete with a recommended selection from its extensive wine cellar, consisting largely of high-priced and famous older-vintage Bordeaux and Burgundies, a few sort ofmammoth, macho Rhône wines, and the odd excellent, highly allocated, and difficult-to-find California boutique wines. Since the wine was matched so specifically to their personal menu, most people gratefully went along with the selection. This was where Pleasure Model made its profits, and that margin allowed Lorene to reserve only two seatings a night, so the kitchen could actually adapt to the many different menus. Mina spent her first year working for Lorene tirelessly and meticulously entering the highly specific and esoteric dietary restrictions into the computer (all extremely confidential) and creating client histories so regulars would only have to make a reservation and Mina would see their complete restrictive history listed before her. She developed the current Food Baroque system: Producer and Young Wife call for reservation, two weeks in advance minimum, and confirmed on Amex (at a charge of $50 a person if the reservation was canceled with less than a week’s notice). Producer specifies no red meat, low cholesterol, under twenty percent saturated fat (entered as XRM, — C, <20%sF). Wife is 600k, — CB, XS, +O3 (no more than six hundred calories, low carbohydrates, no sugar, and high omega-three oils). Or any combination thereof. The clients were devoted and, Mina realized, quite unpleasant people, alternately deeply paranoid (constant rumors surfaced after Food Baroque was a sensation that they ignored the restrictions altogether, and in fact the food tasted so good because the chef put a stick of butter in everything), and deeply grateful, with young starlets weeping with joy and holding Mina’s hand, as at long last they could have their cake and not have to purge it as well. Her excellent management of FB earned Lorene’s loyalty forever, and certainly gave Mina license now, in the wake of their success, occasionally to be hours late, or be there but notbe there, and Lorene accommodated Mina’s eccentricities as Mina accommodated the eccentricities of Food Baroque customers. Mina had grown to hate FB, and had fantasies about the days when the fundamental thing about food was taste, finito. It was in fact essential to Lorene and Mina’s success to remember that every success had to be contradicted and revised in order to maintain itself, each extreme had to contain its own contradiction, each virtue its vice, each style its own mannered counterstyle. Lorene realized, in another eureka moment, that certain loyal customers used to sneak in the back alley for a cigarette between courses of guiltless, organic “lite” cuisine. She created a downstairs “private” smoking room, a secret lounge with elegant banquettes and beautiful service persons wherein a customer could bum a cigarette (even call in his favorite brand with his dietary restrictions) and smoke in privacy, and only in view of other guilty smokers. Only smokers knew of the room, so spouses could be fooled about the reformation of smokers, and the clients could enjoy their weakness with no shame. Phillipe Stark disposable toothbrushes were even provided in the secret room’s secret bathroom, so the telltale breath could be eliminated before returning to the main dining room. So chic and popular this little room became that many notorious power deals were struck there, and some ambitious mongering types even cynically feigned being smokers just to get in, until Lorene had to pick and choose the “right” smokers. She spun this secret room into its own place, Dead Animals and Single Malts (with the added attraction of wild exotic-game meat such as buffalo filet mignon, New Zealand ostrich prosciutto, and free-range alligator carpaccio), and as successful as that was, and well ahead of the current macho scotch, cigar, and “meat” craze, it never had the cachet of the Room at Food Baroque, thesassy defiance of the secret cigarette. It closed after the recent smoking laws went into effect. Mina saw Vanity and Vexation as another attempt to recapture the Room, and didn’t disguise her indifference, although undoubtedly it would have great success.