My sister set me up with a woman who wore white gloves to dinner, and the first thing I did was count them.
Two, one on each hand. Plain white cotton, the kind you see in documentaries when somebody lifts a very old book. She also had a spare pair in a clear plastic bag beside her water glass. The bag had a label on it.
The label said THURSDAY.
It was a Tuesday.
"In case of soup," she said, when she saw me looking.
I am fifty-two years old, and I have run a catering company for twenty-four years. I have served weddings, wakes, retirements, one divorce party and a christening where the baby bit a bishop. I like to think I am hard to surprise. I had never been on a date with a backup pair of anything.
"Gideon Wexley," I said, and held out my hand.
She looked at it the way you might look at a stranger's dog. Friendly, probably. Possibly sticky.
"Imogen Wardell," she said, and gave me a small nod instead. "I don't shake hands. Cotton transfers. It's nothing personal."
"What does it transfer?"
"Everything," she said. "That's the problem with cotton."
The restaurant was Vellucci's, on Fourth Street in Westmere. My sister Wynne had picked it. Wynne is fifty-five, a dental office manager, and she believes in two things: reading the reviews and fixing my life.
"She's a conservator," Wynne had told me on the phone. "At the Varnum Museum. Paintings. She's forty-eight, very smart, a little particular."
"Particular how?"
"You'll see. And don't do the thing."
"What thing?"
"The portions thing. Where you look at a room and say how many it serves."
I do not do this. I do it maybe twice a day. When you cater for a living, you stop seeing rooms and start seeing headcounts.
A church basement serves eighty, seated. A backyard serves forty if nobody brings a cousin. Vellucci's, I noticed as I walked in, served about sixty. The table by the window served two.
Imogen was already sitting at it. She had short dark hair with a streak of gray at the front, which looked deliberate and probably wasn't. She wore a navy cardigan buttoned to the top, with reading glasses on a cord. The gloves rested on the tablecloth, very still.
She had arrived early to inspect the table. I know this because she told me.
"There was wax on the cloth," she said. "I had them change it."
"You noticed candle wax."
"I notice everything on a surface. I spend nine hours a day looking at paint through a magnifier."
She adjusted her glasses. "I once found a fly in a 1740 portrait of an admiral. The fly was also from 1740."
"What did you do with it?"
"Left it. It had been there longer than the admiral."
I laughed. She looked pleased about it, briefly, the way a cat looks pleased when you finally sit where it wanted you to sit.
The waiter brought breadsticks. Imogen ate hers with a knife and fork.
She did it beautifully, I'll give her that. She cut the breadstick into four even pieces and ate them one at a time. A man at the next table, in a golf shirt, actually stopped chewing.
"You can just pick it up," I said. "This is a breadstick-forward establishment."
"Olive oil," she said, and nodded at the little dish. "Olive oil goes into cotton and never comes out. On Thursday I'm cleaning a seascape from 1888. I'd rather the seascape didn't smell like Vellucci's."
"So the gloves are for the paintings."
"The gloves are for everything. Paintings, frames, paper, old wood, doorknobs." She paused. "People, a little."
"People?"
"People are mostly oil," she said. "I don't mean that unkindly."
I said I hadn't taken it unkindly. I'd spent a quarter century in kitchens. Nobody had ever told me anything about people I didn't already know.
She ordered the risotto, because it could be managed entirely with a spoon. I ordered the veal. She watched me cut it with the expression of someone watching a stranger carry her grandmother's teacups.
"You hold your knife like a professional," she said.
"I am a professional. Wexley's Table. Weddings, corporate, the occasional funeral."
"Do your servers wear gloves?"
"God, no," I said. "We're a friendly operation. You see a waiter in white gloves and suddenly you think you're using the wrong fork."
"You usually are," she said.
"Not at my events. At my events there is no wrong fork. That's our whole thing."
She seemed to file this away. I would learn that Imogen Wardell filed everything away. She just didn't always tell you which drawer.
By dessert I had a list.
She had worked at the Varnum Museum of Art for nineteen years. Her lab was in the basement, beside a north-facing window she called "the good window." She owned forty-two pairs of white cotton gloves, labeled by day and washed by hand on Sundays.
When a pair was retired, she didn't throw it out. She bagged it, dated it and kept it in a filing box.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because everything I touch, I touch with gloves," she said. "So the gloves are a record. If something goes wrong with a painting, I can check what was on my hands that day."
"Has anything ever gone wrong?"
"Not once. That's what the gloves are for."
There was a pause. She looked down at the THURSDAY bag.
"Also," she said, more quietly, "nothing gets ruined if you never touch it with bare hands. It's a good policy. For paintings."
I didn't ask what else it was a good policy for. I'm a caterer, not a fool.
Instead I asked about her boss. This turned out to be the right move. Her shoulders came down about an inch.
"Conrad Uxbridge," she said. "Director. He's fifty-nine and he measures every sentence in donor dollars."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning if I say the roof over Gallery Six is leaking, he says, 'That's a three-hundred-thousand-dollar sentence, Imogen. Can we say it after the gala?'" She did the voice. It was a good voice. It had a cufflink in it.
"What gala?"
"In three weeks. We're getting a Wainscott."
I made a face that I hoped looked knowledgeable.
"Ottilie Wainscott," she said kindly. "She painted fruit, mostly, and died in 1930. The light comes through her pears like they're lamps."
"And you're getting one."
"There are nine left in the world. One hung over a radiator on Willet Avenue for forty years."
She straightened her fork by a quarter inch. "The owner is a widow named Philippa Uttley. She's seventy-nine, she cheats at cards, and I like her enormously."
"What's the painting called?"
"Pears in Winter Light. I did the intake exam at her house in July. Every inch, under magnification. It's in wonderful shape, except for one thing."
"What thing?"
"A tiny hole in the upper left corner. Her late husband hung a Christmas wreath on it in 1971, with a thumbtack."
She smiled very slightly. "It's in my report. Nobody else knows it's there. You'd have to be looking."
"Are you going to fix it?"
"I was supposed to. Then Conrad let the donor's dealer take it for cleaning and reframing. A man named Laszlo Wendt, with a gallery downtown and a very expensive scarf."
She said "scarf" the way some people say "parking ticket."
"Conrad thinks it's good optics to let the family's man handle it," she went on. "I think it's a pear painting from 1911 in the hands of a man who calls me 'the glove girl.'"
"He calls you that?"
"To my face. I'm forty-eight. I have a doctorate."
"Do you want me to poison his canapés?"
She considered it. "No. Just be ordinary to him. He hates being ordinary."
When the check came, she paid her half with exact change from a coin purse. The coins came out in a neat stack. The waiter looked at the stack the way I look at a perfectly piped rosette.
Outside, it was cool and smelled like rain. We stood under the awning. In my experience, this is the part of a date where somebody reaches for somebody's hand.
I didn't. She noticed that I didn't. She gave me another small nod, and I understood it was a thank-you.
"I had a nice time," she said. "That's not something I say for the optics."
"Would you do it again?"
"Somewhere without olive oil."
"I know a place. Serves thirty. No breadsticks."
She looked at me sideways. "Your sister told me you'd do that. She said it was charming. She was lying, but only a little."
Three days later, Wexley's Table got an email from the Varnum Museum of Art.
Their usual caterer had double-booked. They needed someone for the Wainscott gala: two hundred guests, black tie, heavy hors d'oeuvres. Conrad Uxbridge's assistant had found us through, and I am quoting, "a colleague in Conservation who was surprisingly insistent."
I called Imogen.
"I said you held your knife correctly," she said. "Conrad did the rest. Can you do two hundred?"
"In my sleep. What's the room?"
"The Grand Hall. Marble floors, high ceilings, one painting on the far wall."
"Then it serves two hundred and forty, standing, if nobody brings a cousin."
"Gideon."
"Sorry."
There was a pause. Then she said something I would think about many times over the next three weeks.
"I'll be there early. I want to see the painting the moment it comes back from Laszlo."
Another pause. "I want to check the corner. I just want to make sure the hole is still there."
It was a strange thing to want. I didn't think about it much. I was thinking about crab puffs, and how fast two hundred people could empty a tray.
Three weeks later I was standing in the Grand Hall with a tray in my hands. And the hole in the corner of Pears in Winter Light was gone.
Up next: Nothing Happens Here
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