Our second date was in my kitchen, because it was the only place in Westmere I could personally guarantee was free of olive oil.
That's not true. My kitchen has eleven bottles of olive oil. But I put them in a cupboard and taped it shut.
Imogen looked at the tape for a long moment. Then she said, "That's the most romantic thing anyone has done for me since graduate school."
"What happened in graduate school?"
"A man let me hold his slide rule," she said. "It was 1999. It was already an antique."
Wexley's Table operates out of a converted bakery on Dorsey Street. The kitchen serves, in theory, a hundred and fifty plates an hour. That night it served two, plus a dog.
The dog's name is Yolk. He is a nine-year-old yellow mutt with the build of an ottoman. He came with the building, along with a proofing cabinet and a smell of cinnamon that will never fully leave.
Yolk walked straight up to Imogen and leaned on her shins. He does this to everyone. It's his only trick, and he's committed to it.
She looked down at him. Then she looked at her gloves. Then, very carefully, she took the THURSDAY bag out of her cardigan pocket and set it on the counter, within reach.
"Dogs are worth a Thursday," she said, and patted him on the head.
Yolk closed his eyes like someone who had finally been understood.
I made her a menu for the gala. That was the excuse for the date, anyway. Eight hors d'oeuvres, each one a single bite, nothing that dripped.
I had designed every item to be eaten in white gloves without leaving a mark. I didn't tell her. I wanted to see if she'd notice.
She noticed on the second bite.
"Nothing runs," she said.
She held up a crab puff and turned it slowly, like a curator checking the back of a frame. "The filling sits inside the pastry. There's no sauce. You could eat this in a ballgown."
"I've catered a lot of ballgowns."
"You made a glove-safe menu."
"I made a gala menu," I said. "It's just also glove-safe. Coincidentally."
She ate the rest of the crab puff and said nothing for a while. Then she said, "Two hundred guests. How many crab puffs?"
"Six hundred. Three a head. People say they'll have one. Nobody has one."
"What if they have four?"
"Then someone will go home with two," I said. "And it will probably be a board member, and nobody will ever say anything."
She laughed. It was a short laugh, like a drawer opening and shutting. I wanted to hear it again immediately, which I recognized as a problem.
Later, washing up, I asked why she'd become a conservator. She dried a plate with a dish towel, gloves on, very thoroughly.
"Because things fall apart," she said. "Paint cracks, varnish yellows, people lean on frames at parties. My job is to slow it down."
"That sounds a little bleak."
"It's the opposite of bleak. It means somebody's always needed."
She set the plate down. "Did you know varnish takes about a year to cure? It feels dry in a day. Underneath, it's soft for months."
"I did not know that."
"Most people don't. That's how you catch a bad restorer," she said. "They're always in a hurry. You can feel the hurry in the surface."
I filed that away. I am not, as a rule, a filer. But I had started to pick things up.
The official menu tasting was the following Wednesday, at the museum.
The Varnum Museum of Art is a big limestone building on Upland Square with two lions out front. The lions have been there since 1902. One of them has a pigeon on its head at all times. Imogen says it's not the same pigeon, but it has the same attitude.
The staff entrance is around the side. Behind the security desk sat a man in a navy blazer with a brass name tag that said O. YANCEY. He was about seventy and looked like he had been carved there along with the lions.
"Delivery?" he said.
"Caterer. Gideon Wexley. For Mr. Uxbridge."
"Otis Yancey," he said, and shook my hand with a grip like a vise. "Head of security. Forty years this March. Sign the book."
I signed the book. It was an actual paper book, ruled in pencil, with columns for name, time in, time out and purpose. Every page was filled in by the same careful hand.
"You've been here forty years?"
"Since 1986," he said. "Nothing happens here."
"Nothing?"
"Not since 1986." He leaned in, as if confiding a state secret. "Pigeon got into the Dutch Room. Took us four hours."
"And since then?"
"Nothing. I write everything down anyway." He tapped the book. "You never know."
"You never know," I agreed.
"You never know," Otis said again, with enormous satisfaction, and waved me through.
The tasting was in a conference room on the second floor. It had a long table, portraits of dead trustees, and Conrad Uxbridge.
Conrad was tall, silver-haired and tanned, with a pocket square folded by a professional. He had the smile of someone who has asked a great many people for money. He shook my hand with both of his.
"Dr. Wardell speaks highly of you," he said. "That's a fifty-thousand-dollar sentence."
"She speaks highly of the pigeon," I said.
"The pigeon's on our letterhead," Conrad said, without irony.
Imogen sat at the far end of the table, gloves folded in front of her. She gave me the small nod. I gave her one back. Conrad looked between us like a man trying to read a contract upside down.
Then the door opened, and the room got about ten percent more expensive.
Laszlo Wendt was fifty-six. He wore a black turtleneck, a camel coat over his shoulders like a cape, and a scarf the color of a very good wine. He had a gray goatee trimmed to a point and the posture of a man who expected applause on entry. He did not wait to be introduced.
"The famous caterer," he said, not looking at me. "Conrad, darling. And the glove girl. How are the gloves?"
"Clean," said Imogen.
"Always so clean." He sat down and snapped his fingers twice at no one in particular. Nothing happened. He seemed surprised by this.
I served the tasting. Laszlo ate one crab puff in two bites, which is how I knew he was going to be trouble. A crab puff is a one-bite item. Two bites is a statement.
"Fine," he said. "A little provincial."
"It's a crab puff," I said. "It's provincial on purpose."
Conrad laughed too loudly. Imogen didn't laugh at all, but her eyes did something at the corners.
"How's the painting?" she asked Laszlo. "I'd like to see it before the gala. I'd like to check the condition against my intake report."
"Oh, no." Laszlo waved a hand. "The reframe is a surprise. Not even the gloves get a peek."
"Conrad," said Imogen.
"It's a forty-thousand-dollar reveal, Imogen," Conrad said apologetically. "The donors love a drape. Laszlo's people will install it the night before, under cover. You'll see it with everyone else."
"I'm the conservator."
"And you'll be the first to admire it." Conrad smiled the money smile. "Laszlo has handled the cleaning personally."
"I used to paint, you know," Laszlo told the room. "Before I realized I was better at knowing than doing."
He picked up a second crab puff and looked at it. "I never had the patience. Who has time to wait?"
Imogen looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at me.
I knew that look. It was the look of somebody filing something away, in a drawer I hadn't seen yet.
The gala was on a Saturday in October. I arrived at three o'clock with a van, two ovens and eleven staff in black shirts and no gloves.
Otis signed us all in. He wrote each name in pencil, with the time, in his careful hand. When he got to Benji Ziegler, my youngest server, he looked up.
"Twenty-three?"
"Twenty-four next week," said Benji.
"You'll do," said Otis, and wrote it down.
By seven the Grand Hall was full. The room serves two hundred and forty standing, and someone had brought a cousin. Make it two-sixty.
There was a string quartet in the corner and a great many tuxedos. I had six hundred crab puffs. At the current rate, we'd be out by eight-fifteen.
At the far end of the hall, on a temporary wall, hung a large shape under a dark red velvet drape.
Philippa Uttley sat in a velvet chair in the front row. She was tiny and upright, with a white bun, a purple shawl and a cane she didn't seem to need. She had already eaten five crab puffs.
Imogen stood off to the side in a long black dress, with her white gloves. A few people glanced at her hands and then glanced away, the way people do. She didn't notice them. She was looking at the drape.
At seven-thirty, Conrad made a speech. It was mostly thank-yous. Each thank-you was worth, I would estimate, between ten and seventy thousand dollars.
Then Laszlo stepped forward, took hold of the velvet, and pulled.
The room went "ahh." The pears glowed. Even I could see it: winter light, coming through the fruit as if from inside.
People applauded. Mrs. Uttley dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
Imogen walked toward the painting as the crowd drifted back to the bar. The frame was a hair crooked on the left. I watched her reach up with one gloved fingertip and nudge the corner level, gently, the way you'd tidy a sleeping child's blanket.
Then she stopped.
She stood very still. She looked at the upper left corner of the canvas for five full seconds. Then she brought her hand down and turned it over.
There was a faint yellow smudge on the tip of her white glove.
Up next: A Two-Million-Dollar Sentence
Continue to Part 3 →