You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood Page A

was called a Kirby cucumber fermented in sea salt, spring water, Chardonnay vinegar, and Sri Lankan green peppercorns. At the time the concept was completely new in provincial old Boston, pioneered by a small cadre of ambitious young restaurateurs who were inspired by Julia Child’s bodacious local TV show. Celebrated for our variations on traditional favorites—cod cakes sautéed in white truffle oil garnished with Usukuchi soy sauce and orange blossom honey; I had to memorize this stuff—and presentations assembled as delicately as a house of cards, we were among the first restaurants in a city known for Yankee comfort food to feature la nouvelle cuisine.

    The owner/chef was Le Cordon Bleu trained and not only considered herself an artist but liked to hang out with them and hired a wait-staff of painters, musicians, dancers, singers studying opera, and me, the would-be novelist. We knew nothing about food, much less about wine, and blundered through table service with pure youthful chutzpah. Before I got the job I didn’t have any artist friends my own age but the regimen of the restaurant soon made it impossible to hang out with anyone else. We slept until noon, reported for work at four, and spent the next eight hours at an all-out sprint. Exhausted to the bone at midnight but unable to sleep, we swigged the dregs of our tables’ unfinished wine bottles, counted our tips, and primped to hit the dance bars while trash talking our customers, our boss, and all the undeserving artists who were making it while we were not. I saw precious little of Marge on her one night in the city as I worked Monday through Friday and arrived back to the apartment reeking so intensely of sweat, food, alcohol, tobacco smoke, perfume, dish water, and all the congregate effluvium of fine dining, that no matter how late I entered she would be awakened from sleep, sit upright in bed and gag. Every Friday night, however, I drove to Cape Cod for the weekend, leaving whatever bar at last call, grabbing coffee and a roast beef sandwich at Buzzy’s, the all-night drive-in next to Mass General, and plowed the hundred-plus miles with the windows open and the radio blasting to keep me awake. One night I left Boston so blindly drunk that I arrived
in Wellfleet with a sandwich in my lap that I had neglected to eat and could not remember buying. Much as I enjoyed the life I had to admit that waiting tables in a high-end restaurant, like working in the theater or the emergency room, the night desk at a daily newspaper or for that matter organized crime, guaranteed access to the shadow world of the nocturnal demimonde but made it impossible to conduct a relationship with anyone outside the business. I gave notice soon thereafter.
    I had accumulated some savings to live on, however, and more than enough material for the novel. In a little over a year, I managed to complete and revise a draft that was competent enough to get me a good agent, which at the time I defined as anyone who had a mailing address in New York City, at least one client who had written a best seller, and took me to lunch in a restaurant with a wine list.
    The book was rejected by over thirty mainstream publishers and although their comments ranged from the condescending (“Mr. Wood is a writer whose next project might be worth reading”) to the absurd (“I cannot publish this book because I hate the protagonist. He reminds me too much of myself”) I was aware of a disjointedness of opinion that I could not dismiss. Many people familiar with the novel, including some quite famous writer-friends of Marge’s and audiences who heard excerpts read aloud, liked it very much. I kept being told how the book spoke to them of family situations they found painfully familiar, of what they feared went
on inside pretentious restaurant kitchens, and above all how much it made them laugh. My agent had felt that way too, at first, but wearied of making costly