The Wangs vs. the World(57)
She grinned. “Morning drinking. Even better.”
And then the other guy, the one who would turn out to be Leo, leaned back and laughed, parting his pink lips, showing every single one of his pretty teeth, leaving his smooth throat open and vulnerable.
That, she thought, looks like a healthy diversion.
Saina had chosen a house on the outskirts of Helios because the town was small (population: 1,214) and isolated (three miles off of County Road 19) and she thought that she didn’t want to see or talk to anyone ever again.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right.
It was more like she’d seen it all as bucolic set dressing for her inevitable comeback. This was the magazine story she really wanted—not some exegesis on failure penned by Billy, but a tribute to her rebirth.
Depressed and disgraced, artist Saina Wang traded her Meatpacking District loft for a ramshackle Catskills farmhouse only to undergo a creative and personal renaissance.
“I’m thrilled,” says the stunning twenty-eight-year-old, grinning as she holds an Araucana—the artisanal hens lay bright blue eggs that match the shutters on the eighteenth-century barn she converted to a studio. Wang talks to us about chickens and eggs, the birds and the bees (wink, wink!), and doing her best work yet.
Some parts of it were true. She was twenty-eight, and she had painted the shutters on the barn bright blue, but she’d never know for sure if they matched the tufted bird’s eggs because it turned out that baby chicks, no matter how heritage, can freeze to death even in sixty-degree weather. It also turned out that chopping wood was impossibly hard. On the first attempt the ax slipped from her hands and went flying, the second time she kept a vise grip on the ax and it was the wood that flipped off the stump. Convinced that the third try would cost her a toe, Saina draped a tarp back over the woodpile and hid the ax in the broom closet.
It wasn’t just the buried chicks and the pile of unchopped wood. It was the vegetable garden that wouldn’t grow despite the manure she heaped over the soil, the flowers that budded but never blossomed, the neighbor who inched his fence over her property line, the gang of neighboring goats that made a daily escape from their enclosure and pillaged her stunted garden. The countryside was refusing to live up to her pastoral fantasy, just like the rest of her life. Inside the house, where money could reliably fix most problems, things were nearly perfect, but outside, butch nature trampled all over wimpy nurture.
When she interrupted them, Leo and his friend Graham, the owner-bartender-chef-occasional-butcher, were putting together a new cocktail menu for G Street, Graham’s restaurant-bar-occasional-town-hall.
Herbs from Leo’s farm were piled all around them, spilling out of torn-open paper bags with the Fatboy Farms logo. Leo was pounding sprigs of rosemary in an oversize mortar and pestle. Graham was sifting freshly ground nutmeg together with turbinado sugar and white pepper. The smells came at her like Christmas and Thanksgiving over the chemical lemon of the floor cleaner. The men had invited her to join in—“We need to temper the testosterone a little”—and the three of them spent the next hour infusing simple syrups over a portable burner and trying to put together the most herb-intensive cocktails they could think of.
“I want something burly. Bitter. Pungent. A gut punch. But, you know, suave,” said Graham.
“A man’s drink,” said Saina.
“Mixology: The New Bespoke Tailoring.” Leo, it turned out, sometimes spoke in pronouncements.
As the sunlight faded, Leo edged closer to Saina, balancing a foot against her stool, placing his lips precisely over the spot where she’d sipped from a glass of basil-cucumber-cayenne-gin-and-ginger. Soon it was just the two of them sitting and drinking in the half dark. The restaurant was officially open, but no one had ventured in. Graham was in the kitchen, drunkenly calling out instructions to his prep-cook-waiter-accountant and Leo leaned towards her, conspiratorial.
“Let’s surprise Graham.”
“By raiding his cash register?”
“I have a better idea.” He stepped off the stool and picked up the discarded mop. “Do you know how to do a three-corner fold?”
Saina shook her head. “But I can make it up.”
He tossed her the package of freshly laundered napkins. She tore open the plastic and pulled out a bright white cloth. As she folded, she watched him swab the tiles until they were shiny, and then they put the chairs in place and ripped long sheets of butcher paper to drape over the tabletops.
Leo held up a napkin, inspecting the fold. “Very impressive. Precision and beauty.”
Saina felt her cheeks get hot. Who was this guy? This greens-growing, Catskills-living, yeshiva-named black man whose first drunken instinct was to do sweet favors for his friends? Who wielded a mop with balletic swoops and wore his T-shirt tight and loose in all the right places?
The kitchen door swung open to reveal Graham, a chef’s hat on his head and a giant zucchini in his hand. “Dudes! You’re my magic mice! Cinderelly! Cinder—ouch!” Before the second “elly,” the door swung back and smacked him in the nose, then opened again. “Where’s my prince?”
Saina and Leo smiled at each other. They smiled and smiled and didn’t stop until a couple walked in and asked to be seated. As Leo settled them at a table and brought over glasses of water, she stayed in place, watching him.