Chapter 3 Luca
THEN
Wes's guest room has been mine for ten days. I looked for a place, but the realtor said there wasn’t much available. Wes offered his place again, and the thought of another night stuck in a generic hotel was just too much.
This is the fourth restaurant we've gone to since I moved my suitcase in.
He picks every restaurant since he knows the area.
This has become the routine after practice.
We practice hard, go home, shower, talk about making dinner in the kitchen.
Spend too much time debating what to have, and then Wes chooses a restaurant.
Tonight's restaurant has tile floors and low ceilings, and our server keeps calling Wes "boss" in a way that should be annoying but lands with enough warmth to survive.
Wes ordered the branzino and it's better than my lamb, but if I say this out loud, he will hold it over me for the rest of the week.
The appetizer is where we disagree. Wes thinks the ceviche is a seven-one.
I think the ceviche is a six-eight. The texture is mistaken, and I think the acid ratio needed another ten minutes, and I am going to be right about this when we discuss it later.
Wes pays the bill without looking at the total.
He does this every time. Pulls his card, signs, puts the receipt in his pocket.
I reach for my wallet, and he looks at me the way he has looked at me the last three times I have reached for my wallet, which is to say he does not look at me at all. He just signs.
We walk home and Wes stops at the gelato place two blocks from the building. The woman behind the counter knows his order, or knows him, or both. He comes back with two cups. Pistachio for him. Stracciatella for me.
The penthouse is cool after the sidewalk.
Wes drops his keys on the counter, kicks off his shoes, and settles into the corner of the couch with one leg curled under him.
His polo shirt has come untucked on one side and he doesn't fix it.
He eats the pistachio with the small silver spoon and looks at his phone and then puts his phone down and looks at me, as if he knows I am just waiting for the opening.
"The ceviche," I say.
"Here we go." He rolls his eyes, but he settles back into the couch ready for the argument.
"The ceviche was a six-point-eight."
"The ceviche was a seven-one, and you are wrong, and I will explain why you are wrong if you give me thirty seconds."
"Explain away."
"The acid was right." He counts points off on his fingers. "The fish was right. The red onion was cut thin enough. You are grading the texture of the plantain chip on the side. The chip is a garnish and should not be weighted equally."
"The plantain chip is structural,” I say. “You eat it with the ceviche. It is part of the experience."
"It’s a garnish." Wes says, ready to argue about the plantain as much as I am.
"A garnish is parsley. A garnish is a lemon wedge nobody squeezes. That chip is infrastructure. If the chip crumbles when you scoop, the whole dish falls apart."
Wes stares at me, his spoon of gelato paused halfway to his mouth. "You just called a plantain chip infrastructure for ceviche."
"And I stand by it." I'm already building the next point in my head when I catch his eye and whatever I was about to say dies on arrival. He bursts out laughing first and I'm half a second behind him.
"We should track this," Wes says after catching his breath. He puts his gelato on the coffee table and reaches for his laptop on the side chair. The screen glows in the dim living room as he opens it up.
"Track what?"
"All of it. The restaurants. The dishes. We both have opinions on the few places we’ve been and we are just saying them into the air. You just gave a plantain chip a full thesis argument. That's data, Berger. Data deserves a home."
I shake my head and laugh. He is sitting on his couch with his laptop open building a spreadsheet for restaurant ratings at eleven at night. And I am not sure I want to be anywhere else right now.
"What scale should we use?" He asks while typing.
"One to ten."
"Any decimals?"
"One decimal place. Anything past that is false precision."
"So seven-point-four is a valid number but seven-point-four-three is too much?" He looks over at me, eyebrow raised.
"Seven-point-four-three is a person lying to themselves about how much attention they were paying to the food. One decimal." He types a note in a cell off to the side. SCALE: 1-10, ONE DECIMAL.
The columns go up fast. Restaurant, date, dishes ordered, individual ratings.
Separate scores per dish, because a restaurant that serves a perfect appetizer and a mediocre main should answer for both performances.
He adds separate rating columns and renames them RATING (M) and RATING (B).
Dessert, bread service, and coffee each get their own sub-index.
Ambiance gets fifteen percent of the weighted average, because a great room is allowed to help but not allowed to carry.
"Sixty-five percent for food overall," he says. "Fifteen ambiance. Ten service. That's ninety."
"The remaining ten is the bread basket."
I stare at him. "You're giving the bread basket ten percent of the weighted score."
"You just called a plantain chip infrastructure. The bread basket is the first thing a restaurant gives you. It's the restaurant saying: this is who we are, this is the standard we're operating at, welcome. That's worth ten percent."
He is not wrong. I don't tell him he's not wrong because we have known each other for three weeks and I am not ready to concede a point this early in whatever this is. "Fine. Ten percent for the bread basket. But if the bread is store-bought, the ten becomes a penalty."
"That's not how percentages work."
"It's how bread works."
"And a binary at the end," I say. "Would we go back, yes or no."
He considers this for a moment. "That's not a rating. That's a verdict."
"It's the only rating that matters. Everything else is supporting evidence. The verdict is: would you walk through that door again."
"Then it goes after the weighted average."
He types RETURN? in the final cell.
We enter La Marea as the first row. The ceviche holds at six-eight versus seven-one. The lamb gets debated and settled. His hands are careful on the keyboard, deliberate, the same patience he brings to everything I've watched him do for days.
"The bread," I say. "Five."
"Five-two."
"You're giving the bread a five-two?"
"There was olive oil." He says this as if olive oil alone can rescue the bread from what it is.
"The olive oil was the only thing keeping the bread out of the fours. That bread basket was the restaurant saying: we bought this from someone else and we're not going to talk about it."
"It's bread, Berger."
"It's a five."
He looks at me for a second longer than the bread warrants. His eyes are dark in the lamplight and very still. Then he goes back to the screen and the bread keeps its row.
The key lime gets a six-three from me, a six-eight from him.
The coffee gets a seven flat from both of us, which is the first number we have agreed on all night.
He turns his head when I say "seven" at the same time he does, and the look between us holds for a beat before we both go back to the screen.
He adds a Notes column. Types in the first row: B claims plantain chip is "infrastructure." Under review.
I read it over his shoulder, a few inches closer than I need to see the screen. "Under review? By who? Who is the review board?"
"I am." He turns and looks at me. We are close enough I can see the light sprinkle of freckles across his cheeks and the green in his hazel eyes.
"We are co-founders of this spreadsheet. I have veto power."
"You have veto power on ratings. You do not have veto power on editorial notes.
" He doesn't look away. The laptop screen is still glowing between us, casting a blue shadow over his face.
His hands are still on the keyboard but they have stopped moving.
He watches me like I might have the answer to a question.
I don't.
Or I do, and the answer is the reason I haven't called my realtor back, and the reason I know what soap he uses, and the reason I am sitting on this couch at midnight arguing about bread ratings.
Then something shifts behind his eyes and he turns back to the laptop, and his fingers start moving again like nothing happened.
"That is a rule you just invented," I say, because someone needs to say something.
"I am writing it down." He opens a second tab, labels it Rules, and then types:
1. Berger has veto power on ratings.
2. Mercer has editorial discretion on notes.
3. Disputes settled by dessert quality at the next meal.
I read the third rule twice. "Disputes settled by dessert quality?"
"If we can't agree, we go out again. Whoever's dessert is better wins the argument."
"That incentivizes arguing."
"Does it?"
I look at him. He is looking at the screen, but I see the smile he's trying to hide.
"Fine," I say. "But I pick the restaurant."
The spreadsheet has sixteen columns now and one complete row of data and a Rules tab with three rules on it. The weighted average reads seven-point-one for the evening. Good. Not great.
Wes saves the file. In the filename field, he types RESTAURANTS.
"We'll rename it later," he says.
"We won't."
"No." He closes the laptop halfway. "We probably won't."
The gelato cups have been empty for half an hour.
The clock on the wall above the kitchen reads twelve-fifteen.
We have been arguing about food for over an hour and neither of us has suggested stopping.
Wes takes both cups to the kitchen. I hear the water running and the cups land in the recycling.
He comes back through the living room on his way to his bedroom, and he does not stop walking but his hand passes near the back of the couch where I am sitting and his fingers brush the cushion beside my shoulder. Not me. The cushion.
"Buenas noches, Berger," he says.
"Buenas noches," I say, and my accent is terrible, but he does not correct it.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the guest room with my phone in my hand.
The spreadsheet is there. Wes shared it with me while we were building it, a muted notification.
I open it now. One row of data. La Marea, September, ceviche six-eight versus seven-one, lamb seven-two versus seven-four.
The Notes column: B claims plantain chip is "infrastructure.
" Under review. I close the spreadsheet then open it again.
My apartment search has three saved listings I have not visited. The realtor emailed on Monday and I did not respond. I tell myself I will respond tomorrow. I tell myself I will look for an apartment this week.
?