Chapter 2 #2
Because Julian Volkov is, I realize as I circle the table with the third course, magnificent at this.
Every person who speaks to him gets his whole attention, his eyes steady on their face like whatever they’re saying is the most interesting thing said all year.
He asks Theo about the fishing—not small talk, real questions, like the difference between a good season and a bad one, and whether the cod have come back.
He asks Doris about the market. He listens to the mayor’s story about the lobster with the patience of a man who has all the time in the world, which, I’m starting to think, he might.
He charms every single person at both tables.
Over the next two hours we learn that he is something like an art collector, and that he restores things.
He came back to Black Harbor because the house needed him, which is a strange way to put it and which I don’t think about until much later.
He doesn’t own a phone. He has read the Ansel Pratt journal, which is something perhaps four people in this town have done, and one of them is Mabel and the other three are dead. And now five people have read it.
We learn absolutely nothing else.
He isn’t evasive. That’s what gets me. I know evasive—I’ve catered enough second weddings—and he definitely isn’t.
Julian answers every question he’s asked, and then redirects it.
Somebody asks where he’s from and he says “a great many places, none of them recently” and turns it into a question about them so smoothly that by the time they answer they’ve forgotten they asked him anything.
Somebody asks what an art collector actually does all day up in that big house, and he says, “Mostly I dust,” and the whole end of the table laughs, and nobody notices he still hasn’t answered. I notice, because I notice everything.
By nine o’clock Harriet Coyne has told him about her hip and both her husbands.
Theo has him cornered about the ‘78 storm.
Mabel is arguing with him about the north wharf and the 1826 survey—actually arguing, red-cheeked and radiant—and I hear her say Well then where do you think it was?
in a voice she has never once used on me.
And then Doris Alden’s grandson comes back down after he’s supposedly been herded upstairs.
He stands in the doorway a moment, taking in twenty-four adults and forty candles.
Then he walks the entire length of my dining room, directly to the strange man at the head of the table, and puts a wooden horse in his lap.
The room notices. Doris starts to get up, and I put a hand on her shoulder.
Julian looks at the horse for a moment. Then he says, entirely seriously, “That is a very fine animal.”
“His name is Horse.”
“Naturally.”
“Do you want him?”
“I would not deprive you.” He turns it over in his fingers, looks at the underside, and hands it back with both hands, the way you’d return something valuable. “The near foreleg has been mended. Whoever did it took care.”
The boy beams like the rising sun and goes off to find his grandmother, dragging Horse by the tail.
And I stand there with a stack of dessert plates against my chest, feeling something warm and precarious happen behind my ribs, and think, well. There goes the serial killer theory.
“You’re staring,” Lucy says, appearing at my shoulder with her camera and a tart.
“I’m hosting.”
“You’re hosting at him.”
I ignore her and go to refill his water glass for the third time. It’s still full.
I bring the fourth course—the black garlic short rib, the one I’m proudest of, the one that took three days—and I set it in front of him and I wait for the thing I live for. That first bite. The little pause. The look.
He looks at the plate. He looks at me. And he says, with a courtesy so complete it’s almost a wall, “This is the most beautiful thing anyone has put in front of me in longer than you’d believe. Thank you.”
And he does not pick up his fork.
You should know that I do not dine.
I’d read the words. I’d turned them over.
I’d decided, somewhere in the back of my optimistic skull, that they meant dietary restrictions or fasting or shy about eating in public.
I’d known he might not touch anything. I just hadn’t quite believed it.
I have fed people who swore they weren’t hungry, people who were grieving, and people who hadn’t sat at a table with anyone in years.
I have never, not once, put a plate in front of a person and watched them simply decline to be reached.
The short rib sits there, glossy and perfect and untouched, and something in my chest pulls tight in a way that makes me extremely uncomfortable.
“Everything all right, dear?” Mabel asks softly. She’s materialized next to me the way she does, and she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Julian, at the full plate and the man behind the plate, with those sharp old eyes narrowed the smallest fraction behind her cat-eye glasses.
“Fine,” I say. “He’s—he told me. In the letter. He doesn’t eat.”
“He hasn’t touched his wine either,” she murmurs.
“Maybe he doesn’t drink.”
“Maybe.” Mabel studies him over the rim of her glasses. “There’s something familiar about that man.”
“You’ve met him?”
“No.” Her eyes narrow slightly. “That’s what’s bothering me.”
I circle back to the kitchen. I plate the dessert.
I refill goblets and laugh at the mayor’s jokes and let Theo talk me into promising the Widow’s Lantern a batch of the broth.
I do my job. I run my room. And the whole time, my eyes keep going back to the head of my table, to the still, pale, unfairly gorgeous man sitting in the no-longer-empty seat.
Twice, I catch him.
Twice, across the length of my crimson-draped, candlelit dining room, over the ruin of a dinner nobody’s finishing because they’re too busy talking, I look up and find that deep reddish gaze already resting on me.
The first time, he glances away, courteous, giving me the room.
The second time, he doesn’t.