Icarus

FOUR

Jack Keller woke up, as always, one minute before his clock radio sounded. And, as always, as he'd done for nearly twenty years now, the moment he flicked it off he instantly reached over to lightly pat Caroline, to reassure her that he was up, that he was all right, and she didn't have to rise with him. That it was 4:30 in the morning and there was no reason on God's earth why she couldn't stay tucked under their pastel-blue down-filled comforter and sleep for five or six more hours while he went to the meat district and then the fish market and then, unless their new baby chef, whom they'd recently stolen from Danny Meyer and his Eleven Madison Park restaurant, had decided to go, to the Union Square farmers' market.

"Sleep," he would whisper in her ear almost every morning, then kiss her lightly, his lips barely grazing her soft cheek.

"Mmmmm," she would breathe her contented response, because even though she had no intention of doing anything but sleep, this was their ritual. She needed to feel his presence in the morning. However brief that presence was. She didn't like to wake up to find him gone. It frightened her. Caroline did not like either empty beds or surprises.

But this morning his fingers didn't find the silk nightgown clinging to the small of her delicate back or her firm and familiar lightly tanned shoulder. His hand instead groped the cool texture of their antique off-white linen sheet and, for a moment, his eyes widened, disoriented, before he remembered.

Virginia.

They had decided to expand again, one more time, and she was down in Charlottesville, Virginia, preparing for the opening of the new restaurant. The new Jack's.

He lingered in bed for a few moments, smiling at the fact – amazed, really, after all these years – that he still missed her when they were separated. They spoke every day, of course. Three or four times a day, in fact. Even when it was just the minutest details of business, he still got a kick out of talking to her. Even when she was brusquely discussing square footage and the number of tables and the impossibility of finding a quality "anchor" to work the front of the restaurant, he was soothed by the cool huskiness of her voice and the affection that seemed linked to her crisp pronunciation and firm lilt.

Lately they'd been discussing a lot of minute details and Jack thought – realized with a start – that, for the first time in quite a long time, Caroline seemed genuinely happy again.

Maybe for the first time since Kid had disappeared.

It was a wound that, for both of them, had not quickly healed.

Jack saw the effect on Caroline for several years. No one else could possibly have detected it but he thought she seemed lonely and just slightly less joyful. He did not sense her full recovery until they decided to open up this new Jack's.

This was her baby. He'd wanted to throw himself full force into the planning and opening in Charlottesville and, at the beginning, he had. But it soon became clear that Caroline had developed a special attachment to this one. And that attachment had added an extra weight, an importance and sense of urgency she'd never shown before. She was becoming possessive about it; it had become personal with her.

"I watch you sometimes, in New York," she said. "The way you look around the restaurant. Not at the staff, not at the customers, at the place. The bar, the tables, the scuff marks on the floor. It's a living, breathing thing to you."

"It's a part of me," he said.

"Sometimes, my darling husband, I wish you looked at me the way you look at that goddamn swinging door you bought for the kitchen."

"It's an awfully beautiful door." He grinned, and she shook her head in mock dismay.

But then she took his hand, held it lightly, ran her fingers over the calluses on his right palm. "That's the way I feel down in Virginia," she told him, and he was surprised at the seriousness of her tone. "I have something down there that's beautiful. That's mine."

She never said that she wanted to go it alone, to have her head this time, but he knew her too well to miss the signals. And he understood, too, that it was a way for her to do what he'd done in London – to be alone for a while, to develop her own secrets. This restaurant was her idea to begin with. The town was only thirty miles or so from the family farm where she'd grown up; it was still in the family, although rarely used these days. Caroline's father was dead, nearly nine years now. Her mother couldn't bear to sell the property, but couldn't bring herself to live there, either. She basically stopped going to the farm right after the funeral. Too many memories, she said. It was where she'd been young; she didn't want it to see her sink into old age. So the farm had become a kind of elegant retreat, a stately – if ghostly – second home. Caroline's two sisters used it on the occasional weekend. The eldest, Llewellyn, had too many children with too many soccer matches and a husband with too many golf games to make it a permanent retreat. The other sister, Susanna Rae – never married, never particularly connected to the rest of the family, and always resentful, somehow, of Caroline's success and happiness – just seemed to stay away. So, for the most part, the wonderful estate was left to the care and goodwill of the Trottys, the black couple who'd worked for the family for too many years to count.

Even though she had run away as quickly as she'd been able, Caroline had always felt a special attachment to Virginia. It irked her somewhat that she was still bound to it, but she cared deeply for its beauty, its tie to the old South that was rapidly being eaten away by the encroaching anonymity of Starbucks coffee bars, Gap stores, and Blockbuster monstrosities. She loved the politeness of Virginia and its gentility. Above all, she loved the farm, where she could foxhunt and skeet-shoot and, on the spur of the moment, still pull on a pair of slick, shiny riding boots, leap onto her favorite mare, and go racing across the rolling hills.

They'd been there together many times during the course of their marriage, but Jack had firmly remained a city boy. He believed that if man were intended to get around on horseback, he would never have invented the BMW. He was always ecstatic to see the Manhattan skyline upon their return and it never failed to thrill him when he stepped back into their apartment and onto the terrace overlooking Central Park. Now, there was the perfect melding of man and nature. Good, competitive touch football games in the autumn followed by a cold beer made a hell of a lot more sense to him than spending hours in tight pants and silly little hard hats chasing some poor, terrified fox for miles and miles through the Virginia mud.

At the beginning, when she'd said she'd been thinking about Charlottesville as a location, he'd thought it was a strange choice. But she reminded him that fortunes had been made on such strange choices. No one thought Vegas was a food city before Puck and Emeril opened up there. No one thought rich New Yorkers would venture downtown to Union Square until Danny Meyer decided to open his Cafe there. And their research and marketing people assured him it was the right move. The D.C. intelligentsia and media folk had discovered the town over the past decade. They now had country retreats in the area. Even Hollywood had been coming in droves. A lot of the actors, producers, and directors who kept people's heads swiveling at the Jack's in L.A. and New York were now taking over the culture of the Virginia countryside. As the townspeople became more and more sophisticated, so too did the shops and the local theater. The only thing lagging behind was the food. All food explosions, he knew, followed two trends: coffee and bread. When serious coffee shops opened in a city, followed by upscale bakeries, the market was ready for top-of-the-line chefs. It happened in Seattle exactly that way. And Portland. San Francisco had not only followed that pattern, it had created it. And Charlottesville was filling up with wonderful quirky coffee bars and equally wonderful pastry and bread spots. Had been for a year now. The city was a bonanza waiting to happen for the right restaurant – the right name, the right combination of tastes, the right prices, and the right atmosphere – and Jack's was the perfect fit. Added to all of that, Charlottesville was also a huge tourist center, so close to Monticello, that testimony to the genius of man – or at least one man, Thomas Jefferson.

What pushed Jack into his final decision – although deep down, he'd known as soon as she suggested it that it was as good as done, as soon as he saw the pleasure in her eyes – was that he visited some of the Virginia vineyards and tasted some of the local wine. Not there yet, but getting there. The Alan Kinne Chardonnay was absolutely first-rate, satisfyingly oaky. The Dashiell Pinot Noir was fine, not far behind some of the midrange Washington and Oregon vineyards. And the Barboursville Cabernet was both delicious and a smooth fit with Jack's menu. In another few years, he could have a perfectly nice Virginia section on his wine list. He liked that idea. After all, it was Thomas Jefferson who'd introduced wine to the New World. The local reds would eventually go very nicely with some of the Southern adaptations of the restaurant's classic recipes.

So they agreed it was a go.

"Is it still fun for you?" she'd asked.

He'd thought a bit, surprised he had to think, then he nodded and said, "It's still fun with you."

She smiled – the answer had pleased and touched her – and she leaned over, kissed him on the top of the forehead, let her lips linger long enough that he could feel her breath rustling his hair.

They got a good deal on a location, in the middle of the brick-lined Downtown Mall, near enough to the glorious university so it felt as if they were hovering in Jefferson's overwhelming shadow, yet far enough away so as not to be lumped with the raggedy barbecue and burger joints or the more staid places with their fake Colonial decorations and wild melange of would-be sophisticated ingredients. Their staff came together easily, too, and would come easier in the future; Jack talked to the university and they agreed to start a small master's program in restaurant management. Not only would Jack and Caroline give several lectures a year, the students could apprentice in the new kitchen and on the floor. In the meantime, they brought several people up from Miami, including the manager, a wonderful woman named Bella who worked twenty-four hours a day. was scrupulously honest, and was in the midst of a not-very-friendly divorce, so that she was anxious to get out of town for a while. The sous chef in Chicago was definitely ready to take over his own place and staff, so when he willingly made the move, everything was set.

Now they were in the home stretch. One day to go before the opening.

Caroline had been down in Charlottesville quite a bit lately, two or three days a week for several months, making sure that this newest venture would run with the only two things that she demanded of everyone and everything around her: precision and elegance. He'd gone with her several times, of course, as often as he could, but there was much work to be done at home.

An overwhelming amount of work, really.

There was a lot more pressure being the president of the United States, Jack always said, but even the president didn't put in the kind of hours a topnotch restaurateur in New York did.

Now Jack glanced at the alarm clock: 4:45. He was fifteen minutes behind schedule.

I must be getting lazy, he thought. And then he went through, in his mind, what he had to do that day, and he laughed out loud. Lazy. Yeah, right.

With that, Jack started to swing his feet out of bed. But before they could touch the floor, he was startled to hear the phone ring. Then he was smiling, not so startled, as he picked up the receiver and, without asking who it was, said with mock sternness, "Why are you up so early?"

'An annoying habit," Caroline said on the other end.

"I've never been referred to quite that way," he told her, "but I guess it's better than nothing."

"You're running behind schedule."

"How do you know I'm not on my way out the door?"

"You sound too cozy. My guess is you're still in bed thinking about how much work you have to do."

"Lucky guess," he said.

Her response was a confident "Mmmmm."

Then she filled him in on what her day was going to be like, said that she was going back to sleep for a few hours, that she'd just felt like speaking to him before he headed out.

"You're talking so quietly," he said. "Everything okay?"

"Everything's perfect. It's just so quiet and peaceful here right now. It doesn't seem right to spoil it."

"You, my sweet, are incapable of spoiling anything."

"And you, my sweet, are going soft in the head. When are you coming down?"

"Tonight. I'll have an early dinner with Dom and then I think I'll drive. Probably leave around eight, get there around midnight. Should I come to the house or the restaurant?"

"Restaurant. I'll still be there. And you know you have a meeting with the Beauferme vineyard guy at five-thirty tonight," she said. "He wants to sell you a new Rhone."

"Oh, Christ. I forgot."

"Write it down."

"He's going to want me to drink with him and I'm going to have to argue with him-"

"Write it down, please."

"You know I don't taste wine that way. I don't drink with the salesmen. I drink it with dinner, the way you're supposed to drink it."

"Write it down and stop whining. Or wining…"

"Very funny."

"… as the case may be."

"Even funnier."

"Write it down." And during the pause, as he made a face at the phone and waved his hand in the air, pretending to write down the information, she said, "Jack, don't just make faces and humor me. Write it down."

"I'll never understand how you do that," he said. "But it kind of steams me."

"Oh," she said. "Will you bring the hunting rifle? I want to go shooting tomorrow."

"It's here?"

"In the foyer closet. I brought it back to be realigned."

"This ain't what I thought romance would be – 'Yes, darling, I'll bring your rifle.'"

"Don't forget," she said.

"I'm writing it down," he said, and again he moved his fingers in the air.

"Go to work."

"Sleep well," he told her and then they hung up.

The next few minutes were as always: a trip to the kitchen to put the coffee on, a quick shower, a few moments to throw-on a pair of jeans and a comfortable sweater-shirt, back to the kitchen to pour a large mug of coffee, then a few steps over to the enormous wraparound balcony to sit – not too close to the rail, never too close to the rail – and sip the hot liquid, looking out, from on high, at the lights of the city caught in the fading night and rising dawn.

Jack took a deep breath, a satisfied breath, then left the terrace and walked into the elevator that opened up straight into his apartment foyer and took him down to the garage in the basement of his building. He slid into the driver's seat of his four-door, gleaming black Beamer, maneuvered out of the tight parking space, drove up the steep incline that led to the middle of East Seventy-seventh Street, then headed south on Fifth Avenue.

Manhattan was still asleep and there was a faint, predawn chill to the air as Jack's day began. He loved that chill, never failed to appreciate it when it hit him each morn. It made him shiver and come alive and thrill to the edge of the city-It reminded him, every single day, how much he liked that life, despite the ghosts that still haunted its edges. The life that he and Caroline had fought for, and worked for, and carved out for each other.

The life that, in one more day, when the Virginia restaurant opened, would shatter and change forever.