Light streams through the windows as the espresso machine roars; a gorgeous, rich scent fills the air; and witty conversation unspools over the porcelain cups.
That's the café dream. Mark and Nina are about to experience the reality. Determined to re-create the perfect Viennese coffeehouse, they descend on New York's gritty but hip Lower East Side to educate the locals on authentic café culture. Soon Mark and Nina are in a downward spiral that will strip them of money, friends, sex life, status, shelter, and, finally, sanity—and offer salvation through something they have never experienced: disaster.
Inspired by the author's own coffeehouse hell, Ground Up is a sharp and funny portrait of a New York constantly reinventing itself, and a surprisingly tender story of falling out of love and back in it again.
Light streams through the windows as the espresso machine roars; a gorgeous, rich scent fills the air; and witty conversation unspools over the porcelain cups.
That's the café dream. Mark and Nina are about to experience the reality. Determined to re-create the perfect Viennese coffeehouse, they descend on New York's gritty but hip Lower East Side to educate the locals on authentic café culture. Soon Mark and Nina are in a downward spiral that will strip them of money, friends, sex life, status, shelter, and, finally, sanity—and offer salvation through something they have never experienced: disaster.
Inspired by the author's own coffeehouse hell, Ground Up is a sharp and funny portrait of a New York constantly reinventing itself, and a surprisingly tender story of falling out of love and back in it again.
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Overview
Light streams through the windows as the espresso machine roars; a gorgeous, rich scent fills the air; and witty conversation unspools over the porcelain cups.
That's the café dream. Mark and Nina are about to experience the reality. Determined to re-create the perfect Viennese coffeehouse, they descend on New York's gritty but hip Lower East Side to educate the locals on authentic café culture. Soon Mark and Nina are in a downward spiral that will strip them of money, friends, sex life, status, shelter, and, finally, sanity—and offer salvation through something they have never experienced: disaster.
Inspired by the author's own coffeehouse hell, Ground Up is a sharp and funny portrait of a New York constantly reinventing itself, and a surprisingly tender story of falling out of love and back in it again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429939447 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/21/2009 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Michael Idov is a staff writer for New York magazine and a frequent contributor of Russian-language columns and criticism to major Moscow publications. Ground Up is his first novel.
Michael Idov is a staff writer for New York magazine and a frequent contributor of Russian-language columns and criticism to major Moscow publications. Ground Up is his first novel.
Read an Excerpt
Ground Up
By Michael Idov
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2009 Michael IdovAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3944-7
CHAPTER 1
NOVEMBER 2006-MARCH 2007
Oh, to Be an Ox
The evening was an unrelieved success. If it were a play, Nina would have received a standing ovation. In a way, a play it was: we had put on a small-scale pageant — a piece of dinner theater starring ourselves as a couple remarkably like ourselves, with a few crucial differences. Our characters lived in a cleaner apartment, dressed better at home, were more effusive about figure skating, took care to plate their food in eye-pleasing designs before scarfing it down, and were (let's be cruel but honest here, to set the tone for the rest of this slender tome) slightly more in love.
In fact, hours earlier Nina and I had had a fight. It flared up in the kitchen, with forty minutes to go until the announced feeding time of eight o'clock — a marker that, given Nina's distressingly punctual friends, begged to be taken for its face value. The fight thus couldn't even proceed along the normal arc wherein one of us would storm off to the corner diner and wait for the other's phone call over a cup of terrible coffee. Like most spousal dustups, it was an exercise in bilateral escalation: I had inquired if there was a reason behind Nina's marked lack of enthusiasm for the party, Nina said it was nothing, I told her not to hold it in because I could tell it was something, Nina asked me not to badger her, I took umbrage at the word badger, Nina took exception to the word umbrage, and it was off to the opera from there. By the time the duet crescendoed past yelling and into hissed logistics ("It's your place, you stay; I'll sleep in a motel, I don't care"), it was 7:40 and we both knew we had to fast-forward right to the reconciliation. Somehow, working in concert, we nailed the peacemaking note seconds before the doorbell rang.
Nina and I didn't entertain much. Our social circles formed a kind of Olympic logo: five, barely intersecting. My friends were fellow failed academics, fellow freelance journalists, and Vic. Nina's crowd was a combination of adoring male attorneys, whom she humored out of collegiate noblesse oblige, and conceptual artists, whom she had befriended during her tentative stabs at collection and whose ranks she was half secretly yearning to join. Hosting all these people in a two bedroom would be a task akin to the old Russian brainteaser about a man shipping intact a wolf, a goat, and a sack of cabbage across a river. (Answer: goat, return empty, wolf, return with goat, cabbage, return empty, goat.) Before we'd know it, academics would be sneering at attorneys steering clear of journalists envying artists pitying Vic. Everybody pitied Vic, a gigless thirty-two-year-old songwriter and, to increasing mutual inconvenience, my best friend since junior high.
Over the two years of cohabitation, and a year of marriage, Nina and I had successfully avoided combining our crowds via various means, including elopement. Tonight was to be a controlled experiment, a petri-dish mixer. Six guests, three from each side, no dates. Vic was a sad given. So was Nina's friend Lydia, an up-and-coming something-or-other who demanded to be called a "performalist" (at the time she was, I believe, working on a series of classically lit glamour shots taken after she roofied the models). Nina added a lawyer named Byron, of whom I knew only that he had unsuccessfully courted her back at NYU. I countered with Alex Blutz, my editor at Kirkus Reviews — the bulk buyer of my unbylined bitching. Nina answered with Frederick Fuchs, a Williamsburg gallery owner who, she figured, would find common language with Lydia. I delivered the coup de grace by inviting former Olympic skater Oksana Baiul, whom neither of us had ever seen in person but who, I felt, would bring a welcome destabilizing element to the emerging dialectic. Baiul's e-mail address had fallen into my hands when she was shopping around for a discount ghostwriter to pen a memoir. Ben Morse, one of the friendly failures, kicked the gig down to me after acquainting himself with the Baiul bio basics. "Dear Mark," read his accompanying note, "I'm not Russian enough for this."
Nina peered into the fisheyed spyhole, whispered "Blutz," and opened the door. In rolled Boss Blutz with a box of chocolate marshmallows and a date, damn it, a towering blond named Oliver. Alex was an interesting creature. He was gay and Jewish, not a remarkable combination by any means, but he took both identities to a plateau where each alone would have been anyone else's definitive trait. Meshed together, they created a behavioral hedge so thick it was impossible to see the person behind it. After three years of observing Blutz at work and play, I couldn't say with any certainty if he was kind, or scheming, or unhappy, or short-tempered, or even smart. He was all tics and shtick. This, of course, made him a great dinner guest.
"Hiya guys," sang Alex, and lunged across the doorstep to kiss Nina's hand. At twenty-nine, he was likely the last person of his generation to use "hiya." The date, one step behind, shyly began to unclick the many metal fasteners that held together his ski jacket. Oliver took up the entire antechamber. His sleeves hissed against the walls.
"Wanna know something amazing about Oliver?" asked Blutz.
"He doesn't eat food?" I said hopefully. "We were cooking for eight."
"Ah, bite your tongue. Come, come, come quick." Blutz grabbed Nina and me by the shirtsleeves and pulled us into the kitchen. Once there, however, he seemed to have forgotten the topic.
"That," he said, taking in the prep-area chaos and sniffing, "that is serious cooking." It was November, and we had concocted a fairly heavy menu: winesap-and-fennel salad, bagna cauda, and braised oxtail with garlic potato gratin. Blutz's nose led him toward the largest saucepan. He lifted the dewy lid and stared, for a pensive minute, at the oxtail darkly bubbling within.
"You were going to tell us about Oliver," said Nina.
"Oh, yeah," said Alex, closing the lid and switching to a piercing stage whisper. "Do you guys know who he is?"
"Judging from your tone, NSA or MI6."
"Ha, ha. He's a restaurant critic."
"And who does he write for?" asked Nina in a flat, due-diligence voice.
"The, uh, Michelin Guide," Blutz murmured, sensing danger. "The New York edition, of course. They're starting one this year. There's no way in hell I'd date a French guy. Sweaty anti-Semites, all of them."
It was a valiant attempt to change the topic, but it came too late. Upon hearing the words Michelin Guide, Nina had silently tipped the gratin into the dustbin. I caught her by the wrists just as she was reaching for the oxtail.
"That's it, we're ordering Domino's," she said. At that very moment, the doorbell rang again, lending reality the bouncy timing of a TV commercial. I glowered at Alex, who stood frozen in the kitchen doorway.
"I'll let them in," he said, and ran.
"Come on," I said to Nina softly. "First of all, the food's amazing. Personally, I'll be trash-diving for some gratin as soon as nobody's looking. Second, critics learn not to take the work home. I wouldn't approach, uh, I don't know, your aunt's scribblings in a birthday card with the same tool set that I would the new Franzen."
"I would," said Nina. "Otherwise it's an insult to my aunt. And to my cooking. Not to mention that it's a major fallacy to assume that book critics are anything like food critics. Food critics are power-mad, because they know they're the last ones that matter."
"Well, that's nice to hear."
Nina looked at me and growled like an angry cat, scrunching up her nose. At the same time, from the hallway came gasps, one-man applause, and a rush of fevered Blutz-talk followed by a volley of loud, snapping air kisses and throaty Slavic laughter. The party began.
Nina's crisis of confidence should have been over as soon as the first course hit the table. The acclaim was so intense that I was obliged to grab partial credit. After all, the bagna cauda (literally, hot bath) was the result of an ongoing stump-the-chef game between Nina and me: one of us brought in a ridiculous ingredient, the other found a reasonable use for it. This week was Nina's turn, so I lugged home an enormous rutabaga. Nina calmly cut it up and served it raw alongside a dark dipping pool of pulverized anchovies and oil.
"This sauce," said Alex, jabbing a rutabaga stick into the bagna, "I don't want to know what it's made of, but I hope to be embalmed in it when I die." He may have been ladling on the praise a little too thick after eyewitnessing the fin of the gratin, but the rest of the guests made a convincing chorus.
"This is the best bagna cauda I've had since Del Posto," said Oliver.
"Thanks," said Nina. "Strange to think of it as an Italian dish, right? It's so northern-feeling, practically Swedish."
"It's very sexual," said Lydia. "I love it." Bald, droopylidded Frederick yawned, stretched, and rested his arm on the back of her chair — like a thirteen-year-old at the movies, in the movies. Lawyer Byron was meanwhile forlornly gazing at Baiul, seated across the table. He appeared to be under the impression that Nina was setting him up with the skater. Vic's chair was empty, or, rather, occupied by Oliver.
"Sexual? Why?" asked Oksana Baiul, breaking the word into two syllables in that Russian-girl way, "Ooh-eye."
"Delectable," said Alex. "You're delectable."
Baiul, her hair in a bun so tight it doubled as an eyelift, gripped a half-drained dirty martini, her third. She had put me on martini detail the moment she walked in — no wine pairings for her. Her left hand, with fingers splayed out, sought and failed to find counterbalance in the air.
"What — what's delectable?" she said. "Marik, pochemu on nado mnoi smeyotsya?" My pallid second-generation copy of Russian was barely enough to reassure Oksana that Blutz wasn't mocking her.
"He means you're very inspiring." The gallant gallerist, riding to my aid. "I remember you at ... Lillehammer, was it? I immediately signed my Kanika up for some lessons. Kanika's from my first marriage," he quickly added to Lydia.
"That's so sweet," said Baiul, negotiating the martini. The liquid sloshed around the glass as if consciously evading the champion's lips. A giant olive slowly turned in its muddy depth. I glanced at Nina, hoping she was enjoying the absurdity of it all. She shifted and smiled as soon as she felt my stare, but by then I had already caught a glimpse of her empty, switched-off face.
"Of course, she was a little, what's the word, corpulent," continued Frederick into the vacuum. "But some of that Soviet-style discipline didn't hurt."
Baiul nodded assent, dipping her sharp nose into the glass, and put her free hand on the gallerist's thigh, earning a glare from Lydia.
"Oksana, poslushai," I said, showing off. She refocused her gaze, not without effort. "Hochesh' kakoi-nibud' drugoi drink?"
"Yes." Baiul thrust the glass toward me. "This one is being too difficult."
The gratin-bereaved oxtail arrived, to clamor. Lydia was the sole holdout. She had gone microbiotic-vegan days before, as part of an art project, no doubt. I decided not to inform her that she had just eaten a school of mashed anchovies, and took her oxtail back to the kitchen to slightly rearrange the presentation and serve it to Baiul. A schoolyard taunt was bouncing around my brainpan, lengthening as it cycled. Lydia-chlamydia, works in multimedia. If her eyes were beadier, she would work in video. On any other night, I'd whisper it into Nina's cool ear and watch stifled laughter paint it crimson, but tonight it didn't seem like a good idea. So I sat down and stuffed my mouth with braised gristle. It was great. Bombarding the meat with both cinnamon and cardamom was an especially nice touch.
"The cardamom is an especially nice touch," said Oliver, turning sharply to Nina. "You know, you should — and I'm so sorry if it sounds silly or cliché — you should give a thought to doing this on a grander scale."
"Doing what?" Nina looked confused.
"This." Oliver held up his thoroughly cleaned plate.
"I think he means competitive eating," I said.
"Oh, sod off," said Nina in a posh-Brit twitter that occasionally came over her.
"I don't mean this," said Oliver. "This." With that, he made a semicircle with his free hand, meant to include the whole room. "You conjure up such a welcoming atmosphere so effortlessly."
"Ollie," said Alex. "Stop patronizing the young lady."
"I'm not," said Oliver.
"You know," said Nina, "We've always dreamed of owning a small café." Have we?
"That's wonderful," said Oliver.
"Of course, it wouldn't be the real thing if it weren't a bit of a social center as well," Nina continued. "Readings, talks."
"Sounds fantastic," said Oliver. "Movie screenings."
"Those are illegal, believe it or not," said Nina. She really sounded like she'd given it a lot of thought. I admired this: they must offer some special gravitas workshop at law school. "Exhibits are okay."
"I'd totally hang my work there," said Lydia, perking up.
"Hell, I'd go to a café like that every day," said Frederick. "Especially if it had Wi-Fi."
"Me too," said Alex. "My grandpa's brother, in East Orange, used to own a coffee shop. The best rugelach in town, it really was."
"I once ate only arugula for a week," said Oksana Baiul, abruptly lifting her head. Alex and Oliver slowly cocked theirs. "Lost four pounds."
"Oh my God, I adore her," said Lydia.
Vic showed up, as was his won't, at the worst possible moment — that satisfied post-entrée lull when the conversation slows to a drip and the last thing anybody wants to do is get up and go through another round of introductions. Alex Blutz, astride a sofa cushion, was showing Nina some suspiciously pink-hued photos on his cell phone; Byron was pressing Oliver to reveal the "real" reservation-line number at Per Se; and Lydia was lazily sketching Baiul in a borrowed pad while Frederick traced his index finger down her vertebrae.
Vic surveyed the scene and immediately shrank. Sweatsoaked black curls clung to his sallow forehead. He set down his amp, a Fender Twin with a torn tweed grille that he had just lugged up four flights of brownstone stairs.
"Oh, shit," he said. "Mark, this is all so civilized, I don't know if I can — I'm sorry, man. I was supposed to be out by eight, you know? But this asshole was on after me, Adam Green, you heard of him? Moldy Peaches? He wouldn't fucking let me get my gear off the stage. So I had to sit there while he did his two fucking sets just to get my amp. Ridiculous. Right?"
"Come on," I said, coaxing him out of the foyer and into the living room.
"Wait, wait. There's another thing." He switched to his blink-and-stammer mode, which could only mean one thing.
"You need to borrow some money." In our days as roommates, tens and twenties zipped between me and Vic in both directions. Lately, that street had become a one-way.
"Yeah. Not a lot. A couple of hundred. I'm sick to death of Logic. I'm going back to four-track."
"Sure," I said. "Later, okay? Everyone, this is Vic Fioretti, my friend from the Brazil days and the sole savior of my sanity. He's a musician, as you may have deduced from the deathly pallor. Also, the fact that he's carrying an amp. Vic, meet everybody." There were no empty chairs, so I leveled an accusatory squint at Blutz and showed Vic to my seat.
"Hi, everybody," said Vic weakly, triggering a roll call. "Oh, wow. There's no way in hell I'm gonna remember all of that." He sat down and made himself uncomfortable, perching on the edge of the chair and twisting his torso to keep the amp in his line of sight.
"So what genre are you working in?" asked Lydia. "I've done some sound collages myself."
"It's, um, I guess people call it antifolk," said Vic.
"You mean misanthropic?" said Nina. That was her first and last joke of the evening, and it was dry enough for Vic to get spooked.
"No, no, oh God no, it's actually very positive," he protested.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ground Up by Michael Idov. Copyright © 2009 Michael Idov. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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