The Groaning Board

lemon caper
sauce, to which Wetzon had been partial although she was not particularly fond
of veal. The scallops with shiitake mushrooms in a light cream sauce was too
rich; besides, veal scallops bored her. And then there was the roast.
    “A.T., sugar.” Smith moaned
dramatically, hand to brow. “Help me out here.”
    “Go with the roast,” A.T. said. “You
can’t go wrong.” Her hair was medium brown with sun streaks of blond. Long and
frizzy, it curled like an unruly hedge around her angular face. Her eyes were
set close together over an emphatic nose. When she smiled, her thin lips
revealed a not unattractive overbite. When she didn’t, the whole effect was
rodenty. Her face was devoid of makeup, perhaps the only holdover from her
undergraduate days at Bennington in the sixties. A.T. was a couple of inches
taller than Wetzon, but nowhere near Smith’s height. Thin and hyper, she wore
loosely pleated Armani trousers, a black tee shirt, and a casually cut jacket.
You couldn’t miss the look. Nor could you miss that it was spotless. Wetzon
wondered if A.T.’d ever actually stirred a pot or caught any remnant of food
under her dark dagger fingernails. It didn’t seem so. “You know,” A.T.
continued, “it’s so simple and classic. We did it for the Perelmans, and the
Weills were there and they called us...“
    She went on and on until Smith
finally said, “Well, I don’t know.” Smith stared hard at Wetzon, who shrugged.
    It appeared that A.T.’s approach to
sales was: talk your client to death. She didn’t seem able to steer the pitch
to a close. Ask for the fucking ticket already, Wetzon thought. A.T. would
never have made it on Wall Street.
    “We’ll give you tiny russet potatoes
in butter and chives and white asparagus. We just did—”
    “We’ll do a rice mold with a mix of
wild mushrooms.” Micklynn, terse and almost condescending, overrode her
partner. She was rinsing anchovy fillets under cold water, pressing them onto
paper towels. She did not look at A.T., and the stiff set of her shoulders
seemed ominous, relating, it appeared, to something Smith and Wetzon had
interrupted over two hours earlier.
    “Mick—” The skin around A.T.’s lips
crinkled white. She was furious.
    “Sounds good to me,” Wetzon said
quickly.
    A. T. Barron’s “Marvelous” came after
a hesitation that lasted less than a mini-second. The pause would probably have
gone by unnoticed, but Leslie Wetzon’s partnership with the formidable Xenia
Smith was not an easy one, and Wetzon was certainly more sensitive to the
nuances in similar relationships than most.
    Whatever was going on, Wetzon had
picked up the vibes the instant they’d entered the kitchen from the bustling
storefront room with its clusters of hanging garlic heads, drying herbs,
baskets of breads, and jars of richly colored preserves and sauces.
    The Groaning Board occupied the
ground floor of Micklynn Devora’s three-story brick carriage house. At Eighty-first Street just off Second Avenue, the building was on a block of similar houses
that in the early nineteenth century had garaged the trappings of the wealthy,
who usually lived a street below in magnificent town houses.
    The extra-wide doors had been
replaced with a picture window through which could be seen the warmly inviting
shop, its crowded marble countertops surrounded by old wooden cupboards. Two
normal-sized doors, one opening into the shop and the other leading to the
duplex above, flanked the window.
    The Groaning Board was “definitely
the sexiest food shop in New York,” according to Gael Greene in New York magazine. And the New York Times critic, who didn’t review food
shops as a rule, was rumored to have spent a tasty afternoon with Devora and
Barron. In a market survey the critic pronounced them, their kitchen, and what
it produced “seductive” and “delightful.”
    Through an arrangement with one of
their suppliers four years earlier, the two proprietors had begun to package,
manufacture, and sell their products in supermarkets and specialty shops under
The Groaning Board label to enormous success. Demand for their flavored
vinegars and olive oils, the raspberry confit, the lemon curd, muffins,
macaroons, and rugalach was almost overwhelming. Addicted displaced New
Yorkers, particularly those who had moved to LA, had their orders FedEx’d.
    Behind the center counter of the shop
was a doorway meant to be concealed by a drapery, but not hidden at all