Flavian then produced his own magically refilled glass and set it on the table. Chellis just didn’t know what to say. To say she was shocked would be overstatement. But she was enough surprised to be speechless. She looked at his glass and then looked deeply into his eyes with intense curiosity, as if a new breed of cockatoo had suddenly shown up in his bird cage.
She took a sip, and within two seconds recognized it as Clos Du Bois, probably an ’09, maybe a ’12, but just the right vine for her.
“So, let me get this straight Flavian,” she said. “You’re going to bring Astrid to a nice place like this, and pull this trick with the wine flask in your coat? Is that what she can expect?”
Flavian looked at her as if she was asking a hod carrier how to build a pyramid. He blinked twice, shrugged, and took a small gulp of wine.
“Our special tonight,” they heard from the suddenly appearing waitress, “is free range organic turkey breast with sage dressing, artisan broccoli in a lemon-butter sauce and candied yams. Our soup is butternut squash and our fish is mahi-mahi with a hazelnut rind and that would come with baby Yukon gold potatoes and asparagus sauteed in a white wine reduction.”
Chellis opted for the soup and the house salad that was famous even in Moscow for its secret vinaigrette atop a variety of greens, goat cheese and sun-dried cranberries. Flavian went for the turkey, which for him had comfort food implications that were irresistible.
But he’d not had anything for lunch, being so nervous about the whole thing, and the alcohol from the wine was arriving more quickly than he could have expected. Considering his very tightly-wound underlying condition, the wine was changing his brain chemistry the way a Bourbon Street jazz band would change a funeral service.
The observable effect, for Chellis, is that Flavian was now more like his old self, before the Astrid mortification phase hit him. He was chatty, and funny, offering a surprising ribald theory about how the Pinot Noir grapes may have been crushed and speculating that the artisan broccoli would be served in a beret.
But, of course, the whole point of the evening was to address the mortification with a more lasting therapeutic experience. Not that Chellis would have ruled out drugs as a last resort, but it frustrated her to think that Gardner, in trying to surprise her by setting Flavian up with the flask of her favorite wine, had screwed up the experiment.
But she couldn’t stay mad. Flavian was now doing impersonations of the voices on the rental car navigation system and she was having to use her napkin to tamp down the stuffed mushrooms that wanted to return to her appetizer plate.
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