Wagyu

When I was interviewing for my first job at an advertising agency, my future boss, George, told me that he wanted to hire someone with integrity. Three months later, when a group of clients were on the fence about signing a contract with us, George and I decided that we would bribe them. I’d always thought I’d be good at going to a park, handing someone a briefcase, and leaving without saying a word, but what TV doesn’t teach you is what to do when the person you’ve handed the briefcase to is not the client representative, but just some guy hanging out at a park in a trench coat, so rather than take that risk and pay them off in cash, George and I took the clients out to dinner.

I didn’t know any of the clients, but I did talk with one of them over email to ask what restaurant I should book. Her name was Roxy, and from her email I gleaned that she was fluent in both English and emoji.

“Happy Monday!” her email said. “I spoke with the rest of the team, and I think we’re in a steakhouse-y mood this week. Smiley face emoji!”

I assumed that Roxy would be just as cheerful in-person, but when I sat down across from her at the restaurant, I noticed a sour look on her face. Her demeanor was that of a punctured ball, and she was losing air and patience by the minute. “Oh,” she said when I asked her about her job, “you wouldn’t want to hear about it anyway.”

Sitting next to me on either side were the other two clients, Carl and Daisy. Daisy was around my age, fresh out of college and working her first job as a secretary like me. She was quiet, mostly keeping to herself, and her brown, wavy hair rested on her shoulders like a cocker spaniel’s ears. Carl, on the other hand, was the oldest of the bunch, late thirties with a pencil moustache and about two months away from realizing he’d made a terrible mistake.

“I just bought a house in Long Island,” he told us. “We move in in two months.”

“No way,” George said. “I live in Long Island.”

The two tried figuring out who had the longer commute to work, and over the next few minutes their conversation devolved into a dick-measuring contest. The appetizers arrived not long after, and the clients took out their phones to take pictures of the food. The room was dimly lit, so they kept the flash on.

“The camera always eats first,” Carl said.

A round of tequila shots followed, and then George and Carl were yammering about which steakhouse in New York was the best, which they agreed wasn’t this one. Roxy, meanwhile, turned out to be a food critic for the New York Times. The thick-cut bacon was too greasy, the baby-gem Caesar salad too bland, and the west coast raw oysters too…raw. Red meat grossed her out, so she ordered for herself a sirloin steak and asked it be cooked well done.

“Oh, and a diet Coke?” she added. Two dollars more and she could have made it a meal with fries and a toy.

For the rest of us, George ordered wagyu, a Japanese beef that he insisted was an American meat with a made-up foreign name, like Haagen-Dasz or Doritos. He explained to us that these special cows get massages and drink wine every day to keep their muscles relaxed and tender.

“Now those guys have it good,” George said. “As far as cows go, they’re living the dream,” which is a lot like saying as far as prisons go, Alcatraz gets the best weather.

We began to eat the wagyu, and after ordering another round of drinks, George and Carl decided it was finally time to get serious.

“What do you think happens to your soul when you die?” Carl asked. “Like what’s the most compelling answer out there for you?”

George answered saying he had been non-religious for most of his life until a priest told him something that changed his perspective entirely.

“And what was that?” Carl asked.

George paused to look around, as though what he was about to share had been bought off the black market. “The priest said, ‘Life is like a used car,’ and I’ve been a Christian ever since.”

A muffled crash came from upstairs, and I assumed St. Peter was having a stroke. I wondered whether it was too late to fake an emergency phone call and leave, and then I wondered what I’d say were I to go through with such a plan. Every excuse I came up with involved my mother getting into a horrible and outrageous accident.

“Thirty feet down a manhole?” my tablemates would ask as I rushed to put my coat on. “And then the horse bit her what off?”

There wasn’t anything wrong with what George and Carl had to say, but were they to try having their conversation with my family at the dinner table, they’d be laughed out of the room and told to save the bullshit for dessert. The two men’s animated discussion was a performative act; a method to stomach what was plainly a relationship built on money. Here at this business dinner, George and I were paying the clients to like us, and they in-turn were letting us wine them and dine them like the cows now plated before us.

Dessert was served, and Roxy announced that her 18-layer chocolate cake was good, but she’d counted, and it wasn’t 18 layers. The plates were cleared, the check paid, and marveling at the receipt, George told everyone to guess how much the dinner had cost. The number started at $500, then rose to a thousand, and then two thousand, and soon it was too high for me to even hear, and as the table broke into a raucous applause, I leaned back and listened to the sound of my silence being bought.