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coming down the pike,” she said. “One of the top marketing people got hired away by MirrorMirror. If the job gets posted, I think we should talk California again.”
    I let out an audible sigh. We had talked California before; it was our greatest sticking point. To Dhara, the Midwest, though she’d been born and raised here, had always seemed a foreign place, a flat horizon with no reward at the end of it, and California the land of gold and poppies and a great bridge over the bay. To me, the Midwest was home, a parchment on which I might write stories; to leave would mean abandoning my material, letting go of my claim. “We can talk about it later. The timing isn’t great, with my father’s situation,” I said, and now shuddered at the thought of inviting him to move in: Vritra, the god of drought and destruction, Collyer Brothers Professor of Chaos, coming to Chicago to share our eight-hundred-square-foot apartment, where we didn’t have space for our own worldly goods. Our bedroom closet was so cram-jammed that I had to wrest my shirts off the rack; our storage cage, on the twentieth floor, was stacked higher than an ossuary; and most of our wedding gifts still sat in a vacant room in my in-laws’ motel. What had I got us into? How could I tell Dhara?
    The most expensive restaurant in America had no sign out front. You could walk right past the gray brick townhouse and not know this was Alchemia, the five-star, Gourmet number one, James Beard Award–winning toughest reservation in town. Ever the long-term planner, Dhara had called a year ago, the day after our wedding, to get us a table. She’d been looking forward to this night ever since, reading blogs, checking online forums, downloading Alchemia’s changing menu of magical molecular gastronomy.
    A lone doorman greeted us with a cunning smile and swiftly admitted us, as if into a Cold War hideout. Inside, we were alone in a long purgatorial hallway, lit orange and seeming to narrow to nothing but a wall. But as we neared the end of the corridor an automated door whispered open and a glimmering host and hostess appeared. “Mr. Clary. Ms. Patel,” the host said, “happy anniversary,” and took our coats. The hostess led us upstairs and seated us by a corner window in the white-walled, vase-and-stem-lined dining room. In the center of the table she placed two fresh sprigs of rosemary anchored and held aloft by metal cylinders. When she walked away, the scent of rosemary stirred in her wake.
    Dhara asked if I wanted to go for the twelve-course tasting menu or the twenty-five-course tour. “They’re small bites,” she said, “like tapas for the gods.” I knew this was my first test of the night, so I said the tour, of course, ignoring the price—$250—and when she asked about the wine pairing, which was an additional $250, I held my tongue. All told: a thousand dollars for both of us. “Tour with pairing,” I said to our waiter, and snapped the menu closed.
    A problem I had with upscale restaurants was that they made me feel like I was at church, on punishment, or a fraud. My suit felt wrinkled and secondhand. I got fidgety, like a boy, and quaffed the wine I was supposed to save for the first two courses. At the table next to us, four businessmen worried aloud about future junkets in the coming age of government oversight. They swallowed their food without pausing to admire how each piece was a mini postmodern sculpture.
    Dhara and I were not the kind of couple who sat in silence across a table. Since I had her old job and we worked in the same office, with the same collection of wannabe-hipster engineers, we could have talked shop all night if we’d wanted to. But I found myself at a loss for words. And she seemed edgy as well. About California, no doubt. How I’d dismissed that conversation, kicked it down the road.
    â€œAren’t you forgetting