The Merge

Sloane Bex had ended three restaurants, and she did not lose sleep over a single one of them, because a critic who lost sleep over closures was a critic who would eventually start being kind, and kindness, in Sloane's professional opinion, was the slow death of a palate. She wrote under the name M. Sloane Bex was the name on her bills. M. was the name the city feared. M.'s column ran every Friday, eight hundred words, and restaurateurs had been known to recognise M.'s prose style in a single unsigned sentence and quietly comp the table before the main course, which never worked, because M. always noticed the comp, and always said so. So Sloane was not in a generous mood when the editor called her in to announce the merge. "The Gazette bought the Courier," the editor said. He was a tired man named Pratchett who managed his writers the way a man manages weather. "You know this. Everyone knows this. What you don't know yet is that two papers means two of everything, and the one thing a merged paper does not need is two restaurant critics." Sloane felt the floor of the conversation tilt. "You're not letting me go," she said. It was not a question, because the idea was structurally impossible. M. was the most-read thing the Gazette printed. M. was the reason people bought a Friday paper at all. "I'm not letting you go. God, no. I'd sooner let go of the building." Pratchett rubbed his eyes. "I'm also not letting the other one go, because the other one is, regrettably, also very good, and his readers are loyal, and a merged paper that fires a beloved critic looks like a merged paper that's bleeding. So." He spread his hands, the universal gesture of an editor about to ruin someone's month. "You're going to share the column. Both bylines. One desk. One expense account. You'll review together, file together, and the readers get the two best palates in the city in one place. The Courier's board is calling it a flagship. I'm calling it a headache. You may call it whatever gets you through the door on Monday." "The other critic," Sloane said, with a calm she did not feel. "From the Courier. What's his name." "Theo Vance." Sloane laughed. It was not a good laugh. Because she knew Theo Vance's work. Every serious critic in the city knew every other serious critic's work; it was a small, vicious profession. Theo Vance wrote the Courier's reviews under his own name, no pen name, no mystery, his actual face printed at the top of the column like a man who wanted to be recognised, and his reviews were — Sloane had words for what his reviews were. They were warm. They were generous. They forgave a kitchen its bad night. They found, in any restaurant, the thing it was trying to do, and praised the trying. Theo Vance had, as far as Sloane could establish, never once ended a restaurant, and he seemed to consider this a point of honour rather than the dereliction of duty it plainly was. "His palate," Sloane said, "is a hug. You're asking me to share a byline with a hug." "I'm asking you to share a byline with the only other person in this city who takes the work as seriously as you do. He just takes it seriously in a way you find personally offensive." Pratchett slid a folder across the desk. "He starts Monday. Your desk. The big one by the window — I've had the second chair brought up. Try, Sloane. I'm not asking you to like him. I'm asking you to not get either of you fired before Christmas." Sloane took the folder. She did not open it. She went home, and she poured a glass of something good, and she sat at her own kitchen table and was furious in the productive, particular way she was best at — and somewhere around the second glass, to take her mind off Monday, she opened her laptop and did the thing she did most evenings, the small private thing nobody at the paper knew about. She had a correspondent. Had done for two years. It had started on a food forum, an argument in a comment thread about whether a perfect dish could also be a boring one, and the argument had been so good — so sharp, so unwilling to let her win a point she hadn't earned — that she and the stranger had taken it to email, and the emails had simply never stopped. They wrote under handles. Hers was Vinaigrette. His was Mise. They had never met, never swapped real names, never wanted to; the whole point of Mise was that he was the one person in the world who knew Sloane's mind completely and her face not at all. There was a new email from Mise waiting. There usually was. Big change at work, it said. Being forced to share my column with another critic. Someone whose every published sentence makes me want to lie down in traffic. Two years you've listened to me complain about this person's reviews without knowing their name. Well — now I have to sit at their desk. Wish me restraint, Vinaigrette. I have so little of it and I'm going to need all of it Monday. Sloane read it twice. Then she read it a third time, very slowly, with a cold feeling arriving in her stomach that had nothing to do with the wine, and she opened the folder Pratchett had given her, the one she hadn't opened, and she looked at the photograph clipped to the inside of it — Theo Vance, the actual face, printed like a man who wanted to be recognised — and she sat very still in her kitchen for a long time. Two best palates in the city. One desk. And, it was now horribly clear, one inbox.