Page 18 of Slanting Towards the Sea

SEVENTEEN

AFTER MY COFFEE DATE with Tara, I walk to a hip bistro in Split’s town center, where I’m supposed to meet the investor interested in discussing the purchase of Lovorun for lunch.

When I step inside from the cobbled street, I have to stand in the doorway for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dim light.

Inside, everything is velvety. The purple upholstery on the chairs, matching heavy drapes embroidered with gold framing the floor-to-ceiling windows, hardwood floors brushed into softness.

I try to calm the tremors in my fingers.

I’m not equipped for this. For all my supposed intelligence, I’m no match for the cunning and guile of a professional negotiator, someone who facilitates the buying and selling of hotels for a living.

Whatever tactical advantage I have, I’ll ruin it as soon as I open my mouth.

He’s easy to pick out among the few scattered patrons.

He occupies the corner table, one hand swirling a teaspoon in his coffee cup, the other on his laptop.

His face is mirthless, with clean-cut edges, exactly what I’d expect a businessman of his caliber to look like.

He can’t be more than a few years older than me, but he oozes the sort of authority that reminds me of Astrid and the fearful respect I had for her, how my stomach always clenched before our sessions, then almost imperceptibly unclenched after them, because I could never tell what she really thought of me.

When he looks my way, his crinkle-less eyes scrutinize me until I feel unstable on my feet despite wearing flats.

I expand my lungs to make room for the anxious feeling rising inside.

He gets up from his seat and I offer my hand for a shake. He takes it in an exacting grip. “Asier Henry,” he introduces himself.

I mutter my name, and he splays his hand toward the chair I’m supposed to take. “Please.”

The waiter hands us menus. The bistro is one of those places that have started popping up recently, a combination of hominess and haute cuisine.

Dalmatian comfort food, reimagined as high-end.

The menu is short, only a handful of offers for each course.

It takes thirty seconds to scan over it, but I take my time, grateful for the chance to gather my composure.

The investor orders brancin carpaccio with blackberry cream and capers, and I opt for mussel buzara deconstruction.

When the orders are placed and there’s wine on our table, the investor leans back in his chair, playing with the stem of his glass.

He has that scrutinizing look again. “I’m assuming Stipe told you that we—the fund I work for—are in the process of scouting a couple of hotels here in Dalmatia to add to our portfolio.

In fact, I just came from Vis island. Have you been there? ”

“I haven’t,” I say.

“A stunning place. We were looking into a property there. But there was a legal issue, a dispute over the ownership of the land. So our attorneys flagged it as a no.” There’s an accent to his English that I can’t place. Not quite American, but not British either.

“Courts here are very slow.” My own English comes out a bit rough around the r’s and the w’s, which is frustrating because it flows so seamlessly inside my head.

“So I’ve been told.”

“May I ask one thing, though?”

He nods.

“Why heritage hotels?” As poor as my understanding of the hotelier business is, I know it’s a numbers game. Mass consumption makes for the biggest profit. Four-star hotels with hundreds of rooms are the real cash-makers. Everything is more expensive to run on a smaller scale.

Asier gives a half smile. The skin on his cheeks is pockmarked, pitted with long-ago acne scars, and it makes him look even more severe.

“Well, the fund’s founder started this business with a heritage hotel in the south of Spain.

He built his whole empire on that premise.

And frankly, the pandemic has been favorable for our niche.

” He leans in, twirling the stem of his glass between his palms. “The market is changing. New generations—Millennials, Gen Zers—don’t want to lie idly on a beach somewhere, like their parents did.

No matter how beautiful the beach is. They want a full, immersive experience. ”

I bite the insides of my cheeks to prevent myself from smiling. Dad doesn’t know the first thing about Millennials, but he hit the nail on the head with his heritage hotel idea. “I see.”

The plates arrive. His food is assembled like a piece of art on a porcelain canvas.

A Miró painting, with clean edges, and vibrant colors rimmed by blackberry sauce.

My food is served in a bowl, with what looks like tomato soup in the center, lined with smoked mussels on one side, and some sort of tuile on the other.

“Bon appétit,” Asier says, seeming unimpressed.

Eating food like this, in places even more lavish and opulent, must be his norm.

He scoops some of the brancin on his fork, and I do the same with my shellfish.

When it hits my palate, the taste ricochets in my mouth.

The smoked mussel is tender, the tomato sauce creamy, infused with garlic, parsley, and wine.

I close my eyes, and for an instant, I’m transported to my mom’s kitchen, aged six, or eight, or ten, eating her scampi buzara on a Saturday, because that was the day she frequented the fish market. “Mmmm.”

I open my eyes, warmth creeping up my ears for letting out an audible moan.

Asier smiles, the first sign of humanity. “That good?”

“It’s like tasting my childhood,” I say.

“That,” he points a finger at my plate, “is what we’re going for with our hotel experience. Not eating to quell hunger, but for the sake of the experience itself.”

“Tell me about Lovorun,” he says.

I scrape the last bit of sauce from my bowl.

The balance between what I should reveal and what I should withhold is porous, but comes with a barbed edge.

I need to tread the line with caution. “It’s a remote little hamlet that my family renovated recently in order to turn it into a hotel,” I tell him, sticking to the facts.

“It lies on a seafront, the main building has ten rooms. Other cottages, still in need of some final touches, make for separate apartments, each suitable for a family of four or five. The estate is surrounded by a vibrant, verdant olive grove.” My throat expands delivering those last words. I’m going to miss those olives.

He nods, satisfied. The bistro has filled with more patrons, the clamor making the atmosphere less austere. “What about you, are you in the hotel business?” he asks, finishing his wine.

Ah. Masked in this inquiry is the mother of all questions.

What do you do for a living? The only question I hate more than When are you planning to have children?

Though, with being divorced and approaching forty, that one is becoming so infrequent I almost miss it.

Much as I hated being asked, at least it signaled that people still thought it could happen for me.

Asier’s eyes probe me. They are gray, the color of the abaxial side of an olive leaf. He has a calmness about him, which I’m sure brought him many a victory in contentious negotiations. And a poker face that could coax you into revealing your cards before it’s good for you.

Neither my job at the stationery shop nor my running Dad’s company sounds like an adequate response.

They’re what I do to make ends meet, or because there’s no one else to do it.

The only thing I do for living is pruning those olives with care, teasing life from their branches.

Using my otherwise useless knowledge of biology to make the best oil possible.

A negligible contribution to the world compared to what the Italian scientist does, but one I am proud of nonetheless.

I reach for a small bottle of olive oil among the condiments and twist off its cap. I swirl it under my nose, the way a wine connoisseur would her wine, and take a whiff, then swirl it again. I offer it to him. “What does it smell like?”

He thinks a moment, then says. “I don’t know—olive oil?”

“This oil was pressed from olives that had been stored in the seawater before milling. The bioactive phenolics are only partially preserved. It still has some health value, but not nearly as much as oil from freshly pressed fruits.”

Asier sniffs the oil again. “How can you tell?”

“Extra-virgin olive oil smells like cut grass, or olive leaves; or fruit. Sometimes like green almonds. It’s pungent and spicy. This one is mild, doesn’t sting the inside of your nose when you breathe it in.”

He looks around the bistro, as if wanting to file a complaint with the staff.

I twist the cap back on. “It’s a common practice here.

Back when there weren’t as many mills, people had to preserve the olives in seawater so that they wouldn’t go bad before it was their turn in the mill.

Now there are mills everywhere, but people still put their olives in seawater.

They’re accustomed to the milder taste.”

“But are they aware it’s of worse quality?”

“Some are. And some are convinced that the traditional way must be the best.” A lot could be said about the inability of people from these parts to latch onto progress, I want to add, but refrain.

“I see,” he says.

I sit back. “That’s what I make. Oil. The kind that’s the equivalent of your hotels,” I say. “Not a product, but an experience.”

There’s something liberating about saying this aloud to a man like him.

Someone who must have trodden the streets of every major city in the world, who’s reached a level of professional success I can only dream of.

It may be simple and lowly, and unrefined.

But so is sales. And isn’t that what he’s in?

Sales? A bit more sophisticated than the kind that happens in a stationery shop, but commerce nonetheless.