by Jessica Tom
“You deserve it for fucking the slut first.”
“Pascal . . .” I started. “Why did he say those things to you?”
He inhaled and approached me gently. “Tia, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken you there. I think you’re great but I don’t want to lie to you.”
I sat up and looked him in the eye. He looked away and sat down on a stool. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked.
The tears came out slowly at first. I thought about losing Pascal. The man I’d thought I loved was actually using me.
And apparently people in the restaurant industry knew about it. I wasn’t just a slut, but something even worse: an ignorant slut.
I would have wanted to cry alone, but what did it matter now if Pascal saw me? Everything I had, I put into those tears. They gushed out of me like a waterfall and there seemed to be no end.
I thought about my family and friends. I thought how I had wasted this semester and important relationships so I could—what? Be a pawn in Pascal’s game?
I thought of Elliott, poor Elliott. He deserved someone better than me. Of all the guys to see me kiss—this jerk? This scum who had taken advantage of me this whole time?
Pascal sat next to me and put his hand on my thigh. And even that killed because it still felt so good. Unbearably good, a touch that sizzles in your skin. Even when I knew it was a ploy, something else not anything like love.
“Christian, my friend at Tellicherry, tipped me off,” he said over my crying. “We worked together at Veilleurmet Kitchen. I lied to you when I sat down at your table—I didn’t have the night off. Tonight is the first night I’ve taken off since Bakushan opened. I couldn’t rest until that review came out. You must understand that, right?
“For a while, the restaurant industry lost track of him. He went off the radar. But then we heard from some people at Madison Park Tavern that he had gotten super thin. Christian spotted him at his place and told me. I dropped everything and went to study him. He was the one and only reason I’d ever leave the line. And that night, I saw you there with him.”
I hushed myself, hiccupping my sobs so I could hear him explain himself. He couldn’t even say his name. I wanted him to just say it. To admit that he’d been using me for Michael Saltz. Say it while I was sitting on this couch smelling of our sex.
Sit across from the girl at Tellicherry, get her number, get her in bed. I had made it too easy.
“There’d been buzzing among some chefs that Michael Saltz had taken up with a young woman, which came as a surprise because everyone knows he’s gay. But there was a picture taken at Panh Ho, and it’s been making the rounds among some of my chef friends. I recognized you from the other time you came to my restaurant.”
The click I’d heard as we left Panh Ho—I had been “made” from the very beginning. I had thought I was secret, special. I’d thought I could play NYC any way I wanted. But now I realized with gruesome clarity that the city had been playing me the whole time.
I wished more than anything that this was a bad dream. Maybe I’d had an allergic reaction at Room 113. Some high-proof lobster cocktail.
“Everything between us was a lie,” I whispered to myself. “So you never liked me? All those times we went out, and Whole Foods . . . and earlier tonight, when we . . . ?” I ran my hands over my filthy dress. I looked down at Pascal’s couch, the pillows we had thrown aside earlier in the evening, and the room started spinning.
“It’s not that simple,” he whispered back. “Not many people know, and even fewer believe you have any influence. Like, what do you do for him? Are you his secretary? His . . . cover of some sort?”
I smacked a pillow. Now he was calling me Michael Saltz’s secretary? He didn’t know anything. He didn’t know that everything the man wrote was mine. I was no secretary. I was the one in charge.
And yet. Now I was a puppet who finally saw her miserable strings.
I lost the will to sit up and slumped over on the couch. Pascal took me by the shoulders and sat me up again. “You’ve probably heard how Bakushan has been getting mixed reviews. I had to do something about it.”
“Oh, I don’t know. . . . You could have made better food!” I screamed. “Trained your staff better. Made sure there was no sand in your fucking dumplings! What did you think you’d get from me?”
Pascal looked at me like, Do you really want me to tell you? But he relented.
“Tia, it wasn’t just me. Didn’t you notice when the restaurants always sent you and Michael a good-looking male waiter? Couldn’t you tell when people played you? You knew it came with perks, right? You’ve always known that.”
“I didn’t do this for the perks!” I said in a teary, wet voice. “I did this . . . for you. I did it because Michael Saltz told me that I’d be able to work with Helen Lansky. Did you know that, too?”
He looked confused with a tinge of fear, like he wasn’t sure if I’d snap. I wasn’t sure, either. “Know . . . what?”
“About Helen. About why I did all of this!” I shrieked.
He backed away. “No, I didn’t know anything about Helen. I just knew that you were involved somehow with Michael.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t ask for that. I just wanted to work with Helen, and help her with her cookbook—”
“Wait, wait, a cookbook? That sort of recipe-testing drudgery? Tia . . .” He started laughing but then stopped himself. I realized then that even though he was just six years older, he was talking to me like a child. He saw me as a child, someone he could toy with.
“Maybe you thought you were doing this for Helen. But I’d venture to say you played along with Michael Saltz for other reasons.” He looked me up and down: my dress, my shoes, my hair. I closed my eyes and felt as if I had vanished, become a total fabrication made of nothing but falsehoods.
I picked up my coat and started to leave. But as much as I hated him, part of me just wanted to stop time, to keep this hurt where I could see it and understand it. I knew once I walked out that door, it’d get a lot worse. I’d see the world in its true colors.
“Tia, no. Don’t go,” Pascal said. “Can you blame me for seeing an opportunity and taking it?”
I just stood there, tired. Tired of staying up late, for him, so I could get to know him and be in his world. Tired of standing in these stupid high heels and this tight, ridiculous dress. I wanted to go back to the way things were.
“If you’re going to leave, I want to give you something.” He opened his fridge and pulled out a plastic quart-size container of something bright green.
“It’s my pea shoot puree. The same one encased in the foie gras.”
“So?”
“I know you loved it.” I had said as much in my review. “Here, you can have it.”
“Oh. Oh! Really?” I started to chuckle, then giggle, then laugh hysterically. “Is that, like, a doggie bag?” My words slurred but Pascal stayed alert, even concerned.
“I could give you the recipe. Every press outlet asks me for it, but I’ve never given it out. Here, I’ll print it out for you.” He walked to his laptop. “You can reprint it in the Times.”
“No!” I yelled. “No! No!” I smacked the container off the table and it blew open, spilling green ooze on his white rug. “You do not get to do that to me. You’ve fed me nothing but bullshit this whole time. How do even live with yourself?”
Pascal plopped onto the couch. “I’m sorry, Tia. This is the game. I didn’t make it up.” He opened his arms, inviting me to sit next to him. “Come on, please, don’t take it so hard.”
His voice sounded so sincere. It didn’t seem like he had wanted to harm me, but what did I know?
“We were just hanging out.”
I exhaled sharply. This had never been “just” anything—“just” grad school or “just” Helen Lansky. I hadn’t “just�
�� been hanging out with Pascal, and most of all, this hadn’t “just” been sex to me.
When I’d said I loved him, I thought it had come true. For me. For both of us. And now this loss had gutted me from the inside out.
“Here, take this.” He held out my crumpled La Perla underwear. So maybe I hadn’t lost them, maybe he’d taken them from me as a kind of bounty.
I looked around his apartment. The table where he’d first poured me wine and where I’d happily—naïvely—watched him read his review. The couch where he’d fucked me. When I had first arrived, I’d thought this empty apartment was everything, that he was an open book. But now I realized that I’d never even seen his bedroom. This whole time, we had only ever stayed in his living room.
I knew tomorrow I’d see the Bakushan review in print and the blogosphere would go crazy over it. There would be lots of naysayers, but for the most part, people would take my word as truth. I’d thought that feeling would never get old, the thrill of my words rippling across the world. But now the hype terrified me. I could only wait for its crushing force, like a tsunami arriving the day after an earthquake.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I left his apartment shattered and raw. A rancid feeling started in my mouth, then went down to my stomach and finally the space between my legs. The only upside was that I doubted my heart would survive. Good riddance. I couldn’t trust it anyway.
I WALKED BACK to the apartment. I had expected the sun to rise hours ago, but the night stretched like elastic, moving but not advancing. People smoked and talked on the sidewalk and cars passed in the street. I briefly thought I had been drugged because the night had become too surreal. But that was wishful thinking.
When I got to the apartment, I knocked on Melinda’s door. No one answered. I waited for a couple of minutes, or maybe more than that, I don’t know. I had never found our living room so mesmerizing.
Finally, the door opened.
“Tia? Tia, what’s wrong?” Melinda could barely open her eyes and she hugged her arms across her chest. “What’s going on? What time is it?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I had so much to say and yet to talk felt like an impossible challenge. I lifted my wrist to look at my watch, then remembered I wasn’t wearing one. I opened my clutch and looked for my phone, but couldn’t find it, even though the clutch was no bigger than two paperback books.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I squeezed out, and the tears started falling. “I don’t know what time it is.”
“Oh, Tia.” Melinda laughed. “That’s okay.”
“I’ve been such a bad friend.”
Melinda furrowed her brow. “It’s not a big deal. We’ve known each other for, like, two seconds. You don’t have to put so much pressure on yourself.”
My bawling only got louder. “Everything’s gone wrong.”
Melinda raised her hands. “No, Tia. Stop. Nothing is worth this much grief, okay? Whatever’s happened, it’ll pass. Let it go.” Another one of Melinda’s mantras, but now it didn’t help.
“I can’t. Things won’t get better on their own.”
We stayed quiet while she thought. If someone had blown on me, I would have crumbled.
“We all screw up, Tia. And we all get screwed, too. It’s the circle of life, and it sucks. But you’ll be back on the upswing soon enough. I know you will.”
That night, Melinda and I fell asleep on her air mattress.
We had brunch the next morning at a greasy spoon diner with old, cranky waitresses. My chair was still warm from the man who’d sat in it before, and I had to wipe his crumbs off the table. Melinda had a chocolate chip muffin and a side of bacon, and I had an omelet filled with onions, white mushrooms, and green peppers.
Every now and again a little sob would make its way into my breathing, but Melinda never once called attention to it. I smothered my omelet with ketchup and black pepper, took one bite, then decided I didn’t have an appetite. I didn’t feel like eating now. I didn’t feel like eating ever.
Chapter 28
FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS, MY BED BECAME MY BEST FRIEND. I didn’t go to my internship seminar. I planned to watch the livestreams of my classes, but instead fell into an agonized sleep with my jaw clenched and my chest heaving on cruise control. When I woke up, I never felt rested. I called in sick to Madison Park Tavern and I didn’t care about what Dean Chang would say about my scholarship. No one from the restaurant had contacted me, so I figured that they hadn’t seen my episode with Felix and Pascal. I didn’t answer Michael Saltz’s calls, but I read his emails. Surprisingly, he didn’t raise a fuss about my disappearance. I passed on a re-review of The Oak, helmed by a dangerously sexy, tattooed chef-wunderkind. I finally saw that sexy chefs were a dime a dozen. But that didn’t lessen the hurt.
An email from Carey finally got me out of my funk.
Hey, how’s it going? I heard you’ve been sick. I hope you feel better! I can’t wait for you to come back to the restaurant. Chef has some new dishes and they are to die for. (I know I’m prone to exaggeration, but this time I’m SERIOUS.)
See you soon? Before Thanksgiving for sure!
Carey
XX
I read that email ten times, hearing Carey’s voice in my head. Every time I read it, more of the restaurant fleshed out. The late-afternoon light shining through the dining room window. The rotation of beautiful flowers at the entrance. The elegant clockwork of the kitchen, the dining room, and even the coatroom. Plus, all my friends.
The next day, Saturday, I went back to work. I missed those guys, and more than anywhere else, the restaurant was my home.
“Tia!” Jake called to me.
I ran up to the dining room wearing my old Jil Sander. What can I say—it was a good suit and didn’t raise any eyebrows.
“Gary is in Miami this week, so I’d like you to help in the dining room tonight. Would that be okay with you?”
“Yes!” I said. “I’d love to.” The Pascal episode had weakened me a lot, but I felt myself reenergizing the second I walked into the restaurant. Here I’d be useful. The tasks were straightforward, elemental. Bring food, take away food, clean. I had never fully appreciated how pure this job was. People want to be nourished. To be welcomed. To be known. That’s what the best restaurants provided.
Jake grinned and handed me an apron. “Come on. You’re getting your hands dirty tonight.”
Carey wasn’t kidding about the revitalized menu. In his rush of post-review inventiveness, Chef Darling had introduced a dish of “crushed autumn duck” in which the waiter presented a clean, lovely plate of carved duck and vegetables. Then a backserver—me—used a medieval-looking instrument to crush the carcass so the remaining juices dripped down a spout onto the plate.
The machine was massive. Every time I crushed a new carcass, I had to degrease the nooks of the intricate carvings. The crank was so tall I had to stand up on my tippy-toes. I tried with all my might to avoid sticking out my tongue in intense concentration.
Halfway through the night, Angel pulled me aside. I was briefly scared that Carey had told him something. Or maybe word had gotten around about Pascal and Felix. But instead he took out a tasting portion of the duck I had been serving.
“You have to try this. This is one for the Madison Park Tavern Hall of Fame.”
It was incredible—especially the carcass drippings.
By the end of the night, my apron was soaked with duck fat. I loved every minute of it.
Carey ran up to me. “Hey, amazing work with the duck press! Do you want to go to Room 113?”
“I’d love to,” I said, “but I have some schoolwork I need to do.” I’d also vowed to never step foot in Room 113 ever again.
“Oh, yeah, I forget you’re still a grad school intern. I always think you’re one of us.”
&nbs
p; “Aw, Carey . . .” I said.
“Well, you should come out with me and Romina on Monday. It’s industry night at Kel Jabone.”
Industry night at a nightclub? That seemed like the last place I wanted to go—as bad as attending a Food Studies graduate reception as an anonymous restaurant critic.
“Come on,” she implored. “I know I was out of it at Room 113, but . . .” She shrugged and gave me a look that implied Chef Darling had rejuvenated more than just his menu.
I had holed myself up for days already and I could have done that indefinitely. Yet Carey’s kind eyes finally convinced me. I could be a pathetic moper, or I could go to Kel Jabone.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m in.”
Carey looked surprised that I had agreed. I had never taken her up on her invites, but she never gave up on me and I was glad to have someone like that.
I was about to leave when Jake met up with me in the entryway. “Thanks for pinch-hitting with the duck press. That’s difficult work, but you did a great job. Sorry about the grease.” He gave me a twenty-dollar bill.
“What’s this for?”
He looked down at my outfit and for a split second I thought I had worn the wrong thing and he suspected something. But then I saw that the duck fat had soaked through my apron, onto my skirt.
“Dry cleaning.” Jake smiled.
Chapter 29
MONDAY NIGHT, I WENT TO CAREY’S APARTMENT ON AVENUE C to pregame. Melinda even joined me. I’d never liked big contrived social events, but dancing I could do.
I still hadn’t responded to any of Michael Saltz’s emails, even though they bore down on me more with every passing second. A review had come out that I didn’t write, so I guessed Michael Saltz had summoned the bullshitting skills he’d used during the three months before he’d found me.
“Hey, guys! Thanks for coming,” Carey said as she laid out a plate of cheeses, charcuterie, crudités, and homemade cookies. Romina put Nina Simone on the record player and the wintry late November chill slid off us.
