The Surf Guru

by Doug Dorst

  “I made a sale today,” she said. “A big one.” She told him about Dinaburg and the lavish wedding.

  “He’s from New York?” Roger said. “Charge him double. He won’t notice.”

  “I love it when you act ruthless,” Kacy said. Of course, if he actually were ruthless, he’d have made partner last year. Instead he’d been told he’d remain of counsel, which translated to Don’t get your hopes up. Since then the wrinkles around his eyes had deepened, and his cheeks had begun to sag into premature jowls. He had a disappointing tendency to let his setbacks eat him up. That was life, though: people disappoint you, so you’d better be able to take care of yourself.

  Kenny came into the room with Mooch padding along behind him. The dog turned in circles before choosing a place on the rug to lie down. Kenny did the same, and they curled up together. “I hit the ball today,” Kenny said.

  “I heard,” Kacy said. “Maybe you’ll be a pro-leaguer someday.”

  “Big-leaguer,” Roger said.

  “You know what I meant.”

  Kenny smiled and closed his eyes, feigning sleep. He hugged Mooch tightly to himself, and the dog didn’t resist.

  “Where’s April?” Roger asked.

  “Out with William,” she said.

  “Skillet?”

  “William. Call him William.”

  Watching Kenny, she remembered how different April had been, even at that age: shy, cautious to a fault, secretive, and prone to disappointments Kacy could see but not understand. Here was her brother, eleven years younger and completely unplanned, a high-spirited boy who loved his dog. She couldn’t help but look at him and think, Maybe this one will turn out normal.

  Kacy waited for Dinaburg’s call. She’d perfected a new red-raspberry glaze, and she was eager to pitch it to him. He phoned the following Thursday night, while Kacy was frosting a cake shaped like the state capitol building for a reception at the Austin Historical Society. She sat at her desk and flipped open her sketchbook. “I’ve come up with some ideas I think you’ll love,” she told him. “This could be my best work ever.”

  “We’ve decided to go with someone else,” Dinaburg said.

  Her stomach plunged. “Pardon?”

  “We’re getting a cake in Manhattan and flying it in.”

  “Why?” she managed to ask. “You said you loved mine.”

  “Mrs. Burroughs, or Kacy—may I call you Kacy?—I enjoyed meeting you, and I thought your cakes were fantastic, really first-rate stuff.”

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  “We found one that tastes better.”

  “The sample was frozen. I explained that. You said you wouldn’t hold it against me.” She felt herself gaining steam. She could push him, sell him. She could still win.

  “You know what I think the difference is?” he said dreamily, more to himself than to her. “The water. There’s something about New York City water. The way it makes things taste. It’s magic.”

  “The water?”

  “What I mean is, you’re at a disadvantage. Your water just doesn’t have that same pizzazz. I’ll tell you a story: a friend of my father’s was a bagel maker on the Lower East Side, and when he retired to Boca Raton, he opened a new shop, but he could never get them to taste—”

  “Cakes aren’t bagels. I don’t boil my cakes. Most don’t even have water in them.”

  “Trust me, it makes a difference. It’s like my wife says—”

  But Kacy had stopped listening. She murmured a good-bye, and she didn’t wait for him to offer one in return. She put the half-frosted capitol building into one of the refrigerators and turned out the lights. She slid open the doors to the family kitchen, closed them behind her, and dropped three ice cubes into an iced-tea glass, which she filled halfway with scotch. She swirled the glass, watching as the ice cracked and spun.

  In bed that night, Roger nudged her awake three or four times because she was grinding her teeth. The first time she apologized. The second time she said, “Deal with it.” The last time she stayed awake long enough to watch him leave their room with a pillow under his arm.

  On Monday morning, Kacy called the number on Dinaburg’s business card. The phone was answered by a secretary with a haughty tone, who pecked at Kacy with questions (Was she a client? No? Had she been referred to Mr. Dinaburg?) before putting her through.

  “I have an idea,” Kacy told him. “I could use your water. You could ship it to me.”

  “I appreciate the offer, Kacy,” he said. “I do. But it’s a done deal. Signatures have been signed. Cash has been paid. I’m sorry.”

  After hanging up, Kacy flung open her desk drawer and took out a pack of Winstons that Marisol had left the last time she’d cleaned. She shook out a cigarette and rolled it in her fingers. She’d quit smoking three years before, so her taste buds could be in top shape. She considered lighting up, could almost feel the smoke caressing her lungs, but she tucked the cigarette back into the pack. She wasn’t about to let a man like Dinaburg-as-in-dynamo drive her back to a habit she’d worked so hard to break.

  April appeared in the family kitchen and began pawing through the fridge. Her hair was limp and greasy, and a patch of scalp glared out at Kacy, pink and naked in a morning sunbeam. Kacy considered throwing the pack of cigarettes at her daughter. “Here,” she imagined saying, “try being self-destructive like a normal person.” But she didn’t throw the cigarettes, and she didn’t say anything—proof, maybe, that she was not the worst mother in the world, after all.

  A week later, Kacy called Dinaburg again. She reached the same secretary, who sniffed and put her on hold. After a few minutes with Neil Diamond crooning tinnily over the line, Dinaburg picked up. “I’m sorry to bother you, Joel,” Kacy said, “but could you tell me where you’re getting the cake? I need to know my competition.”

  “Sure,” he said, as if nothing were wrong, as if he’d never raised her hopes and then crapped all over them. “We’re getting it from Rona Silverman. You’ve heard of her, right? She’s famous. A New York institution.”

  “Rona Silverman,” Kacy repeated. The name was bitter on her tongue.

  She drove to the library and found a profile on Rona Silverman in a magazine called Bridal Elegance. The full-page photo showed a birdlike, maroon-haired old woman inspecting a cake through gold pince-nez, surrounded by three shiny-toothed young men in starched chef’s coats. The article gushed about Silverman’s attention to detail, claiming that she spent afternoons picking flowers and bringing them to her kitchens for her assistants to study and re-create in painstakingly detailed gum-paste miniatures, which were then put in tiny boxes and filed away in refrigerators. Kacy quietly tore the article out of the magazine, folded it, and tucked it in her purse. Gum-paste flowers! A cheap gimmick. Dinaburg ought to know better.

  On the way home, she stopped at a red light on Guadalupe, the sky blackening behind her as an early-summer storm rushed in toward downtown. She was watching a cluster of spike-haired kids slouch around a storefront when she saw April walking past them on the sidewalk. Yes, it was her daughter: the thick legs, the slump-shouldered trudge, a newish bald patch on the back of her head. And no hat. Good Lord. Kacy was about to honk the horn and call to her, but she stopped herself when Skillet—wearing a ridiculous pair of orange-plaid bell-bottoms—emerged from a café and flagged April down. They walked together, talking, and Skillet gave no sign that he noticed how mangy she looked. For once, Kacy found herself thankful that men refuse to see what they don’t want to see.

  The light turned green and Kacy drove, not wanting to interrupt them. After she’d gone a few blocks, though, thunder cracked and rain poured from the sky, beating insane drumrolls on the car and sheeting over the windshield. She turned off Guadalupe and doubled back to find her daughter, to get her home safe and dry. She made three circuits, rolling slowly along as she watched for April and Skillet through the passenger-side window, ignoring the honks behind her. But the two kids were gone, as if they�
��d melted away like spun sugar in the downpour.

  One night, Kacy dreamed about Dinaburg. They were together in her kitchen, cooking by candlelight. A bottle of champagne appeared in his hands, he popped it open, and they each drank a glass. They used the rest of the bottle to make a champagne reduction. Dinaburg held her by the hips as she stirred the hot mixture on the stove. Then, suddenly, she was supine on the butcher-block island in the middle of the kitchen, and he was frosting her naked body with champagne buttercream. He started at her feet and worked his way up, over her legs and hips and breasts, and then covered her entire face, and then all she could see was a smooth sheet of yellow-white. When she felt him bite off her big toe and understood that she was made of cake, she found she didn’t mind being eaten, not really. Not until she felt bites on both her feet at the same time and heard an old woman hack out a snicker. Then she knew Rona Silverman was there with him, in Kacy’s own kitchen, and they were laughing together as they ate her up. She awoke in the bed alone.

  Roger was in the kitchen, making coffee. The circles under his eyes were even darker than usual. “You’re not going to have any teeth left,” he told her. “You sounded like a goddamn blender last night.” He snapped the lid onto his plastic travel mug and walked out the door with his shirt poking through his open zipper. She let him go.

  Kacy returned home from a Texas Businesswomen’s Club luncheon hosted by the governor’s wife—for which she’d baked a raspberry gâteau with a sweet mascarpone icing that had seventy-five female executives moaning in caloric ecstasy (and made with a splash of good old Austin municipal water, thank you very much)—and she found a message on her business line from Dinaburg. “Calling to talk cake with you,” he said. He left his home number. She immediately memorized it.

  Her mind raced happily with the possible reasons his deal with Rona Silverman had fallen through. Had he come to his senses, remembered the sweet, smooth glide of the Four Chocolate Delight across his tongue? Or maybe Rona Silverman had died. Kacy imagined a photo of the old crone in her stupid pince-nez on the New York Times obituary page.

  “Hello, Joel,” she said when he picked up. “It’s Kacy.”

  “Such a quick response,” he said. “Ever the professional. How are you?”

  She told him about the governor’s mansion and about the gâteau. She told him how busy she’d been lately, spending ten hours a day in the kitchen just to fill orders and even more time experimenting with crème fraîche infusions and searching for even better-tasting butters and flours and vanillas and rums. She was, she said, doing the best work of her life. She stopped herself, realizing she should let him talk. She wanted to sound casual. She asked him how his azaleas were.

  “Doing fine,” he said. “The neighbor’s dog dropped dead. The guy thinks I poisoned it, which, for the record, I didn’t. But I called about business.”

  “I can do the wedding,” Kacy said. “I’ve kept the date open, just in case.”

  “No, no, no, Kacy. Like I told you, we’re already committed.”

  She was confused. She would have said something, but she was afraid she’d cry.

  “I’ve had my own kitchen designed,” he said. “I based it on yours. I’d like to fax you the plans. Could you take a look and tell me what you think?”

  “Sure,” she lied. “Happy to.”

  When the fax came in, Kacy studied the plans, making comments on the paper with a thick black felt-tip. She kept her notes brief. MAKE ISLAND WIDER. WHERE IS HOBART? LOCATION OF SINKS=DUMB. She faxed the plans back to him an hour later, then opened the best bottle of scotch in the house and toasted her brand-new vow never to call him again.

  Time passed. It got hotter, and people complained about the humidity. Lawns browned under the sun. The free-tailed bats gave birth to their pups under the Congress Bridge, and every evening hundreds of tourists watched them blacken the sky as they flew in search of food.

  Kenny went to day camp, which he loved, even though he was banned from arts and crafts after gleefully showering everyone in grout on Mosaic Ashtray Day. Roger lost a trial, got steamrolled in two settlement negotiations, and spent his nights buzzed on Lone Star, watching Astros games with Kenny snoozing on his lap. Kacy couldn’t tell if Roger looked content or inert, and she was irritated by the possibility that it could be both.

  April spent most of her time in her room or out with Skillet. She wore hats when she left the house, but Kacy doubted she kept them on. Her fears were confirmed one afternoon at the fitness club, when her friend Helen Swindon asked if April was ill; when Kacy said no, Helen tactlessly mentioned the name of a hairdresser who “worked miracles.” That night, Kacy slipped a note under April’s door: It’s OK if you don’t like any of your hats, but you need to wear one. Do you want people to laugh at you? Let me know what you like, and I’ll buy it. Please. I love you. After that, April started wearing a navy wool watch cap she had bought on her own. It was ugly, Kacy thought, completely unladylike and far too warm for a Texas summer, but April wore it happily, and it was better than no hat at all.

  For Kacy, it was a summer of work, work, work. Orders poured in for weddings and museum functions and book-release parties and golden anniversaries and retirement dinners. The local weekly honored Kacy’s Kitchen with a Best of Austin award, finally. She didn’t sleep much, and when she did, she usually woke up with a headache and a sore jaw. Even so, she worked right through the discomfort and fatigue, humming through her coffee-fueled days in high gear. She was never late with a job, never cut corners, made sure everything was perfect. It made all the difference between being the best and being nobody.

  Summer ended. April and Kenny went back to school. The nights turned chilly, and the bats flew back to their caves in Mexico. And still Dinaburg did not call.

  The day before the high school closed for Christmas break, Kacy got a call from Mr. Gomez, April’s social studies teacher. He was worried about April, he said, because when he’d looked in on the class during their final exam, he’d seen her pulling out her own hair.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “That doesn’t sound at all like April.”

  “I saw her. She stopped when she saw me looking.”

  “Well, better her own hair than someone else’s.”

  “I’m serious, Mrs. Burroughs. It could be a sign of some, ah, psychological issues. And, ah, if something’s wrong, I’d like to see her get, ah, help. She’s a special girl—”

  “We know that,” Kacy said.

  “—and I’m concerned for her.”

  “Your concern is appreciated, Mr. Gomez. I’ll look into it.”

  “Is there anything you can, ah, tell me? I mean, how are things at home? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  Kacy did mind. “Things at home,” she said, “are just fine, thank you.” Which they were, really. She and Roger were together, which was more than you could say for most families these days. And if Mr. Gomez was blaming her for working, he could go straight to hell, because the hair problem had started long before Kacy’s Kitchen opened for business.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” Kacy said, and she hung up. Her chest tightened, and her heart speed-thumped, and she was afraid she might throw up. It was the same feeling she’d had a few weeks before, when she’d opened the oven door and found her butter cake had fallen and it was her fault, she’d overbeaten the egg whites probably, and there was nothing she could do but watch the cake sink farther into itself, ruined.

  She took her glass of scotch into the bathroom, set it on the vanity, and locked the door behind her. She looked in the mirror and ran one hand over her jawline, seeing for the first time how her teeth grinding had bulked and hardened her jaw muscles. She caressed the nascent sags of skin under her eyes, trailed her nail along a crease across her forehead that she didn’t remember being so deep. She lifted a hand up to her perfectly bobbed chestnut hair, took hold of a single strand, and yanked. It stung, although not as much as she’d expec
ted. She held the hair up to the light. The root was white and oily-looking. Disgusting. She let go and watched the hair flutter into the sink. She plucked out another, and then another, and then a few more. Why on earth would April do this?

  The house was still. Cool, contracting metal ticked somewhere inside the ventilation system. And aside from that, nothing. Silence. As if there were nothing else in the world, nothing beyond her standing alone in this bathroom with a spent drink and a sink littered with her hair. With a blast of water, she rinsed the hair away.

  The front door banged open and Kenny unleashed his little-boy war whoop. She heard him chase Mooch down the hallway and up the stairs. She just couldn’t take it, all the thumping and screeching, not today. “Kenny!” she shouted at the ceiling. “Goddamnit to hell, not now!” Above her, the footfalls stopped dead.

  Kacy and Roger spent New Year’s Eve at the Johnson Library at a black-tie benefit for leukemia research. They both drank heavily, and Roger draped himself all over the chesty girl who was serving champagne. After the obviously repulsed girl pried him off, Kacy told him he disgusted her, and they’d stopped speaking. When Kacy awoke the next morning, she could taste cigarettes and alcohol in her mouth, but she felt surprisingly clearheaded. She was alone in the bed; Roger was sleeping it off elsewhere in the house.

  A new year. Clean slates, new hopes. She picked up the phone on her nightstand and called Dinaburg at home, humming as her fingers danced over the buttons.

  He answered. “Kacy,” he said. “Happy new year!”

  “Happy new year to you, too. How’s your kitchen?”

  “Great,” he said, “though I don’t get to use it as much as I’d like. It’s funny—I was just thinking that I’d like to talk shop with you. The other night I made a Prinz Tom torte that came out aces. My wife’s sick of hearing about it. She sure loved eating it, though.”