I’m listening but I’m also working. The thing with Melissa is that I fully and completely and 100 percent understand and comprehend what she is saying—to its fullest meaning—within the first fifteen seconds. And unfailingly by the end of the third sentence. I’m not saying I’m that smart. I’m saying I get her that well. We Two Are One.
But her purpose is not to merely convey to me the story or the information until I have comprehended. Her purpose is to take a long luxurious bath in my ear and to disgorge the entire unedited contents of her brain—with sidebars, cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and repetitions—so that she can examine those contents. She is processing. She long ago abandoned those one-line phone messages and three-sentence notes when we were roommates. When she senses, somehow, that she is running out of time or your patience, she’ll say, okay, a long story short—and then continue on her winding, circuitous, often amusing way for another several detailed chapters. And I understand every single word of it, every stop for gas, every detour. I think exactly what she thinks. She says, finally: “I am not going to even try to cook for Soltner.” And I get it. Entirely.
It would be pitiful to try and impress this man with some elaborate meal. I get it. I agree, “un-hunh” into the phone while holding the cord up over my head so the busser can duck under it with a full tub of glasses—like a game of London Bridge.
“Yeah, don’t go overboard,” I say. “Just a pot roast or soup or something.”
“Right?” she says. “I mean I think I’m just gonna make omelettes and a salad.”
“WHAT?!!” I involuntarily shriek. Everybody on the line looks over and pauses.
“Yeah, Gabs, omelettes and a salad or something. Ultra simple.”
Now I’m raising my voice, incredulous, my setup and my last-minute prep thoroughly halted as I give her my full attention.
“Melissa, you cannot cook omelettes for Soltner. Are you crazy?!”
Andre Soltner is currently a dean at the French Culinary Institute. He’s the guy who judges a cook by his omelette, his roast chicken, his vinaigrette. After that, whatever you want to flambé or shove in a ring mold is up to you, but if you can’t make a French-style, perfectly yellow omelette, you can’t graduate, or something absurd like that. I have heard the legendary tale—exaggerrated I am sure—that the final exam, pass or fail—your six hundred hours of cooking school down the fucking drain if you fail—is to make the perfect ovoid omelette with tiny curds so finely pored that it resembles a baby’s butt.
“Hmmm,” she said, kind of deflated. “I’m going to have to think about this. Later ’Gator.”
“Ciao Mein,” I said. “Good luck.”
On several different occasions, Melissa and I have tried to piece together where everybody was that summer after the divorce, when Simon and I were left alone. She claims to have been home that summer, but she was definitely not. We both think maybe Jeffrey was around, too, having surely returned from Africa by then to discover an already split-up home that had been intact when he’d left. But we can’t place him, and I can verify with total certainty that he was not, that summer at least, in the house. We have had long incredulous conversations with each other about our often starkly different experiences of the very same family. She wants me to be sure to know that our father once took his clean white pocket kerchief and folded it successively over and over onto itself, with the precision of an architect, until it had the sharpest angle imaginable and he kneeled down and dabbed a gnat that had slammed into the inner corner of her eye.
There are only five years between us, but five years is enough time for the geography and topography of a family to change dramatically, for ravines to form, trees to upend, streams to run dry. By the time she is calling me at the restaurant in the hectic minutes before dinner service, excitedly hissing in my ear about this famous French chef on his way over the very next day for lunch, she’s the only member of my family that I still know the entire, detailed landscape of.
Soltner arrived and Melissa, in spite of my warnings, said she wanted to prepare him an omelette, if he wouldn’t mind, and she was wondering if he wouldn’t mind showing her how he makes them. She enlisted the instructor in him. And he was glad to oblige, but asked her to prepare hers first. So she made her omelette the way we do at home, perfectly delicious, dragging the beaten egg in from noon, three, six, and nine o’clock in the pan until all the loose egg had run into the pan and set. She let the omelette get a touch of golden color on the exterior. Then she filled the omelette, turned it in half making a half moon, slid it onto a plate, and kept it warm in the oven.
Andre Soltner picked up one egg and cracked it on the edge of the counter. With two hands, he split the egg open and deposited its contents into a bowl. With each thumb, he reached into each half of the shell and scraped out the remaining albumen that tends to cling to the membrane until he had thoroughly cleaned out the egg.
He said, “When I was growing up, this is how my mother got thirteen eggs out of the dozen.” Then he put the shells in the trash.
I acutely remember how badly I wanted to be able to crack and split eggs with one hand when I was coming up. I had seen guys cracking eggs by the crate into large white buckets over a china cap using one hand to do the whole process and then flinging the shell into a trash bin set farther and farther away—which was part of the fun in an otherwise tedious task. That’s how I’d seen it at Mother’s and that’s how Greg and I did it at Jake’s, cranking it out to Guns N’ Roses. I have become totally competent at this one-handed maneuver, regularly wiping down the streak of watery white that ends up on the fridge door or stove lip with every toss into a remote garbage can. But this story stopped me in my hot speedy tracks. I felt this strange mixture of admiration and contrition. I had lately been fascinated by the deconstructed, dehydrated eggs Benedict at the newest temple of molecular gastronomy. And had even been thinking that I wanted to learn how to copy the sous-vide seventeen-hour egg at the trendiest restaurant downtown where you will never get a reservation. But this story of this seventy-five-year-old man, cracking an egg slowly and accurately with his two hands and using his thumbs to get the thirteenth egg as his mother had done during wartime food shortages, put me right back on track.
He beat the eggs and poured them into the prepared pan and then he agitated the eggs with a fork, constantly, over low heat until the curd was soft and tiny, and when the egg had adequately set, he tapped the pan, with gusto, on the burner to take out any last tiny gasp of air and then—did he flip it in the air, did he set it on fire, did he get out the chemical compounds to make omelette “eggs”? He did not. He grasped the pan in his left hand and tilted it slightly toward the back of the stove. With his right hand, he tapped his left wrist, like a junky searching for a good vein, over and over, causing a little vibration in the pan that pushed the omelette incrementally with every tap up against the lip and then, when cresting, back in over itself until the whole omelette was folded over into thirds, a perfect football shape, absolutely no color on it, just perfectly cooked yellow omelette, and he put the little torpedo onto the plate for lunch. The omelette. As prepared by Soltner with just two hands, a fork, and a sauté pan.
12
I MET MY HUSBAND WHEN HE STARTED COMING TO PRUNE TO EAT. HE was on his way to a popular crappy Italian spot around the corner where, even though it was a nothing place with cheap German “Parmesan” standing in for the real thing and commercial balsamic vinegar in industrial-sized plastic jugs, you had to wait an hour on the sidewalk for a table, naturally.
Michele does everything, no matter what, in Italian. He picked our pediatrician because she’s Italian, he buys only Italian wine, he roots for Italian soccer teams, reads Italian newspapers, and though he has been in this country for more than twenty years, he has determinedly maintained an Italian accent so thick and a syntax so poor that his English is very often incomprehensible. This is not a provincialism, by any stretch, but rather a point of view.
But he decided to
forgo the hour-long wait on the sidewalk at the Italian joint and came to check us out. We had been open less than a year. He looked in and saw all women in the kitchen and mostly women on the floor and, like an Italian, slowed down a minute and took a closer look in through the doors. And then he came in. And then he met and made friends with the hostess and the hostess’s girlfriend and then he made friends with my sous chef and her girlfriend, and then he fell for one of our waitresses and then another of our waitresses, and by then he kind of got swept along by the current, possibly unaware of the lesbian drift of things—or simply undetterred—until he washed up on the shores of the kitchen and landed his sights on me.
I was standing at the pass, a little too thin, drawn and pale, cooking the lamb sausages wrapped in caul fat, the rye cracker omelette with fried duck skin, the rabbit legs in vinegar sauce that he was falling truly in love with when he finally sat down to eat at Prune. And he became less casually intrigued and more seriously innamorata and came back again, quickly, and then again, and pretty soon he was actually “in love.” But with what? With whom? With the place or the person behind the place? I think he was like the teenage girl who falls in love with the drummer in the band—she loves the music, the smoke, the light show, the emotion conjured in her own self, and there at the back of the stage, keeping the whole thing running is the drummer. She decides it’s him she wants.
I can understand him. Prune was a juicy place in the beginning. The women were dolls and the wine was freely poured and an Icelandic accountant, let alone an Italian bachelor like Michele, would’ve been hard-pressed to feel nothing or indifference when eating here. Plus, the food reminded him of his mother’s in a way. He was always exclaiming, “Theees eees exactly like my motherrrr used to make.”
But I do not believe he was aiming for me at all. He was just pointing his boat toward the twinkling lights on shore. Prune was a place with so much warmth and insouciant female energy that I believe we seduced more than impressed our earliest fans. But eventually, inevitably, he bumped up against me and for some outrageous audacious reason considering we had barely met—maybe it was the monkfish liver, the trippa Milanese, the marrow bones—he lightly scratched me from the shoulder to the wrist, one long, slow, light scratch with his fingernail the long distance of the tender back part of my arm, and I, electrified, turned around to finally take a look at this guy whom I had barely registered until now. It was ballsy and accurate, that scratch; two qualities I find particularly appealing.
The timing of it was rather appealing as well as I was skidding on the rocks with my gold golden girlfriend of goldness. You can’t script these things better than they happen in real life. A year of restaurant intensity had done its destructive best on the relationship finally, as I was chronically scurrying home in the middle of service to strip us of a handful of desperately needed forks or a chair, but otherwise gone from eight in the morning until finally hauling my ass home at two the following morning. There was not a single day off, not a single one, and not a single thought not thought about the restaurant in all that time. My girlfriend, still an adamant Michigander almost three years into our city life, personally offended by overt professionalism as if it were showoff-y and self-referential to display some, herself fundamentally and philosophically opposed to vulgar Ambition, found herself widowed by mine, abruptly. Her resentments were palpable and insurmountable.
How utterly perfect, then, to meet up with an equally ambitious, hardworking heterosexual male for whom I would probably never feel much more than warm affection. How unthreatening. That scratch was not his opening gesture. He had started earlier by bringing me food at the restaurant that he himself had made. I was very moved by this, even though the food was mostly unspectacular and lived for long periods decaying back in some unreachable corner of the lowboy until it became so furry it had to be tossed. There was an olive bread that was flat and hard and overworked. It tasted of nothing but the effort. Then he brought incredibly beautiful ravioli that he had made—so thin you could see through them like collected stamps in a cellophane sleeve. One of the completely unanticipated parts of owning a restaurant that I had failed to envision was that people would be so kind to us. I had no idea how many people I would meet, how many friendships I would forge, how much warm feeling and gesture would be passed back and forth between customer and us. I thought we would just be taking care of and serving unknown people. But customers bring us wine, send us postcards, have their birthdays and anniversaries here, and Michele started as one of them, proferring homemade ravioli for our family meal. I have never gotten over it. Maybe some guys open restaurants because they think they’re going to meet chicks or drink for free or make a lot of money, which are pleasures not to be underestimated, but there is a subtler gratification in that lovely exchange with the customers that is worth all of the profound anguish and worry and hours clocked in.
But I had a girlfriend at the time and not only did I still love her and live with her; if you turned around from scratching my arm in that most suggestive and sexually charged way, you would see her there behind the bar, polishing some glasses and mixing the cocktails while we stand over here in my open kitchen doing that utterly forbidden thing: shitting where we eat. The warm exchange between customer and restaurateur is not supposed to go quite that far. In the script, though, you and your girlfriend are already on the rocks and filled with resentments and anger and every conversation turns into a fight and you’ve stopped having sex a long time ago and then of course, like clockwork, someone appears who finds you attractive, who is not yet angry with you, who wants to win your affection. And then it’s just a hastening to the inevitable ending.
Michele was that part of the script. Right on time, page 53.
But lesbians are incredible. We take a year to break up when a week would do, and then we like to remain roommates while still toughing it out at couples counseling. It’s so sensible. Improbably, my affair with the Italian, an intensely overachieving M.D./Ph.D., actually breathed new stamina and energy into my relationship with the bartender because I was now getting some relief, some kindness, and some sexual attention outside of the relationship, which took the heat off the expectation at home. We went off-script and we didn’t break up. That Michele was male was even better, as far as I was concerned, because I thought I knew certainly it would go absolutely nowhere. I didn’t even feel that I needed to disclose this little facet of my life to my girlfriend because, as far as my heart was concerned, there was nothing going on.
As the restaurant moved out of its first year and into its second, and gained its footing, I finally allowed myself a regular day or part of a day off. Michele came to pick me up.
It was a rather chilly afternoon in late fall but he came on the motorcycle anyway.
“Aren’t we going to freeze?” I asked. And he pulled out of his messenger bag an extra set of gloves and handed them to me. He drove expertly through Brooklyn and then Queens—boroughs I had rarely even been to in my twenty years in New York—and from the back of the bike I got a tour of the parts of my own city that I never knew. When we saw mansions lining a broad boulevard I yelled through my helmet, tapping him on the shoulder, “Where are we?!”
“Woodside,” he easily replied without even needing to think about it.
Soon we started to smell the ocean and we passed through a park land or state preserve, with tall golden grasses lit up by the afternoon sun. We drove through what felt and looked like a village, like an actual village in a small town in a small rural community—and yet, if I looked behind me, I could still see the city. Little Cape Cod–style cottages sat next to each other in a row and almost all had American flags and also Italian flags here and there, proudly displayed in their front yards.
“Now where the hell are we?”
“Broad Channel.”
A few minutes later we were at the empty beach, wide and rough and exciting in the off-season, and we were almost the only ones there. Two men fished together close to
the surf and seemed not to catch anything. We sat and stared out at the ocean, not really speaking, which is effortless at a dramatic ocean in the off-season. He unpacked from his bag several sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil that he had made himself. He had used prosciutto and arugula and good bread from Le Pain Quotidien. And then he had dressed the sandwiches with olive oil from his own orchards in Puglia.
“This is your own olive oil?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean, your own olive oil?”
“Eh”—he shrugged—“it’s mine. We grow it.”
I sat eating my sandwich, deep in my coat and sweater, thinking the oil tasted very good, buttery and acidic at the same time, but wishing there was more meat and maybe a smear of cool waxy butter also. I love the perfection of three fats together—butter, olive oil, and the white fat from prosciutto or lardo.
“These could use one more slice of meat, maybe.”
He was silent.
“And maybe a little sweet butter.”
And he has made them that way ever since.
That winter, Michele took me to Ducasse for my birthday when it was $1,500 just to walk in the door or something crazy like that. I half panicked in the vestibule.
“This is where you’re taking me?” I halted in the lobby, as we entered the hotel and I realized what restaurant was there. “I am so not adequately dressed for this place!”
But he pushed me ahead and the beautiful young woman at the door, more expensively dressed than me, warmly said “good evening” and put me right into one of those chairs at one of those tables with the heavy silverware as if I were welcome. We ate pigeon and an ouef en cocotte and I got a slight chill—from the actual temperature, not the exalted level of cooking—the pigeon was unfortunately so rare that its juices hadn’t even begun to run—and when I asked if I could have my coat back from coat check, they brought over instead a wooden box of pashmina shawls in a dozen colors from which I could pick the one most matching my outfit. I never would have gone there on my own and at that time, with my $423.00 weekly paycheck, I never could have afforded it, but I am still, to this day, more impressed by the sandwiches.
Blood, Bones & Butter Page 17
