“Morning.” Milena Migliari realizes she’s being anything but polite, but the fact is she feels like her private space is being invaded, in a moment when she’s already feeling unstable. She points to the basin with the persimmon pulp. “Sorry, but I’m working.”
“I see. I hope I’m not disturbing you.” Nick Cruickshank might be a little embarrassed, maybe not. Leather or fake-leather motorcycle jacket, green sweatshirt with an unintelligible design, blood-red foulard, faded black jeans, boots with buckles: it looks like an oft-used stage costume. “I wanted to tell you something.”
“What?” Milena Migliari’s tone goes curt in self-defense, her expression hard.
With her back to the refrigerator Guadalupe has an air of suffering about her; maybe she was hoping to see the rock star greeted with a festive atmosphere, offers of tastings, compliments on his songs, various kindnesses and attentions.
“Your gelato is incredibly good.” Nick Cruickshank’s expression is so serious that it’s impossible to know whether he’s telling the truth or joking.
“Thank you.” Milena Migliari smiles faintly, nods faintly; she tries not to commit herself with unnecessary facial expressions or gestures.
“Actually, it’s the best gelato I’ve ever tasted in my entire life.” Nick Cruickshank’s slightly hoarse tone has an extremely familiar emphasis, bearing the echo of innumerable songs and associated places, stories, moments.
“Well, I’m glad to hear it.” Milena Migliari realizes she’s smiling much more openly than she’d like to, but she can’t help it; the creases on her face melt away of their own accord. How do you remain indifferent after a comment like that, spoken with such apparent conviction?
Guadalupe, seeing her less hostile, reveals her extremely white teeth, fixes her hair under the hairnet, continues gazing adoringly at Nick Cruickshank.
“I’m not saying it in the intolerably empty way it’s usually used. It’s not a formula, I swear.” In his eyes is a light of unfiltered, disconcerting sincerity. He smells of patchouli, or marijuana, or both.
“No?” Milena Migliari forces herself back to a more controlled expression, but a current alters her heart rate ever so slightly. But why? What should she care about the opinion of someone whose sense of taste has almost surely been permanently altered by decades of who knows how many drugs? Someone who almost surely smoked a joint before tasting her gelato yesterday, and would have craved anything sweet? Is she too a victim of the impact of celebrity, just like Guadalupe?
Nick Cruickshank gestures: his movements are fluid, but with tiny pauses seemingly dictated by sudden doubts or inspirations, not out-and-out jerks but nearly. “And you’re brave.”
“Why?” Milena Migliari realizes she seems anxious for an answer; she wishes she could rewind a few seconds, limit herself to a shrug.
Nick Cruickshank places his forehead on his hand, like he’s pursuing sensations difficult to put into words. “You don’t try to make any flavor simpler or more reassuring than it is.”
“Really?” She makes another attempt to hide the emotions coursing through her, but she can’t.
Nick Cruickshank nods energetically. “You’re able to capture the essence of each flavor and all the marvelous and even imperfect sensations and memories and associations it brings to mind.”
Milena Migliari feels herself blush, though it’s the last thing in the world she’d want to do; and in the same moment she feels an uncontrollable desire to understand how someone like this could ever have come and said to her what he just said.
Guadalupe’s stare shifts from her to him, uncertain. Her English leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s not the words she’s struggling with: it’s the sense of their exchange.
Nick Cruickshank motions toward the lab and its equipment. “Any chance I could take a look?”
“Just don’t bring those shoes in here.” Milena Migliari speaks without thinking, maybe to claim jurisdiction over her territory, make sure she isn’t invaded any more than has already occurred.
“Oh, sorry.” Nick Cruickshank jumps back with great agility; only his head is still inside.
Milena Migliari feels a sort of tickle, similar to when she knows she’s made a better gelato than she was expecting, or she’s mastered a particular dance step. She motions to Guadalupe. “Would you give him a pair of overshoes?”
Guadalupe instantly bounds away to get the box from the closet, takes out two sterile transparent plastic overshoes, hands them to Nick Cruickshank.
He takes them, studies them closely as if they’re mysterious objects, puts them on with a skill belying his initial puzzlement. He takes two swishing steps into the lab, looks at his feet. “Wow.”
“The hairnet, too.” Milena Migliari maintains her firm approach.
Guadalupe rushes to get one of the nonwoven bouffant-style caps from the box, passes it to Nick Cruickshank.
He gathers his long partly black and partly gray hair, fits the hairnet over it, and makes a funny face.
“It’s because of health rules.” Milena Migliari realizes how absurd her requests might seem, but at this moment she feels the need for protective shields of any kind. She’s also annoyed at being observed by Guadalupe with her doll-like stare; she gestures for her to pick up the containers from Monsieur Deleuze.
It takes Guadalupe a couple of seconds to react; she stirs. “I’m going, I’m going.” Yet it takes her a very long time to leave the lab, and just as long to leave the shop, locking the glass door behind her.
Nick Cruickshank half bows, extends his hand. “Yesterday we didn’t even introduce ourselves. Nick.”
“Milena.” She reaches out from behind the work counter, shakes his hand.
“Nice name. Mi-le-na.” Nick Cruickshank walks around the lab, his clear overshoes and hairnet combining in surreal fashion with his rocker’s garb; he studies the glass refrigerators, the pasteurizer, the batch freezer, the maturation vats, the blast chiller. Very respectful, as if in the studio of a great artist.
“And which flavor did you like the most?” Milena Migliari doesn’t know why she asks him; soliciting judgments on the part of those tasting her gelato is something she never does, not ever. Early on she asked Viviane for her opinion, but that soon stopped, since her eyes didn’t exactly light up; all she said was “good” or “yes.”
Nick Cruickshank takes on a pained expression, like he’s being forced to make an excruciating choice.
“Just choose one.” Milena Migliari wonders why she’s being so insistent. Is it the way he’s looking at her, his unrestrained curiosity? But didn’t she decide four years ago that she had had enough of men’s looks, whatever their intentions? Is she simply excited to talk about gelato with someone capable of making meaningful comments and observations?
“The almond one was stellar.” Nick Cruickshank makes a wave-like gesture, raising his hand toward the ceiling. His movements have a theatrical quality, but strangely they don’t seem rehearsed; it’s as if they belong to another dimension, another era.
“And then?” She continues pressing him, doesn’t ease the tension; it’s absurd, sure, but she can’t help it.
“The pomegranate, my God.” Nick Cruickshank makes another gesture, semicircular. “The color, the intensity. Inspirational.”
“You knew it was pomegranate?” Milena Migliari can no longer conceal anything, not even her surprise.
Nick Cruickshank looks at her; he seems disconcerted. “How could I not have known? You were able to preserve so marvelously that sourish-sweet flavor, slightly tannic, alive. You didn’t trivialize it, didn’t soften it, you captured its true soul. You found the exact point of convergence between truth and pleasure.”
“Really?” Milena Migliari realizes she’s shaken, but then it is the first time she’s heard someone talk this way about her gelato. Sure, she has admirers, such as Katharina and Ditmer Bouwmeester, who produce high-quality artisanal chocolate near Utrecht and come by almost daily in July; or Liam Bradford,
whose fantastic review on his blog convinced the English lady to make her huge order; or Marianne O’Neil, who dedicated a poem to her Saint-Paul-en-Forêt wild peach. But no one has ever talked to her with the emotional urgency of this English rock star, equally passionate in gaze and voice, in his gestures, in his gait, in his breathing.
“Yes. Yes. Yes.” Nick Cruickshank bends forward at the waist and opens his arms, again like he’s on a small stage in the eighteenth century, but during a rehearsal, without a live audience. There are no visible traces of affectation or smugness in his style, only a distinct separation from the behaviors of normal life.
Milena Migliari doesn’t know what to say anymore; the words don’t come. She pours a certain amount of pulp into the blender, adds the creamy milk she buys unpasteurized from Didier Tornaud in Montauroux, who before making the midlife turn to dairy farming was a computer programmer in Bordeaux.
Nick Cruickshank comes closer to her, his overshoes rustling. “But I wanted to tell you something else.”
“What?” Now Milena Migliari feels a small interior wave of alarm: it’s rising, from her stomach toward her heart.
Nick Cruickshank makes as if to say something, but switches expressions, as if a different idea has occurred to him. He has this rough grace, which fits with his worn elegance, his ease of movement. “That flavor that tastes like date—”
“You didn’t recognize it!” Milena Migliari feels an unexplainable relief at him not having been able to identify the flavor; and a little disappointment, sure. But the relief prevails for some reason.
“Hey, who said I didn’t recognize it?” Nick Cruickshank has a sudden angry reaction, as if in response to the most unjust of accusations.
“The date one I make near Christmas.” She feels a bizarre urgency to strike down the impassioned definition of truth to which he seems committed; to file him away as superficial and presumptuous, convinced of being able to speak about the complexities of flavor without truly understanding them.
Nick Cruickshank looks at her with flaming eyes. “I know what it was. Jujube. Ziziphus jujube.”
The surprise is so great that it hits her like an electric shock, makes her legs wobble. Immediately after she feels like laughing; she laughs, convulsively.
Nick Cruickshank is puzzled for a moment, then he laughs as well, stomps on the floor with a plastic-wrapped boot heel.
They both laugh, for reasons that are far from clear. And they continue, seemingly unable to stop; it takes them several seconds to recover.
Milena Migliari tries to recover her attitude from when he came in, somewhere between diffidence and mild curiosity, but she can’t. “What do you know about jujubes?”
Nick Cruickshank shrugs, smiling. “Already got an idea about what I can or cannot know?”
“Of course not.” She shakes her head, though she actually did think she had a pretty good idea, and in that idea there wasn’t the slightest chance that he even knew jujubes existed.
Nick Cruickshank adjusts his hairnet: he pulls down on the elastic and lets go. “You know in the Odyssey, when Odysseus and his men disembark on the island of the Lotus Eaters and give in to the temptation to eat the magic fruit that makes them forget their wives, families, and even their nostalgia for home—”
“They were wild jujubes!” Milena Migliari feels her heart jump, the skin on her face prickle.
“Ziziphus lotus!” Nick Cruickshank is excited, too; he does a strange kind of jump.
“Yes!” Their voices overlap; they seem amazed in the identical way.
Milena Migliari moves slightly backward, shakes her head slowly. “Nobody knows jujubes. They’re a forgotten fruit, practically.”
“I have a tree of them in Sussex, really old.” Nick Cruickshank gestures, as if to indicate Sussex. “People once thought they brought their house good luck.”
“Yes!” Milena Migliari is speaking louder than she’d like, but it’s her entire perception of herself that’s confused.
Nick Cruickshank, for his part, continues to sustain an extremely focused stare. “It’s such a simple fruit, and strange. When they’re still light-colored and not completely ripe they taste like apples, right? They only take on their true flavor when they become dark and wrinkled.”
She nods, far too emphatically. “And they’re so sugary, but their leaves contain a substance that cancels out the perception of sweetness. Ziziphin, it’s called.”
He stares at her without saying anything. He seems bedazzled.
She wants to look away, but still feels that tingle in her face; to avoid looking stupid she tries for a look of impatience, though she’s none too sure how it comes off. “What was the other thing you wanted to say to me?”
He puts his hand over his eyes, as if to remember the question; he looks back at her. “Not say, ask.”
“What did you want to ask me?” Once more she feels the little wave of alarm rise within her.
“Why is the marvel imperfect?” He stares at her, waiting.
She asks herself whether she should look for a precise answer or weasel her way out with humor; in the end she speaks without thinking. “Because it doesn’t last.”
He continues gazing at her; it’s disconcerting how receptive his expression is, how open, how uncompromised by acquired knowledge. “It goes away. Along with the wonder, the curiosity, the meticulous care, the fun, the pleasure, the joy it contained.”
“Take a really good gelato.” She realizes her expression is similar to his, that she’s speaking in a similar tone, by a strange form of contagion. “One moment it’s so deliciously cold, with the most delightful balance of softness and compactness. You’re so happy to have it in your hands, to be able to enjoy it. And a moment later it’s finished, done. You can’t even get another one, because you know perfectly well that it wouldn’t be the same.”
He’s still gazing at her; then he smiles, only just. “You know you’re even more surprising than your gelato?”
“You’re pretty surprising yourself, when it comes right down to it.” Again she replies without thinking, in the uncontrolled spirit that’s surrounded them since they started talking. Right away she thinks that she never should have said something like that to him; but now she’s said it, it’s happened.
His gaze is so totally focused it almost hurts. “And the messages you write on those little pieces of paper tied with red string? I got one that was incredibly appropriate.”
“Really?” She finds it increasingly difficult to stay calm in this exchange: it’s like trying to stand still in the middle of a buffeting wind.
He comes closer to her; his movement seems unstoppable. “You just really have something special.”
She feels the alarm wave turn into fear that rises up to her lungs, takes her breath away.
He places his hands on her temples, comes forward; he kisses her on the forehead.
She registers the movement of air, the moistness of his lips on her skin, the bodily warmth, the smell of patchouli or marijuana or a combination of both, the rustling of plastic hairnets. She’s caught so much by surprise that as soon as he breaks away she feels like laughing again; she laughs, her face burning up, her heart beating erratically.
He laughs, too, only an inch or two away, with an expression that radiates the communicative joy of a child, of a savage.
She wavers between contrasting sensations and thoughts: she can’t figure out if this kiss was the most innocent thing in the world, or the most dangerous. Can she continue being natural with him? Should she distance herself as soon as possible?
Nick Cruickshank smiles, but at this point he too seems at least a little uncertain. He makes one of his gestures. “It’s just I tend to be physical with people I like.”
Milena Migliari thinks that she tends to be physical with people she likes, too: she’s always grabbing wrists, holding arms, patting shoulders, caressing heads, giving little shoves. More than once she’s argued about it with Viviane, who claims that ph
ysical contact should be reserved exclusively for intimate relationships, maybe because her own work consists of handling the bodies of strangers every day. But however you want to look at it, this was not about simply being physical: he took her and kissed her, even if on the forehead. Their bodies made contact with a certain degree of pressure, activated tactile sensations, though for no more than two or three seconds. How innocent can a gesture like that be from a man, particularly a man who has almost certainly been a serial seducer for decades?
Nick Cruickshank must perceive these thoughts, because he seems less and less comfortable. From his jeans he takes out a pocket watch attached to a band with a silver chain, looks at the watch as if he suddenly has somewhere to be. “I have to go.”
Milena Migliari is trying to understand what happened a moment ago and what is happening now, but she’s unable to formulate an answer.
Nick Cruickshank slices the air with his hand. “I’m going flying. With a glider.”
“Ah, sounds great.” Milena Migliari realizes how generic her reply sounds, but the fact is that her thoughts and sensations keep jumbling together without any semblance of order.
“It is.” Nick Cruickshank points to the persimmon pulp in the blender, waiting to be mixed with the creamy milk. “This gelato is going to be amazing, too, I’m sure.”
“I hope so.” Milena nods, not sure of anything.
There are noises coming from the shop door: it’s Guadalupe coming back in and giggling with someone. A moment later she comes into the lab, sets the large box of Styrofoam containers on the floor, directs her dark and bright eyes on Nick Cruickshank, even more excited than when she left. “Sorry, but there’s a friend of mine who’ll kill me if you don’t take a picture with her.”
Her friend Delphine, the clerk at the nearby bakery, peeks in: as soon as she sees Nick Cruickshank she starts making faces and squealing. “Mon Dieu, c’est lui! Je ne peux pas le croire, c’est genial!”
Imperfect Delight Page 9
