The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

But the most notable difference between Brooklyn and the Villages is the noise. At least half of the residents travel by golf cart—everywhere: the grocery, the doctor, friends’ houses. They drive beside cars at nearly the same speed on protected and tunneled side roads, buzzing around like ants up and down the water-lined pavement.

  I’d been given one week to assimilate to my surroundings before reporting to work, spent five of those days settling into my one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the Villages—a palm-tree-shaded flat with white walls and low popcorn ceilings and shades that are always drawn, a double bed, a ten-year-old television, a small stereo, a dresser, and a dinette table sized for two next to a kitchen sized for a ten-year-old—and perusing the surrounding areas in my late-model Hyundai Accent (arguably dig number three) and blowing my first subsistence check on replacement clothes and glasses.

  Every day is the same: awake at seven; whip up coffee, peppers, and eggs and toast; read as many papers as I can stand online (Justice, regarding my assistance: “We’re still currently accumulating evidence.” Regarding Melody: chirping crickets); go for a long run through the neighborhood, shower, watch the news on TV and see the feds fumble about the recent string of Mafia-related killings. This gets me through midday, right around the time I start to daydream about Melody, which eventually becomes fantasy. I have every page of my journals memorized like scripture, realizing now the things I should have done and said, the minor modifications to that script that might’ve made things perfect, might’ve made it impossible for us to separate. Now that she’s been set free, I am unburdened, liberated to wonder what might’ve happened if we took the risk, if we’d run off together, if every night she slept in my arms. I have a lot more time on my hands—like, all of it—and the only thing on my mind is Melody. Do I think of Pop and Peter and my brothers? Am I concerned for my family? Of course I am, the way Angelenos fear Los Angeles may tip into the Pacific; it’ll probably happen eventually, but not today. My concern and interest in Melody, though, is as much a part of me as my Italianness. For twenty years, I masked my distant love for her with the disguise of trying to right the wrongs. Now that she is free and safe, there is nothing left but the love, nothing but the desire.

  I count the hours until I start the job acquired on my behalf, desperate for something to take my mind in another direction, any direction. On day eight, I meet my new boss, a guy named Chuck Mullen, a second-generation Irishman who runs an Italian restaurant at the center of one of the so-called villages, the sole proprietor of a thirty-two-table establishment named (heaven help me) Mulleno’s. The eatery is nestled between a Ralph Lauren store and a boutique wine shop in a town center that could easily be confused for historic Charleston or Savannah, right down to the preserved live oaks covered in wisps of Spanish moss, each building a perfect replica of architecture and style but with all the conveniences of a modern complex. The restaurant looks better than it smells—the polar opposite of the place in midtown Baltimore where Melody and I shared our first meal—with high-backed booths and serene lighting and crimson walls. I walk in at the peak of lunch hour and less than a third of the tables are taken.

  Chuck, a tall and slender guy in his late fifties with wild gray hair, meets me at the front and offers a firm handshake, looks over the top of his glasses at me.

  “Michael?” he asks, the first to call me this name.

  And away we go: “Please, call me Mike.”

  He introduces me to the hostess on duty and the kitchen staff, offers an overview of the menu and their approach to cuisine.

  Which is: none.

  Chuck bought the restaurant as an investment when he retired from NASA, then subsequently lost all of his management and kitchen staff, ended up having to run the place himself and learn about the restaurant industry in the process. And by the end of our first conversation, when he smiles and offers his hand again, seems thrilled at the idea of having someone in the kitchen who understands its components no matter what a hack I may turn out to be, I know I should probably contact Justice and let them know this place will never survive—I’ll be needing another job within six months.

  My first full day on the job, I enter the kitchen from the rear of the restaurant, am tasked with chopping tomatoes and onions. I grab the only eight-inch chef’s knife from a canister across from the prep area, twist it in the light and look for a sign of hope—a marking that reads Henckels, Wüsthof, even Victorinox—but find nothing more than made in China. I place it atop a pink hothouse tomato and attempt to slice through it, but the knife is so worn I nearly crush the tomato; juice spurts out where the stem once resided. I look out the corner of my eye, see the guy who would be loosely defined as the sous-chef close his eyes as if to say, “That’s only the beginning.” I grip the knife firmly and attempt to whet it, have never found a hunk of steel so incapable of possessing sharpness. Trying again with a yellow onion, I see its skin bend up at the sides as I press down. It’d be easier to rip the thing apart with my hands.

  As I walk toward the stove in search of a better knife, I see another cook begin making sauce—what might act as their base for anything red—and I watch in horror as a gallon-size can of orange liquid is poured into a large stockpot.

  I scowl and look at the cook. “What is that, V8?”

  He frowns back, says through a thick accent, “Might as well be.”

  After many hours of slicing (bending) and mincing (crushing) and preassembling salads (don’t ask), I take my break, fold my apron, and head to the front door. Chuck spots me on my way out and says, “Smoke break?”

  I pause and smile. “Nah, I don’t smoke.” I leave off the piece from my true past: anymore.

  “Where you heading?”

  “Just walking down to TooJay’s to grab a quick bite.”

  He turns and looks at the kitchen, then back at me. “But… you can eat here for free.”

  I bite my cheek, say gently, “I know.” I turn and slip out the door.

  Work has really helped. Instead of thinking about Melody all of the time, I am cutting onions and peppers and tomatoes and cutlets and thinking about Melody all of the time. Some days I wonder where she is, others are consumed with wondering if she’s settled her life, if she’s found a lover, if she’s finally happy.

  As I live my existence here, away from my friends and family, away from everything I know, I rest—can fall into the deepest sleep—knowing she has finally been rescued. I hope and pray she is living the life meant for her.

  A little over one month later, just after I finish cleaning up my station for the day, I walk past Chuck in his office, a fist to his mouth and staring off into the distance. He says, “’Night, Mike,” without any attempt at making eye contact.

  “See ya, boss.”

  I have one foot out the back door when he says, “What am I doing?” One more step and I would have made it out, could’ve reasonably pretended I never heard him. I sigh and turn around and walk back in, make my way to his office but do not respond. “What am I doing,” he says, then adds, “wrong?”

  I bite my lip and scratch my chin as I shrug. He finally twists and looks my way, stares at me for a minute before he fakes a smile and says, “Well… never mind. Good night.”

  As he spins around in his chair and looms over order sheets, I sigh and run my fingers through my hair, tip up my glasses so I can rub my eyes. I step out of his office and say, “Come here.”

  He turns and looks at me, eventually gets up. When we get to the kitchen, I turn on the lights, open the chiller, and pull out a five-pound package of links.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  He looks at it, then me, then directs his answer to the meat. “It’s sausage.”

  I hold it closer to his face. “It’s turkey sausage. With cherries and nuts.”

  He half shrugs, offers a response that sounds like a question: “It’s gourmet.”

  “It’s crap. This is Thanksgiving dinner in a synthetic casing. If sausage isn’t full of pig,
I don’t understand what it is. The flavor everyone wants comes from the fat. Pig fat.”

  I toss the sausage back in the chiller, pull out a plastic container of Caesar dressing purchased premade from a distant distributor and hold it up. “No.”

  “Why?”

  I point to the listing of ingredients. “This is mayonnaise flavored with chemicals. And really, Caesar without anchovies?”

  “People hate anchovies. People always say no anchovies.”

  “People don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “I hate anchovies.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You like Worcestershire sauce?” Chuck blinks and nods. “Read what’s in it. That flavor you like so much? Anchovies. Trust me: Crush the anchovies and mix them into a fresh dressing and people will be talking about your salads all the way to Panama City. And please—you gotta explain to the guys who work in this kitchen the difference between Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano-Reggiano.” Blank stare. “Which is…” Nothing. “Pecora is Italian for sheep, hence Pecorino Romano is made from sheep’s milk; the Parmigian’ from a cow. Not even close to the same, and absolutely not interchangeable.”

  I walk to the storage area, wave for him to follow. I flip on the light and hold up one of the twenty 128-ounce cans of that V 8-like fluid. “This,” I say. “I’m speechless.”

  “Sauce?”

  “Because the people in Bayonne who canned it tell you it is? Do me a favor: The distributor who sold you this can also sell you the same gallon-size cans of crushed tomatoes. Get those instead and we can cook the tomatoes down into a nice marinara. Or better yet, buy me a twenty-dollar tomato press and I’ll make fresh sauce for you every morning out of those hothouse jobs you’re tossing in the trash every day. I’ll even do it on my own time.” I’ve got plenty of it to spare now—what do I care? “And please, no more bottled lemon juice. Isn’t this the friggin’ citrus capital of the world? I mean, you’ve got six-hundred-dollar pendant lights hanging over every table but you can’t swing a three-dollar bag of lemons?”

  Chuck rolls a shoulder like he’s loosening a kink. “You know a lot about Italian food for a guy with an English heritage.”

  I flinch a little. Ah, right: Martin.

  He sighs and rubs his temples. “How do I know what people like? No one ever says anything. I go to the tables and ask how they like their meals, but they just nod and smile, just pay their checks and leave.”

  “They’re telling you every day, Chuck. Take an hour each night and stand at the door to the kitchen and watch what remains on the plates when the busboys bring ’em back in. Your customers are gonna eat what tastes good.” He nods a little. “Tell you what, you let me make my Caesar, anchovies and all, and we’ll serve it to one half of the room, while the other half gets the chemical mayonnaise, and let’s watch what makes its way back into the kitchen.” As we walk out and turn the lights back off, I add, “And if I win, you gotta agree to buy some new knives.”

  The playful competition between me and Chuck, between my homemade offerings and his cost-cutting factory-formulated food products, has served as a wonderful distraction from my obsession with Melody. Every night and every morning remain the same, but when I arrive at work, if for just an hour, I focus my attention on something else, indulge in the camaraderie of the kitchen and my subtle instruction (tear the basil, I tell my peers; don’t cut it or half the flavor remains on the knife and cutting board), enjoy the task of cooking without having to worry about things like personalities and profit and paychecks. Over time, I plan out what I’ll be trying next, what imitations can be replaced with the real thing.

  I’ve had some great successes. My Caesar had an 88-percent success rate (that remaining 12 percent still baffles me) and a near 100-percent success rate with the sausage we began having shipped down from Satriani’s, a place in Brooklyn that used to make biweekly deliveries to Sylvia, a tip I gave to Chuck after pretending to randomly find them on the Internet.

  Now, at the end of my third month, Chuck sits me down, opens a pair of icy Heinekens, and hits me with, “How would you like to manage this place?”

  I swallow a mouthful and look away, wipe the moisture from my lips.

  He hits me again: “I’ll give you a thirty percent increase.”

  I take another drink to avoid answering, but the gap in silence wears me down. “I’m just a cook.”

  He sits back and drops his hands to his lap, seems genuinely surprised at my apathy. “You’ve got to be kidding. You know everything about this industry. I don’t know how a produce guy could have such a broad grasp on the ins and outs of this business, but you’re a natural. I mean, I’ve never seen someone take the remainders of the day and turn them into salads and antipasto the way you do. What nonurban restaurant gets busy at nine at night?”

  Chuck’s referring to an idea that morphed into a decided success about a month ago. I suggested that instead of preserving or tossing the vegetables and meats and breads opened for the day, we use them up, make salads and antipastos and bruschettas—and serve them free to folks who just wanted to stop in and grab a beer or bottle of wine. The first night I took an eggplant left unused from eggplant parmigiano and diced it up and sautéed it in olive oil, then added all of the ill-fated chopped vegetables—onions, green peppers, olives, celery, tomatoes—and a cup of the gravy that had nearly thickened to paste, a little salt and pepper and there you go: caponata. Folks in the bar scooped it up and piled it onto hunks of bread and drank alcohol until closing. The next day: sliced tomatoes with garlic and fresh basil and oregano. Every day it was something else. Last week, there was no room in the bar after nine for five consecutive days. The only cost to the plan was my time, and by this point I was so miserable without Melody that I spent every waking hour at the restaurant, could only fall asleep at night by passing out, wanted so badly to numb myself that it was the only alternative to a full-blown depression and the self-destructive behavior that would soon follow.

  I smile a little and drink again, already halfway through my beer. Then I shake my head slowly. “I’m just a cook.”

  He leans in a little, speaks softly. “It’s okay, you know. You can move on. Start again. Let yourself be open to finding someone.”

  Though he’s referring to my nonexistent, now dead wife, Chuck has no idea how true his words are, how badly they bother me. I stare at him for a long time before I finally respond. “There will never be anyone like her.” I take a drink to avoid getting choked up. “You have no idea how much I miss her.” I look down and wipe my eyes, then my face. “I’m just a cook.”

  Chuck wrinkles his chin, droops his shoulders. “You can have the thirty percent anyway,” he says, then turns and looks out the front window. “Just… please don’t leave.”

  I place my beer between us on the table, cover my mouth with my hand. I suppose his request is the one thing I can’t promise. Though I have no real reason to think I’d ever be yanked away, the chance exists, the possibility that Chuck will one day open the restaurant without me and I will never show, will never call in, will never return. Another solid relationship and assumption of trust to one day be thrown aside, never explained. Another story that ends with the line: and we never heard from him again.

  So the rut begins, working all morning and day and most of the night, seven days a week, because I can’t stand the idea of being alone with my idle mind. Chuck institutes a daily regimen of begging me to take a long break, fearing I’ll burn out. What he will never know is that being at home with the images that run through my head before I drift into sleep, the first that enter when I open my eyes the next morning, will destroy me far sooner than the long hours and being on my feet thirteen hours a day. Avoiding those thoughts is like avoiding a hit man; no matter how many times I duck around a corner, he’ll find me eventually.

  And today I ran out of hiding places. I run through my morning routine today, a day the same as all the oth
ers. I shower and brush my teeth and drag a razor across my face, make one full swipe through a lather of shaving cream, leave my cheek looking like a yard of snow with a shoveled sidewalk down the side. And that’s it; I can’t lift the razor again, can’t move. I open my palm and let the razor fall into the sink. I stare at my reflection in the mirror until I no longer recognize myself, the view of my face distorted from tear-filled eyes.

  I fall back to my towel rack and slide to the floor, rest my back against the wall and drop my head to my hands and pray in a manner that would too easily be confused with begging.

  Through my sob-laden requests, I ask God to free me of Melody, to finally let her go, to feel the freedom that she now feels, to help me stop wanting her and loving her, to stop wondering how and where she is, to complete the process of becoming the new man that Justice created.

  I sound so desperate, I’d convince any onlooker of my genuineness, though I’m so unsure of what I really want, of what I really need; I pray for ten straight minutes for freedom, then end with this: “Unless, God, I might possibly one day find her again.”

  I am doomed.

  “Please, God. Help me find her again.”

  His answer isn’t No.

  As I make my true request, I sense a darkness falling upon me, a creation made of my own hand, composed solely of possessiveness and passion.

  His answer isn’t Not yet.

  All those moments, beginning when I was just a child, I prayed that I could keep Melody safe—and that one day I could set her free. God answered those prayers, gave me precisely what I so badly wanted. Here I am asking for more: I want Melody to be free to be with me. This request is no longer about Melody; it’s to fulfill the desires of my own selfish soul.

  His answer seems unequivocal: Never.

  MALE E BENE A FINE

  VIENE

  (EVIL AND GOOD COME TO AN END)

  Two years and nine months later