L'America

by Martha McPhee

  She'd bring flowers home—tulips flown in from Amsterdam on a 747, the airplane filled solely with flowers, an image she enjoyed—put them in a vase, turn on her Italian music, and make lists of what she had: her job at the pizzeria; the money from it; the success of the pizzas. Indeed, Italian tourists had started frequenting the place. It was written up in an Italian guidebook as the one place in Manhattan for authentic Italian thin-crusted wood-oven pizzas, Come in Italia. And then she would make a list of what she wanted: to be a cook, a chef; to write a cookbook; to own a restaurant. That's what she really wanted; that was why she was here.

  Sometimes he would call, the international beeps rippling over the lines declaring him: "Sei ancora perfetta?" he'd ask simply, bringing back all of Greece. "Sono ancora perfetta," she would respond. And that would be that, the call receding with the days until he would call again. The Italian music always made her sad, made her remember the Città life, the one she believed now she could so easily have lived.

  She took a job for a famous chef, chopping vegetables in his kitchen, julienning lemon peel, mincing rosemary, dicing pancetta, chopping endlessly. Blisters developed on her hands. Her hands smelled perpetually of garlic. Her hair smelled of the kitchen. The kitchen buzzed with the activity of a dozen prep cooks, the pastry chef and his sous-chefs, the chef and his souschefs. The staff was large so that each task could be done efficiently and perfectly. Sometimes, if Beth was lucky, she was allowed to plate the food. But you had to be fast for that task, and no mistakes. No sauces on the rims. The food had to look like a million dollars before it was sent out, had to look so perfect the diner wouldn't want to cut into it. Flaws were not tolerated. There was a lot of heat, a lot of yelling, though oddly the chef never spoke. The restaurant was called Lago ("Lake") and it got three stars in the Times for its exquisite northern Italian cuisine. The big deal was that it deserved four stars but only got three because, along with Julia Child, the critic did not believe that Italian cuisine demanded the use of enough technique. Four stars were reserved exclusively for French restaurants. The famous chef of Lago, American, was famous as well for never speaking. He never did interviews, and those close to him were not allowed to speak on his behalf and had to sign an agreement not to before working for him. This was the late 1980s, the very beginning of the era in which chefs became superstars, garnering publicity and ardent followers, and raking in cash for celebrity endorsements of Viking Range appliances, say, or Calphalon pans. Indeed, Lago's chef was among the first of this species—though he never did endorsements. He was a purist. The press knew him and referred to him simply as Leo. Lago was the hottest restaurant in town even if it was not French. In fact, people loved that it was not French; they were tired of French and curious about authentic Italian. It took a minimum of three months to get a reservation at Lago, and Leo was firm on no insider deals for earlier dates. Beth felt lucky to have landed a job there. All the other kitchen staff at Lago were aspiring chefs. A few other young women worked alongside her, eager, disciplined, ready to give everything. The waiters, on the other hand, actors or artists, all gay, all male, and all northern Italian, seemed to have more authority than those in the kitchen—except, of course, for Leo—and would snap at the kitchen help if a dish had even the slightest flake of parsley in the wrong spot. They seemed to belong here, in New York, unquestionably. After the restaurant closed for the evening they loosened their ties, put up their feet, joked with Leo for not talking, poured themselves a drink, lit cigarettes—did things that the kitchen help would never have felt comfortable doing. Then they would disappear into the night and the city as if it had always been theirs. Unlike Cesare, they were able to leave Italy because they had nothing there and it was easier to be gay in New York than in Milan.

  "All that education to work in a restaurant?" the grandmother asked. And then, "What has happened to my prince?"

  "Your prince?"

  "Well, your prince?"

  The chef had a wife. Her name was Cosella and she was attractive in a fierce way, very tall, with short hair dyed blond, platinum really. Her natural color was jet black, and she liked for the roots to show. The abrupt contrast, along with her long nose, were her defining characteristics. Bones protruded from her willowy body, making her angular, adding to her ferocity. She came from Lago di Garda in northern Italy, and it was rumored that she was the real talent behind the duo, that late at night she was the one in the kitchen. (Beth would later come to understand that mystique and myth had everything to do with fame.) During the day, however, Cosella was the sole face of human resources, did the hiring and the firing and was known not as Cosella but as the Bitch (as in, "the Bitch this..."; "the Bitch that..."). She made every single person who worked for them cry on one occasion or another, often multiple times. The crying was done in the walk-in refrigerator—a cool chrome world of vegetables and meats and berries and desserts—and was usually the result of having been made to feel stupid and inadequate or just plain incompetent. For example, "You don't know who Escoffier is? Who Jacques Pépin is? My six-year-old son knows who Escoffier is." It's an Italian restaurant, Beth wanted to counter, but never dared. "It's all food, all for the preparation of great fine food. And these are the masters," Cosella would have answered in her thick Italian accent. She always had an answer for everything. "I must be in charge of everything," was her refrain. "No one pays as much attention to detail as I do." She would look at you, peering down her long nose from behind her vast desk. If you sank a soufflé, if your chocolate separated, if you accepted the delivery of imperfect vegetables, you would hear about the talents of her six-year-old son again and any of the talents you were hired for disintegrated in her mind as well as in your own.

  When she hired Beth at $ 14,000 a year, Cosella was stunned to learn, after Beth said she didn't know how she would survive on that salary, that Beth had no trust fund. Cosella, looking at Beth with genuine puzzlement, said "Can't you dip into your trust fund?" It had never occurred to her, it seemed, to wonder how her employees survived on the small salaries—Beth would learn that they were lucky to even have salaries, since most restaurants paid hourly. If they couldn't afford to live on the offered salary, she assumed they had trust funds. She wouldn't have imagined the dark holes they lived in, piled up on top of each other to make the cheap rent even cheaper. She had always had money, always lived among people with money, and had no idea what it meant to do without. "But you look like you come from a good family," Cosella said, as if in apology. Money defining good.

  "I don't have a trust fund," Beth said. Cosella held Beth with her eyes for what seemed to be the longest and most awkward moment Beth had experienced thus far in life, as if Cosella were seeing in Beth something she had never seen before. Cosella, though Italian, had moved to New York when she was fourteen and spent her teenage years in a brownstone on Fifth Avenue. Central Park was her front yard. She had gone to one of the best private schools and then to Barnard. Her father was in finance, her mother into spending money on Cosella and her three sisters. Cosella wore a mink coat throughout the fall, winter, and the spring. She had villas in Garda and on Sardegna, an estate on Nantucket, too. Her diamond engagement ring was ice-cube size. It was given to her after Leo became famous (and wealthy). Before that her parents had disparaged her choice of husband, believing their daughter would not be able to adjust to a life of lesser means. In fact, Cosella and Leo became so rich they liked to say that they were "able to sell their brownstone to buy an apartment," quoting a famous writer who hit the jackpot with a novel and was thus able to buy an apartment with twice the square footage of his enormous brownstone.

  "It was all because of me," Cosella would later say. "I knew how to make money make money. Left to Leo, we'd be paupers." She seemed to like the notion of having just narrowly escaped pauperdom in the way people like Sylvia's Chas fondly remember their brush with poverty on youthful trips around the world.

  Finally Beth averted her eyes and the silence ended with Cosella saying sim
ply, "I'm sorry." She was sincere, sorry for Beth's lack of fortune and the hardship it entailed, though not so sorry that she'd consider paying her more. Other than the detail of no trust fund she knew very little about Beth—knew nothing of Claire (the mother, or the farm), nor that she had gone to NYU, that her grandmother was a patron of the Met, that Beth was wildly in love with a man she could not have for reasons she did not completely understand. Somewhere Beth wanted Cosella to know all about her, wanted Cosella to have more sympathy for her and to fall in love with her and adore her as a mother would. Beth wanted to win her, have her see how bright and sharp she was, what a fabulous cook she was. She wanted her warmth to melt Cosella's iciness. It would feel like a victory, she imagined. Indeed, Beth wanted all older women to love her like a daughter—Bea's mother, Cesare's mother, Preveena, Sissy Three, even.

  There were times though when Cosella would surprise Beth, make it clear to Beth she had compassion, that she was capable of love, that she was not the Bitch. (She knew how she was referred to.) She would show Beth that she understood that she was struggling, that she knew Beth was giving a lot to the restaurant, and that she was appreciated. Cosella would call Beth to her office and give her a check for a staggering sum, over a hundred dollars, and send Beth to her salon to indulge in a haircut. The salon was like nothing Beth had ever seen—spare, burbling water fountains, prancing borzois, Farrah Fawcett and other superstar patrons smiling from the slickly framed covers of Elle and Vogue and Harper's Bazaar that adorned the walls. The stylists glided around the salon with the insouciance of the rich and of those who cater to them, their hair all sorts of colors and styles and their clothes hip and of black leather involving chains and exceedingly skinny legs. For all of her grandmother's pretension and Paul Stuart tuxedos, Beth had never been in a place like this. The tip was more than Beth spent on food in a week (she ate at the restaurant and had ramen noodles at home, three packages for a buck). Beth had to write the stylist a check in order to offer a tip and then hope that the stylist wouldn't cash it before Beth's paycheck hit her account. To compensate for the unexpected expense she paid her electric bill late. She was too proud to ask her grandmother for help.

  After one punishing episode in Cosella's office (scolded for dropping a lobster in a pot of boiling water without first killing it with a sharp jab to its head: "Scalded in boiling water? Can you imagine? The most painful way to die. Do you know how long it takes for the water to come back to a boil, thus to kill the creature? Do you? Do you? You had no business handling the lobsters. They aren't your territory. You stick to celery, carrots, scallions, shallots. Stay away from the lobsters."), Beth broke down and cried right there in front of her. "I can't keep this up," she said. "I'm exhausted." In the beginning, Beth kept her job at the pizzeria, waiting tables three nights a week after sixty or so hours chopping vegetables and beating egg whites at Lago. Running between jobs, literally, had taken its toll. In the bathroom of Lago, Beth would change into her waitressing uniform (tan pants, white shirt), put on black running shoes that doubled as her waitressing shoes, and run three blocks across town and thirty blocks downtown to Amalfi Pizzeria. She could always see the restaurant's flashing neon sign far in the distance as she ran down Seventh Avenue: the sign, a beacon of tackiness, made her think of the critic of Lago giving it three stars because it was Italian cuisine. (Each time, running down Seventh, she would remind herself to tell Bruno to upgrade his sign.) Arriving sweaty, she would wash her face in the bathroom, pinch her cheeks, brush her teeth, and wait on tables until 2 A.M. At 8 A.M. she would begin the entire routine over again. She sat in Cosella's office sobbing.

  Instead of firing her, which Beth believed Cosella would do, she sent a masseuse to Beth's studio, not once, but four times. Lying beneath the hands of the masseuse, on a table the masseuse had lugged up all four flights, Beth fell in love with Cosella. At the end, when she tried to tip the masseuse, Beth was told that everything had been paid for. The following summer Cosella gave Beth her house on Nantucket for two weeks while she and Leo went to India on vacation. Despite the kindness, the gifts, Cosella remained demanding: ever vigilant for the smallest sign of incompetence, she never hid her anger at Beth's or anyone's mistakes. And Leo always remained an enigma. During the years Beth worked at Lago, he did not speak one word to her. But Beth penetrated Cosella, pried her open like an oyster, forcing Cosella, in all her privilege to see (and admire) raw sloppy ambition at its inception. Cosella's ambition had had a head start; she had always had the plush cushion of wealth.

  Eight months into Beth's job at Lago, Bruno fired her from Amalfi Pizzeria for not being on the ball. (The news of Beth being fired delighted Victor, the Albanian pizzaiolo.) Beth was not surprised. Rather, she was relieved. She had gone as far as she could go there. It was only a pizzeria, after all. Now her ambition was to someday make the critics see that Italian cuisine was equal to or better than French. Beth found herself wishing that instead of a massage or a haircut Cosella would give her a raise. But the thought of Cosella, entrenched in her dark office behind her vast desk, looking at her subjects by raising her head and sliding her eyes down her long nose, made the asking of a raise all but impossible. And chopping carrots, there was little way for Beth to measure her contribution or make a case for the essential need of having her there. And there—Lago—was definitely one of the best restaurants to be working in if food was your dream. A list a mile long of people who wanted to work at Lago waited on Cosella's desk, a fact that everyone knew well.

  Late at night, lying on her bed, Beth would wonder why she wanted this. She would wonder where she would be if somehow she had been able to go to Italy. She would look at the phone, will it to ring. Cesare had written her a letter after their Old Faithful argument, a letter telling her to take responsibility for her part, reminding her that she could have come to Italy, if only just to see: that she had owed that to their relationship. Telling her that Greta meant nothing, a nice woman, sure, but not Beth—not warm like Beth, soft like Beth. Greta was hard and fun, but not serious. He needed Beth. Telling her that this interruption in their relationship was the challenge they had needed to get beyond for their great love to thrive. She would read and reread the letter, wondering if he was being fair or if he was just trying to pass the blame. Exhausted, she would breathe in those sweet fumes, eat take-out Chinese in bed for a splurge, and watch the fat man in his underwear in the apartment across the courtyard scratch his butt and balls before settling down in an armchair to his dinner and the blue glow of the television. She would fall asleep with the lights on, the remnants of the Chinese food on the floor by her bed. She would dream of the apartment growing bigger, doors opening onto rooms she didn't know that she had, rooms that then opened onto more rooms until she had so much space she could waltz endlessly from room to room to room. In the morning the shower would scald her if someone anywhere in the building flushed a toilet. Even so, walking to work she would feel elated by the dream of all those rooms.

  She did have some fun, too. Hunter moved back to New York from Claire, took a job working for a hedge fund (Beth could never understand what that meant no matter how many times it was explained to her), made tons of money, and took her out to fancy restaurants and the theater on her days off. He took her dancing and to comedy clubs and jazz clubs. At a thrift store, he bought her a dress for these occasions, a black dress with a thousand silk string tassels. When she moved, the dress shimmered with all the elegance of money. Beth thought, How easy it could be to surrender to Hunter, to succumb to his wealth. He enjoyed spending money. "Money is meant to be spent," he would say. But he liked to spend it on objects and situations that could tell a story. At an antique store, he bought her a Persian ring from the fifth century, sold by a wizened man in his upper years with a cane and a bent back who still traveled the world in search of treasure. The stone was red jasper and Hunter placed it himself on the middle finger of Beth's right hand, scaring her as she felt a pang of desire. The muted hammered gold and th
e sparkling stone were fifteen hundred years old. She loved wearing that history, loved imagining the other women before her admiring the ring on their hands. At ABC Carpet he bought her a Persian rug, a Kerman with a garden design. She learned that Iranians were among the first rug makers twenty-five hundred years ago and that originally the rugs' designs were a form of writing for illiterate tribesmen, a way of setting down their fortunes and their troubles and their joys, dreams and sorrows. The rugs came from places she had never heard of, grand names like Khorassan, Baluch, Quchan, Shirvan, Lilihan—places she would never visit or know but that Hunter talked about bringing her to as if in doing so he could open up the world, make it just a little bigger than Italy. She would pull out the atlas and try to find the towns on the map. About Hunter, there were things, his vast knowledge, that desire to know and to share, that reminded Beth of what her father might have once been.