Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  Jeffie, that he had managed to block out as well. Crap!

  “In-country” had been a couple of straight-laced, botanist, lab rats studying the aftereffects of various defoliants on native Vietnamese flora and fauna. Phillip told stories like a wild-ass, forward-area patrol ranger with a relish that was utterly believable. Even Jeff, who’d actually been there, had been amazed at the incredible things they’d almost certainly never experienced, together or apart.

  Well, if they wanted to fluster him, they were doing it perfectly. He’d never been able to get a word in edgewise on Phillip. Not in the jungle, not in college, and certainly not in the three years he was working with him after ‘Nam.

  EMS, the Enclave of Mad Scientists, was a screwball idea of Jeff’s that Phillip took seriously and Mandy made happen. Maybe they weren’t operating anymore. Maybe the whole silly idea had collapsed long ago. But here were Phillip and Mandy, and Phillip clearly had an agenda. His bravado was always more outrageous when he was harboring a secret.

  And Mandy was . . .

  Don’t go there, Jeff. Just don’t. Grab a topic. Any topic.

  “I’m working with Southeast Asian flavors for my next round of shows. Wanted to get them back in my head.”

  “Right. Jeff the Chef. America’s number one. King of the live cooking show no less.” Phillip finished the first bottle and tossed it into the sink. If it had been a beer can, he’d probably have smashed it flat on the top of his balding head first.

  Jeff and Mandy winced as the bottle rattled and clacked around the sink like a bullet shot off inside an armored tank. He tucked his head down until it quieted without shattering.

  “Christ, Jeffie. Jeffie the Cheffie? Damn, the swamp monkeys would either die laughing at you or shoot you for being such a dweeb. You were good, buddy mine. Damn good. Not just some lazy-ass lab tech, but a guy who could figure crap out. And now this shit,” he waved at the fridge. “Who in the hell of fucking Christmas and Thursdays are you kidding with this string of bull? Not me, that’s for shittin’ sure.”

  Christmas and Thursdays, hadn’t heard that one in a while either. Suddenly he missed his old life, which was the intent of their visit. It had to be to make him nostalgic after all these years. Well, he didn’t miss it that much. Underfunded. Underappreciated. Massive governmental pressures to cease and desist. The true outsiders to everyone except themselves. And scared as hell at what he’d ultimately discovered.

  Not that he’d ever mentioned that to anyone, not even Mandy.

  No! That couldn’t be why they were here! At least that one piece of the past was going to stay there. Permanently!

  He’d made it out, god damn it. Took the secret to the grave when he’d buried the old Jeffie and reinvented himself.

  He jabbed a finger against Phillip’s sternum.

  “I busted my ass to become the best. Twenty-seven years I’ve been working on being the best chef on the air. I’ll be damned if you and your six-foot-four load of bullshit will make me feel like a screw-up.”

  “That’s a damn sight better. Hey, Amanda. Your runaway boyfriend got a spine while we weren’t watching over him. Weird, hunh?” He rapped the bottom of his mostly empty Biere 333 against the top of Jeff’s untouched Tiger. In the instant of silence that followed Jeff remembered the old trick. He just managed to get his beer over the sink before it foamed out of the narrow neck like a hoppy volcano. Phillip howled with laughter as Jeff rinsed off his hand up to his elbow.

  Resentment flowed over him like the cold, soapy water. That old feeling. Always in Phillip’s shadow. Always the lesser of two evils. Always number two. Well, screw him. Jeff was the number one live TV chef in the nation. True reality broadcasting, on a three-second delay. Syndicated into twenty-three countries and four languages.

  To hell with Phillip.

  CHAPTER 8

  A light pressure on Jeff’s arm stopped the argument he’d never won before he even brought the attack to Phillip.

  Mandy was shaking her head slowly.

  Right.

  It was just Phillip, the master of no tact.

  He’d always been that way and aging hadn’t added a softer voice to his blunt blade.

  Phillip, seeing the bait unbitten, moved back to his exploration of the apartment, kitchen to living room.

  Jeff practiced some deep breathing exercises which must have helped a little, he managed to get Mandy a glass of a nice Merlot without too much fumbling about. Behaving was a possibility, perhaps limiting himself to water or a V8, tomorrow was show day after all.

  He poured a triple Glenlivet into a highball glass, without an ice cube. Single malt scotch was still the only anodyne to his former colleague, and former best friend. Now that was a title from hell indeed.

  “Wow! Cool cave, Batman. Nice shit here.” Phillip took one more glance at the living room before he cruised out of sight into the bedroom.

  Jeff tried to pull back and see the room through a stranger’s eyes. First of all it was forty-three floors up and no matter how cozy, it was not a cave. Entirely the wrong image. Though, now that he thought of it, he couldn’t name a better one, not that cave was any less wrong. “Private escape” was about as far as he’d ever bothered to go.

  Chagall on the walls, all reprints except for a small pencil and pastel sketch between the bookcases, his prize. It had cost him a year’s income and been worth every penny. Tiffany glass lamps lighting exotic ferns and a dusky red leather sofa complimented the look. Of course Phillip could have been talking about the Joyce DeWitt babe shot in the Three’s Company rerun that some rattled TV exec had used to replace the end of Julio’s show.

  Julio. The man was dead, lying on a studio floor in midtown. Jeff’s recording was playing back a quiet moment that hadn’t existed in the studio. Canned laughter showed up on the screen in heavy block type as “[laughter].” And Julio was dying, had died last night. Jeff’s head hurt and slamming back a mouthful of potent scotch did nothing to clear his thinking. It only made it hard to breathe.

  Just don’t go there, Jeff. There is a limit to how much you can deal with at once. And Phillip alone shot him right over that limit.

  Then Mandy stepped out of his peripheral vision and into the living room. A delicate step, one a cat might make entering a new room for the first time. One foot on the hundred-year old oak and the other on the two-hundred year old oriental rug.

  Stupid git, Jeff.

  All these years and he finally understood.

  Blind as a bloody bat in his cave! Phillip was right after all.

  It wasn’t his room. It wasn’t his “private escape.” It was a nest designed for a woman, for one specific woman. No wonder his wife had hated it so much before she became his ex-wife, it wasn’t for her and she’d known it. For the first time in six years he felt a bit of sympathy for Cruella de Vil. A tiny bit. Not very much really.

  This was Mandy’s room.

  Phillip plowed through from the bedroom and disappeared out the sliding glass doors to the balcony as Mandy stood in the exact center of the rug slowly turning. A girl twirling in slow motion as if dancing to a tune no one else could hear.

  “Damn nice view, Jeffie.” Phillip called from outside.

  Mandy shook free of her self-hypnosis and followed his voice out the doors. As she crossed the threshold, she turned back to look at the room once more and he could see her face despite the silhouetting of the evening sky.

  After all these years, her smile was still radiant, but richer with a wisdom gifted by time. In one brief instant she’d understood the room, but she didn’t look at him. Was aware of him, they’d always known exactly where the other was, but didn’t look. There was no need to make a point of it.

  Then she turned to him and it all came back hard enough to rock him back against the stools along the outside of the kitchen-island counter.

  Impossi
ble! She even knew that he hadn’t understood what he’d built here until she was standing in the middle of the room he’d designed for her.

  This time the smile was sad. Sad for time missed, those years apart. But there was a little twist to the corner of her mouth. Just a tiny hint that told him one day they would both laugh about this. Really laugh. An instant, there and then not, that reminded him that this quiet woman had an ability to laugh like no one he’d ever met, as if she were a teapot boiling over with good nature.

  And the moment was gone. The time wasn’t now.

  Even as he blinked, she disappeared. Out on the balcony with her brother. Or a phantom, evaporated once again from his life.

  Jeff took a deep breath, and finding no deeper fortitude whatsoever, followed out onto the balcony as a prisoner followed the guard to the gas chamber. He brushed aside the billowing aubergine sheer.

  Mandy was there, out in the narrow space. Not a phantom at all.

  But neither was Phillip a phantom.

  The sun was settling low on the horizon lighting up Manhattan like a torch. The Chrysler Building stood front and center, a magnificent spaceship covered in shimmering sunlight, crouched solidly in the moment before liftoff. Lower buildings blocked any view of the East River, but Queens and Brooklyn poked up in the misty orange distance.

  New York was at its finest in the first days of fall, when the tiniest soupçon of apple-crispness cut into the agonizing summer heat. The aroma of the thousands of restaurants didn’t reach the forty-third floor any more than the dust and garbage. Up here, Manhattan was ocean and early-evening terra firma, salt and exotic spice.

  He took the moment of silence to study his friends. At one time his closest colleagues. His college roommate and his first true love. Okay, maybe his only true love. Where was his head today? He hadn’t seen her since they were half their present age. She’d probably changed a bit since then. Good thinking, Jeff. Real good.

  Phillip had changed too, despite the initial bluster that was all too familiar. He was pushing the same mid-fifties that Jeff was, but where it had made Jeff lean and the gym had made him tough, Phillip was gone heavier and grayer. On his large frame, it almost made Jeff worry about the strength of his balcony. And something more. Phillip, never one to come to rest, was unnaturally still. Something held him tightly in check. His second beer sat half-finished on the small wicker table. His hands fisted about the balcony railing. It was not right in the natural order of the universe.

  And Mandy.

  Holy Christ, what was he supposed to do with that memory?

  He breathed in deeply, but the apple-crispness was gone. The gentle perfume of Mandy’s skin and hair were all he could smell.

  He’d gotten out of EMS not knowing the totality of the step. The years since were rife with a desperate aloneness, so thick that it could be made into a respectable beef gravy without any reduction whatsoever. He’d ostracized himself from the only place he’d ever belonged. Until tonight.

  The light was fading abruptly up here. Darkest actually before full night when the city lights filled the air. A heavy dusk that wrapped around him like, like, a pig in a blanket.

  If he could kick the part of his brain that offered up such stupid images and such lousy food, he would certainly do so at the first opportunity.

  Phillip and Mandy were here because . . . ? Not hard to put that one together. But he’d shredded then burned all the evidence. The reason he’d left EMS was moot, destroyed past retrievability. Even as he thought about the chemistry it began to unfold inside his head in formulas as neat and elegant as a fine chef’s recipe. He slammed it aside. It was the final archive and it would never be breached. Ever.

  Maybe there was some other reason they were here. Please let there be some other reason. No longer the timid man of two-plus decades ago . . . Okay, someone who had spent two-plus decades learning how not to act as timid as the man he really was, Jeff decided to grab the proverbial bull by the horns before he himself was gored worse than a block of Swiss cheese.

  “So, what is the Enclave of Mad Scientists up to these days?” He sipped his scotch. Smoky, easy, not the killer instinct of the big sherry malts, just a little mellow, exactly what he needed at this moment.

  Mandy nodded ever so slightly.

  He’d rediscovered control of his voice, if not the ability to smell anything other than her heady scent from the past.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Look,” Jeff pointed at the three cameras ranged around the television studio kitchen. “That is a live, national feed. No second takes. No redo. Just a three second delay. If I screw up, over twenty-million people see it even if they may not hear it.”

  Phillip eyed the trio of blank, glass eyes warily and, for once, kept his silence.

  “You have three options. My preference, get the hell out until I’m done, but you’ve already turned that down.”

  “Leave?” Phillip shook off the hypnosis of the cameras and placed an open hand dramatically over his heart. “Not until I change your mind, just like I told you last night. EMS needs you. Until then, we’re the infamous Siamese Musketeers, bonded at the hip once again. And Amanda makes three.”

  Phillip winked then settled next to Mandy on one of the pair of kitchen counter stools whistling the tune of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

  “And I’m still not buying your dodgy explanations about what EMS needs. Two,” Jeff reached deep for patience and found a little in an unused kitchen gadgets drawer. “You join the studio audience, smile a lot, and clap when everyone else does.”

  Phillip finished a verse and started the second chorus. If he could either carry a tune or looked like Barbara Streisand it would be a different story, but he failed miserably on both accounts and it was as irritating as hell. Mandy punched his shoulder, but he didn’t miss a single mangled beat of it.

  “Three, you can sit at the counter as my special guests . . .”

  Phillip stopped whistling and flashed him a huge smile.

  “But! You do not speak. You look interested and appreciative. You make yummy sounds when it makes sense. And you get to taste the final dish.”

  Phillip looked at the cameras, the studio seating, leaned over the counter and peered down at the cutting block and stove as if he were John Powell surveying the Grand Canyon for the first time.

  “Best seats in the house, too. We’re good here. Right, Little Sister? No speaking? You sure? I think my smooth Texas drawl might add a little personality to your Northeast tight-ass twang. Always did. Amanda’s never spoken anyway. Quiet little brat sister, too damn polite to even beat up on. What fun was that?”

  Phillip’s Texas drawl was as authentic as French’s yellow mustard. He’d grown up in New England and had picked up the Texas drawl from a lab assistant in Vietnam.

  Phillip began offering up tunes that might have once been lines from the musical Oklahoma before he’d grasped them by the throat and throttled out any familiar vowels or consonants.

  “Absolute silence!” Jeff cut him off. He should have thrown them out, but they’d figured him right. He could be rude to Phillip. The man wouldn’t care either, he’d just shrug it off and blunder on.

  But not to Mandy. Even if Jeff could bring himself to speak directly to her, rudeness would never be possible.

  Phillip nodded with all the truculence of a punished four-year-old. Hopefully the admonition would last through the hour-long broadcast.

  Jeff glanced at the clock, barely an hour to show. He’d best get moving on his prep. As he laid out his ingredients, he watched Mandy in careful sidelong glances.

  She in turn watched the crew with avid attention as they assembled. Phillip, predictably, was off ten seconds after he’d settled. Fearless warrior off to explore the foreign world of a live production studio. In moments, he was done with the fine oak and cool blue tile of the studio kitchen and moved of
f to behind-the-scenes territories.

  He wouldn’t find much. A dozen rows of theater seating curled in front of the long curved counter like a cat gathering as much sun as possible. In between, enough space for the cameras to dolly back and forth. At the far end, audience met counter, making him appear much closer to the television audience than they were in the central working area.

  Prep sink, cutting boards, and cooktops embedded in the surface for easy filming. Hot and normally blinding studio lights hung overhead and off to either side but were still dark now. Only a pair of down spots gave him working light, worklights lit the rest of the studio well enough for safety but dim enough that it blended into the background of his attention while he worked.

  This kitchen was his center, his home away from home. The kitchen’s personality matched his show’s, casual and comfortable with an upscale twist. A dozen wine bottles in an oak rack. A nice, but not overwhelming collection of well-used copper pots. No showcase perfection here. This was a cook’s kitchen. It was used to serve food to people. Herbs grew fresh in a planter along one side of the space, a pair of his grandmother’s porcelain white poodles carefully guarding the bed from any stray ceramic cats.

  Backstage wasn’t much really. This was reality television at its most immediate. If it wasn’t onstage at the top of the show, it wouldn’t be there at the end. No props department lurked in wait. No backup kitchen and no messy wash sink. If he made a mess, it stayed onstage until the end of the show, perhaps on the copious open shelving under the counter and out of view, but onstage.

  Within the minute he heard Phillip’s trademark roar of laughter and a bunch of the guys joining in. He’d apparently swung around to the back of the studio and was chatting up the soundman and the ladies in the control booth. Amazing. The man was never out of place, Jeff was never in. Except when he was in front of the camera. They hummed together, he and his electronic audience.