But Jessica knew that he was not oblivious. Although he now spent most evening shifts washing dishes and whistling, he still owned this sumptuous place, he still overheard and oversaw everything in his bizarre way. He was a culinary genius, who had laid all of the famous Fabergé Restaurant delicacies, but he was also a little eleven-year-old boy, the same little boy he’d been all those years ago when he started working in restaurants in the North End of Boston. He was today, as he was back then, scrubbing dishes, and he was polishing the machine that washed them, and he was doing so with the vigor of his younger self.
Jessica also knew, from speaking with Doris, the bookkeeper, that in spite of his half-century career, if John were to stop washing dishes and shutter this place up tomorrow, the bank would take it all over, all of it, and he’d be left with nothing but the incomprehensible tune he always whistled. No matter what the bank might seize, however, the strange aura of a giant egg in Manhattan that John had designed and built and occupied would remain. And so, too, would all of the culinary offspring, the palate’s memories of eggs that had been beaten and whipped and fried and boiled and spiced for the consumption of the many wealthy customers who had visited and savored the Yolk’s creations.
In moments like these, Jessica would feel a wave of compassion, almost desire, for John, particularly when she thought back to her short stroll around the block with Tom, the man in black, prior to returning to work. Tom was staking claim to her luscious body, and to her maternal touch. Tom, that resentful and powerful man, didn’t know how to take “no” for an answer, any more than she knew how to utter it to him. Tom frightened Jessica with his silent persistence and his calm persuasiveness. She still bore the odor of the calf-leather glove with which he had stroked her cheek when she gave in to a quiet kiss in front of his hovering limo. Seemed like years ago. Now she needed to worry about sauces for tonight’s meals.
“Where’s Nicky?” she asked.
“He’s showing the new guy the walkins,” replied John.
“Hmmmm,” she sighed. She wondered if the ‘new guy’ had ever worked in restaurants. If so, had he spotted the crate of whipping cream canisters that arrived this morning? And if he had, she wondered, had he been into any of them yet? She decided to make her way over to the walk-in for a surprise appearance, just as Nicky and the new guy pushed the heavy door open towards her. The result was very nearly a bruised nose.
“Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha-ck up!” said Nicky with his huge Greek grin and an exaggerated Greek accent. “So sorry, Jessica, we were just seeing if the sheep fit!”
Nicky-the-Sous-Chef brushed passed her, pressing his stomach out so as to be able to bang into her taut midsection in a way that might resemble the collision of an inflated airbag and a captive body. Jessica didn’t mind. Nick was harmless, and he was cute, with his dark, curly hair, his bushy eyebrows, his eternal smile. Besides, she secretly enjoyed the banter he constantly maintained to keep the kitchen staff abreast of his gallant efforts to impregnate his wife.
“Ooops, Jess! Jeez, if you get too close to me I might spill the spermies I am saving for my wife tonight!” His passing left Jessica in the fact of an awkward newbie, who looked to be fourteen years old.
“Hi, I’m Russ,” said the new guy.
“Pay not attention to her Rusty!” proclaimed Nicky. “On second thought, why not? You know what they say . . .,” he paused for dramatic effect. “If the sheep fits, wear it!”
“That’s right!” agreed Jessica, and then realized what she’d agreed to, and stuck out her tongue towards Nick.
“GENIUS!” cried Nick. “She’s a genius, Russ, watch out.”
“Nick!” shouted John from the dishwashing station. “The gravy?”
“Oh my!” said Nick, winking at Jessica. “John is starting to get a little personal!” He turned towards John. “It’s thick and potent, and it’ll be ready tonight!” He turned back to a mystified Russ, and poked him in the ribs. “And she’s going to love it!”
Nate, distracted from the triathlon he was still supervising, called out, “Hey, Nicky, your wife just called!”
“Ssssstop it!” replied Nick.
“It’s true! The sheep costume you ordered for her just arrived, she’s waiting for you at home!” He always had to participate in the goings-on in the kitchen, even from afar.
“Ah, gotta go, Rusty!” said Nick, feigning undoing his apron and turning towards the “Egg-Zit” sign that hung above the door.
“Nicky!” called John, with the voice of a battle commander. “The inspectors are coming tonight! Show the new guy where we keep the bleach.”
“Oh, the inspector, ooh!” squealed Nicky. He bent over and turned his posterior towards Jessica, “Well, okay, John, if you say so!”
Russ started laughing, and then turned, guiltily, in the direction of the dishwashing station. John was glaring down at him with steel-blue eyes, sleeves rolled up, apron around his waste, Popeye arms, and his been-around-the-block Irish Boston look. Russ stopped laughing, and all that remained was the sound of industrial fans, hastening the exit of non-existent fumes, flames, and odors. It was 5:00 p.m., so this would soon change, as customers and servers headed towards the eggy heaven of Fabergé Restaurant.
The closing ceremonies for today’s Lobster Olympics were over, and Nate begrudgingly started the process of cleaning up the cutlery that he had strewn about the floor and disassembling the lobster stairway to heaven. Nicky walked to the prep area to check on the sauces and au jus that were being warmed-up for the evening service. Johnny was checking the grill, scraping off remnants of last evenings gravies, to ensure that dreaded smoke didn’t alert John to a less-than-shiny, metallic surface in the caverns of the ovens. Jessica reviewed the evening’s specials, mentally noting how many fresh ingredients were in the walk-in, since John allowed no leftovers or frozen back-ups to get them through busy evenings. And John stood on the starboard mast, willing creation with his desire, and confining his underlings to their unhatched fate.
The early-evening shift was about to begin, and there’d be hands to occupy, vegetables to chop, eggs to sort, gravies to season, knives to sharpen, water to boil, stoves to heat, server stations to man, bread to bake, and, in the dining room, tongues to bathe, eyes to please, guests to serve, guests to tip, gases to release, digestive tracks to clog up, effort to be exerted at the end of it all to get it all out, and then clean it all up, so that they could start the process again tomorrow.
Chapter 7
Jude had returned to Fabergé Restaurant early that evening, oblivious but now curious about all that was going on behind the steel, swinging doors that led to the yolk, and to Jessica. For him, the restaurant was almost eerily quiet. By the time he arrived, the late lunchtime clients had, for the most part, disappeared, leaving the few and the privileged, those with the leisure of long conversations and others who had more furtive motives and surreptitious existences. There were bankers who, with their wives, were trying to undo what had been done in secret; investors who had retired hours early from the trading, dealing, stealing frenzy because of one sale sweet enough to warrant withdraw; executives who decided upon a “meeting” with feigned personages far from the office, after a decidedly ignoble morning of video games, or an awkward tryst with a secretary, colleague, owner, boss, or supplier, or, more ignoble yet, knees upon the carpet and sex in hand, themselves.
Life, after all, just isn’t that glamorous.
Jude surveyed the familiar egg setting. The meager expenditures he made there each day were adding up, exceeding all other expenses in his life, even his rent. As always, he entered Fabergé Restaurant timidly, looking for a quiet table where he wouldn’t be in the way of real customers or in close proximity to voices distinct enough to disturb his writing. The only exception to that rule was an as-yet unrealized glance of possibility from a searching eye, an I in search of a we for the purposes of mutual bliss. This possibility was entirely theoretical, because he’d never actually met a lover in a bar or a r
estaurant, no matter how interesting he feigned to look with his skateboard, his soiled jean jacket, his tussled hair, and the glaringly obvious lack of plans for any real work that day. In short, the bohemian writer look had yet to bear any fruit; it had not led to the hatching of any new trysts, and had not even stimulated much interest from the staff of Fabergé Restaurant. Or so he thought.
The fact was, Jude’s look may have been appropriated in a grungy coffee shop on the West Coast, but he was decidedly a tad pathetic in a place that aspired to, and succeeded in, attracting the kinds of clients Fabergé Restaurant generally attracted. The exception to his casual attire, discernable only to the well initiated, was a very thick, black Montblanc cartridge pen, a gift from his aunt Doris. Five years ago she had paid a visit to his hometown. Jude happened to be there at the time, visiting his mother. Aunt Doris made contact with him, because she’d learned, from his mother, that he was aspiring to be a writer, and Aunt Doris loved the idea of having one such blessed soul in the family. She was the enlightened relative who, consciously emulating Madame Bovary, had read her way through sufficient romance novels to blur the line between her life of tedious marriage and her fantasy of endlessly passionate affairs with exotic men in fancy settings.
It turned out that the fantasies that Aunt Doris had dreamed up were but castles in a darkening sky of impending old age, however, one day she just gave away that large, black pen. It had fulfilled a negative destiny, remaining exactly what it was: a large, black pen. In her fantasies, it was the powerful phallic symbol that would draw into her being a world of lust and seduction, as it had for so many writers, like those who’d flirt and find love in the Parisian quartier of St. Germain-des-Près early in the twentieth century. But Aunt Doris didn’t live in Paris, and she was not a writer, and her fantasies couldn’t change that. But maybe she could live through a relative who could wield it, and thereby find love vicariously?
Jude carried the Montblanc everywhere, rendering it more an obligation than a weapon. In this respect, Jude did have a brush with legendary characters, because he, like Atlas, who had sided with the Titans in their war against the Olympians, was forced to stand at the western edge of Earth and support the entire sky upon his shoulders. Jude’s pen wasn’t the sky, but it represented great altitudes, and it could have been the inventor of celestial bliss, had he been successful in his attempts to wield it for creation. But, alas, at the Fabergé Restaurant Jude found himself wielding Montblanc amongst a crowd who couldn’t recognize it for what it truly represented, which had the rather unfortunate effect of thereby rendering it powerless.
For most of the clients of a restaurant of this type, the Montblanc pen is recognizable, but it’s only brought out for short flourishes, usually cryptic signatures on incomprehensibly complex contracts, initials on divorce agreement stipulations, or ill-advised scribbles on children’s report cards or notes of absence. Further, on account of his terrible handwriting and awkward grip on the large shaft, Jude couldn’t get his thick symbolic weapon to function properly, and he generally caused it to leak and spray in his pockets and hands, like a young man inadvertently spewing out his lust on contact with the object of his desire. And so Jude usually just displayed the Montblanc like a peak to be ascended, and did his actual writing with a cheap ballpoint pen that didn’t leak all over his hands or exhaust his untrained grip.
Jude unscrewed and screwed together the Montblanc cartridge chamber, quizzically. He had not seen Aunt Doris again, even though, he often said to himself when he looked at its thick, black shaft, he really had wanted to. In her youth, she had been an artist who had made fashion sketches for the city newspaper in Baltimore. She was family, and he didn’t have any other family, because his own little tribe had moved around so much that his parents had successfully severed ties with every existing relative and friend each of them had ever made.
“Someday,” he reasoned, while staring upon the peaks of his miniature Montblanc, “I will get to know her beyond this pen.” He looked at the emblem on the top of it and hoped it would give him luck by connecting him to all of the great authors who’d stared down towards that same emblem. Maybe Percy Shelley had used a Montblanc to write his magnificent poem “Mont Blanc.”
“Probably,” he thought, wrongly. And maybe John Steinbeck had used one to write The Grapes of Wrath.
“Probably not,” he thought, rightly.
“Shit. Whatever. Today is going to be a big writing day!” he assured himself. As such, he was committed to spending at least part of it working on the novel that he had not as yet started, but which was going to launch him into literary stardom. To do so, though, he had to first get through a few pages more on his “egg manuscript.” Now that was a great name: egg manuscript. It sounded like something you’d actually make out of eggs: First, you separate the whites, and then you carefully add cream of tartar powder, gently, like powdering a baby’s bottom. Then stir gently, and once combined, heat the mixture to the point that its color shifts from glossy orange yellow to matte yellow cream. Pour it onto a granite counter or baking pan and then, using a conventional iron on low heat, iron the substance down until it assumes the consistency of parchment paper. You can now write on it, carefully, producing nearly translucent sheets of scroll that can be used to forge ancient documents of great import, or eaten in times of great duress.
Egg manuscript.
The problem with Jude’s creating a masterpiece today was that he’d made the mistake of calling his stupid bank’s 800 number that morning to find out from the endlessly prompting electronic operator that, thanks to a balance that was suddenly reduced by seventy dollars, he was now about to spend money that was supposed to be spent ten days from now. Obsessively concerned with conserving his tiny nest-egg, he had transferred money last weekend into his savings account, and then had, in a moment of debt-guilt, promised the bill-pay section of the bank’s website to also pay his heating, telephone, and electricity bills. And, he learned from the stupid robot, he had dated those payments to yesterday afternoon.
Furthermore, by shielding his checking account from undue spending on food, he’d accidentally overdrafted instead, causing his fucking fraudulent bank to impose $36.00 in fees for each bounced payment, for a total of $108.00, and then he overdrafted again on each food purchase he’d made at three different places. So for a total of $41.26 he had racked up $216.00 in fees, and would be charged again by each biller for having bounced checks to them, which would add another $75.00 to the mess, for a grand disaster fee of $291.00.
$291.00.
$291.00 represented more than two weeks of food. Even at Fabergé Restaurant that amount would pay for twelve different eggy ideas that would contribute to his egg manuscript.
“$291.00. In fees. To a fucking, fucking, fucking bank. Shit. Fuck. Fucking banks!”
He felt better for a moment, elucidating his fucks. Now he felt worse. What the fuck was he supposed to order in order to stay at Fabergé Restaurant today?
$291.00 in fees.
“What the fuck!” And that wasn’t the end of it, he suddenly thought. Since yesterday, he had used his check card for little purchases, including a chocolate bar in one place and a carton of chocolate milk in another. He had used it, well, let’s see, six times? Seven times? He couldn’t remember. There was also the beer he had purchased in the convenience store, and then there were those tissues he bought a few minutes later when the can, shaken more than it could stand, exploded its frothy contents all over his hands and clothing. He feared sticking to the inside of his skateboarding gloves for the next three weeks, so in an uncharacteristic moment had bought a handy little pack of Kleenex tissues, for $1.18. “Those little Kleenex tissues would now cost . . . um . . . $37.18 with the service charge. Fuck! Fuckity-fuck!” And there’ll be service charges of $36.00 for each of the other purchases. He dared not add it all up.
“Fucking rip-off fucking banks.”
Then there was the broken parking meter he’d used when some guy
in a bookstore told him that he wasn’t allowed to park the truck where he always parked when he went in to browse this month’s Vanity Fair and Skateboard Digest. Holy Shit. He didn’t dare add up those damages either, for fear of total despair, the enemy of creativity.
“Banks,” he thought, “are the enemies of creativity. Fuck!”
His thoughts turned to salvaging the disaster by finding enough money to at least cover the little purchases, but how was he to get around the service charges? He would have to go back to his bank and beg forgiveness, as he’d done in the past, and hope that the teller would be sufficiently sweet, or perhaps hot on him, to save him from this ruin.
“Oh, and by the way,” thought Jude to himself. “Who the fuck ever allowed the banks to deduct $36.00 per transaction in fees, when each purchase had already passed through his stupid account, electronically? And what kind of bloody computer takes days to process a $3.00 transaction? Better still, what kind of a sadistic bastard decided to steal, in $36.00 increments, from the poorest clients of the banks, with total impunity? Who? And how the fuck is it possible that charges that run through the bank instantaneously are also just ‘pending’ for days afterwards, even though they aren’t fucking ‘pending,’ because they appear instantaneously, because banks use computers as means of defrauding their clients, and then use delayed accounting to add service charges to people who can least afford to pay them, obviously, because who the fuck else has less than $100.00 in their account when they go to buy fucking groceries, chocolate bars, and Kleenex?”
Hatched Page 6
