by Jane Heller
“Elaine, want to sample this one?” Jonathan asked, sidling up next to me and offering me one of the weeds.
“Sure, thanks,” I said. It tasted like the sort of bitter, too-tough-to-chew garnishes I always left on the side of the plate, but what I did enjoy was the way the tips of Jonathan’s fingers gracefully brushed my lips as he fed me. It was a very intimate gesture, and I would have blushed if I’d been the type.
“Did you sleep well last night?” he asked, his brown eyes boring into me with laser focus. I always heard that there were men who could make you feel as if you were the only one in the room (or in the woods, in this case), and Jonathan Birnbaum had that gift.
“Yes, I conked right out,” I said. “You?”
“I had a dream about you,” he said. “We were in Palm Beach swimming in my pool. You were doing the breast stroke, as I remember.”
“Sadly, the dog paddle is the only stroke I know.” So he was imagining me in a bikini or perhaps as a skinny-dipper—doing the breaststroke.
“At the risk of repeating myself, I’m really glad you’re here, Elaine,” he said. “Something tells me you’re going to make this trip a memorable week for me.”
“Oh, come on. You probably say that to all the women who come to cultivate their bounties.”
He laughed. “Only the ones whose bounties are worth cultivating.”
“Help! Help!” came a shout from behind us. “I fell!”
We turned to find the shout, and it belonged to Beatrice. She was lying flat on her back in the bushes, moaning. She must have slipped on a rock or a branch.
Jonathan hurried to her side with me in tow. Amazingly, every strand of her shiny silvery gray hair was still in place, even her bangs, and there was no evidence of blood or torn clothing. Still, she was in her eighties, and bones were brittle at that age. My mother had her original hips, knees, and teeth—her marbles too—but it was a crapshoot.
“Can you tell me where it hurts, Mother?” Jonathan asked. He lowered himself to the ground and sat next to her.
“Try not to move, Beatrice,” said Kevin, our forager. “Let’s be sure you’re not injured.”
As everyone gathered around and murmured their concern for a member of our newly formed group, Jackie whispered, “I love the way Kevin’s taking charge. He has a cute ass, too.”
“Ow,” Beatrice wailed, ignoring Kevin’s warning and grabbing and clinging to her son’s hand and twisting her body in his direction, nearly dragging him down with her. “I think it’s my back.”
“So you didn’t break a hip or anything?” said Jonathan.
“I don’t think so,” she said, grimacing and wincing and making every pained face I’d ever seen, creating quite the theatrical experience. “My back is sore.”
“It’s always sore,” he said gently. “You have arthritis, Mother.”
Pat whispered, “Do you think she’s faking? Lucy fakes stomachaches when she doesn’t want to go to gym class.”
“Anything’s possible,” I said.
“More than possible,” said Jackie. “She probably saw her son coming on to you, Elaine, and got jealous.”
Kevin told Beatrice to lie back down and then asked her to rate her pain level on a scale from one to ten.
“My back’s a ten,” she said between moans.
“I’ll call for the EMTs,” he said. “Once they get you to the hospital, the doctors will be able to diagnose—”
“I am not going to any hospitals!” Imperious Beatrice had quickly replaced Vulnerable Beatrice.
“It’s just a precaution,” said Kevin. “If everything checks out, they’ll let you come right back here.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “My son will make sure I’m all right. Help me up, Jonathan, would you, dear?”
He didn’t contradict her, as if he’d been through this routine before and knew it would be a waste of time. Instead, he held her hand and carefully pulled her to her feet, while we all stood there watching, a rapt audience.
Beatrice gave us a triumphant wave, like a soldier limping off the battlefield after having been wounded in combat. She arched an eyebrow when she lit on me and said, “My son will take good care of me now.”
Before Jonathan began their walk back to solid ground, he leaned toward me and said, “Welcome to my world. Please don’t let it scare you off.”
“I don’t scare easily,” I said. I was lying, of course. I scared easily and often, but there was something about the way Jonathan had handled his mother that impressed me. He was sweet and kind and did what she’d asked, but without seeming reduced or resentful.
“I’m counting on it,” he said with a wink.
“Wow, he likes you.” Jackie nudged me after they were gone.
“He does,” Pat agreed. “Now aren’t you glad you came this week?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “I only just met him, let’s not forget. But no matter what happens between us, it’s good to be in the country, ninety miles away from you know who.”
My friends didn’t answer, I assumed, because deep down they were still rooting for Team Simon—a fruitless enterprise.
5
Rebecca handed each of us a Whitley chef’s apron and instructed us to sit in the folding chairs arranged in two rows of five, facing the center countertop that functioned as a stage. I took a seat in the front row; Pat and Jackie sat on either side of me.
“This demo kitchen’s a lot nicer than mine,” said Jackie, who was renting the guesthouse on the estate of one of her longtime landscaping customers. She lived rent free in exchange for tending to the customer’s gardens, and the only downside was a kitchen the size of a closet.
“It’s nicer than most people’s,” I agreed.
One of Whitley’s red barns had been converted into a state-of-the-art facility with high-end appliances, lots of countertop workspaces, and a separate alcove for a long oak dining table with chairs on either side. The table had been set for eleven, so I assumed we’d be sitting down to eat whatever it was we were about to cook. I would have known exactly what the menu was if I’d bothered to sort through the Whitley tote bag I’d picked up at the Welcome Happy Hour, but I’d dumped it somewhere in the cottage and forgotten about it.
“Chef Hill, our artisan in residence, will arrive any minute,” Rebecca said. “He’s a busy man, and we’re lucky to have him whenever he gets here.”
“He’s so worth waiting for!” Connie said, flapping her arms again from the end of our row.
“I hope she doesn’t jump up and start screaming when he gets here,” Jackie muttered. “She’s like a teenybopper at a Justin Bieber concert.”
Jonathan, who was sitting directly behind us, leaned forward and whispered, nodding at Connie, “She’s very enthusiastic, isn’t she?”
I turned around and smiled at him. He smiled back. It was fun flirting with a hot guy in a cooking class, especially because I was newly on the market and hadn’t flirted in awhile. Men you hardly know are exciting in that there’s no stored data of the same inane arguments, no baggage to contend with. Well, okay, Jonathan had Beatrice, who was probably heavier baggage than a Louis Vuitton trunk.
“For those who haven’t had a chance to read his bio,” Rebecca stood next to the counter, tapping her fingers on it, unable to contain her excitement, “Jason Hill became a leader in the creative, clean-food, farm-to-table movement with the launch of The Grow, his flagship restaurant in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. You each got a complimentary copy of his most recent cookbook, The Grow Eats, in your tote bag last night. His other two cookbooks are available for purchase in our gift shop. A devoted husband and father of two, Chef Hill is a frequent competitor and judge on television cooking shows and appears at food and wine events around the world. He’s the owner-chef of six outposts of The Grow, the cornerstone of his Planetary Empire Corporation whose mission is to cook and serve food that’s grown responsibly and sustainably, to support farm workers’ rights, and to make ingredient choices ba
sed on the environment as well as flavor. Currently, he’s scouting locations for his next eatery.”
“He needs to put it in Wisconsin!” Connie shouted. “Wouldn’t that be the best, Ronnie?”
He patted her considerable thigh. “Maybe we’d get a discount since you’ve been to so many of his talks.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Pat whispered with an apologetic shrug. “The only TV chef I know is Julia Child.”
“Unfortunately, she won’t be coming this week,” I said.
“I’m thinking of basing my main character on Jason Hill,” said Alex, who was seated next to Jackie. “My script is about a chef who loses his restaurant to his young, ambitious sous-chef—only to find that the sous-chef is also angling to steal his wife. It’s All About Eve with a foodie twist.”
“Don’t give up your day job,” I wanted to say but didn’t, because Alex seemed like a decent person. “Sounds fascinating,” I said instead. “Have you always wanted to be a screenwriter?”
“Any kind of writer,” she said. “You should see all the novels and short stories I’ve started and never finished.”
“Maybe this script is the one,” I said. “If it sells, you can turn it into a novel.”
“I wish.” She smiled hopefully. “Then I can give up dentistry and write full-time. Removing tartar from people’s teeth gets old after awhile.”
I was about to share my own trials with crowns and root canals and receding gums, but I noticed that Rebecca was hurrying into the hall outside the kitchen. I assumed she was retrieving Chef Hill so she could usher him in with great fanfare. I turned away to resume my conversation with Alex when I heard an oddly familiar voice coming from the hall, a male voice, a voice that was apologizing to Rebecca for being late.
“I meant to get here earlier, but hey, circumstances beyond my control and all that,” the male voice went on, becoming more identifiable—too identifiable—with every syllable.
It can’t be, I thought. It really couldn’t be, even though Simon often used the fallback line, “Hey, circumstances beyond my control and all that,” when he was late. No. It was impossible, unthinkable, unconscionable that he would suddenly appear at Whitley Farm—as a Cultivate Our Bounty agritourist, no less. No. Just no. I must have been overthinking it.
“Not a problem,” Rebecca said.
“No, really,” said the voice. “One of these days I’ll show up on time. Being late is a weakness of mine, a character flaw.”
This can’t be happening, I thought. Yes, Simon was always late for things, but so were plenty of other people. On the other hand, he was probably the record-holder for being late, and I had the emotional scars to prove it. Take my birthday, for instance, which turned out to be the last straw for our relationship. He’d made a reservation at my favorite restaurant. He’d said we’d have a romantic evening, just the two of us, and that he’d bought a special present for me—a present that he’d wait to give me after we got home from dinner, a present that would have significance for us as a couple. I thought that he didn’t want to make a big show of proposing at the restaurant because it was such a cliché the way men slipped rings in champagne glasses and hid them in bread baskets and arranged for pastry chefs to embed them in the center of chocolate molten lava cakes. I really thought he meant business.
Our reservation for dinner on that fateful night was for seven thirty. I didn’t panic when he didn’t show up at my apartment at six thirty. I didn’t panic when he didn’t show up at seven, either. I didn’t even panic when he didn’t show at seven fifteen, although the restaurant was on the West Side and I lived on the East Side. And it was pouring so hard we’d never in a million years be able to get a cab. Oh, and the restaurant was one of those self-important places that charged your credit card if you bailed at the last minute. I reminded myself that Simon was habitually late and had been since I’d met him on the ship when he used to arrive at dinner every night at least ten minutes after the rest of us were seated. He was forever losing track of time, and I’d learned over the course of our many months together that his intractable tardiness was simply a personality quirk. I loved him in spite of his lateness is what I’m saying.
But when he walked into my apartment at 8:34, toting a heavily soaked, gift-wrapped package as big as a microwave, I was beyond livid. I was livid that he was late on a night that was supposed to be one of the happiest nights of my life. I was livid that our reservation was canceled and I wouldn’t be swooning over the restaurant’s pan roasted loup de mer with the crispy skin, the potato puree, or the lemon artichoke sauce. I was livid—and this was the most egregious item on the already egregious list—that the heavily soaked, gift-wrapped package as big as a microwave turned out to be a microwave. I mean, you can’t put a microwave on the ring finger of your left hand and go around modeling it for everybody now can you?
“I’m sorry you missed our welcome party last night and our foraging expedition this morning,” said Rebecca. “Come and join the others while we wait for Chef Hill to get here.”
I started sweating like some crazed menopausal woman off her HRT, and if volcanic lava could explode out of one’s nose and ears, it would have exploded out of mine.
“Really looking forward to these cooking classes,” said the voice.
“You’ll have a great time,” said Rebecca. “Follow me.”
He doesn’t have the balls, I thought as I heard the footsteps approaching. He has no right to crash my week with my friends. I’ve already begun to entertain the possibility of a relationship with Jonathan Birnbaum. I’ve moved on!
I ducked as they entered the kitchen. My right eyelid began to twitch too, one of those nerve things where you lose control of your body and can’t do a thing about it. I finally glanced up, only because I couldn’t spend the whole class with my chin tucked inside my rib cage, and confirmed that our latecomer for the week, the entire fucking week, was my former boyfriend.
Naturally, he looked stupidly handsome in his jeans and Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, the mesh slim-fit one with the breathable cotton, the one in that liquid-blue shade that accentuated his liquid-blue eyes. The one he’d worn on the ship last year when he’d made me fall in love with him. He had the nerve to wear that shirt of all shirts. But he could have worn one of Whitley’s tote bags and still looked movie-star handsome—George Clooney, Cary Grant handsome, only extremely tall, around six five, which made us the perfect couple, height-wise. He had dark, wavy hair with touches of gray at his temples, sky-blue eyes behind his tortoiseshell glasses, a straight nose, a square jaw, juicy lips, a lean, yet broad-shouldered body, the complete visual package.
He waved at me with a grin that should have been sheepish but was instead full of self-confidence and good cheer, and took a seat in the row behind me, next to Beatrice, who seemed to have recovered just fine from her “fall.” I heard him introduce himself to her and everybody else. He told them his grandparents used to have a farm up in Duchess County and as a boy he’d enjoyed spending weekends there. He regaled them with tales of collecting eggs from the chickens and feeding the baby goats with a bottle and watching Rudy, the rooster, wander into the driveway and nearly get run over by his grandpa Charlie’s tractor. So what if he’d told me the same stories and they were true? He had walked right into my vacation, my cooking class, my space, and charmed the crap out of these people; it was a total breach of breakup etiquette.
Keeping my gaze straight ahead, I reached for Jackie’s hand with my right, Pat’s hand with my left, and hissed, “Do you believe this?” When all they did was giggle, I realized I’d been set up. “You knew?” I hissed some more, searching their faces now. “You knew?”
Jackie leaned in and whispered, “He wants to show you he’s sorry. He asked us if it was okay to come and we said yes.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t turn around.
“Hey, Slim,” said Simon.
“You think this is funny,” I said still looking straight ahead.
> “A little,” he agreed. “I can’t wait to see you cooking. It’ll be epic.”
Ha ha ha. I’d give him epic. An epic week of the cold shoulder.
I was relieved when Chef Jason Hill materialized in his chef whites with his entourage of four, each of whom was a young male schlepping a heavy, clanging bag of kitchen tools. He waved halfheartedly at us with the pained expression of a very famous person who resented having to perform in front of such a small audience.
Connie bolted up, threw her arms in the air and said, “He’s heeeere!” and Chef Hill didn’t so much as make eye contact with her. A compact man in his mid thirties, with tattoos that ran up his neck and down the exposed parts of his arms, he had a crooked, tough-guy nose, acne-scarred skin, a shaved head, and a goatee—not a heartthrob in the conventional sense but the sort of anti-hero that culinary stars were made of these days. He reeked of pomposity as he issued commands to the members of his staff, who proceeded to prep all sorts of food with lightning speed, as if their boss had a plane to catch.
While we students continued to sit in our seats, and Rebecca wished us an enjoyable class before fleeing, he barked more orders at the underlings and then looked up at us and said, “Hold tight, gang. Be right back,” after which he disappeared in the direction of the restroom. When he returned a few minutes later, his mood seemed to have lightened. Even from my seat I could guess why: His nostrils were dusted with the tiniest traces of a powder that wasn’t confectioner’s sugar, and he was sniffling.
“I think Chef Hill’s a cokehead,” I whispered to Pat and Jackie. “It would give new meaning to farm-to-table, as in a farm in Colombia.”