by Cleo Coyle
TWO
I hurried around the high steel service counter and finally got a good look at Solange’s kitchen. The space was a long, narrow rectangle, with a bank of stoves along the wall and prep tables opposite.
According to my daughter’s descriptions, Solange operated no differently than any other busy, upscale restaurant. It utilized the brigade system: basically, a hierarchical food assembly line that was invented in the nineteenth century by the Frenchman Escoffier.
There were supposed to be line cooks here, each one in charge of a different part of the menu (grilling and roasting, sauces, fish, soups, pastry…). But the kitchen looked suddenly abandoned, like a creepy ghost ship’s galley with pans left simmering on the fire and food still on prep tables.
So where’s Joy?! And where’s the staff?! I just heard them!
“I have had enough! Enough, do you hear!” Chef Rouille’s voice shrieked from the back of the long kitchen.
I moved around obstacles toward the sound of French obscenities, stepping carefully over shattered china, a pan emptied of its contents, and an overturned bowl of asparagus stalks.
Finally, I found my daughter. Her back was pressed against one of the stainless steel doors of the walk-in fridge. A brown sauce was splattered across the front of her white jacket—as if someone had sullied her deliberately. Her chestnut hair was slipping from its dark net. Her green eyes were wide, and her heart-shaped face was crimson with embarrassment.
An older woman was bawling her out, and I assumed this was Brigitte Rouille. She was thinner than Joy and slightly taller. About my age, maybe a few years older, with pale skin, a long nose, and straight hair that trailed down her white-jacketed back in a long ebony ponytail.
“You stupid brat!” Brigitte shouted. The woman’s face was flushed with fury. Beneath her tall chef’s hat, her forehead was beaded with sweat. “You are a clumsy moron! Vous écoutez-moi! If you bump into me one more time during service, I will filet your ass so it fits into this kitchen!”
“It’s not my fault, Chef Rouille. I know about economy of movement from school, but you kept bumping me. I was standing still.” Joy’s quiet defense seemed to further enrage the woman, and she went back to shouting in French, tendons bulging on her neck.
My fists clenched, and I looked around to see what had happened to Joy’s coworkers. Finally, I saw them. They’d fled to the dishwashing area: five male line cooks (four small Caucasian men and an Asian guy, their faces blanched as white as their chef’s jackets and flat-topped cook’s caps). There was also an older Latino swing cook, a younger Latino dishwasher, and an African American pastry chef (an attractive young woman wearing a burgundy chef’s jacket). They were all huddled close, like paralyzed swimmers watching a shark circle its chosen victim a few yards away.
Just then, Chef Rouille paused to take a breath from her venomous ranting, and Joy finally snapped out in anger: “If Tommy were here, you wouldn’t be acting like this!”
Chef Rouille’s body went still. “You little putain,” she spat. “You’re the one undermining me with Chef Keitel, aren’t you?”
“No!” Joy’s head shook vehemently. “I’ve never said a word to him about you.”
“You’re lying!”
I desperately wanted to stop this horrifying scene. Yet I knew, as bad as this looked, it was still a workplace matter. I could see Joy was starting to defend herself now, and I didn’t want to make things worse for my daughter, who’d plainly told me to “butt out” of her business more times than I could count.
But then something happened that tilted my universe.
Chef Brigitte Rouille raised her arm. “I’ll teach you!” she cried. Something flashed in her hand, and Joy screamed. That’s when I realized this woman was menacing my child with a foot-long chef’s knife. Okay, that’s it! Butting out time’s over!
I lunged forward. “Get away from my daughter, you crazy bitch!”
I don’t remember exactly how I got myself in front of Brigitte’s slashing chef’s knife. One moment I was calm, the next livid. One moment I was standing still, the next I was on the move, grabbing a wooden cutting board off a prep table and shouting my own head off.
“Back off!” I cried, raising the cutting board like Lancelot’s shield. “I’m Joy’s mother! Je suis la mère de Joy!”
This failed to impress the woman. She was breathing hard, her eyes dilated, her lips curled into a sneer as she continued shouting in French and making stabs at the board. The line cooks remained huddled across the room; still no help from that quarter!
Before Brigitte could do any real damage, however, Napoleon Dornier crept up behind her, seized her wrist, and twisted it.
Brigitte howled in pain.
“Get hold of yourself, woman!” the maître d’ commanded, shaking the chef’s knife from her hand.
The heavy blade clattered to the floor, striking a spark when it hit the tiles. I kicked the knife. It slid away and clanged against the base of a metal cabinet.
Brigitte whirled, lashed out with a clawed hand that shredded the flower on the man’s lapel. “Mon Dieu!” Dornier reared back but continued to grip the sous-chef’s arm.
Though she was very thin, Brigitte Rouille was obviously very strong, and it looked like Dornier might actually lose this struggle.
“Ne me touchez pas!” Brigitte repeated again and again. “Do not touch me! Do not touch me!”
“Stop it, this instant!” Dornier demanded. “It is me, Brigitte! Il est moi! C’est Napoleon Dornier! C’est Nappy!”
“Nappy?…”
Brigitte stopped fighting, and Dornier released her. She blinked and looked around the room in a daze.
“Brigitte, what is going on?” Dornier demanded. “Are you—”
Before he could finish his question, Brigitte burst into tears. Covering her eyes, she fled the kitchen through the back door.
“Brigitte! Brigitte!” Dornier called, and followed the sous-chef into the alley.
WITH the disturbing scene over, the line cooks returned to their stations, picking up with their duties as if nothing had happened. I turned to face my daughter. Joy’s eyes were full of tears as she yanked off her stained chef’s jacket.
“Honey, are you okay?”
I didn’t know what reaction to expect, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the one I got.
“Omigawd, Mom,” Joy whispered, then hugged me tight. “Thank you.”
My daughter had a good four inches on me, and she had to stoop slightly to bury her face in my neck. I could feel her shaking, and I held on to her, giving her time to regain her composure. The staff worked on, avoiding us with their eyes.
“Joy, what happened?” I asked softly.
My daughter pulled away, swiped at her tears. “Ramon,” she called to the older Latino swing cook, “can you take over my station?”
The squat, dark-haired man with a slightly pockmarked face nodded once. “No problem.”
Joy thanked him, then took my arm and led me down a narrow corridor lit by buzzing fluorescent ceiling lights. She sat me down in a tiny room next to a stairwell. Inside the room, a bunch of metal folding chairs was scattered around a wooden table. There was a TV, a computer, and a boom box, all of which were off.
“This is our break room,” she explained, avoiding my gaze.
My daughter was obviously dealing with feelings of embarrassment. I was feeling a very different emotion. “What’s wrong with those people out there?” I said loudly.
“Quiet, Mom, they’ll hear you—”
“No. You could have been killed, hurt badly at the very least, by that crazy woman, and nobody in your kitchen moved a muscle! You’re lucky the maître d’ was there to disarm her!”
Joy closed the door and sat down. “You don’t understand,” she said, much softer than I was speaking. “Brigitte accused me of messing up some of tonight’s plates.”
“Excuse me?”
“She said the sea bass should have gone out on a be
d of ramps, but I was putting asparagus down instead. I wasn’t! I know the difference between a freakin’ locally grown leek and a spear of asparagus! She accused me of being incompetent, but I told her that I’d done it right. And since the plates went out already, I couldn’t even prove it. I told her nobody sent them back or complained—so she was just making it up to make me look bad in front of everyone. That’s when she flung the béarnaise sauce on me.”
Joy lifted the soiled chef’s jacket in her hand. “And then she said I was purposely bumping into her all night. I wasn’t. She was the one bumping me—and on purpose, if you ask me. Anyway, her little fit tonight was nothing new. Chef Rouille’s been throwing a tantrum almost every night now.”
“I’d call trying to slash your throat with a chef’s knife more than a simple tantrum.”
Joy sighed. “She probably wouldn’t have hurt me—”
“Probably!? Muffin, that woman’s certifiable. I think someone should press charges. Surely Brigitte’s guilty of assault with a deadly—”
“No!” Joy touched my arm. “My internship’s been going really well. I’m not going to mess it up by calling the cops on Tommy’s restaurant.”
“Okay…but you have to tell me more. What exactly has been going on with that woman?”
Joy shook her head. “It’s not like Chef Rouille singled me out for special persecution. Last Saturday she screamed at Henry Tso, the sauté chef, and Henry never makes a mistake. On Tuesday she came down on Don Maris, the seafood chef, for overbroiling a lobster. Then yesterday, she gave Vinny so much work he had to hide in the walk-in refrigerator until everybody went home last night, just so he could finish. She threatened to have him fired if he didn’t have it all done by the morning. You remember Vinny Buccelli, don’t you? You met him at that press party last month. It was the same night you met Tommy.”
I did remember Vinny. He was a nice-looking Italian boy—a young friend of Joy’s from her culinary school class. I had assumed (wrongly) that the quiet, slight young man was Joy’s boyfriend, something I still hoped could come true once she realized how wrong she was to get involved with Tommy Keitel.
Joy frowned. “Brigitte’s got Vinny so rattled he called in sick today. And nobody calls in sick at Solange unless they want to lose their job.”
“What kind of a kitchen is Tommy running?” I demanded.
“This isn’t Tommy’s fault,” Joy replied—too quickly, I thought.
“Mr. Dornier told me that Tommy hasn’t been around much lately,” I said. “Dornier doesn’t sound happy about it, and I can see why. Tommy’s the executive chef. If he’s not around, then he’s not doing his job.”
Joy’s face got tight. I recognized the look. I’d obviously struck a nerve.
“Is that man still sleeping with you?” I asked bluntly.
“Mom!”
“I know. I’m not supposed to bring it up, but—”
“Please don’t start that again, or we’ll have to stop talking altogether.”
I threw up my hands. “Truce!”
Joy flipped her ponytail over her shoulder, looked away.
“Truce,” I repeated, reaching over to squeeze her arm. “Okay?”
Eyes downcast, Joy nodded. “Okay,” she said softly. “And the answer is yes. Tommy and I are still involved…romantically.”
I tried not to cringe at the word. I found nothing whatsoever romantic about their relationship. It was seedy. It was wrong. And it was a testament to my daughter’s immaturity that she’d use a word like that to describe what was going on between her and a workplace supervisor thirty years her senior, who was married with kids.
On the face of it, I would have guessed that Joy had been singled out for criticism, if not sabotage, because she was getting preferential treatment from the big boss. But if the restaurant’s French-Canadian sous-chef had been torturing poor Vinny Buccelli so badly that he’d called in sick, it sounded like she was routinely targeting different staff members for her wrath. So why wasn’t Keitel doing something about it?
“Joy, tell me what’s going on with Tommy.”
“Well…Mr. Dornier is right,” she began, leaning closer. “Tommy has been absent—a lot. When I first started my internship three months ago, he was practically married to this place. Everyone says he was like that from the very first day. He’d come in early, oversee everything in the kitchen, right through dinner service. He’d stay late, too. After the last customer left, he and Dornier would sit in the dining room with a bottle of wine and go over every detail of the evening—‘tragedies and triumphs’ is how Tommy put it. He wanted to be in on every little thing that went wrong or right at Solange.”
Joy shook her head. “I really loved that about him, Mom…but now he’s hardly here. Sometimes he checks in around noon, but then he takes off a few hours later, way before dinner service even starts. And he doesn’t come back.”
“Where does he go?”
Joy shrugged. “Nobody knows. He won’t tell me, and everyone’s talking. Everyone has a theory about where Tommy’s going, what he’s doing…even who he’s doing…”
My daughter’s voice trailed off, and she looked away, her expression hurt and confused. Congratulations, Joy, I thought but didn’t dare say. Now you know how Tommy’s wife must feel.
I loved my daughter more than anything, but I wanted her to learn from this mistake. Affairs between older, high-powered men and their young interns seldom ended well—and the beginning of the end was the girl getting a clue that her cloud-nine view of Mr. Big was far from grounded in reality. I was relieved to see Joy at last displaying some ambivalence toward the larger-than-life Keitel.
“It wouldn’t be so bad,” Joy began to equivocate, “except that Tommy leaves Brigitte in charge.”
I forced myself not to roll my eyes. “I can see where that would be a problem.”
“You can’t imagine how bad it’s gotten,” Joy said, shaking her head. “Brigitte was just fine when Tommy was around, telling her what to do, but now that he’s gone, she can’t handle the responsibility. Some of the other cooks are saying she’s taking drugs to get through it—”
“Drugs!”
“Mom, please! Keep your voice down.”
Oh, God…of course… That crazed woman had shown all the signs: the dilated pupils, the sweat on her brow, the shaking, the paranoia, the uncanny strength when she’d fought Dornier. It has to be uppers. Amphetamines would have caused those symptoms, and they were the drugs of choice in this kind of late-night work. Stay up! Stay focused! Speed or meth would produce those symptoms, too. So would cocaine…
The very word doused me with horrible memories.
My ex-husband had become a coke addict during our marriage (and I’m not talking about the stuff you buy in ice-cold cans). The drug use had been “harmless” at first. Or so Matt kept telling me. “Just a few lines” during parties in Central and South America, where cocaine had been used for centuries and was still a cash crop. Then he began doing lines privately “just to combat jet lag.” Right. Somewhere in there he’d started sleeping around and cleaned out our bank account. Clearly, the drug use wasn’t so “harmless” anymore.
Hearing about drug use in Solange’s kitchen was my nightmare come true. Ever since I’d caught Joy snorting cocaine with some friends in the bathroom of a downtown nightclub, I worried she’d start traveling the same path her father had: arrested for possession, rushed to the hospital after overdosing, relapsing after rehab.
Joy’s use hadn’t gone beyond a few casual experiments, out of “curiosity,” but I knew it was a short trip to hell if she wasn’t careful—because I’d had a front-row seat for Matt’s descent.
My ex-husband was clean now, and he believed he’d won out over his addiction. But recovered addicts never really stopped fighting the battle. He’d have to continue resisting relapse for the rest of his life. I didn’t want that for my daughter.
Joy cleared her throat. She seemed to take my lengthy silence fo
r disbelief. “I know it sounds crazy,” she said. “I mean, who has time to do drugs in Tommy’s kitchen? There’s too much work, and so much is expected of everyone. You always have to perform to the highest standards, and who can do that while they’re high or stoned out of their minds?”
“What are you saying?”
“That Tommy won’t tolerate drugs. He’s made that clear to everyone. If he ever found out Brigitte was using again, he’d fire her on the spot. I’m sure of it.”
I was genuinely surprised by this revelation. I’d assumed Tommy Keitel was a hard-partying guy. But if Tommy was doing drugs at all, it would have been with the young woman he was bedding; and I could see in Joy’s eyes that she was telling me the truth.
“Tommy knows something’s wrong in the kitchen,” Joy continued. “But, for some reason, I don’t think he cares. He didn’t come in at all last week, and Brigitte was in charge. She’s fine for the prep work and most of service, but at the end of the night, she goes ballistic, freaking about any little thing she thinks went wrong. It’s been getting worse and worse—”
A knock on the door interrupted us.
“Yes?” Joy called.
“It’s Ramon. We’re getting ready to close up now.”
“I’ll be right out,” Joy said. She rose, picked up her soiled jacket, and straightened her bangs with her fingers. “I kind of have to go.”
“Me, too,” I said, rising. “When I left your grandmother in the dining room, she was flirting with a new potential beau.” I smiled at my daughter. “They’re probably engaged by now. Either that or your grandmother’s already broken his heart and moved on to her next conquest.”
Joy laughed, and I was happy to hear it.
“Listen, honey,” I put my arm around her. “Tommy needs to be told what’s going on. Will you let me talk to him?”
“No, Mom. That’s ridiculous. This is my workplace. I’ll handle the problem. I’ll just explain to Tommy what’s been happening. I’m sure he’ll listen to me.”
“Are you, Joy? Tommy Keitel doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who listens to anyone.”