Naturally, being good at everything, Brian knew how to kiss. He had the oblique style she liked. She murmured ambiguously: “I love your taste.” He put his hands everywhere she’d expected him to put them. She unbuttoned his shirt as the woman does at a certain point. She licked his nipple in the nodding, firm way of a grooming cat. She put a practiced, curled hand on the lump in his pants. She was beautifully, avidly adulterous and she knew it. She embarked on buckle work, on hook and button projects, on elastic-band labors, until there began to swell inside her, hardly noticeable and then suddenly distinct, and then not merely distinct but increasingly painful in its pressure on her peritoneum and eyeballs and arteries and meninges, a body-sized, Robin-faced balloon of wrongness.
Brian’s voice was in her ear. He was asking the protection question. He’d mistaken her discomfort for transports, her squirming for an invitation. She clarified by rolling out of bed and crouching in a corner of the hotel room. She said she couldn’t.
Brian sat up on the bed and made no reply. She stole a glance and confirmed that his endowment was per expectation for the man who had everything. She suspected that she wouldn’t soon forget the sight of this dick. Would be seeing it when she closed her eyes, at inconvenient times, in far-fetched contexts.
She apologized to him.
“No, you’re right,” Brian said, deferring to her judgment. “I feel terrible. I’ve never done anything like this.”
“See, I have,” she said, lest he think her merely timid. “More than once. And I don’t want to anymore.”
“No, of course, you’re right.”
“If you weren’t married—If I weren’t your employee—”
“Listen, I’m dealing with it. I’m going in the bathroom now. I’m dealing with it.”
“Thank you.”
Part of her thought: What is my problem?
Another part of her thought: For once in my life, I’m doing the right thing.
She spent four nights by herself in Alsace and flew home from Frankfurt. She was shocked when she went to see the progress that Brian’s team had made at the Generator in her absence. The building-within-a-building was already framed out, the concrete subfloors poured. She could see what the effect would be: a bright bubble of modernity in a twilight of monumental industry. Although she had faith in her cooking, the grandness of the space made her nervous. She wished that she’d insisted on an ordinary plain space in which her food could shine alone. She felt seduced and suckered somehow—as if, unbeknownst to her, Brian had been competing with her for the world’s attention. As if, all along, in his affable way, he’d been angling to make the restaurant his, not hers.
She was haunted, just as she’d feared, by the afterimage of his dick. She felt gladder and gladder that she hadn’t let him put it in her. Brian had every advantage that she had, plus many of his own. He was male, he was rich, he was a born insider; he wasn’t hampered by Lambert weirdnesses or strong opinions; he was an amateur with nothing to lose but throwaway money, and to succeed all he needed was a good idea and somebody else (namely her) to do the hard work. How lucky she’d been, in that hotel room, to recognize him as her adversary! Two more minutes and she would have disappeared. She would have become another facet of his really fun life, her beauty reflecting on his irresistibility, her talents redounding to his restaurant’s glory. How lucky she’d been, how lucky.
She believed that if, when the Generator opened, reviewers paid more attention to the space than to the food, she would lose and Brian would win. And so she worked her ass off. She convection-roasted country ribs to brownness and cut them thin, along the grain, for presentation, reduced and darkened the kraut gravy to bring out its nutty, earthy, cabbagy, porky flavor, and arted up the plate with twin testicular new potatoes, a cluster of Brussels sprouts, and a spoon of stewed white beans that she lightly spiked with roasted garlic. She invented luxurious new white sausages. She matched a fennel relish, roasted potatoes, and good bitter wholesome rapini with fabulous pork chops that she bought direct from a sixties holdover organic farmer who did his own butchering and made his own deliveries. She took the guy to lunch and visited his farm in Lancaster County and met the hogs in question, examined their eclectic diet (boiled yams and chicken wings, acorns and chestnuts) and toured the soundproofed room where they were slaughtered. She extracted commitments from her old crew at Mare Scuro. She took former colleagues out on Brian’s AmEx and sized up the local competition (most of it reassuringly undistinguished) and sampled desserts to see if anybody’s pastry chef was worth stealing. She staged one-woman late-night forcemeat festivals. She made sauerkraut in five-gallon buckets in her basement. She made it with red cabbage and with shredded kale in cabbage juice, with juniper berries and black peppercorns. She hurried along the fermentation with hundred-watt bulbs.
Brian still called her every day, but he didn’t take her driving in his Volvo anymore, he didn’t play her music. Behind his polite questions she sensed a waning interest. She recommended an old friend of hers, Rob Zito, to manage the Generator, and when Brian took the two of them to lunch, he stayed for half an hour. He had an appointment in New York.
One night Denise called him at home and instead got Robin Passafaro. Robin’s clipped phrases—“OK,” “Whatever,” “Yes,” “I’ll tell him,” “OK”—so irritated Denise that she deliberately kept her on the line. She asked how the Garden Project was going.
“Fine,” Robin said. “I’ll tell Brian you called.”
“Could I come over sometime and see it?”
Robin replied with naked rudeness: “Why?”
“Well,” Denise said, “it’s something Brian talks about” (this was a lie; he rarely mentioned it), “it’s an interesting project” (in fact, it sounded Utopian and crackpot), “and, you know, I love vegetables.”
“Uh huh.”
“So maybe some Saturday afternoon or something.”
“Whenever.”
A moment later Denise slammed the phone down in its cradle. She was angry, among other things, at how fake she’d sounded to herself. “I could have fucked your husband!” she said. “And I chose not to! So how about a little friendliness?”
Maybe, if she’d been a better person, she would have left Robin alone. Maybe she wanted to make Robin like her simply to deny her the satisfaction of disliking her—to win that contest of esteem. Maybe she was just picking up the gauntlet. But the desire to be liked was real. She was haunted by the feeling that Robin had been in the hotel room with her and Brian; by that bursting sensation of Robin’s presence inside her body.
On the last Saturday of baseball season she cooked at home for eight hours, shrink-wrapping trout, juggling half a dozen kraut salads, and pairing the pan juices of sautéed kidneys with interesting spirits. Late in the day she went for a walk and, finding herself going west, crossed Broad Street into the ghetto of Point Breeze, where Robin had her Project.
The weather was fine. Early autumn in Philadelphia brought smells of fresh seawater and tidewater, gradual abatements in temperature, a quiet abdication of control by the humid air masses that had held the onshore breeze at bay all summer. Denise passed an old woman in a housecoat standing watch while two dusty men unloaded Acme groceries from a corroded Pinto’s hatchback. Cinderblock was the material of choice over here for blinding windows. There were fire-gutted lunc onettes and p zer as. Friable houses with bedsheet curtains. Expanses of fresh asphalt that seemed to seal the neighborhood’s fate more than promise renewal.
Denise didn’t care if she saw Robin. Almost better, in a way, to score the point subtly—to let Robin find out from Brian that she’d taken the trouble to walk by the Project.
She came to a block within whose chain-link confines were small hills of mulch and large piles of wilted vegetation. At the far corner of the block, behind the only house left standing on it, somebody was working rocky soil with a shovel.
The front door of the solitary house was open. A black girl of college age was sit
ting at a desk that also contained a vastly ghastly plaid sofa and a wheeled blackboard on which a column of names (Lateesha, Latoya, Tyrell) was followed by columns of HOURS TO DATE and DOLLARS TO DATE.
“Looking for Robin,” Denise said.
The girl nodded at the open rear door of the house. “She’s in back.”
The garden was raw but peaceful. Not much seemed to have been grown here besides squashes and their cousins, but the patches of vine were extensive, and the smells of mulch and dirt, and the onshore autumn breeze, were full of childhood memory.
Robin was shoveling rubble into a makeshift sieve. She had thin arms and a hummingbird metabolism and took many fast small bites of rubble instead of fewer big ones. She was wearing a black bandanna and a very dirty T-shirt with the text QUALITY DAYCARE: PAY NOW OR PAY LATER. She seemed neither surprised nor pleased to see Denise.
“This is a big project,” Denise said.
Robin shrugged, holding the shovel with both hands as if to stress that she felt interrupted.
“Do you want some help?” Denise said.
“No. The kids were supposed to do this, but there’s a game over at the river. I’m just cleaning up.”
She whacked the rubble in the sieve to urge some dirt through. Caught in the mesh were fragments of brick and mortar, gobs of roofing tar, ailanthus limbs, petrified cat shit, Baccardi and Yuengling labels with backings of broken glass.
“So what did you grow?” Denise said.
Robin shrugged again. “Nothing that would impress you.” “Well, like what?”
“Like zucchini and pumpkins.”
“I cook with both of those.”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“I have a couple of half-time assistants that I pay. Sara’s a junior at Temple.”
“And who are the kids who were supposed to be here?”
“Neighborhood kids between twelve and sixteen.” Robin took off her glasses and rubbed sweat from her face with a dirty sleeve. Denise had forgotten, or had never noticed to begin with, what a pretty mouth she had. “They get minimum wage plus vegetables, plus a share of any money we make.”
“Do you subtract expenses?”
“That would discourage them.”
“Right.”
Robin looked away, across the street, at a row of dead buildings with rusting sheet-metal cornices. “Brian says you’re very competitive.”
“Oh really?”
“He said he wouldn’t want to arm-wrestle you.”
Denise winced.
“He said he wouldn’t want to be the other chef in the kitchen with you.”
“No danger of that,” Denise said.
“He said he wouldn’t want to play Scrabble with you.”
“Uh huh.”
“He said he wouldn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit with you.”
OK, OK, Denise thought.
Robin was breathing hard. “Anyway.”
“Yeah, anyway.”
“Here’s why I didn’t go to Paris,” Robin said. “I thought Erin was too young. Sinéad was having fun at art camp, and I had tons of work here.”
“I understood that.”
“And you guys were going to be talking about food all day. And Brian said it was business. So.”
Denise raised her eyes from the dirt but couldn’t quite look Robin in the eye. “It was business.”
Robin, her lip trembling, said, “Whatever!”
Above the ghetto a fleet of copper-bottomed clouds, Revere Ware clouds, had withdrawn to the northwest. It was the moment when the blue backdrop of the sky grayed to the same value as the stratus formations in front of it, when night light and day light were in equilibrium.
“You know, I’m not really into guys,” Denise said.
“Pardon me?”
“I said I don’t sleep with men anymore. Since I got divorced.”
Robin frowned as if this made no sense to her at all. “Does Brian know that?”
“I don’t know. Not from my telling him.”
Robin thought this over for a moment and then began to laugh. She said, “Hee hee hee!” She said, “Ha ha ha!” Her laugh was full-throated and embarrassing and, at the same time, Denise thought, lovely. It echoed off the rusty-corniced houses. “Poor Brian!” she said. “Poor Brian!”
Robin immediately became more cordial. She put down her shovel and gave Denise a tour of the garden—“my little enchanted kingdom” she called it. Finding that she had Denise’s interest, she risked enthusiasm. Here was a new asparagus patch, here two rows of young pear and apple trees that she hoped to espalier, here the late crops of sunflowers, acorn squash, and kale. She’d planted only sure winners this summer, hoping to hook a core group of local teenagers and reward them for the thankless infrastructural work of preparing beds, running pipes, adjusting drainages, and connecting rain barrels to the roof of the house.
“This is basically a selfish project,” Robin said. “I always wanted a big garden, and now the whole inner city’s going back to farmland. But the kids who really need to be out working with their hands and learning what fresh food tastes like are the ones who aren’t doing it. They’re latchkey kids. They’re getting high, they’re having sex, or they’re stuck in some classroom until six with a computer. But they’re also at an age when it’s still fun to play in the dirt.”
“Though possibly not as much fun as sex or drugs.”
“Maybe not for ninety percent of kids,” Robin said. “I just want there to be something for the other ten percent. Some alternative that doesn’t involve computers. I want Sinéad and Erin to be around kids who aren’t like them. I want them to learn how to work. I want them to know that work isn’t just pointing and clicking.”
“This is very admirable,” Denise said.
Robin, mistaking her tone, said, “Whatever.”
Denise sat on the plastic skin of a bale of peat moss while Robin washed up and changed her clothes. Maybe it was because she could count on one hand the autumn Saturday evenings that she’d spent outside a kitchen since she was twenty, or maybe because some sentimental part of her was taken in by the egalitarian ideal that Klaus Müller-Karltreu found so phony in St. Jude, but the word she wanted to apply to Robin Passafaro, who had lived in urban Philly all her life, was “midwestern.” By which she meant hopeful or enthusiastic or community-spirited.
She didn’t care so much, after all, about being liked. She found herself liking. When Robin came out and locked the house, Denise asked if she had time for dinner.
“Brian and his dad took the girls to see the Phillies,” Robin said. “They’ll come home full of stadium food. So, sure. We can have dinner.”
“I have stuff in my kitchen,” Denise said. “Do you mind?”
“Anything. Whatever.”
Typically, if a chef invited you to dinner, you considered yourself lucky and you hastened to show it. But Robin seemed determined not to be impressed.
Night had fallen. The air on Catharine Street smelled like the last weekend of baseball. Walking east, Robin told Denise the story of her brother, Billy. Denise had already heard the story from Brian, but parts of Robin’s version were new to her.
“So wait,” she said. “Brian sold his company to W——, and then Billy attacked one of W——’s vice presidents, and you think there’s a connection?”
“God, yes,” Robin said. “That’s what’s so horrible.”
“Brian didn’t mention that part.”
Shrillness came pouring out of Robin. “I can’t believe it! That’s the whole point. God! It is so, so, so like him not to mention that part. Because that part might actually make things hard for him, you know, the way things are hard for me. It might get in the way of his fun time in Paris, or his lunch date with Harvey Keitel, or whatever. I can’t believe he didn’t mention it.”
“Explain to me what the problem is?”
“Rick Flamburg’s disabled for life,” Robin said. “My brother is in
jail for the next ten or fifteen years, this horrible company is corrupting the city schools, my father is on anti-psychotics, and Brian is like, hey, look what W——just did for us, let’s move to Mendocino!”
“But you didn’t do anything wrong,” Denise said. “You’re not responsible for any of those other things.”
Robin turned and looked straight into her. “What’s life for?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.”
They marched along in silence. Denise, to whom winning did matter, grimly noted that, on top of all his other luck, Brian had married a woman of principle and spirit.
She further noted, however, that Robin didn’t seem particularly loyal.
Denise’s living room contained little more than it had after Emile had emptied it three years earlier. In their contest of self-denials, on the Weekend of Tears, Denise had had the double advantage of feeling guiltier than Emile and of having already agreed to take the house. In the end she’d succeeded in making Emile take practically every joint possession that she liked or valued and many others that she didn’t like but could have used.
The emptiness of the house had disgusted Becky Hemerling. It was cold, it was self-hating, it was a monastery.
“Nice and spare,” Robin commented.
Denise sat her down at the half Ping-Pong table that served as her kitchen table, opened a fifty-dollar wine, and proceeded to feed her. Denise had seldom had to struggle with her weight, but she would have blimped out in a month if she’d eaten like Robin. She watched in awe as her guest, elbows flying, devoured two kidneys and a homemade sausage, tried each of the kraut salads, and spread butter on her third healthy wedge of artisanal rye bread.
She herself had the butterflies and ate hardly anything.
“St. Jude is one of my favorite saints,” Robin said. “Did Brian tell you I’ve been going to church?”
“He mentioned it, yes.”
“I’m sure he did. I’m sure he was very understanding and patient!” Robin’s voice was loud and her face red with wine. Denise felt a constriction in her chest. “Anyway, one of the great things about being Catholic is you get to have saints, like St. Jude.”
The Corrections Page 45