Food Whore

by Jessica Tom

  SUBJECT: Let’s Talk

  I assume you’ve seen the review by now. You have a special talent. Come to my apartment, 257 Central Park West. Tomorrow we will discuss everything.

  Damn right we would. I had seen my words in the New York Times once before, and that time I hadn’t made the most of it. Now I knew the value of my voice, and I wouldn’t let someone else take it without a fight.

  Chapter 8

  ­PEOPLE CAME READY TO GOSSIP ABOUT THE REVIEW AT MY internship seminar.

  “I bet everyone freaked,” said Rachel, a thirty-­year-­old former banker interning at a sustainable fishing advocacy group.

  “Reviews are over, anyway. Do ­people still care about those?” Geo asked. He was working at a kitchen incubator geared toward low-­income immigrant women.

  Even our seminar leader, a Food Studies postdoc researching the link between obesity and methamphetamine use, weighed in. “Authority will never die. It may change platforms, it may shift voices, but there will always be room for the guru,” she said, with a doleful nod. “And Tia, what do you think?” she asked.

  My classmates looked at me with disinterest. I’d be skeptical about my insight, too. From what I’d heard about the internships, the early weeks were about busy work. Students came in with these ideas and directions for the future, only to have them squashed by protocol, status quo, and moody staffers who made sure the grad student didn’t feel too privileged.

  “Well . . .” I said. “It’ll be tough to recover, I’m sure. I was there when it happened and I saw him.” I stopped and watched them slip to the edges of their seats. Just for kicks, I waited a beat longer to see their eyes widen even more. “We even talked.”

  “You talked to Michael Saltz?” Rachel squawked. “About what?”

  “Oh,” I said, slow and easy, knowing that all ten of them at the seminar table were hanging on my every word. On some level, they must have known they were merely gossiping earlier. Idle academic chatter.

  But I couldn’t tell them about my real role, not until Michael Saltz gave me an explanation. “I just gave his table their palate cleansers,” I said reluctantly.

  And then the spell broke. Rachel leaned back. Geo rolled his eyes. Even our seminar leader sighed audibly.

  “Okay,” she snapped. “Let’s talk about our actual work.”

  Easy come, easy go. I opened my notebook, a journal of my internship experience. Already the words were reading like a farce, a sanitized shell of intellectualized blabber. Just like this seminar. Just like grad school. A play-­area separated from what mattered. Who mattered.

  AFTER SEMINAR, I rode the C train to Michael Saltz’s Upper West Side apartment, a beautiful high-­rise with a fountain and a rounded driveway in the front, like a hotel.

  “I’m here to see Michael Saltz, please,” I said to the man at the front desk. The lobby dripped baroque—­marbles and golds and heavy drapery—­and I felt too young and poor and disheveled for the surroundings. Why hadn’t I worn my Jil Sander suit?

  The man at the front desk had a long face and boxy chin and eyed me through wire-­rimmed glasses. “And your name is?”

  “Tia Monroe. He’s expecting me.”

  Without hiding his grimace, he dialed a number, then turned away and whispered in the phone. He spun around. “Thirty-­five Q. Elevators are over there,” he said, without showing me where “there” was. I took the elevator up and stood in front of 35Q for a split second, clenched my jaw, and knocked. I vowed that whatever he said, I’d hold my ground. He’d stolen my words, and I needed to find out why.

  Michael Saltz opened his door slowly at first, then swung it wide open.

  “Come in, come in,” he insisted. He grabbed my elbow so tightly, I was sure he couldn’t know his own strength. Strangers don’t touch other strangers like this. I swallowed hard as he pulled me into his living room.

  As expected, his thirty-­fifth-­floor apartment had a stunning view of Central Park. But what I didn’t expect was the smell. I picked out smoke and meat, spices and herbs. Eggs and bananas and cheese. Not bad separately—­delicious, even—­but the combined vile stink of everything meant I spent the first five minutes trying to figure out how to will my nostrils shut.

  Michael Saltz looked like a different man from the one I had seen on the street and at the restaurant. Sober and in the light, he looked sharp and intimidating, despite the oppressive stench. He was quite tall and slinked onto his long, white leather couch with a calm, collected fluidity. I knew he was a very important man. I knew I was alone with him in his apartment. But I didn’t know what he wanted from me, and that was the gravelly grind inside my throat.

  I sat down on another couch. In front of us stood a coffee table topped with various jars. In fact, jars covered every surface of the apartment, all of them closed except for a few by a laptop on the dining room table.

  I leaned back on the couch and my cardigan slipped down at the shoulder, revealing my tank top and a little bit of my bra strap. I yanked it back up.

  “Don’t worry about that.” Michael Saltz laughed. “I’m flaming.”

  “Oh,” I said. That relaxed me, but only a little. I wanted to confront him about stealing my words, but already I felt scared.

  “You’re not here for a booty call, that’s for sure. But I’ll tell you why I invited you in a moment, I just want to get one thing.” He picked up a beige-­gray ceramic jar from the far corner of the coffee table. He circled his fingertips around the lid gingerly, as if the jar held a tiny animal that needed to be coaxed out.

  Was he going to drug me? Show me something disgusting? It seemed like he was taunting me, flaunting how much control he had.

  Finally he revealed a brilliant tangle of saffron. I could tell it was excellent quality by the long, elegant strands and the way it had stained the unglazed jar its same shade of burnt red.

  He swirled the jar in front of his nose. “But before I go into that whole mess, isn’t this magnificent?” He poked his finger inside the saffron, mashing the valuable threads, and brought the jar up to his nose. ­“People forget that saffron is the backbone of a flower,” he said, still sniffing. “They get so preoccupied with saffron’s cost that they forget what saffron really is.”

  “My boyfriend used to study crocuses in college,” I said, unsure where the conversation was going, but determined to set it on stable ground. “He harvested the strands for a pilot dining hall program, but gave me the best ones to cook with.”

  “A match made in heaven.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s great . . .” But we weren’t here to discuss my love life. What were we here to discuss?

  “And what did you make with the saffron?” Michael Saltz asked.

  “My specialty is a rice stew with ginger and flounder.” He had brought the conversation back to food and I felt more at ease.

  “Like a paella?”

  “No, not like a paella. I don’t use shellfish, because . . .”

  “Oh, right, allergic! Yes, how could I forget?”

  He had an excellent memory. Or maybe just for me.

  “It has an Asian flair,” I continued. “The saffron adds a taste of the sun. You have the pillowy sea element of the flounder and the earthiness of the rice, and I think the farminess of the saffron—­that rustic, rough flavor—­brings the dish together.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” Michael Saltz said. “Simply wonderful. Will you excuse me for a moment?”

  “Fine, but I wanted to talk to you about—­” But he wasn’t listening.

  He walked to a cabinet underneath his wide expanse of windows. “I bought this from an old library in Paris,” he said, running his fingers across the labeled drawers until he came across the one he wanted. He opened it and plucked out a lined white card. He brought it back to the table, and wrote in slow, tortured script:

  Saffro
n rice with ginger and flounder: haylike, sea, land.

  He put the card back on the coffee table and looked at me blankly, as if he hadn’t just sucked the words right out of my mouth.

  “Wait a second,” I said. I was willing to hear him out by coming to his apartment, and was even willing to let him delay his explanation. But I wouldn’t let him make a habit of stealing everything I uttered.

  “Tell me what you want from me,” I said. “I’m not talking about food until I get some answers.”

  “Answers!” he said, as if they were at the tip of his tongue all along. “Yes, that’s what we’re here for. I’m quoting your words for my archives.”

  “Archives . . . so you have dishes to refer to when you try new things?”

  Michael Saltz laughed a long, disturbing laugh. He turned bright red and said, with tears in his eyes, “No. Wouldn’t that be nice. Actually, that’s why I’ve asked you here.”

  Finally—­this was the moment. Maybe he had some news about Helen? Or he wanted to apologize for not securing her internship for me?

  “There are no new dishes to me,” Michael Saltz continued. “That card catalog of tastes, that’s all I have. My memories, and the memories of others.”

  “Oh . . . because you forget flavor combinations?” I guessed. I thought of the ras el hanout pork. He had clearly forgotten what that tasted like, or else he wouldn’t have mistaken it for the regular salt-­and-­pepper version.

  “You can’t forget what you’ve never had,” he said. “But here, let me demonstrate.” He opened a drawer in the coffee table and handed me a bottle of red liquid wrapped at the base with aluminum foil. The bottle looked like it belonged in a lab more than in a living room.

  “See this? This is made from one of the hottest chilis in the world, bhut jolokia. There are some farmers who say they’ve grown a hotter pepper, but the bhut is the most natural—the gentleman’s hot pepper, I’d say. Open it.”

  I twisted the small cap, and immediately my hands burned and my eyes teared.

  He snatched the bottle away from me, tilted his head back, and shook the bottle into his mouth until a sinister-­looking pool of sauce collected on his tongue.

  He closed his mouth and sucked his cheeks in. After about thirty seconds of what felt like a private freak show, he stuck his tongue out and revealed a quarter-­sized welt that pulsed with anger.

  “This is my favorite ‘taste.’ But it’s not really a taste. I can only feel the burn. These are volatile, violent oils. But that’s all.”

  Suddenly, I understood. His apartment’s funk, his skeletal frame, his inability to differentiate those two porks.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “All gone. Sweet, spicy, sour, bitter . . . the flavors mean nothing. The most finely calibrated soups taste like sewer water, an elegant filet is cardboard. I’m the unluckiest man in the world, or so I thought . . . until I found you. I need your help and your exquisite palate.”

  My eyes were still tearing from the tiny whiff of bhut jolokia I’d caught, and I was sure the sauce had singed a hole in my cardigan, but I didn’t care. This was huge. Michael Saltz, the world’s most powerful food critic, couldn’t taste. He couldn’t do his job at the most basic level, and now, for some reason, he wanted my help.

  “I’m just a shell of what I used to be, robbed of what I loved most in life,” he said. But then his eyes lit up. “But my grief is your opportunity. I want your assistance. You are a true food mind, someone who understands flavors and honors the craft enough to pursue it at all costs. I want you to become my sense of taste. You will be my protégée and accompany me on my meals—­the best and newest places. You will know about them all, experience them all . . . rule on them all. If you’re up to the challenge.”

  My mouth dropped as I struggled to understand. “You want me . . . to eat meals with you . . . and write about them? Me?” I thought he had invited me to his home to apologize. But he’d done something even better.

  Michael Saltz opened his hands, palms up, as if to say, Of course you. “And there are perks,” he quickly added. “I have a personal account with Bergdorf Goodman, unrelated to the New York Times. I want you to go there. You can use my personal shopper, Giada. She will take good care of you.”

  Bergdorf: the grand mecca of designer clothing. This was going a bit too fast and all I could do was repeat what he was saying, even though the words were fantastical and strange coming out of my mouth. “So . . . I get to go with you to these restaurants? And pick out my own outfit at Bergdorf Goodman?”

  “Not an outfit. A whole wardrobe! Giada will help you. This will be a wonderful change for you.”

  I felt delirious. It seemed like a joke. And yet the intense smell of the apartment and Michael Saltz himself, staring at me with his beady-­eyed gaze, convinced me. Amazingly, this was real life.

  My mind raced through every fancy dinner I had ever had. I could count them on one hand, and they’d always been apologetic affairs, excursions where I felt underdressed and left hungry for more. The only time my family had gone out to eat had been when we were on vacation, and still my parents would complain how they could make those dishes better at home.

  The first time I’d felt like I belonged at a fancy restaurant had been less than a week ago at Madison Park Tavern’s tasting. But now I’d be on the other side, dining and not serving. I wouldn’t have to worry about not dressing the part. My personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman would take care of that.

  I could even get my own Prenza Schooler purse, or whatever the brand was called.

  “Just one small thing,” he continued. “It probably doesn’t even need to be said.”

  “Oh, what’s that?” I asked, breathless over this new chapter.

  “This has to be a secret. If anyone found out I was working under these . . . unsuitable . . . conditions, the whole food world would have a fit. It’d be journalistic fraud, which is a very serious offense. I ask for your discretion, and in return you get dinners and clothes and an education unlike anything you can get in any school.”

  “Discretion . . . So I can’t tell . . . anyone?” My mind clicked. Of course, a catch.

  “Not a soul. Remember—­free dinners, clothes, and, occasionally, your words in the Times blended with mine. That is your compensation, and our secret. Now that we’ve become involved, no one must know where you’re going or what you’re writing.”

  Now that we were involved? I had agreed to come to his apartment, but I didn’t remember signing a contract.

  “Mr. Saltz . . .” I said.

  “Please, we’re partners now. Call me Michael.”

  “Okay . . . Michael. ‘Our secret’? I still haven’t said yes to anything.”

  Michael Saltz scowled, his face an asterisk of wrinkles. Then he spoke, bringing his face so close to mine that I saw the veins in his eyes, wild branches of red that crowded his pupils.

  “But don’t you see? You have. You talked to me in the basement and didn’t tell anyone you saw me, not then and not after. You probably didn’t even tell anyone you were coming here.”

  He had me there, yet again. I had told no one. But I couldn’t put my finger on why. I guess I’d wanted to keep this to myself, to incubate it away from insistent eyes. Just for a little while.

  “That’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he continued. “You were being judicious.”

  If my parents or Elliott or anyone knew what was happening, surely they’d encourage me to explore the opportunity. Explore and negotiate. I had to be smart about the offer. Michael Saltz was asking me to sacrifice something tremendous—­my identity. Now I recognized his enthusiasm at the door as desperation. It would be ridiculous to do this gigantic favor for him without securing a prize of equal value for myself. Wouldn’t it?

  I must have made a thoughtful face or hesitated too long, because when Saltz spoke again there was an edge t
o his voice.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked sourly. “Is this generous offer not to your liking?”

  “No. I mean, yes, it is. It’s amazing. I’m just wondering about one thing.” I was afraid to say it, afraid he’d withdraw his proposal. But what did I have to lose? He may have been playing tough, but I saw the hopeful, embarrassed look in his eyes. I had leverage and I had a dream, one I hadn’t let go, even with my Madison Park Tavern assignment.

  “Helen Lansky,” I said.

  “Yes, Helen. The fine woman who brought us together.”

  “Right. You said you’d help me get that internship before, but now it’s gone. Dean Chang at NYU said there are no guarantees that Helen will serve as a mentor again. If I’m working with you, and keeping all of this secret, I won’t be able to concentrate on building my résumé if and when Helen accepts applications again.”

  Michael Saltz looked around his apartment. I followed his gaze, but couldn’t tell what he was looking at or thinking.

  “Helen, Helen. How could I forget about Helen? I should have known you’d still want to work alongside her after being placed at Madison Park Tavern. She has quite the pull. Well, in that case, I’ll tell you the full story. I neglected to mention that I’m planning to undergo taste-­correction surgery later this fall—­January, at the latest—­pending approval from my ENT doctor, my neurosurgeon at New York–Presbyterian, and the FDA. It’s an experimental surgery, and I’m up next in the trial. So this is only for the current semester. After that, I’ll make sure you and Helen Lansky connect.” He spoke with a certainty and crispness that sounded like fact.

  “Didn’t you promise that the first time around? That you would get me Helen?”

  He waved his hand. “Yes, but that was for school. That’s not the real world. The world doesn’t act on committees and applications. It acts on this.” He jerked his hand between our bodies. “Personal relationships. Influence. Access. You know I know Helen and that I can get you into any restaurant. And you know your opinions will matter to me. The one thing you need is faith.”