by Jay Rayner
“Perhaps if you opened the door I could introduce myself?” There was the sound of locks being turned and safety chains being slipped from their holding place. I pulled myself up. A man flung open the door, but turned and walked away into the house so quickly that I didn’t get a good look at him.
“I told you to stay away,” he shouted back at me as he slipped into the shadows. “I tell them all to stay away.”
“I’m really sorry if I misunderstood you, Professor Schenke. I asked if I could come to see you and I thought you said you’d be here, which I took to mean I could drop by.” It is true he had slammed the phone down after that, but I had assumed his closing words to be an invitation from a busy academic lost in his own thoughts.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he barked from somewhere deep inside the house.
I followed his voice to a study at the back. Its shelved walls were packed with books and most of the floor space was covered by tottering piles of yellowing journals. Light filled the cramped room from a wall of windows that presented a view of the tree-carpeted Catskills, and the sun caught motes of dust and old paper that hung in the air. Schenke was sitting at a desk behind a copy of that day’s New York Times, the broadsheet held full spread in a way that reminded me immediately of my father.
“Professor …?”
He dropped the paper. “What do you want?” He was a wiry man in his fifties, and everything about him—his clothes, the bags beneath his eyes, his wild wavy hair—hung down, as if the force of gravity affected him more than others. His steel-framed spectacles were pushed up atop his long forehead, and when he jutted his head toward me the lenses scattered the sunlight about the room, which made me squint.
“I was wondering whether we could discuss the practicalities of the international apology?” I said. It sounded pompous, but it really was the point of the trip.
“You want to know about practicalities? I’ll tell you about fucking practicalities. There’s no hot water ‘cause the boiler’s blown, my car’s up shit creek, and now that witch of a cleaning lady”—he waved toward the front door—“has walked—”
“I heard breaking glass.”
He stood up, leaned across the desk at me, and shouted, “She made me throw the bottles at her!” He sat down and started reading the paper again, laid flat across the desk. “It was provocation,” he muttered to himself. “That’s what it was. Undue provocation. That’s what I’ll tell ’em. Call me a slob, will she?”
“Maybe I chose a bad day. Perhaps I’ll go now and we can sort out another time when—”
“Hah! What’s a good day? Define a good day for me, O Mighty Chief Apologist. The man who knows everything. Where did they find you anyway?”
“Well, I—”
“Some snotty jerk profiting off my hard work.”
“I don’t think that’s fair. I’m only trying to do a job that—”
“Another lazy little shit like all the rest of them, leeching off me. Sucking me dry.”
“Professor Schenke, I don’t see how I can be accused of doing anything to you.”
“You’re like the rest of them.” He leaned back in his chair and picked up the paper to hide behind. I watched him in silence. He did not move. All I could see were his two wrinkled thumbs pressing so hard against each outer edge of the paper that it began to tear. I decided to try another tack.
“You know, Professor, you’re not at all what I was expecting.”
He snapped the paper down. “What were you hoping for? Snow-fucking-White?”
“Jennie, he’s vile.”
“We did try to keep you away from him.”
“He’s paranoid. He’s raving.”
It was the next morning and she was sitting on one of the sofas in my office, her hands clenched nervously in her lap. I paced up and down in front of the window, my gaze fixed on the view of the river.
“I really don’t think you should worry about Professor Schenke.”
“He seemed so angry about everything.”
“Yes, anger is one of his problems. I believe he came up with the first draft of his apology laws as part of the homework for an anger management course he was sent to.”
“Sent to?”
“By the courts. He was the subject of a restraining order. It was a while ago, though.” She crossed one leg over the other.
I stopped and stared at her. “You’re telling me that the founding father of Penitential Engagement is mentally unstable?”
“It doesn’t undermine the quality of his scholarship.”
“No?”
“Absolutely not. His blueprint is still valid. It merely means the Professor isn’t the right man to be involved in the process. Which is why you’ve got the job.”
I turned back to look at the East River, sparkling beneath an early summer blue sky. I watched the tugs drag themselves through the water and the smoke billow from factory chimneys in Queens on the other side and thought about this furious man in his mountain aerie, raging at the world through the mocking sunlight. Angry at everything and nothing at all. Furious with me. And then retiring to his desk in his book-infested study to write works of great moment.
That was when it struck me. Going to see Professor Schenke hadn’t been a mistake. On the contrary. It had been exactly the right thing to do. By discovering what a monster he was, I had given myself the freedom to pursue my apologies however I saw fit. I wasn’t beholden to Schenke. He wasn’t my master and I wasn’t his slave. The mystery had gone. It was as if he had ceased to exist.
I turned to Jennie and said, “Let’s get the team together again.”
She threw me a wink. “That’s my boy.”
Later that day Joe Phillips came up from Psychology, still looking like a Gap billboard, all loose denim and unironed plaid, clutching hours of videotape of Lewis Jeffries III in action: giving lectures, taking meetings, milking cows …
“Milking cows?”
“Yeah, sure,” Joe said. “He owns a few purebred Friesians down at Welton-Oaks. Makes his own cheese and butter, apparently.”
“He wrote a book about it,” Satesh said, flipping through a pile of paper. “Here it is. The Deepest Furrow: An African-American on the Land. It was, er—hang on …” He read the summary quickly. “It describes it as a, quote, polemical memoir reappropriating for African-Americans their traditional role as custodians of the land rather than merely slave labor working upon it, etc., etc., unquote. Published four years ago.”
Joe nodded as if he knew all this already. “Jeffries is a complex chap, Marc, who has managed, quite remarkably, to keep a foot in both urban and rural black American culture while maintaining an impressive profile in academic circles. He still teaches law at Xavier in New Orleans, regularly publishes, both books and in journals, sits on god knows how many committees …” He was leaning on the top of the huge flat-screen television in the sofa area of my office, the picture fixed on a close-up of one of Jeffries’ hands clutched about an engorged bovine teat. He stood up and pointed the remote at the machine. “Anyway, if we just move this along …” He wound the tape forward. “Here’s some very precious footage shot just before the substantive talks at the Georgia statehouse last year.” We all leaned in toward the screen.
“Okay, what I want you to look at here is the straight back, the arms not crossed but open and laid on the table, palms up, head bowed slightly here … and again … in deference to the other side of the table without indicating self-abasement. Either this chap is as honest and open as they come or he’s read a lot of books on how to appear so. Look now … he reaches across to take something from that small bowl in front of him, nuts or something …”
I watched carefully.
“And instead of tipping the bowl toward him, which is a closed-off, exclusive gesture … there we are …”
Beneath the lights in the room the white porcelain of the bowl gave off a sudden glare on the screen which, just for a split second, obscured the whole image. This busin
ess with the bowl and the nuts intrigued me. It looked so very precise.
“… he tips it to one side slightly. He can still see what’s in there, but he’s not excluding anybody, he’s—”
I stood up. “Joe, hold the picture there.”
“Marc, I don’t think we need to—”
“Freeze the picture.”
I studied the screen. For all the nodding I had done and the insightful questions I had asked and the oohs and the aahs, nothing anybody had said to me had moved me an inch closer toward a viable vehicle for the apology. Perhaps there was something in this nut-bowl thing.
I said, “I know what he’s doing.”
Joe looked at the television. “He’s choosing nuts. He’s tipping the bowl and choosing nuts.”
I shook my head. “It’s far more specific than that. He’s not just choosing nuts. He’s choosing specific nuts. He’s picking out all the macadamias and who can blame him? I’m a sucker for them too. Macadamias are fabulous things. Could you, you know, start the tape again … There—see? Pick, pick, pick. Out go the macadamias.” Triumphantly I said, “The man likes his food. That’s what pushes his boat out …”
I sat back down in my seat and turned to Jennie, but I could see from the look on her face that she had already got it. “Fried chicken, potato salad, gumbo …,” she said.
“… macadamia nut pie …”
She tipped her head to one side. “Is there such a thing?”
“Who cares, Jennie? If you can make pecan pie you can make macadamia pie. We’ll find him a recipe. Or we’ll invent one.”
“A menu of African-American soul food. The real thing.”
“Exactly.”
“We’ll need cookbooks.”
“Lots of them.”
“And a big house with a huge prep kitchen. Marc, it will be a triumph.”
“I will apologize to him for the appalling crimes of slavery over a lunch like he’s never had.”
“I said you were the right man for the job,” Jennie said. “I just knew you were right.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. Around me the rest of the team was nodding enthusiastically, even Will Masters. They broke into a round of applause and I felt a warm glow of anticipation break over me: I was only days away from the huge emotional release of a real apology.
Nineteen
There were many things I loved about Lynne McPartland; her cooking was not one of them. She was lousy, unburdened by either technique or good taste. In the early months of our relationship this was a terrible problem because she refused to accept it was so.
“I’ve survived into adulthood on my own food well enough, thank you,” she said one evening, when I offered a little constructive advice. “I think I can get along just fine without you now.”
I did wonder. The casual manner in which she cut up raw and bleeding pieces of meat on our wooden cheese board threatened us repeatedly with poisoning, and even the dishes that came out the way she intended promised a certain measure of gastric distress. She refused to believe, for example, that the order in which ingredients were introduced to each other was of any importance. If Lynne attempted a coq au vin you could never be sure whether the onions would be sweated down before the wine hit the pan or after, uncooked. She insisted upon frying garlic to a bitter brown crisp before allowing anything else near it. And then there was her love of cupboard condiments. One evening she watched me beat a little red currant jelly and Dijon mustard into a lamb jus. This flicked a switch; the secret to flavor, she concluded, lay in the sticky jars that crowded our cupboards. This was the vital intelligence I had kept from her. The next evening I found her spooning neat strawberry jam into a fish pie “to add a touch of sweetness.” The liquor from ajar of pickled onions became a particular favorite “to add an oniony acidic edge” and no Lynne McPartland dish was ever complete unless half a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup had been upended into it.
I took to patrolling the kitchen whenever she was cooking, like a prison guard watching for escapees. I couldn’t help myself. I knew terrible things were happening to innocent ingredients and it was my duty to protect them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the guts to face the situation head-on. Instead of just telling her to cease and desist I would hover by her shoulder and say things like “Are you sure you want to put that smoked salmon in the pan before you’ve scrambled the eggs?” or “Salted anchovies in the mushroom risotto?” She would become ever more hunched over the stove, as if convinced she could hide its tragedy from me.
Inevitably my frustration boiled over, and in the worst possible of places: a review. It was a London hotel restaurant specializing in the fusion of Turkish and Austrian cooking, the resulting horrors served up on overengineered lumps of white porcelain by Villeroy & Boch or Royal Doulton. Koftka schnitzel. Caramelized aubergine puree Strudel. And so on. As I put it:
The last time Austria and Turkey were introduced to each other was on the field of war, and the result here is no less murderous or bloody. Why had I come? After all, if I genuinely wanted to eat food this bad I could have stayed home and got my girlfriend to cook dinner. What’s more, she wouldn’t have charged me fifteen percent for the dismal service. The service would have been equally as dismal. She just wouldn’t have charged me for it.
I told her it was a joke. I told her lots of things, but she was still furious, and rightly so. Yet it did the trick. A division of labor developed in our household which gave us a certain balance; we filled in each other’s gaps and made a kind of whole. I did all the cooking and the washing up. She attended to the rest of the domestic duties, at which, in any case, I was terrible. This suited me perfectly for I was, by nature, a solitary cook who both wanted and needed to keep control of everything that happened in the kitchen. I suspect that even if Lynne had been a good cook I would have done everything in my power to keep her out of there. She could have the bathroom and the living room. She could have the hallway and the bedroom. The kitchen was mine. I was not a team player.
This was what made my first three days down in Louisiana so curious and special. There in our house by the heavy waters of the Mississippi, Jennie and I cooked together, hemmed in by volumes of recipes from Camille Glenn and Craig Claiborne, Bill Neal and Jeanne Voltz and the Culinary Institute of America. We fried chicken that had been dusted only with flour, after Glenn, and then fried some more that had first been soaked, pace Claiborne, in milk and Tabasco, and decided we preferred it unsoaked. We tried our hand at Frogmore stew, thick with lumps of smoked sausage and shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico and hacked-up ears of corn. I made a wild rice gumbo, spiky with cayenne and andouille, and Jennie cooked crawfish in a huge pot that took up half the stove and steamed the windows, and the two of us swapped spoons to taste and check and advise. We took turns beating our grain to make hominy grits until our forearms ached, and boiled them up with salt and butter. We practiced gently kneading buttermilk biscuit dough so that the gluten didn’t become overdeveloped and the biscuits too tough. We cooked up a pasty milk gravy that looked no more appealing for being made according to the instructions. We even tried to invent a macadamia nut pie, using a pecan pie recipe, but it wasn’t a success.
“This tastes like something died,” Franky said after trying it, and as Franky was a Southern boy and wore a pistol in the holster strapped to his chest, it didn’t seem right to argue.
“Franky knows his pie,” said Alex approvingly, as they sat side by side at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, jackets off in the early summer heat, a little sweat staining their shirts, tasting our efforts.
“So we make Key lime pie instead,” Jennie said. “And just chocolate-coat the macadamias?”
Franky and Alex agreed. “That’s all you need with a fine macadamia,” Franky said, heavy with the wisdom of the world bequeathed by a childhood in Alabama. “A good overcoat of chocolate.”
It felt good to be in that kitchen, cooking hard alongside Jennie. We understood each other. So when late on the second day she asked me h
ow my meeting with Max Olson had gone at the Dayton Air Force Base—my “Max Moment,” as she called it—I felt relaxed enough to tell the truth.
“I think he meant it to be special,” I said. “But in truth it was just bizarre.”
Following Schenke’s second law—that no one can apologize for a hurt unless it is their responsibility—it had been deemed necessary to invite individual nations to appoint their own representatives to deal with areas of “local penitential interest” which would fall outside of my purview. For example, because I had opposed South Africa’s apartheid regime during my student days, and had even played a part in The Struggle (by refusing to shop in my nearest supermarket, which insisted upon stocking cans of South African pineapple rings), I clearly wasn’t the best person to say sorry. Instead the job would be falling to a Dutch apologist. Likewise the French apologist would be dealing with various issues in North Africa and Indochina (although I would get to keep the Vietnam War because of the American connections in my family and a certain unwillingness by the French, the former colonial power, to admit they had anything to do with it at all). An Italian countess had been chosen to deal with Ethiopia and Albania, and a trio of Germans had been appointed to do nothing but say sorry to Israel for the grievous hurt of the Holocaust, on a monthly basis, for the next two years.
A former KGB man called Vladimir Rashenko had been appointed by Russia to say sorry for all the things it had done to its neighbors during the Soviet era, “which is particularly fitting,” Jennie said as she led me toward him across the ballroom of the airbase conference center where the UNOAR inaugural meeting was being held, “because dear old Vlad was directly involved in most of them.” Around us the opening cocktail party was in full swing, and the room was packed with UN diplomats and apparatchiks, many of whom Jennie seemed to know.
“You’re kidding me?” I said, trying to keep up.
“No, really. He was a wonder with the cattle prod and the thumbscrew, apparently. Wrote the KGB handbook on modern interrogation techniques.”