by Jenny Nelson
“I knew there was something up with him last night. At least you found out before the wedding.”
“Are you saying I shouldn’t marry him? Because of the coke?”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do, Georgia. But even without the coke, things haven’t seemed so great between the two of you. Ever since he proposed, you’ve seemed, I don’t know, anxious.”
Georgia stood and walked to the window. “Glenn’s a great guy,” she said slowly. “He is. He’s smart, successful, funny—he’s everything any girl would want. It’s just been hard to see lately.”
“But is he what this girl wants?” Clem pointed at Georgia.
“Yes. At least I think so. I don’t know.” Georgia stared at the treetops dotting Central Park, full and verdant after the barren winter. The rain had stopped and the sky filled with a dim light. “Maybe I’m just suffering from a severe case of cold feet.”
“Maybe,” Clem said doubtfully.
“Where’s the kitchen?” Georgia asked. “I’m starving.”
Clem directed her to the kitchen, easily the size of her entire apartment, and she took stock of her ingredients. Some people smoked when they were upset, some did yoga, or drank, or paced, or picked fights, or counted to one hundred. Georgia cooked.
As a small girl growing up in Massachusetts, she’d spent most of her time in her grandmother’s kitchen, watching wide-eyed as Grammy kneaded the dough for her famous pumpernickel bread, sliced up parsnips and turnips for her world-class pot roast, or, if she was feeling exotic, butterflied shrimp for her delicious Thai basil seafood. A big-boned woman of solid peasant stock, as she herself used to say, Grammy moved around the cramped kitchen with grace and efficiency, her curly gray hair twisted into a low bun. Humming pop songs from the forties, her cheeks a pleasing pink, she turned out dish after fabulous dish from the cranky Tappan stove she refused to replace. Those times with Grammy were the happiest Georgia could remember. It had been almost a year since she died, and not a day passed that Georgia didn’t miss her.
She pulled out half a dozen eggs, sliced supermarket Swiss and some bacon from the double-width Sub-Zero. A quick scan of the spice rack yielded a lifetime supply of Old Bay seasoning, three different kinds of peppercorns, and sel de mer from France’s Brittany coast. People’s pantries were as perplexing as their lives. Whisking the eggs, Georgia considered Clem’s words. Marriage was a huge step. Had she accepted Glenn’s proposal because she wanted to marry him or because she wanted what came with marriage: a baby, a family, security? Or maybe she was scared of what would happen if she didn’t marry him. But how could she build a life and family with someone she couldn’t trust? She turned on the stove and listened for the whish that signaled the burner was on.
The eggs sizzled in the sauté pan. Her brow moistened and she preemptively twisted her hair into a bun, knotting it at her neck. During her yearlong break from Glenn, Georgia had dated a dozen men, sleeping with four. There was Marco. And that truffle purveyor who had always flirted with her. And Jim, the singer-songwriter Lo was friends with, the one who lived in corduroy suits. And Paul, the really cute guy who, it had turned out, had a really scary girlfriend.
The thing was, Georgia loved being half of a couple. Waiting in line for overpriced brunches, soaking up sun in Sheep Meadow, late-night flicks at the Angelika—she felt her best when part of a pair. And in that whole year, she hadn’t met anyone, not anyone, she could pair up with. So when Glenn came knocking on her door a year after she walked out of his, bearing a bouquet of out-of-season ranunculus, she welcomed him back with cautiously open arms, sick of hoping to meet him, ready to be an us again.
The smell of crackling bacon lured Petal into the kitchen, where she licked imaginary food drippings from Georgia’s sneakers. Ignoring her, Georgia flipped the omelet, trying to recall the last time she and Glenn had sex. With their equally grueling but opposite schedules, they barely had time for a kiss let alone a romp. Every girl who’d read Cosmo even once knew that once the sex is gone, you may as well kiss the relationship good-bye.
Their first time was that summer in Newport on Mysterious Ways, a sixty-five-foot burled-wood beauty that looked as if it belonged in a Bond movie and was docked at the Yacht Club where they both worked. Easy access to unattended boats was a perk of being the head launch driver. Save for the waves of nausea rippling through Georgia’s belly with each pitch of the boat, it was amazing. After, he sang the Beatles’ “Julia” only semi-ironically, replacing the title name with hers. Somehow she managed to smile serenely as bile danced in her belly, never letting on how close she was to spewing her guts all over her unsuspecting lover. By summer’s end they had inaugurated nearly every boat in the harbor—plowing through three albums’ worth of Beatles songs—and she hadn’t thrown up even once.
Clem walked into the kitchen and pulled up a stool at the center island. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just trying to figure out if it’s really possible that I haven’t had sex with my fiancé in five weeks. And I’m part of the problem too, so I can’t blame it all on the coke. What is happening to us? And why am I just noticing it now? Here”—Georgia slipped the omelet onto a plate—“have an omelet.”
“You know, sometimes nothing happens,” Clem said with her mouth full. “Sometimes you just grow apart. Happened to me, happens to everyone. There’s probably even a Hallmark card for it.” She popped another bite into her mouth and rubbed her tummy. “Now this is good. Even with these lame ingredients, this is good. Open up Georgia’s Joint, and it’ll be a huge hit, no question. Just make the kind of food you like to eat, and they will come.” Clem was the food and wine editor for Happenings, a weekly magazine about the city, and even more obsessed with the restaurant scene than Georgia.
“That’s the plan, minus the Georgia’s Joint part. The Mercedes review definitely doesn’t suck as far as financing is concerned, but first I need to figure out my life. I have a date with a white dress and a judge in nine weeks, with a guy I’m neither sleeping with nor, as it turns out, talking to.”
Clem put her arm over her friend’s shoulder. “Cheer up, George. Everything will work out the way you want it to. You just have to figure out which way that is.”
Georgia ate her omelet and left the Dakota, turning down Clem’s invitations for a shopping trip on Columbus or a bad teen movie on Vudu. Walking through Central Park, she settled in front of the William Shakespeare statue on Poets’ Walk. The crocuses had come and gone, grape hyacinths and daffodils pushed through the dirt, the tulips would soon follow. Anything could happen in springtime in New York.
Fishing through her bag, she pulled out a red leather Smyth-son journal, a Valentine’s gift from Glenn. Thanks to his mother, who basically shopped for a living, Glenn was privy to all the finer things a girl could want, and generous as well. As Mrs. Tavert said, almost everything worth buying could be purchased at the four Bees: Bergdorfs, Barneys, and Bendels, in that order. Bloomingdale’s, the last of the Bees, was a distant fourth, unless you happened to be on the hunt for an electric toothbrush.
She scrawled Pros and Cons across the top of a page and drew a line down the middle. When in doubt, her father, the physics professor, always said, make a list. This was one of the few points on which she wholeheartedly agreed with him.
Under Pros she wrote:
Smart
Sexy
Good hair
Good in bed
She crossed out Good before in bed and wrote Great, then added an arrow indicating it should sit before Good hair. Still not satisfied, she added, (when available/in the mood, i.e., never). Which was actually a con. She crossed it all out, rewrote Good in bed, and moved on.
Successful
Funny
Plays guitar
Athletic
Good taste (gifts)
Makes great burger (and steak)
Loves good wine
And cocaine, she thought. Which brought her to Cons:
Cokehead<
br />
Not trustworthy
Workaholic
Sketchy clients
Doesn’t like my hair/offered to pay for crazy expensive Japanese
straightening.
She stopped writing. He sounded like a white-collar criminal who might or might not knock her socks off in bed, feed her a postcoital steak au poivre, then take off for a game of pickup basketball, but not before strumming a ditty on his gee-tar, snorting cocaine from the glass coffee table in her living room, and leaving behind a wad of cash for an overpriced beauty treatment. So much for lists.
Maybe the coke was just a passing phase. Maybe, as he said, it really wasn’t a big deal. She’d get home and he’d be waiting, and before she could even ask him to stop, he’d say he already had. Then they’d kiss and he’d tell her she was way more important than the coke, or his clients or even his career. She’d believe him… wouldn’t she?
A sax player wearing dark shades and a tweed newsboy cap played “From This Moment On” and Georgia looked up, taking note of all the happy-looking couples strolling and laughing. Euro tourists, she thought, eyeing one especially stylish couple. Lousy with love, the pockets of their his-and-her Helmut Lang jeans lined with euros just waiting to be spent on fabulous clothes, meals, and shows. She was suddenly desperate for a trip to the Italian countryside she loved, for the rolling, green vistas, the quaint hill towns, the alfresco meals. In between her two years at the Culinary Institute, she’d done an externship in Florence with Claudia Cavalli, the famous chef, unearthing a love of all things Italy. Her last visit there was with Glenn, to the wedding of American friends who were married at the former villa of Dante Alighieri. The couple recited their vows in a garden overlooking the Duomo, and she and Glenn had squeezed hands thinking, next time, maybe us.
Her eyes grew heavy and she felt a knot in her throat. Do not cry, she told herself. Do not do it. She stared at the elm trees looming overhead, having once read it was impossible to cry while looking up. Only when she was certain her tears wouldn’t fall did she pick herself up and begin the walk home.
Sally greeted Georgia as she stepped into her apartment, tail wagging, pink tongue lolling happily out of her mouth. Georgia wrapped her arms around Sally’s head, pressing her nose against her dog’s wet, black snout; she had never felt so glad to see anyone. There was no sign of Glenn, no message, no note. Sally nudged her hand and Georgia sank down next to her on the floor. The phone rang.
“Hello?” She didn’t bother checking caller ID.
“Hey.” It was Glenn.
“Glenn. Where are you?” She was ready to forget everything: his coke, her doubts, their problems.
“I’m over at Ray’s. I think I’m gonna crash here tonight.” Ray was Glenn’s hedge-funder cousin who shared a multimillion-dollar, four-thousand-square-foot Tribeca loft with a tank of exotic fish. Georgia and Glenn had toured the space with him before he made his all-cash offer, and she was quite sure she had visibly salivated over the kitchen: six-burner Wolf range, twin Miele dishwashers, double wall ovens, marble countertops honed from a quarry in England. All this for a guy whose Sub-Zero would never hold more than a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a six-pack of Bud.
“Are you serious? You’re not coming home?”
“Yeah. I went back to the apartment while you were out and grabbed some stuff. I need a break, Georgia.”
For the second time that day, Georgia pointed her chin to the ceiling, willing herself not to shed even one tear. “Hold on. You mean, you’re not coming back?”
“Not right now.”
“Because of the coke?”
“It’s not just the coke, Georgia. I need some time.”
She swallowed. “Then take it.”
Georgia replaced the phone on the receiver. She looked into the kitchen, her eyes falling on the pricey Vita-Mix blender Glenn had given her as a makeup gift after their year break. That night they whipped up fresh-mango margaritas and strolled clumsily up Madison Avenue for gelato. It was a balmy spring evening, one of the first of the season, and they had just decided Glenn would move into her apartment. Or rather Glenn had decided and Georgia agreed.
She frowned. Was that how it was between them? He made the decisions and she went along with whatever he decided?
Sally rolled over on her back, nudging Georgia’s hand with her paw. “Time,” she said as she reached down to scratch her pooch’s belly. “He says he needs time.” For what, she didn’t know. As far as she could tell, he’d already decided. And maybe she had too.
Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire danced across the screen while Georgia lay on the couch waiting for the delivery guy. As far as thirties musicals went, it didn’t get more glamorous than Top Hat. She and Grammy had watched it together a million times, a bowl of popcorn propped on the sofa between them, swooning over debonair Fred and gorgeous Ginger. That night, popcorn wouldn’t cut it. The doorbell rang and Georgia went to answer it, picking up a twenty from the dining-room table.
Ice cream in hand, she shuffled into the kitchen, swung open the oven door, and pulled out the second sheet of Toll House cookies, baked to back-of-the-package specifications. Sally had followed her in and now looked up expectantly.
“I’m afraid you’re out on this one, Sals. No chocolate allowed. You know the rules.” She pried off the top of the Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby and stuck in her spoon. “‘Heaven,’” she sang à la Fred Astaire as she took her first bite. “‘I’m in heaven.’” She’d tried convincing Glenn that “Cheek to Cheek” should be their wedding song, but he vetoed it as too cheesy. They still hadn’t agreed on a song for their first dance.
After scooping nearly all of the ice cream into a mixing bowl, she popped it into the microwave to get it sufficiently slushy. She stuck half a dozen cookies into a Ziploc, smashed a frying pan on top of the bag, then mashed the cookie bits into the ice cream, topping it off with a generous pour of U-bet chocolate syrup. For a classically trained chef, Georgia’s tastes, at least in crisis mode, tended to the plebeian.
The phone rang and she picked it up without checking caller ID, sure it’d be Glenn. “Hi.”
“Georgia. I’ve been leaving messages for a week. Didn’t you get them?” It was her mother, Dorothy. After years of twice-monthly phone calls, she’d taken to calling two, sometimes three times a week. Georgia blamed the ring on her finger for her mother’s ringing on the phone.
“Oh, hi. I’ve been really busy lately.” Georgia scooped up a bite of the magical Chubby Chippie concoction. “Sorry,” she said, her mouth full.
“What are you eating?”
“Chubby Hubby ice cream and chocolate chip cookies.”
“With the wedding just weeks away? Not to mention that our family has a history of diabetes.” Dorothy paused. “Although with my mother in the bakery business you’d never know we had issues with sugar.”
Georgia refused to take the bait, well aware that Dorothy’s relationship with Grammy had been less than perfect. Based on Georgia’s own relationship with Dorothy, she was pretty sure she knew why—and it had nothing to do with Grammy.
“Are you trying to get sick, Georgia?”
“Nope.” She took another bite. “Just fat.”
Dorothy sighed. Georgia’s rejection of her mother’s bone-jutting body ideal had been a point of contention between them since Georgia turned three, which was the age, Dorothy believed, when baby fat was no longer adorable.
“Mom, please try to remember I’m a chef. It’s practically illegal for me to be skinny. And I’m not even fat.”
“I know, I know. Anyway, I’m calling to remind you about tomorrow and to check on the wedding planning. I haven’t heard an update lately.” For some inexplicable reason Georgia couldn’t figure out, Dorothy cared more about this one day in her daughter’s life than she had about her entire thirty-three years put together.
“We already have the space, the caterer, the florist, the band, the judge. There’s no more updating to do.”
&nbs
p; “The invitations?”
“We’re going to see the proof next week.”
“Good. How’s Glenn?”
“Glenn is great.” It would never occur to Georgia to tell Dorothy the truth. “Remind me about what?”
“Tell him we’re looking forward to seeing him.”
“I will. Oh, it looks like we’re getting a three-fork review.”
“A what?”
“The restaurant. We’re getting a three-fork review.”
Dorothy was silent.
“Marco? Where I work? A really important reviewer came in last night, and she’s giving us a fantastic review.”
“That’s great, Georgia. I’m glad that cooking is finally working out for you, since it’s obviously what you like to do.”
“Oh, is it that obvious?”
Dorothy charged on, as seemingly oblivious of her daughter’s sarcastic tone as she was of everything else about her. “I was wondering if you thought I could wear a sort of rosy-red dress to the wedding. I know red is traditionally very Republican, but it’s more magenta actually, a floor-length tunic with hand embroidery around the neck.”
“Sounds like Mrs. Roper from Three’s Company.” Considering Dorothy’s obsession with skinniness, you’d think she’d have at least a vague clue about fashion. Instead, she was stuck in the era of Earth shoes, muumuus, and rust-colored pantsuits.
“Mrs. Who? Is Glenn’s mom wearing something similar?”
“I doubt it, Mom. Wear whatever you’d like.”
“Great. Then I’ll see you tomorrow. The party’s at one.”
“Party?”
“You haven’t forgotten, I hope? Dad and I are driving down tomorrow and spending the night in Millbrook at Uncle Paul’s. I have the environmental summit in New York on Monday, remember? Paul invited us all to a lunch he’s having at the farm. All four of us. You said you were coming.”
Georgia put down the Chubby Chippie and tried to remember when Dorothy had mentioned the luncheon. Paul was her dad’s younger, only, and extremely successful brother. He owned a co-op on Sutton Place and a horse farm upstate and had recently gotten engaged—for the third time.