Chapter 3
Thursdays were always crazy in the kitchen. We had the Friday night ceremonies for the late planners and the couples looking to save money on room rentals, not to mention preparing for Saturday’s onslaught of nuptial madness. Luckily, at this point I rarely had to make a personal appearance at the receptions anymore and instead relied on our drivers who were also trained to assemble the cakes on-site when necessary. After all, as the proprietor of Lauren’s Luscious Licks, I was much too busy to be navigating the streets of Boston in a refrigerated truck – or at least that’s what I led my clients to believe. The truth was, if I had to sit through one more round of outdated, humiliating wedding traditions I’d hurl myself onto the cake knife and beg the caterer to put me out of my misery. Whether it was watching adult women lift their thousand dollar dresses to expose a four dollar garter belt like some tart at the Mustang Ranch, or the bride and groom kissing like a couple of Pavlov’s dogs every time some relative from Topeka clinked a glass with a fork, I’d had my fill. I mean, toss a handful of hundred dollar bills into a crowd of single women instead of a secondhand wilting bouquet – they could use the cash a hell of a lot more than twenty-hour old roses and the promise that they were next down the aisle. Even I’d join in on that little ritual.
Typically I didn’t even offer tastings past noon on Thursdays, but when it was one of your best friends getting married, you made an exception.
The boutique’s cake gallery didn’t have a clock, but I could tell by the noises coming from the kitchen that it was just past four o’clock. All today’s orders were filled by now, and it was clean up time. I headed into the kitchen to check on Paige’s tasting selections, and found the staff preparing tomorrow’s cake boards with a thin layer of rolled sugar paste while Maria stooped over one of the butcher block benches.
“We all set?” I asked Maria as I took the serving tray down from a speed rack.
“Almost.” She squeezed the pastry bag gently, piping just the right amount of raspberry puree into an elegant spiral on the last plate. “Now we’re ready. Paige will be happy.”
Maria loved Paige. Whenever Paige stopped by the boutique on her way to a client’s house or in between appointments, Maria turned from a grand monster into the consummate Italian grandmother. She let Paige taste icings and fillings, and always put together a little something for Paige to take home with her. Even though I thought Maria did it as much to annoy me as anything else, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t love Paige.
When I walked into my room on the second floor of Pomeroy my freshman year at Wellesley, I was curious to meet the owner of the three matching Samsonite suitcases on the otherwise empty floor. My roommate for the next nine months had wasted no time during our brief phone conversation filling me in on what she thought I should know. In less than four minutes I learned that Paige Carmichael was valedictorian of her graduating class (but it wasn’t such a big deal, Paige had assured me, there were only a hundred kids in the entire class, and most of them were morons), that Paige was going to major in economics and go into real estate (Boston’s answer to Donald Trump, only without the gilt-covered tributes to her ego or entourage of starlits), and that Paige Carmichael absolutely, completely, to the core of her being, detested applesauce (but if you like it, then I’m sure we can come to some sort of compromise, Paige had offered, as if I might be planning to hoard jars of Motts under my bed).
I had pictured a very tall, very attractive, self-assured blonde (we’d never gotten around to asking each other what we looked like, even though we were curious we felt it belied our intellect and burgeoning feminism to care about such things), so when a petite brunette in a pink corded headband showed up with the last of her belongings, I was surprised – all that confidence was packed into someone so tiny, so completely the antithesis of what I had pictured, that I was immediately at ease. How could you not like someone who looked like the leader of a pep squad, sported a t-shirt that read Visualize Whirled Peas, and feared the concept of pureed apples? We wouldn’t be sharing clothes, which was a bummer because I figured one of the benefits of having a roommate was the doubling effect it would have on my wardrobe, but I hoped we’d become good friends.
Even after we’d met Robin on the steps of the bookstore smoking a cigarette, Paige and I shared a level of familiarity and candor that could only come from surviving close living quarters, monthly mood swings, and all the firsts that went along with our newfound independence. Even now, I found it hard to believe that the Paige who was getting married, the over-achieving real estate agent who wouldn’t consider going outside without sunscreen much less without undergarments, was the same girl who had Robin and me on the floor of Donovan’s pool room searching for her lost underwear. And how did we get Paige Carmichael, birthday girl, Phi Beta Kappa member and anal retentive president of the class of 1993 to remove her underwear in a bar? We didn’t, but the Harvard senior feeding her celebratory shots of Jagermeister did.
"Could I have lost any more dignity in that room just now?" Paige asked when Robin and I caught up to her in the hallway outside the poolroom and learned that she’d had to sacrifice her underwear in a mad dash to get dressed. Apparently a group of rugby players were about to turn on the overhead lights and discover her splayed out on the pool table in her birthday suit with a guy named Digger. As she was leaving, one of the Rugby players uncovered her pair of lacy bikini bottoms and decided that instead of returning them to Paige, as she’d asked him to do, he’d use her underwear for a game of hot potato.
“That would mean we thought you had dignity to begin with.” Robin cracked a smile, but by now Paige’s Jagermeister buzz had given way to a throbbing headache and her sense of humor was left in that room along with her underwear.
“Look at it this way, you have a hell of a story to tell your tenants when they refuse to leave the premises: The case of the vacated panties – why possession is still nine tenths of the law,” I managed to say before we all burst out laughing.
“You ever repeat this to anyone and I’ll sue your asses for defamation.”
I threw an arm over Paige’s shoulder and led her back toward the bar. “At least our asses will have underwear on them.”
That was probably the last time I saw Paige do anything irrational. Since then she’s managed to keep her head, and her underwear, screwed on tight – unless you counted sleeping with a science teacher from Roxbury on a scuba diving trip she won for having the highest quarterly sales in her office. I guess oxygen deprivation and a wet suit with fins can do as much to impair one’s judgment as a few shots of Jagermeister. In Paige’s case she literally opted for a shot of sex on the beach instead.
I was arranging the gallery’s tasting table for Paige and Steve, placing two Reed & Barton dessert forks every eight inches until there were six matching sets, when the phone rang and the front door opened simultaneously, letting in a burst of winter air.
I took the call and held up a finger to indicate to the visitor that I’d be a minute.
“I’ll be right with you.” I mouthed, pointing to the cordless phone I had pressed up to my ear.
The man smiled and turned his back to me as he looked up at the over-sized cake portraits hanging on the gallery walls. It was actually a very nice smile, an easy smile. Usually the men who came in alone were uptight, as if just by walking into a cake boutique they were at risk of losing their manhood. If they thought Lauren’s Luscious Licks was intimidating, they wouldn’t last five minutes in the lobby of Women In Action.
I sat down at the tasting table and opened the scheduling diary to next week. But even as I went through the available openings, I had trouble diverting my eyes from the black overcoat making its way across the floor. A few snowflakes dotted the shoulders and arms of the coat, and I watched as they melted away, replaced by shiny droplets of water.
After finally settling on Wednesday afternoon, I penciled in the caller’s name and turned my attention to the dark haired
man slowly moving from one photo to the next.
“Can I help you?” I offered, and waited for my unexpected visitor to turn around so I could get a better look at who those broad shoulders belonged to. The wait was worth it.
“Lauren? I’m Charlie Banks.” He started toward to the tasting table where I was still seated on my stool. “We met the other day in Starbucks.”
“Oh sure, I didn’t recognize you.” I stood up and went to shake Charlie’s hand, which was warm from being nestled in his coat pocket.
Is this what I was missing every morning by walking around half comatose before my daily dose of Starbucks? How could I have not noticed what a great smile Charlie Banks had? I glanced at his left hand for evidence of a precious metal, a skill most women have mastered by the time that little detail starts to matter, and noticed it was bare.
One benefit of working in a cake boutique was being able to immediately find out if a man was already taken. Of course, one of the disadvantages was that ninety-nine percent of the men who entered the boutique were accompanied by their fiancés.
“Are you interested in a cake?” I asked, screening him for a future Mrs. Banks.
“Actually, I’m here because Gwen Stern was afraid that if she came here herself, you’d hold it against her, and she’s still got her heart set on one of your cakes for her next wedding.” Charlie stuffed his hands back into his overcoat and shrugged, as if he was embarrassed to even be having this conversation. “Anyway, she’d like her photo removed from your portfolio. She says the emotional strain of knowing other couples will see it is too great.”
“Sure. No problem.” I started back toward the tasting table to retrieve the portfolio.
“I feel ridiculous even doing this.” Charlie apologized and followed me, each step of his polished wing-tipped shoes echoing throughout the sparse gallery.
“Don’t. It’s not the first time.” I assured him, even though it was the first time a client sent a six foot tall attorney with caramel brown eyes.
“It’s a first for me. But you know, we do share a lot of the same clients.”
“Do we?” I gestured for him to take a seat and started slowly going through the portfolio page by page even though I knew exactly where to find the Stern’s cake.
“Oh, sure. I’ve seen a lot of your cakes immortalized in photo albums that are touted around as proof. My male clients don’t usually bother trotting out the wedding photos, but for some reason the women like to take me through every page in painstaking detail, pointing out how happy they were, and how their soon-to-be-ex-husbands should have to pay for making it all go awry. I swear, sometimes I think I can tell they were going to end up in my office just by looking at the pictures of the bride and groom feeding each other cake – some couples just look so gleeful at the opportunity to take a four-pronged utensil and drive it at their spouses face, like they wish it was a pitch fork.”
Charlie’s admission was an instant aphrodisiac. It seemed the Goodman & Moore partner and I shared more than a roster of clients. We shared insight that was as valuable as insider information. But while his instinct may be right on when his client is signing the retainer check for his services, I could tell which couples were destined for a seat in his downtown office before they even tied the knot. Still, it wasn’t often I met someone who shared my propensity to predict coupling catastrophe.
“That’s funny. Sometimes I think I can tell just by watching them pick out a cake, like it’s my sixth sense – I see divorced people.”
Charlie let out a laugh and grinned at me. “Maybe there’s an opportunity for us there – a joint venture of sorts, or at the very least I could offer you a referral bonus or something.”
“Sounds lucrative, but that would eliminate all the romance, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t get to see much of the romance, as you can probably imagine. In my line of work, marriage is more a form of job security than anything else.”
I stopped turning the album’s pages and looked up at Charlie. He held my glance for a moment before looking away, and it wasn’t until an embarrassingly long breath escaped from my mouth that I realized I’d stopped breathing.
“Is that it?” he asked, pointing to the citron vodka cake displayed behind a sheet of non-glare plastic.
“That’s it.” I slid my hand behind the stiff covering and removed the photo. Reluctantly, I handed it over. “Here you go.”
Charlie took the photo and carefully slipped it into the chest pocket of his overcoat. “Thanks. I better get going, I’m not quite sure how I’ll explain this on my time sheet – there’s not exactly a column for billable hours spent retrieving cake portraits.”
I followed Charlie to the front door, inhaling the deliciously foreign and unsweet scent of him as I lingered in the wake of his cologne. I tried to think of a way to get him to stay a little while longer, but my arsenal of witty banter and feminine wiles ran out years ago.
The best idea I could come up with on such short notice was to ask Charlie if he’d like any other clients’ photos, or even just a cup of coffee before venturing outside again. Not exactly original, but also not something he’d be likely to turn down in twenty degree weather, either. Just as I was about to say something Charlie stopped in the open doorway and peeked his head back into the gallery, his cheeks already turning pink from the wind. “Thanks again, Lauren.”
I smiled mutely, choking under the pressure. Me, a woman who once addressed an entire auditorium filled with wedding planners, couldn’t get out the words necessary to offer a man a cup of coffee. Quite pitiful, even for someone out of practice. Obviously getting a date wasn’t like riding a bike. Or if it was, I was a candidate for training wheels.
When the door closed behind him, I wrapped my arms across my chest and let out a little shiver. Charlie Banks was more than just a divorce attorney who managed to be charming even as he was revoking a client’s cake portrait. He had something most men lacked – intuition. A man with intuition who didn’t wear skin tight silk t-shirts, perch his hands on his hips and call everyone sweetie. I didn’t know they existed.
As far as I was concerned, there were two kinds of guys – the aforementioned hip swaying variety was automatically excluded, of course. In my experience, which I wish I could say was vast but was more like selectively sporadic, there were the guys you met and enjoyed talking to for a while before it dawned on you that maybe this was someone worth getting to know. It had been like that with Neil. Then there were the guys you met and even though your lips were moving and the conversation was bumping along nicely, the only thing going through your head is what’s this guy like in bed? And which group did Charlie fall into? Come on, it wasn’t even a toss up.
Maybe I could call Judy Dennison and recommend that I introduce her to a divorce attorney at Goodman & Moore. Or maybe a joint venture wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
After seven years of self-imposed dating exile, Charlie was like a mirage in my dating desert. I wasn’t going to let him slip away that easily. While the thought of recommending Charlie to Judy Dennison was tempting, she was probably on the market again and already looking for husband number two. I didn’t need the competition. So how could I get Charlie back into the boutique?
I straightened up the cake gallery and mulled over my options. Thankfully, straightening up consisted mostly of arranging the client chairs and my chrome stool. Everyone always thought that “cake boutique” was just a fancy term for bakery, but in fact the room was modeled after the upscale art galleries that my clients loved to ooh-and-ah over even as they passed over the works of art for the art of networking. The seventeen-by-twenty five foot room had the requisite polished blonde hardwood floors and recessed lighting, but large blow-ups of black and white cake photographs were mounted on the ivory walls where canvases would usually hang. Readying the gallery for tasting appointments simply required realigning the two Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs that faced the client-side of the glass-topped tasting table. T
he chairs, with their white quilted leather seats and chrome plated metal frames, may have seemed a little sterile for an environment that should conjure up childhood memories of licking batter-covered spoons and stealing fingertip-covered swipes of sugary icing, but the crowd that flocked to Lauren’s Luscious Licks weren’t exactly traditional. My brides wore chic sheaths and strapless gowns that showed off sculpted bodies and cleavage sprinkled with bronzing powder. There was nothing frilly about my clientele – they approached wedding planning with the managerial savvy of a CEO and the acute knowledge that a wedding was only as good as it looked. Right down to the cake.
At Lauren’s Luscious Licks, we didn’t adorn the gallery with all the homey touches normally associated with weddings – there were no elaborately carved and upholstered Victorian side chairs, no salmon and pink chintz curtains ballooning over the large picture windows running along the sidewalk, no oriental rugs lining the floors or grand chandelier hanging from the ceiling. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fresh tulips tucked into a solitary Lalique vase standing on the glass slab tasting table, passersby would have probably thought the storefront was deserted. But, even as clients sunk into the plush leather seating and swayed gently to the George Winston CD softly wafting from the built in speakers, I knew that the Zen-like quality of the gallery was all an illusion, because beyond the cream-colored swinging door in the center of the back wall, the real work was getting done.
Maria kept an immaculate kitchen, all shiny stainless steel with a place for everything and everything in its place, as she liked to remind me. Maria’s only personal touch was a handwritten piece of paper taped up on the wall above one of the butcher block benches. In her tight, sharp script she’d scrawled The only way for a woman, as for a man, to know herself as a person is by creative work of her own. It wasn’t as if Maria went around quoting feminist writers, so I figured she must have seen the Betty Friedan line on a calendar or something. When I asked her if she’d ever actually read The Feminine Mystique Maria didn’t miss an opportunity to put me in my place.
Dress Rehearsal Page 3