Eat Cake: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  Chapter Ten

  FOR THE SECOND MORNING IN A ROW I WAS UP AT four o’clock. Yesterday I couldn’t sleep because I was too nervous about getting the cakes off. This morning I couldn’t sleep because I was worried about how they were doing. Did the manager take them home and eat them? Did he feed them to his wife and kids, throw the box away, and consider all the unseen perks of being a restaurant manager? Or were the cakes eaten at a conference table, the owner, the manager, the sommelier, and the head chef all sitting down for a serious slice? Did they discuss the body of the cake, the crumb? Did they analyze the icing? Choose a nice Sauternes to complement it, or did they drink a little water between slices to clear their palates?

  Sam rolled over, sighed, and pushed down deeper into his pillow to dream of sloops and yawls. I got up and put my bathrobe on and headed to the kitchen. I turned on the light over the stove and set the oven to three-fifty. I was just going to take the butter out of the refrigerator when, for the second morning in a row, I met my mother coming down the hall from the wrong direction.

  “Don’t you sleep anymore?” She was very nearly shouting.

  “Keep your voice down. Somebody in this house is probably still asleep. I’m tense, okay? I’m worried about the cakes.”

  “Why can’t you be tense in your own bedroom?”

  “Mom, I’m not asking you what you’re doing wandering around at four in the morning, why do you care what I’m doing? Why can’t we both walk through the kitchen whenever we want to?”

  “There’s no privacy in this house.”

  “There hasn’t been in a long time.”

  We both folded our arms across our bathrobes and stared at each other.

  “What are you doing anyway?” she said.

  “I’m going to bake some cakes.”

  My mother looked at me as if I had told her I was going to move to Memphis and join an Elvis cult. “All you’ve done is bake! You have to stop this.”

  “I didn’t make the cakes for the concierges that Dad called. And you said yourself you wanted some cakes for people at church.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted them at four in the morning.”

  “Well, you don’t get to set the schedule.”

  “Fine!” she said. “Then I’ll just go back to work on the boxes. I wasn’t planning on sleeping anymore anyway.”

  My mother had on her same old pink chenille bathrobe and her hair was a little out of whack, but there was something different about her. “You look different,” I said. I couldn’t place what it was.

  She gave me a very nasty look, as if I was referring to whatever was going on down the hall, which I was not. “I look exactly like I always do at four in the morning.”

  “No, there’s something …” I smiled. “You don’t have your glasses on.”

  My mother reached up and touched her face and then the top of her head as if she didn’t believe me. Then she turned around without a word and went back to my father’s room. By the time she came out again I had two cakes in the ovens and was working on my third. It was seven o’clock in the morning.

  At noon my father got up and I poured him a bowl of cereal, which he ate by himself using a large-handled spoon. It was as magnificent as seeing a man walk on the moon.

  “Are you going to issue a press release? Stop staring at me. I’ve been feeding myself my whole life,” he said.

  “Well, I have a short memory.”

  He put the spoon in the bowl, picked up a napkin, and wiped the corners of his mouth. It wasn’t fast, but it was perfect. “You know, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. Why don’t we throw those cakes in the back and I’ll go with you to drop them off at the hotels. It would be good to see those guys again. Some of them, man, it’s been years.”

  My mother came in with a new set of boxes. Each one was so beautiful, such a deeply realized piece of art, that I didn’t want to let any of them out of the house. Who knew she had it in her? “If you gave me a little more time, you’d be impressed with what I could do.”

  “I’m impressed anyway,” I said. “They’re wonderful.”

  “Hey, Hollis, Ruth and I are going to take these cakes to the hotels. Why don’t you fix yourself up a little and come along for the ride? You can help carry the boxes.”

  “If I’m going to be the porter, then I don’t have to fix up,” my mother said. “Is that a spoon you’ve got in your hand?”

  “I’m almost grown,” he said, smiling. “Before you know it I’m going to be out of the nest.”

  He meant it as a joke, but a dark cloud passed over my mother’s face. She turned back to her room and walked away. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

  It didn’t take long for my mother to get herself ready, but she put a special effort into getting my father bathed and dressed. It was no small task. He went out of the house so rarely that we didn’t have to deal with the issue of his clothes very often. At home he wore ratty button-down flannel shirts with half of the sleeves cut off, things that were easy to take off and on. But today he wore pressed pants and a white short-sleeved dress shirt that made him look like he had retired to Miami. My mother had cut open the sleeves of a cardigan sweater partway and hemmed up the edges so that they covered the steel halos nicely. She had shaved him and combed his hair and, in short, made him look more like the man I had known before he fell down the basement stairs of a nightclub.

  “Look at you,” I said approvingly.

  “I have people to see,” my father said.

  “Don’t you think he should wear a tie to go to the doctor?” my mother said. “He won’t wear a tie.”

  “I remember when you used to tie my ties. You always tried to choke me.”

  Our first stop was Sam’s old hospital, where we went to see the surgeon who had taken over my father’s case. When we entered the front lobby I felt a little like I was betraying my husband, going to see a building that had done him wrong. I thought of all the times Sam had forgotten a file and I had brought it over to him, all the times I’d run over for lunch in the cafeteria when he had a break, the countless Christmas parties, punch cups, and buffet lines. Sam had given an awful lot to this place. It should have ended better for him. We rode the elevator to the fourth floor and went to sign in. A little while after we’d taken our seats in the waiting room, a nurse came to take my father away for X-rays. “Don’t you want one of us to come?” I asked him.

  “I don’t think they’re going to ask me to operate the machine. I only have to show them my arms.”

  “I’ll take that as a no,” I said.

  “Family,” my father whispered to the pretty nurse as they walked away. “They think I can’t even feed myself.”

  “I liked him better when he was helpless,” my mother said, picking up a two-year-old issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. She was watching the door he had disappeared through. I could tell she had been planning on going back with him.

  “Are you falling for him?” I said. I don’t know why I felt I could ask her that in a crowded waiting room of a doctor’s office when I couldn’t say it when we were alone in my kitchen at four in the morning.

  My mother kept her voice even and her eyes on the magazine. “You know I can’t stand your father.”

  “And you probably couldn’t stand him when you married him, either. That’s not my question.”

  “No, then, to answer your question, I am not falling for your father. Now, there’s an article here I want to read if you don’t mind.”

  I picked up a People magazine that had a picture of Diana’s two boys on the cover. “No, I don’t mind.” I tried to figure out whether or not I cared if my parents were having sex or falling in love or fighting like badgers or playing gin rummy in the small hours of the morning. I was clear on the fact that it was none of my business and also clear on the fact that it certainly bumped up against my life both past and present. The problem was this: My mother and I had a hard time when I was young. There was a great dea
l of scraping by and doing without. I was led to believe that the reason we were scraping by was because my father was gone and the reason he was gone was that he and my mother absolutely could not abide the sight of one another, a fact that was supported in the few times I ever saw them in the same room over the years. These are the things that shaped every aspect of our lives. So what if the central fact of your life turns out not to be true? What if my parents, in fact, actually loved one another? I’m not saying it would be a bad thing, but it would be a little bit like finding out that the early Spaniards were right: The earth was flat and it was quite possible to sail off the edge of the map and plummet down into the nothingness below.

  When the nurse came back for me and my mother, we had been waiting for nearly forty-five minutes and neither of us had turned a single page of our ancient magazines, both of us sitting side by side, lost in what I would bet were exactly the same thoughts.

  A different nurse led us back to a small office with a desk and a few chairs. My father was waiting for us. “Have you ever seen so many framed pieces of paper in your life?” he said. “I bet this guy frames his Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes entries.”

  I was about to answer him when the doctor came in. He was friendly and hurried and suspiciously young. He said a quick hello to everyone and then stuck some film of pinned-up bones on a light board and clicked it on.

  “You see there, these little lines? That’s everything healing up nicely. The doctor who put you together in Des Moines did a fine job, Mr. Nash. I’d say you’ve got at least another month in the braces, but you’re going to do fine.”

  “A month?” my father said.

  “Could be three weeks, could be six weeks.” He clicked off the light with an authoritative snap. “I don’t know the exact time schedule your particular bones are going to heal on.”

  “I’ve been working on my flexibility,” my father said. He held out his hands and bent his fingers down and then straightened them out again.

  The doctor looked up from his notes, but he had already missed the show. “That’s great,” he said. “Are you doing that, Mrs. Nash?”

  “I’m working with him,” my mother said.

  “That’s just great.” He slapped my father’s file closed to indicate that our audience was terminated. He had never sat down. He was shaking my hand. “The pin sites look great. Keep them clean. Come back in four weeks.”

  “You said it could be three,” my father said.

  “Right you are. Make it three. The nurse will make an appointment for you on the way out.”

  Bang, just like that he was gone. The man should have been a bank robber. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could have held him down.

  We all went back to the car feeling an overwhelming sense of neglect. “You should have told him you were a pianist,” my mother said. “I’m not even sure he knows.”

  “When was I going to fit it into the conversation?” my father said.

  “You’ve always found a way in the past,” my mother said.

  “He wouldn’t have cared anyway.”

  “It was good news, though.” I tried to make my voice sound cheerful. “He said the bones looked good. So he didn’t have any bedside manner. It would have been nice, but at least he didn’t say you were going to spend the rest of your life with pins in your arms. Something tells me if the news had been bad, this guy would not have hesitated to break it to you.”

  “It’s true.” My father got into the front seat of the car and held up his arms while my mother reached around him and buckled up his seat belt. “Thanks, Hollis,” he said.

  “The last thing we need is to have you go flying through the windshield,” she said.

  “Let’s go have a little fun, shall we?” my father said. “There’s nothing like a really good hotel.” My father had called on three concierges he knew and told us our first stop should be to see Sid at the Marquette.

  “Just pull up front,” my father said once we arrived there. He pointed to the front of the hotel with his head.

  “Don’t you want to go in?” I asked.

  “Right there.”

  I pulled in front of the hotel, right into the middle of the loading zone, and rolled down my window. A man in a complicated black suit and top hat that made him look like a wealthy character from a Dickens novel swept up to the driver’s side. There must have been eighty buttons on his jacket. “Good evening, madame. Will you be checking in?”

  “No, we’re just—”

  “Hey, Wexler. You trying to hit on my daughter?”

  The doorman stuck his head in the window and then leaned across to my father. “Guy? Where the hell have you been?”

  “I’m having my arms copied so that they can be preserved for future study. All for the good of science!” He held up his cages.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Sharks! Get us out of this car and I’ll tell you the whole sordid story.”

  Wexler came around and opened my door and let my mother out of the back. “Should I go park?” I said.

  He shook his head discreetly. “Leave the keys,” he whispered. “All taken care of.”

  While my mother and I got a cake box out of the back, Dad caught up with the doorman and a handful of bellboys. As we stepped into the gleaming marble lobby, everyone was on us. “Guy, where have you been?” “Guy, what did you do to yourself?” My father spun stories of fistfights, bionic arms, and a deadly case of carpal tunnel syndrome from playing too damn beautifully for too long. “It catches up with you,” he told the pretty Korean girl at the front desk.

  “How do you know all these people?” I said. I was starting to wonder if my father had actually lived in Minneapolis for a while and just never called to tell me.

  “I’ve played here from time to time over the years.”

  “So have a lot of people, I would think. Do they treat all returning piano players like Frank Sinatra?”

  “Only the really good ones,” my father whispered to me.

  Then Sid caught sight of us and crossed the lobby with long steps and open arms. “I thought you were making it up,” he said, kissing my father on each cheek and then, after proper introductions were made, kissing my mother and finally me. “I thought you had just gotten too big to play here and you were trying to spare my feelings.”

  “I’d never spare your feelings, Sid.”

  “Come in the bar and I’ll make you a drink.”

  “First take your cake.” He turned to me with a flourish and let me know it was time for me to fulfill my part of the ceremony. I set the box in Sid’s hands.

  “I appreciate your help,” I said.

  “Your help!” my father said. “Ruthie, this man didn’t help us. He made us! We’re going to be in business, thanks to you.”

  Sid politely demurred. “Au contraire. I’ve had four calls already this morning, people telling me how brilliant I am to have found the best cakes in the city.”

  “Who called?” my mother said.

  “You’re going to be busy, busy,” Sid said to me, wagging his finger. “Everybody loves what you do. And now I have a cake. I can see what the fuss is all about. Of course, I told them I had been eating your cakes for years, that everyone on the inside had them shipped in from L.A. for the big parties.”

  “Sid, you’re an operator.”

  “I owe you a favor or three. Surely you haven’t forgotten that.”

  We sat down beside a piano in a dark bar and Sid went off to get our drinks without asking us what we wanted. I tried to call him back but he was gone.

  “That piano,” my father said wistfully, “is one of the greatest pianos I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.”

  My mother looked over her shoulder. “Really.”

  “A profoundly beautiful tone. And the acoustics in this room …” He shook his head. “Heavenly.”

  Sid came back with a tray. “Something soft for the lady who is driving and had every intention of turning down a
drink.” He sat a tall glass on the table in front of me. “And something with a little more bite for the two people I suspect will join me in a drink.” He set a tall water glass upside down on the table and topped it with a short highball glass into which he placed a straw for my father.

  I was somewhere between impressed and amazed by Sid’s preternatural sense of what people wanted. I guess that is the hallmark of a good concierge. We toasted my father’s health and the luck of the cakes.

  “Hollis here is going to play you a little something on the piano,” my father said to Sid.

  “No, she is not,” my mother said.

  “You’ve got to hear this piano and I can’t play it and you know good and well Ruth isn’t going to play.”

  “You’ve got that right,” I said. I sipped my drink, which was a cross between a lime and a cucumber with a lot of sparkling water thrown in. It was perfect.

  “I don’t play piano in bars,” my mother said.

  “That’s only because no one has ever asked you to and you know it.” My father gave her a hard stare. “Come on, Hollis, be a sport about this.”

  Sid looked at my mother as if he loved her. “Nothing would make me happier,” he said.

  She took a healthy sip of her own drink. “One song.”

  I waited for her to ask for some sheet music. Maybe she was going to play the Gershwin again, but she sat down and started playing “Stardust,” a loose and rambling interpretation that went perfectly with the surroundings. Maybe my mother didn’t need sheet music after all, maybe she just put it out as a sort of habit, the way I looked at cookbooks when I knew the recipe backward and upside down. My mother was finding a way to break with her routines. It wasn’t such a bad thing.

  “Oh, this is a nice piano,” she said.

  My father closed his eyes and smiled.

  The people who were in the bar, and there weren’t many of them, stopped their conversations and turned to face my mother. They watched a seventy-three-year-old woman in mint-green slacks and an overly colorful patchwork sweater play her heart out. She didn’t mind the attention at all. For all the timidity she had shown in the past year, she never was afraid of a piano or a spotlight.