Princess Charming

by Jane Heller

  He waved at me with a grin that should have been sheepish but was instead full of self-confidence and good cheer, and took a seat in the row behind me, next to Beatrice, who seemed to have recovered just fine from her “fall.” I heard him introduce himself to her and everybody else. He told them his grandparents used to have a farm up in Duchess County and as a boy he’d enjoyed spending weekends there. He regaled them with tales of collecting eggs from the chickens and feeding the baby goats with a bottle and watching Rudy, the rooster, wander into the driveway and nearly get run over by his grandpa Charlie’s tractor. So what if he’d told me the same stories and they were true? He had walked right into my vacation, my cooking class, my space, and charmed the crap out of these people; it was a total breach of breakup etiquette.

  Keeping my gaze straight ahead, I reached for Jackie’s hand with my right, Pat’s hand with my left, and hissed, “Do you believe this?” When all they did was giggle, I realized I’d been set up. “You knew?” I hissed some more, searching their faces now. “You knew?”

  Jackie leaned in and whispered, “He wants to show you he’s sorry. He asked us if it was okay to come and we said yes.”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t turn around.

  “Hey, Slim,” said Simon.

  “You think this is funny,” I said still looking straight ahead.

  “A little,” he agreed. “I can’t wait to see you cooking. It’ll be epic.”

  Ha ha ha. I’d give him epic. An epic week of the cold shoulder.

  I was relieved when Chef Jason Hill materialized in his chef whites with his entourage of four, each of whom was a young male schlepping a heavy, clanging bag of kitchen tools. He waved halfheartedly at us with the pained expression of a very famous person who resented having to perform in front of such a small audience.

  Connie bolted up, threw her arms in the air and said, “He’s heeeere!” and Chef Hill didn’t so much as make eye contact with her. A compact man in his mid thirties, with tattoos that ran up his neck and down the exposed parts of his arms, he had a crooked, tough-guy nose, acne-scarred skin, a shaved head, and a goatee—not a heartthrob in the conventional sense but the sort of anti-hero that culinary stars were made of these days. He reeked of pomposity as he issued commands to the members of his staff, who proceeded to prep all sorts of food with lightning speed, as if their boss had a plane to catch.

  While we students continued to sit in our seats, and Rebecca wished us an enjoyable class before fleeing, he barked more orders at the underlings and then looked up at us and said, “Hold tight, gang. Be right back,” after which he disappeared in the direction of the restroom. When he returned a few minutes later, his mood seemed to have lightened. Even from my seat I could guess why: His nostrils were dusted with the tiniest traces of a powder that wasn’t confectioner’s sugar, and he was sniffling.

  “I think Chef Hill’s a cokehead,” I whispered to Pat and Jackie. “It would give new meaning to farm-to-table, as in a farm in Colombia.”

  “But sodas are bad for you,” said Pat. “Even I know that.”

  “She means cocaine, Pat,” said Jackie. “It’s just Elaine being Elaine.”

  “It could be true,” I said. “The guy promotes clean food, but if he’s polluting his own body then he’s a phony.” I was about to defend my theory, but Chef Hill began our class by stepping out from behind the counter and walking quickly toward us.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Jackie. “He’s not nearly as hot in person. I’m much more into Kevin, our forager. Now there’s a guy I’d like to—”

  “I’m Jason Hill,” he said with a rapid-fire delivery, as if the coke had somehow sped up his vocal chords along with his brain. “Hope all you people are ready to cook from the land today. Do you know how to get the best flavor out of food? I’ll tell you how: Get it from farmers who are local. That’s right. Get it from someone in the neighborhood, someone whose growing practices you respect. As a cook, you’ll be the curators of what tastes good, of what’s delicious, and the way to get ‘delicious’ is to get it fresh. Look, I’ll be honest. My family is the world to me. They keep me grounded. They’re my emotional and spiritual center. Feeding them clean, farm-to-table, dock-to-dish meals is the same as telling them I love them. So here’s the deal. I can show you people every recipe and technique ever created, but it all starts with freshness, with purity, with saving our planet by not dumping chemicals on what we put in our mouths.”

  Chef Hill nodded at us to indicate his little speech was over, and Lake and Gabriel, clearly his acolytes, leapt to their feet and clapped vigorously, which made everybody else feel obligated to leap to their feet and clap vigorously.

  “Thanks, thanks,” said Chef Hill, gesturing for us to sit back down. “Now, just so I have an idea what I’m dealing with this week, how many of you think you know your way around the kitchen, knife skills and all?”

  Lake and Gabriel raised their hands and announced that they had their own set of knives at home with their initials on them. Jonathan raised his hand and said he found cooking to be a very satisfying experience. Alex raised her hand and said she enjoyed cooking but was intimidated by recipes with more than six ingredients. Pat lifted her hand and said she cooked for her children but that she often fell back on mac and cheese, sloppy joes, and Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks. And Connie raised her hand and said she’d met Chef Hill before—several times, in fact—and bought all his cookbooks in both print and e-book editions, which didn’t qualify as knowing how to cook but got him to glance in her direction. Simon didn’t raise his hand but took the opportunity to lean over and say to me, “You should have told him about the turkey you roasted at Thanksgiving, Slim. Remember how you left the plastic bag of giblets in there and the plastic melted?”

  Yes, hilarious. Good one, Simon. I’d like to roast your bag of giblets.

  “I’m splitting you into groups by mixing up the know-hows and the wannabes,” he said. “Then I’ll assign everybody tasks—bang bang.”

  “Bang bang,” I would come to learn, was Chef Hill’s catchphrase, the way Emeril became synonymous with “Bam,” and he used it as liberally as he used salt. He sent me, Jonathan, Ronnie, and Gabriel over to a table on which rested two long slabs of meat. They were pork tenderloins that looked like a couple of extremely large penises, pink and glistening under the recessed lighting.

  I waved across the room to Jackie, who had gathered with Connie and Alex over what looked like salad and vegetable fixings, and at Pat, poor thing, who’d been exiled to the dessert station with Lake, Beatrice, and Simon, who thought I was waving to him even though I was doing anything but.

  “Oh, boy, do I love this animal,” said Ronnie, salivating over the raw meat, which was probably rife with trichinosis.

  “According to the background material we got for each recipe, these tenderloins come directly from Whitley’s pasture,” said Gabriel. “They’re grass-fed and low in fat.”

  “I haven’t looked in my tote bag,” I confessed. “I don’t even remember where I put it. Is the recipe very difficult?”

  “Not if you follow the directions,” he said. “Cooking is like working out at the gym: discipline, discipline, discipline.”

  “You’ll be fine, Elaine,” said Jonathan with a reassuring smile. “If you have a question, just ask me.”

  “Here I am,” said Chef Hill as he scuttled over to us, his shortness keeping him low to the ground like a crawling insect. “You guys are making the main course, which is pork tenderloin stuffed with prosciutto, pesto, and arugula. Now let’s get at this—bang bang.” He snapped his fingers and the members of his entourage rushed over with bowls of ingredients. “You first.” He nodded at me. “What’s your name, hon?”

  Hon. Did this man not have as much respect for workplace protocol as he did for responsibly fertilized soil? “My name is Elaine,” I said, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. “I’m inexperienced in the kitchen, just so you know.”

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nbsp; “We’ll have you cooking like a pro, hon.” He motioned me closer to the cutting board. “You’re going to butterfly these babies after you cut off the silver skin—bang bang.”

  I assumed he would demonstrate what the hell he was talking about, but he stood there waiting for me to do what I was told. When neither of us moved for several awkward seconds, Jonathan jumped in and took over, rescuing me just like I’d rescued him earlier. He picked up one of the six knives on the table and began peeling back the layer of fat on the two tenderloins.

  “Yeah, that’s how it’s done,” said Chef Hill. “Perfect execution. Can you butterfly these too, guy?”

  “Sure.”

  Clearly, Jonathan was a ringer. With care and skill, he reached for another knife and, holding the blade flat so it was parallel to the meat, he cut across the pork nearly to the opposite end, and then opened the flaps as you would a book. Covering the tenderloins with plastic wrap, he pounded them with a mallet to make them thinner, and looked up at our chef. “Next step?”

  “Next step is you get your own restaurant, guy,” he said, slapping Jonathan on the back. “You’ve got talent. Well done.” He pointed at Gabriel. “You’re up.”

  Gabriel’s job was to spread a piece of prosciutto on top of each butterflied and flattened tenderloin, then make the pesto.

  “No biggie, right, guy?” said Chef Hill, thumping Gabriel on the back. “All you do is throw everything into the processor and pulse.”

  Into the food processor went shelled pistachios, figs, chopped garlic, basil, freshly grated Parmesan cheese, and olive oil. Gabriel mixed it all up, then stood back from the machine admiring his work.

  “Now you again, hon,” Chef Hill said to me. He didn’t slap me on the back, but he did give me a little shove I didn’t appreciate. “Spread the pesto on top of the pork, then mound it with the arugula.”

  Okay, Elaine. This isn’t brain surgery, I told myself. This is cooking, which is what people all across the world do in rooms called kitchens. I thought of my mother, who cooked but inattentively. I remembered when I was kid, and she was making me macaroni and cheese for dinner. She was stirring it on the stove when the phone rang. It was her older sister, my Aunt Rhoda. Theirs was a fraught sibling relationship, involving long periods in which they refused to speak to each other for reasons no one understood. My mother was so undone by the call that she forgot about the macaroni and cheese and pretty much incinerated it. Is it any wonder I never learned how to cook?

  “Come on, hon!” Chef Hill snapped, checking his watch. “You’re holding up the works.”

  “Sorry.” I made a mental note to go on Yelp, Urbanspoon, and TripAdvisor and trash Chef Hill for being a rotten cooking instructor.

  I picked up a spatula and poured the pesto on top of the prosciutto laid out over the butterflied schlongs, and spread it around. Then I reached for the arugula leaves and deposited them onto the meat.

  “See? That wasn’t anything to get all wigged out about,” said the cokehead.

  “No, it really wasn’t.” I smiled, thinking of all the nasty things I would write about him online.

  “You’re up, guy,” he said, motioning Jonathan toward the meat. “Since you’re the star in this group, how about you fold these babies up, tie them with the string, sear them nice and brown on all sides in the skillet, and finish them off in the oven while I go help the others.” And off he went in Jackie’s direction.

  “I guess we’re free to eat the leftovers,” said Ronnie, who emitted one of his hiccup-belches, then reached into the bowl of pistachios and crammed handfuls of them into his mouth. When he’d emptied the bowl of nuts, he grazed on the arugula, getting most of it stuck between his teeth. “I think I’ll go see how Cupcake is doing.”

  After Ronnie had waddled over to his wife’s station, Jonathan said, “Cupcake is probably thrilled that she’s breathing Chef Hill’s air.” We shared a laugh. “Not very warm and fuzzy, our chef.”

  “No, but hey, you’re good with food, Jonathan,” I said. “You have a natural feel for it, and maybe you really should pursue it as a career. It’s never too late for reinvention.” Like I knew about reinvention. I wore the same pale pink nail polish color year after year. Never changed it, not even when women started painting their nails in blood reds and teal blues and pewter grays. I resisted change the way cats resist baths.

  “You’re a very supportive person, Elaine,” said Jonathan. “I don’t get much of that from my mother.”

  “What about the rest of your family?” I asked, instead of coming right out and grilling him about his marital status and/or sexual orientation.

  “I’m an only child, and my mother’s dependence on me got worse after my father died. I’m all she has, and since my latest divorce—there have been two—she’s afraid I’ll leave Palm Beach and run off to some foodie mecca in Brooklyn.”

  “Everybody says Queens is the new Brooklyn. Maybe you should go there and bring her with you.”

  “God no.” He laughed. “I take yearly trips with her. I spend Sunday afternoons with her. I handle her financial affairs and put in appearances at her charity functions, but that’s my limit. I lead my own life.” He sounded relieved to get all that off his chest. “Tell me about you? Married? Significant other? Still on the market? None of the above?”

  A loaded question, given the circumstances. “I was divorced—once—from a businessman named Eric Zucker. He runs a chain of funeral homes in the Tri-State area. Right after we were married, he started sleeping with Lola, the employee who applies industrial strength makeup to the embalmed corpses. According to my therapist, I had essentially married my father, who was always shtupping redheads behind my mother’s back. When I was twelve, he found one who—quote unquote—‘really rang his chimes.’ He abandoned us for her and never looked back.”

  “Must have been tough to deal with on both counts,” said Jonathan. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve got my own war stories. We’ll have a drink and see whose are worse. What about now?”

  “For the drink?” We were in the middle of a cooking class.

  “No, what about now in terms of any significant other? Is there a boyfriend?”

  “Oh, that,” I said as if Simon were no big deal and not watching us from a few yards away. “I’m newly single after ending a relationship.”

  “Good,” he said. “So there’s a window of opportunity.”

  “For what?” I said, fishing. I found Jonathan more than a little appealing, and there was no harm in getting to know him better.

  “For seeing how this goes,” he said, pointing to himself and then to me. “It’s not everyday that I meet a woman willing to stand up to the formidable Beatrice Birnbaum. My ex-wives either cowered in her presence or avoided her altogether.”

  “Hey, I’m a pushy New Yorker,” I said. “We mug the muggers.”

  He laughed again. “I was born and raised in the city, but I’ve lived in Florida since I was ten, the year my father decided he hated winter. I miss it up here. I’d move back in a minute. Maybe we’ll fall in love and you’ll beg me to move back.”

  “Tell me the truth: Do you say things like that to every woman you meet on vacation?”

  “No, but I like pretending I do. It’s all part of my smooth-and-sophisticated act. Is it working?”

  “It might be.” It was fun trading rom-com retorts instead of stuffing pork tenderloins. “Would you really move back to New York though? What about your—”

  I couldn’t finish the sentence because a very loud “Goddammit!” bellowed from across the room.

  “What now?” said Jonathan. We looked in the direction of the commotion to find that Chef Hill was grabbing his finger and hopping around as if he’d been set on fire. “At least it’s not my mother this time.”

  It turned out that Jackie, Alex, and Connie had been assigned both the amaranth soup and the bulgur-wheat-and-wild-blueberry salad, and that somewhere along the way there had been an incident.

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p; “Missed it,” Jackie said with a helpless shrug, when I was breathless to know what had happened.

  “I did too,” said Alex. “I was folding the blueberries into the bulgur, and Jackie was making the vinaigrette. She was asking about my fiancé’s brother, and I was telling her he might be ready to date again after a bad breakup.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose, Chef Hill!” Connie was protesting, her pudgy cheeks scarlet, arms flailing. “I swear I didn’t!” She seemed on the verge of a psychotic break.

  “Damn right she didn’t,” Ronnie said in defense of his wife.

  “Well, I sure as shit didn’t do it to myself,” said the chef, who yelled for an underling to help. Blood was gushing from the forefinger on his right hand despite his having wrapped it in a kitchen towel. “She could have hacked me to death.”

  I’m sorry to report that my first thought was not for the chef’s health and wellbeing. It was for my own. I vowed not to let a single molecule of the soup cross my lips, not when there was a possibility that his bloodily fluid had contaminated it, and not unless someone made a fresh batch after the cutting board had been scrupulously scrubbed.

  “I was just trying to do my best!” Connie cried. “I wanted to please you.”

  “You said you had knife skills, for Christ’s sake,” Chef Hill muttered, while a young man with a ponytail and black stainless steel studs in his earlobes wrapped a bandage around his boss’s injured finger. “I was demonstrating how to chop the amaranth because you didn’t have a clue and neither did the other ladies. But did they crowd me at the cutting board? No. Did they get in my space? No. Did they grab a serrated bread knife and start chopping amaranth where my finger was? No. I mean who does that?”

  “Listen, buddy, she didn’t mean to hurt you,” said Ronnie, puffing out his chest with indignation. “She has all your cookbooks. She wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

  “She’s just a little… eager,” Jonathan chimed in, proving once again that he was chivalrous. “Why don’t I start from scratch on the amaranth soup, since I’ve read the recipe for it?”