The Art of Undressing

by Stephanie Lehmann

  The place folded after I was there about two years. That happens. Restaurants come and go all the time. The profit margin is very thin, especially if you don’t sell liquor, and people get tired of the same old menu and décor. It’s almost expected that, like a beautiful woman, a restaurant’s power to attract customers is only a fleeting thing. The closing coincided pretty much with my graduation, so when the owners told me they knew someone in the city who was looking for a prep cook, I took the bus in for an interview. Before I knew it, I had a job at Chantal.

  Back to Manhattan I moved. After a major search using roommates.com, I found a psychology major at City College who let me move into her small two-bedroom. My portion of the rent was a thousand dollars a month—not bad for the neighborhood, but a hefty chunk of my paycheck.

  The Upper West Side has never been known for its “cuisine,” and Chantal was not anything spectacular. I assisted Carlos, the garde manger chef, basically prepping the cold appetizers on the menu. I got very fast at chopping parsley, peeling carrots, and tearing lettuce. I’d heard that the guy who did the job before me was an illegal alien from Mexico who spoke no English and went on to get a better job—delivering dry cleaning—but I was determined to learn everything I could and move up in the hierarchy there.

  I found I really didn’t like working with cold things. Turnips, carrots . . . very standoffish, those foods. I was attracted to warm, cuddly ingredients like butter, cream, and flour. I started to hang out a lot with the pastry chef, trying to pick up what I could. He was a middle-aged ex–real estate agent who’d given up his Volvo to study at Le Cordon Bleu, and it was from him that I got the idea of going to a cooking school.

  So here I was, at the New York School of Culinary Arts, standing with my new classmates around six butcher-block tables shoved together in the middle of a huge, fully equipped kitchen. My uniform—black-and-white houndstooth pants and white cotton double-breasted jacket—was brand-new. I’d worn jeans and a baseball cap at Chantal, so it felt like I was dressing up for Halloween. Coco would’ve hated it except as a costume to be flung in someone’s face. But I liked it. The black-and-whiteness. The way it made us all look the same. Except the hat. The hat was just silly. Not that I had any right to complain. I knew going into it about the hat.

  “Now we will go around the room,” Chef Jean Paul said in his thick French accent, “and introduce ourselves.” He was tall, about six-three, in his fifties, with pale skin, a round face, and thinning, sandy brown hair.

  There were twenty of us total. A plethora of pimply-faced boys who looked like they were just out of high school, or the army, or prison. A few middle-aged second careerers. Four women other than me—one very pretty blonde, one short brunette named Priscilla who I thought I could be friends with, and one who reminded me of the older ladies who used to work in my school cafeteria. Then there was the one cute guy. He had this clean-cut look with a strong jaw, short brown hair, surprising blue eyes, a rosy glow and, most important, he was taller than me and had a very nice build. When he introduced himself, he said he was from Iowa. Or was it Ohio? Some small town with a name like Grand Junction. He looked so solid, so reliable, so steadfast! His name was Tom Carpenter.

  Then Tara introduced herself. The blonde. I really wanted to make friends with the other women in the class. We gals had to stick together! But Jean Paul fussed over her like she was an honored guest. “Miss Tara Glass is the daughter of Jonathan Glass, who owns L’Etoile.” L’Etoile was one of the most successful restaurants going in Manhattan, and Jean Paul was obviously delighted to have her in our midst.

  “My father has owned restaurants since before I was born,” she announced. “My dream is to own my own restaurant one day.”

  “Welcome,” he said with a slight bow, “to our class.”

  “I’m honored to be here.”

  How long had it taken her to bobby pin her hair so beguilingly under her hat?

  When it was my turn, I only fleetingly referred to college, as if it had been a waste of time. In this world, brains were only of interest sautéed with a little butter. Desired attributes were brawn and stamina as demonstrated by the ability to function under pressure while drunk, stoned, cut, and burned, along with the facility to speak fluent Spanish with the immigrant dishwashers and prep cooks in virtually every establishment in the city. Classes in human evolution? Definitely not helpful. I mentioned the crepe restaurant in passing, and then made my job at Chantal sound more impressive than it really was.

  After we’d gone around the room, Jean Paul went over the drill. “You will rotate back and forth between the main kitchen here with me, and the demonstration kitchen with Mr. Robert Kingsley, where you will have lectures on the history of cooking, restaurant management, and the difference between a Burgundy and a Bordeaux.”

  My pulse revved at the mention of Robert Kingsley. He was a guest instructor this semester, somewhat of a celebrity in the foodie world, and one of the big reasons I’d picked the school.

  “Of the twenty students who begin,” Jean Paul continued, “only ten will be chosen to move upstairs for the Master Class to have the privilege of cooking in the school restaurant.”

  Three of those ten students would specialize in pastry. It would be up to Jean Paul to choose who made the cut. Nancy Riviere, one of the most highly regarded women pastry chefs in the world, was going to be visiting from Paris to teach. It would be so incredible to study with her.

  Meanwhile, there was Jean Paul to contend with. I was hyperaware that I really needed him to decide I had that extra glimmer of talent to move me into the Master Class. He began our first lecture, or should I say rant, about mise en place, which is the French term for having all your ingredients ready before you cook. “You must prepare your station! You must be ready for the shit that is going to hit the fan! You must have your pots, pans, ladles, side towels, salt, pepper, parsley, oil, butter, wine, tomato concassé, chopped shallots . . . everything you need positioned around you, so that you know exactly where it all is the moment you need it. Why? Because! Once you start the service, and everyone sits down at the same time, and orders off a menu of ten or twenty or thirty different things that all must be ready together, there will be no time! So! We will now chop the mirepoix for our first stock!”

  After we’d all settled at our respective cutting boards, I peeked at Tom Carpenter. He was chopping onions. His sweet, serious dash of a little mouth was set with determined concentration. His eyes were really watering, so you’d almost think he was truly upset. He paused to wipe his tears with the back of his hand. Chopped some more. Paused to wipe them again. Then looked around, self-conscious, and caught me spying. He shook his head at how ridiculous it was that his eyes were watering so much. I realized he was embarrassed. It wasn’t “manly” to cry, even if it was just from onions. So I nodded my head and frowned with sympathy, trying to let him know that it was okay. He nodded and smiled. And I smiled. And I went back to peeling my carrots. And he went back to chopping his onions.

  “What is more important,” Chef Jean Paul asked, “taste or presentation?”

  It was the end of the day. We were all once again standing around the butcher-block tables. Everyone gaped at him, stumped and stupefied. I tried to blend in to the bank of reach-in refrigerators behind me. But his finger was pointed at . . . moi.

  “You?”

  I thought of one of my mother’s favorite sayings: You can make a living displaying your naked bod, but you won’t earn the big bucks unless you actually make ’em come.

  “Taste?”

  Jean Paul sneered at me like I was curdled cream. “And why is that?”

  “Because the whole point is to make food that people will enjoy eating.”

  Tara’s hand shot into the air. He called on her.

  “Presentation,” she said.

  “And why, Miss Glass, iss presentation so important?”

  “Because,” she said, “it is with your eyes that you first taste.”


  Did she just sneak a smile at Tom Carpenter?

  “Yes! You see eet first! Zen you decide whezer to eat it. Zee first impression—that iss the most important one.” He turned to me again. “So tell us. Why will they eat your food if eet looks ugly?”

  I wanted to answer. I wanted to say it didn’t matter how anything looked if it tasted lousy. But I already knew that Jean Paul was always right about everything because he learned from the bottom up interning at the Hotel de Monte Carlo when he was fourteen while we were wasting our time in school. On my way out of the kitchen, Jean Paul muttered to me that I might want to “stick to toasting le Pop-Tarts.”

  I stood in the lobby in a daze. What just happened?

  “What he just did?” a male voice came from behind. “That was so not fair.”

  I turned around. It wasn’t Tom Carpenter. It was a guy who looked a bit like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Blond, apple-dumpling cheeks, cuddly body, adorably gay.

  “Was that not a rhetorical question?” I asked.

  “They’re both too important! You can’t choose one.”

  “No matter what I said, it was going to be wrong.”

  “He just wanted to make her look good.”

  “Or me look bad.”

  “He doesn’t even know you. Does he?”

  “No. But he can tell.”

  “What?”

  “I’m an imposter. And I’m destined to fail!”

  “Oh, my god.” He took both my hands. “That’s exactly how I feel. Chef Jean Paul is so scary!”

  “You feel that way too?”

  “I’m terrified!”

  Tom Carpenter was approaching. He looked at both of us with a teeny smile, then looked down at the floor as he passed by. Such a drag he had to see Jean Paul pick on me. Doughboy and I followed his ass with our eyes until the door to the men’s locker room shut behind him.

  “I’d stay and commiserate,” Doughboy said, “but don’t want to miss the show.”

  “It’s not fair the locker rooms are segregated.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ginger.”

  “Ginger? Spice Girl! I love it.”

  “And you are?”

  “Ralph. As in Lauren, not Kramden. Now I really must go or I’ll miss all the fun.”

  chapter four

  i have always been intimidated by my father. A handsome man. Tall. Broad shoulders. He was currently wearing his dark hair very short, almost a buzz cut, very fashionable. He liked expensive clothes. Expensive restaurants. I was in awe.

  It sucked. Good-looking men can get away with a lot, especially if they have money. He didn’t deserve my awe. The man lacked warmth. But I couldn’t help myself. When I was around him, I was on my best behavior. Polite. Hoping, constantly, for some little token of his love. All it took to melt me was the tiniest bit of attention. Like the question: “How are you?” It didn’t matter if he didn’t bother to listen to my answer. It didn’t matter if there wasn’t even one follow-up question. He had deigned to look at me, just me, if only for a moment, and ask. I knew that I wasn’t really supposed to tell him how I was. I knew that it was important for him to believe I was doing great, and important for me to let him think I was doing great, and the true communication during that question was that he was confirming that I was not going to be making any demands on him. But still. He’d asked.

  My father was not a talkative man, but he liked to think of himself as an expert on everything. Wine, food, movies, theater, literature. His name was Ben, but long ago, Coco had given him the nickname “the Sheriff.”

  I sat across from him at a good table by the wall at a new restaurant a few blocks from his townhouse on the Upper East Side. I felt, as usual, honored to be in his presence. The food was a combination of French, Italian, and Mediterranean. We commented on the frescoes painted on the walls and the huge mosaic pizza oven. It was extremely noisy and lively and everyone around us seemed to be having a great time.

  Emma, my half sister, was not invited along because it was understood that this was my “special time” with him, whereas she got to live with the guy. Part of me would’ve liked her there with us, if only to help sustain the conversation. Leah, his second wife, had always been the expert at keeping the conversation going. But she wasn’t there to help either.

  My state of awe was a real impediment. It made it really hard to get mad at him. You need to be able to get mad at a person every now and then if you’re going to be able to be close. And I think many objective people would agree that I deserved to be mad. Not that I wasn’t mad. I just couldn’t show him.

  I was probably that way because I’d never actually lived with him. I hardly even saw him when I was little even though he’d always lived in Manhattan, just a bus ride away. But he left my mom when I was a year old, and he never even tried to get custody, and they didn’t speak for a long time. It wasn’t until I was in high school, after my grandmother died, that Leah made him make the effort to get to know me. She was the one who engineered dinners out every few months to help us build more of a relationship. I always felt happy to see Leah, at those meals, and honored that he showed up.

  As a matter of fact, Leah was the one who convinced me to swallow my pride, go to my father, and ask him to help me pay for cooking school. He’d always been reliable about child support, but this felt different. It was like I was saying, okay, I’m not going to hold a grudge against you all these years because you were a shitty father. I’m going to get over that, accept your help, and hope it brings us closer.

  But still. He never felt comfortable with me. I always knew, on some level, that as far as he was concerned, I simply wasn’t supposed to exist.

  “How are you?” he asked, after the waiter filled our glasses from a bottle of Pouilly Fuisse.

  “Good. How are you?

  He was wearing his usual Egyptian cotton three hundred thread count white shirt and blue silk tie. I was dressed up (though he may not have been able to perceive that) because I was wearing some black stretch bell-bottoms and a short-sleeved button-down flower power print shirt and spanking new hot pink Converse sneakers. I waited for him to pour his heart out to me about how he always wished he could’ve raised me himself, and even if Coco was a “trip,” she was a really fun person, wasn’t she, and why don’t you move in with me now and we can make up for lost time?

  “I’m good. How’s cooking school?”

  “Great. How’s the law?”

  “Keeping me busy . . .”

  “Emma?”

  “Doing really well.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You know.” He smiled. “Under the circumstances.”

  “Right.”

  Emma was born when I was in middle school. There I was, plagued with greasy hair, acne, and a growth spurt so intense it should’ve qualified as an extreme sport. Emma? She was so little, so precious, so perfect, so adorable you just wanted to kill her. Okay. I was the only one with the homicidal thoughts. It just didn’t seem fair. She got to grow up in their beautiful East Side apartment. She went to posh private schools, fancy summer camps, deluxe hotels in Europe. It seemed like she had every benefit of living in the world that I did not, crowned by the fact that she got to grow up in the perfect nuclear family.

  When I wasn’t hating them, I used to wish that I could live with them. And it made me feel so guilty to betray my mom like that, even if it was just in my head.

  But Leah was a wonderful person. She worked part time as a lawyer trying to save rain forests. And she didn’t care if her apartment was messy. And even though she was way too obsessed (in my opinion) with things like designer clothes and interior design, I excused her for it. Because she was a really great listener. She always encouraged me talk about my problems without giving me condescending advice. And she never tried to put Coco down either, even though it must’ve been tempting. She just let me talk about her. So I could bounce back and forth between being angry and defensive and then realize
all my contradictory feelings made some sort of sense. Because, god knows, my mother was confusing. For obvious reasons, she wasn’t like other mothers, but I didn’t completely realize that for a long time. I just assumed all daughters had some sort of problem with their mothers and mine was just a variation. It wasn’t until I went to college that I started to think this was not variation, this was Bizarro World. All the more bizarre because it felt normal to me. But Leah never tried to turn me against Coco. She just tried to help me get some kind of grip.

  And then, two years ago, Leah found a lump.

  There was a year of chemo and radiation and that whole nightmare and of course when she got through that we all hoped she could put it behind her. But it came back, and spread to her liver and lungs. She had another round of chemo, but it continued to spread. She got weak. And skinny. It began to affect her breathing.

  She died at home. She’d just turned forty-five.

  Right after it happened . . . right after my father called to let us know she had passed away . . . I suddenly felt so grateful to have my fun, crazy but loving, never-been-sick-a-day-in-her-life mom!

  On the day of the funeral, after the services, my dad’s living room was crowded with people wiping tears off their cheeks and shoving hors d’oeuvres in their faces. I sat there on the sofa feeling like an outsider. Coco told a joke about someone who calls the hospital and asks how Mrs. Jones is doing in room 420. And the nurse says her blood work came back and everything looks fine and she’s going to be released the next day. And the caller says good, because I’m Mrs. Jones calling from room 420 and the doctors don’t tell me anything! And I laughed. I laughed good and loud at her stupid joke. Because I wanted poor ten-year-old Emma to know that for once I didn’t have to feel jealous, because even if Coco was a freak and a slut, she was alive.