I tried to be Dick’s friend, until I realized that he was a Republican who’d voted for “W” and that he wasn’t interested in being friends with anyone. We were making a dish that required us to stuff spinach inside phyllo dough. Just like in Basic and Intermediate, we would not get enough ingredients, but at the end of the day everyone shared. I was busy frying something when I realized I had forgotten to get my spinach. Everyone else already had theirs and there was no more left.
“Where’s the spinach?” I asked Pepa.
“There’s no more,” she replied. I turned around and saw a bowl overflowing with spinach on the counter next to Dick. I assumed it was available, so I went back to my station and reached over to get some. Dick snapped, “That’s mine!” like a two-year-old in day care. I was stunned at first, then tried reasoning with him like an adult.
“Clearly that’s not all for you because there’s none left. You don’t need that much. We’re only going to need four or five leaves and you’ve got like—”
“They’re mine,” he insisted and turned back to his stove.
“But you’re not going to need all that. There’s no way you could possibly use all that spinach,” I said in a loud voice so he would respond.
“Well… after I get my spinach you can have some, but you have to wait,” he snapped. I was actually shocked that an adult male didn’t know how to share. People kind of noticed and Blanca leaned over and said in Spanish, “Don’t worry, we’ll find some for you.” But I wasn’t worried that I wasn’t going to get some; I was flabbergasted that someone could be so thoughtless and selfish. By now I should have gotten used to it, but it took me several minutes to get over it. Dick couldn’t care less about sharing; he wanted to come in first. Suddenly I felt sad for Dick, that he had to win to feel good about himself. He wasn’t bad-looking; his thinning hair and thin body were not unattractive. Maybe he had been an abused and neglected child left in the closet, or maybe he was a repressed homosexual (also left in the closet), even though he claimed to be married. Stop it, I told myself. “Just because someone has been mean to me doesn’t give me the right to think bad thoughts,” said the angel on my right shoulder. The devil on my left shoulder insisted that Dick had tortured animals before coming to cooking school and was someday going to shoot up people at the post office.
The spinach incident was just the tip of the iceberg lettuce. As the weeks progressed, his passive-aggressive ways also scared Blanca and Craig. He was like a poodle with fangs. Every time I would eye him stealing herbs from people’s trays like a sneaky squirrel, I would debate whether I should tell him what a jerk he was. Chances were he already knew it and didn’t care. I knew he was not just competitive but rotten too.
During a practical class Blanca finished cleaning her stove and moved to the sink to wash her knives. I was about to call Blanca’s name when she looked at her stove and noticed a small pot on it.
“Who put this pot on my stove?” she asked. Dick was stationed next to her and said nothing. She grabbed the pot by the handle, then yelled and dropped it. The pot had come straight out of the oven and had burnt her hand. I turned to see Dick’s face at that second and caught his eyes sneaking a peek. He remained emotionless and continued packing his knives. Everyone else stopped what they were doing to sympathize with Blanca and to ask how her hand was doing. Craig almost hugged her, feeling her pain. Dick snapped shut his tool case and left without looking back.
“It was probably Dick who did it,” I said to her in Spanish and described his look. Any conscious and kind human being would have reacted with sympathy or even admitted that they were sorry they had accidentally left the hot pot on her stove. The fact that he’d left made him evil in my eyes. Blanca practically cried as she passed her hand through cold water for several minutes. Her hand was badly burnt and she had trouble cutting for the rest of the day.
The next day Blanca was missing celery from her tray and I told her I’d seen Dick take it, which he had.
“Dick, did you take my celery?” asked Blanca.
“No,” he responded without blinking or taking the time to consider her accusatory question.
“Dick, are you sure you didn’t take my celery?” she asked. He denied it again. I no longer wanted to find a reason to feel sorry for Dick. I wanted to kick his ass, but we were stuck with him until graduation.
I was so stressed out already by being thrown into a competitive environment that I wondered whether I wanted to choose that battle. I just kept telling myself to ignore Dick. When it’s over I’ll just laugh at his pathetic existence.
I woke up at three in the morning to catch a taxi and pick up Blanca at her apartment. We arrived at a spot near the metro stop by the school and got on the chartered bus to Rungis, the world’s largest food market. It hadn’t been on our schedule, because our class was too fast-paced, but I’d insisted and we’d been given the same opportunity to visit Rungis that the regular Superior cooking classes got. We were made to wear white lab coats and hairnets in order to enter the food markets. I had never seen so many gutted pigs and cows in my life. There were cheeses the size of tractor tires, weighing over two hundred kilos, a large selection of rotting cheeses, and roosters and poultry of every shape and size. After about two hours of this food tour I was ready to fall asleep, but this was just the beginning of our day.
We were supposed to have a nine-hour day, but by the middle of the practical I was brain-dead. When I said good-bye to everyone, Pepa couldn’t believe my audacity. She wished she could do the same; she had no choice but to finish her classes. Pepa had started the intensive courses thirteen weeks ago, and she was burning out. She desperately needed the diploma because she was planning to open a cooking school in Spain.
Bassie invited me to her graduation and I debated whether or not I should go. On Fridays the last thing I wanted to do was go out. I told her I would attend her graduation because I heard in her voice that it meant something to her if I went. She had no family coming and Henry was history. I promised I would be there and would try not to fall asleep. I bought flowers for Bassie and congratulated her on passing her final exam. No matter how incompetent they wanted to claim she was, she’d finished the exam on time and her food was actually good.
“Henry still has feelings for you,” Bassie admitted.
“No. We just had fun,” I said.
“I’m sure you did, but he kept bringing up your name. I just know he still cares about you and I feel like a jerk for being with him,” she confessed.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t feel right being with someone who I thought had feelings for someone else,” I concurred, then added, “But you are not a jerk, Bassie… I know how cold a bed can be in Paris.”
Bassie shrugged. “I’m returning to the States next week. My ex-boyfriend wants me back.”
“Not the guy who was a jerk to you, then became nice, then went back to being a jerk?”
Bassie shrugged again. “Same one.”
“Has he changed?” I had to ask.
“No, I have.” Bassie looked up proudly and smiled.
Sunday night, when I was sleeping, I heard a knock at the door. It was only nine p.m., but I’d been exhausted and had gone to bed early so I could be ready for my practical class. I got up and answered the door wearing my skimpy see-through camisole. It was either that camisole or no clothes at all, because I can barely sleep with clothes on. If an earthquake ever happened I would run out naked, I don’t care… Besides, I figured it was probably just Marina, since she was the only person in the building who would talk to me. All the other immigrants, like the Filipina housekeepers or the African chauffeurs, just smiled but never spoke.
I pulled open the door and found two police officers. They looked at me, and simultaneously their eyes headed south, where my nipples were saying hi to them. I slammed the door like a criminal and they pounded on it, demanding that I open up right away. I’m sure they threatened to break down the door in French, but I threw on a robe and opened my
door again before they had a chance to kick it in. They began to ask me questions in French, but I asked them if they spoke English. They said they spoke a little. My other neighbors, as well as Marina, had surrounded my door, wanting to know what was going on. I asked the police officers to come in so the neighbors would stay out of my business. I offered them chairs, but they preferred to stand. They took in my room and asked me for identification. I handed them my carte de séjour and they asked me what I was doing in France.
“I’m studying cuisine at Le Coq Rouge,” I said, but they had never heard of the school. I wondered how that was possible if it was supposed to be so famous. They told me they wanted to ask questions about the robbery. I told them I knew nothing about it except that it had happened to Madame Bodé. I sat down on my bed and looked up at them. They went on to say that Madame Bodé had filed a police report and on her report she’d claimed that she’d seen me with a young Arab male a few days before the robbery.
“Madame Bodé claims she saw you with a man one night on the stairway having sex. Is that true?” Officer Sansgene asked. His question surprised me and I regretted letting Mohammed convince me to do it on the stairway. But what the hell had Madame Bodé been doing on the stairway at three a.m.? She lived on the first floor and there was never a reason to come upstairs … unless she’d been visiting her chauffer in the middle of the night… Hmm, so she’d caught me and I’d caught her. Must be why she’d seen us and, yet, said nothing to me. I would have expected her to chastise us and make a scene, but she’d quietly passed us and slipped away into the night.
“Yes,” I said, trying to reveal as little as possible.
“Was this man a maghrébin?” Officer De la Corbeille asked.
“What is that?” I said, feeling so ignorant for not knowing.
“An Arab.” Officer Sansgene slipped in. Maghrébin was their P.C. term.
“Yes,” I said, wondering what kind of trouble I was in for having sex with an Arab.
“Who was this man? Is he your boyfriend? Does he live with you?” Officer Sansgene continued his probing.
I didn’t want to give them any information because Mohammed would think it low of me to do so. “No. He is not my boyfriend and he does not live here. I was seeing him for a few weeks and then we had a fight and I kicked him out and I have not seen him since,” I said, trying to imagine the officers naked. It was a technique I’d used so often to keep from being intimidated by people in positions of power who I was interviewing that it had become automatic. As soon as they began their interrogation I saw them naked and imagined the shorter one with a huge penis to explain his inner confidence. I recalled making love to Mohammed on the stairway… then I fantasized about the two naked officers joining us. They would handcuff me and take turns penetrating me as I—. I shook my head and smiled, trying to erase that image. God, why do I have such inappropriate thoughts at the most awkward times? They stared at me with more seriousness and continued with their questions.
“How long ago did you stop seeing him?” Officer Sansgene asked. They took turns drilling me with questions. Reluctantly, I gave them all the information I had on Mohammed and hoped that was the end of it.
“Who was that Muslim woman staying with you?” Officer De la Corbeille asked. Madame Bodé was so nosy; why did she have to tell them about Altair? I should tell her husband about the chauffeur, I thought. Of course, he probably visits the nanny at night too.
“She was a friend who was visiting, but she went back to her country a few weeks ago,” I said, casually fighting my tears. They nodded their heads, satisfied, and the short officer gave me his card. He wrote his cell phone number on the back of the card just in case I remembered any other information, no matter how small. I assured him I would call him if I wanted to be handcuffed—I mean, if I had any more information for him. They said “Bonne nuit” and apologized for scaring me. I turned off the lights and debated in the dark whether I should have told them about Altair. Maybe they could have given me the information necessary so I could confirm for myself if she was dead or had been deported.
That night I had a nightmare. I woke up crying when I saw Altair’s corpse being pulled out of the Seine. In my dream she had been wandering by the Seine, searching for her children, and when she lost hope she drowned herself. In my dream I ran to her body and when I kneeled to look at her face it was Luna looking back at me, with sad eyes full of tears and water drops from the Seine. It took me an hour to recover from the nightmare. I felt ashamed for not having tried harder to find Altair or given her hope. I cried myself to sleep and woke up feeling like crap on Monday morning.
CHAPTER 17
No Exit
In the kitchen my biggest fear was cutting myself, so when I saw Alexandros chop up his bones with his cleaver and nearly chop off his left thumb, I thanked God it wasn’t me. He didn’t hit the bone, but he carved enough of a cut that he had to go to the emergency room for stitches. Every time I would need my bones chopped up I would ask Akiva, who used to be in the army back in Israel, to do it for me. He took so much pleasure in doing it that I was convinced he had experience clubbing people the same way. Akiva, who had finally learned to respect the imaginary border between us, had a soft heart and dreamed of being a chef so he could provide for his little girl back in Israel. He missed her a lot, and the thirteen weeks he had been in Paris with only a little French and with even less money was taking a toll on his heart. Only when he was drunk would he show it, but I tried not to get too close to him because he also got frisky when he got drunk.
As the days continued I kept looking at the final recipes, doing a countdown like a prisoner waiting to be released from a ten-year sentence. All the recipes started to look and feel the same; how many times could we do guinea fowl? I was so tired from nearly three weeks of cooking nine hours a day that I couldn’t care less about making the guinea fowl in a bourguignon sauce.
“Didn’t we do this dish already in Basic?” I asked Bianca, but she was nervous about the written exam in a few days. Bianca still reminded me of Chicken Little, always waiting for the culinary sky to fall apart. That girl was so nervous and insecure about everything. No matter how bad I did, Bianca was always more disorganized, lost, and just plain worse. She was always asking for advice and begging for help. Pepa had taken her on as a mentee and looked out for her like a mother hen. I felt sorry for Bianca—how could she possibly be worse than me?
Chef Tristan was unlucky enough to finally get stuck with our class—the Le Coq Rouge orphans abandoned in the second- floor dungeon. We were the orphans because our class was always given the leftover food. Why this was, no one from the school ever explained. Chef Tristan was a stern man with sad eyes and dark circles under them. He had dark hair and a beautiful mouth. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a manly presence that demanded respect. When he would address me I would shake in my skin and be aroused by his masculinity. I couldn’t look him in the eyes because I felt he could see my naked soul. I quivered in my shoes, but I smiled every time I presented a dish. I’d learned to enjoy the sensation.
The day we were making the guinea fowl bourguignon I bunched up my leftover bacon into a ball and threw it into the sauce. What the hell, I figured. We’re not doing brain surgery; it’s just food. I’d gotten to the point in my cooking where I knew that no matter how much you mess with the recipes, it always comes down to the taste. Of course, taste is subjective. What I thought was delicious and would be a best-seller at a restaurant in California wasn’t necessarily what the French chefs considered delicious in Paris. So who the hell cares about pleasing the chefs? Ultimately, I have to please myself. Isn’t that what self-esteem is about?
I presented the plate to Chef Tristan, expecting him to hate it. He tasted my sauce and looked up at me, licking his lips, savoring the flavor. I wanted him to take me right there on the counter. I could picture us on the marble surface having thrown off all the food to make room for our sweaty bodies, struggling to remove our stupid rooste
r-looking cooking uniforms. In my fantasy all the students would still be there cooking, oblivious to us making nasty and passionate lust sauce.
Chef Tristan tasted my sauce for a third time and said, “Magnifique! C’est parfait!” He said it was perfect. He gave me a score of five and said, “Excellent travail, Chef.” This was the first time I had scored a five, the highest possible grade, and been called “Chef” by any of the chefs. I blushed and walked away all proud of myself. I’d begun cleaning my tools when Chef Tristan told Alexandros, who was being judged, that his sauce was good, but not as good as mine. He announced to everyone in the class that so far my sauce was the best. Dick smirked and continued packing his tools. I instantly turned all shades of red and lowered my head. Even with my newfound self-esteem, I had a problem accepting compliments—fighting is easy; winning is hard. Blanca congratulated me and I said thanks. I did my best to ignore Dick, not wanting to allow someone like him to ruin my moment.
Two weeks before the final exam we were given the list of all the ingredients. There were three that were absolutely required: artichokes, fava beans, and lamb. This time around we would also create an original recipe that demonstrated our cooking skills. I studied the list and came up with so many possibilities. I decided on something easy but delicious and unique. I was going to stuff the lamb. Maybe mix some mushrooms, pine nuts, crème fraîche, and then use port to make a sweet sauce. Is there an alcohol that has mint in it? I wondered. Probably, but not one we had in our kitchen. I wanted to add mint to the lamb because it goes so well with it, but they weren’t going to give us mint if it wasn’t on the list or already in the kitchen. They were giving us red and green bell peppers and onions, so I planned to mix them and cook them together in a tian… maybe a tomato confit too. The confit stuffed with artichoke and basil would be so simple and tasty. I was more excited about this final than I had been for anything else in the class.
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