Reality Check

by Leslie Carroll

The uniformed bellhop was so intent on observing the antics of his giggling passengers that he didn’t even comment on one of the bags that rested on the cart and gave an occasional wiggle as we sped up in the elevator to the nineteenth floor. Jack tipped him well. The cart was brought directly to his door, and once safely inside the suite, Jack deposited me on the edge of the king-sized bed. “Madame,” he teased, removing my slingback from his jacket pocket with a dramatic flourish. I extended my foot and he slipped the shoe on, ensuring that the strap fit snugly around the back of my ankle. Then he deposited a gentle kiss on my bare instep. His lips felt soft against my skin.

  “You would have given Sir Walter Raleigh a run for his money, Jack.” I reached out my arms to him. “Come here. I want to thank you.”

  He leaned down and I brushed his lips with my own. “Thanks,” I said. “It was gallant of you. And I love the way you didn’t mind looking silly.”

  “My guess is that every guy in that hotel lobby wished he’d been me,” Jack replied softly.

  We looked at each other; it was that moment that always arrives in every new, blossoming, mutual attraction. That ocean of time where you sort of size each other up . . . where, for some reason, it always feels like an eternity from that moment when your gazes lock and you both acknowledge what’s going on to the one-time-only instant when you have that first real kiss. The one that’s for keeps. Jack’s lips were soft and tasted of spearmint. His kiss was tender and gentle, and although we hardly knew each other, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to be kissing him. In fact, it felt so right, so natural that our mouths didn’t need to learn one another’s lips and tongues.

  “Thank you for that, too,” I said, enjoying the look of contentment on his face.

  “You’re welcome, Liz. Very welcome.” He regarded me for a few moments, then turned his focus toward our lobsters, which were still hell-bent on survival. “Shall we start working on dinner?”

  “I suppose so,” I replied, a bit disappointed, thinking another kiss would have been nice.

  Jack began to lay the Chelsea Market purchases out on the coffee table. “You can watch or you can help,” he told me. “It’s up to you. And I promise not to make any jokes or judgments on your lack of culinary expertise, whichever you decide to do.”

  I elected to pitch in. Jack handed me the lemons and a sharp knife and told me to cut the fruit into wedges. I looked at him. “Where?”

  He looked just a teensy bit exasperated. “In the bathroom. On the marble counter top.” I regarded him wide-eyed, terrified we were going to end up trashing the place. “Marble is the best cutting surface,” Jack said. “When you’re done with the lemons, you can mince the herbs.”

  Mince?

  While I was struggling with the lemons—mostly because I was so self-conscious about preparing a meal with a true pro, trying very hard to slice only the citrus and not myself—Jack had mixed up a fistful of the breadcrumbs with dashes of this and that seasoning. He didn’t measure a thing; he just seemed to know exactly how much of each ingredient to use. He uncorked the wine and poured us each a glass, then added a splash of chardonnay to his breadcrumb mixture.

  My lemon wedges were all uneven, with jagged edges. Jack wiped his hands on the legs of his pants— in the absence of an apron or dishtowel—a gesture that sort of shocked me a bit. He placed his now-clean, warm hands on my shoulders and surveyed my handiwork, leaning over me. He seemed to be breathing in the scent of my shampoo. “Oh, Liz,” he sighed, “you’re smart, you’re funny, and you’re very, very attractive, but you’re hopeless in the kitchen.”

  “Better hopeless in the kitchen than clueless in the bedroom,” I kidded.

  He turned me around to face him and looked me straight in the eye. “Who says you have to be one or the other?” Before I could reply, he winked at me and handed me a plate for my lemon wedges. “Just put those in the minifridge,” he said.

  I opened the door to the little refrigerator and almost had a heart attack. Jack had stashed the two lobsters in there and as soon as they saw daylight, they tried to make yet another dash for freedom. “Jack,” I sort of wailed, “can you put them back?” I could swear that one of them had one of those teeny bottles of Stoli clasped in its claw, no doubt in an effort to blunt the horrible contemplation of his imminent demise.

  Jack stuffed the crustaceans back into the fridge and took the plate of lemon wedges from me, carefully placing it on one of the shelves. “Why don’t you just sit down for a while,” he suggested. “I’ve got everything under control.”

  I curled up in one of the armchairs. “Then you’ve done this before?”

  “Done what?”

  “Cooked a lobster dinner in a hotel room.”

  “Actually, Liz, I haven’t, but the task doesn’t daunt me.”

  “I can see that.”

  “You have to know my background. When you’ve run a noisy, bustling, professional kitchen like it’s an army on the march or a well-oiled machine— where each participant has his place and knows exactly what his responsibility is, and where timing is essential, even crucial—something like this is only a minor challenge.”

  I sipped my chardonnay. “I’m sorry I blew it. Didn’t rise to the challenge.”

  Jack stopped what he was doing, knelt in front of me, and took both my hands in his. “If it’s any consolation, the kitchen help at Tito’s don’t do any better on their first day of the job either.”

  I felt like such a butterfingers. I had told Jack that I don’t cook, not that I can’t cook. I had made a pact with myself a couple of years ago not to go out of my way to cook elaborate meals for my dates because after a while I started to feel taken advantage of by guys who would show up for some good home-cooking, never offer to help pay for the groceries, chow down, and then sit on the couch watching TV while I did the dishes.

  Tonight, though, I’d wanted to impress Jack with my dexterity as a chef’s helper. I was more than a little intimidated by his cordon bleu credentials, in addition to which I found him so attractive that it was hard to concentrate in his presence.

  “So how did you become a chef?” I asked, preferring to put the focus on him rather than on my embarrassing inability to cleanly slice a lemon. “I can’t imagine a little boy deciding that’s what he wants to be when he grows up.”

  Jack checked the status of the water in the lobster pot, which took up both burners of the hot plate, and removed the critters from the refrigerator. “I’m going to put them in the pot, now. Don’t look if you don’t want to.”

  “Good idea.” I went into the bathroom and covered my eyes, even though I was in the next room. Jack started to sing “Home on the Range” at the top of his voice. “What are you doing?” I called out to him.

  “Singing. So you won’t hear that pathetic whining sound you said you hate when they first hit the water.”

  “That’s very considerate of you,” I yelled back. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Jack poked his head in the bathroom. “All clear. You can come out now.”

  I returned to the safety of the armchair.

  “You’re curious as to why I became a chef,” Jack said. “Everyone’s got to eat and a meal should be a pleasurable experience. It should delight all the senses. My mom was a dreadful cook. I was raised in a working-class household where my father firmly believed cooking was a woman’s job, so he never went near the kitchen except to get another beer, and I was a boy who liked to eat—in fact, I was a bit of a porker as a kid. I was also a mediocre student; the one subject I truly excelled in at school was chemistry. I liked whipping up concoctions and testing the results. My parents, and later my friends, were willing to be my guinea pigs because more often than not my creations were a success. A little weird sometimes, I’ll admit . . . like the time I did an artichoke leaf and rose petal tart—don’t wrinkle your nose, Liz—I know it might sound gross, but it actually tasted pretty good!”

  “My roommate Jem is like that. She
’s a communications professor, but she’s also a genius behind the bar. She invents all sorts of wild cocktails. I don’t know exactly what she does or how she does it, but there’s . . . like . . . voodoo magic in there or something. She’s mixed race, got all sorts of island blood as well as Indian blood—as in ‘Native American,’ I mean—and she swears it’s the legacy of her ancestors that she can create these potions that make you feel a certain way, or behave a certain way. Not all of them have the same effect, but every one tastes wonderful.”

  “And how do Jem’s cocktails usually make you feel?” Jack asked.

  I blushed. “Horny. B-But I haven’t had any of her concoctions this evening, so . . . let’s not go there,” I stammered, when I felt him looking at me. I wondered if he had any additional romantic thoughts beyond that first kiss we’d shared. If he did, he wasn’t letting me in on the secret.

  When the lobsters were boiled, Jack removed them and placed them on plates, while he drained the water from the pot by dumping it into, of all unromantic places, the toilet. He slit open the crustaceans’ bellies and stuffed them with his herb and breadcrumb mixture, then, as unselfconsciously as he’d done earlier, wiped his hands clean on his trouser legs. I wondered if it was a “chef” thing, but I was too embarrassed to call attention to his now-filthy chinos. Should I get him a handtowel from the bathroom?

  “You’re on,” he said to me, pulling me out of the armchair.

  “Huh?”

  Jack motioned to the minifridge. “Go get a couple of your lemon wedges and squeeze the juice onto the stuffing.” I did so and he congratulated me on my apprenticeship. I think he was teasing me. He refilled my wine glass and sent me back to the armchair while he placed a lobster over each of the two burners on the hot plate. “Not optimum, but the best I can do under the current conditions,” he said, looking at his handiwork. “It’s the closest I can get to broiling.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be delicious.”

  “Now, if you would be so kind as to set the table.” He motioned to the placemats, napkins, and flatware. I actually enjoy setting tables and I made the coffee table look as pretty as I could. Too bad neither of us had thought to pick up a couple of candles. I was now thoroughly into the romantic loopiness of this dinner.

  Jack smacked his forehead with his palm. “Jesus, what kind of chef am I? I forgot to pick up vegetables. Corn on the cob would have been perfect. And so easy.”

  “I won’t hold it against you,” I said, saluting him with my glass.

  Once the lobsters were sufficiently “broiled,” Jack rested them on our plates, then melted some butter for each of us, pouring it into small ceramic ramekins that he’d picked up at the cookware store. He handed me a cracking tool and a lobster fork, and brought our plates to the table. We dug in.

  “This is amazing,” I said, tasting the stuffing along with the sweet lobster meat. I raised my fork to him. “Bravo!”

  He nodded. “You’re welcome.”

  “I can’t believe you were a fat kid,” I said. He sure as hell looked amazing now. “How did you take it all off—if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “First? I stopped feeling compelled to taste everything I cooked. This may become a problem again when I open my own restaurant. I’m seriously considering leaving Tito’s once the salsa launch goes national. Anyway, I discovered the joys of exercise. I was never much for team sports, so I started running on a regular basis and took up golf.”

  “Golf?” I wrinkled my nose. “Golf isn’t exercise .”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s a waste of perfectly good park land, that’s what it is.”

  “Watch it, Liz. I happen to love golf. And it’s terrific exercise if you walk the course.”

  I think we’d just hit our first sandtrap. “You really love golf?”

  “Uh-huh. You can’t grow up in Miami and not play. Love to watch it on TV, even.”

  There was an awkward silence. I looked down at my plate and picked at my lobster.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t subject you to my plaid pants and white bucks.” Jack diplomatically changed the subject. “So, how did you end up a copywriter, Liz? That doesn’t seem to be something a little kid in the sandbox decides she wants to be when she grows up.”

  “Did you ever wonder what makes people tick?” I asked Jack. “Why the color blue makes people feel one way and yellow makes them feel another? Why something that costs $99.99 seems so much cheaper than something that costs a hundred dollars? Maybe I’m nuts, but I get a kick out of this stuff. I’ve always been fascinated with what makes people buy what they buy and use what they use. The power of advertising and marketing is enormous. Think about it. Would you really buy a car, for example, from a TV commercial? But if those ads didn’t get people into the showrooms, the automakers would never spend gazillions of dollars to run them. The art of persuasion intrigues me. In school, I found out that I was good at using words as power tools, so I took summer intern-ships at advertising agencies, and when I graduated college, I had a short list of places I wanted to work that were creative, trendy, and cutting edge. I was very lucky, Jack. My first choice liked my portfolio and I’ve been at Seraphim Swallow Avanti ever since. Of course, who knows how much longer I’ll be there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told him about the pitch session that I’d fled.

  “ ‘Snatch’?” he asked. “As in . . . ?” He looked like he wasn’t sure whether to point to my crotch or his own, just for the sake of gentlemanliness.

  “You know of any other kind of snatch?” Then I told him about the Numbers Crunchers assignment. “That one should be less of a challenge. For one thing, the product doesn’t sound obscene.”

  “Sounds like the snack food of choice for CPAs,” Jack joked.

  “You’re not bad at this. Want my job?”

  “Got any ideas for the ad campaign yet? You can bounce them off of me. ‘Jack Blow, American Consumer.’ I’d love to hear them.”

  My throat seized up.

  “It’s all right. You don’t have to tell me. I didn’t mean to pressure you, Liz.”

  I put my hands on my neck. I couldn’t swallow all of a sudden. In fact I could barely breathe. My legs started to itch, too. So did my arms. I looked down and noticed that my limbs were covered with red splotches that seemed to increase in size with every passing second. I touched my right leg. The skin felt blisteringly hot. My stomach seized up with cramps while a simultaneous wave of nausea sent me running to the bathroom. When I returned to the living room, I tried to speak to Jack, but the sound would barely come out. What I managed to say was apparently unintelligible. I bolted up from the couch and grabbed a Waldorf-Astoria notepad and pencil from the desk.

  “I think we should get to a hospital,” I scribbled as hastily as I could manage. “Something really weird is happening to me.” I shoved the pad under Jack’s nose.

  “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed.

  I took the pad away and scrawled two more words: “I’m scared.”

  9/

  Where’s George Clooney When You Need Him?

  Next thing I knew, we were speeding in a taxi toward Mount Sinai hospital. I refused to be taken anywhere else. While Jack stroked my forehead and whispered reassuringly that everything would be okay, I counted how many successive green lights we made in an effort to take my mind off the ever-increasing rash swelling body part after body part. The fact that I could barely breathe or speak because my throat felt swollen shut from the inside made me a lousy conversationalist.

  The cab dropped us at the Madison Avenue emergency room entrance to Mount Sinai. I wasn’t prepared for the sight. Inside the dirty white waiting room, about half a dozen people, who looked like winos or addicts sleeping it off, were curled in or sprawled over the vinyl-covered chairs.

  Jack wrinkled his nose. I wasn’t sure if he detected a whiff of piss coming from one of the waiting room denizens (I did), or whether he was reacting to the noxious fum
es of disinfectant that stung our nostrils as an indifferent janitor pushed a stringy, filthy mop across the linoleum in front of us.

  Jack seemed twice as anxious as I was. “Are you okay?” I mimed the question. He cracked his knuckles. “I hate that,” I started to say, but I was having trouble forming the words.

  “Sorry.” Jack shoved his hands in his pockets. “Hospitals make me nervous. I hate them. I really, really hate them.”

  I raised my shoulders to ask him why, but he waved his hand to interrupt me. “Forget it,” he said, “I don’t want to get into it right now. No need to freak out either of us more than we already are.” Jack’s tone of voice reflected his squeamishness in spades. “Let’s take care of you and get the hell out of here as fast as we can,” he added.

  I pointed to an unstaffed window with a sign that read TRIAGE. PLEASE FORM A LINE. The compos mentis people in the waiting room—those who were not already passed out or otherwise asleep—looked as though they had long given up hope of seeing a doctor that night. I started scratching my leg again and Jack tried unsuccessfully to encourage me to stop.

  Leaving me at the triage window, Jack started to pace the hall, looking for a doctor, nurse, anyone who could admit me. I noticed another sign inside the little triage cubicle and ran over and grabbed Jack’s arm. I pointed to it: IF YOU HAVE A PERSISTENT RASH OR COUGH, DO NOT STAY IN THE WAITING ROOM. SEE THE TRIAGE NURSE IMMEDIATELY. I gestured frantically at my legs and arms. Jack nodded and reminded me that there was no triage nurse to be seen, regardless of my condition.

  “Entertain me, Jack,” I scribbled on the back of a trifolded brochure I found lying on the floor. “It’ll give us something to take our minds off being here.”

  Jack threw his hands in the air in a semi-shrug. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me a story. I told you about my job situation. What’s the silliest one you’ve ever had?” By now my hand was starting to cramp from writing so quickly, and Jack was squinting at the brochure in an effort to decipher my scrawl.

  “Well, I’m not sure this qualifies as ‘silly,’ but I managed one of the gift shops at Disney World the summer between my college graduation and the start of business school. Every morning before I opened up for the day, I would go around the store and decide to make all the Eeyores smile—the ones I could affect— you know, the stuffed toys where I could take my fingernail and manipulate the stitching around their mouths. There I was, in charge of the largest gift shop at the ‘happiest place on earth’ and we sold unhappy toys. I didn’t want them to be gloomy anymore.” He kissed the top of my head, then rose and resumed pacing and cracking his knuckles, despite the desperate look I gave him, hoping he might quit. The manifestation of Jack’s nerves set mine even more on edge.