by JD Hawkins
“Yes.”
I see his jaw shift a little as he grinds his teeth. “Why didn’t you say anything? How the hell did this come about? When did you even have time to—?”
I squirm on the chair a little, until I’m so uncomfortable I just stand up.
“Well…when I came to L.A. I…it’s complicated. I have this friend, right, and…look, forget the ‘how,’ the thing is—it’s happening. I didn’t think it would, but now it is, and it’s all been so crazy. We have investors and a location and we—”
“We?” Cole snorts, everything about him taut and angry now. “Who’s ‘we’?”
I take a deep breath, struggling to find the best route through this explanation.
“A friend. Tony, I think I mentioned him to you,” I say. The words come out sounding pathetic, too common and familial to reflect just how bad I feel, just how much I recognize the tragedy of what I’m doing to him.
Cole shakes his head and looks up, laughing darkly before he turns away, moving behind his desk as if he can’t stand not to have a barrier between us.
“Oh, this is too good,” he says, sarcasm and anger mixing in his voice.
“I didn’t want things to turn out like this,” I say, moving close to the desk now as if to keep him close. “It just happened so fast, it all got way out of—”
“Hold on,” Cole says, his smile grim and heavy now, as if clinging to his shred of irony in order to comprehend this. “So the night you came to my apartment, the night I made you that snack you liked, and you came back from a phone call with Tony all confused, leaving in a hurry…” Cole leans over the desk. “You knew then?”
“I…that wasn’t…”
Words fail me, every explanation I come up with sounding even more incriminating in my head. All I can do, finally, is nod.
Cole’s head drops, and for the first time I see the small, book-sized gift on the desk beside him, wrapped in pink paper and tied with a red ribbon. He raises his head again, eyes even darker now, even more distant.
“And when I took you to the beach,” he says, voice slow and thudding, as if he knows the answer already, “and I told you about how Jason betrayed me, scarred me so deep I couldn’t trust anybody else until I met you—” He stops himself to take a breath and find his words again. “And you sat there, all sympathetic and concerned, telling me it was a ‘lonely way to live’ and ‘so sad’ that I didn’t trust anyone. Did you know then?”
“Look, Cole, it’s not like that—”
“Did you know?”
He doesn’t shout, but the words are as powerful as bullets, impossible to ignore.
“Not really…I mean, kind of. It wasn’t really…” I wince and get frustrated with myself for not being able to express this. “It was just an idea…I didn’t think it would really happen. I mean, maybe in a few years or something, but never this soon. This is what I came out here for, though. It’s my dream. Aren’t you even…a little bit excited for me?”
I know even as the words come out that they’re the wrong thing to say. Cole drops himself back into his chair, muscles slumped, his fingers drumming on the table, as if impatient to see the back of me now. After a few tense moments where I mentally toss and turn to find the right words, the right angle on this whole situation, Cole lifts his hand and makes a tight fist, professional and guarded.
“You have a location already?”
“Yes.” I take a deep breath again, pausing before I have to deliver another hit, like a reluctant boxer. “It’s…a couple of streets away. On the way to Santa Monica from here.”
Cole closes his eyes.
“The corner building? The one that used to be a gallery?”
“Yeah,” I say quietly.
“So…” he says, looking at me again, “not only are you leaving me—you’re about to become my competitor.”
“No!” I say, unpersuasively. “Of course not. The food we’re going to make is completely different. And the whole vibe—”
“Knife is the best restaurant in L.A.,” he interrupts. “Anyone anywhere close to us wouldn’t bother with any other restaurant. Other places exist in our shadow. Except now you’re going to give them a choice to make. Because even though I feel like I don’t know really know you anymore, the one thing I do know is that you’re a killer chef.”
“Oh come on, Cole,” I say, starting to feel desperate, “it’s not like Knife is going to go out of business.”
Cole smiles, his expression like ice.
“Alright,” he says, drawing himself upright in his chair and pulling himself toward his desk. He picks up the wrapped gift and drops it in a drawer, sliding it shut forcefully. “I’ll have Martin reach out to go over your final paycheck with you—”
“Cole…”
“—and I’ll have someone come in to cover your shift today.” He pulls his phone from his pocket and gestures at the door, avoiding my eyes. “So if you wouldn’t mind.”
Suddenly, with all his walls back up, Cole becomes a stranger, somehow even more shut off from me than the first time I met him. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“Don’t apologize. You’re just following your dreams. I get it. I’ve trampled over people to get to where I am.”
I shake my head. “It’s not like that.”
“In this business, it’s always like that.” He stands. “You know your way out.”
I start to say something else, but the understanding that anything I say beyond this point is just another stab, another punch in the gut for both of us, stops me. Damage done, wounds raw, even being this close starts to hurt.
I turn my eyes away, and make for the door.
We’re over.
19
Cole
“Are you kidding me?” Martin says, nervously pushing back his hair like a man quitting cigarettes.
“You think I like jokes where I’m the punchline?”
It’s after midnight and we’re sitting at a table in the dining room of Knife, the sound of the dishwashers singing Spanish songs lifting the silence just above unbearable. Between us are a few leftover gougères, though Martin only managed a bite of one before I told him the news and he dropped it on the table.
“So we’re back to square one,” he says, exasperated. “Square zero, since the ship has sailed on the candidate I was chasing.”
“Looks that way,” I say, before sipping long and slow on my wine.
Martin shifts in his seat uncomfortably. He picks up the pastry, brings it to his mouth, then decides he can’t eat again and drops it.
“So with Michelle going to Vegas and no replacement, we’re down a head chef and a line cook at Knife now. Meanwhile Fork is opening in less than a month so you can’t be here to supervise.”
“I know,” I say, pouring the last drops of the wine into my glass.
One of the dishwashers comes into view, poking his head beyond the kitchen doors.
“Uh, boss? We’re done.”
I raise a hand.
“Sure.”
“Should we leave the door open out back?”
“No. Lock it up. We’ll leave out front. Oh…wait. Could you bring a bottle of wine from the office?”
“Sure. Which one?”
I pause for a second, try to think, then realize it doesn’t matter anymore.
“Whatever. I don’t care.”
This makes Martin glare at me, almost fearfully. He watches with a kind of macabre pity as the bottle comes and I pour it lazily into the glass, down it, then pour again. For a moment, I can tell he wants to question it, but then he lets it pass, present problems still occupying the forefront of his thoughts.
“I suppose you’ll want to keep Michelle here, then?” he says, eventually.
“No. She’s still going. She raised her hopes—she likes the idea. Least I can do for her.”
Martin nods. “Maybe that’s smart. She’ll get Fork to hit the ground running—and by the way, we still need to come up with a name. At this rate
we’re gonna be stuck with ‘Fork’—which I don’t mind—but you did say you hated it.”
I watch the red liquid swirl in my glass a little, allow the viscous way it clings to the glass to hypnotize me a little, then raise it to my lips.
“I’m gonna call it ‘Vérité.’”
Martin studies my face for signs I’m joking.
“Truth? You want to call the place Truth?”
“Mm-hmm,” I hum into my glass. “We need a little more of that in this world.”
Once again Martin stares at me like a concerned teacher, likely considering whether he should make an intervention. Eventually he decides against it, stiffening up in his chair instead and putting his palms on the table, the way he always does when he’s galvanizing himself to deal with a problem.
“Ok,” he says, his voice a little sturdier now. “So then the first thing we need to solve is the head chef for Knife. I’d narrowed my list down to two when I was looking for Fork—I mean, Vérité—but one of them is in Europe now, and the other is not going anywhere. There was a third chef up in Oregon that—”
“I’ll do it,” I say, putting my glass down and topping it up.
Martin looks at me for a second.
“You want to take over the search?”
“No. I said I’ll do it,” I repeat. “If you want something done properly, you’ve got to do it yourself. You and Michelle can handle Vérité. I’ll take over here.”
Martin takes another considered pause before speaking.
“You want to get back into cooking again?”
I nod. “I wanna revamp the menu too,” I say, taking my glass and standing up to pace around the table a little, looking around at the place as if with new eyes. “It’s too accessible, too simple. Too many potatoes. People could make our cassoulet at home. It needs to be more sophisticated.”
Martin gives out an incredulous sigh.
“What do you mean? You won your Michelin stars on this menu. We already have a hard enough time finding chefs capable of doing even the most basic dishes on it.”
“You don’t get anywhere by resting on your laurels,” I say, still ambling around the place, listening to the way my voice reverberates around the room. “I’m getting sick of this décor, as well. It’s so…California. Have somebody come by my place. I have a Lautrec that would work better. Maybe put a couple of the Cartier-Bresson prints up, too. And another thing: We’ll do a taster menu. A dozen small plates, charge a few hundred bucks a head.”
Martin’s incredulity reaches intense levels now, and when he speaks I can hear how dry his throat is.
“A taster menu? You said that they were too pretentious—even for you.”
“Yeah, well, things are different now,” I say, ruminating on the woodgrain of the maître’d counter. “We’re gonna raise prices, roll out a new menu, and start producing food sophisticated enough to win literary awards.”
I drop myself back into the seat opposite Martin and allow his astonished gaze to take in my sincerity.
“The food is sophisticated,” he says, shaking his head. “And we already charge some of the highest prices in the city.”
I open my arms wide.
“I’m cooking here now. People would pay a hundred bucks for a glass of water if they thought I poured it. They’d probably say it’s the best they’ve ever had, too.”
He’s silent for a minute, and I pour myself another glass of wine and start thinking more in depth about the new menu, where I can source the most difficult-to-find ingredients, how soon I can schedule a nice long research trip to Paris.
“Cole…I know we don’t usually talk personal stuff,” Martin finally says, tentatively. “You and I have never really…you know…opened up, or anything. It’s not really my place. But I have to ask you, ‘cause this is…well, these changes you’re talking are pretty dramatic. Are you sure your head is in the right place for this right now? I know that you and, uh, Willow had…well…something going on, and...”
“You’re right, Martin,” I say, staring at him humorlessly. “It’s not your place. Yours is the ‘how,’ not the ‘why.’ So don’t ask me anything like that again. Oh, and I want you to fire Leo. Tell him he might be the best saucier in America, but his bouillabaisse still tastes like fresh sewage. He’s welcome to drop by and taste mine if he wants to learn how it’s done.”
It takes Martin a few seconds to digest what I’m saying, but when he does he pulls out his notepad officiously and starts writing.
“Yes, boss.”
For the next few months I work harder than I’ve done since I built the place. I turn up to the restaurant before sunrise and leave by moonlight, a flurry of swearing and high standards as I whip the kitchen into better shape than it’s ever been. I kill items from the menu like traitors to a dictatorship—the Basque burgers go first, of course—and replace them with items evermore complicated. Truffled chicken quenelles over cured seabass, hand dived scallops with shiso and dried Japanese mushrooms, clay-baked young ginger, fennel, and candied beetroot, smoked bone marrow, pork, and blanched quince.
The plates become works of post-modern art, food pornography that instills hunger at first glance. Mandarin, pear, and pinenut napoleons so delicate and towered so high that they defy gravity. Coq au vin that commits the transgression of using white wine—and gets away with it. Hazelnut and ginger macarons so perfectly concocted they have to be eaten within minutes of being cooked.
I take as much time over the presentation as over the cooking, raging at chefs who put down a line of cherry preserve on the thyme-roasted veal that’s a quarter inch too long, losing my shit when I see a leaf of arugula on the feta and lemon puree olive salad that isn’t glistening with the exact shade of green it needs to be. I reject several sample menus for being printed paper that doesn’t evoke quality. Two new line cooks quit within days of this baptism of fire, before the third one, a woman who relishes the battle-like atmosphere I’ve created, finally sticks. Broccoli and cheese soup becomes ‘charred calabrese broccolini and stilton soup with walnut-encrusted croutons,’ is served in a bowl the size of an egg-cup, and has fifty dollars added to the price.
I do all this with Willow’s words echoing in the back of my mind. ‘Food should look like food… It should be made with love… It should satisfy…’ I do all this to defy her, to go further in the opposite direction, as if this difference in philosophy might increase the distance between us, between what I feel for her. Felt for her. I do it all to prove her wrong, to somehow numb the betrayal of what she did, what she’s about to do.
I work til my muscles ache, til the skin on my hands goes tough with the heat of pan handles again, until I’m spending so little time at home that my place starts to feel unfamiliar. I don’t have time for days off, or eating out myself—or even Chloe’s lessons, anymore.
It works, for a while. Word spreads that I’m back in the kitchen, and almost immediately Knife has lines that stretch beyond the famous seafood place down the street. The food critics start pouring in with the masses, each of them looking for a reason to stand out by giving our new menu a critical reception, and none of them leaving with it.
Each night, as I agonize over the chicken and pistachio galantine’s imperfections, I have to delete several voicemails from my phone. Offers to return to television and guest star on cooking shows, invitations to exclusive clubs and parties, requests to give interviews on the ‘return of Cole Chambers.’ Knife’s success already reaching sensation levels that almost rival its opening.
Except…
Here I am, alone in the back office, unaware of the time but for the fact that the dish washers have gone, feeling empty and unfulfilled. A gaping hunger inside of me that no food or wine can fill; no glowing, verbose review with a prestigious name on top of it, no celebrity customer’s compliments, not even the cell number of a voluptuous Italian actress, which she scrawled on a cocktail napkin tonight and had Charles promise to make sure I received.
I look
at the napkin on the desk, pushing it around a little, with tired, blistered fingers. The number ends with a heart—an insinuation of what lies at the other end of the line if I call. I pick the napkin up and hold it in my hand, as if trying to divine what would happen if I called. The coy flirting, the insinuating chatter, the meeting, the move, the morning after. She’ll play hard to get a little, verbally spar with me as a kind of test, then give in beautifully, as if being typecast as the bombshell in every movie had compelled her to do the same in life. Except all I want to do is fall into bed arguing about the right way to make seafood risotto.
I scrunch the napkin up and toss it into a wastepaper basket, then get up from behind the desk, every sound I make loud in the heavy silence of the empty restaurant. My muscles ache as I move through the place, turning off lights and setting the alarm system. I clench and unclench stiff fingers, callouses re-hardened on hot pan handles, my back cracking when I pull my shoulders back after hours spent hunched over counters.
Locked up, I walk slowly across the lot to my parked Porsche, breathing deeply, the night-released jasmine cleansing senses that have been overwhelmed by flavors and smells throughout the shift. I don’t know why I do it, but I don’t turn right out of the parking space. Right toward the road that’ll lead me to my empty house, where I’ll turn on the TV, pour a glass of whiskey, and fall asleep before I’ve even taken a sip or changed the channel. Instead, I go straight. Straight toward Santa Monica, just a couple of streets…
I pull up across the street. Close enough to see the giant, etched wood sign hanging above the entrance, close enough to make out the familiar sight of a half-furnished restaurant inside, but not too close, because there’s a single light on, and a single figure moving around inside. I check the time. One-thirty-three am—and it’s a weekday. Even here in the middle of the city, the streets are so dead that even the streetlights feel like a waste of electricity.
And yet there she is. The figure could be anyone at this distance, but those movements are unmistakable, that poise too well-remembered for it to be anybody else. And besides, it’s not like anybody else would be up at one-thirty in the morning working in a restaurant that isn’t supposed to open for another couple of weeks.