The truth of it was that as much as Jim betrayed me with another woman, I betrayed him with my career. My ambition was more important than my marriage. I’d made a choice. I am not saying that it was the wrong choice, but I definitely made a choice. I’d begrudgingly acknowledged this to myself in the darkest hours of the night when I lay there unable to sleep, when the rational part of me demanded that it takes two to destroy a marriage. But even in those dark hours I’d tell myself, well, I might have worked too much, but at least I didn’t fuck anyone else. That I also wasn’t fucking him somehow seemed immaterial. All that smug house of cards came tumbling down the afternoon I sat panting in O’Connor’s car, and the only thing stopping me from ripping his clothes off was the beep of his cell phone. Apparently, I just hadn’t found the right person.
That afternoon had plunged me back into therapy, forced me to acknowledge that it was time for Saint Mary to hang up her halo, that Jim’s fall from grace wasn’t an excuse for me to start screaming holier than thou, that even though I hated to admit it, I bore some responsibility for the demise of my marriage, and, Mary, that will be $130 dollars and next Tuesday?
“Cara,” Antonello boomed over the oven timer. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. We’re all waiting. Dean Benson wants to formally welcome you to….”
Antonello saw my face stiff with shame and stopped.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded over the whine of the timer, throwing a menacing glare in O’Connor’s direction. “Chef Mary, is there a problem?”
I rushed past both of them and turned off the timer.
“No, everything’s fine,” I lied. “Chef Antonello, meet Inspector O’Connor. He was Jim’s partner in the S.F.P.D. Homicide Division. He’s…here…at school…a student.” I mumbled, waving my hand in the direction of the kitchen.
“Pleased to meet you, Chef Antonello.” O’Connor held out his hand. “Mary’s told me a lot about you over the years. I can hardly wait to get into your class.”
Antonello gave me a sideways glance, at which I tried to smile. The nostrils in his nose flared, his chocolate brown eyes hardened. If looks could kill. He shook O’Connor’s hand with only the barest courtesy and said nothing in return.
Antonello turned back to me. “We’re waiting for you at the chefs’ table, Cara.” He put a friendly hand on my shoulder and for a brief second pulled on my earlobe. “Are you coming?”
“Yeah, I’ll be there in just a second,” I assured him. “Let me get these cakes out of the oven first.”
Antonello looked at O’Connor and then back to me.
“Are you sure?” he insisted. “Let me help you.”
“No, no, I’m fine,” and I waved a pair of oven mitts in the direction of the dining room. “Go. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Before Antonello left the room he made a curt nod in O’Connor’s direction. “I warn you once, Mr. O’Connor.”
As I opened the oven and started sliding hot sheet pans out of the deck oven onto rolling racks, O’Connor picked up another set of mitts and began helping me.
“Does he maul every woman that way?” he demanded, slamming the sheet pans onto the rack. “Jim told me that guy was always all over you.”
I slid the last sheet pan on the rack. I turned to face him, now in complete control.
“Mr. O’Connor. Handle those cakes with care, if you please. They’re made of eggs and air, not cement. You’re here to learn pastry. You’ll learn pastry. Class starts again at 11:00 a.m. I suggest you get something to eat. One final note: Neither you nor my ex-husband have any right to comment on my relationships with other men. Get a grip.”
I threw the oven mitts at him and noted with satisfaction that they left soot streaks all over the front of his pristine white chef’s jacket.
***
“Mary, we’re so happy to have you with us.” Dean Benson’s rich basso boomed across the room as I neared the chefs’ tables. Standing up to execute a dramatic flourish with his left arm, he indicated that I possessed the seat of honor next to him with the old guard. I hoped that this wasn’t an indication of his position in this ridiculous conflict. Surely, he wasn’t taking sides? I sat down somewhat secure in the knowledge that I had no choice but to obey the Dean’s express wish that I be his guest for lunch. I hadn’t realized how much time had elapsed while O’Connor and I’d been duking it out at the ovens. Everyone else had begun on their entrees. The students had finished eating, and people were going for their second cup of coffee. A pleasant buzz surrounded each table as students compared notes for the first morning of classes.
I nodded in Benson’s direction and sat down, unfolding my napkin with a snap in an effort to hide my nerves. This was my first official meal with my fellow chefs, and I desperately wanted to make a good impression.
Antonello, who was sitting next to me, whispered in my ear, “Everything okay?”
I nodded briefly. Even that minute exchange had all eyes at the table on us. A few of the older chefs who’d taught when I was a student leered at me as if to say, “You and Antonello still at it, eh?” The old Mary would have stared them down. The humble and poor Mary silently muttered “frigging perverts” while checking to make sure her napkin was centered on her lap. High road, I told myself, take the high road.
Napkin safely unfolded on my lap, I turned to Benson. “Dean Benson, how nice to see you again.” I shook his hand and nodded at the student chef who’d been hovering over that end of the table, dying to serve that one lone salad. Turning his body slightly away, he made a quick, sneaky swipe of his brow with his jacket cuff. I smiled in sympathy. Waiting on the chefs’ table is the penalty for those who are late. His tardiness, most likely BART related as the trains always run late on rainy mornings, wouldn’t make a difference. Curt, the maitre’d, was merciless.
“Too much salt in this coq au vin, Marc. Try to keep your students more in check, if you please.” Benson sniffed loudly and threw down his knife and fork on the plate with a loud clatter. This was said to the other table where the younger chefs sat. The older chefs smiled at one another in repressed glee. The briny chicken sat untouched on everyone’s plates. Marc Lapin, a twenty-five-year-old wunderkind from Texas, hung his head in disgrace, his dreadlocks not doing a very good job of hiding the deep blush on his face.
Actually, as a dean, Bob Benson wasn’t a bad choice. To his credit, although he knew nothing about running a business, he knew food. An unfortunate trait that most chefs share. Which might explain why eighty percent of all food establishments fail in their first three years of operation.
To give Benson his due, armed only with a degree from Cornell’s hotel management program, he was the first to realize that what America needed was a venue that trained chefs. And what better way to get the big bucks out of people than by capitalizing on the cachet of training your juvenile delinquent in the old European tradition. With European chefs! He realized that food would become the new theater, that restaurants would become the new stage, that food magazines would start to resemble a type of Bible.
Hand in hand with this amazing, prescient idea was the grinding need to prove to his father, a real estate king who owned a baseball team back in the Midwest, that he could make it in the big bad world of corporate America without Daddy’s help. When the school began bleeding money, Benson, still determined not to let Dad bail him out, frantically put the school out to bid. A pharmaceutical company snapped it up, so in addition to owning a cooking school, it was simultaneously conducting research on pills designed to let you eat what you want, all the time, when you want, without gaining an ounce. The irony seemed to be lost on everyone but me. Two years ago the school had been sold yet again to some nameless conglomerate. I could have cared less so long as the stock kept its value and they didn’t ask me to bake with margarine.
Aside from his unerring ability to turn anything having to do with money into a textbook case on how to file for bankruptcy, Benson had an un
canny pulse on the food scene. What were trends before they were even trends. A fact that was not lost on the corporation that now owned the school. Benson now ran the food end of it, but had handed over the financial reins to a controller who has the personality of a cauliflower and an extremely pale and sort of lumpy face (his name exited my brain the second it was told to me). He’d also hired an office manager, Marilyn Cantucci, to run the office.
I’d been introduced to her when I’d filled out my forms. A woman whose devotion to spectator pumps was only surpassed by her loyalty to her manicurist. We sniffed around each other like dogs that didn’t necessarily click but hadn’t reached the stage of out and out growling and teeth snapping. Not someone I could relate to. A woman whose number one investment was herself. Manicures, pedicures, waxing, eyebrow shaping, outfits so coordinated they screeched of having her colors done—I’ve been dying for someone to ask me what my season was so I could say black—she never has that embarrassing white stripe of gray at her part—a fashion faux pas I’ve been guilty more times than I care to count. It seems pointless to go through all that rigmarole when you spend your life in a uniform boxy enough to fit a man or a woman.
I suspected that Marilyn was the real power behind the throne, Bob the idea man. It would behoove me to stay on her good side.
“Inedible chicken aside,” Benson threw another pointed look in Marc’s direction, “we’d like to formally welcome Mary Ryan to the school. Mary, in addition to her formidable culinary skills, is probably our most infamous teacher. How’s the body count these days, Mary?” Dean Benson chortled at his poor attempt at wit and wagged a fat finger at me, obviously expecting some sort of equally pithy remark.
I brought my napkin up to my face and wiped my mouth, hiding an involuntary grimace. Before I’d begun teaching, I’d deluded myself that everyone would be too polite to mention last fall’s murders. Fat chance. The morning was barely three-hours old, and my own dean was bringing it up. I’d have to cut this line of discussion off at the knees, or I’d be the target of dead body jokes for the next four months.
“Fortunately, Dean Benson, I left my dead body magnet at home today.” I smiled sweetly to take away the sting, but hoped that would end this annoying line of repartee.
Benson bit his bottom lip, clutched the lapels of his two thousand dollar suit, and scooted his butt to the far side of his seat.
When I was a student, we all thought Dean Benson’s need to puff himself up at someone else’s expense more a pathetic attempt to establish credibility with the other owners because of his relative youth than any real character flaw. Here he was barely thirty, telling a bunch of seasoned European chefs what to do; guys who’d had been carving chunks of carrots into the requisite seven-sided bullets when Benson was still in diapers. Well, we were wrong. Rather than waning as he aged and his confidence grew, this arrogance had calcified so that now it was as hard as spun sugar. I’m sure they’ll find a gene for it someday.
Benson’s name often pops up in the society columns, which I read every day as it pays to keep tabs on your clients; who’s divorcing whom so you don’t seat the ex-Mrs. X at a table next to the old Mr. X and the newer, younger Mrs. X. Benson comes from money, a preliminary (but not a given) foot in the door in San Francisco society. He aims for old-money types, who find him perfectly acceptable as a dinner partner, but never consider him suitable husband material. Benson was a few hundred million short of the funds necessary to gloss over Dad’s questionable real estate deals.
I steeled myself for more tasteless remarks regarding the murder when the student waiter saved the day by inadvertently trying to clear the table before everyone had finished. A big no-no. Personally, I can’t stand dirty dishes in front of me, the food congealing in a lumpy mass while everyone else finishes their meal, but it’s not proper etiquette.
“Young man,” Dean Benson intoned deeply, stroking his red power tie for emphasis.
“Y…y…yes, Dean?” The student stuttered back in response.
“Do not, I repeat, do not remove the plates until everyone is finished. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” the student whispered. Beads of sweat erupted on his brow, as if we were going to ask him to remove his chef’s jacket on the spot so that we could flog him with giant wire whisks. With a casual flick of his wrist, Benson dismissed him, and the poor guy fled back across the dining room to the kitchen as fast as he could short of breaking into a run, no doubt in search of cooking sherry.
I’d forgotten how terrifying I found the first four months while at École. If it hadn’t been for Antonello De Luca, I probably wouldn’t have finished the program. Obviously, the sport of humiliating students hadn’t changed over the years. I’d experienced that identical terror many times.
The first time I waited at the chefs’ table I knew enough not to clear the table before everyone was finished, but no one told me that Europeans cross their utensils to indicate they’re done eating, in direct contrast to Americans, who place their utensils side by side. After several chefs with accents reprimanded me, I caught on.
Once the obligatory humiliation of the student waiter was over, in an all too familiar repetition of our lunch in December, Benson began scraping his plate for the last remnants of the cherry cobbler. I pegged him as the kind of man who’d lick his dessert plate in the privacy of his own home.
I made a show of digging in, trying to muster enthusiasm for chicken cordon bleu at ten-thirty in the morning. Being around food all the time usually has one of two effects: either you become so sick of looking at food all day and night that very little tempts you—many chefs become vegetarians; cutting up a few sides of beef can have a real negative effect on your meat consumption—or you become entranced by it and can’t stop eating. I tended to be of the eat-just-enough-to-stay-alive camp, but on my first day I should at least pretend I was enjoying the food.
Ugh, the chicken was too salty.
“Mary,” a female voice called to me from the other table. I turned toward a petite Asian woman whose severe black crew cut highlighted her delicate bone structure and the blood red of her lipstick.
“I’m Shelley Tam. Nice spread on fruit desserts in last April’s issue of American Chef.”
“Thanks. Didn’t you open up a number of Wolfgang Puck’s places? You’ve had a few articles in American Chef yourself.”
“Mmmn.” She acknowledged my praise with an elegant, cat-like shrug of her shoulders and twirled a spoon between her fingers. “What I liked most was your comment about how fussy desserts were becoming. How there’s so much man-handling of food these days. The endless chopping, the straining, the mauling.” Then she dropped the spoon on her dessert plate so that it clattered on the china.
All forks stopped. All eyes were on me.
“I didn’t say maul. I just meant that I like my desserts simple.” I babbled on, casting desperate looks at Antonello to save me. “Some fresh fruit with a little ice cream, and I’m happy. Just my personal taste.”
I didn’t know the rules of this war, except the more I talked the more I was bound to offend someone.
Marc, the teacher Benson humiliated earlier, interrupted me. “Hey, I know what you mean, Mary,” he drawled, his Texas accent lazy and contemptuous, a lot of vowels and no consonants. “All that turning of vegetables, making stuff into unnatural shapes, pushing everything through a sieve so there’s no texture left at all. Glorified baby food.” He paused to push up the sleeves of his chef’s jacket, like he was gearing up for something.
Marc looked directly at Étienne Broussard, who had apprenticed in Paris during Maxim’s heyday. “You know,” he paused, “Only the French could come up with a cuisine that makes torturing food a near religion. I can’t believe we’re still teaching that crap.”
Marc barely got that final “pee” out of his mouth, which considering his usual drawl was quite distinct, before Chef Étienne stood up, picked up a pitcher of water, and marched ove
r to where Marc was sitting.
“You’re a disgrace to the profession,” Étienne shouted. “You’re incapable of even making a decent cordon bleu.” And he threw the entire pitcher of water into Marc’s face.
Chapter Four
Fortunately, the cutlery had been bussed, so there wasn’t any danger of anyone getting stabbed. Unfortunately, not ten seconds earlier, in his zeal to avoid any more reprimands, the student waiter had placed fresh pitchers of water on the tables and filled all the water glasses.
The water fight started out slowly, with Marc returning Étienne’s initial volley with one of his own. I thought it was going to stop there. Silly me. Because Shelley decided to up the ante and somehow, in her impossibly small hands, picked up three water glasses at once and arced a wall of water at all the traditional chefs, soaking their jacket fronts. It was all over at that point. We later found out that an enterprising student just happened to have a digital camera with him and paid his remaining school fees by putting together a calendar entitled, “Wet Chefs.” My stock with the students went up several substantial notches as it was one of those haven’t-done-the-laundry-in-two-weeks days, and I was wearing an oh-my-god-what-was-I-thinking leopard print push-up bra.
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