Roux Morgue

by Claire M Johnson

  “I don’t dislike him,” she said, sounding surprised. “I just think his time is over.” Her voice lost its hard edge. “It’s more personal with Marc. I don’t know why. He won’t tell me.”

  Something in her tone made me realize that she and Marc were a little more than just co-workers.

  “You and Marc?” I hinted.

  “Of course.” She slammed her locker door shut. “I wouldn’t stay at this hellhole of a school for more than two weeks if it weren’t for him. I told him only four more months. Then I’m out of here. He can stay if he wants.”

  I made one more appeal. “I don’t think this in-fighting is in the best interest of the students.”

  “Fuck the students. You’d better decide on which side your bread’s buttered, Mary, or butt out,” she warned. She turned on her heel and walked out of the locker room: ninety-five pounds of pure hell.

  ***

  A letter addressed to all the chefs appeared in our mailboxes that morning. In it, Benson admonished us to not have any more fights and to “keep in mind that we were beacons of culinary knowledge to these students, and we shouldn’t jeopardize the glorious traditions established at École by petty grievances.”

  If this were Benson’s sole response to that water fight yesterday, we’d all better take out life insurance. I’d have to get the scoop from Antonello later on whether more drastic measures had taken place behind the scenes.

  Whether it was Benson’s letter or the water fight, most of the chefs seemed to realize that some horrible line had been crossed. The tables were still segregated between the old guard and the new, but aside from Étienne, Marc, and Shelley, who wouldn’t speak to any one at the “other table,” everyone else was at least polite to each other. I made a point of sitting at the old guard’s table at breakfast and the new guard at lunch. Antonello did the same.

  When I found myself side by side with Marc in the hallway, I decided to not say anything. What would be gained?

  “Shelley says you’re trying to talk some sense into us.”

  About six four in height, he slowly came to a stop and leaned against the wall and turned toward me, demanding an answer. He was like Antonello; a man who wore his sexuality with ease. Didn’t beat you over the head with it, but if you were looking—and I was—it was there. Maybe not for the taking, but it was there. For the first time in ages I found myself physically responding to someone—aside from O’Connor and that wasn’t so much as a response as a full-blown sex attack. I opened my mouth to respond and nothing came out. His eyes did a minute one-two up and down my body and the shy smile that accompanied it told me that the kick between us was mutual. It wasn’t offensive; as flattering as all hell if the truth were told. If they’re all like this down in Texas, I’m moving next week.

  “Need to choose your poison, Mary,” he drawled.

  A little nonplussed by the pheromones this man was radiating, I stuttered, “N…n…no, I don’t.” If I ignored the slope of his waist and how his apron rested nicely on his hips, I might be able to get out a complete sentence. “Can we talk about what happened yesterday? We’re all professionals, right? It got pretty ugly. Why not—”

  “You want to whup some sense into us all?” he interrupted.

  I blushed. When he put it like that, Allison’s accusations of me acting like God All Mighty seemed a little too close to home.

  “No,” I back-pedaled. “I just think there’s room for both types of cuisine. We don’t need to start throwing water glasses at each other. Food is a fluid art. Next week Étienne’s style might be all the rage.”

  “You’re probably right,” he agreed, and his face lost that come-here-you-sexy-thing look. He scrutinized me with a sharpness and energy I hadn’t noticed in him before. For a split second, I understood what an effort it must be to hold his own with older heavyweights in the field. “Next week someone’s going to present that old tried-and-true French shit and give it a fancy name, like retro-nouveau cuisine, and I’ll have cow pie all over my face. But Étienne and I are on a collision course that you can’t stop, darlin’. So if you don’t plan on signing the petition I’m circulating requesting that Étienne’s ass be canned, you can just go back to piping out éclairs.”

  He didn’t wait for me to respond, but turned away and resumed his stroll down the hall.

  Étienne was one of the original owners of the school and still had plenty of clout, if not stock, to guarantee his job. Marc had better brush up his resumé; it wasn’t Étienne’s ass that was going to be in the proverbial sling.

  That made three people in the last twenty-four hours who had told me to mind my own business.

  Memo to self: stop trying to solve everyone else’s problems and get down to teaching pastry.

  Second memo to self: this celibacy thing is getting old. You need to get laid.

  Chapter Seven

  The next week was a blur of activity, culminating in the buffet on Thursday and Friday nights, often called the Last Supper, a slur in reference to the amount of food people consumed. Some things hadn’t changed; the students still nominated Pig of the Night, the one individual who piles salads, cheeses, patés, and slices of meat on his or her plate in one gigantic, gravity-defying mound. When I was a student standing in officious attention behind the buffet table, I actually saw someone take a hunk out of a tallow carving and add it to her food mountain.

  A buffet has no redeeming features other than being an excuse for sheer gluttony. Part of the sensual ambiance of eating is having your food arranged on your plate, each dish framing the other like a painting, not piled on top of each other like kitchen scraps about to go down the disposal.

  Buffets are the secret culinary code for “emptying out the walk-in refrigerators before next fresh produce delivery.” To this day, I will not eat at buffets unless it’s Mother’s Day and I have no choice. Then I stick to the cheese platters. Cheese is supposed to be aged.

  Marc and Shelley ignored me. I ignored them.

  Devoting all my energies to my students, the first week flew by as I tried to simultaneously assess the experience level of the students, still produce what we needed to produce, and not make too many mistakes. Many of the kids in this group had never been in a kitchen before and the potential for injury was enormous.

  Some classes are a mix of novices and seasoned restaurant professionals who want the credential and contacts that École provides, other classes are constituted of students just out of high school and can barely turn on a mixer. This class was very green; O’Connor, Brad, and Coolie were exceptions to the rule. Despite all my intentions to do otherwise, I found myself depending on O’Connor constantly. The students came to look up to him as my assistant, and I didn’t dispel them of the notion. Often I’d turn around and find him watching me, no expression on his face. I’d return his stare, blank expression for blank expression. I always turned away first.

  Two thirty on Friday found me pleasantly tired. The students had packed up their knife rolls and headed for the bar. As soon as I connected with Allison about the inventory and researched a few things in the library, I’d be across that bridge. For the first time in ten years, I’d have weekends off, the perks of teaching. The latest issue of Fine Gardening had arrived the day before, and I was itching to read all about setting up a potager’s garden.

  I dreaded conferring with Allison for an end of the week wrap-up. What in the hell was going on between her and Marilyn Cantucci? The strain she was under was physically evident; everyday the stretch of her neck tightened, like a horse with a sadistic rider pulling hard on the reins. By her own admission, this was to be the day of reckoning. I didn’t know whether I wanted her confidences or not.

  Imagine my shock when she almost waltzed into the pastry kitchen. Her cheeks were as flushed as a shiny ripe apple, and her eyes had a satisfied gleam in them, like a kid-in-the-candy store who’s just eaten a handful of gumdrops behind his mother’s back.

  “He
y, Allison, you sure look happy,” I greeted her.

  “Oh, hi, Mary. We all set for tonight?”

  “Yep, plus we made a fresh batch of fondant for the petit fours, and the four sheetpans of croissant dough have had all four turns. They just need to sheeted and cut.”

  “Oh, the sheeter?” she asked, as if she’d never been in a pastry kitchen in her life.

  “Yeah. You know. The thing that automatically rolls out dough so you don’t have to use a rolling pin?”

  She blushed deeply. I extended the clipboard. Instead of taking it, she ran both hands through her luxurious hair, in a motion redolent of the bedroom. I used to make those sort of post-coital motions myself when I had hair down to my waist. Like a cat stretching itself after a particularly wonderful snooze in the sun, it’s an affirmation of pleasure. During one of our bitterest fights, Jim told me that when I cut my hair off, I effectively ended our sex life.

  The green finger of jealousy stroked my cheek. My sex life these days might be reduced to gratefully accepting leers from twenty-six year old co-workers, but it is like riding a bike, you don’t forget. If Allison hadn’t just emerged from having the time of her life, I’d eat my kitchen clogs. I knew I sounded snippy and churlish, but the words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

  “Allison, I’d like to get out of here. Could you come back down to earth?”

  The sharp tone in my voice penetrated her carnal reverie.

  “No need to snap at me. Something bothering you, Mary?”

  I couldn’t really say, yes, I’m as jealous as all hell that you have someone to fuck, someone to argue with, someone to connect with.

  “No,” I denied. “I want to find some historical tidbits in the library for next week’s lessons. Except for one or two, the students seemed bored.”

  Having taught freshman pastry for many years, she shrugged her shoulders in resignation.

  “You know how it is, people either love pastry or they hate it. There’s no middle ground.”

  Pastry is a culinary animal all to itself. Chefs de cuisine look down their noses at pastry chefs. It’s never accorded the same respect as the other disciplines. The pecking order in the kitchen is as follows: chef de cuisine, saucier, garde manger chef, and pantry chef. Off in the corner chopping up blocks of chocolate all by themselves are the pastry chefs. The prevailing attitude is that those who can cook, do, and the rest became pastry chefs.

  “I know, I know, but I’d at least like to try to make the effort. I’d like to get on the bridge before it gets backed up. You know what Friday afternoons are like.”

  As Allison’s students began shuffling in, I noted with satisfaction that they didn’t look any more awake than mine did. At the sound of knife rolls hitting the tables, she whirled around and then looked at her watch.

  “God, I didn’t realize it was so late. Mary, do me a big favor will you? Here are my keys. I’ve got a bottle of vitamin supplements in my locker. Would you get them for me?”

  Before I could answer she handed me the keys and turned to her students. In penance for being so snotty to her, I went to fetch her vitamins. As I crossed the pastry kitchen, I spied Antonello marching across the empty dining room. His face looked flushed, too. Hmmm.

  Memo to self: you’re not supposed to butt into other people’s lives.

  I turned away and headed straight for the locker room.

  The locker room isn’t much lighter at three o’clock in the afternoon than it is at six o’clock in the morning. Damn, I’d tucked the clipboard under my arm and forgotten to give it to her. Fumbling with the key to her locker, I swore, prayed, and wiggled that key in every permutation I could think of. I might be a wizard with a whip, but I’m a klutz with a key. My father always told me that there was no greater force than gentleness, but obviously he never opened a locker at École. True to type, the school spent ten thousand dollars last week on new wine goblets, but they bought the cheapest-shit lockers available for the chefs. As I gave the lock one last vicious turn, the door flew open, the clipboard went flying, and a pill bottle rolled across the floor.

  God-dammit, this was turning into a scavenger hunt.

  I got down on my hands and knees and found clipboard at one end of the locker room and the bottle of vitamins lodged under a bench at the other, near the lone window in the room. What sort of vitamins was so all-important that she had to have the pills ASAP?

  Holding the bottle up to the meager light, I read the label. Vitamins my ass. They were some sort of herbal diet pill: VitaLife. What sort of crap was the answer to Allison’s imaginary weight problem? The front of the bottle guaranteed that these pills would give you more energy, increase your circulation, and, by the way, melt away twenty pounds in two months. Just take one pill one hour before you eat. I shifted the bottle to my left hand to open the door and the bottle pulled at my hand. I peeled it away from my palm and little bits of old glue dotted my skin. I turned the bottle over. Odd, the label on the back seemed to have been peeled off.

  When I returned to the kitchen, I caught her eye and tucked the bottle in her purse. She gave me the high sign, her cheeks still faintly aglow. I was just about to leave when I remembered I still had the clipboard with the inventory on it.

  I scooted by her students, who were lined up along the long stainless steel tables like soldiers, icing cakes with a military precision, and said in a low voice, “Allison, I forgot. Here’s the inventory, plus on the front of the clipboard is a copy of Marc’s petition asking for Étienne’s resignation. I crossed out my name. Marc is being ridiculous. Étienne’s not going to be—”

  I never finished my sentence. At the mention of the word petition, her cheeks reflamed.

  She snatched the clipboard from my hand, ripped off the petition, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it on the floor. Students stopped, their spatulas suspended in mid-air; globs of buttercream dropped onto the floor as they watched her, their mouths open.

  “That’s what I think of Marc’s petition. If he asks you where it is, send him to me.”

  Her indignation as potent as her sensuality had been not thirty minutes earlier, she was never so beautiful as she was at that moment. The next time I saw her she’d be covered in gigantic red welts and gasping her last breath.

  Chapter Eight

  Despite all intentions to hit the road, I spent more than an hour and a half leafing through cookbooks and magazines comparing ten different recipes on how to make the authentic Sacher torte, something only a true foodie can understand.

  When I looked at my watch it was almost four thirty. Cars would be packed on that bridge like sardines. Having blown my window of opportunity, I decided to have something to eat on the school’s dime. The students would just be sitting down to their evening meal, two hours before the onslaught of buffet addicts.

  I loved Fridays; it was buffet day. Which might seem like a paradox because I hated the buffet. But unlike Monday through Wednesday, when the students cooked for the school’s restaurant (which had a menu just like a traditional dining room), and Thursday (when everyone was gearing up for the buffet), on Fridays the students were free to experiment and make what they wanted for the student lunch. More often than not they’d make something ethnic: curries with nan, mole with handmade tortillas. My lips twitched in anticipation.

  The dining room was filled with the happy sounds of students and chefs gossiping and eating. The scene brought back memories of when I was a student. I lived on bad coffee, gossip, and the hype you get from people savoring something you’ve cooked. Talk about instant gratification/depression. I’d peeked through the glass to see if diners liked the desserts I’d made; a frown and a pushed away plate sent me scurrying back to the kitchen to do it again, a smile of pleasure filled me with a high that lasted all night. I’d go home to Jim and regale him with my culinary triumphs. The aroma of baking bread permeated my hair, driving him crazy with desire. He’d rip off my jacket and we’d make lov
e in the hallway of our cramped apartment, the yeasty smells of bread and sex the ultimate aphrodisiac.

  Crossing the dining room, I noticed that Antonello, who was seated next to Allison, had stayed late as well and was speaking to Benson. If the hand-gestures and table pounding were any indication, Antonello was furious; Benson’s attention was focused entirely on his plate.

  I stifled the jealousy I felt percolating as I saw Allison and Antonello sitting side by side. Although Antonello and I had done some pretty hot and heavy flirting, we both knew it’d go no farther than innuendo. It was petty on my part to resent his relationship with Allison, more like she got the bigger piece of cake that I really didn’t want until she got it; it was fifth grade sort of behavior that should be beyond me. Well, maybe not beyond, but at thirty-five you should be mature enough to relegate it to the mental trash bin.

  Recalling those hot and heavy scenes with Jim had sent my libido up to broil. I contemplated different locations in the school suitable for a nice after lunch romp. My imagination went hog wild wondering where Allison and Antonello could commit sexual acts without detection in such a public place. Obviously, their sexual acrobatics had taken place at school, but where? The garage was pretty dark, but Antonello drove a Lancia sports car so small that wouldn’t accommodate two mating cats, never mind Allison’s voluptuous curves. Her car? Again, no way, she drove one of those smallish Japanese imports. A deserted classroom, perhaps?

  These licentious thoughts carried me all the way across the dining room when I realized I still had Allison’s keys in my pocket. Scooping them up in my hand, I turned toward where she was sitting. I knew the symptoms right away. Even from fifteen feet away I could see angry red welts popping out on her face and hands. My throat constricted in complete terror. I squeaked out a scream, but no one heard me over the chatter.