“But is this considered soul food?” the mayor said.
Etienne looked him up and down: “It’s all soul food when I make it, baby.”
His rich Jamaican accent morphed as he cooked and visited and joked into a Creole patois, then into a Detroit homeboy street rap, then into stiff-lipped Andover Prep, then just plain earnest New Jersey suburban (his actual heritage), and back to Jamaican.
Benedikta excused herself, wandered onto the deck and then out to the beach, disappeared. I exited through the kitchen, made my way round the dune. She looked more herself in the moonlight, more her own height with the heels kicked off.
“Obviously hire him,” she said.
I put my arm around her, tried to draw her in.
“You’re thinking our sexual relationship will transfer from my professional space to yours.” Hard to tell when she was kidding.
I said, “No, no. This is the beach.”
“And you thought perhaps under moonlight we could move our relationship a little toward the romantic and away from the clinical. Well, David. I do like the moonlight. I do like the sea air. I do like you. I like the tension right now, as well. I’d like, actually, to be pressed down in the sand and ravished. But in fact I prefer a therapeutic tension. You have an appointment Monday, I believe.”
I said, “You are in fact a strange woman.”
She swayed for my benefit, said, “I am in fact drunk. Also, sweetie, I don’t want a bunch of sand in my panties.” With that she let me kiss her, a nice companionable smooch, not very promising.
“How’s that for therapeutic tension?” I said.
“I’ll bill you,” she said.
“For one kiss?”
“I’ll bill you the whole dinner, darling—we’re going on four hours.”
She kissed me a little more, found a brief moment of passion. I gathered her long dress in my hands fold by fold, eventually found the skin of her legs.
“Sorry, no,” she said. “Crabtree will taste you later.”
“He’s so sensitive?”
She ignored me, looked out to sea. She said, “Also, I’m puzzling over things here. I see you trying to erase yourself, all your accomplishments, all your sorrows, trying to slip into a new world where you can be a kid again, a figurative kid, learning new things, around new people, lessons from adults, a new school. Right—you’re the new kid, you’re going to be the new kid. And nothing that happened back in the old neighborhood will matter anymore.”
“You’re losing me.”
“I predict. I refuse to play parent. Carter—he’s your dad, I’m going to say, your proto-father. And this new one, with the tattoos, with the woman on his face and in his body, he’s to be your mom.”
“They’ll never live up to Nick and Barb.”
“You aren’t funny.”
I gathered her in again.
After a while, she said, “You are growing invisible.”
“I’m right here.”
“But some other creature is taking your place.”
The waves came in set by set and there were freighters at anchor out there, long strings of lights. By separate routes and staggered timing, we found that Etienne had seated everyone in the living room and was actually giving a talk, explaining the points he’d been making about service and métier, as he called it, also a few notes on pricing. Afterwards, all of us comfortable there, he served a kind of alcoholic espresso pudding, whoa.
I didn’t mind the idea of a new family. I looked at Etienne with thoroughgoing interest.
“A restaurant needs a great name,” he said as we ate.
“Soul Train,” Lionel answered. Maybe Lionel could be my uncle.
“Your tattoos,” Crabtree said as we ate, total non sequitur, unable till then to ask whatever question he’d had in mind. Talk about an erased man.
Etienne pulled his shirt off to show that he was covered, Mother Mary continuing down his chest and into his trousers, whirligigs and creatures and stray words, little portraits, numerous flowers, a lot of vines. I felt suddenly that my future was in his hands. And more, that he held the key to the past.
Etienne pretended to unbutton his trousers: more to show, ha-ha.
With that, the mayor and his daughters applauded, stood on cue, shook all our hands, and quickly left. More slowly, more applause, lots of hugs and encomiums, our teammates thanked us, thanked Etienne, and staggered out on the arms of their wives. I gave the waiter the pair of hundred-dollar bills Carter had slipped me to tip him. The visiting chefs left in deep conversation: there was a new master in their midst.
Carter hustled Lionel and me back to the spotless kitchen for the briefest possible conference. When had Etienne had time to clean? Three thumbs up. Our man entered with the last dishes in his hands.
“Floridiana,” he announced, the name all but visibly coming to him at just that moment.
“Soul Train,” Lionel said forcefully.
“Floridiana,” Carter preached, his comical best: “Gives us some latitude, and not just attitude. And try it on your tongue-uh. Floridiana! It’s music, it’s location, it’s the ocean-uh, it’s the farm, it’s the colored people, but baby, it’s everybody else-uh, too.”
He raised his hands, I raised mine. We regarded Lionel till he raised his reluctant hands in the air.
“You got the spirit,” Carter said more seriously. “And Etienne here gets his name: Floridiana-uh!” Then he made the offer: six-figure salary, profit sharing after a year, full bennies immediately, the works. Etienne looked touched, went all dramatic, plain homeboy New Jersey accent: “I want to. I would love to. It’s just that there’s something I have to confess. Something Floridiana must know before it hires me. Might even be a deal breaker. I’m sorry, gentlemen, to have waited. There just wasn’t the opportunity. I’m happy Floridiana likes my food. I’m happy you like it. Those pork chops? Those were fun to make! They were fun, right?”
We clambered to reassure him, dark possibilities flashing through our besotted brains. We knew about the drug arrests. That part of his life, we’d been assured, was more than ten years gone. And obviously, he was gay, not exactly unusual in Miami. In fact, he’d put it plainly. Tattoos, fine. Had he killed someone in prison? What language did you use to withdraw an offer?
Our man played the moment to maximum effect, held the silence to its breaking point, looked at each of us in turn, divulged his secret, great comedy from a great comedian: “Gentlemen, I’m vegetarian.”
“Fucker!” Carter shouted after a beat.
UNANNOUNCED, I FLEW north to see my sister at McLean up in Boston—an intense and well-kept place with a kindly vibe, corridors full of brisk staff and apologetic patients roaming. I waited over an hour to learn that my sister had been moved into a residential house on the outskirts of the campus, a pretty clapboard place where the inmates cooked their own meals, did their own cleaning, formed a kind of family, worked to help themselves toward long-term recovery.
My touchstone, my living history, my heart, Lady Kate opted not to see me that first afternoon—stupid of me to just show up at reception—but the nurse said she’d invited me back for the next afternoon’s “open family period.”
I felt the need of support, waited in line at the pay phone in the nurse’s station, one of those old wooden booths, dialed Benedikta.
“You missed your session,” she said when I repeated my name. “And you didn’t call to cancel.”
“I suddenly had a couple of days.”
“You can’t save her.”
“I can’t abandon her, either,” I said.
“Said the one who was actually, in fact, abandoned.”
“You almost sound hurt.”
“Oh, Lizard, I am I think.”
“Can we reschedule for Friday?”
“I will give you the morning. You’ll be tight after flying.”
“Thank you, B.”
“You had a chance you know,” she said. “You had a chance to break away from
them. To make yourself new.”
“I think that’s just what’s happening.”
“You can’t make yourself new in quicksand, David.”
The man at the window knocked.
Repressed tears got into my voice. I said, “I’ve lied to her half my life.”
“Friday, then,” Benedikta said a little coldly.
“Friday,” I said. Then, clinically as I could: “I’ll have missed you.”
“Okay,” she said more warmly. “I’ll have missed you too. Careful, then.”
I kept it cool. “Yes, careful.”
“I love you, David.” She’d never said that before, nor anything close.
“You’re manipulating me,” I said.
She thought about that, said, “It’s my job.”
I MET JACK in Mystic, Connecticut, for dinner. We toured one of the old whaling vessels, remarkable, admired the deck prisms that had brought light to the sailors working below, not much to say, but tangible warmth between us.
“Where does your devotion come from?” I asked him over lobster rolls, long conversation about Kate’s latest treatment, the new drug regimen, the guarded prognosis, all the damage her body had been through, her weariness after years of illness. After all she’d put him through, I meant, how did he hang in?
“I love her, Lizard. It’s simple as that.”
“That’s not very simple,” I said.
Next afternoon I found her playing Ping-Pong with a fellow patient, a thick-waisted Japanese-looking man with castlike bandages still on his forearms. The two of them gave no quarter, slammed that ball back and forth. It took maybe a half hour for Kate to get to twenty-one. Muted victory dance in slippers. She still liked to win.
“Hi David,” she said grinning.
“Hi yourself.”
The grin faded, triumph fleeting. “I have some energy again. Really a lot of energy. Appropriate energy.”
“I see—you two used the whole room for that game. It’s brilliant.”
“He lets me win.”
“No way,” said her opponent. “I was trying my best.” He had a crush on her, you could see, also that he really had let her win.
Her face was bloated, the rest of her diminished, an older and more fragile person than I’d expected, terribly skinny, no sunshine in her, meds and oversleep. The raised lip expressed more fear than contempt, and maybe that had always been true. Hard to keep her gaze, which was disconcertingly steady. I guess I didn’t like the flatness of her eyes, which had gone gray, the ocean of her meeting the sky of her in an indistinct horizon on a cloudy, windless day.
I said, “Everything good?”
She looked to her Ping-Pong partner.
“You’re very strong,” he said encouragingly. He wasn’t going to leave us to ourselves.
She said, “I’m using myself up. You know? Just burning up the fuel. This stuff they’ve put me on makes mud puddles in my head.”
“Better than landslides,” the Ping-Pong guy said likeably.
Kate ignored him. “I’d want to learn to play the guitar. I would love that. Certain songs are in my head when I see you, David. ‘Fire and Rain,’ for example. I imagine I could play that. I want to have a business. It would be nice to sell something.”
“Jack sure loves you,” I said.
“Everyone loves Katy,” her partner said.
“Like furniture. I would love to be able to make and sell furniture. Jack and I visited a shop when I had a weekend pass where they make these perfect, stable chairs. Shaker something-or-other. Design something-or-other. They have a school attached to it, or an apprenticeship program of some kind. I’d build boxes and then things to put in boxes.”
“You were always good with tools.”
“Kate has been through so much,” the Ping-Pong guy said.
“I imagine you have, too,” I said.
“All self-inflicted,” he said.
“You love me,” Kate said, not quite a statement, not quite a question.
“Of course I love you,” I said. “I love you, Katydid.”
“What happened?” Kate said. “I mean, what the fuck?”
“I guess we know the answer to that,” I said.
“I guess we don’t,” she said.
“There are things I need to tell you,” I said.
“You’d better tell yourself first,” she said.
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on Kate,” her friend said. “Maybe a better way to say it would be, Now I’m going to listen to you.”
Kate had looked away, wouldn’t look back, nothing more to say.
“You’re a nice man,” I said to the friend.
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on me,” he said.
Soon an attendant came in, indicated it was time for me to go, took my arm like I was a ward, escorted me all the way back to my car and practically put me in it.
“There’s so much I haven’t told her,” I said sorrowfully.
“This shit’s no picnic,” the attendant said. He wanted me gone, didn’t want to have to listen to the visitors’ stories, too.
ETIENNE CAME ON board at Floridiana immediately, stepped into our soul kitchen two weeks after his interview and served his first meal that very night, our regular menu with our regular provisions, and yet everything looked better, tasted better, sold better. Same number of guests as the night previous, double the gross.
After that, small changes every day, new workstations installed, fresh suppliers, individual meetings with staff, a new attitude overcoming everyone, a new culture of song—Etienne always singing—joy in the work. The regular customers didn’t know what hit them, it came so gradually, but slowly the place was made over in Etienne’s image. Best of all, he didn’t mind my cooking beside him, seemed to take pleasure in handing me insurmountable tasks. The two of us were first in, last out every day, both of us married to the work and therefore to each other, in a way, long discussions over morning prep quickly becoming personal. He never offered advice, just wanted to hear my story, or so it seemed, so much so that I didn’t notice he never talked much about himself and his own struggles, if any.
He was fascinated by Kate, considered her driving into Long Island Sound a sensible response to all that beset her. In his view, she’d swum naked as a newborn to Yale in order to return to the moment of our parents’ deaths. She was attuned to them, that’s all, aware of their needs in the other world, which left her weird for ours. “Those deaths must be avenged to put her right.”
“What kind of gentle gay psychology is that?”
“That’s voodoo gentle gay psychology, boss, with skulls.”
After a few months, the restaurant roaring along once again, I set Etienne and Kate up talking on the phone once a week, thinking he’d like her, also that he’d be as good for her as he’d come to be for me, and maybe she for him. She had become a vegetarian at McLean—you got better food that way—and this opportunistic strategy had turned into a passion. Her campaign was to get Floridiana to stop serving meat—any kind of meat—because after all there were a million other things to serve, things that didn’t have eyes and didn’t feel fear, whose deaths wouldn’t load bad karma upon us.
“But meat feels good,” Etienne liked to respond. Even ribbing her, he was the one person who could make her laugh. And before long, contradictions upon contradictions, he was putting vegetarian items on the Floridiana menu, as passionate as she, just subtler. He never used the word vegetarian for example, mixed and matched fantastical Caribbean fruits and flowers with familiar grains and vegetables, a multiplicity of beans, varietal rices in traditional African spices and herbs. Dish by dish, week by week, he began bumping meat plates off the regular Floridiana menu.
“Poor people never got much meat,” he explained in a short segment on 60 Minutes highlighting the Afro-American chefs of America (as if they weren’t just chefs), for which, he said, he played Black. “That’s what soul food all about, bein’ poor. Rice and peas, gree
ns and knuckles. Corn meal and potato flour, pig’s ears and tripe, any leafy thing at hand, anything the rich folk won’t touch, Mister Wallace.”
YET REVENUES, WHICH had spiked after Etienne took over, began to falter. Covers were up (numbers of guests eating, I mean), a good thing, but expenses were up as well. The new dishes were maybe too brilliant, the new restaurant maybe too good, the new customers maybe too, I don’t know, plain odd—despite brilliant reviews, better service, sexier atmosphere, the old regulars started going elsewhere, plenty of choices around Miami when it came to meat. Which was Etienne’s point, of course. You forged a clientele, not just a cuisine, a clientele that couldn’t find your product anywhere else on the planet.
I had another always-a-bridesmaid season with the Dolphins, less play than any year previous, less money, too, and was very happy to get back to the restaurant after The Team was shockingly bumped from the playoffs.
And so I was there the night a huge reservation, some kind of wedding party, walked out when they saw the chef’s sheet for the night—I mean thirty-five people who’d come for meat. Of course the bride was some cousin of Lionel’s mother’s niece, and word got back to him, and from him to Carter, and, Lionel at his side, Carter was upon us the very next night, wrath of God.
“I wanna see barbecue back on the menu to-fucking-night,” he shouted around the kitchen during prep, fresh off a plane from Dubai. Etienne rolled his head on his neck, Yes sir, sure sir, very dead serious, not a single look in my direction.
Lionel tried to soften things, sweet guy, always more articulate: “And, yo, E.T., if we could eliminate the roots-and-fruits.”
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to eliminate,” Carter said, big finger in Etienne’s chest.
Then my partners took me outside and Carter threatened me, too: if I didn’t manage the place the way they’d envisioned, whether profits shrank or rose they’d push me right back out on the street and no amount of lawsuit would get me my investment money back, not one dime.
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