by Mindy Klasky
Ouch. Amy was my sister. I had to stick up for her. “Amy is very good at what she does!” Timothy shook his head, and I couldn’t tell if he was contradicting me, or merely trying to interrupt. “She is!” I insisted. “She’s one of the top ten in her class! And that’s with juggling a lot of other stuff, with Justin—”
“Erin,” Timothy said. My name on his lips sounded strange, almost like it hurt him. He shook his head again. “I wasn’t criticizing her. It’s just that what she’s learning, what she’s being taught to do, none of it matches who I am. What Garden Variety is all about.”
Okay. I could understand that. Sisterly loyalty or no, I had to admit that Amy didn’t always understand. She certainly didn’t get what I was doing with my life. She thought that acting could be managed like any other business, like any other career. Now that I was no longer so intent on defending her, I could think about the million times I’d tried to explain to her, tried to communicate the artistry of my chosen profession.
“Give me an example,” I said.
Timothy waved a frustrated hand toward the wall of refrigerators. “I tried to explain what I’m doing with local foods, but she keeps telling me that I should buy from traditional vendors. If I just work with the regular guys, I could get my produce for half the cost.” He shook his head. “She’s right, of course. I could. But it wouldn’t be organic. And it wouldn’t support the farmers I already buy from. It wouldn’t help Dani and the Gray Guerillas.”
“Well, maybe Amy just doesn’t understand that piece of it. She’s been trying to make Derek’s tiny paycheck stretch a really long way for a long time. She has to cover tuition, and child care for Justin, and still have enough to buy groceries at the end of the week. It’s hard to value organic when you aren’t certain you can fit anything into your budget.”
“I know,” Timothy said. “I’m not trying to work a revolution overnight. She’s got every right to believe what she believes—that’s the way most Americans have bought groceries for decades. I just need her to see that I do things differently. That there’s a reason for what I do.”
I didn’t think they were at a permanent impasse. But something else was bothering Timothy. I could tell from the frown that ironed a crease between his eyebrows. “What else?” I asked.
“She wants me to set menus. To cook more of the same things for multiple nights, for a month at a time. She says that I can be more efficient, not only with my purchasing, but also with the time I spend cooking. And she says that very few—probably none—of my customers come in often enough that they’ll even realize.”
I could see exactly what Amy was thinking. She was used to managing meals for two, planning menus for the nights when she could barely see straight from exhaustion. She knew that most of the restaurants around her served the same fare, night after night, week after week, boring month after boring month after boring month. From a business perspective, her suggestion would make everything run more smoothly. I tried to explain her point of view. “Just the predictability would make things easier….”
“I don’t want predictability!” Timothy slammed his fist down on the center island, making me jump. He must have realized that he’d startled me, because he lowered his voice and said, “I don’t want to do the same things, day in, day out. That’s why I started Garden Variety in the first place. If I wanted predictability, I could have worked at McDonald’s.”
He glanced at the papers in despair. Okay. Amy had said that he should buy conventional produce, that he should work from a conventional menu. Neither of those suggestions was enough to justify the emotional stress I was seeing. Neither was enough to keep a man awake, worried and frustrated, all night long. I pitched my voice low, as if I were trying to comfort some feral animal. “What else did Amy say? What other suggestions did she make?”
He swallowed hard and glanced at the door that led to the dining room. “She told me to get rid of the table by the kitchen. Or, more precisely, to transform it into a four-top. For paying customers. Try to turn it three times on a busy night.”
I closed my eyes. Once again, Amy’s advice made perfect business sense. Earning income from twelve diners would be much more profitable than giving away food to two or three.
But there wasn’t a chance that Timothy would give in on that. There wasn’t a possibility that he’d lose that anchor to his ideals. The table for the homeless folks was the key to what he was doing with Garden Variety. It was the root of his fight with his landlord. It was the core of his beliefs—how he cooked, how he served, how he worked in the professional culinary world.
And Amy had missed all that. She’d been blinded by textbooks, by professorial lectures. She’d been constrained by course deadlines and family obligations.
I’d been an idiot to think her counseling Timothy could ever work out. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Amy shouldn’t have called you. She shouldn’t have talked you into being her class project. Garden Variety and B-school are a lousy match.”
“She thought that she could help.” He was trying to sound gracious. He even came close to succeeding.
I shook my head, though. This was just another version of the arguments that Amy and I had tossed back and forth for years. My sister understood dollars and cents. She had, ever since that law firm bookkeeping job, the one that had convinced her to go to business school in the first place. She was born understanding business plans and return on investment.
She’d never, though, ever, in all the years I’d been struggling in New York, comprehended why I put myself out there in auditions, why anyone would dump so much time and effort and money into something so unlikely to pay off.
I reached out and touched Timothy’s arm. It was important that he hear me. Important that he understand. “Timothy, she’s wrong. Just because Amy quotes some business school case study, that doesn’t mean she knows what she’s talking about. Her class assignment was to develop a business plan for a restaurant. But she had no right to take your restaurant and turn it into a carbon copy of every other one that’s out there. She should have listened to you. Respected you. Built on what you’re already doing and found ways to make it better.”
“I don’t want to cause trouble for you.”
The look of concern on his face made my belly swoop. For just a moment, I was back to being tongue-tied Laura Wingfield; I couldn’t think of the next words to say, the right way to respond. But then I looked around the kitchen, at the seasoned pots and pans, at the well-scrubbed stove and sink. Honest, straightforward tools. Pointing toward an honest, straightforward conversation. “Just tell her that she’s wrong. That’s what she needs to learn, if she’s going to succeed in her class. In her career. And it’s what you need to say to your landlord, too, if you’re going to make this place work.”
For the first time that morning, a smile flirted with his lips. “And how, exactly, did you become so wise?”
I grinned back. “I’ve had a lifetime of telling Amy that she’s wrong.” And that, finally, left me with the perfect opening for the conversation that had brought me there in the first place. “Speaking of which,” I forced myself to say. “I was wrong yesterday.”
“When?” He looked mystified.
“When Martina went off on caterers. When she tried to insult me, and you got caught in the backlash.”
“Martina is a spoiled bitch who cares more about her designer shoes and her reality-show credentials than she does about any human being around her. Besides that, she can’t act her way out of a paper bag.”
My lips twitched. Of course, I couldn’t agree more. “Still. I should have called her on it.”
“You were in a tough position. You don’t want her complaining about her understudy showing her up.”
I gritted my teeth. “She doesn’t even know that I am her understudy.”
“That’s her problem. Not yours. Seriously. I’ve watched enough of those rehearsals to know. Everyone says the same thing, whenever you run through a scene. You�
�re better than Martina, and it’s a crime that you weren’t cast in the role.”
It felt wonderful to hear someone else say that. Wonderful to know that it wasn’t just my spite, my selfish anger with Martina, coloring my perspective. “Thank you,” I said.
“There’s no reason to thank me,” he said, his voice filled with a new determination. “It’s the truth.” He pushed himself back from the center island and began stacking Amy’s recommendations into one neat, orderly pile. “Shouldn’t you be getting over there?”
I glanced at my watch. “Yeah. I guess. Are you joining us today?”
Timothy shook his head. “Ken said not to bother. He figured everyone would rather work straight through and get out early enough to see fireworks.”
“Great,” I said. No one had asked me. I’d rather get free food than see fireworks, any day of the week. Get free food, and visit with Timothy, that was.
He laughed. “Don’t sound so excited.”
“I can’t imagine how Martina is going to react.”
He rolled his eyes as he led me back through the shadowed dining room. “Think good thoughts,” he said as he unlocked the door to let me leave. “Martina just might surprise you, after all.”
Martina surprised me, all right.
She surprised me by coming up with entirely new ways to drive me insane. It started while we were collecting our bags, giving up on rehearsal after six hours. Six hours, and we only got through two scenes. At one point, Ken sent all the lead actors backstage, told them to look over their lines while we understudies took a pass at the action. Thinking about what Timothy had told me that morning, I let myself believe that Ken was running us understudies so that he could get a break, get some perspective on what the play was supposed to look like.
Of course, my time onstage was minuscule, compared to the main cast’s. By the end of the day, my mind was muddled by a combination of starvation and disgust. I couldn’t believe that Martina had presented so many questions about staging, so many arguments about blocking, so many ideas about how Laura’s character should evolve. We’d been through all of this a thousand times before. Didn’t she realize that we were rapidly running out of time? We had one month until opening night, one month left to pull together our entire masterpiece—costumes, full orchestra and every single scene in the entire musical.
The final straw was Martina announcing to Ken that she’d like to receive her Lucky Red Dragon early.
“Lucky Red Dragon?” Ken had asked.
“It’s in my—”
“Contract,” Shawn had completed in a drawn-out whisper, digging his elbow into my side.
Somehow, Ken managed to keep a civil tongue in his head, questioning Martina with an appropriate level of concern to determine that Lucky Red Dragon was a brand of Chinese soda, flavored with ginseng and a dozen other herbs and secret spices. Ken was contractually bound to provide a case of Lucky Red Dragon by opening night, and an additional case every week for as long as the play ran with Martina in the lead. Our fearless diva insisted that the carbonated beverage was the only thing that gave her the power to appear onstage, to sing her heart out for the masses.
“If it’s so important to her,” Shawn groused as we collected our belongings at the back of the theater, “you’d think that she’d keep her own stock permanently on hand.”
“And give up a chance to send us all scurrying around on her behalf?” I asked. I would have said more, but Ken was walking down the aisle. I didn’t want him to overhear and think that I was bitter or anything. I pasted on a smile and asked Shawn, “Are you going to see fireworks tonight?”
He made a face. “What? Try to find a spot on the river? Patrick and I are making our own fireworks, sweetie!” He growled playfully and air-kissed my cheek before hurrying out the theater’s double doors.
Before I could follow him, I heard Ken exclaim, “Timothy! Am I glad to see you!”
I looked up to see Timothy standing in the back row of the theater. I couldn’t be certain how long he’d been there; his black clothes made him disappear in the shadows. I ran a quick mental movie of how I’d acted during the last endless hours of rehearsal. If he’d been sitting behind me, then he’d had ample time to observe Shawn’s snide comments, to monitor my laughing attempts to shush my partner in understudy-crime.
Timothy shook Ken’s hand. “What’s the problem?”
“Have you ever heard of Lucky Red Dragon? It’s a soda or something. Chinese.”
“Sorry,” Timothy said, shaking his head.
“Could you try to track some down? Martina needs it.”
Timothy’s face tightened visibly, but he kept his voice neutral as he asked, “A bottle?”
“A case. Each week.”
Timothy shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Ken barely managed to mutter a few pleasantries before he stumbled out the door. I was left alone in the theater with Timothy. “I thought you weren’t coming over here today. Did you leave something backstage?”
He shook his head. “I came to see you.”
Wow. So much for hoping he hadn’t noticed me, hadn’t been paying attention. Timothy was direct. Not witty and flirty and beating around the bush. He just made a straightforward statement of what he wanted. Just like I’d told him to do that very morning—to Amy, to his landlord.
I hadn’t planned on his applying that technique to me, though.
As I tried to remember enough words in the English language to reply, he asked, “What are your plans to see the fireworks?”
I wrinkled my nose. “I love watching them, but I hate fighting the crowds. I’ll probably just go home and turn on the TV.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” he said.
“Serving up dinner at the restaurant?” I wondered if he could possibly be taking me up on my long-ago request for work.
He shook his head. “I closed the restaurant tonight. One of the perks of owning the place.” I looked a question toward him, utterly mystified about what he might have planned. He said, “Trust me.”
And I did. I trusted him. I’d trusted him every time I’d set foot inside Garden Variety. I’d trusted him when I’d seen him in the hallway of my apartment building. I’d trusted him whenever I’d taken a break from the play that Martina was ruining, whenever I let some delectable catered treat bring me back from the edge of insanity.
We left the theater and made our way through the hot city streets. Heat shimmered off the asphalt, radiating off the sea of pedestrians that flooded the sidewalks. Sometimes, the summer turned city crowds crazy. Tonight, though, there was just a jangling hum of expectation, of excitement. Everyone was flowing toward the river, toward the traditional Macy’s display of fireworks.
But Timothy led us upstream. He seemed to have some special skill for finding paths through the crowd. He eased between people like a shadow flickering beneath a jungle canopy. I stumbled once, missing a gap that he had found effortlessly, and he reached back for my hand, folding his fingers around mine as if he’d intended to touch me the entire time.
Before I could question where we were going, before I could ask what Timothy had planned, we were entering one of the huge hotels near Times Square. Timothy guided me across the cool lobby, slipping across the marble floor like a predator heading into its lair. He led us to a hidden hallway, to a service corridor that looked like a hundred other service corridors I had haunted during my catering days. A staff elevator waited there, its doors opening as soon as Timothy pressed the call button.
“Where—” I started to ask, but the amused twist of his lips silenced me. He pressed the button labeled R.
R. For Rooftop.
The elevator opened onto a tiny lobby, a grimy greenhouse that crouched on the roof. The flyspecked glass would have made the room unbearably hot, but someone had blocked the door open. A sultry breeze wafted through.
As we stepped onto the building’s roof, a dozen white-aproned maids looked up from their gossiping clust
ers of three and four. A couple of bellhops stood apart, talking to each other with the slouched shoulders and easy camaraderie of hard-working men on a break. A clutch of uniformed busboys broke off their conversation in Spanish, calling out greetings to Timothy. He answered them with an easy wave and a smile.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“They work here,” he said quite reasonably. He still held my hand, and he was drawing me away from the others, toward the far edge of the roof.
“But what are we doing here?”
“Getting the best view of the fireworks in all of Manhattan.” He gave in to my confusion. “I know the head chef of the restaurant. Jean-Louis and I go way back.”
I could have asked a dozen more questions, but there wasn’t really any need. Timothy knew people. In the same way that he knew the homeless people who ate in his restaurant, in the way he’d come to know our cast and crew. It was easy, effortless, for Timothy to slide between worlds. And tonight, he’d brought me with him.
A black railing marked the edge of the roof. Timothy staked out a place for us on the very corner, far from the laughing hotel staff. I caught my breath as I looked out. We could see all the way across to the river; not a building hampered the view.
Something about that open expanse made me reluctant to edge all the way up to the rail. I knew that it would protect me. It would keep me safe. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think about how many hundreds of feet I could fall. I wanted to invent an invisible safety net, a massive, unseen hook that I could fasten to my sundress, to keep me safe and secure.
As if he sensed my fear, Timothy moved to stand behind me. His chest was warm against my back, solid. Comforting. I edged a little closer to the corner. A warm breeze billowed up below us, startling me, and I jumped away from the edge. Timothy laughed, a chortle that sounded almost like a growl. He stepped even closer, settling his arms on either side of me, catching me in the corner between his body and the railing.
With anyone else, I might have felt restricted. I might have felt confined. With Timothy, though, it seemed like I was supported, protected. Even though I knew the hotel staff was talking behind us, even though I knew we were two people surrounded by millions of other New Yorkers, I felt as if we were miles away from anyone else.