“bobross sweetbreds u charmr? C u soon”
Wes stared at the phone. And when, after thirty seconds or so, the screen went dark, he pressed the refresh button and stared at it for another thirty seconds. U charmr. No one had ever called him a charmer before. He wasn’t quite sure what it meant, or what Lucy might mean by calling him one, but it had a nice ring to it. He couldn’t remember Delia ever having said something so pleasantly mysterious to him, let alone about him. Still, given what a total basket case he’d been only a few hours earlier, Wes couldn’t help wondering how easy it would be to just walk away from the whole Delia project. On the one hand, who ever gives a second thought to Rosaline, Romeo’s infatuation before he meets Juliet? On the other hand, Romeo gets to sleep with Juliet the day after he meets her; it might have been a totally different story if she’d kept him at arm’s length for a whole friggin’ year. Wes sighed; maybe he was just being too sensitive. Maybe all the ungenerous thoughts he’d been having about Delia were just the result of exhaustion. He could stay friends with her, probably, maybe; he could let her continue to instruct him in the basics of Buddhism. But of course it would never be the same, and there was something sad about that. It wasn’t even that it was an entire year of his life, a beautiful dream, that he would be putting behind him. It was a whole idea of himself, about who he was and the things that had once seemed so important, that he would have to leave behind. Those visions would now be part of his past, forever. Wes thought that this must be what it feels like to leave home for college—excited, hopeful, a little scared but a little grieving. Even if he ended up regretting it—even if it somehow turned out that he had given up on the better part of himself—he could never be that person again. But of course, he already knew that. He was sorry to think that it was a lesson that would have been useful for his dad to learn, and he felt a transient pang of compassion for the old jerk.
Wes had washed and dried the mushrooms, and was preparing to chop them when he sensed Nora’s presence in the doorway. He turned and smiled at her, to show her that it was safe; she smiled back hesitantly but continued to hover on the threshold.
“Know how to chop mushrooms?”
She shook her head, and he beckoned her into the room.
“I’ll show you.”
He stood behind her, guiding her hands with his arms about her shoulders, and showed her how to trim the stems and quarter the mushrooms. With his face above her head, he could tell that she had not washed her hair in some time; it looked oily and smelled of bitter wax. When she had the hang of it, he returned to the tomato and diced it finely, then retrieved a half-empty bottle of Vernacchia from the refrigerator, its neck sealed with a crumpled scrap of tin foil. Through the open window, he heard a group of passers-by burst into sudden laughter, and one baritone laugh lingered longer than the rest, rolling like thunder. Wes paused to listen as the group receded towards Hudson Street, then looked down at Nora and gently stopped her hand with his. Nora looked up anxiously.
“Am I doing it wrong?”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“You’re the greatest. I truly adore you.”
Nora blushed with pleasure, although she seemed confused at the same time.
“You do?”
“I really, really do.”
Nora and Wes stared at each other for a moment or two, and then she went back to chopping the mushrooms, the rhythm of her work subtly changed, or so it seemed to Wes. Wes tore off a sheet of paper towel and used it to dry the sweetbread on both sides, after which he seasoned it with salt and pepper. He poured a modest mound of flour into a shallow bowl and dredged the sweetbread through it, making sure that every shallow crevice and depression received a thorough coating. Then he sought out a heavy sauté pan from beneath the counter, placed it over a medium flame on the stovetop, allowed it to warm for a few moments, and added two tablespoons of vegetable oil. He tried to focus on the task at hand, to be in the moment, and not to allow himself to be distracted by wayward thoughts. As the oil heated, it thinned slightly and covered the bottom of the pan. When Wes deemed it to be sufficiently hot, he grasped the sweetbread between the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, shook the loose flour into the bowl, and gently laid it at the center of the pan. It sizzled briefly and emitted a thin cloud of steam. Wes grasped the pan by the handle and gave it a quick jolt to prevent the meat from sticking. Then he turned the oven on to warm to two hundred degrees, checked that the kettle was full, and turned the gas on high underneath it. Nora stood back from the counter—she had finished chopping the mushrooms and invited Wes to assess her work. She’d done a conscientious, workmanlike job, and Wes nodded his approval.
“See this blue cheese? I want you to get a small plate and crumble the cheese onto it, little pieces about the size of a pea. Can you do that?”
“What’s this for?”
“The potatoes.”
“Yum.”
While Nora was occupied with the cheese, Wes chopped the parsley and cut the stems off the bok choy. He gave the pan another jolt. Wes wasn’t sure that he believed, as he once had, that there was a right way and a wrong way to do anything, but it certainly felt that way when he was cooking. There was a precise, limited number of ingredients; they needed to be addressed in a particular order and handled and combined in a specific way; they were required, in theory, to undergo a predefined physical transformation through the application of the appropriate heat in a suitable crucible; the goal was that, by the end of the process, the disparate elements should have acted upon one another and melded into the single, ideal product that had been envisaged and desired even before the first step had been taken—even before the ingredients had been purchased and assembled. Wes could not think of any other activity in his life or the life of anyone else in which control, mastery and vision were applied to such satisfying, foreseeable ends. People said that writers were driven by the need to create a world over which they could exert total control, but Wes knew from his own experience and from observing his father that in writing you often ended up making something that was very different from what you had intended to make when you had started out. That was not and could not be true in cooking. If you start out with the idea of making a cake, you had damn well better end up making a cake—and exactly the same cake you had intended to make—because any other result is by definition a failure. If you start out with the idea of making seared sweetbreads with mushrooms and bok choy, and you end up with anything other than seared sweetbreads with mushrooms and bok choy, you have done something terribly wrong. But even if you do get it wrong, there is something reassuring and simple in the knowledge that certain rules and certain procedures, if followed, will and must yield certain results. If you understand what you want, and precisely what you need to do to get it, you ought not to end up with your heart broken or your thoughts confused. You can congratulate yourself and people will love and admire you for your ability to follow instructions. That was the theory.
Wes lifted one end of the sweetbread with a flexible spatula, considered the underside, then flipped the entire slab over. It was perfectly golden brown, crisp and glistening, just as called for in the recipe, and was enveloped in a steamy cloud that smelled of nuts, earth and something just on the right, sexy side of sweaty. He was briefly disturbed by a sense memory of his own lips on Lucy’s inner thigh, but with Nora standing at his side, looking down into the pan like Macbeth seeking his destiny in the witches’ cauldron, he chose not to indulge it.
“What’s next?”
“Tear me off a square of tin foil, about yea big.”
Wes thought there must be a way to make life more like cooking—a series of recipes that could be followed faithfully to predictable results. Why shouldn’t he be able to line up all these ingredients on the counter and make perfect sense of them? What if he were just to come out and say to himself: “Okay, I loved Delia, or thought I loved her, but now I see that maybe I didn’t, or don’t anymore.”
Why shouldn’t that come out just right? And yet it didn’t. There was something missing. It was as if you were trying to bake a cake, say, but for every ingredient listed in the recipe there were three secret ingredients that you had to figure out for yourself. So, when you said “I loved Delia,” the secret ingredients might be “I desired Delia,” “I loved the idea of being in love with Delia,” and “I invented Delia,” or they might be three completely different things; when you said “I thought I loved her,” the secret ingredients might be “you don’t know what love is,” “you would have loved anyone,” and “you have never understood your own desires;” and when you said “I don’t anymore,” what you needed to add was “I will never love again,” “I will never love” and “I love someone else.” Or not. How the fuck did people do it? Did they just close their eyes and guess?
The kettle was now at full boil, and Wes turned off the heat underneath it. When Nora returned, Wes retrieved a baking sheet from the interior of the oven and lined it with the foil. Then he and Nora resumed their vigil over the pan. After a minute or two, Nora leaned her body against his, and he draped his arm over her shoulder.
“Still looks gross to me.”
“It isn’t.”
“Stinks like a wet dog.”
Another minute passed, and Wes again checked the underside of the sweetbread with the spatula, deciding that it was done. There was no getting around it—where earlier it had resembled a misshapen, metastatized, grayish and glistening turd, it now looked more like a beautifully golden, crispy, fragrant turd. He transferred it to the baking sheet, which he slid into the warming oven, along with a large, oval platter. He walked the sauté pan to the sink and poured off most of the fat, taking care to aim the stream directly into the drain so as not to create extra mess. Then he returned the pan to the burner, raised the flame a little, cut a one-tablespoon length from the stick of butter and dropped it into the pan, swirling it to make the butter melt a little faster. When the butter began to color, he reached across Nora for the chopping board and scraped the mushrooms into the pan, turning them with a wooden spoon.
“You want to stir?”
“‘Kay.”
Wes watched Nora stir the mushrooms as if they were precious, fragile jewels, and when they had given off most of their liquid and turned soft and light brown, he scraped in the shallots and garlic.
“Keep stirring.”
Wes ground some pepper into the mixture and threw in a light palmful of salt, then tipped the tomatoes into the pan along with a half cup of wine. Nora stepped away fearfully from the violently rising steam, but Wes stood behind her and gently nudged her towards the stove, showing her that she had nothing to fear. He raised the heat to high and the wine began to bubble vigorously, breaking down the tomatoes.
“Keep stirring.”
Wes found an old wooden serving tray in the larder, brought it into the kitchen, and stacked it with four plates, four wine glasses, four knives, four forks and four paper napkins, then returned to Nora. With the tomatoes almost dissolved, he emptied the tub of veal stock into the pan, allowed it to come to a boil, then lowered the heat until the sauce loitered at a gentle simmer.
“Do me a favor, Cookie? Go make sure mom’s awake?”
“‘Kay.”
Wes turned the gas on again beneath the kettle, and poured the potato flakes into a stainless steel bowl. The water in the kettle returned to the boil almost immediately; he measured out a full cup and poured it over the flakes, which instantly dissolved into a gluey pudding. Wes scraped the crumbled blue cheese into the mess and stirred until the cheese had fully melted into it. He sampled the potatoes, then added salt, pepper, butter and a dash of paprika from the spice rack. It was not, he considered, a dish that any reasonable person might identify as mashed potatoes, but it had a kind of perplexing uniqueness, a quiddity, that he hoped others would find intriguing. Back on the stove, the mushroom sauce had thickened appreciably, and Wes tested it for consistency against the back of a spoon, which it coated in a silken, coruscating unction the color of damp loam. Wes threw in the bok choy, parsley and a healthy pat of butter, swirled them into the sauce and turned the gas down to the lowest possible simmer while he retrieved the warming sweetbread from the oven. Using a pair of tongs, he picked most of the bok choy leaves out of the sauce and created a bed of greens at the center of the platter, onto which he transferred the sweetbread, then spooned the sauce directly onto the meat. Et voilà—ris de veau aux champignons sur lit vert. Bon appétit!
Nora appeared in the doorway. “Someone’s here for you. It’s a girl. It’s your girlfriend, I think.” Lucy was lingering behind her in the doorway. She stepped out of the shadows, looking awfully beautiful, and smiled.
“‘Allo, Lez-lee,” she said in a cartoon French accent. “Ah ‘ope you ‘ave ze sweat breeds ah commanded? Sacré bleu!”
“Nora, this is Lucy. Lucy, Nora.”
“I didn’t even know Wes had a girlfriend until James told me.”
“Leslie didn’t know he had a girlfriend until James told him.”
“She’s not . . . ”
“Don’t say anything stupid, Leslie.”
“He lets you call him Leslie?”
“I can call him anything I want. I’m his girlfriend. I usually call him Typo.”
“Typo? Can I call you Typo?”
“No. Think you can manage that tray, Cookie?”
“Maybe, but I better not.”
“Okay. I’ll take the plates and you take the food, Lucy. Careful, the plate might be hot.”
Wes conveyed the tray up the stairs, while behind him Nora whispered something that made Lucy giggle. Outside the bedroom, Wes turned and entered the room backwards, opening the door with his butt. Lucy followed close behind and gently lowered her tray onto the corner of the bed, as there was no other free horizontal space in the room. His mother was sitting up in bed, hair newly combed and housecoat neatly draped across her chest.
“Nora told me Lucy’s here. Lucy honey.”
Lucy planted a kiss on Wes’s mother’s cheek and sat beside her at the edge of the bed. Only then did Wes notice that she had changed her clothes. She was now wearing a short black dress, made of some sort of shimmery material, with a kind of half-length purple cardigan.
“It was so nice of you to invite me to dinner, Marion. My mom and dad are away for the weekend, so when Wes said he was making sweetbreads . . . ”
All four looked down upon the sweetbread, which swam in a pool of sauce the color of crude petroleum that shimmered and rippled in response to the vibrations of the mattress. Wes was put in mind of the raft of the Medusa, with the mushrooms, despairing of their lives, clinging to their pathetic vessel like starving, half-crazed seamen. On the television, Bob Ross enumerated the colors necessary to undertake the painting he was preparing to demonstrate: titanium white, phtalo blue, dark sienna, van dyke brown, alizarin crimson, sap green, yellow ochre, Indian yellow, and bright red. Wes took up a carving knife from his tray and proceeded to cut the sweetbread into four equal quarters, while Nora hovered anxiously at his back. The meat did not feel like steak beneath the blade, or even like brisket; barely resisting the lightest pressure and uniformly unctuous, it felt more like a heavy pudding. Each section was the size of a large burger.
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