by Jane Heller
I waved across the room to Jackie, who had gathered with Connie and Alex over what looked like salad and vegetable fixings, and at Pat, poor thing, who’d been exiled to the dessert station with Lake, Beatrice, and Simon, who thought I was waving to him even though I was doing anything but.
“Oh, boy, do I love this animal,” said Ronnie, salivating over the raw meat, which was probably rife with trichinosis.
“According to the background material we got for each recipe, these tenderloins come directly from Whitley’s pasture,” said Gabriel. “They’re grass-fed and low in fat.”
“I haven’t looked in my tote bag,” I confessed. “I don’t even remember where I put it. Is the recipe very difficult?”
“Not if you follow the directions,” he said. “Cooking is like working out at the gym: discipline, discipline, discipline.”
“You’ll be fine, Elaine,” said Jonathan with a reassuring smile. “If you have a question, just ask me.”
“Here I am,” said Chef Hill as he scuttled over to us, his shortness keeping him low to the ground like a crawling insect. “You guys are making the main course, which is pork tenderloin stuffed with prosciutto, pesto, and arugula. Now let’s get at this—bang bang.” He snapped his fingers and the members of his entourage rushed over with bowls of ingredients. “You first.” He nodded at me. “What’s your name, hon?”
Hon. Did this man not have as much respect for workplace protocol as he did for responsibly fertilized soil? “My name is Elaine,” I said, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. “I’m inexperienced in the kitchen, just so you know.”
“We’ll have you cooking like a pro, hon.” He motioned me closer to the cutting board. “You’re going to butterfly these babies after you cut off the silver skin—bang bang.”
I assumed he would demonstrate what the hell he was talking about, but he stood there waiting for me to do what I was told. When neither of us moved for several awkward seconds, Jonathan jumped in and took over, rescuing me just like I’d rescued him earlier. He picked up one of the six knives on the table and began peeling back the layer of fat on the two tenderloins.
“Yeah, that’s how it’s done,” said Chef Hill. “Perfect execution. Can you butterfly these too, guy?”
“Sure.”
Clearly, Jonathan was a ringer. With care and skill, he reached for another knife and, holding the blade flat so it was parallel to the meat, he cut across the pork nearly to the opposite end, and then opened the flaps as you would a book. Covering the tenderloins with plastic wrap, he pounded them with a mallet to make them thinner, and looked up at our chef. “Next step?”
“Next step is you get your own restaurant, guy,” he said, slapping Jonathan on the back. “You’ve got talent. Well done.” He pointed at Gabriel. “You’re up.”
Gabriel’s job was to spread a piece of prosciutto on top of each butterflied and flattened tenderloin, then make the pesto.
“No biggie, right, guy?” said Chef Hill, thumping Gabriel on the back. “All you do is throw everything into the processor and pulse.”
Into the food processor went shelled pistachios, figs, chopped garlic, basil, freshly grated Parmesan cheese, and olive oil. Gabriel mixed it all up, then stood back from the machine admiring his work.
“Now you again, hon,” Chef Hill said to me. He didn’t slap me on the back, but he did give me a little shove I didn’t appreciate. “Spread the pesto on top of the pork, then mound it with the arugula.”
Okay, Elaine. This isn’t brain surgery, I told myself. This is cooking, which is what people all across the world do in rooms called kitchens. I thought of my mother, who cooked but inattentively. I remembered when I was kid, and she was making me macaroni and cheese for dinner. She was stirring it on the stove when the phone rang. It was her older sister, my Aunt Rhoda. Theirs was a fraught sibling relationship, involving long periods in which they refused to speak to each other for reasons no one understood. My mother was so undone by the call that she forgot about the macaroni and cheese and pretty much incinerated it. Is it any wonder I never learned how to cook?
“Come on, hon!” Chef Hill snapped, checking his watch. “You’re holding up the works.”
“Sorry.” I made a mental note to go on Yelp, Urbanspoon, and TripAdvisor and trash Chef Hill for being a rotten cooking instructor.
I picked up a spatula and poured the pesto on top of the prosciutto laid out over the butterflied schlongs, and spread it around. Then I reached for the arugula leaves and deposited them onto the meat.
“See? That wasn’t anything to get all wigged out about,” said the cokehead.
“No, it really wasn’t.” I smiled, thinking of all the nasty things I would write about him online.
“You’re up, guy,” he said, motioning Jonathan toward the meat. “Since you’re the star in this group, how about you fold these babies up, tie them with the string, sear them nice and brown on all sides in the skillet, and finish them off in the oven while I go help the others.” And off he went in Jackie’s direction.
“I guess we’re free to eat the leftovers,” said Ronnie, who emitted one of his hiccup-belches, then reached into the bowl of pistachios and crammed handfuls of them into his mouth. When he’d emptied the bowl of nuts, he grazed on the arugula, getting most of it stuck between his teeth. “I think I’ll go see how Cupcake is doing.”
After Ronnie had waddled over to his wife’s station, Jonathan said, “Cupcake is probably thrilled that she’s breathing Chef Hill’s air.” We shared a laugh. “Not very warm and fuzzy, our chef.”
“No, but hey, you’re good with food, Jonathan,” I said. “You have a natural feel for it, and maybe you really should pursue it as a career. It’s never too late for reinvention.” Like I knew about reinvention. I wore the same pale pink nail polish color year after year. Never changed it, not even when women started painting their nails in blood reds and teal blues and pewter grays. I resisted change the way cats resist baths.
“You’re a very supportive person, Elaine,” said Jonathan. “I don’t get much of that from my mother.”
“What about the rest of your family?” I asked, instead of coming right out and grilling him about his marital status and/or sexual orientation.
“I’m an only child, and my mother’s dependence on me got worse after my father died. I’m all she has, and since my latest divorce—there have been two—she’s afraid I’ll leave Palm Beach and run off to some foodie mecca in Brooklyn.”
“Everybody says Queens is the new Brooklyn. Maybe you should go there and bring her with you.”
“God no.” He laughed. “I take yearly trips with her. I spend Sunday afternoons with her. I handle her financial affairs and put in appearances at her charity functions, but that’s my limit. I lead my own life.” He sounded relieved to get all that off his chest. “Tell me about you? Married? Significant other? Still on the market? None of the above?”
A loaded question, given the circumstances. “I was divorced—once—from a businessman named Eric Zucker. He runs a chain of funeral homes in the Tri-State area. Right after we were married, he started sleeping with Lola, the employee who applies industrial strength makeup to the embalmed corpses. According to my therapist, I had essentially married my father, who was always shtupping redheads behind my mother’s back. When I was twelve, he found one who—quote unquote—‘really rang his chimes.’ He abandoned us for her and never looked back.”
“Must have been tough to deal with on both counts,” said Jonathan. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve got my own war stories. We’ll have a drink and see whose are worse. What about now?”
“For the drink?” We were in the middle of a cooking class.
“No, what about now in terms of any significant other? Is there a boyfriend?”
“Oh, that,” I said as if Simon were no big deal and not watching us from a few yards away. “I’m newly single after ending a relationship.”
“Good,” he said. “So there’s
a window of opportunity.”
“For what?” I said, fishing. I found Jonathan more than a little appealing, and there was no harm in getting to know him better.
“For seeing how this goes,” he said, pointing to himself and then to me. “It’s not everyday that I meet a woman willing to stand up to the formidable Beatrice Birnbaum. My ex-wives either cowered in her presence or avoided her altogether.”
“Hey, I’m a pushy New Yorker,” I said. “We mug the muggers.”
He laughed again. “I was born in the city, but I’ve lived in Florida since I was ten, the year my father decided he hated winter. I miss it up here. I’d move back in a minute. Maybe we’ll fall in love and you’ll beg me to move back.”
“Tell me the truth: Do you say things like that to every woman you meet on vacation?”
“No, but I like pretending I do. It’s all part of my smooth-and-sophisticated act. Is it working?”
“It might be.” It was fun trading rom-com retorts instead of stuffing pork tenderloins. “Would you really move back to New York though? What about your—”
I couldn’t finish the sentence because a very loud “Goddammit!” bellowed from across the room.
“What now?” said Jonathan. We looked in the direction of the commotion to find that Chef Hill was grabbing his finger and hopping around as if he’d been set on fire. “At least it’s not my mother this time.”
It turned out that Jackie, Alex, and Connie had been assigned both the amaranth soup and the bulgur-wheat-and-wild-blueberry salad, and that somewhere along the way there had been an incident.
“Missed it,” Jackie said with a helpless shrug, when I was breathless to know what had happened.
“I did too,” said Alex. “I was folding the blueberries into the bulgur, and Jackie was making the vinaigrette. She was asking about my fiancé’s brother, and I was telling her he might be ready to date again after a bad breakup.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, Chef Hill!” Connie was protesting, her pudgy cheeks scarlet, arms flailing. “I swear I didn’t!” She seemed on the verge of a psychotic break.
“Damn right she didn’t,” Ronnie said in defense of his wife.
“Well, I sure as shit didn’t do it to myself,” said the chef, who yelled for an underling to help. Blood was gushing from the forefinger on his right hand despite his having wrapped it in a kitchen towel. “She could have hacked me to death.”
I’m sorry to report that my first thought was not for the chef’s health and wellbeing. It was for my own. I vowed not to let a single molecule of the soup cross my lips, not when there was a possibility that his bodily fluid had contaminated it, and not unless someone made a fresh batch after the cutting board had been scrupulously scrubbed.
“I was just trying to do my best!” Connie cried. “I wanted to please you.”
“You said you had knife skills, for Christ’s sake,” Chef Hill muttered, while a young man with a ponytail and black stainless steel studs in his earlobes wrapped a bandage around his boss’s injured finger. “I was demonstrating how to chop the amaranth because you didn’t have a clue and neither did the other ladies. But did they crowd me at the cutting board? No. Did they get in my space? No. Did they grab a serrated bread knife and start chopping amaranth where my finger was? No. I mean who does that?”
“Listen, buddy, she didn’t mean to hurt you,” said Ronnie, puffing out his chest with indignation. “She has all your cookbooks. She wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
“She’s just a little…eager,” Jonathan chimed in, proving once again that he was chivalrous. “Why don’t I start from scratch on the amaranth soup, since I’ve read the recipe for it?”
“Fine,” said Chef Hill. “I owe you, guy.” He slapped Jonathan on the back with his uninjured hand.
“You’re good to go,” the medic underling told his boss. “Looks like a superficial wound, no stitches necessary.”
“Just keep that one away from me,” Chef Hill said, nodding at Connie.
“It was an accident!” she said emphatically, her tone angrier now, less pleading. “It’s not like I tried to kill you!”
6
“I can’t believe we made all this.” Pat dove into the strawberry crumble a la mode that she, Lake, Beatrice, and Simon had concocted, including the ice cream that had come straight from Whitley’s prized, grass-fed, hormone-free milking cows. Pat hadn’t been able to operate the ice cream machine, and her first crack at it had yielded a substance with the consistency of cement, but Lake, who owned her own machine along with her immersion blender, her milk frother, and her molecular gastronomy set, took over and turned out a restaurant-quality product. I should add that the ice cream flavor wasn’t chocolate or vanilla or anything as uninspired as that. No, it was hay. That’s right. They made hay ice cream. Chef Hill delivered a big speech about the earthiness and grassiness of hay’s aroma and flavor profile and the sustainability of incorporating it into the foods we’d be cooking during the week. If you asked me, it didn’t smell earthy or grassy; it smelled like cannabis. As for Simon’s contribution to the dessert, I really couldn’t say. I ignored him. He tried to sit next to me at the long table where we were all partaking in the fruits of our labor, but I beckoned Jonathan over and he pulled out the empty chair next to me instead. Simon was stuck at the end, sandwiched between Ronnie and Connie.
“Alex and I did a pretty decent job with the bulgur salad,” said Jackie, high-fiving her new friend.
“Yes, but I think we should all drink a toast to Jonathan,” I said, both because I meant it and because I intended to make an ostentatious point of showing Simon I wasn’t the least bit impressed that he’d dropped everything at the magazine so he could come to Connecticut and torture me. “To Jonathan.” I raised my glass of Whitney’s chardonnay. I’d been sipping it because it was all we were served, but I hated chardonnay. It was like licking the bark of an oak tree.
“To Jonathan,” Jackie replied, not waiting for the rest of my toast before taking a healthy swallow of her wine. She was on her third glass and had asked one of Rebecca’s assistants to bring us another bottle. I’m not saying she couldn’t hold her liquor—she’d always been more of a drinker than I was—but she never used to drink so much so fast. Whenever I suggested she might want to slow down, she either teased me for being a worrier or told me to go fuck myself.
“Jonathan not only carried the heavy load on the pork tenderloin,” I continued, my glass still in the air, “but the amaranth soup I was dreading was really tasty. He could be a professional chef, no question.”
Beatrice’s wingspan smile curled into a tight circle. “Please don’t encourage him, dear. It’s splendid that he has a hobby, but he’s an attorney.”
Jonathan laughed her off and hoisted his wineglass. “Thank you, Elaine. I appreciate the plug. When I’m running that kitchen in Queens that we talked about, I’ll hire you to do my PR.”
“Deal,” I said and glanced at Simon, who had the nerve to mouth the words “I love you.”
“I’d just like to express my gratitude to the land,” said Lake, who spoke with her head down and her palms pressed together as if saying grace at a church breakfast. “We cultivated our bounty here today and it was a beautiful process, thanks to the guidance of our brilliant chef.”
“Some chef,” growled the normally good-natured Ronnie. “Jason Hill was not a nice person, the way he treated my cupcake.”
Connie beamed. She’d bounced back from her ordeal by the end of the meal, she and Ronnie having gone back for several helpings of everything. “He’d better not mess with my hubby again,” she said. “Ronnie’s a teddy bear if he likes you, but he’s a grizzly if he doesn’t.”
“I hope he really, really, really likes me then,” said Pat, who was an even cheaper drunk than I was. One look at alcohol and she got a contact high, and from the flush on her face it was clear she’d had more than a look.
After the meal, Jackie and Alex were saying they wanted to adj
ourn to Whitley’s bar for a nightcap. Pat was saying she wanted to go back to her cottage for a good night’s sleep. Jonathan and I were saying we wanted to step outside and walk off all that food, and Simon took my elbow, apologized to Jonathan for interrupting our conversation, and said, “We need to talk.”
“No,” I said, wresting my arm from his grasp. “We really don’t.”
“Come on, Slim,” he said as I turned back to Jonathan. “Give me twenty minutes. Your cottage or mine?”
“Not interested,” I said. “Enjoy the rest of your evening.”
“Do you two know each other?” asked Jonathan when it was clear Simon wasn’t moving away. “From before, I mean.”
“We do,” I said with a casual, no-big-deal toss of the head. “I met Simon on last year’s trip with Jackie and Pat. We were on a Caribbean cruise, and he was covering it for Away from It All, the travel magazine. Now it turns out that he’s here covering agritourism vacations. Coincidence, right?”
“Maybe I’ll put you both in my article,” said Simon in an effort to play along, before taking my elbow again and spinning me around to face him. “Twenty minutes. That’s all I ask.”
“Five,” I said.
“Fifteen,” he said.
“Ten,” I said.
“Ten it is,” he said, and began to hustle me out of the kitchen.
“See you bright and early tomorrow,” I called out to a mystified Jonathan. “Sleep well!”
7
We didn’t go inside either of our cottages because I thought better of it. Trying to have a serious discussion when there was a big, poufy bed around would have invited temptation. So we spent his allotted ten minutes on the quaint front porch of my cottage sitting stiffly in the two Adirondack chairs. Whitley had thoughtfully outfitted the chairs with little rectangular lumbar support pillows. And yes, there was also a hammock on the porch, but it would have invited the same temptation as the bed, albeit with more swinging action.