The stacks of clean pans and dishes were shrinking before my eyes. We’d have to pick up the pace to have any hope of equalling the speed of the machine. I came back from spinning my last batch of leaf lettuce and the arugula, which was running low. I passed Jonathan in the stairwell as he slowly climbed up, with an empty look in his eye.
The scallops were still thawing in a bath of cold water. That left me just one sink. Even going as fast as I could, washing and rinsing the arugula was taking forever. I had to be extra careful to avoid the wrath of Séverine, who’d once found a batch still covered in sand and made it crystal clear to me that this was a restaurant, not the beach.
Someone came flying down the stairs. Greg showed up looking for wine for “those idiots who don’t know shit about wine.” I was checking the time every ten minutes. I wanted to get my prep out of the way, so I could help the others faster. Then, over the cacophony of the service and the clatter of pans, I heard Carl’s whiny voice:
“Yo Bébert, I’m not gonna do all the work while the other guy’s playing with his dick downstairs.”
I felt the hair on my neck stand up and started shaking.
“Quit bitching. Not a good time.” Bébert yelled at him.
I stopped what I was doing and listened. Carl upped the ante, saying he wasn’t about to do the work of two just because I couldn’t keep up.
“Shut it, dude!” Bébert said again.
My cheeks were burning. I could feel that something bubbling up in me, my heart was beating fast enough to burst. I heard someone coming down the stairs. I recognized Carl’s footsteps. He appeared at the foot of the stairs. I saw his smug lazy face, and his fucking cell in his hand. Overwhelmed by an untenable pressure, something in me popped. Carl went to say something but I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him over to show him the sink full of arugula, and asked him if it looked like I was playing with myself.
“Let me go, you little faggot,” he said, fighting to free himself.
He pushed me with surprising strength. I pushed back. He flew into a pile of baking dishes and sauce buckets lying under one of the prep counters. He stood up and threw himself at me, his face purple with rage, threatening me like the cocky little punk he was. He caught me around the neck and I wrapped my two hands around his throat, pressing on his Adam’s apple. I could feel his strength, and also my own powerful, visceral desire to kill him then and there by pressing on his windpipe until he shat his pants. His hands dropped from my dishwasher’s shirt and locked on my forearms, but it wasn’t enough to make me relinquish my grip. The pockets under his eyes were turning blue.
“Let me go, you crazy fuck,” he managed to gurgle, spitting on me.
He started slapping my forearms and I squeezed tighter. I couldn’t feel a thing, but it felt like I was swelling up all over. Adrenaline flowed through my body and my blood vessels dilated as I crushed Carl’s trachea.
“If I ever hear you say I’m slacking off again,” I said in a muffled, raspy voice. “Get it, you fucking germ?”
Probably alerted by the sounds of our struggle, Greg came out of the cellar to break us up. He pulled Carl far away from me and told him in a firm voice to calm down. Carl was bent over, sucking air, wheezing and holding his knees, his face scarlet. It was almost enough to believe his shiny, purple face was going to pop off and send blood gushing in every direction. I would have rejoiced at the sight. He ripped off his apron and started insulting me, it was his turn to shake with rage, barking out whatever came to his mind, completely absorbed in his starring role as a two-bit gangster. He was yelling at me over Greg’s shoulder, while Greg, like a hockey referee, pushed him into the staff room. He kept right on yelling at the top of his lungs that I didn’t know who he was, but I was going to find out, believe it.
Greg pushed him again. “Calm down, little man.” I was coming back to my senses, with nerves on edge and a surge of nausea. I could still hear Carl swearing and threatening me like he was some serious gangster, and throwing shit all over the staff room and pounding on lockers.
“Just relax, man.” Greg said. “Before I start laughing.”
Carl kept right on kicking up a fuss until the sharp sound of a slap rang out, followed by a silence broken only by the growl of the hood vent.
“That’s enough, you little fuck,” Greg said in the same tone, firm and final. “Scram!”
I heard Carl quickly gather his stuff and head out the back door.
By the time Greg came back and stood in front of me, anger had given way to shame. I was breathing deeply, to chase the sick feeling from my stomach.
With a smile on his face, Greg asked if I was okay. He said again that I was a fighter, and thanked me for giving him the opportunity to slap Carl.
“I’ve wanted to slap that little punk for a long time,” he said. I tried to stand up again, but I was short of breath. I realized I was dripping with sweat. Greg left me alone with my thoughts, picked up his bottles of white wine, and headed back up the stairs. When he got there I heard him break out in laughter.
“You’ll never guess what happened. New guy beat up the little slacker.”
He started laughing again.
Thirty seconds later Renaud came bounding down the stairs. He found me leaning against the steps, still trying to calm down. He surveyed the scene, eyes wide and mouth agape. His sleeved were rolled up over ropy forearms. He put a glass of beer on one of the prep counters. I longed to disappear.
“That’s for you,” he said after looking at me in silence a few minutes.
I didn’t move.
“Sorry, man. I should have dealt with him a long time ago.” He tapped me on the shoulder.
“The repair guy’s on his way. You’re gonna have hot water again. In the meantime do the best you can. Jonathan and I will give you a hand between rushes.”
My throat was in a knot. I felt completely drained and on the verge of tears. I choked back a sob, just in time. Renaud looked at me, as if he had all the time in the world for me. I don’t know why but at that moment I thought of Marie-Lou, and Malik, and everything else. Somewhere deep inside a sort of animal stress had been unleashed, and I started thinking about money, and my debts, and Alex and Rémi, and the myriad lies I’d gotten into the habit of telling everyone I knew.
“I’ll finish the lettuces and then I’ll be there,” I managed to spit out.
“Good.”
Renaud looked reassured. He squeezed my shoulder, looking down at me this time. Then he turned around, checked on the scallops, and went up slowly. I heard him sighing in the stairwell.
Chapter 16
The dish shortage caused by the hot water outage left little time to dwell on the possibility Carl might burst into my dishpit with two or three buddies and kick my ass. But my hands were still shaking when I got back to work.
Whenever he got a chance, Jonathan came back with fresh hot water. You had to change the water in the sink after every batch of dishes. Even with institutional soaps powerful enough to wear away the skin on my hands, the water quickly grew dirty. We were using the machine, hand-filled with hot water, for the toughest pots and pans. Bébert would bring them to me, rapping away, all hopped up on something that gave him the power to float above the confusion. Jonathan looked perpetually bummed out, and when he did break his silence you could tell he had a lump in his throat. He dried dishes, to give his cut finger a chance to heal. I scrubbed and rinsed.
We individually washed each fork, knife, and spoon. Servers were begging us for cutlery. Some set up little caches, others hoarded it in their aprons. Most of what I washed went to Greg. He’d pick up each item like a nugget of precious metal, congratulating me on each clean handful and calling me “fighter.” Then he’d slip off into the dining room like a smuggler with a new shipment, distributing the contraband to whichever server was paying top dollar. Forks and knives had become a covete
d staple. In every section of the restaurant the floor staff was struggling to set new tables, and until they did they couldn’t seat new customers.
At a certain point I stopped noticing the mountains of dishes piling up around me, and my focus trained on whatever was most urgently needed at any given moment. Jonathan did what he could.
From time to time I’d take a load of clean dishes to the kitchen. The lack of hot water hadn’t slowed them down one iota. The sizzle of meat, garlic, and onions in the skillet, the sputtering of cooking wine or cream in the hot pan, the growl of the hood vents, the orders shouted in a mixture of French and English: everything was coming together in a cacophony that would drive you crazy if you spent more than five minutes being mercilessly buffeted around by the cooks.
Everything was happening at breakneck speed. Without a single wasted movement Renaud was carefully setting up plates, which were going out to the dining room twelve at a time. Humming along to his music, with glassy eyes and dilated pupils, Bébert had his hands right in the pans, manipulating the food as it cooked. The stifling heat kicked up a notch every time the oven door opened. As the sweat streamed down their temples, everyone kept right on working. Through the pass-through I could see Maude and Sarah’s eyes shining in the warm dim light of the dining room when they’d come pick up their orders. Farther off toward the front of the dining room, in the hopping section of full tables with servers dancing around them, Séverine welcomed new customers with a warm smile. She was relaxed, a side of her personality we rarely got to see. Leading diners to their tables, she elegantly manoeuvred through the crowd, impervious to the ambient chaos. Out front everything was proceeding without incident, while in the back we had no hot water and the repairman squatting under the water heater was clocking double-time and the work was piling up and I was packing a paring knife in my pocket in case Carl came back with his crew to teach me a lesson, while Bonnie ran to the kitchen bathroom to throw up between orders and Bébert took long regular swigs from a paper-bagged King Can of Blue he kept under the bottles of olive oils. He’d seen that I’d seen him and, before sending me off for a backup of blue cheese sauce he shot me a pirate’s grin that exposed his chipped teeth.
“And bring me the right one this time, hey?”
The hot water’s return had the psychological impact of the power coming back on after the 1998 Ice Storm. Or at least to me it did. I set up the ghetto blaster in the dishpit and put on the most brutal mixtape I could find in my bag, to help me attack the strata of dishes and pans that had amassed. Jonathan went back to the kitchen to take over from Bonnie. Renaud had sent her home. He wasn’t overly scrupulous about that kind of thing—about a lot of things really, as I’d later find out soon enough. He’d let Bonnie break one of the tacit rules that binds the staff of every restaurant, a cardinal principle of solidarity: no one misses a shift for a mere hangover, particularly when said hangover was earned in the company of co-workers, and especially on an unusually busy night.
I was in the scrubbing pans when someone cranked the volume as Slayer’s “Killing Fields” kicked off.
“What do you know? A young kid who listens to decent music.”
I turned around. Greg was headbanging as he sorted clean cutlery and put it back in the rack. He seemed relaxed, as if we hadn’t narrowly averted catastrophe.
“I saw them in ’95. Verdun Auditorium. Crowd went off. Moshing so hard people got hauled away in ambulances.”
I never would have pegged Greg as a metalhead. But knowing this made me somehow less afraid of him. He told me later he’d played bass for a few years. His band even had a few shows at Café Chaos.
It was getting close to ten, and I’d worked my way through the worst of the dishes. It helped that Séverine had stopped taking new tables around nine-thirty, to make room for the forty-five.
I hadn’t heard her come up because of the music, but when she materialized in the dishpit I turned around. It felt like a member of the royal family had deigned to visit my hovel. I went to turn down the music, almost embarrassed to be listening to it in front of her. Her hair was pulled tight over her head, and pulled up in the back in a Samurai bun. Her thin eyebrows were furrowed. She surveyed the shelves with an annoyed look. I felt like an impotent child. I expected her to scold me for the state of my dishpit, or for getting in a fight with Carl. Instead she began rearranging the stacks of clean dishes in a few quick, methodical movements.
“Give me a hand,” she said without looking at me.
I wiped my hands on the last clean rag. She explained which service plates I’d have to take down to the prep kitchen. That was where they would plate the salads and bisque. She picked up a heavy pile, then looked at me. Her forehead relaxed, her perfume refused to yield to the nauseating odours of the grease trap and garbage can. She smiled at me. Little dimples appeared in her cheeks, which looked paler because of her hair.
“When the hot water went out. . . You did a good job.”
She had already turned on her heels and was walking away toward the service kitchen with her pile of dishes, taking long steps like a sprinter.
“Bébert,” she said. “Plate the osso bucco in these.”
I got to work. I brought the soup bowls and salad plates down to the basement. Renaud was heating the bisque. Jonathan’s finger had swollen up like a lightbulb, but nothing seemed to bother him or slow him down. He was tossing lettuce leaves with dressing in the big stainless-steel salad bowls. Maude had arranged long trays on the prep tables.
“Put the salad bowls on these,” she said. “Nine bowls on each tray.”
Séverine went downstairs. I set the bowls on the tray, Jonathan filled each one with a portion of salad, and Renaud garnished them with a colourful julienne of veg and a monk’s cress. Maude wiped the rims of the bowls to catch any splashes of dressing. We all swirled around the prep counter without ever bumping into each other, our movements coordinated in a bizarre spontaneous choreography. Séverine inspected every salad before Denver and another server I’d never seen before grabbed a tray each and lifted it seamlessly onto their shoulders. They went up with the first salads. Denver had barely returned for the second tray when Maude asked me to lay out the soup bowls. She wiped off the trays as they came back, and helped me place the bowls.
“All right, people. Bisque. Go!”
Renaud had finished garnishing salads and was about to go upstairs to get the thawed scallops to Bébert, who would sear them. Séverine stopped him in his tracks.
“Renaud. Did you taste this?”
His face was impassive, his cheeks hard as ivory. The hood vent stopped growling of its own volition, and it felt like the fluorescent tubes might explode from the tension in the air.
“Taste.”
I saw Renaud tasting the bisque exactly as he had the first night, when he was portioning it. At that moment I saw exactly what kind of person my sous-chef was. He acted surprised and disgusted—exactly as he had a few days early. The man wasn’t a bad actor. He recited the same lines, in the same order, as if he were tasting the bisque for the very first time. But this time he added that Christian had told him it was fine. Maude tasted it too. She screwed up her face. Renaud kept laying it on thick.
“Damn, you just always have to check up after him.”
It was like watching the teacher’s pet ratting out a classmate.
“But this time you didn’t check, did you?”
Renaud muttered something, but Séverine had already stopped listening and was no longer looking at Renaud. Her attention had turned to the stockpot full of bisque. Séverine ordered Renaud to bring her a bucket of cream sauce and started fixing the bisque herself. She didn’t bother with an apron, just perched on her high heels in her tailored jacket, her necklace clinking over her silk top. Renaud watched her with an idiotic, forlorn expression on his face and in his deep-set insomniac eyes.
“Maude, tell th
e guys to slow down the appies, then wait at least ten minutes to clear. Sell a little wine while they’re waiting.”
Maude darted upstairs. Séverine turned toward Renaud while she added cream to the steam pot. I was sure she’d get splattered but her movements were so assured and precise you would have felt safe if it was nitroglycerine in her hands.
“What are you waiting for? Take the scallops up.”
Renaud snapped out of it and hurried upstairs with the scallops.
That left just me and Jonathan with her. I was worried that any minute I might become the designated scapegoat for this gong show, and looked around for a dark hole to crawl into. Jonathan found something to do before Séverine had to ask: he rinsed out the salad bowls, then started searching around in the prep kitchen for graduated plastic pitchers. I was about to ask Séverine what she wanted me to do. She beat me to it.
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