“How are you doing?” she asked as she made me a long espresso I hadn’t asked for.
“Okay,” I said. “Two days off in a row helps.”
While Jade worked the espresso machine I peered into the service kitchen. I could see Steven filling the pass-through fridge with backups he’d brought up from the basement. He had circles under his eyes, and looked nervous. Renaud appeared from god knows where, carrying clean pans from the dishpit. When he reached the dessert side of the pass-through I asked him, jokingly, the name of the hurricane that had ravaged the dishpit.
“Haven’t found a dishwasher,” he answered, without looking at me.
He was shaking the sauce inserts in the steam table with an annoyed look on his face. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and his stubble stretched from his big Adam’s apple to above his bony cheekbones. Then he snapped back at me.
“If you hadn’t gotten rid of Carl, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
It made me sick that he had the nerve to say that to me.
“Don’t listen to him,” Jade whispered as she gave me a coffee. “He’s stressed out because of all the changes.”
I poured cream in my coffee. She stared at me, with an even bigger smile.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Do you want to go for a drink after work?” she asked.
“Uh . . . okay. When?”
“Uh . . . after work,” she repeated, with a little laugh. “Like, later.”
From the dessert side Nick was watching us, as he dried bread dishes. He pricked up an ear. I played with the saucer of my espresso dish. Jade’s big eyes sucked me into their orbit. I took a sip of coffee and cleared my throat.
“Okay, sure. If we don’t finish too late.”
“Cool,” she said, squeezing my arm. “It’ll be fun.”
She turned around, light on her feet, to take the drink orders. I watched her a minute, still smiling as she pulled pints and poured wine. Nick winked at me. I took off for the dishpit. I didn’t know what to think. I really wanted to go, but was hesitant at the same time. I’d have to talk about me. I’d have to make up stories again. I set off to burn through my prep, convincing myself that Jade would change her mind by the end of the night. But if the invitation was still out there, I’d have to find a way to not stink of garbage too badly.
While I washed my lettuces Bébert beaked away as he finished off all the many jobs Renaud hadn’t gotten to during the day. The guy could do the work of three cooks. Even though he was in a pissy mood he still found time to bring his prep dishes back to the pit. He even cleaned the steam pot.
“Tell your new chef he’s got one cook who’s not a lazy bastard.”
Twenty minutes later I went back up with the focaccias. Renaud was on the hotside, coaching the new guy, whose name was Vlad. Steven was on the pass. It was the first time I’d seen him in that station. He was distributing tickets and calling out the plates with greater assurance than his hangdog look had led me to expect. It was like his mind was elsewhere. I gave Jonathan my focaccias. The kitchen was easing into a slow service, nothing like the rush from the previous nights. It gave me time to catch up on my dishes.
When I say Renaud was “coaching” the new guy it sounds like more than it was. Vlad knew exactly what he was doing, just needed to be filled in on a few details. The garde-manger was child’s play for him. He moved with an agility none of the other cooks could match, his every motion a precise part of a larger sequence mapped out long beforehand. He wiped his knife after each use with a Samurai’s martial grace, and kept his apron immaculate throughout the service. He never made an abrupt movement, didn’t knock anything over. When he ran short on clean plates he came back himself to pick up a stack.
Vlad always showed up for work with face and head freshly shaved. He was as economical in his speech as in his movements, and never engaged in idle chit-chat. He would venture back to fetch things from the dishpit like a man on a journey to face his sworn enemy. Everything the guy did was of the utmost seriousness; everything a matter of life and death. He was nothing like Jonathan or Bonnie, let alone Bob or Bébert. He knew the menu by heart before starting his first shift. One Sunday night when it was just me and him in the kitchen he brought me dinner in the pit.
“Here,” he said.
“Is that for me?” I asked.
“You see customers here? Bon appétit.”
Vlad had cooked me a tuna steak—there was one left over—using one of his own recipes, and garnished the plate as if I were a VIP client. In the middle of the dish, the tuna steak lay delicately balanced on a small yellow, red, and green pedestal of glazed veg. The fish was delicately sauced with some kind of salsa that looked almost like relish. He’d sprinkled a few drops here and there around the rim of the plate.
Usually I only ate fish that was overcooked, fried, in a pie, or doused in sauce, almost always salmon. But Vlad’s tuna tasted like barbecued beef. It was so good that, ravenous though I was, I took my time and savoured every mouthful. All these years later I can still say without hesitation that this was one of the best meals of my life. I ate it on an upturned soap bucket, with my plate on my knees, in a dishpit redolent of bleach and used cooking oil.
The night was moving along nicely. Two consecutive days off had left me refreshed. I was getting through my work easily; it all seemed somehow much less arduous than my previous shifts. Maybe I was just learning to be more efficient with my trips back and forth between dishpit and kitchen. I had begun to anticipate what would need to be done, instead of being caught off guard by it. I wasn’t getting in the juice, I was swimming in the juice, as Bonnie put it in her bizarre mixture of creaky French and Montreal English. This was a high compliment reserved for people who could stay calm even when there seemed to be a hundred orders on the rack.
The dining room never really filled up that night, so the floor staff had plenty of time to come back to the dishpit for a smoke. It didn’t matter who came back for a five-minute break, they’d always have a chat while I scrubbed dirty plates or drained the soup of dirty food in the dishpit sink. Over several nights, these five-minute scraps added up to real conversations, laced with intimate confessions. A lot of people seemed to almost talk to themselves as they smoked. Part of washing dishes was being everyone’s accidental confidant. Denver filled me in on his latest adventures with the bartender from the Diable Vert. Guillaume was worried as he waited for the results of his STI test. Sarah didn’t know what to do about her boyfriend. And Nick never stopped letting on that every woman who came in to eat wanted a piece of him—except tonight, he was too busy teasing me about Jade.
“A barback going out with a dishwasher. . . Now I’ve seen it all, man.”
Maude had a way of releasing the night’s pent-up stress as she took a few drags of her smoke and told me little anecdotes. She’d been in the business ten years, and been smoking the same length of time. After one particularly ridiculous rush a chef had just handed her a smoke. “Just one dart, then we’ll go back in.” Maude didn’t smoke at that point, but she’d accepted it out of fear that the alternative was to go right back in. For lots of restaurant workers smoking was the only way to get a break.
Around eight it was Bébert’s turn to stop by.
“First time I’ve sat down today, fuck.”
He was deeply relaxed, as if he had just taken a puff of Greg’s hash. That was when he caught sight of the little sketchbook I’d brought along and left lying on one of the shelves between two stacks of clean dishes, next to my spare apron. I didn’t notice him flipping through it until he shouted out in praise.
“Hey!” I said. “Leave that alone, man.”
I went toward him to take it away. He pushed me with one hand and pulled the sketchbook away from me with the other.
“Whoah, chill. I’ll be careful.”
Carefully turning my sketchbook
pages with one eye shut to keep the smoke out, Bébert looked like a monocled diamond merchant assaying the quality of a stone.
“You’re good, man. I really like that one,” he said, turning the book toward me.
He had flipped to the sketch of the massive Lovecraftian octopus god I was planning to rework for the album cover. It made me nervous. I was afraid he’d judge me, or think I was just a little art student. He went through, commenting on the different drawings, and looking more carefully at the goriest among them. He compared them to album covers of a band his cousin was into, Deicide. Eventually he put the sketchbook back where he’d found it.
“We going out for beers tonight?” I asked, filling up a rack of pans.
“Don’t you have a date? With sweet Jade?” he said, holding in his smoke.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I . . . haven’t decided if I’m going or not.”
He squinted at me, incredulously.
“Yeah, I bet . . .”
He threw his butt out the open door.
“Anyway, not me, man. I’m done for the night. I’m going to meet my buddies. You can stay and close with these goofs. We’ll go out another night, I’m stuck here all week. Ten days in a row.”
“Are you finishing early because Steven’s on the pass?”
The way he glared at me made him look more sinister than Greg on his worst days.
“What are you saying, dude?”
He really snapped it out. I turned toward him with my scrubber in one hand and a charred pan in the other.
“Uh, you know, aren’t you usually on the pass?”
He looked me up and down. Then he calmed down.
“Renaud wants to get him trained up fast as he can. But he’s not ready. No way I’m going to do the pass seven days a week I’ll be back on the hotside in no time. I’m gonna be the night chef.”
He unbuttoned his chef’s coat and headed down to the basement to change.
The night went by without a trace of drama. After eight I was alone with Vlad and Steven. But with Vlad on the team everything went twice as fast. That much was apparent from the very first time we closed together. The second the orders stopped coming in, he got busy closing as if his life depended on it. When he got through with his station it was clean enough to perform surgery. He even scoured the prep room. Not to do me a favour: he cleaned it because it needed cleaning. I wondered where Renaud had managed to dig up a cook so unlike himself, and what common ground their friendship could possibly be based on.
When it was time to mop the kitchen I did it more carefully than usual. I wanted to at least approach Vlad’s level of attention to detail. After closing I washed myself as best I could in the big prep room sinks. I soaped myself up to the underarms in degreaser and alien-green industrial hand soap. I rinsed my face off several times, to scrub off the greasy film that coating it from my forehead to my cheeks. Though my hair smelled like a combo of cooking oil, spices, and the grease trap, I drew the line at a shampoo.
I got changed and went upstairs. When I punched out, the clock read 23:23. I’d almost never finished that early.
Steven was finishing off his staff beer in silence; Vlad was already gone. He seemed like the kind of guy who would be eager to get a good night’s sleep, the better to get right back to work the next day. A pint of beer was waiting for me at the bar. Jade had placed it across from her so we could talk while she finished her close. Maude was chatting with a few lingering customers. They must be regulars, since they thought nothing of camping out for hours with what was left of their bottle of wine. It must have been expensive. The glasses they drank from were taller than the others. I asked Maude what that was about.
“Shiraz glasses,” she said, looking at them. “They let the wine breathe. You taste wine in your mouth, but it starts off in the nose.”
I shrugged my shoulders. It all smelled the same to me, but I didn’t say so. She turned around to see what her clients were up to. Her blond hair was cut in short, angular locks that fell over high cheekbones, and her face was somehow at once hard and beautiful. It was the first time I’d really taken a close look.
Like Séverine, she was a different person entirely with her customers. Or maybe that was her true self, and this her true element. She laughed often and smiled widely. The two customers competed for her attention while she surreptitiously filled their glasses, slowly emptying what was left of their bottomless bottle. Their teeth were stained blue from the wine and they were talking loudly. They were on their third bottle, it turned out. Maude kept the discussion going. She’d ask questions, stoke the fire a bit, and then slip off once it was up and running, and reappear at the perfect moment to sell them a digestif. In the meantime she worked her way through the bar cleanup, right in front of them, though it never looked like she was working. As I watched the way she maneuvered, I figured I could never do her job.
I talked to Jade while she polished the last of the glasses. When she wasn’t speaking, she seemed to be singing to herself. It took around ten minutes to finish up. As she folded up her cloth, she asked if I wanted to go to the place across the street.
“It’s chill, we can talk there.”
Her shoulders were bare in her low-cut top. I took a sip of beer.
“Works for me.”
Nick came out and threw his bag and coat on one of the stools. He sat down next to me with a half-empty pint and a big bratty smile on his face.
“Where are you guys off to?”
Jade turned to him and rolled her eyes.
“Oh, you’re still here. . .”
“He better still be here,” Maude said as she came up to where we were sitting. “He still hasn’t put away the wine order.”
The two stragglers were finally gone. They hadn’t even taken two sips of their last drinks. She put their glasses in the glass-washer.
“Fuck that, Maude.”
She was cleaning the bar where the two guys had been sitting. She answered in a mock-relaxed tone.
“Totally, fuck that. Greg’ll be super happy to do it tomorrow.”
She must have said the magic words. Nick tensed up. His face grew livid. He drained his pint and disappeared into the basement.
Jade took a last look around the bar to make sure she’d taken care of everything, then pointed at me as if I were the final item to cross off on her to-do list.
“Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
My cheeks were bright red from nerves and excitement. I finished my beer in the few minutes it took Jade to come back upstairs. Her shoulders had disappeared under the cowl neck of a beige sweater. She had punched out. We put our coats on and said bye to Maude, who’d started printing out the nightly reports, and set off into the night. Jade led the way; I followed behind.
She held me by the arm until we were safely across the taxi-filled street. The scent of her perfume blended with the car exhaust. I opened the door for her. She gave me a look.
“I think I know how they work, these ‘door’ things.”
The place was full and the crowd was older than the Roy Bar or the Zinc. Polished mahogany lined the walls, the lighting was warm and dim. Behind the bar, dozens of whisky bottles shone like elongated amber jewels. The patrons were old enough that I didn’t have to worry about running into anyone I knew. At the counter, fifty-year-olds with drawn faces nursed glasses of Scotch, taking dainty sips every fifteen minutes or so. I thought I recognized my Cegep French teacher sitting with a woman. At tables full of pitchers of dark beer thirty-somethings talked about politics and sports. I felt a little more in my element than at the lounge we’d ended up at that night with Greg. I didn’t see any machines.
Jade led us to a table by the window. I took off my coat, hoping my “sponge-bath” had scrubbed off the worst of the stench of dish grease and cold sweat. She sat down across from me, relaxed, eyes shining with post-sh
ift tiredness.
A server came to see us with a clinking of change. Jade asked what whites he had by the glass. He described two or three. She frowned, as if before someone who was about to drop a very fragile package, and ordered a pint of wheat beer. I had my usual amber ale. The beers arrived quickly and Jade paid the first round. I felt myself getting nervous again. I looked around. I rubbed my hands together. Some eczema had appeared around my knuckles, surely from soaking them in water all night. Jade touched my forearm.
“Relax,” she said. “He won’t bother us here.”
I pretended to get what she meant. She added.
“Nick is banned here. Since the time with him and Bébert.”
I remembered the story about shot glasses tossed across the bar.
She looked me in the eyes. I tried to calm down. I smiled. Had a sip of beer. It was hard for me to look her in the eye. She broke the ice.
“So do you think they’ll move you up to the kitchen soon?”
“I have no idea.”
I took another sip. She signalled that I should wipe my mouth, with a smile.
“I’d like to, anyway. It must be a little more . . . rewarding than washing dishes. But you know, this is my first restaurant job. I guess you gotta start at the bottom.”
“You never know. Some people climb the ladder faster than others.”
She asked me what I was doing with my life, if I went to school. I said I was studying graphic design. She gave a look of approval.
“That’s what my big sister is doing. She’s at university.”
She took the slice of lemon garnishing her beer and crushed it between her thumb and index. She sucked the juice from her fingers.
“So you like drawing.”
“Yeah”
She beckoned with her hands, trying to get me to go on.
“I write stuff. And do illustrations too.”
“Like comics?”
“Sort of.”
The Dishwasher Page 26