by Unknown
“It was in the kitchen the first day after we had everything cleaned up—I assumed you’d gotten it.”
“Nope, Steve, that one’s on you. Is it working okay? Do we need another one?”
“It works just … fine. No need to mess with it. It’s just that I burned myself on it yesterday and I think it’s the Salamander we used at Avec. Funny that it found its way here.”
oOo
It had been a year of growing success for the restaurant, as a few superb reviews had brought the naysayers back in to give With Wine another try. Those reviews, with comments like “hit its stride as one of the city’s top eateries” and “a can’t miss destination for anyone who likes classic French food with innovative seasoning” were filling the restaurant every night. They were solidly in the black and considering expansion.
Marco pitched his voice too low for anyone else to hear. “Steve, where did you find those new line cooks? They know nothing about French food. Or any food, really.”
Steve whispered back, “So train them.”
“I’m trying.”
Steve looked at the stove, where a Béarnaise sauce sat halfway completed, getting lumpy. “Who’s responsible for this?”
One of the new cooks turned around. “Mine, Chef.”
“Throw it away and start it again.”
“Right away, Chef.”
“Who showed you how to do this?”
“Marco did, Chef.”
Steve could feel his face getting hotter. “Marco, you know a Béarnaise must be whisked constantly.”
Marco said, “I was prepping starters, Chef. My fault.”
“Don’t let it happen again.”
“No, Chef,” said Marco, his eyes down.
Steve was finishing set up as the restaurant’s opening time approached. He smelled burning, and looked up to see another pan of Béarnaise, this one smoking.
“Marco! Burning. On the stove.”
“Yes, Chef.”
With the larger kitchen staff, and subsequently more crowded prep area, Steve had to actually cook, and he was frustrated. It wasn’t worth putting much effort into. He’d taste the dishes coming out of the Salamander and they were perfect every time, no matter what went it. It took the fun, the passion, out of it. He knew he should replace the Salamander, but a nagging fear remained that he just couldn’t produce dishes as good as what was coming out of that oven. So he went through the motions.
At the end of shift, Marco tapped Steve on the shoulder. “Chef?”
“What?”
“I work hard. My cousin Joe works hard. We can’t have you yelling at us all night in the kitchen just because the new kids you hired need to be trained.”
Steve felt his annoyance at the whole situation come to a head. “It’s my restaurant. I’ll yell at you when you screw up if I want to.”
Marco looked at him and shook his head slowly. He took off his apron and said, “Then I quit.”
“So do I,” said Joe.
“You can’t do that!”
“Yes, we can,” said Marco, as they walked out.
Steve stared at the new line cooks, “What are you looking at? Get back to cleaning up.”
It’s great to be on top, Steve thought, with no enthusiasm at all to keep on cooking.
oOo
Beginning of another short-handed shift. Desperate to save some time, Steve glanced around and, while no one was watching, put a couple of pieces of filet of sole and fish stock in a pan and rough grated some cheese on top. He tossed it in the Salamander. Two minutes later, he pulled it out. The dish was a mess … just a jumble of toasted ingredients.
Shit. Now he was really in the weeds.
He threw more ingredients into the pan, trying to convince himself that it hadn’t been enough to trigger the Salamander. But deep inside, he knew. He put the pan into the oven, but the result was just what he feared. A disaster.
He forced himself to concentrate and cook the dish properly, from scratch, before popping it in the Salamander to melt the cheese. He plated it and sent it out to the dining room, trying to figure out what was going on.
He stopped and looked at the burns on his arm. Did the Salamander need another offering? He shivered at the thought.
All shift he cooked, snapping at the improperly trained sous chefs, at the even newer line cooks, working harder than he had in ages. Dishes were sent back to the kitchen with complaints they were undercooked, overcooked, or over-seasoned. After over a year, he’d become dependent on the Salamander to make his food for him, and he’d lost the knack. If he’d ever had it. The day stretched on.
When the dinner service was finally done, Steve sent Carrie home without him. He opened a bottle of his favorite red wine and drank a glass, then another, slowly sucking down the whole bottle while working up his nerve. He rolled up his sleeve, walked over to the Salamander, and, before he could back out, pressed his arm against the raised area on the right corner, slowly counting to ten.
The burn hurt like hell.
He forced himself to put together a pan of fish and grated cheese and slid it into the Salamander. He tapped his foot waiting for it to finish, the skin on his arm’s third burn blistering. When he couldn’t wait any longer, he pulled it out.
A gooey, overcooked mess.
He sat in a corner in the kitchen and got very, very drunk, stumbling home just before dawn
Later, Steve sipped black coffee to banish his hangover while he tried to explain to Carrie. He looked down, anywhere but at her. He was halfway through his second cup when he finally said, “There’s something I need to tell you. That night Pierre reviewed us, the review that started everything … I think that’s when it started.”
“When what started?”
“When I put food in the Salamander, it came out … different.”
“Different … how?”
“The pans, for one thing. When I looked at them later, they were a different brand. And the food—the food was perfect. Even when I forgot an ingredient. One night there was a mix up in the kitchen and we used sugar instead of salt for about an hour in all the starters—it didn’t matter. Anything that went through the Salamander came out tasting fantastic.”
“You weren’t cooking the food?”
“I was sort of cooking it. Some of it. I didn’t figure that out right away. Stuff from the Salamander was just coming out better somehow. Then I realized I just needed to put in enough ingredients to somehow trigger the right dish to come out.”
“Steve, you’re not making sense. Pierre wrote that review eighteen months ago. The dishes he ate—were you cooking the food or not?”
Steve’s brain hung on the phrase eighteen months. Avec had gone into a decline it never recovered from that lasted for eighteen months. Chef Étienne’s specialties stopped tasting right …
He looked at his freshly bandaged arm and shook his head.
“Steve. Steve!” Carrie’s perky voice intruded. “Didn’t it bother you that you weren’t cooking the food?”
“Yes. No. At first. I was cooking, kinda. It was just another tool. I mean, if I’ve got a blender, should I be whisking soups by hand?”
“Steve, this sounds crazy. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad you’ve gotten it off your chest. Can I see the Salamander do … whatever it does?”
“It’s over. Yesterday, it just stopped. I tried everything to get it to work, but it’ll never work again. Avec is closed.”
“Avec? It’s been closed for years.”
“I thought the Salamander was magic—but it’s not. It’s the same oven I burned myself on at Avec la Vin, just before their food got, well, not so good. Somehow, in some screwed up way, it’s been pulling the dishes from Avec. Through time.” Steve started to talk low and fast, trying to get it all out. “The bad reviews Chef Étienne got were for my food. The food I cooked here, at With Wine. It somehow got swapped back to Avec. But after eighteen months—”
“—Avec closed,” Carrie finished, sta
ring at him. “Do you really think that’s possible?”
“I don’t know. But today I worked my butt off cooking. And food kept getting sent back to the kitchen—I don’t know what went wrong.”
“We can fix this. You’re a great chef. We’ll work it out.” Carrie’s voice was calm, soothing.
“I don’t need to ‘work it out.’ I know how to cook.” Steve got up and stomped out of the apartment. She would never understand. Had he been responsible for the failure of Avec? There was a cold feeling at the pit of his stomach when he thought about the future of With Wine.
oOo
Steve let himself into the restaurant to prep for dinner, and poured himself a glass of wine. Lately, it made the work easier. Over the last month, he’d come to dread coming to work. Carrie’s bitchy side had come out, constantly checking up on him, pushing the sous chefs to double-check everything he did. He was in charge of the kitchen, not her. In the last month, since the Salamander had stopped doing its thing, there’d been bad reviews. Critics were speculating that the original chef had left. Business had dropped off.
Carrie’d moved out last week. He tried to make himself care, but in truth he was glad to see her go. She never let up, whining about losing her investment if the restaurant went under.
The dinner service went pretty smoothly. The restaurant wasn’t crowded—it was never crowded anymore—and only a few plates were sent back with complaints.
The next day, Steve came in early to work on a brandy cream sauce, trying to get the seasoning and texture right. The night’s special was pork chops, but the sauce kept breaking, while the chops were undercooked. Or overcooked.
In the middle of the chaos, Carrie stepped into the kitchen.
“Steve, can you find some time for me after closing tonight? We need to talk.”
“Fine. I’ll make time.”
At least she left the kitchen and let him work. His staff was starting to arrive. He gave up on the sauce and cooked the chops in butter and garlic. They were not a popular special.
After closing, they talked over coffee for a long time in the kitchen, cavernous and echoing now that the staff had gone home.
“Steve, it’s come to this. We’re chafing at each other, and it’s hurting the restaurant. Either buy me out and I’ll leave; or I’ll buy you out, but you’ll have to go.”
He thought about it for half a second—he’d been itching to leave since the Salamander’s mojo had failed—then said, “It’s yours. I want a bank check for my half of the investment tomorrow.”
“You know that’s not possible.”
“As soon as you can make it happen then.”
He walked out without looking back, confident no one working in that kitchen could do half the job he did.
oOo
Three months later, Steve walked past With Wine. He’d just quit his job at a high end steakhouse, and was wondering if Carrie would re-hire him. The restaurant was full, with people queued up outside. Carrie stood next to the hostess, looking relaxed and animated, chatting with the customers. The day’s menu was posted, with Chef de Cuisine Étienne Morel across the top.
Above the bar, on a shelf, the Salamander sat, disconnected. A few climbing plants were sitting on it, vines twining in and about it.
Steve turned around and walked away for good.
BLACK AND WHITE
by David B. Coe
Jessie stepped into her grandfather’s office the way she might have slipped into a crypt.
Even now, a grown woman come to sort through a dead man’s effects, she felt ill at ease alone in this room. It didn’t matter that Nana had sent her in here to sort through the boxes of old photographs stored in his closet; Grampa’s office had always been hallowed ground. During her childhood, when she and her cousins descended on Nana and Grampa’s house, they were free to roam wherever they wished. Nana’s kitchen was their common room, the upstairs bedrooms and closets and hallways their castles, caves, and haunted houses.
Only Grampa’s office remained off-limits.
“Grampa’s working in there,” Nana would tell them. “You leave him be.”
As a little girl, Jessie hadn’t known what to make of this. She pictured him sitting at his desk, solemn and intent, poring over papers she couldn’t quite see, or perhaps speaking on the phone with important men. Men like him. On those few occasions when she was permitted to enter the office, she found it both exciting and slightly disappointing, the thrill of being with him in his special place tempered by the realization that his refuge was not all that different from the dry, colorless offices of other adults she knew.
She didn’t remember his desk appearing quite so disheveled, or the volumes on his bookshelves sitting so haphazardly. The photos on the walls, however, hadn’t changed much over the years. Some had faded, a few hung off kilter, but the images remained the same, comforting in their familiarity.
And the camera sat where it always had, on the shelf behind his desk, where he could reach it without getting up.
A Nikon “F” series SLR in silver and black. Made in 1959, it and its siblings were the first of their kind. Single lens reflex cameras dominated the photography market now and had for more than half a century. All of them traced their lineage back to this camera. It looked clunky and antiquated–nothing like the sleek digital SLRs she used–and it bore scratches and small dents that bespoke a lifetime of use. Still, she couldn’t help but admire its stolid utility, so much like that of the man who had used it to capture the world. She walked to the shelf, her eyes never leaving that old camera and the fifty millimeter lens mounted on it. She didn’t touch it of course. This was Grampa’s camera. At least it had been. It was hers now, if she wanted it.
“He’d have wanted you to take all that equipment of his,” Nana had told her when she arrived in Berry’s Bluff for the funeral.
That would take some getting used to.
Jessie stared at it for another moment and even went so far as to reach out toward it, only pausing when her hand hovered just above the viewfinder.
No, not yet.
Instead, she opened a window to let in fresh air, and then went to the closet and dug out his boxes of photos. There must have been thirty of them, one heavier than the next. Odd that images made of light and imagination could weigh so much.
The meticulousness that Jessie remembered from the Grampa of her youth–and that she no longer saw in the office–persisted in his cataloging of the photos. Each box was marked with a range of dates: “October 1964-May 1966,” “April 1972-June 1973,” and so forth. Those notations bracketed births and birthdays, anniversaries and deaths, wars and elections and assassinations. But for this purpose–for the organization of Daniel Stratton’s professional life–the dates themselves were enough.
She opened the first box, the earliest that she could find, and began to work her way through the photos. Nana wanted her to cull the “worthless” shots and keep only those of value. But Jessie knew from the start that this would be impossible. There wasn’t a worthless photo here. She meandered through the collection, marveling at his eye, the deceptive simplicity of his compositions. She was a professional photographer, just as he had been, and yet nothing like him at all. She ran her own business: portraits in her home studio, weddings, showers, parties, and the occasional corporate event on location. On occasion, magazines hired her for stories, but those assignments were the exceptions.
Grampa, though, had worked for the Berry’s Bluff Herald, and had sold work to several regional papers with far larger circulations. Some of his photos had been picked up by AP and UPI. He’d been featured in exhibits and published in at least two dozen books. Daniel Stratton might not have been a household name, but he was a pro. More often than not, Jessie felt like a pretender.
Not that Grampa had ever made her feel that way. From the time she was eleven and started to ask questions about photography, he had nurtured her interest. He bought Jessie her first camera, showed her how to load it
and use the controls, and taught her to see the world through a viewfinder.
“You have a fine eye,” he’d say, looking through her photos. “And you’re careful. A good photographer takes the time to get her settings right.”
He never warmed to digital photography.
“Film slows you down,” he told her once. “It demands precision. Digital is too easy. It makes you sloppy, wasteful. You screw up one, you get it right the next time. That might be taking pictures, but it sure as hell isn’t photography.”
She smiled at the memory.
That first afternoon in the office, she spent hours poring over his work. Outside the sky darkened lazily, the way it does in late summer in the South. At one point Nana called her for supper, but she wasn’t hungry and kept working, accompanied by the drone of katydids and the distant cries of nighthawks.
The next morning, Nana apologized to her.
“I didn’t mean to make you work so hard, sweetie. How late were you up last night?”
“Not that late.” A lie. Jessie hadn’t gone to bed until after two. “And I don’t mind it. But there are so many images I can’t identify. His work belongs in a library, but first we should be able to assign a date and place to every photo.”
“Well, Dan did that. It’s all in his journals.”
Jessie gaped. “He kept journals?”
“Oh, yes. I think they’re in the attic. He wouldn’t put his pictures up there because of the heat and such. But the journals should be up there.”
The words were barely out of Nana’s mouth before Jessie was scrambling up the pulldown ladder into the attic. She found it much as she remembered, in easy disarray. The stifling air still smelled of dust, mold, and bat piss, of summer and hide-and-seek and the sweet hint of an approaching thunderstorm.