by Jane Heller
“The bounty,” I said without missing a beat. “Cultivating it, I mean. I have so much to learn, as you can tell from the Mystery Challenge. And I’m looking forward to the cooking, of course.”
“Perfect,” he said with a gleam in those brown eyes. “We’ll be in the trenches together all week, Elaine.”
Suddenly, things were looking up. Maybe Jonathan Birnbaum and I would embark on a torrid affair during Cultivate Our Bounty week. Maybe that affair would evolve into a meaningful relationship, one with stimulating conversations and stimulating sex and safety deposit boxes stuffed with Cartier jewelry. Maybe being dragged to Whitley was the best thing that would ever happen to me.
Of course, there was a slight complication. I already had a boyfriend.
2
“Home sweet home,” I said out loud upon entering my cottage. After depositing the tote bag of Whitley handouts in the corner near my emptied luggage, I sank into the armchair to the right of the king-size four-poster bed. Other amenities of my accommodations included a marble bathroom with a soaking tub and rainfall shower, a desk area that offered Wi-Fi, an iPod dock and a fifty-inch flat-screen TV—pretty swanky for a farm.
I was tired and therefore grateful for the early night, particularly since we’d be forced to get up at the crack of dawn the next morning to shovel cow dung or something. Still, the evening had ended on a high note. Jonathan Birnbaum and I had chatted for a few more minutes while Jackie scurried off to the bar and Pat scurried off to the restroom. (Before departing, Jackie had mouthed, “He’s hot,” the same thing she said about most men, although in this case she was spot-on.) Jonathan told me he was a partner at his late father’s law firm in Palm Beach, specializing in estates, wills and trusts; I told him I was a VP and senior account executive at Pearson & Strulley, the international PR firm where I’d worked for nine years. He told me he lived in a Mediterranean-style house with a pool and a tennis court across the street from the Intracoastal Waterway; I told him I lived in a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in a doorman building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side across the street from Madonna. He told me he was an accomplished home cook. I told him I was an accomplished orderer from restaurants that delivered, which made him laugh, which made me laugh, and before I knew it we were chuckling like fools. He said he wasn’t expecting to “click with anyone” at Whitley and he was looking forward to the week. I said, “Me too,” and then we said goodnight. He was definitely hitting on me, my friends confirmed later, and I have to say I didn’t hate it.
I heaved a contented sigh, reached into the pocket of my white linen pants, and pulled out my cellphone to turn it back on since electronic devices were a no-no while the week’s activities were in progress. I had no desire to post selfies or food porn on my Instagram page, but it was torture for me not to be able to get e-mails and texts. I liked to feel needed.
I checked the phone. Nothing. Bah.
I was about to connect it to its charger and put it and myself to bed when it rang.
My heart did a little dance when I saw that the caller was Simon, the boyfriend I mentioned. He and I had broken up shortly before the trip, so he was not, technically, my boyfriend, but that didn’t stop my pulse from quickening every time I heard his damn voice,
“What?” I said in a not-very-cordial greeting.
“Hey, Slim. How’s it going in Farmaggedon?” said Simon, clearly trying to be charming in that way he had of turning everything into a joke. “Were you out tilling the soil or picking berries for that pie you’ll be baking for me?”
“I was at a party,” I said, determined to sound chilly yet irresistible, like a heroine from a classic movie, say Lauren Bacall.
“Look, I know you hate me right now, but I love you and I’ll prove it,” he said. “You’ll see.”
“I won’t hold my breath.” How dare he try to reel me back in? We were done. I’d ended it. And, trust me, it hadn’t been easy.
“Don’t you remember how good it was between us, Slim?”
Of course I remembered. That was the problem. I’d met Simon Purdys on the Princess Charming and, after a lifetime of mistrusting men, I’d allowed myself to trust Simon. We’d entered into a passionate romance after our shipboard fling, a serious, sappy romance of the type where you can’t bear to be without the other person for more than an hour and even an hour is a stretch. For a year it was miraculous and unexpected and beyond my wildest dreams, but not anymore. “What’s the point of this call, Simon?”
“To cheer you up,” he said. “You seemed pretty miserable the last time I saw you.”
“Yeah, because I was angry. People aren’t jumping for joy when they’re ending a relationship.”
I had shared the details of the breakup with Jackie and Pat, of course, and they both thought it was my fault. Some friends.
“Don’t be a fucking idiot. He’s a keeper,” Jackie had said.
“I wouldn’t give him up if I were you,” Pat had advised. “He’s a special, special man, Elaine.”
He’d certainly seemed to be. He’d been a well-regarded travel writer at Away from It All magazine when we met on the ship. He’d been thinking of resigning; he’d said he was tired of traveling so much. Then shortly after we got back from the cruise, his publisher offered him the editor-in-chief position, and he grabbed it, thinking a desk job would mean less time on a plane and more time for a life. Wrong. He was in nonstop meetings, buried under an executive’s workload. I could handle that, no problem, since I was a workaholic myself.
But then he hired—no, campaigned for—Mallory Ryan to join the team as editorial director of afia.com, the magazine’s web site. Like every other magazine, Away from It All had experienced flagging newsstand and subscription sales and needed its digital operations to pull in more eyeballs. Since Mallory was a tech genius with a reputation for efficiently bringing print media into the twenty-first century, and she was ambitious, stupidly gorgeous, and only twenty-eight years old (the horror), Simon had convinced his boss to open his corporate wallet for her. I wasn’t thrilled that my boyfriend spent many hours of the day and night canoodling with her about memes and gigabytes and platforms, nor was I wild about hearing Mallory this and Mallory that whenever we were together. (He wasn’t wild about my nicknames for Mallory either: “the Web Wench” for obvious reasons and “Mammary” due to her big gazongas.) I’m sure she was a delightful person, but the fact was this: He claimed to love me but hadn’t asked me to marry him or live with him or even leave a toothbrush at his apartment. Not in the year that we’d been together. Had she bumped me out of contention?
Or was he simply a commitmentphobe? He would tell me—I’m saying he himself would speak the words without any provocation from or prompting by me—that he wanted the same sort of coupledom that I did, but then he would go through periods when he would avoid the subject as if it had crab lice. It was a pattern, and it drove me nuts. He would get me all hopeful and excited about our future and then drop me on my ass if I tried to pin him down on the specifics, and I’d had it up to here with his flip-flopping.
“Well, we don’t have to get into things tonight,” said Simon. “I just wanted to wish you luck with all the farming.” He laughed. “Still trying to picture you as that pioneer woman on the Food Network. What’s her name?”
“Ree Drummond, and she lives on a ranch, not a farm. She’s married to a cowboy.” I’m sorry to tell you that I emphasized the word “married” because I couldn’t help sticking it to him that he and I weren’t.
“I meant that I know you’re out of your element up there,” he said, his tone softening. “I hope you’ll meet some nice people. Really, Slim.”
“As a matter of fact, I already did,” I said with a gleeful lilt in my voice, “and he’s extremely nice.”
“He?”
“Goodnight, Simon.”
Day Two:
Tuesday, July 16
3
“The land is divided into twelve plots, and we grow around 200
varieties of vegetables,” enthused Rebecca, the Willie Nelson look-alike. My friends and I and the seven other members of our group stood beside a row of red and golden beets. “Behind us is celeriac, chard, and kale, and down below we have cabbage and corn. At the top of the hill we have hops that are used by craft breweries in the area….”
Blah blah blah. It was 9:00 a.m. and the day was a scorcher already—not a hint of a breeze, not a single cloud in the sky. Just hot, muggy air that made my hair frizz, my body clammy, and my brain yearn for my meat-locker-cold office where flies didn’t dive-bomb my neck and the sun’s rays didn’t bore through my broad-spectrum SPF 100 moisturizer. I wondered how I would survive the week.
Don’t get me wrong. Whitley Farm was breathtaking—the stuff of landscape painters—but harvesting my own kohlrabi wasn’t high on my bucket list. I was more interested in getting into the presumably air conditioned kitchen.
“We also do a lot of inter-cropping, so we plant green manures in between actual food crops….”
More blah blah blah. I tried to look nonchalant as I scanned the group for Jonathan, and he gave me a big smile when our eyes met. Yes, he’ll be the bright spot, I thought, as Rebecca asked us to introduce ourselves and explain what had brought us to Whitley’s Cultivate Our Bounty week.
“We have one more agritourist coming,” she added. “He’ll be joining us in the kitchen after our foraging expedition. In the meantime, let’s have those of you who are here get to know one another, shall we?”
“At least the person coming later is a man,” Jackie whispered before the introductions. “There aren’t many in this group, and Elaine has already staked out the hot guy, so having one more gives me a fighting chance at some action.”
“I asked Bill to fix you up with that doctor,” said Pat, “but you didn’t like him.”
“The proctologist?” Jackie shuddered. “All he wanted to do was stick his finger where it doesn’t belong.”
“If the ladies over there are finished, I’ll go first. I’m Lake Vanderkloot-Arnold,” said a thirty-something who would have been pretty except that she didn’t look human. What I mean is she had the figure of a lollipop—all head and no body. I was thin for my giantess height, but she was as skinny as a haricot vert, with only the occasional ripple of muscle in her arms and legs. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a perky ponytail and she was dressed in Lululemon yoga wear. She bounced on the balls of her feet when she spoke, which suggested abundant energy and vivacity, but her face was drawn, her skin sandpaper dry, and her collarbones protruded from her pale blue tank top. In the daylight, I realized she was the one who’d guessed all the right answers to last night’s Mystery Challenge. “My life partner and I live in Manhattan—I volunteer at the Guggenheim, and he’s in commercial real estate at Cushman & Wakefield—and we came to Whitley because we’re true believers in the farm-to-table movement. We shun restaurants that don’t use the freshest, locally sourced ingredients and we bring our own food to dinner parties if we think the host is serving anything processed. We’ve been yearning to take our journey deeper by honing our cooking skills to reflect and honor the land. If you don’t honor the land and its bounty, you can’t really walk the walk.”
Okay, who in their right mind talked like that? And what cooking skills was she referring to? Her idea of a meal was probably a chia seed.
“I’m Lake’s husband Gabriel,” said the man she had called her life partner. He was as body-perfect as she was body-deprived, attractive in a slightly hawkish, predatory way. He had a long, angular face with a sharp nose and chin, and he wore his brown hair in a man bun, which, given that he worked in the corporate world, he probably trotted out only during his downtime. His heather-green cargo shorts and stretchy yellow shirt revealed taut, professional-athlete-grade thighs and abs that were so perfectly sculpted they looked like implants. “As Lake said, we take care of ourselves, and that means being vigilant about what we eat. I can promise you that nothing goes into this mouth unless I know where it comes from.” He pointed emphatically to his mouth in case we mistook it for his ear or eye.
I kept waiting for the Vanderkloot-Arnolds to laugh or make a snarky remark to show us they had a sense of irony or were just plain joking, but no. Again I had the thought that it would be a long week.
“I’m Connie Gumpers,” said a woman who gave us all a little wave. She was in her late fifties, short and chunky, with a muffin top she didn’t try to camouflage with a tunic like many middle-aged women in Manhattan. Instead she wore a too-tight Green Bay Packers T-shirt with her blue jeans and sneakers. There was something equally refreshing and low maintenance about her brassy blonde hair with visible gray roots, which hung at random around her ears. “My husband Ronnie and I live in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Our grandkids were begging us to take a cooking trip for our anniversary because they know their Gammy watches food shows 24/7.”
“She sure does,” said Ronnie, a heavyset man whose jeans strained to contain his bulk, and whose balding head carried the burden of three chins. He was sweating profusely, and I feared he might collapse in the heat. “Bobby Flay’s her favorite TV chef, but she also goes crazy for that judge on Chopped.” He turned to his wife. “What’s his name, Cupcake? The one with the tan and the fancy suits?”
“Geoffrey Zacharian,” she said. “He’s a dreamboat. But I love the whole bunch of them—Giaada, Ina, Rachel, Guy, and especially Jason Hill. I’ve followed him to other cooking demonstrations and now I’ll be seeing him again this week. Yay!”
“She’s a hoot, isn’t she?” Ronnie nodded at his wife affectionately. “Wonderful, wonderful mom and grandma. All those years I was building my building business? She took care of everything at home, kept it all running like clockwork. Now I’m retired, and we’re living the high life.” He paused to catch his breath. He was sort of wheezing. “She does her chef thing, and I let her drag me along for the ride. I say ‘drag me along’ because I’m not all that gung-ho on the healthy this, healthy that. Give me a four-cheese Whopper with a side of onion rings and I’m a happy man.” He chuckled. “I love to eat—so does Cupcake—but we do other fun things together too. We learned how to restore old clocks, took a course in woodworking, went with the grandkids to Comic Con, the convention where all the superhero actors go to plug their movies. And we spent a couple of weeks in Gay Paree.” He chuckled again, guiltily this time. “I guess I’m not supposed to say that anymore. Sorry if I offended anybody. Great people, the gays. The French too. They get a bad rap for being uppity, but they were friendly as all get out when we were over there. Now here we are doing the Cultivate Our Bounty thing with you nice folks because Connie wanted to see her chef and we’re celebrating our anniversary. Good, good times.”
I gave Jackie and Pat my cross-eyed look. We started laughing like naughty children, which prompted a “shush” from Rebecca.
The third couple wasn’t a couple at all, at least not in a romantic sense. They were a mother and son duo, and the son was Jonathan. “Beatrice Birnbaum,” boomed the deep-voiced septuagenarian—a stunning, erect-postured, commanding woman who removed her sunglasses and squared her shoulders before she spoke, and gave off the sense that she was not to be crossed, despite having a big, wide smile plastered across her face. She had the shiniest silvery gray hair I’d ever seen, lacquered and expensively cut, with bangs across her forehead and layers framing her face. “My son Jonathan and I live in Palm Beach, but we come north in the summer to visit family and friends. Jonathan’s an attorney who harbors ambitions of being a chef, of all things. I hope this week will disabuse him of that notion.” She maintained the smile even as her tone suggested utter disdain for her son and his “notion.”
We all glanced at Jonathan, who at forty-plus was old enough to make his own career decisions as well as stop traveling with his mother.
“Beatrice thinks I must be going through a mid-life crisis, and maybe I am, but there are worse things, right?” he said, with a jolly laugh that broke the
tension and reinforced my interest in him as a potential romantic partner. I’d just have to wean him off his mommy. “The truth is, I’d really like to go to culinary school in my spare time and see what comes of it. Cooking farm-to-table food and feeding it to people seems like a creative and enjoyable pursuit.”
“It is indeed,” commented Rebecca. “A noble pursuit.”
“I have a genuine appreciation for the work that’s done here at Whitley,” Beatrice allowed, still smiling incongruously. “And there’s nothing I relish more than a meal prepared with the freshest ingredients and the utmost skill, but Jonathan’s father, my dear Arthur, built that law firm. He’d turn over in his grave if he knew his only son was thinking of throwing it all away in order to make beet-and-goat-cheese salads.”
As Jonathan winked at me as if to say, “Don’t pay any attention to her,” I decided to begin the weaning process immediately.
“I’m Elaine Zimmerman,” I said. “I’m a senior account executive at Pearson & Strulley, the international PR firm, and I don’t think I’m throwing it all away by taking a week off with my best friends, Beatrice.” Her smile faded, and she glared at me. “I’m a complete klutz in the kitchen, and I couldn’t tell you the difference between snap peas and snow peas, never mind whether that Belgian salad vegetable is pronounced en-dive or on-deev, but it’ll be fun to watch good cooks like Jonathan work their magic.”
“Thanks for the assist, Elaine,” said Jonathan, giving me a grateful, knowing smile, as if we’d just gone through an ordeal together. “Something tells me you’ll be out-cooking us all by the end of the week.”
“I doubt that,” I said, pleased that I had scored the compliment.
“Hi everyone,” said Jackie. “I’m Jackie Gault and I run a nursery in Westchester County. I’ve logged lots of time in the garden, but farming is new to me. I’m really excited to cook what Whitley grows.” She pumped her fist, just the way she did when her favorite baseball team won. She knew the names and stats of all the players, and could sit and stare at a game for hours. She deserved a boyfriend who would appreciate the jock in her. Isn’t that what men wanted? A woman who shared their interests? I’d shared Simon’s interests. We’d sent each other links to magazine pieces we liked and ran off to see buzz-worthy films as soon as they were released. We’d read the same books on our iPads and compared notes about them as soon as we were both done. A lot of good that did me.