by Jane Heller
“Don’t give up your day job,” I wanted to say but didn’t, because Alex seemed like a decent person. “Sounds fascinating,” I said instead. “Have you always wanted to be a screenwriter?”
“Any kind of writer,” she said. “You should see all the novels and short stories I’ve started and never finished.”
“Maybe this script is the one,” I said. “If it sells, you can turn it into a novel.”
“I wish.” She smiled hopefully. “Then I can give up dentistry and write full-time. Removing tartar from people’s teeth gets old after awhile.”
I was about to share my own trials with crowns and root canals and receding gums, but I noticed that Rebecca was hurrying into the hall outside the kitchen. I assumed she was retrieving Chef Hill so she could usher him in with great fanfare. I turned away to resume my conversation with Alex when I heard an oddly familiar voice coming from the hall, a male voice, a voice that was apologizing to Rebecca for being late.
“I meant to get here earlier, but hey, circumstances beyond my control and all that,” the male voice went on, becoming more identifiable—too identifiable—with every syllable.
It can’t be, I thought. It really couldn’t be, even though Simon often used the fallback line, “Hey, circumstances beyond my control and all that,” when he was late. No. It was impossible, unthinkable, unconscionable that he would suddenly appear at Whitley Farm—as a Cultivate Our Bounty agritourist, no less. No. Just no. I must have been overthinking it.
“Not a problem,” Rebecca said.
“No, really,” said the voice. “One of these days I’ll show up on time. Being late is a weakness of mine, a character flaw.”
This can’t be happening, I thought. Yes, Simon was always late for things, but so were plenty of other people. On the other hand, he was probably the record-holder for being late, and I had the emotional scars to prove it. Take my birthday, for instance, which turned out to be the last straw for our relationship. He’d made a reservation at my favorite restaurant. He’d said we’d have a romantic evening, just the two of us, and that he’d bought a special present for me—a present that he’d wait to give me after we got home from dinner, a present that would have significance for us as a couple. I thought that he didn’t want to make a big show of proposing at the restaurant because it was such a cliché the way men slipped rings in champagne glasses and hid them in bread baskets and arranged for pastry chefs to embed them in the center of chocolate molten lava cakes. I really thought he meant business.
Our reservation for dinner on that fateful night was for seven thirty. I didn’t panic when he didn’t show up at my apartment at six thirty. I didn’t panic when he didn’t show up at seven, either. I didn’t even panic when he didn’t show at seven fifteen, although the restaurant was on the West Side and I lived on the East Side. And it was pouring so hard we’d never in a million years be able to get a cab. Oh, and the restaurant was one of those self-important places that charged your credit card if you bailed at the last minute. I reminded myself that Simon was habitually late and had been since I’d met him on the ship when he used to arrive at dinner every night at least ten minutes after the rest of us were seated. He was forever losing track of time, and I’d learned over the course of our many months together that his intractable tardiness was simply a personality quirk. I loved him in spite of his lateness is what I’m saying.
But when he walked into my apartment at 8:34, toting a heavily soaked, gift-wrapped package as big as a microwave, I was beyond livid. I was livid that he was late on a night that was supposed to be one of the happiest nights of my life. I was livid that our reservation was canceled and I wouldn’t be swooning over the restaurant’s pan roasted loup de mer with the crispy skin, the potato puree, or the lemon artichoke sauce. I was livid—and this was the most egregious item on the already egregious list—that the heavily soaked, gift-wrapped package as big as a microwave turned out to be a microwave. I mean, you can’t put a microwave on the ring finger of your left hand and go around modeling it for everybody now can you?
“I’m sorry you missed our welcome party last night and our foraging expedition this morning,” said Rebecca. “Come and join the others while we wait for Chef Hill to get here.”
I started sweating like some crazed menopausal woman off her HRT, and if volcanic lava could explode out of one’s nose and ears, it would have exploded out of mine.
“Really looking forward to these cooking classes,” said the voice.
“You’ll have a great time,” said Rebecca. “Follow me.”
He doesn’t have the balls, I thought as I heard the footsteps approaching. He has no right to crash my week with my friends. I’ve already begun to entertain the possibility of a relationship with Jonathan Birnbaum. I’ve moved on!
I ducked as they entered the kitchen. My right eyelid began to twitch too, one of those nerve things where you lose control of your body and can’t do a thing about it. I finally glanced up, only because I couldn’t spend the whole class with my chin tucked inside my rib cage, and confirmed that our latecomer for the week, the entire fucking week, was my former boyfriend.
Naturally, he looked stupidly handsome in his jeans and Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, the mesh slim-fit one with the breathable cotton, the one in that liquid-blue shade that accentuated his liquid-blue eyes. The one he’d worn on the ship last year when he’d made me fall in love with him. He had the nerve to wear that shirt of all shirts. But he could have worn one of Whitley’s tote bags and still looked movie-star handsome—George Clooney, Cary Grant handsome, only extremely tall, around six five, which made us the perfect couple, height-wise. He had dark, wavy hair with touches of gray at his temples, sky-blue eyes behind his tortoiseshell glasses, a straight nose, a square jaw, juicy lips, a lean, yet broad-shouldered body, the complete visual package.
He waved at me with a grin that should have been sheepish but was instead full of self-confidence and good cheer, and took a seat in the row behind me, next to Beatrice, who seemed to have recovered just fine from her “fall.” I heard him introduce himself to her and everybody else. He told them his grandparents used to have a farm up in Duchess County and as a boy he’d enjoyed spending weekends there. He regaled them with tales of collecting eggs from the chickens and feeding the baby goats with a bottle and watching Rudy, the rooster, wander into the driveway and nearly get run over by his grandpa Charlie’s tractor. So what if he’d told me the same stories and they were true? He had walked right into my vacation, my cooking class, my space, and charmed the crap out of these people; it was a total breach of breakup etiquette.
Keeping my gaze straight ahead, I reached for Jackie’s hand with my right, Pat’s hand with my left, and hissed, “Do you believe this?” When all they did was giggle, I realized I’d been set up. “You knew?” I hissed some more, searching their faces now. “You knew?”
Jackie leaned in and whispered, “He wants to show you he’s sorry. He asked us if it was okay to come and we said yes.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t turn around.
“Hey, Slim,” said Simon.
“You think this is funny,” I said still looking straight ahead.
“A little,” he agreed. “I can’t wait to see you cooking. It’ll be epic.”
Ha ha ha. I’d give him epic. An epic week of the cold shoulder.
I was relieved when Chef Jason Hill materialized in his chef whites with his entourage of four, each of whom was a young male schlepping a heavy, clanging bag of kitchen tools. He waved halfheartedly at us with the pained expression of a very famous person who resented having to perform in front of such a small audience.
Connie bolted up, threw her arms in the air and said, “He’s heeeere!” and Chef Hill didn’t so much as make eye contact with her. A compact man in his mid thirties, with tattoos that ran up his neck and down the exposed parts of his arms, he had a crooked, tough-guy nose, acne-scarred skin, a shaved head, and a goatee—not a heartthrob in the conv
entional sense but the sort of anti-hero that culinary stars were made of these days. He reeked of pomposity as he issued commands to the members of his staff, who proceeded to prep all sorts of food with lightning speed, as if their boss had a plane to catch.
While we students continued to sit in our seats, and Rebecca wished us an enjoyable class before fleeing, he barked more orders at the underlings and then looked up at us and said, “Hold tight, gang. Be right back,” after which he disappeared in the direction of the restroom. When he returned a few minutes later, his mood seemed to have lightened. Even from my seat I could guess why: His nostrils were dusted with the tiniest traces of a powder that wasn’t confectioner’s sugar, and he was sniffling.
“I think Chef Hill’s a cokehead,” I whispered to Pat and Jackie. “It would give new meaning to farm-to-table, as in a farm in Colombia.”
“But sodas are bad for you,” said Pat. “Even I know that.”
“She means cocaine, Pat,” said Jackie. “It’s just Elaine being Elaine.”
“It could be true,” I said. “The guy promotes clean food, but if he’s polluting his own body then he’s a phony.” I was about to defend my theory, but Chef Hill began our class by stepping out from behind the counter and walking quickly toward us.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Jackie. “He’s not nearly as hot in person. I’m much more into Kevin, our forager. Now there’s a guy I’d like to—”
“I’m Jason Hill,” he said with a rapid-fire delivery, as if the coke had somehow sped up his vocal chords along with his brain. “Hope all you people are ready to cook from the land today. Do you know how to get the best flavor out of food? I’ll tell you how: Get it from farmers who are local. That’s right. Get it from someone in the neighborhood, someone whose growing practices you respect. As a cook, you’ll be the curators of what tastes good, of what’s delicious, and the way to get ‘delicious’ is to get it fresh. Look, I’ll be honest. My family is the world to me. They keep me grounded. They’re my emotional and spiritual center. Feeding them clean, farm-to-table, dock-to-dish meals is the same as telling them I love them. So here’s the deal. I can show you people every recipe and technique ever created, but it all starts with freshness, with purity, with saving our planet by not dumping chemicals on what we put in our mouths.”
Chef Hill nodded at us to indicate his little speech was over, and Lake and Gabriel, clearly his acolytes, leapt to their feet and clapped vigorously, which made everybody else feel obligated to leap to their feet and clap vigorously.
“Thanks, thanks,” said Chef Hill, gesturing for us to sit back down. “Now, just so I have an idea what I’m dealing with this week, how many of you think you know your way around the kitchen, knife skills and all?”
Lake and Gabriel raised their hands and announced that they had their own set of knives at home with their initials on them. Jonathan raised his hand and said he found cooking to be a very satisfying experience. Alex raised her hand and said she enjoyed cooking but was intimidated by recipes with more than six ingredients. Pat lifted her hand and said she cooked for her children but that she often fell back on mac and cheese, sloppy joes, and Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks. And Connie raised her hand and said she’d met Chef Hill before—several times, in fact—and bought all his cookbooks in both print and e-book editions, which didn’t qualify as knowing how to cook but got him to glance in her direction. Simon didn’t raise his hand but took the opportunity to lean over and say to me, “You should have told him about the turkey you roasted at Thanksgiving, Slim. Remember how you left the plastic bag of giblets in there and the plastic melted?”
Yes, hilarious. Good one, Simon. I’d like to roast your bag of giblets.
“I’m splitting you into groups by mixing up the know-hows and the wannabes,” he said. “Then I’ll assign everybody tasks—bang bang.”
“Bang bang,” I would come to learn, was Chef Hill’s catchphrase, the way Emeril became synonymous with “Bam,” and he used it as liberally as he used salt. He sent me, Jonathan, Ronnie, and Gabriel over to a table on which rested two long slabs of meat. They were pork tenderloins that looked like a couple of extremely large penises, pink and glistening under the recessed lighting.
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 sto
ve 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.