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Arrogant, ironic, devoted Emile became her asylum. She felt infinitely adult with him. He said he'd had enough of marriage his first time around, but he obligingly took Denise to Atlantic City and (in the words of the Barbera D'Alba she'd been drunk on when she proposed to him) made an honest woman of her. At Cafe Louche they worked like partners, experience flowing from his head into hers. They sneered at their pretentious old rival, Le Bee- Fin. They impulse-bought a three-story town house on Federal Street, in a mixed black and white and Vietnamese neighborhood near the Italian Market. They talked about flavor the way Marxists talked about revolution.
When Emile had finally taught her everything he would ever teach her, she tried to teach him a thing or two—like, let's freshen up the menu, how about, let's maybe try that with a vegetable stock and a little bit of cumin, how about— and ran smack into that wall of irony and ironclad opinion that she'd loved as long as she was on the happy side of it. She felt more skilled and ambitious and hungry than her white-haired husband. She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she'd aged so rapidly that she'd passed Emile and caught up with her parents. [...]
At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down garde manger. The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sickened Denise—her C.I.A. education (Denise was an autodidact snob), her overfamiliarity with more senior cooks (especially with Denise), her vocal adoration of Jodie Foster, the stupid fish-and-bicycle texts on her T- shirts, her overuse of the word "fucking" as an intensifier, her self-conscious lesbian "solidarity" with the "latinos" and "Asians" in the kitchen, her generalizations about "right- wingers" and "Kansas" and "Peoria," her facility with phrases like "men and women of color," the whole bright aura of entitlement that came of basking in the approval of educators who wished that they could be as marginalized and victimized and free of guilt as she was. What is this person doing in my kitchen? Denise wondered. Cooks were not supposed to be political. Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not reallyofit. Denise suspected that Becky Hemerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be one tough chick, to hold her own with the guys. Denise loathed this motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. Hemerling had a way of looking at her that suggested that she (Hemerling) knew her better than she knew herself—an insinuation at once infuriating and impossible to refute. Lying awake beside Emile at night, Denise imagined squeezing Hemerling's neck until her blue, blue eyes bugged out. She imagined pressing her thumbs into Hemerling's windpipe until it cracked.
Unfortunately, as soon as he was gone, Denise had second thoughts. She and Becky enjoyed a lovely and instructive honeymoon and then began to fight. And fight, and fight. Their fighting life, like the sex life that so briefly preceded it, was a thing of ritual. They fought about why they were fighting so much, whose fault it was. They fought in bed late at night, they drew on unguessed reservoirs of something like libido, they were hungover from fighting in the morning. They fought their little brains out. Fought fought fought. Fought on the stairway, fought in public, fought on car seats. And although they got off regularly—climaxed in red-faced screaming fits, slammed doors, kicked walls, collapsed in wet-faced paroxysms—the lust for combat was never gone for long. It bound them together, overcame their mutual dislike. As a lover's voice or hair or curving hip keeps triggering the need to stop everything and fuck, so Becky had a score of provocations that reliably sent Denise's heart rate through the roof. The worst was her contention that Denise, at heart, was a liberal collectivist pure lesbian and was simply unaware of it.
When they returned to the car, the greenness of which was of a piece with the weeds around the empty gravel lot, Brian asked if she'd made plans for Europe. "You should take at least two months," he said. "I have an ulterior motive here."
"Yes?"
"If you go, then I can go for a couple of weeks myself. I want to eat what you eat. I want to hear how you think."
He said this with disarming self-interest. Who wouldn't want to travel in Europe with a pretty woman who knew her food and wine? If you, not he, were the lucky devil who got to do it, he would be as delighted for you as he expected you, now, to be delighted for him. This was his tone.
The part of Denise that suspected she might have better sex with Brian than she'd had with other men, the part of her that recognized her own ambition in him, agreed to take six weeks in Europe and connect with him in Paris.
Brian, deferring to her judgment absolutely, made her choose the wine and order both dinners. Over coffee she asked him why Robin hadn't come along to Paris.
"It's the first zucchini harvest at the Garden Project," he said with uncharacteristic bitterness.
"Travel is a chore for some people," Denise said.
"It didn't use to be for Robin," Brian said. "We used to take great trips, all over the West. And now that we can really afford it, she doesn't want to go. It's like she's on strike against money."
"It must be a shock, suddenly having so much."
"Look, I just want to have fun with it," Brian said. "I don't want to be a different person. But I'm not going to wear sackcloth, either."
"Is that what Robin is doing?"
"She hasn't been happy since the day I sold the company."
Let's get an egg timer, Denise thought, and see how long this marriage lasts.
[...] She was ready to go home.
Two nights before they left, she knocked on Brian's door before dinner and he pulled her into his room and kissed her.
He'd given no warning of his change of heart. She visited the confessor in her head and was able to say, "Nothing! I did nothing! I knocked on the door, and next thing I know, he's on his knees."
On his knees, he pressed her hands to his face. She looked at him as she'd looked at Don Armour long ago. His desire brought cool topical relief to the dryness and crackedness, the bodywide distress, of her person. She followed him to bed.
She was haunted, just as she'd feared, by the afterimage of his dick. She felt gladder and gladder that she hadn't let him put it in her. Brian had every advantage that she had, plus many of his own. He was male, he was rich, he was a born insider; he wasn't hampered by Lambert weirdnesses or strong opinions; he was an amateur with nothing to lose but throwaway money, and to succeed all he needed was a good idea and somebody else (namely her) to do the hard work. How lucky she'd been, in that hotel room, to recognize him as her adversary! Two more minutes and she would have disappeared. She would have become another facet of his really fun life, her beauty reflecting on his irresistibility, her talents redounding to his restaurant's glory. How lucky she'd been, how lucky.
She believed that if, when the Generator opened, reviewers paid more attention to the space than to the food, she would lose and Brian would win. And so she worked her ass off. She convection-roasted country ribs to brownness and cut them thin, along the grain, for presentation, reduced and darkened the kraut gravy to bring out its nutty, earthy, cabbagy, porky flavor, and arted up the plate with twin testicular new potatoes, a cluster of Brussels sprouts, and a spoon of stewed white beans that she lightly spiked with roasted garlic. She invented luxurious new white sausages. She matched a fennel relish, roasted potatoes, and good bitter wholesome rapini with fabulous pork chops that she bought direct from a sixties holdover organic farmer who did his own butchering and made his own deliveries. She took the guy to lunch and visited his farm in Lancaster County and met the hogs in question, examined their eclectic diet (boiled yams and chicken wings, acorns and chestnuts) and toured the soundproofed room where they were slaughtered. She extracted commitments from her old crew at Mare Scuro. She took former colleagues out on Brian's AmEx and sized up the local competition (most of it reassuringly undistinguished) and sampled desserts to see if anybody's pastry chef was worth stealing. She staged one-woman late-night force meat festivals. She made sauerkraut in five- gallon buckets in her basement. She made it with red cabbage and with shredded kale in cabbage juice, with juniper berries and black peppercorns. She hurried along the fermentation with hundred-watt bulbs.
Shrillness came pouring out of Robin. "I can't believe it! That's the whole point. God! It is so, so, so like him not to mention that part. Because that part might actually make things hard for him, you know, the way things are hard for me. It might get in the way of his fun time in Paris, or his lunch date with Harvey Keitel, or whatever. I can't believe he didn't mention it."
"Explain to me what the problem is?"
"Rick Flamburg's disabled for life," Robin said. "My brother is in jail for the next ten or fifteen years, this horrible company is corrupting the city schools, my father is on antipsychotics, and Brian is like, hey, look what W just did
for us, let's move to Mendocino!"
"But you didn't do anything wrong," Denise said. "You're not responsible for any of those other things."
Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?"
"I don't know."
"I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning."
They marched along in silence. Denise, to whom winning did matter, grimly noted that, on top of all his other luck, Brian had married a woman of principle and spirit.
guiltless golden retriever energy
Robin ended Denise's moratorium with a phone call. She was screeching mad. "Do you know what Jerry Schwartz's movie is about?"
"Uh, Dostoevsky in Germantown?"
"You know it. How come I didn't know it? Because he kept it from me, because he knew what I would think!"
"We're talking about a Giovanni-Ribisi-as-wispily- bearded-Raskolnikov type of thing," Denise said.
"My husband," Robin said, "has put fifty thousand dollars, which he got from the W—— Corporation, into a movie about a North Philly anarchist who splits two women's skulls and goes to jail for it! He's getting off on how cool it is to hang out with Giovanni Ribisi, and Jerry Schwartz, and Ian What's His Face, and Stephen Whoever, while my North Philly anarchist brother, who really did split somebody's skull —"
"No, I get it," Denise said. "There's a definite want of sensitivity there."
"I don't even think so," Robin said. "I think he's deeply pissed off with me and he doesn't even know it."