View all notes
Denise for her part was jealous of the college "men" in Julia's life. Initially both she and Julia had been besieged. An inordinate number of the junior and senior "men" who banged their trays down beside them in the dining hall were from New Jersey. They had middle-aged faces and megaphonic voices with which they compared math curricula or reminisced about that time they went to Rehoboth Beach and got so wasted. They had only three questions for Julia and Denise: (1) What's your name? (2) What dorm are you in? and (3) Do you want to come to our party on Friday? Denise was amazed by the rudeness of this summary exam and no less amazed by Julia's fascination with these Teaneck natives with monster digital wristwatches and merging eyebrows. Julia wore the heads-up look of a squirrel convinced that somebody has stale bread in his pocket. Leaving a party, she would shrug and tell Denise: "He's got drugs, so I'm going with him." Denise began to spend Friday nights studying by herself. She acquired a rep as an ice queen and possible lesbian. She lacked Julia's ability to melt at the windowside chorusing of her name at three in the morning by the entire college soccer team. "I'm so embarrassed," Julia would moan, in an agony of happiness, as she peered around the lowered blind. The "men" outside the window had no idea how happy they were making her and therefore, in Denise's strict undergraduate judgment, did not deserve to have her.
Denise spent the next summer in the Hamptons with four of her dissolute college hallmates and lied to her parents about every aspect of her situation. She slept on a living-room floor and made good money as a dishwasher and prep drone at the Inn at Quogue, working elbow to elbow with a pretty girl from Scarsdale named Suzie Sterling and falling in love with the life of a cook. She loved the crazy hours, the intensity of the work, the beauty of the product. She loved the deep stillness that underlay the din. A good crew was like an elective family in which everyone in the little hot world of the kitchen stood on equal footing, and every cook had weirdnesses concealed in her past or in his character, and even in the midst of the most sweaty togetherness each family member enjoyed privacy and autonomy, she loved this.
[...] Almost every Sunday she took the cheap slow proletarian combo of SEPTA and New Jersey Transit to New York. She put up with Ed Sterling's paranoid one-way telephone communications and his last-minute postponements and his chronic distraction and his jaw- taxing performance anxieties and her own shame at being taken to cheap ethnic restaurants in Woodside and Elmhurst and Jackson Heights so as not to be seen by anyone Sterling knew (because, as he told her often— running both hands through his mink-thick hair—he knew everybody in Manhattan). While her lover teetered closer to utter freakout and inability to see her anymore, Denise ate Uruguayan T-bones, Sino-Colombian tamales, thumbnail crayfish in red Thai curry, and alder-smoked Russian eels. Beauty or excellence, as typified for her by memorable food, could redeem almost any humiliation. But she never stopped feeling guilty about the bike. Her insistence that she'd chained it to the usual post.
origin story
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.