It was his moment of truth, the moment in which his courage very nearly failed him. She was stunning. Glowing. As perfect and unapproachable as the plucked and haughty girls who looked out at him from the covers of magazines at the supermarket, icily elegant in a clingy silk chemise the color of béchamel. How could he, Albert D’Angelo, for all his talent and greatness of heart, ever hope to touch her, to move such perfection, to pique such jaded taste buds?
Wounded, he looked to her companions. Beside her, grinning hugely, as hearty, handsome, and bland as ever, was the Palate—he could expect no help from that quarter. And then he turned his eyes on the couple they’d brought with them, looking for signs of sympathy. He looked in vain. They were middle-aged, silver-haired, dressed to the nines, thin and stringy in the way of those who exercise inflexible control over their appetites, about as sympathetic as vigilantes. Albert understood then that it was going to be an uphill battle. He turned back to the grill, girded himself in a clean apron, and awaited the worst.
Marie fixed the drinks—two martinis, a Glenlivet neat for Willa, and a beer for the Palate. For appetizers they ordered mozzarella di buffala marinara, the caponata D’Angelo, the octopus salad, and the veal medallions with onion marmalade. Albert put his soul into each dish, arranged and garnished the plates with all the patient care and shimmering inspiration of a Toulouse-Lautrec bent over a canvas, and watched, defeated, as each came back to the kitchen half eaten. And then came the entrées. They ordered a selection—five different dishes—and Albert, after delivering them up to Eduardo with a face of stone, pressed himself to the porthole like a voyeur.
Riveted, he watched as they sat back so that Eduardo could present the dishes. He waited, but nothing happened. They barely glanced at the food. And then, as if by signal, they began passing the plates around the table. He was stunned: what did they think this was—the Imperial Dinner at Chow Foo Luck’s? But then he understood: each dish had to suffer the scrutiny of the big man with the brutal jaw before they would deign to touch it. No one ate, no one spoke, no one lifted a glass of the Château Bellegrave, 1966, to his lips, until Jock had sniffed, finger-licked, and then gingerly tasted each of Albert’s creations. Willa sat rigid, her black eyes open wide, as the great-jawed, brush-headed giant leaned intently over the plate and rolled a bit of scallop or duck over his tongue. Finally, when all the dishes had circulated, the écrevisses Alberto came to rest, like a roulette ball, in front of the Palate. But he’d already snuffed it, already dirtied his fork in it. And now, with a grand gesture, he pushed the plate aside and called out in a hoarse voice for beer.
The next day was the blackest of Albert’s life. There were two strikes against him, and the third was coming down the pike. He didn’t know what to do. His dreams had been feverish, a nightmare of mincing truffles and reanimated pigs’ feet, and he awoke with the wildest combinations on his lips—chopped pickles and shad roe, an onion-cinnamon mousse, black-eyed peas vinaigrette. He even, half-seriously, drew up a fantasy menu, a list of dishes no one had ever tasted, not sheiks or presidents. La Cuisine des Espèces en Danger, he would call it. Breast of California condor aux chanterelles; snail darter à la meunière; medallions of panda alla campagnola. Marie laughed out loud when he presented her with the menu that afternoon—“I’ve invented a new cuisine!” he shouted—and for a moment, the pall lifted.
But just as quickly, it descended again. He knew what he had to do. He had to speak to her, his severest critic, through the medium of his food. He had to translate for her, awaken her with a kiss. But how? How could he even begin to rouse her from her slumber when that clod stood between them like a watchdog?
As it turned out, the answer was closer at hand than he could have imagined.
It was late the next afternoon—Thursday, the day before Willa Frank’s next hatchet job was due to appear in the paper—and Albert sat at a table in the back of the darkened restaurant, brooding over his menu. He was almost certain she’d be in for her final visit that night, and yet he still hadn’t a clue as to how he was going to redeem himself. For a long while he sat there in his misery, absently watching Torrey as she probed beneath the front tables with the wand of her vacuum. Behind him, in the kitchen, sauces were simmering, a veal loin roasting; Marie was baking bread and Fulgencio stacking wood. He must have watched Torrey for a full five minutes before he called out to her. “Torrey!” he shouted over the roar of the vacuum. “Torrey, shut that thing off a minute, will you?”
The roar died to a wheeze, then silence. Torrey looked up.
“This guy, what’s his name, Jock—what do you know about him?” He glanced down at the scrawled-over menu and then up again. “I mean, you don’t know what he likes to eat, by any chance, do you?”
Torrey shambled across the floor, scratching the stubble of her head. She was wearing a torn flannel shirt three sizes too big for her. There was a smear of grease under her left eye. It took her a moment, tongue caught in the corner of her mouth, her brow furrowed in deliberation. “Plain stuff, I guess,” she said finally, with a shrug of her shoulders. “Burned steak, potatoes with the skins on, boiled peas, and that—the kind of stuff his mother used to make. You know, like shanty Irish?”
Albert was busy that night—terrifically busy, the place packed—and when Willa Frank and her Palate sauntered in at nine-fifteen, he was ready for them. They had reservations (under an assumed name, of course—M. Cavil, party of two), and Eduardo was able to seat them immediately. In he came, breathless, the familiar phrase like a tocsin on his lips—“She’s here!”—and out he fluttered again, with the drinks: one Glenlivet neat, one beer. Albert never glanced up.
On the stove, however, was a smallish pot. And in the pot were three tough scarred potatoes, eyes and dirt-flecked skin intact, boiling furiously; in and amongst them, dancing in the roiling water, were the contents of a sixteen-ounce can of Mother Hubbard’s discount peas. Albert hummed to himself as he worked, searing chunks of grouper with shrimp, crab, and scallops in a big pan, chopping garlic and leeks, patting a scoop of foie gras into place atop a tournedos of beef. When, some twenty minutes later, a still-breathless Eduardo rocked through the door with their order, Albert took the yellow slip from him and tore it in two without giving it a second glance. Zero hour had arrived.
“Marie!” he called, “Marie, quick!” He put on his most frantic face for her, the face of a man clutching at a wisp of grass at the very edge of a precipice.
Marie went numb. She set down her cocktail shaker and wiped her hands on her apron. There was catastrophe in the air. “What is it?” she gasped.
He was out of sea-urchin roe. And fish fumet. And Willa Frank had ordered the fillet of grouper oursinade. There wasn’t a moment to lose—she had to rush over to the Edo Sushi House and borrow enough from Greg Takesue to last out the night. Albert had called ahead. It was okay. “Go, go,” he said, wringing his big pale hands.
For the briefest moment, she hesitated. “But that’s all the way across town—if it takes me an hour, I’ll be lucky.”
And now the matter-of-life-and-death look came into his eyes. “Go,” he said. “I’ll stall her.”
No sooner had the door slammed behind Marie, than Albert took Fulgencio by the arm. “I want you to take a break,” he shouted over the hiss of the sprayer. “Forty-five minutes. No, an hour.”
Fulgencio looked up at him out of the dark Aztecan slashes of his eyes. Then he broke into a broad grin. “No entiendo,” he said.
Albert mimed it for him. Then he pointed at the clock, and after a flurry of nodding back and forth, Fulgencio was gone. Whistling (“Core ‘ngrato,” one of his late mother’s favorites), Albert glided to the meat locker and extracted the hard-frozen lump of gray gristle and fat he’d purchased that afternoon at the local Safeway. Round steak, they called it, $2.39 a pound. He tore the thing from its plastic wrapping, selected his largest skillet, turned the heat up high beneath it, and unceremoniously dropped the frozen lump into the searing black dept
hs of the pan.
Eduardo hustled in and out, no time to question the twin absences of Marie and Fulgencio. Out went the tournedos Rossini, the fillet of grouper oursinade, the veal loin rubbed with sage and coriander, the anguille alla veneziana, and the zuppa di datteri Alberto; in came the dirty plates, the congested forks, the wineglasses smeared with butter and lipstick. A great plume of smoke rose from the pan on the front burner. Albert went on whistling.
And then, on one of Eduardo’s mad dashes through the kitchen, Albert caught him by the arm. “Here,” he said, shoving a plate into his hand. “For the gentleman with Miss Frank.”
Eduardo stared bewildered at the plate in his hand. On it, arranged with all the finesse of a blue-plate special, lay three boiled potatoes, a splatter of reduced peas, and what could only be described as a plank of meat, stiff and flat as the chopping block, black as the bottom of the pan.
“Trust me,” Albert said, guiding the stunned waiter toward the door. “Oh, and here,” thrusting a bottle of ketchup into his hand, “serve it with this.”
Still, Albert didn’t yield to the temptation to go to the porthole. Instead, he turned the flame down low beneath his saucepans, smoothed back the hair at his temples, and began counting—as slowly as in a schoolyard game—to fifty.
He hadn’t reached twenty when Willa Frank, scintillating in a tomato-red Italian knit, burst through the door. Eduardo was right behind her, a martyred look on his face, his hands spread in supplication. Albert lifted his head, swelled his chest, and adjusted the great ball of his gut beneath the pristine field of his apron. He dismissed Eduardo with a flick of his hand, and turned to Willa Frank with the tight composed smile of a man running for office. “Excuse me,” she was saying, her voice toneless and shrill, as Eduardo ducked out the door, “but are you the chef here?”
He was still counting: twenty-eight, twenty-nine.
“Because I just wanted to tell you”—she was so wrought up she could barely go on—“I never, never in my life …”
“Shhhhh,” he said, pressing a finger to his lips. “It’s all right,” he murmured, his voice as soothing and deep as a backrub. Then he took her gently by the elbow and led her to a table he’d set up between the stove and chopping block. The table was draped with a snowy cloth, set with fine crystal, china, and sterling inherited from his mother. There was a single chair, a single napkin. “Sit,” he said.
She tore away from him. “I don’t want to sit,” she protested, her black eyes lit with suspicion. The knit dress clung to her like a leotard. Her heels clicked on the linoleum. “You know, don’t you?” she said, backing away from him. “You know who I am.”
Huge, ursine, serene, Albert moved with her as if they were dancing. He nodded.
“But why—?” He could see the appalling vision of that desecrated steak dancing before her eyes. “It’s, it’s like suicide.”
A saucepan had appeared in his hand. He was so close to her he could feel the grid of her dress through the thin yielding cloth of his apron. “Hush,” he purred, “don’t think about it. Don’t think at all. Here,” he said, lifting the cover from the pan, “smell this.”
She looked at him as if she didn’t know where she was. She gazed down into the steaming pan and then looked back up into his eyes. He saw the gentle, involuntary movement of her throat.
“Squid rings in aioli sauce,” he whispered. “Try one.”
Gently, never taking his eyes from her, he set the pan down on the table, plucked a ring from the sauce, and held it up before her face. Her lips—full, sensuous lips, he saw now, not at all the thin stingy flaps of skin he’d imagined—began to tremble. Then she tilted her chin ever so slightly, and her mouth dropped open. He fed her like a nestling.
First the squid: one, two, three pieces. Then a pan of lobster tortellini in a thick, buttery saffron sauce. She practically licked the sauce from his fingers. This time, when he asked her to sit, when he put his big hand on her elbow and guided her forward, she obeyed.
He glanced through the porthole and out into the dining room as he removed from the oven the little toast rounds with sun-dried tomatoes and baked Atascadero goat cheese. Jock’s head was down over his plate, the beer half gone, a great wedge of incinerated meat impaled on the tines of his fork. His massive jaw was working, his cheek distended as if with a plug of tobacco. “Here,” Albert murmured, turning to Willa Frank and laying his warm, redolent hand over her eyes, “a surprise.”
It was after she’d finished the taglierini alla pizzaiola, with its homemade fennel sausage and chopped tomatoes, and was experiencing the first rush of his glacé of grapefruit and Meyer lemon, that he asked about Jock. “Why him?” he said.
She scooped ice with a tiny silver spoon, licked a dollop of it from the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “I guess I don’t trust my own taste, that’s all.”
He lifted his eyebrows. He was leaning over her, solicitous, warm, the pan of Russian coulibiac of salmon, en brioche, with its rich sturgeon marrow and egg, held out in offering.
She watched his hands as he whisked the ice away and replaced it with the gleaming coulibiac. “I mean,” she said, pausing as he broke off a morsel and fed it into her mouth, “half thé time I just can’t seem to taste anything, really,” chewing now, her lovely throat dipping and rising as she swallowed, “and Jock—well, he hates everything. At least I know he’ll be consistent.” She took another bite, paused, considered. “Besides, to like something, to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I’m wrong? What if it’s really no good?”
Albert hovered over her. Outside it had begun to rain. He could hear it sizzling like grease in the alley. “Try this,” he said, setting a plate of spiedino before her.
She was warm. He was warm. The oven glowed, the grill hissed, the scents of his creations rose about them, ambrosia and manna. “Um, good,” she said, unconsciously nibbling at prosciutto and mozzarella. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, her fingers dark with anchovy sauce, “I guess that’s why I like fugu.”
“Fugu?” Albert had heard of it somewhere. “Japanese, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “It’s a blowfish. They do it sushi or in little fried strips. But it’s the liver you want. It’s illegal here, did you know that?”
Albert didn’t know.
“It can kill you. Paralyze you. But if you just nibble, just a little bit, it numbs your lips, your teeth, your whole mouth.”
“What do you mean—like at the dentist’s?” Albert was horrified. Numbs your lips, your mouth? It was sacrilege. “That’s awful,” he said.
She looked sheepish, looked chastised.
He swung to the stove and then back again, yet another pan in his hand. “Just a bite more,” he coaxed.
She patted her stomach and gave him a great, wide, blooming smile. “Oh, no, no, Albert—can I call you Albert?—no, no, I couldn’t.”
“Here,” he said, “here,” his voice soft as a lover’s. “Open up.”
(1986)
WITHOUT A HERO
In the end, through luck and perseverance and an unwavering commitment to the spirit of glasnost, she did finally manage to get what she wanted. It was amazing. With two weeks to go on her six-month visa, she fell head-over-heels in love, got swept up in a whirlwind romance and found herself married—and to an American, no less. His name was Yusef Ozizmir, he was a naturalized citizen from a small town outside of Ankara, and he was production manager for a prosthetics firm based in Culver City. She called me late one night to give me the news and gloat a bit over her honeymoon in Las Vegas and her new apartment in Manhattan Beach that featured three bedrooms, vast closets and a sweet clean smell of the sea. Her voice was just as I’d remembered it: tiny, heavily accented and with the throaty arrhythmic scratch of sensuality that had awakened me in every fiber when I first heard it—the way she said “wodka” still aroused me even after all that had happened.
“I’m happy for you, Irina,” I said.
“Oh,” she gasped in her tiny voice that was made tinier by the uncertain connection, “that is very kind of you; I am very grateful. Yusef has made me very happy too, yes? He has given me a ring of twenty-four karats gold and a Lincoln automobile.”
There was a pause. I glanced across my apartment at the sagging bookshelves, the TV tuned to a dim romantic comedy from the black-and-white era, the darkened window beyond. Her voice became tinier still, contracting till it was barely audible, a hesitant little squeak of passion. “You know … I miss you, Casey,” she breathed. “I will always miss you too much.”
“Listen, Irina, I have to go …” I was trying to think of an excuse—the kitchen was on fire, my mother had been stricken with ptomaine and rushed to the hospital, my knives needed sharpening—but she cut me off.
“Yes, Casey, I know. You have to go. You must go. Always you go.”
“Listen,” I began, and then I caught myself. “See you,” I said.
“For a moment there was nothing. I listened to the cracks and pops of static. Finally her voice came back at me, the smallest voice in the world. “Yes,” she said. “See you.”
When I first saw her—when I laid eyes on her for the first time, that is—it was by prearrangement. She was in the baggage-claim area of the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, and I was there to pick her up. I was late—a failing of mine, I admit it—and anxious on several counts: about meeting her, missing her, about sleeping arrangements and dinner and a hundred other things, ranging from my total deficiency in Russian to my passing acquaintance with the greats of Russian literature and the fear that she would offer to buy my jeans with a fistful of rubles. I was jogging through the corridors, dodging bleary-eyed Sikhs, hearty Brits and circumspect salesmen from Japan and Korea, the big names—Solzhenitsyn, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—running through my head like an incantation, when I spotted her.