Клео Коул - On What Grounds

“Not exactly a case for an Alan Derschowitz defense,” I said.

“Nevertheless, I made my point.”

“Your point?”

“I may be old, but I’m not stupid.”

I laughed. “What about the plaque?”

“Oh, those polite boys from the Sixth Precinct who explained the charges, they retrieved it for me. I was so happy to have it back where it belonged that I told them to come by anytime for a free cup of Kona. The real thing, Clare. You know what I mean.”

Indeed, I did.

Coffee and crime may not seem the likeliest of pairs, but you’d be surprised how often they went together. Take the great Kona scandal of 1996. A cabal of coffee producers, one of whom Madame had known rather well, had been caught rebagging cheaper Central American blends and transshipping them through Hawaii marked as that exceptional bean, Kona—ironically mellow for something grown in volcanic lava. As far as anyone knows, at least at this writing, Madame’s friend is still in federal prison.

“Now, the reason I called,” continued Madame. “You must come to see me, Clare. This morning .”

A long silence followed in which I heard opera music on the other end of the line. The mellifluous tenor was singing an exceptionally gorgeous piece from Puccini’s Turnadot . “ Nessun dorma !” Translation from the Italian: “Nobody shall sleep!”

Appropriate, I thought, because Madame wasn’t just playing opera. She was trying to make a point. Besides being one of my favorite pieces—full of all the tragic yearning and beautiful heartbreak that exemplified Italian opera—it was orchestrating what Madame had promised would one day come: my wake-up call.

No, I can’t come, the coward in me wanted to say. I have a deadline . Which was, in fact, true. For the past twenty days I’d been writing a two-part article for Wholesale Beverage magazine on the quality of Latin American coffee harvests. The piece was due next week.

But I had to admit, if only to myself, that I was grateful for the call and the invitation to get out of the house—because I was ready to tear my hair out. The subject of the article wasn’t the problem, the isolation was.

Working at home had been fine while I was raising Joy. But since my lively daughter had moved out the month before, I found the small house in the sleepy suburbs of New Jersey to be less than stimulating. Lately I’d begun staring at the lengthening grass in the front yard and thinking about Madame’s furious words the day I had quit my job managing the Blend.

“I do understand why you feel the need to leave,” Madame had said after much wailing and breast beating. “But the suburbs! I swear, Clare, one day you will wake up to find the suburbs have far too much in common with the cemetery.”

“The cemetery!” (I had been outraged, hurt, and angry at Madame for her lack of support, given my personal circumstances at the time.)

“Yes,” Madame had countered. “Both have well-tended lawns, far too much silence, and far too little traffic in the full range of the human condition.”

“It’s safe! And restful!”

“Safety and rest I’ll enjoy when I’m dead. I’m warning you, Clare, you’re making a mistake, and one day you will admit it.”

I had ignored Madame, of course, and moved ninety minutes west of the city, determined to prove the woman wrong. And for the most part, Madame had been wrong—

Raising Joy had been a joy, and the income I’d made from a combination of jobs (providing paid help at a day-care center, baking part-time for a local caterer, and writing the “In the Kitchen With Clare” column for a small local paper) had helped make the difference between the monthly bills and my ex-husband’s inconsistent child support payments.

Then just last year, after a rather soul-searching thirty-ninth birthday, I had actually pushed myself to pitch articles to food-and-beverage trade magazines like Wholesale Beverage, Cupping, and In Stock, and miracle of miracles, they’d actually bought a few.

But now that Joy had packed up and moved to Manhattan to attend culinary school…well, things were different. Unlike many teenagers, my daughter had centered her social life around the house and a close group of girlfriends. Half a dozen teenagers hanging around wasn’t unusual. And I often joined their Video-Movie-Rental parties and “Martha Stewart Survivor nights,” in which the group of girls would cut out cooking projects from Martha Stewart’s Living magazine, then randomly pick them out of a brown paper bag and have to complete the dish in ninety minutes—even if it meant racing to the store for missing ingredients.

(With a game like that, it was no surprise to me when Joy and all four of her friends ended up enrolled in culinary schools or restaurant management programs after their high school graduation.)

These days, however, my evenings had been spent eating Snackwell cookies (what’s the point of baking for one?), watching Lifetime movies, and blowing catnip-laced soap bubbles for Java (whose fur happened to match the color of a medium-roast Arabica bean).

The truth was a bitter residue building up at the bottom of my underused life: fulfillment (except when it came to my daughter) remained elusive. Madame’s call was a welcome excuse for me to take the express bus to the Port Authority terminal on Forty-second Street. And, after my morning espresso and a bracing shower, that’s precisely what I did.

Madame lived near Washington Square in an expansive suite of rooms capping one of those old buildings on Fifth Avenue that had a concrete moat and a doorman who dressed like a refugee from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Pierre Dubois, her late second husband, insisted she move in with him there in the early 1980s. He’d said he vastly preferred it to Madame’s more modest West Village duplex above the Blend, which was the site of their original steamy encounters.

Much like Madame herself, the venerable Fifth Avenue address bridged two worlds. Nearby was New School University. A mecca for writers, artists, and philosophers, it had once served as a “University in Exile” for intelligentsia fleeing Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Also nearby was the Forbes Magazine Building, which housed a lavish collection once owned by millionaire Malcolm Forbes—everything from ship models to Fabergé eggs made for Russian czars. It served as another sort of mecca: a capitalist’s.

Pierre had definitely leaned toward the Forbes end of that particular spectrum. His vast Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment firmly reflected this—as well as his affinity for all things “Old World.” Really old—like eighteenth century.

Brocade drapes, heavy gilt-edged furniture, and overwrought statuary made me feel as though I’d entered a Gallic museum. Then again, Madame’s late spouse always had harbored a love for Napoleon, whom the short-statured Pierre had even slightly resembled.

My trips here always had me contemplating Madame’s contradictions. While I understood she had fallen in love with an Old World man, I also knew that the New World was still a very important part of her. Why else would there be such a note of tremendous pride in her voice when she told her tales of sobering up Jackson Pollack, William de Kooning, and other abstract expressionists at the Blend with more than one pot of hot black French roast? Or allowing the occasional struggling poet (such as the young Jean-Louis—“Jack”—Kerouac) or evicted playwright to sleep on one of the second-floor couches?

Upon my arrival, Madame emerged from her bedroom suite still wearing mourning black, yet elegant and regal as ever. The unadorned dress was impeccably tailored. Her only jewelry was Pierre’s diamond and platinum wedding band. Her hair, once a rich dark brown, had long ago turned gray and was now rinsed a beautiful silver and blunt-cut above her shoulders. Today she wore it in a French twist, a sleek and simple black pearl comb holding it in place.