T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

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 depths 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?”