T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

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 — but 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 tournedo 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 borrowed 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.”