John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

Tony Angel had a Garland eight-burner stove, with two ovens and a broiler, in his kitchen at Avellino; he had a steam table for his chicken stocks, too. At Mao’s, at their busiest, they could seat eighty or ninety people in an evening, but Avellino was smaller. Tony rarely fed more than thirty or forty people a night-fifty, tops.

Tonight the cook was working on a red-wine reduction for the braised beef short ribs, and he had both a light and a dark chicken stock on the steam table. In the “Something from Asia ” category, he was serving Ah Gou’s beef satay with peanut sauce and assorted tempura-just some shrimp, haricots verts, and asparagus. There were the usual pasta dishes-the calamari with black olives and pine nuts, over penne, among them-and two popular pizzas, the pepperoni with marinara sauce and a wild-mushroom pizza with four cheeses. He had a roast chicken with rosemary, which was served on a bed of arugula and grilled fennel, and a grilled leg of spring lamb with garlic, and a wild-mushroom risotto, too.

Greg, the cook’s young sous chef, had been to cooking school on Ninety-second Street in Manhattan and was a fast learner. Tony was letting Greg do a sauce grenobloise , with brown butter and capers, for the chicken paillard-that was the little “Something from France ” for the evening. And Tony’s two favorite waitresses were on hand, a single mother and her college-student daughter. Celeste, the mom, had worked for the cook since ’76, and the daughter, Loretta, was more mature than the usual Brattleboro high school kids he hired as waitresses, busboys, and dishwashers.

Loretta was older than most college students; she’d had a baby her senior year in high school. Loretta was unmarried and had cared for the child in her mom’s house until the little boy was old enough (four or five) to not drive Celeste crazy. Then Loretta had gotten into a nearby community college-not the easiest commute, but she’d arranged all her classes on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule. She was back home in Brattleboro, still living with her mom and young son, from every Thursday night till the following Tuesday morning.

Since the cook had been sleeping with Celeste-only for the last year, going on eighteen months-the arrangement had worked well for Tony Angel. He stayed in Celeste’s house, with Celeste and her first-grade grandson, only two nights a week-on one of which, every Wednesday, the restaurant was closed. The cook moved back into his apartment whenever Loretta came home to Brattleboro. It had been more awkward last summer, when Celeste moved into Tony’s small apartment above Avellino for upwards of three or four nights at a time. A redhead, with very fetching freckles on her chest, she was a big woman, though not nearly the size of either Injun Jane or Carmella. Celeste (at fifty) was as many years older than the cook’s son, Danny, as she was younger than the cook.

There was no hanky-panky between them in the kitchen at Avellino -at their mutual insistence-though everyone on the staff (Loretta, of course, included) knew that Tony Angel and Celeste were a couple. The lady friends the cook had met at The Book Cellar had since moved on, or they were married now. The old joke Tony cracked to the bookseller was no longer acted upon; it was an innocent joke when the cook asked the bookseller if she knew any women to introduce him to. (She either didn’t or she wouldn’t , not with Celeste in the picture. Brattleboro was a small town, and Celeste was a popular presence in it.)

It had been easier to meet women in Iowa, Tony Angel was remembering. Granted, he was older now, and Brattleboro was a very small town compared to Iowa City, where Danny had invited his dad to all the Writers’ Workshop parties; those women writers knew how to have a good time.

Danny had treated his workshop students to an evening at Mao’s on many occasions-not least the celebration of the Chinese New Year, every January or February, when Ah Gou had presented a ten-course prix-fixe menu for three nights in a row. Just before the Chinese New Year in ’73-it was the Year of the Ox, the cook remembered-Xiao Dee’s truck had broken down in Pennsylvania, and Tony Angel and Little Brother almost hadn’t made it back to Iowa City with the goods in time.

In ’74-the Year of the Tiger, Tony thought-Xiao Dee had convinced Spicy to ride along to Iowa City with them, all the way from Queens. Spicy was fortunately small, but it was still a tight squeeze in the truck’s cab, and somewhere in Indiana or Illinois, Spicy figured out that Xiao Dee had been seeing a woman in Bethpage-“that Nassau County cunt,” Spicy called her. The cook had listened to them argue the rest of the way.

Somehow, thinking of Iowa City and Mao’s had made Tony Angel consider that Avellino lacked ambition , but one of the things the cook loved about his Brattleboro restaurant was that it was relatively easy to run; real chefs, like Ah Gou Cheng and Tony Molinari and Paul Polcari, might find Avellino unambitious, but the cook (at fifty-nine) wasn’t trying to compete with them.

One sadness was that Tony Angel wouldn’t invite his old friends and mentors to come visit him in Vermont, and have a meal at Avellino. The cook felt that his Brattleboro restaurant was unworthy of these superior chefs, who’d taught him so much, though they probably would have been touched and flattered to have seen their obvious good influences on the menu at Avellino, and they surely would have supported the cook’s pride in having his very own restaurant, which-albeit only in Brattleboro-was a local success. Since Molinari and Polcari were retired, they could have come to Vermont at their convenience; it might have been harder for the Cheng brothers to find the time.

Ah Gou and Xiao Dee had moved back East, this on the good counsel of Tzu-Min, the young Chinese lawyer who’d married Big Brother-she’d given him some solid business advice, and had never gone back to Taiwan. Connecticut was closer to Lower Manhattan, where Little Brother needed to shop; it made no sense for the Chengs to kill themselves while striving for authenticity in Iowa. The first name of their new restaurant, Baozi, meant “Wrapped” in Chinese. (The cook remembered the golden pork spring rolls and braised pork baozi that Ah Gou made every Chinese New Year. The steamed dough balls were split, like a sandwich, and filled with a braised pork shoulder that had been shredded and mixed with Chinese five-spice powder.) But Tzu-Min was the businessperson in the Cheng family; she changed the name of the restaurant to Lemongrass, which was both more marketable and more comprehensible in Connecticut.

One day, Tony Angel thought, maybe Daniel and I can drive down to Connecticut and eat at Lemongrass; we could spend the night somewhere in the vicinity. The cook missed Ah Gou and Xiao Dee, and he wished them well.

“What’s the matter, Tony?” Celeste asked him. (The cook was crying, though he’d not been aware of it.)

“Nothing’s the matter, Celeste. In fact, I’m very happy,” Tony said. He smiled at her and bent over his red-wine reduction, savoring the smell. He’d blanched a sprig of fresh rosemary in boiling water, just to draw out the oil before putting the rosemary in the red wine.

“Yeah, well, you’re crying,” Celeste told him.

“Memories, I guess,” the cook said. Greg, the sous chef, was watching him, too. Loretta came into the kitchen from the dining room.

“Are we going to unlock the place tonight, or make the customers find a way to break in?” she asked the cook.

“Oh, is it time?” Tony Angel asked. He must have left his watch upstairs in the bedroom, where he’d not yet finished the galleys of East of Bangor .

“What’s he crying about?” Loretta asked her mother.