Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“Betty, I don’t know why you’re reacting like this.”

“What? Maybe you’ve got a whole other family down in the piney woods, or a homosexual lover named Randy living in upstate New York.”

“We’re back to the homosexual question, are we?”

She extended a stiff arm toward the bathroom. “You’ve had the fountain of youth at your disposal all week and you’ve had no desire to sleep with me?”

“I was waiting for the right time.”

“And when’s that, nineteen seventy-three?”

“I thought it was now.”

She lifted her tracksuit top and pinched at the flesh bunched up around her waist. “Is it because of this? Don’t look away, David. You’re always looking away. Is it all my formaldehyde that turns you off?”

“I thought you said you didn’t believe any of that.”

“I was talking for the benefit of our kids! You scared Priscilla half to death. I’d be surprised if she ever ate again. Do you know she photocopies pages from that Albanian report and leaves them under my windshield wiper each morning?”

“Just get it out of your system. I deserve it.”

“What, you think I’ll be done with you in one evening? That it’s that easy?”

“I’m not the only one with secrets, you know. What about you? Have you been sleep-eating?”

She pointed to the door. “You’re on the sofa tonight!”

“Or how about Greystone Park? When did you decide to come back to me? After Ernst assured you I’d be adequately employed? When you knew I’d be able to support you if you went back to school?”

“You expect me to tell you on your terms? Is that it? When all these years you never once thought about me? I’ll tell you when I’m ready, David. And it won’t be tonight.”

She turned to face the window. I stood there, not certain what I was supposed to do. It was only six o’clock.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to come back in thirty minutes?”

“Go see a movie,” she suggested.

So I started out, getting as far as the door. Then I remembered something: the Society dinner was the following night.

“Should I leave your ticket on the kitchen table?” I asked. She’d not only promised to join me, she’d already paid her forty-five dollars and checked the box for steak. “Betty?”

“I think,” she said, and it was as if she were channeling these words from an extra-terrestrial being several star systems away, “you should go.” And here she turned to face me. “Alone.”

THE 360TH MEETING of the Society of Flavor Chemists, Inc., was held at the Sheraton Newark Airport Hotel, located at Exit 14 of the New Jersey Turnpike. It began with a mid-morning board meeting, continued through lunch with a Chemical Sources Association roundtable, and ended in the evening with cocktails and a dinner of chicken, beef, fish, or vegetarian. Before moving into the main banquet hall for the last of these events, we gathered on the mezzanine level for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. I grabbed a glass of pinot grigio from the cash bar and moved over to the long table holding a dozen or so heated silver trays, where I found the outgoing board president moving down the buffet line alongside a young man in blue jeans I didn’t recognize.

“The future’s limitless,” the outgoing president was saying. “Do you know the cost of producing protein from waste effluent? Down near three cents a pound. That’s a third the cost of animal- and agriculturally-derived proteins.”

The man at his side was a journalist, I took it. As I grabbed a wonton, he scribbled in a pocket notebook. “A third the cost, you say?”

The outgoing president pointed a stick of satay chicken at him. “Write this down verbatim. We can feed the world today. We have all the flavorings we need to get the job done. We only lack the political courage to do it.”

I continued around them, forgoing the stuffed mushrooms I’d had my eye on, but soon found my path blocked again, this time by a chemical salesman that FlavAmerica had dealt with for many years. He stood before a large iced bowl, piling shrimp onto his plate.

“David,” he said, looking up with a boozy smile. “Just the man I wanted to see. What’s this I hear about Better Health and Flavorings? Making a full-court press, are they?”

I reached for the ladle in the communal bowl of cocktail sauce, telling him I was sure I didn’t know. “I’m just a cog in the machine, Larry. I’m sure you know as much as I do.”

He leaned into me like a ski jumper in mid-flight, pointing a finger out from around the side of his rocks glass. “They want NoNilla®, don’t they?” His breath was sour and overpowering, his bulbous nose a starburst of broken capillaries. “You don’t have to tell me. Couldn’t be anything else.”

I chuckled and reminded him that this product generated but a small fraction of our total annual sales, which the previous year had surpassed $14 million for the first time. He didn’t care to hear it, though. He shook his rocks glass in my face and told me to look into the future.

“You think the boys at Better Health and Flavorings don’t know what they’re doing? They’ve got more analysts than the Department of Defense.” He drank from his glass and made a face. “And, hell, with China coming on board and India and all the rest of the developing world too, there won’t be enough to go around here soon, and that counts double for vanilla.”

He turned uneasily then and looked off toward a knot of flavor chemists from Better Health and Flavorings, who stood at a table chatting with the Japanese. “There’s a tyranny to high-volume orders, David.” He slurred his words like a latter-day Willy Loman. “If they even take my calls anymore, it’s to ask that I sell at a humiliating price. Well, listen.” He turned back around, his finger bouncing out again from the side of his glass. “Those bastards want to turn capitalism into a blood sport, fine, so be it. But you tell the Kraut to do the same. Whatever they offer, demand a million more. They’ve got it. They’ve been keeping plenty from me all these years.” He looked down into his glass. “Empty,” he said.

I dipped a shrimp in cocktail sauce and chewed, as behind me the outgoing president and the journalist stepped closer.

“I just want to make sure I have this right,” the journalist said. “What you said earlier, do you mean ‘shit’? That there’s a future in flavoring protein farmed from shit?”

I gave Larry a big smile. “Well, don’t be a stranger.” Then I made a beeline for a high-top cocktail table opening up near the railing, and I stood there looking around for my co-workers. Tennessee was downstairs, drinking alone at the better-stocked bar in the lobby. Ernst and Eliza, meanwhile, were on the far side of the mezzanine level, sitting at a low table and talking with two of my mentor’s contemporaries, both past recipients of the Golden Beaker Award. Ernst tapped the floor with his cane, no doubt in the midst of one of his stories. Eliza laughed and primped her hair. She’d had it done earlier that day in New York City, a perm job dyed one of those unfortunate catalogue colors between pomegranate and pimento.

I felt a pang of envy. My mentor had weathered difficult times with Eliza, overcoming even his biggest mistake. And how had he done it? Had it been as simple as writing a check for ten thousand dollars? I realized I should have thought about the rewards, not the costs. For this and so many other things: the rewards, not the costs.

Koba and Beekley joined me a few moments later, speaking of the rumored take-over. Talk of it was everywhere that night; the subject was almost as prominent as chatter about Monica Lewinsky or the surging New York Yankees.