Food Whore (22 page)

Elliott had a shallow way of kissing, lips that moved like an ant on a leaf. Pascal was all push and pull, suck and lick. Every bit of pressure corresponded with another withdrawal, leaving me panting and yearning. With each second, I felt more and more out of my body, out of my mind. I felt, blissfully, like a totally different person.

And that's when I heard him.

“Tia!” yelled a voice from down the street, a silhouette with a slightly off-­balance movement.

It was so late, I didn't think it could be him. But I had been made. And not by Melinda or Emerald or Michael Saltz, but by someone I actually cared about.

He was probably returning from one of his night shifts at the lab. He held a basket of flowers. Crocuses and saffron, I thought, but that could have been some hallucinatory guilt. I thought if I stayed still he wouldn't know it was me. But just like I knew his walk, he knew the lines of my movement. I couldn't even look back to see what Pascal was doing. I just stayed still, waiting for him to walk away, to think we were just some strangers in the night.

Elliott.
He looked for a second longer, and of course I knew more about him than just his walk. I also knew this face he was making now, a frown and a gulp and a punch in the stomach. And then he turned away.

What had I done?

“Elliott!” I called back, but my voice cracked and fell midair. I left Pascal and ran to him, my stomach balling up and my breath quivering in the cold.

He snapped back, his blue eyes sparkling with tears. “So you wanted to go on a break, huh? To do this?” He'd started at a whisper but ramped up to a yell. I hadn't seen him in a month. Had barely talked to him. It crushed me that his face and his body and his voice felt vaguely foreign to me. We had lost something real.

“Elliott, I . . .”

“What is a break to you anyway? You know,
I
thought it was so we could get our heads on straight. Do some thinking on our own. But if I had known that you wanted to use this opportunity to—­”

“Elliott. I . . . it's just . . .”

“Who is . . .” He pointed to Pascal on the other side of the street, who had his hands in his pockets and was looking down at the sidewalk.

“He's just . . . a chef.”

“A chef . . .” Elliott said. And then something clicked for him. “Oh, right. Right! Why didn't I fucking see this before? That's the Bakushan dude who makes the fucking amazing snail bonbons and sauerkraut ice cream.”

I closed my eyes and stayed stone-­still, scrambling for the right words to say.

“It all makes fucking sense now. All fall you've had this weirdness about you that I couldn't put my finger on. It was Helen, or me, or school, or Emerald, I don't know! But apparently this guy makes you happy.”

I couldn't respond because the answer was yes.

He stopped and regained his composure, standing to his full height, six or so inches above me, as if to intimidate me, to show me his worth.

“I get it now. This is who you are.”

The lone shadow across the street turned away. Pascal had made his exit.

Now it was up to me to say something. But what could I say?

That night, I had kissed another man and let him into my heart. I was hiding my life from Elliott and could see no end to that.

“I give up,” Elliott said. “Forget this break. You're a terrible person and I'm done with you.”

A
S
I
WALKED
upstairs, I thought about Elliott's tears falling in a sudden downpour.

How Pascal stared at me in the dark bar.

How Elliott had been with me through thick and thin.

How Pascal rested his hand on my knee.

The look on Elliott's face when he saw me kissing someone else. Every time I thought about it, my heart twisted. Just a ­couple of months ago, I'd been in love with Elliott. New York was going to be our place, where we'd become our true selves.

But that was an old plan. That was an old Tia.

As much as I hated hurting Elliott, I also felt relieved. It was good that he'd let me go. A break was too weak. Because, really, I had let go of him the moment Michael Saltz laid eyes on me.

When I got back to my room, I saw that Pascal had texted me.

:( IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN DO TO HELP?

Yeah. I texted back:

Can you come over?

I didn't want to stumble into my life anymore. I wanted to take charge and control my destiny. In thirty minutes, Pascal was at my door with a bag of beignets he had freshly fried. We ate them in my bed, getting powdered sugar on our clothes, and then on our underwear, and then on our naked bodies.

“Who was that out there?” he said, his tongue edging up from my collarbone, to my neck, to the curve of my ear. His hands were on my butt, and my hands were on his. We were pressing into each other as much as we could, as much as was possible until we were finally one.

“No one,” I said, as he began pushing into me.

No one,
I repeated to myself.
No one. No one.

Inside, a mountain of tension squeezed tighter and tighter before crunching into a tiny crystalline diamond. That diamond shattered into a billion pieces of wonder and I came harder than I'd ever come before. I was broken, but I was also new.

I silently cried myself to sleep with Pascal beside me. But when I woke up, I felt much better. Kissing Pascal had made me feel like another person. And after having sex with him, I knew that the change was finally complete.

 

Chapter 23

M
ICHAEL
S
ALTZ GOT US A GUARANTEED TABLE AT
B
AKUSHAN,
even though they didn't take reservations. Instead, he got a “holder” who waited in line for him, then passed the table on to us when we arrived.

“Thanks for waiting, Hank.”

“No problem,” Hank said in a giddy way, like it was an immense honor to wait in a long line so someone else could eat dinner in his name. “Have a good night . . .
Hank
.” He winked and Michael Saltz and I smiled back awkwardly.

The wait wasn't terrible, though. After the initial excitement, ­people had said that Bakushan wasn't worth the hype, and as Michael Saltz had said, the staff was snobby, and the food uneven. But to me, that was in one ear, out the other.

As I put my phone on the table, I saw Pascal in the kitchen and felt an intense sense of longing for him. What was he thinking? When would we see each other again? I wanted Pascal to whisk me away to fabulous restaurants, show me secret underground bars that only industry ­people knew. I didn't want to disappear anymore. It seemed crazy that just three nights before, we were revealing the deepest parts of our souls, and now I was at his restaurant wearing my most ridiculous disguise yet: a staid pant suit to match Michael Saltz's even more conservative suit. We would have passed at an investment bank, but here in the East Village, at Bakushan, we looked pitifully uncool.

The menu had changed radically since I had eaten there with Elliott and Emerald. If the dish wasn't entirely new, it was an old dish with new ingredients. I was disappointed that the fluke and lovage dish wasn't on the menu, but maybe he was saving it for a special one night.

“This is how you order at a place like this,” Michael Saltz said, in a professorial mood. “You get all the must-­haves. The obvious picks that bring ­people in. Everyone who reads about Bakushan wants to know about certain dishes. Then you get the most expensive and the cheapest, because that gives you range. You get the token vegetarian dish, the trendiest dish, the most loved, and the most hated. And then you get something like this.” He angled his menu toward me and pointed to the page.

“Beef Wellington?” I read out loud. All the other items on the menu had much longer descriptions, but this one was conspicuously spare.

“Right, something is up with this one. And this one here,” he said, pointing to another line.

“Celery soda lemon pie with pine nuts and guanciale,” I read. Guanciale, bacon made from the pig's jowl. I had read it was the “new bacon,” but had never tried it.

“The flavor sounds foul, right?” Michael Saltz said, then looked over at Pascal Fox, as if to size him up.

I wanted to say,
But I bet it's amazing!
or
That's the most creative dish I've ever seen on a menu!,
because I believed that and I wanted to shield Pascal. I had the power to protect him.

“But that's why you get it,” Michael Saltz concluded. “You get the one where the chef is reaching for the stars.”

“Pascal is good at that,” I said, sitting up tall. My voice came out in a steady, authoritative stream. No more of that quiver, and I felt proud that words bent more easily to my will these days.

“Pascal? You get a new hairdo and now you're all chummy with the chefs? I forgot you had that little flirtation with him at Tellicherry.” Michael Saltz shuddered. “Yes, well,
Pascal
wasn't known for his adventurousness at his previous posts. This is brand new for him. There's a lot at stake here.”

I crinkled my nose, playing along with him. “I know, we dodged a bullet there. But it's just . . . I get a four-­star vibe here. I can tell the difference now. You were right about Tellicherry being three stars.”

Michael Saltz's smile was instant and blinding. “Oh! Good, good. You're learning. I've never trusted the hoi polloi. Maybe this place is . . .” He looked around and I laid it on thicker. Michael Saltz ran on ego like cars ran on gas, but because his job required him to be a ghost, he only had me to show off to. I was about to use that to my advantage.

“What were Pascal's other restaurants like? I've read about them, but I never got around to going. You have the most impressive dining history.” I made it sound like I hadn't gone because the restaurants had just been a little bit out of the way, not the real reason, which was that not too long ago I was a girl from Yonkers with parents who thought restaurants were the world's biggest scam. I did it to protect my own ego, sure, but also to make Michael Saltz feel that he was talking to a fawning acolyte.

“Oh, Tia. They were
classic
—­to the book,” he said, playing right into my charms. “Beautiful food, my goodness. But the creative latitude was about this wide.” He held his hands about two inches apart. “And the menu here is like this.” He opened his hands to the width of the table and shrugged his shoulders as if to say,
So what's he got?

I watched Pascal from our table. He never hesitated over a dish or doubled back over something he forgot. I could see his mouth moving, and then understood why the music was so loud—­so the patrons wouldn't hear his constant yelling. By then I had a sense of his musculature and the complex ways he moved through space. His motions were slick and fast, like a seal in the water. For a second he stared at something outside of my sight and I wondered if he was daydreaming of me in that moment. I wished I could have walked right up to the pass and kissed him, but all I could do was stay in my chair, in a pant suit that made me feel ten years older, and make his day in another way.

The food arrived. The snail and pork dumpling had new, thinner dough. I placed it in my mouth but instead of melting away, the skin suctioned to my mouth like a piece of plastic. I gulped it down and noticed a gravelly feeling across the roof of my mouth. Sand.

Then, a pea shoot and foie gras wheel with a small butter knife. Michael Saltz and I stared at it, confounded by how it worked. It stood on its side like an ancient monument, with various crinkly and crackly things at its base.

“Just cut it,” the waiter said kindly. He looked like Pascal Lite, not as exotic or statuesque, but with a bit of Pascal's twinkle and good-­boy-­with-­a-­lot-­of-­tattoos edge.

I slid the knife down. At first nothing happened. The foie gras clung to itself, until it peeled apart sleepily and a green, milky liquid bled out.

“Wow,” I said.

“Wow,” Michael Saltz said.

I took a soft forkful of foie gras and dragged it through the pea shoot sauce and the brown crumbles and white flakes. I rubbed the foie gras against the roof of my mouth, and it stuck there with a sticky stubbornness, then melted away. The taste coursed through my body, a slippery, moody, gutsy smoothness that slithered and pushed and screamed down my throat.

Oh, Pascal,
I thought. If I couldn't be with him, this came close. I flashed back to three nights ago and the pleasure cascaded through me once more.

And then came the celery soda lemon pie with pine nuts and guanciale. It didn't look like a pie, more like a pudding. The pine nuts gave it roundness and body, and the guanciale a lurid, sweaty moodiness. But the soda effervescence was rather unnerving.

“Well, how do you like it?” Michael Saltz asked, picking at its jiggle.

I tried to silence a pine nut–celery–lemon–pork burp. It was . . . interesting.

But it didn't matter. For the purposes of this dinner, I loved it. I loved more than “it”—­I loved the whole orbit of genius that linked the food to the space to the man.

“Four stars, for sure,” I said while imagining Pascal's joy and what would become of us.

“Four stars, oh, yes?” Michael Saltz said. “That's a bold statement, but I shouldn't be surprised, coming from you. You know, I've heard rumblings that Le Brittane is cleaning shop.”

“Cleaning shop?” I gulped.

“Firing all the staff and starting fresh. They were blindsided.” Michael Saltz cleared his throat and his face got stern. “We did a number on that restaurant. I sometimes wonder if they deserved it.” He looked at me for a long time, but not in an accusing way, just pondering, reflective. Even though he didn't care much for me or typical journalistic integrity, he still had his own moral compass when it came to the reviews.

Shit. Le Brittane hadn't deserved it. They hadn't lost two stars because the food had fallen or the ser­vice failed. That day, with Elliott, I had fallen. I had failed. And now ­people were losing their jobs. I thought of our waiter, Hugo. He was probably the first to get fired. Did he have a wife? Kids? A mortgage? I realized with a wallop of regret that he probably had all three.

Writing the review had made me feel powerful, sure. But I never wanted to abuse it again. Back then, I had let the pains of my life affect the stars. But I wouldn't make that mistake again. ­People's lives were on the line, and starting with this review, my impact would be more positive.

“Bakushan deserves four stars,” I said. “Absolutely.” I sat up, ready to flatter Michael Saltz again if that's what it'd take to give Pascal what I wanted.

“Building something up requires more effort than taking it down,” he said matter-­of-­factly. “In this city, ninety percent of all restaurants fail. Another restaurant failing might make news for a ­couple days, until the next week's review gets ­people up in a lather. But a restaurant reaching four stars, rising above ninety percent of the failures and ninety-­eight percent of the mediocres, then that's something to seriously consider.”

“Well, I think Bakushan is up there. You said Pascal never showed his creative range at his earlier restaurants, but look at how far he's come. He's pushing cuisine, and—­”

Michael Saltz nodded. “Okay, okay, you don't have to convince me. I agree. Bakushan certainly has the bones of a four-­star, but let's take this one day at a time. I haven't awarded four stars since . . . since, you know. The experience has to absolutely merit it and I have to be able to stand by the claim.”

“I understand,” I said. “But I stand by it. I've used everything I've learned from you and I really feel that this is it.”

Michael Saltz lifted his fork, then thought better of it and put it down. After all, the food was cardboard to him anyway. “Well, we can keep that in mind. For a four-­star, I'd like to come back again, to check for consistency. I wish I could experience it with you, just so I could know for myself.” He brought his napkin up to his mouth and kept it there for a while, like he was going to cough. “I'm lucky that I've got you.”

I liked the compliment but something about the way he said “got you” made me shiver.

“Thanks,” I said, shaking that off. “I'm glad you've got me, too.”

As we left, I popped a stick of gum to mask the lingering effects of that porky soda pie. Pascal never spotted us.