Hatched (4 page)

Jude was regularly enticed by chatty male patrons into discussions about skateboards, windsurfing, flying, or jumping. Each of these narrative encounters had the same ending, some kind of an “accident,” a “near miss,” that now motivated the speaker to stick to Toyota Camrys, Volvo station wagons, or Range Rover SUVs. Most of these males would tell him that while they used to be adventurous, they were now married to “the wife” who wouldn’t permit them ownership of any recreational vehicle. Most of these same wives had some fading memory of a scooter or a motorcycle driven by a boy from way back when. And some of them even wanted a Vespa, because she’d seen some Hollywood starlet drive it to the Ed Sullivan Studios en route to a conversation about her major role in a minor flick.

Jude’s engine roared, and I could hear him shifting its old gearbox, now first, now second, now third, now receding into the distance, like memories of earlier days, consumed in the exhaust of labored respiration.

Chapter 3

Tina felt annoyed for a short while after Jude’s departure, but she was grateful when she learned that Jessica had returned to work after only a half-hour absence. It was a good thing. Besides, there was work to do. There was always work to do, until the last kitchen fan and last dining-room lamp were turned off for the night. And then it was just a matter of moments, it seemed, until they all needed to be reignited for the next shift. The reality of each day in Fabergé Restaurant was the shift to come, the tables to serve, the set-up, and then the inevitable breakdown. And despite Tina’s desire to control everyone who worked in the dining room, she nonetheless tried to avoid involving herself in peripheral matters, such as what happens when employees leave the premises.

With Jessica, of course, it was a different matter. Tina would always love Jessica, she would always belong to Jessica. But since Jessica had come back to her, as an employee at Fabergé Restaurant, Tina had known a large quantity of people who also loved Jessica, and were, presumably, loved by her. She was a free spirit who gave far more than she ever received—of anyone. Fabergé Restaurant was the exception; for her it was a kind of haven. And Fabergé Restaurant in turn was nourished by her power, and, being an egg, it needed her to care for it, to keep it warm, so that one day it could hatch. For Fabergé the restaurant was also Fabergé the egg, an egg in the middle of John’s favorite island, New York City. True to the complexity of Fabergé eggs, though, the restaurant namesake was also nest, a casing, and a shell that was a façade of perfection for an imperfect world. And so while Jessica fulfilled the maternal task, Tina was charged with keeping the Fabergé Restaurant façade from cracking, chipping, or decaying, and she did so as though the fate of the universe depended upon its being maintained, perfectly.

Busy with her self-assigned chores in the dining room, Tina thought back to Jessica and to him, that man in black. She was convinced that whoever he was, he was rich, and probably famous, at least in some circles (Financial? Real estate? Movies? This was New York, it could be all of them simultaneously). He would probably leave his wife, or whomever, in order to entice Jessica to go with him wherever it is that he’d go when he wasn’t standing at the crack of an entranceway to Fabergé Restaurant. This was an unwelcome thought for Tina, for no matter how long it had been since she had been warmed by Jessica’s breath and caressed by her soft touch, she knew that a precious and fragile memory of pure contentment would shatter if Jessica were to leave. She also knew that John desperately needed Jessica, and that if she were to leave, he’d be plunged into uncertainty and cast headlong into the growing vortex of chaos that surrounded him each day, a vortex that was hidden by his impermeable façade. Without Jessica, he and Tina couldn’t exist, they would crack, they would pour the yolk of their respective existences upon the hard floor of the industrial kitchen where eggs were fried and poached and boiled and scrambled and shattered, along with the lives they could have, or did, contain.

Tina knew that she wouldn’t ask about this man in black. A discussion might nonetheless come up, if only because Jessica always looked mildly annoyed when she returned from her little outings. And in fact, Jessica did feel annoyed when she returned that evening. Or, perhaps, she was just anxious to be back to work, to the array of tasks that awaited her arrival. She entered through the back door and walked intently through a hallway that was lined with cracked paint, chipped plaster, and areas that had apparently been kicked, punched, or bumped by the delivery of heavy plastic crates of lobsters, filled with heavy, splashing, salted water.

The delivery guys who bore the Sisyphus-like tasks of hauling lobsters were always bumping up against or smashing violently into the walls, because John had insisted upon sealing up portions of each entranceway to give the effect that anyone entering was doing so illicitly, breaking the egg, as it were. And so despite the restaurant’s need for provisions, not to mention guests, John nonetheless believed that nobody should in fact be allowed entrance into Fabergé Restaurant aside from those employed by him to be there. Fabergé Restaurant’s innards need to be protected and nourished by him, and by his kitchen staff, those he had delegated portions of his own abilities to. All of his work at Fabergé Restaurant was directed towards forming a perfect being who would, when the time was ripe, crack its own shell, and then burst through its shattered confines.

It was as though John were saying to any trespassers: “I am a keeper of this egg until the time comes when it has fulfilled its mission and given birth to its meaning. And you are bringing it supplies, but you are also threatening it with your brutal ways. And so you are a necessary evil, and I grant you entrance to my Fabergé Restaurant with the reluctance of obligation to my role.”

Some variation of this was the explanation he would provide to any hapless deliverymen who made the mistake of asking about the oddness of the Fabergé Restaurant shape, or complaining about the pathway that led into it. He always told this story with a keen gaze directed to his prey, as though the description of his egg’s
raison d’être
would somehow interest hourly workers whose task consisted of transporting heavy items from one place to another. As such, John failed to understand that a deliveryman’s interest in Fabergé Restaurant extended only as far as the delivery itself went. It should therefore have come as no surprise that not a single deliveryman ever demonstrated any interest whatsoever in the mythological features of Fabergé Restaurant, and every attempt that John had ever made to reverse that trend had failed miserably.

These oddball stories, told by this stern man clad in kitchen whites, weren’t the only reasons why delivery men hated coming to Fabergé Restaurant. They were also condemned to deliver, through the insane congestion of New York City, heavy and unruly cases of champagne that were sold in even more copious quantities in that restaurant than any other beverage, including all of the 341 wines, mostly red, that quietly haunted the bowels beneath the Yolk. The deliverymen who captured John in more whimsical moods, or were off guard and therefore possibly gave the mistaken impression that they cared about him or his stories, would be treated, unprovoked, to strange, one-sided conversations. John initiated these stories when bills for those deliveries would be passed over to him by rugged hands, perhaps in the hope that the linguistic matter would be valuable enough, or distracting enough, to ward off the moment of his having to turn over payment for the delivery.

To unwitting men of large breadth and small interests, John would describe his original idea, to sell only eggs, and to accompany them solely by champagne and bubbly water. Bubbly liquids produced eggy-shaped bubbles that could be considered appropriate for the multitude of caviars that were the original centerpieces of the Fabergé Restaurant. “Champagne, in particular, emulates the frothy waves from which the sea-faring creatures had been plucked for the eventual delight of Fabergé Restaurant’s clients,” he would explain. “And the viscous nature of dated champagnes emulated low tide when choice sea creatures could lay eggs, and multiply, in order to be gathered up near the beaches of northeastern states.”

None of the delivery men, those owners of the rugged hands whose work John delayed with narrative, would ever pry further into this fascinating line of thought, because they didn’t feel addressed directly by John’s piercing, blue eyes and Boston North End accent. Those who chose to think about John afterwards probably felt instead as though they’d been penetrated, violated, captured, and possessed, and that it’d be best to avoid his gaze and linguistic grip. And so, if you’d have asked any of those deliverymen what John had uttered, proclaimed, preached, or explained, even just a few minutes after the interaction, it’s likely that they wouldn’t remember anything other than an impression, a disturbing impression, of an examination undertaken from the inside of their very beings.

In later years, John began to lose his (probably egg-shaped) marbles. And those who actually did the cooking in the Fabergé Restaurant took over, de facto. And without there ever being a discussion on this paradigm shift, liquids other than champagne eventually made their way onto the menu, and into the rivers of intoxicants poured into the wealthy clients who frequented the rarified space of Fabergé Restaurant. These flowing pathways to inebriation were consumed, usually by clients, but oftentimes as well by kitchen staff, and, through accidental upheaval or excited retching promoted by the substance itself, they sometimes flowed unexpectedly, and disgustingly, onto the floor and into the toilets of Fabergé Restaurant’s restroom. Multifarious Dionysian oceans flowed each evening, usually several times, to the obvious relief of exhausted employees and the apparent joy of the growing clientele who, John was apt to bemoan, could barely afford imported beer, never mind millimisé champagne.

The conspicuous consumers, those in the dining room, were wont to make merry when they permeated Fabergé Restaurant, merrier, indeed, than they should have been. The result was that many of them were paying more at the end of the jovial evening than they could afford, and some of them landed up costing John more in damages and cleanup than he could afford. As for the rivers of alcohol that were directed and redirected towards the anxious appetites of the kitchen staff and server, John was, or at least seemed, blissfully ignorant. Those uncharted waters of illicit consumption lay beyond the horizon of his own island of thinking, and the currents that lay below these waters seemed to ward him off, thus limiting his cognitive explorations.

“Seemed” is the operative word here, a term that was often used to qualify people’s understanding of John. He seemed disconnected, he seemed pacified, he seemed quelled, he seemed to be out of control, he seemed to misunderstand the deliverymen, the servers, the chefs, the prep cooks, the knife sharpeners, the workings of the universe. He seemed. In fact, almost everyone thought that John was some grown-up version of that young boy who had learned his trade from the ground up, and was therefore akin to a trucker who can skillfully back the rig into the nooks and crannies of the universe, but only because of a high level of skill that he’d acquired through practice and repetition rather than through the deep comprehension of fundamental matters.

Nothing was further from the truth.

The truth about John, well, only Tina, the maître d’, knew that, and only in eggshell-like fragments that she had never, and would never, try to assemble, for fear that it would fall Humpty-Dumpty-like onto her own fragile frame and crush her with revelation. The truth of John was somewhere inside of his own yolk, in that storehouse of eternal wisdom that trapped the Boston-North-End-boy-turned-Fabergé-Restaurant-owner inside of the logic of his own culinary fantasies. The truth about John was that there was no single truth, and despite the sometimes sinister twinkle in his piercing gaze, he just seemed to be a hardworking owner of a restaurant, a tyrannical boss, or perhaps a strict father. Discerning guests in the restaurant knew better, however, because they had tasted his creations. For them, he was a chef with no equal, a man of unmatched abilities. One single grain of white pepper beyond what he had skillfully applied to the butter-infused Cornish hen egg would have diminished the pleasure of that dish, and the omission of a single spice or the alteration by a single second of cooking time would have changed everything. He was capable as though by magic and intuition to bring out hints of flavor that would have otherwise been trapped, hidden like a yolk in the very heart of his eggy masterpieces.

Tina, who was in charge of the clients, had appreciated Fabergé Restaurant’s transformation from a New York anomaly into a true destination, a landmark, and she did so by quietly engineering the addition of new menu options. As a result, the clientele grew somewhat more diverse and came to include people other than the supposed zillionaires who liked the idea of actually eating, and subsequently shitting-out or puking-up, precious Fabergé eggs that had been pickled in expensive champagne and doused in baths of parmagiano butter. Jude was the extreme example of this new phenomenon of diverse clientele, although she did understand that he wasn’t there for the culinary experience, or to be seen spending wildly, or to experience one of the chef’s new and elaborate creations. She tolerated him nonetheless, because he was a harmless oddity, and there were sufficient numbers of wealthy clients willing and able to chip away at their own golden eggs in exchange for the
merveilles
of Fabergé Restaurant’s menu choices to keep the place afloat—if eggs do, in fact, float.

And they do.

Besides, maybe this young man’s scribbling would someday make him a candidate for other sections of the menu. Maybe he’d marry into a rich family, and he’d convince his bride-to-be that their marriage should be consumed after a sumptuous, eggy meal in this amazing place. Probably not. The distance between the flowing ink of his pen and the stream of cash required to eat at Fabergé Restaurant was too great, it seemed. And so, Tina didn’t bother too much with Jude. At least not at first.