Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance (2 page)

“I don’t know. It was his idea,” I mumbled through a mouthful of chocolate chips, then stirred the few left in the bag into the bowl with ricotta, sugar, vanilla, and orange peel.

“What do
you
want it to mean, Katherine?” she asked as she put the crisp shells down in front of me. She scooped some filling into a plastic bag, twisted one corner, and cut a large hole in the opposite corner. I pulled a pastry bag out of the kitchen drawer where my mother keeps the kitchen tools she never uses and the sexy aprons my father gave her that she wouldn’t even think about showing to anyone, let alone wearing.

“I don’t know that either. I mean, most of the time we’re so comfortable together that it seems perfect. But then I get to wanting more than comfort. I want passionate, exciting, spontaneous.”

“I would have thought you had enough of those things for the two of you. Whatever happened to ‘opposites attract’?” She picked up a shell and smoothly squeezed the filling from the bag into the pastry. I was trying to pipe my filling into the shell, but I was having trouble finding the center because tears were clouding my vision.

“I think someone forgot to finish the thought. Opposites attract but they don’t always make it for the long haul. It’s just too hard. You and Dad are an exception.”

My parents have been married for thirty years, and it’s hard to imagine two people who could be more different and still adore each other as much as they do. My mother is from a traditional southern Italian family. Her mother, my Nonna, raised three boys and two girls the way she had been raised—in the
old country
. She kept a tight rein on her five little Contis, intimidating them by claiming she had “eyes in the back of her
head.” Whatever admonitions Nonna overlooked, the good nuns covered in fourteen years of parochial school and two years of Catholic college. The result of all this rigid upbringing is the outward appearance of a controlled, somewhat prissy person. In fact, Mom can be downright prudish, but beneath the surface, there’s a wild woman looking to escape. No doubt, it was that side of her that attracted my father.

Lots of people think that Costello is an Italian name, but it’s Irish, and Dad inherited more than his share of blarney, charm, and “bit o’ the devil.” When he met my mother, she thought he was too wild to bring home. But it wound up being a good match. She gave his life structure; he gave her structure life. I am their only child, and that has always been just fine with me. In spite of what the third-grade nuns tried to drill into me, I think sharing is highly overrated.

Mom put her arms around me. “I don’t want it to be hard for you, and if Richard is not the right one, better to find out now.”

I hugged her back and it made me feel a little better. We talked about some of the places I’d be seeing in Italy while we filled the rest of the cannoli and dusted them all with powdered sugar. We brought Dad his share of the feel-better pastries and watched a little television before I headed off to bed, dreading the morning’s commute and contemplating the various meanings of “break.”

A
WEEK LATER
, I was still contemplating, when, as I was nibbling on the leftovers from a morning shoot, Richard’s receptionist called my cell to say that she had to reschedule my next week’s appointment.

“To when?” I asked.

“I don’t have an opening right now.”

I couldn’t believe it. Richard and I hadn’t even spoken to each other since the argument and now he was turning “break” into “breakup.” With a canceled dental appointment! How low is that?
Well, no way
, I thought. I decided to go to his office and let him know that
I
was breaking up with
him
and getting a new dentist. It was quarter of one, and Richard always went to lunch from one until two. If the entire staff was out, the office would be locked. If someone stayed behind, I could sit in the waiting room and read the latest copies of six-month-old magazines until Richard came back. The door was open and the waiting room was empty, but I could hear faint giggling coming from one of the operatories. Realizing that one of his assistants or hygienists must be there, I went back to say hi.

The giggling was coming from Lexi, Richard’s provocative, nineteen-year-old chairside assistant who wore gauzy, see-through white uniforms that looked as though they came from
show-all.com
. At the moment, she was sitting on my boyfriend-on-a-break’s lap and showing all to him.

“Casey!” Richard jumped up, dropping the assistant on the floor. “What are you doing here?”

As if that was the predominant question. “What’s going on here?” Okay, that was a dumber question, but my brain couldn’t wrap itself around what I was seeing. And then I couldn’t see at all, because my tears were blinding me. Lexi was still in a crouch position where she had been dumped, and she was clutching her barely-there uniform in a futile attempt to cover what I resentfully noticed was an ample bosom. I gave her a nasty, teary look and screamed, “You should be ashamed of yourself.
Puttana!
” before running out of the operatory. Richard followed me and grabbed my arm.

“Casey. Don’t run off. We need to talk about this.”

“Seems to me there’s not much to talk about except why you couldn’t have at least let me in on your definition of a break. I thought that meant time to think things over, not to work over your assistants.”

“That’s sick, Casey.” He lowered his voice and spoke slowly, as if to show by example that it would be more adult and more civilized to remain calm. “You’re not being reasonable. You’re letting your anger take over.” That’s when I stomped down on his white shoe and left in a stream of Neapolitan expletives.

I walked and wept for ten blocks before taking the subway to my train. On blocks two, three, and five, I tried to call my cousin Mary, who is six months older than I am and happens to be my best friend. She wasn’t picking up her cell, so on block seven, I called her work number.

“I’m sorry. Miss Alfano will be at a meeting all afternoon.”

“
All
afternoon?”

“If this is an emergency I can reach her.” I had tried not to sound hysterical when I called, but it obviously hadn’t worked. I sounded like an emergency.

“No. Thank you. I’ll call back.”

Each one of my pounding steps beat out a rhythmic “I hate him. I hate him.” What is it that makes us feel so miserable when a guy we’re planning on deep-sixing anyway picks himself right up and goes out with someone else? I had pretty much come to the conclusion that I didn’t want him, but I sure as hell didn’t want him to want someone else. At least not right away. A little mourning period would have been in order. But then, what can you expect from someone who uses a canceled dental appointment as a breakup strategy?

As soon as my parents saw me, my mother headed for the kitchen and for once in his life my father was speechless.

“Don’t bother,” I said, shaking my head. “There aren’t enough
cannoli shells in all of Little Italy to make me feel better.” I sobbed my way through the story, through dinner, through the first fifteen minutes of
Wheel of Fortune
, and then went up to my room exhausted.

Mary called just about the time I had torn up the last photograph and thrown out all my floss.

“Look, I know it hurts, but you have to keep reminding yourself that the relationship was a failure anyway.”

“Yeah. Well, the breakup didn’t work out so well either.”

“Seeing Richard like that is the pits. But if you think honestly about it, you didn’t really love him.”

“I was trying to.”

“Not good enough. The right guy is out there waiting for you, and you’re not going to have to
try
to love him.”

“Well, he’s going to have to wait because I’m giving up dating and getting a gerbil.”

“Do you want me to come over?”

“Thanks, no. I’m going to squeeze all the sample toothpastes down the toilet and go to bed. It’s been a rough day.”

Four and a half weeks later my father was still driving me into the city. He said he had business there, but I know he just didn’t trust me near the train tracks.

My future ain’t what it used to be.
—Lonnie Spiker

I
love a TV studio early in the morning. Just like me, it wakes up slowly. When I arrive, the lights are low and whatever noises the prop men are making get lost in the immensity of the room. This will all change in about an hour when the control room opens, the camera and sound crews arrive, and the line producers converge on the set. The show’s hosts, Jim and Karen, don’t join the chaos until about ten minutes before airtime, but sometimes Art, the weatherman, wanders into the kitchen early because he likes to cook and wants to get a few pointers.

There’s always a breakfast buffet set up on a long table in the hallway right outside our studio, with plenty of good coffee, lots of cut-up fruit, every flavor of yogurt, and an Atkins-horrifying abundance of carbs—bagels, at least four kinds of muffins, croissants, three varieties of Danish, sticky buns, English muffins, scones. It’s like a huge room-service bread basket but you get to pick more than two items. I took a corn muffin, a sticky bun, and a carrot-and-zucchini muffin for my
vegetable, plus two large coffees, and headed back to the prep kitchen to start work.

The prep kitchen is a tiny, ten-by-sixteen-foot kitchenette that was never meant to be used to prepare anything like the amount of food we need for televising. It was there for any staff or crew member who needed a refrigerator to hold a lunch or a stove to heat soup or boil water. When Sonya, our executive producer, was able to sign Sally Woods on to the show for regular appearances, she pressed the too-small room into service because it was close to the set and already had appliances and running water. We’ve made the room even smaller by building a butcher-block work island in the center of the room, leaving just enough space between it and the counters for one of us to stand. Two people passing each other qualifies as an intimate relationship, so we call the table Romeo. Right before the show goes on the air at seven o’clock, a heavy soundproof door closes us in—“us” being my assistant, Mae, two stagehands who are assigned KP duty, and me. At some time during the morning, Sonya, the talent, and a set-designer-slash-food-stylist will also cram themselves into the space to check things out. We’ve learned to work around one another nicely, but we all keep an eye on the monitor that pipes the show into the kitchen so we’ll know when there is a commercial break. Then we can open the door for a breather.

Mae was already there when I walked in. I hoped she had her own breakfast. I wasn’t sharing.

“Hey,” she said as she continued to unpack groceries, opening wrapped packages to check them against my shopping list. The first rule of television food production is to make sure the food is all there and it’s what was ordered. On one of my early days with the show, I’d ordered salmon fillets. When I’d opened the wrapped package close to airtime, I’d discovered
that the shopper had bought a slab of smoked salmon instead. Fortunately, the talent that day was dear, unflappable Sally, who has seen it all and dealt with it all in her twenty-five years of cooking on television. She told us to “oil the bejabbers” out of the salmon and ordered the cameras to stay back. It worked out fine, but it was a lesson. Check the supplies in time to replace them if necessary.

“Hey, yourself. How’s it going?”

“Way cool.” For twenty-three-year-old Mae March, life is always way cool. She comes from a bit of a zany family, Mr. and Mrs. March and their daughters, April, Mae, and June. Most people think she’s joking when she tells them that. Mae has her own sense of style—or antistyle, depending on how you look at it. She wears a traditional white chef’s coat to work, but she funks up everything else—from the long, gauzy vintage skirts that end midcalf, just above the high-heeled, black Doc Marten–type boots, to the small green star she applies with a Magic Marker under her left eye every morning. She wears her long chestnut hair pulled up and held with a variety of animal-shaped hair clips and a couple of chopsticks for good measure. Occasionally she colors a small tuft of hair in the front. Today it was a deep maroon, which matched the color of her fingernails. In spite of her attempts at bizarre, she’s a knockout, with a flawless creamy complexion and high cheekbones that get a delicate shade of pink when the kitchen heat is on. Her soft gray eyes have a come-hither look even when she’s inspecting groceries.

Her costuming makes it hard to take her seriously until she starts to work. Mae learned all she knows from high school home economics classes and her parents’ restaurant. She avoided all the culinary school egotism of thinking she’s a star chef and learned the importance of speed, accuracy, and getting along
with people in small spaces. Our kitchen motto at
Morning in America
is EOT: Eye on Target. Mae has no problem with that. Neither do our cute young stagehands, whose target happens to be Mae. We have four stagehands available to us—all named Tony. At first, we tried to distinguish them by calling them Tony G. and Tony M. and so forth, but we could never keep that straight so we gave up. It actually works out okay, because when we need something done we just say, “Tony” and someone does it. Two stagehands stay in the kitchen with us to wash dishes, sweep floors, empty trash, and peel, trim, and chop. The other two are always nearby to run errands, carry trays, repair props, and so forth. Two Tonys arrived just as Mae was finishing unpacking and they tripped over each other to help her. It was like watching puberty on speed.

That morning we were doing a live spot with Tina Lovely, a tall, willowy movie star with a glorious mane of strawberry-blond hair. Working with celebrities is fun from a starstruck point of view, but can be frustrating from a culinary point of view. Unlike Sally or our guest chefs, stars are not food professionals, and we sometimes have to do some cookery sleight of hand to make the recipes work. Tina planned to demonstrate her method of growing herbs under special lights in her sauna. Not exactly a tip with universal appeal, but she happened to be dating a rock star who was all over the news because one of his band members had been caught in a indelicate situation with an underage girl who had turned out to be the daughter of a well-known British politician.