Sweet (12 page)

Teddy smiled and graciously accepted the cup Jules offered him a moment later. Jules felt better behind the counter. He felt stable; there was something onto which he could hold. He did; he gripped the counter until his knuckles turned white.

“Thank you again for the cookies,” Teddy said politely, holding the mug of coffee just under his nose. Jules couldn’t see his mouth. “They were… transcendent.”

Jules raised his eyebrows.

“Okay, well, they were extremely good, anyway. And I only have a couple left, because I really did wind up eating them for dinner last night,” Teddy said, smiling into the coffee.

“Oh, so you really
are
five years old, then.”

“Eight,” Teddy said seriously.

“And I’m seventy-eight,” Jules sighed. “On the bright side, we could both play Monopoly without a problem.”

Teddy gave him a look of confusion—still smiling—and Jules stammered, “Because the box says it’s for ages eight to eighty. It used to say that, anyway. Now I think it just says for ages eight and up. Because people live longer than eighty now, usually. And it would be kind of insulting to be told that you’re too old for Monopoly. Which, I learned in college, is a tool of the capitalist hegemony masquerading as a family game anyway, so maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. To be too old for it.”

Teddy smiled again—he was smiling so
much
, Jules thought—and raised his eyebrows, glancing deliberately at the kitchen door.

“I think, Karl or Che or whoever you are, I was offered a tour of the promised land in there,” he said.

“Oh!” Jules rounded the counter to hold open the kitchen door, motioning for Teddy to go in. Teddy moved past him, sliding his hand along the wood of the door as he went.

“It’s like walking into the wardrobe,” he said. “Or maybe I feel a little like Alice.”

“You look more like you’re disembarking from a time machine from 1947,” Jules said. “But thanks for remembering, or I would have had to make you wear The Hat.” He gestured to the grimy Burns and Son Painting Company baseball cap they kept by the door for anyone unlucky enough to enter the kitchen without their own hair covering.
So many heads have been in that hat,
Jules thought. Teddy looked horrified.

“Furthermore, we had this nice door put on the rabbit hole last year to keep the evil queens out. No evil queens, I swear,” Jules said. And when Teddy looked at him with an eyebrow raised, he said, “Until eight, at least. Before then it’s just me. And I’m not evil.”

“Was that a queen joke?” Teddy asked appreciatively, and then stopped abruptly in front of the large stainless steel prep table by the door. “Oh! I hadn’t pictured it this way. In my head. Not that I was spending a lot of time picturing it,” he said, and Jules could see a scarlet blush creep down Teddy’s cheeks and toward his collar. He was starting to sweat, and his voice softened considerably. “Okay, so maybe I was picturing you back here sometimes.” Teddy drummed his fingers on the table, smiling to himself, still red, “making those transcendent cupcakes with the caramel or something.”

“There’s that word again,” Jules said. He tried to sound as if he were teasing Teddy, but his voice warbled out high and weak and girlish and whispery, making Teddy look up at him and—
again, he won’t stop doing it
—smile.

Jules showed Teddy the ovens, the desk, the dry-stock shelves and the walk-in refrigerator with the blocks of butter and small vats of cream, and then they were standing on either side of the metal prep table by the door again.

“I’m sorry there’s not more to see here,” Jules said. “It’s really just a kitchen. The grand tour took all of five minutes, and that was with me stretching it out with needless explanations.”

“You could put me to work,” Teddy said and, noting Jules’s suddenly widened eyes, he added, “if that’s legal, I mean.”

*

Jules had supervised Teddy as he washed his hands—carefully, twice—at the large metal sink. He wrapped an apron around his waist and awkwardly pulled the bib up over Teddy’s head. It got stuck, of course it did, because they should have done it the other way ‘round; and they both laughed nervously, and Jules stepped back with his hands raised.

“I’ll let you do that yourself,” he said. “I’m not used to the aprons with the tops. Those are ‘Trice’s. I was trying to be gallant, not to manhandle you or tie you up.” He stopped abruptly at that and looked down, furiously red again. He’d blushed at almost everything he’d said to Teddy that morning—he blushed, it seemed, so easily and so brightly, and it was so becoming on him, so endearing, almost innocent. It made Teddy feel stronger, more in control, like a gentleman pitching woo. He laughed to himself silently and happily at that, adjusting the apron over his suit. He liked the thought of it, the thought of being old-fashioned with Jules. They certainly were blushing enough for it.

Jules showed him how to zest fruit and brought him a tall stool to sit on. He kept a respectable distance. He didn’t, as Teddy had hoped, curl his hands over Teddy’s to teach him how to hold a knife, leaning over him with the dry heat of his chest pressed against Teddy’s back, his voice in Teddy’s ear. He didn’t do any such thing, but cheerfully talked him through the first few tries with the steel table shiny and cold between them.

Teddy set to work earnestly on the pile of lemons Jules put out for him. Across the table, Jules was doing something with a large metal bowl and a parade of ingredients, whisk flashing in his hands. While they worked, they spoke a little, in a conversation woven carefully with long silences in which the only sound was the snick of the knife against lemon skin and the occasional clang of Jules’s metal bowl.

Teddy asked about the hat—was it the same Burns? Was Jules the “and Son” on the hat? And Jules talked himself hoarse about his father and his painting business and his stepfamily, about his mother’s disappearance and his grandmother’s death, about loss and mourning, feeling helpless and feeling lonely and, as he grew older, forgetting, little by little. Teddy talked about his job. He talked about Maggie and Dan. He talked about his father and his mother and the camel-colored house in the suburbs of Indiana. (
“Indiana?”
Jules gasped while refilling Teddy’s coffee. “Me too!”) They talked about Indiana and about high school and being gay there versus being gay in New York, being gay at sixteen versus being gay at thirty.

“I think,” Teddy sighed, dropping the knife, “I’m finished.”

Jules looked up from his work at the pile of skinned lemons in front of Teddy, at the little curls of yellow peel in the bowl, and smiled. “That was quicker than ‘Trice usually does it,” he said, coming around the table to inspect the work. He stood so close that
Teddy could feel the warmth rising from Jules’s neck and cheeks. “Of course, ‘Trice usually spends half her zesting time on the phone, or running to the front for coffee, or slipping out for smoke breaks.”

“It was very Zen,” Teddy said, looking at his hands, which he laid flat on the table in front of him.

“You did a nice job,” Jules said, reaching in front of Teddy to touch the peels. “There’s no white on these at all. I might have to get rid of ‘Trice and lock you in here permanently with me.”

The moment he said it, Teddy felt it, the suggestion of a thing curling up between them. Jules’s body was close as he leaned over the table. Teddy felt the rasp of Jules’s cotton coat against the back of his hand, smelled the aroma of lemons rising up clean and floral and sharp between them. Jules stood up straight, suddenly, and was still. Neither of them moved. They breathed, looking down, the both of them.

“I mean,” Jules said, “it’s nice to have you here.” He shook his head, as if deep in a conversation to which Teddy was not privy. “I mean—”

Jules held the knife in his hand, turning it over and over between his fingers. They both looked at it, glinting and clicking against the steel table. They watched Jules’s fingers, pale and long and nimble, crawling across the blade.

“Are you planning to stab—” Teddy started, intending to lighten the mood, but Jules had, at the same moment, inhaled sharply through his nose and cast his glance upward, his eyes very pale and very wide and lightly rimmed with pink. “I’ve been—” Jules started, then stopped.

“This is so stupid,” Teddy heard him whisper under his breath. “Just—”

Jules turned and put his hands on either side of Teddy’s neck. They felt dry and delicate as moths, papery light. Teddy’s heart really did stutter; outside, the euphony of the street really did swell like music. In that moment, with Jules’s hands framing Teddy’s face, holding him still
, holding him to earth, they each closed their eyes, because to look was far too close, and they met, softly, in a kiss.

Teddy lit up like glowing coals flickering with low-burning heat; not a fire but a warmth, not a flame but an ember in the pit of him, as if that heat had been there for a long time but he was just now noticing it.

The kiss was not, by the usual standards, a perfect one. It was a little crooked, a little lopsided and unsteady and perhaps too soft at first, more bewildered than passionate, feathering and light like a calling out, like a question. T
here was no grand moment, no revelation, no specific thing that drove them, passionately, into their embrace. There was only a kind of melting, a giving up or giving in, and they pressed into each other in relief, their bodies finally meeting in a deep sigh. Jules’s lips moved softly against Teddy’s, the gentlest touch paced by little licks of his tongue and the tiniest strokes of his fingers against Teddy’s neck, at once soothing and beautiful and like pushing a hot wire through every one of Teddy’s veins so he felt each of them, burning, distinct,
twisting in a network under his skin. It was not, by the standards of most stories, perfect. But it was, by anyone’s standards, still a glorious kiss.

When they stopped, and they did stop—after far too brief a time, Teddy thought—Jules looked down between their bodies shyly and said, “I haven’t had a kiss in years,” and Teddy’s hands came up to Jules’s waist, unknotted the ties and pulled the apron loose, then let it drop to the floor. It was just a gesture, for it left nothing bare, but Teddy wanted to undo every fastening Jules had, wanted him as loose and opened as he could make him when Teddy kissed him again, this time lightly at the corner of his mouth. Jules’s breath left him in a rush; he looked down at the apron pooled over their shoes, then wound his arms loosely around Teddy’s neck, knocking his hat off and sending it rolling under the metal shelves by the ovens, and Jules kissed him again, kissed him
with more strength, pressing in wet and urgent, with the tips of his canines biting lightly at Teddy’s lip.

They kissed this way, back and forth, an exchange of breath and pressure, a quiet, liquid conversation, until they heard the grinding of the front gate and then the door’s bells shimmering and ‘Trice, who hollered from the front of the store, “Jules! I’m getting coffee!”

And with that, they broke apart. Jules covered his mouth with one hand and smiled shyly while Teddy stooped to find his wayward hat.

*

We can, at this moment, return to Teddy at the windowsill early the next morning, weak coffee and phone in hand, trench coat slung over his shoulders like a cape. He felt, as we said earlier, wound like a coiled spring, full of energy, a kind of reaching pulse that made him feel stretched and open and awake, even at that early hour.

I’m sorry,
he typed into his phone with one thumb,
I hate to leave now when it feels like we’ve started something. I won’t sleep tonight. I might not sleep the whole time. I’ll be gone three days, and then, when I get back, can I see you?

Jules replied almost instantly,
Yes. Dinner? Let’s cook.

And then, a moment later,
My kitchen is better stocked, so you should come here.

And, just as the cab driver outside leaned on his horn, impatient and too loud on the morning-silent street,
I won’t sleep either, Grasshopper.

Ten

Teddy bought a chocolate croissant
and a coffee from one of the fluorescent-and-Formica bakeries at Penn Station, protected them from crush and spill, balanced the package carefully under one arm while lugging his garment bag and pull-along suitcase, and bumped down the platform escalators and finally into a window seat near the front of the train. As it turned out, it hadn’t been worth the care: The croissant was leathery and bland; its chocolate was far too sweet; the coffee was watery. Nothing tasted the least bit loving or glorious or alive. It tasted like nothing at all.

By the time the train finally dug its way out from underneath the city and was clacking along the tracks above ground, past fences and power lines and gray morning sky, Teddy had given up on his breakfast and settled with his cheek pressed to the cool glass of the window.

When he finished college, his parents had sent him, as a graduation gift, on a month-long trip to Europe. He’d traveled alone and bought a student rail pass because the train was the most romantic way to go. He’d brought a notebook, a small manual camera and whatever clothing he could fit in a backpack, nothing more. He’d spent days at a time without saying a word, moving alone through the thin crowds, whistling under his breath as he climbed the cobblestoned hills of town after little town. He’d gestured and pointed sheepishly for shopkeepers whose language he didn’t understand; he’d learned to read warnings and suggestions in pictures and faces and road signs; he traveled without a guidebook, without GPS, without maps. At night, he
had slept in hostels and in the sleeper cars of trains, on thin, under-padded beds, tucked into himself and dreaming while other travelers snored and breathed heavily around him in the dark. During the day, he’d slipped between the living throng in Budapest or Vienna or Prague like a flâneur, he thought proudly, and then like a spirit, and then like air, until the day came when he realized he’d finally slid into the being of nothing.

When Teddy returned to the States, Indiana seemed boisterous, offensive, full
of invasions; everything around him was jangling and demanding and exhausting. The cool, humming quiet of his parents’ house, the stoic dinners around his family’s table, the days and evenings he spent alone, reading or writing or simply staring at the walls in his old bedroom, were a relief. It took a long time for him to speak above a whisper again.

Now, years later, he still felt like an apparition, lost from the cemetery he’d never found, wandering.

He typed a message to Jules on his phone, unsure it would go through once he sent it since his phone’s signal reception seemed, like all else near the train tracks, shaky and weak:

Above ground, finally. Arriving in DC around 9. You are probably baking right now, something real and delicious. Had the worst
pain au chocolat
of my life. It was a PAIN, oh, chocolate! You would have wept. I miss your pastry.

Outside the train window were the backs of small houses, A-frames with wood siding painted in pallid, community-accepted hues: white, cream, pale yellow, pale green, pale blue; the grass was pale and the air was pale, and so were the sky and the gray antennas jutting from the rooftops and the rusting swingsets dotting the lawns. Everything was
breaking his heart with its blandness; his coffee, and the trees and the gravel, and his own hands, pressed against the glass, were pale and colorless.

*

By the time the train had sighed to a stop, by the time he’d dragged his bags out and up and emerged above ground, blinking like a worm in the low light of the last vestiges of the morning rush, Teddy had received four messages from Jules:

Sorry I missed you; I was, indeed, baking. You are probably “landing” soon now. Hope the ride was nice and nobody ate yogurt near you or spanked a baby or had a loud argument on a cell phone (those things always seem to happen to me on the train). I am weeping for the
pain au chocolat
. Who did this? What did chocolate ever do to them? I am also weeping for your bad pun, but only because it was bad, not because it was a pun.

You miss my pastry? Is that a euphemism?

I’m sending you directions to a good bakery for
pain au chocolat
, but go early in the morning
—
croissants get old fast.
Plus I’m sending the names of a few places to go for good food and dessert. Because I want your mouth to redeem itself. That is not a euphemism, either.

The final message was a short list of bakeries and restaurants, with an assignment:
I want a full report on everything you put in your mouth there (within reason, of course)
.

*

While I’m a little disappointed that your wish to redeem my mouth was not a euphemism, I want to thank you for the suggestions. I had dinner and dessert tonight on my own, and I have been redeemed, mouth and all. I can’t even remember that horrible chocolate croissant. What croissant?

The message lit up Jules’s phone just as he was falling asleep on the couch. It was good to wake up, since he was in a terrible position, pinned in place by Andy snoozing against him, head tilted dangerously forward against his chest, legs curled akimbo, a more innocent version of Rubens’ Leda. His cell phone was clutched to his chest; his half-drunk glass of wine sat on the coffee table. He may have, all evening, been waiting.

Grasshopper, I believe I requested a full report,
Jules wrote, stretching his neck and trying not to disturb Andy.
This is nothing of the sort.

I don’t even remember what I ate for dinner,
came the reply,
because I finished with olive oil ice cream served over some apricots roasted in honey, and that almost literally took my breath away. Oh, god, how do I describe it to you? It was… I can’t
.

Start with the ice cream, then. Salty, sweet, bitter, sour? Those are the basics. Like wine tasting. What flavor notes were there? (Remember that flavor is a combination of smell and taste, so go there, too.) Think about adjectives or things to which you can compare the flavor.

During a long pause
Jules refilled his glass of wine and turned on the lamps by the couch. It was late, and dark, and the air was too warm, unmoving. It was the kind of night that, were he back in Indiana, might have been filled with the soft noise of crickets.

Sweet, with a little tiny bit of salty in there? Does that work? Maybe buttery, even though that doesn’t make sense? Mild and fatty and fruity? Silky? Yes, definitely fruity, and maybe a little floral. And soft, if that makes sense. And green, planty, thick. And there were flakes of sea salt on top of the ice cream. So if you got some of that, it was salty, and a little bitter, creamy and tangy, just perfect.

That sounds, uh, very good, but I’ll refrain from commenting on that last taste description,
Jules wrote.
Were you trying to make a comparison?

What? Oh… not like that. I mean. Oh, god. Moving on.
Apricots. Were roasted in honey. The honey was really floral, too, if that makes sense, but in a different way from the ice cream, heavier, thicker. Almost overpoweringly sweet. Apricots were fleshy, slippery. They were warm, so the cream melted everywhere.

Um. Yes. Very good description, once again.

I think it’s your mind,
Teddy wrote,
not my words.

Nope. It’s definitely your words. But good food does that to me anyway. To most people, I think. It’s part of why I like to cook.

It may have turned me on a little bit. Not in a bad way.

I wasn’t aware there was a bad way.

Touché.
I just mean that, had I not had a messenger bag with me, it might have been a bit embarrassing,
Teddy wrote. A moment later, he wrote,
I can’t believe I just told you that.

You had a… reaction… to the dessert?

You could say that, yes. Like I used to have reactions to Justin Timberlake.

Is this a common occurrence with you and sweets?
Jules wrote.
I should remember this. I own a bakery, after all. (And Justin Timberlake? Really?)

It’s happened once before. I had a brief affair with one of your cupcakes.

Which one?

The salted caramel.

Aha. You like salty sweets. (That still doesn’t explain Justin Timberlake.)

Maybe that’s it. But I think it’s more mystical
,
Teddy typed.
I’ve had salty sweets before and not had that… reaction. I may have actually licked the plate tonight. (And I admit that nothing really explains Justin Timberlake.) I feel like I cheated on you,
Teddy added.

With the apricots?

With the ice cream.

Well, we haven’t really talked about being exclusive yet, so it’s probably not cheating.

Excuse me, then, I should go. I promised that ice cream I would call it in the morning.

*

Pastry-Whipped: Adventures in Sugar by a Dedicated Crumpet Strumpet

by Chef Jules Burns of Buttermilk Bakery

April 28:
Ars Gratia Crustum
, or, Art for Art’s Cake

Okay, well, that’s not exactly the translation (my language in high school was French, not Latin, and I learned it in Indiana, which means even my French is probably pretty bad), but it’s certainly the spirit of the pun (I love me a good pun, oh my goodness), so grant me a little wiggle room here. (Actually, I think the translation is closer to “Art for the sake of cake,” which is fine with me, too, because in my book
—
which I’ve not, admittedly, yet written
—
everything is for the sake of cake.)

Doing something just for the beauty of it, just for the pleasure it might bring, is hard for me. And doing it imperfectly? Even harder, though it is often more pleasurable that way. I suspect it’s difficult for most of us, judging from the shy excuses and blushing that happens at my pastry counter every day when someone dares to ask for some lark of a sweet (for what in this world is more about sheer pleasure and beauty than eating pastry? And why does this make us sheepish?). But it is absolutely necessary.
Fiat panis
?
Not good enough. I say—and I wish I had a Marie Antoinette wig for this moment—
fiat crustum.

What can pastry do? It does not nourish; it fills no bodily need. It is entirely about sensory pleasure. We’ve been told all our lives, most of us, about the evils of sensory pleasure, about the evils of taking such gifts for oneself, which has always struck me as ridiculous, since the world seems so full, in its natural state, of opportunities for delight of this kind. For most of us, the daily demands of living
—
literally putting bread on the table, or even, perhaps, affording a table on which one might put bread
—
are pressing enough that we have little left of ourselves to give toward true pleasures. Instead we grab, when we can, the roughest, palest suggestion of happiness, and we make do. But oh, my darling, I remind myself,
collige virgo rosas
. And even this (and its English version, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”) contains a hint of the darkness of that decision: Life is fleeting, life leaves you spent and bare and old and empty, and for
this
reason, take pleasure while you can. What would happen if, instead, we agreed that pleasure should be valuable not because it is fleeting, but because it is always available? What if, instead, I understand that pleasure lies in everything around me, trembling there like a bud on a branch at my hand, mine for the taking, if only I am bold enough to do so?

I have a friend who is visiting D.C., and I’ve sent him on a mission to redeem his heart through the most gorgeous food possible. An odd mission, I admit. And who am
I
, lone and lonely soul, cramped up in the back of my bakery, surrounded by sugar and butter and beautiful things I’ll make but never eat
—water, water, everywhere
, my mother used to recite,
and not a drop to drink—
to send
him
for redemption? But he took the pardon and the permission (hedonism is, after all, an actual philosophy) and went, and on his first stop, he came upon what sounds like a heavenly olive oil ice cream. Just thinking of it gives me little shivers of vicarious pleasure, so I’ve spent the afternoon on a recipe to recreate it upon his return, as a gift.
It was served over apricots roasted in honey, and given, as everything in life should be,
cum grano salis
.

That phrase rings doubly right to me: Take everything, yes, with the smallest grain of doubt, of difference to cut the sweetness, but also, let there be a little salt on your cheek as you do, a little sadness in the joy; let there always be the memory of loss in what you find new and opening in your hands.

Not because you need the one to appreciate the other; those Greeks, with their sweet-bitterness, can stuff it
.
I would have been perfectly happy to have an entirely wonderful life with no bumps or bruises or missing things, without losing my
mother or my grandmother or Andy, without being
without.
I don’t believe you need the bitter to appreciate the sweet, but I do think the bitterness is there, and will always be there, inevitably so, and to push it away or hide it in a closet is useless. Better to call it into yourself, to take it up and turn it, by your own hand, into something beautiful.
Lux ex tenebris
, as they say, though I know I’ve mixed my metaphors here.