Sweet (8 page)

When the dough was finished and Jules had interrupted himself to say, “There, mine’s pretty done. I bet yours is done by now, too,” Teddy nodded in agreement—and even though he knew Jules couldn’t see him, he was sure Jules would sense him nodding through some miniscule change in his breathing or the invisible tension between them slackening just the slightest bit. And he did seem to know, because Jules paused and made a satisfied noise that
sounded as if all the spring-coiled readiness had slid from his body. “This taste,” Jules sighed, “is like Proust’s madeleine.”

They spent an hour playing with the dough and molding it into shapes they wouldn’t reveal to each other. Teddy felt childish and happy and inept and far too adult all at once as he listened to the rhythmic way Jules breathed and spoke, the way his voice moved in and out of silence, like the advance and retreat of shallow waves that left in their wake little broken treasures on the shore.

Only his fingers moved, fumbling and busy and blind as he listened, his whole self waiting for Jules to tell him the next thing, whatever it might be.

*

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

by Chef Jules Burns of Buttermilk Bakery

April 5: Virgin Territory (
Deflouring a Tart and Other Fun Things to Do in the Kitchen)

This one? I’m just in it for the title, really. I have no intention of writing about tarts. (Deflouring, however, that’s fair; I am going to give you some suggestions for pastry work without flour, so I suppose you can give me points for that part.)

I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately, thinking a lot about my past; most especially, as the weather warms and it becomes more common to see the raggedy New York sparrows picking through the garbage cans in Jackson Square, I think about people I’ve loved and lost. (If the boys trolloping around my neighborhood are any indication, I’m living in the hipster tattoo capital of the universe, and boy, do the hipsters love to tattoo birds on themselves; so I’ve learned, and perhaps you already know, that sparrows symbolize companionship, and that they are also the harbingers of death and the catchers of lost souls. So I really was making a logical leap there, and I’m asking you to trust me with it and follow along for a spell.)

 I miss my
grandmother. I’ve lost many people in my life, some to death, some to ill-fated arguments, some to the simple attrition of abandoned intentions, but of all the people I’ve lost, I miss my grandmother the most. She raised me after my mom left—my mom ran off to join the circus just after I was born, my dad used to tell me, too antsy and too artsy and too tied to constant change to stay in one place and raise a kid. So my grandmother—my dad’s mom—took over and helped raise me. She was my One and Only
while my dad worked, and she was the most wonderful combination of mother and grandmother (steadfast, stern, but doting and indulgent). But she died when I was ten years old—so, I know, I’ve lived far more of my life without her than with her, and the memories I have of her are, most likely
—
or so they tell me
—
idealized. But my grandmother was, I’m still confident, a uniquely amazing person. She was very smart and knew exactly six hundred and eighty-five stories by heart and played the guitar and liked to spend afternoons with me making secret-saving boxes decorated with sequins and rock salt glitter, or collecting pretty pebbles from the riverbank near our house (which was, I realized later, not so much a river as a concrete pipe into which all the houses’ gutters emptied during heavy rain, but my grandmother was a recovered hippie and still a free spirit and entirely undeterred). And on days when it was really pouring outside and it was just the two of us, because my dad worked all day painting rich peoples’ houses in tasteful colors named for foods we couldn’t ever afford (avocado, mocha, bisque, brandy),
my grandmother and I would make deliciously rich marzipan and knead into it several brightly brilliant colors and sit at the kitchen table all afternoon making beautifully clumsy little sculpted treats we’d later think far too precious to ever eat. I did, however, much to my grandmother’s light-laughing delight, always consume more marzipan dough than I sculpted. Perhaps this was the point.

The taste of marzipan puts me right back in that kitchen. I’m watching her, bent low over her work at the table, etching a face into the dough with a toothpick, humming softly to herself as if she’s entirely forgotten she’s not sitting there alone. If I offer to braid her hair, she’ll let me, and I like to do it, because her hair is long and softly curling and the same color as mine, but so much more beautiful, and I like to slither it between my fingers like a ribbon and put little kisses on the nape of her neck and listen to her hum as she works. I am six years old. My marzipan treats are always flowers, which are among the few things my stubby little fingers can accomplish with the dough, but my grandmother always makes people. This is, in part, why we can never eat them when they dry; she names them (Jack Inbox, or Sam’s son Delyle
, or the twins, Pat
‘n
’ Pending), and tells me such incredible stories about their lives that I lavish upon them all my hope and love and belief.

The night my poor, uninitiated father, exhausted and hungry and really in
no mood,
came home from painting the entire interior of City Hall and, quite innocently bit the head off of Jimmy Headdress
—
a hat-maker who’d gone crazy from mercury exposure and learned to play, instead, a wicked electric guitar
—
I subsequently terrified and surprised that gentle man with the heat of my anger and hysteria and
was inconsolable all evening until finally, late in the night, I cried myself
to sleep.

I miss my grandmother, but I know very well that mostly what I have left of her to miss are stories I’ve told myself so many times they’re only words; all the sense-memory has faded and gone, like the last scent of her perfume from her button box, saved like a treasure under my bed for all thos
e years. I miss her more fiercely, sometimes, because I know that things fade. Over time, I have slowly forgotten so much of her it’s painful to recognize, even though I know I couldn’t have grown up and gone on with my life had I not done so. Everyone has to let go of their past in this way, whether one loses it to death or simply the washing forward of time, but it is so much harder to let go when it’s mixed up in mourning.

I didn’t intend this to get maudlin, though perhaps I should have seen it coming when I got out the almonds and orange flower water. Marzipan will always remind me of my grandmother, and it will always make me a little sad.

But recently, I taught a friend to make marzipan and, though it was sad for me, the experience was touched with something else, too. He listened while I talked about my
mother running off, and my
grandmother, who left me, when she died, her entire collection of cookbooks a
nd spices and copper pots and too many sweet-and-bitter memories of her. And after I’d talked for quite a while, it seemed I’d run out of words, as though I was, for the moment at least, finished telling the story. And we worked for a while in near-silence, which was punctuated only by the occasional chuckle or frustrated sigh, the clatter of a knife or the scrape of a chair on the wooden floor, and then, eventually, we began to talk about new things: how we both hate Central Park because it’s too ambitious and not nearly wild enough; how we were both tormented and adored in high school in equal measure; how each of us learned to cook by helping someone else in the kitchen (his mother, my grandmother)
as small boys during the long hours our fathers were away at work (and how this turned me towards cooking and turned him resolutely away from it).

I won’t tell you all our stories here
—
some are hidden in the marzipan (my sculptures, this time, were people and playful bugs and model cars and fruits of all varieties). I will tell you that it was one of the loveliest stretches of time I’ve spent playing with food since those rainy afternoons with my grandmother. And what was loveliest, perhaps, was the fact that I was able, in the same moment, both to remember her and to let her go a little bit. And the marzipan began to take on new flavors for me, too
—
bittersweet longing, yes, but also newness (which is a bright citrus) and joy and silliness. And this time, I added pistachios to the almonds, which cut the hint of bitterness with its richness and sweet
warmth.

I realized, as I played with new tastes and stories and shapes and a few old ones, too, in my grandmother’s memory (I couldn’t resist making a little mad-hatter guitarist and took great satisfaction in attaching
—
firmly
—
his head), that the memory of my grandmother didn’t fade when I shared the marzipan
with someone new. In fact, the memory grew stronger. I could
almost smell her perfume, a spicy note lingering under the sweetness of orange flower. And her memory became a part of this new connection, part of this sweet and awkward evening we shared, a permanent part of the emerging story of my new friendship.

***

He came, as he had last time, carrying a small parcel, and laid it carefully on the counter in front of ‘Trice.

“I know he doesn’t ever come out here,” Teddy said, “and I know I’m not allowed to go back there. But would you take this to the back for me? I brought it for him to try, since he helped me again.”

‘Trice peeked. “What is that?”

“That is my attempt at a marzipan calla lily.”

She looked at him steadily. “Listen, Grasshopper, I know you’re probably not an expert here, but that,” she pointed, “is most definitely a vagina. I would know.”

“Um,” said Teddy, which was the only response he could muster.

“Perfect for him,” ‘Trice said, turning so quickly the beads in her hair clacked against each other with a plastic slap.
“BRB.”

She was gone through the kitchen door so fast that Teddy didn’t have time to call after her, to remind her to take the marzipan. He sighed and re-wrapped the foil, carefully, then precisely aligned the package first with the edge of the cash register, then with the container of straws by the tip jar and finally with the counter’s edge, and waited.

*

“Urgent bathroom break!” ‘Trice said. “There’s a customer, but this couldn’t wait. You take it.”

Jules turned from peeling apples to scowl at her. “You’re joking.”

“Nope,” she said. “Bladder the size of a peanut. Very bad for all of us if I stay out there. Probably a health code violation. Very potentially soggy situation.” She slapped her hands on his shoulders, pressing and rubbing hard over his heart. “You can handle this. Up and at ‘em! You can do it if you try! Climb every mountain! Follow every rainbow! Ain’t no mountain high enough! Go get ‘
em, Tiger!”

“In the time it took you to pep talk me,” he said, “you could have made a Bundt cake.” But ‘Trice was already gone, and the plywood door to the bathroom had made the distinctive
pop-clump
sound that meant it had been firmly closed and locked. Jules sighed, tightened the knot of the apron strings around his waist and pushed himself into the shop front.

“What can I get for you?” he asked as he rounded the counter’s corner and came face to face with his key-losing, unwitting gentleman caller.

The bump of the moment, in which everything around them stopped breathing, swung the world up beneath
them both so hard it jolted the sun-glittering strings of crystals overhead and made them rattle and shake a spray of glitter over everything.

“Oh,” said Jules. “May I—”

His voice, he thought, maybe it was his voice, too shrill, too high and girlish and completely ridiculous, because the man looked stricken and stepped back, pulling with him the package that lay on the counter between them, as if he were going to tuck it under his arm like a football and run for an end zone several miles away.

“Would you—” he tried again, but trailed off weakly. He might have tried a third time, since dignity was already out the window, but for the way the man was looking at him, wide-eyed, mistrustful, red-faced. Jules pulled at the knot at his waist, tightening the apron strings more securely. “I’m sorry, I… would you—”

The man shook his head and seemed to put a great amount of effort into dragging his eyes up to Jules’s face. Once their eyes met, however, he held a level gaze, bright with humor, and Jules was locked where he stood, looking back. The man smiled and cleared his throat.

“Hello,” he said.

Seven

Hello.

To utter this simple word was all Teddy could manage, standing, as he was, as he had waited to be, in front of the man he’d wanted to meet for weeks, the man who always hid in the kitchen, it seemed, when Teddy appeared, whose hands—long-fingered, pale, graceful—had mixed and held and shaped the food he’d eaten. He was taller than Teddy had imagined, and slim, with sharp gray eyes and delicate features. He stood still and very straight under Teddy’s gaze, like a dancer, the knot of his apron perfectly centered and tight at his waist and not a spot on his coat, which was brilliantly white and crisp and perfectly fitted. He was balletic and beautiful. But—and Teddy’s heart stopped halfway up his throat—

On his left shoulder, like a badge, was a yellow sticky note with Teddy’s doodle (an excuse for a grasshopper) and scrawl (
I quit
) in red pen.

Perhaps it was meant, he thought, as a quiet message, a wink, a just-between-you-and-me. Perhaps it was meant to mock him. Perhaps it was a warning. Teddy couldn’t read the little sign for meaning, but it took every ounce of courage he had to raise his gaze from that yellow square, look the man in the eyes and whisper that word. The marzipan flower in its foil packet now seemed ridiculous; it had been meant as an announcement, as a revelation, as the gift of his own self, an unfurling, but if Jules already knew who he was, it seemed, instead, superfluous and too crafty. Shabby. He curled his hand over the foil packet.

Jules looked at him for a long, silent moment, his lips pressed together in a thin line, before he inhaled sharply and asked again, “How may I help you?”

“Oh,” said Teddy, backing away from the counter another fraction of an inch, hoping his discomfort wasn’t too plainly visible.
“
‘Trice—she usually—”

“
‘Trice,” Jules said, his voice heavy and flat. “One minute. I’ll be right with you.” Teddy’s heart sank when Jules turned to push back through the kitchen door. The moment was all cement, cold and rough and impossibly hard. Jules pushed at the door, but it wouldn’t move; he shouldered hard at it until Teddy heard a series of muffled thumps from the other side.

“No way, you chicken-baby!”
‘Trice hollered. “The kitchen is closed!”

Jules gave the unyielding door one or two more hearty shoves, then slapped the wood once with the flat of his hand and turned, his back stiff, and his face blushing all the way down into his collar, to smile at Teddy.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “This is embarrassing. She’s usually better behaved than this. You’re stuck with me, I guess.” He shrugged and looked up at Teddy through half-lowered eyelids. “What would you like?”

“Well.” Teddy wanted, more than anything, to say nothing, to turn and burst out of the door and onto the street and not stop walking until he got all the way back to his office, or his apartment. Or Peoria. Jules would not even look at him, but cast his glance anywhere else: the pastry case, the plate glass window, the countertop.

“
‘Trice usually picks for me,” Teddy croaked, trying to stop his hand from squeezing the foil packet too tightly.

“Picks,” Jules said, as if he were practicing the word, re-pronouncing without a sense of its meaning. As if, Teddy thought, it were the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

He was about to mutter an apology, turn and dash. There were miles between Grasshopper—clever, clear-eyed and suave—and
him
, awkward in his gaping gray suit, a bit too short and fumblingly un-charming and with his best offering—slightly squashed, lumpy marzipan genitalia—sweating in its foil package. When he was young, he felt nervousness
blossom with a sense of immanent joy, as if everything would eventually unknot and fall loose and beautiful at his feet. Teddy didn’t know how he’d gotten so twisted away from that, how he’d come to feel so insignificant and just not
himself
anymore, but these were the highly polished, too-tight shoes he was now standing in. Perhaps it was hubris when he was younger, but perhaps he’d lost something powerful when he’d tamed himself out of that, too.

“I—” he said, knowing that he should simply pick something and be gone, something that could be dropped in a bag, but something that spoke, too, of his excellent taste and his true appreciation for Jules’s art, a choice that would, in his absence, suggest that he was perhaps a little more interesting, a little more worthwhile than his stammering and his red face and shaking hands might suggest. “I—” he said, and then, “Oh!” because he felt, wrapped around his hips, two very small hands pushing him to the side
with tiny-fisted force.

Teddy stepped aside, reddening again when he saw his assailant, who could not have been more than three years old. She had a wide round face, knotted blonde hair tied with a fraying blue ribbon and a pot-bellied, squat body stuffed into—bursting out of—a pair of brown corduroy overalls.

“Cleo, keep your jam-hands off of other people,” said the woman behind her. She was a longer, leaner version of the little girl, slightly harried; her own blonde hair was a ratty mess spilling over her sharp shoulders. “Remember the talk we had about respecting other people’s space? You should apologize to him.” She nodded at Teddy, widening her eyes and smiling, as if she were speaking more to him than to the little girl.

The girl looked up at Teddy with watery brown eyes. She held his gaze, then turned and slapped her hands and chin onto the counter and looked up through her thick bangs at Jules.

“Cleo! Nice ribbon!” Jules said, fingering the blue silk. He looked past Teddy to the harried woman and said, “The cake, I presume?”

She nodded, and he turned to pull a box out of the pastry case, setting it gently on the counter and opening the top so that she could see inside.

“Perfect,” said the woman. “Charlie will love this. Charlie loves everything you bake. This is perfect.”

“If chocolate doesn’t fix forty for him, I don’t know what will,” Jules laughed.

The woman laughed. “What the hell do you know? What are you, twenty?”

“Thank you, but no, well past that,” Jules said, his eyes flickering to Teddy’s for a moment. “I’m just cursed with this ridiculous baby face. I still get carded sometimes when I try to buy a drink.”

Teddy watched as the little girl’s pointer finger, deliberate, outstretched, zoomed toward the top of the cake. Slim milliseconds before it could swoop into the frosting, both her mother and Jules, without looking or stopping their conversation, caught her wrist and pulled it
back. She slipped her hand away and promptly stuck her unsweetened finger in her mouth.

“Well, you’re lucky.” The woman sighed. “So’s your boyfriend,” she said, giving Jules a significant look, then glancing at Teddy. For no reason Teddy could explain, something inside him expanded, warm and slow, as if he were suddenly filled with honey. Jules, his skin crimson, shook his head and concentrated on tying a gold ribbon around the closed cake box.

“I don’t,” he said, but didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he rang a total on the register.

Cleo, who had wedged herself against the counter, stretched one dimpled arm up and dropped, one at a time, four dried and slightly
grubby kidney beans onto the counter, then beamed up at Jules, who looked amused and mystified in equal parts.

“She’s paying,” her mother said to Jules. “Cleo, my darling, the cake costs a little more than that. I’m going to give some money, too, so we can buy it together.” She dug into her wallet and produced a few bills.

“Four beans? I think,” Jules said, “that four beans can buy a lot of things here. What do you think four beans could buy?” He glanced quickly at the woman, who nodded, smiling. Cleo pushed past Teddy and pressed herself against the glass of the pastry case.

“Nose and mouth off!” her mother called, and Cleo stepped back a foot. After a moment, she pointed, excited.

“That guy!”

Teddy could have sworn that Jules went even redder. In the top corner of the case, on a square white plate, sat several perfectly shaped marzipan figures: a little yellow dog, a guitar player in a wide hat, a bear cub. Cleo’s finger pressed against the glass, pointing at a small, bright green grasshopper.

“The dog?” Jules asked, picking up a pair of tongs and opening the case.

“No!” Cleo giggled, pointing again. “
That
guy!”

“The baby bear
?” He pointed the tongs at the brown figure.

“The green guy!” Cleo shrieked, laughing.

Jules looked a little unsure. He glanced right at Teddy, smiled tightly and took the figure from the case, then wrapped it in bakery tissue.

“The green guy, as it so happens,” Jules said to Cleo, “costs exactly four beans.”

“Just like the guy on his coat,” Cleo’s mother said, half to Jules and half to Cleo.

“What?” Jules said. “What?” His free hand touched the spot where Cleo’s mother had pointed and he held it there over the note, fingers fluttering, tongs wobbling slightly in his other hand, before he peeled the paper from his coat. He glanced at it, and then quickly crumpled it in his fist. (Teddy felt it as if those fingers were squeezing around his chest, as if they were crumpling up his hope.) Wide-eyed, Jules looked at the kitchen door and then back at Cleo’s mother.

“Tell Jules thank you,” Cleo’s mother said.

Teddy couldn’t hear the rest of the exchange, though he watched Cleo smile up at Jules and take the marzipan figure from his hands, then hold it cradled in its tissue nest, as she walked out of the shop. Teddy couldn’t hear anything because: upon noticing the grasshopper in the case;
upon watching Jules gently lift it, his eyes flitting between Cleo and Teddy; upon hearing Cleo’s mother mention the sign on Jules’s chest, sound outside his own head had gone all white and clear and empty, and he was left only with a pulsing roar in his ears that he knew, distantly, was the racing rush-bang of his own heart.

*

“Magic beans,” the man said to the counter. It came out sounding like an old-fashioned oath.

“What?” Jules was barely able to whisper. His throat felt full of sand and thorns. It had been, by any estimation, a horribly embarrassing few minutes and, even though the people standing in front of him had probably not understood the full significance of any of it, he still felt like an idiot, blushing and stumbling in front of the mystified looking man.

He crumpled the sticky note more tightly and thought about the thirty-six different ways he might murder ‘Trice.

“She paid with magic beans,” the man said, clearing his throat and speaking more clearly.

“Right,” Jules said. It was strange, the two of them speaking to the counter between them.
But Jules’s humiliation hung like a wet rag around his shoulders, and he was still reeling from the hard smack of two worlds colliding, of coming face to face with the man he
’
d secretly watched, and, in the same moment, having the ridiculousness of his flirtation with Grasshopper broadcast like a joke or an embarrassing secret. Jules felt, suddenly, foolish and shallow,
unfaithful
, stringing himself between two men whose names he didn’t know, who knew nothing of
him
, scattering his attention on the wind like a handful of wildflower seeds and entirely forgetting himself in the process, forgetting Andy, forgetting everything that had happened to put him here, where he usually stood, stoic, with the hint of sadness he
’
d wrapped around his shoulders as safe and beautiful and warm as a silk scarf. He could not look up. He pushed a bean toward the man. “Beanstalk?”

The man laughed, loud and sharp, one single sound,
then seemed to catch himself and stopped. But it broke something open; the air seemed to thin, and Jules could move, could let his eyes wander up to the man’s face. He was smiling, lightly, a small smile, kind, his eyes on his own hands, which were folded loosely around a foil package on the countertop between them.

“I could use a golden egg,” the man said quietly and took the bean, then slipped it into the front pocket on his suit.

“Tea,” Jules said, and the man’s eyes darted up, locking with Jules’s for one grinding second, confused again, before they slipped away, focusing again on the counter.
“You could use some tea,” Jules clarified, “and these.” He placed two pieces of shortbread on a plate
and pushed the plate toward the man, then turned to draw some hot water for the tea.

“Thanks,” the man said to his back. “These are…”

Jules dropped a teabag into the water and turned to face the man again. “Chai-laced shortbread cookies. And chamomile tea. Because Cleo is a sticky tornado.
And chamomile is calming. And tea is a surfactant. To help with the jam hands.” He glanced at Teddy’s hips, at the place where Cleo had gripped him, and then, feeling his face get hotter, tore his eyes away. “Which it won’t really do, since chamomile isn’t really a tea. But—” he stopped himself at the man’s gentle laughter and looked up. “I picked for you. I hope that’s okay.”

“More than okay,” the man said, smiling and a little red. “Thank you.”

When he began to dig for his wallet, Jules held his palms firmly on the counter, because they wanted to fly out and grab the man’s hand to stop him, to touch him, to hold, for a moment, something that looked to Jules completely warm. He shook his head. “No, please, on the house,” he said. “Because I picked.”