Sweet Love (5 page)

Bad enough they were long-legged and clear-skinned with shiny thick hair and impossibly athletic bodies. They also spoke fluent French or obscure dialects of Cantonese, understood particle physics and the history of the Franco-Prussian Empire. Plus, they adored him so much they didn’t mind his mother prancing about in her nightgown or the piles of garbage on the back porch. It added to his mystery.

Clearly, I‚ with my awkward teenage mannerisms‚ didn’t stand a chance. And neither did they.

No matter how pretty or smart the girl, she never returned for the next break. It was as if Michael were searching for the unreachable ideal, the utopian woman who didn’t exist. That was until he came home from college senior year smitten by a New Jersey senatorial candidate reputed to be the next John F. Kennedy. Finally, he had found his true love: politics.

But, geesh, the phrases he used—“man of the people” and “visionary”— were so naïve that even in my high school innocence they sounded silly. No one’s really a man of the people, I scoffed. Certainly not someone with a mansion near Jackie O and a stable or two of prize Thoroughbreds.

Mom’s theory was that though Michael had been raised—if you could use that word—to pursue his intellect, he’d grown up in a house free of necessary discernment. (Translation? Free of henpecking gossip, the bailiwick of my mother and her sister, Aunt Charlotte, Queens of Schadenfreude. ) He did not know, as I did, that politicians were all hot air and bluster, that campaign promises weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Michael honestly bought the propaganda that one good person could change the world.

Absurd.

I had to hand it to him, though. He never lost faith. When I last bumped into him six years ago he was working as the tireless campaign manager for Carlos FitzWilliams, a long-shot candidate to represent the Eleventh Congressional District in Massachusetts. By that time, Michael had achieved a reputation in Washington for sending underdogs to the Beltway, and no wonder. The guy was on fire.

It was baffling. Here he was in his forties and still he
believed
. He believed FitzWilliams was the Eleventh District’s one and only answer, the Second Coming who could clean up Congress and save the district’s downtowns. It was like he was sixteen, ecstatic over the zip-line he’d strung from his bedroom window to the garage, gushing about speed and friction.

Except he wasn’t sixteen. Nor was he—to my chagrin—available. Two years before, he’d eloped with a Virginia debutante named Cassie who, according to Paul, was the kind of pearl-wearing sex kitten most prepper boys dreamed of marrying. Pretty, blond, athletic, super teeth, and a devoted sister of “Pi Phi.”

In other words, so not Michael’s type.

Not that his new marriage had anything to do with the vigorous way I plunged into investigating Carlos FitzWilliams. Yes, I was divorced by then and I couldn’t help feeling slightly depressed and rejected that Michael had married another woman without ever once considering me.

But we were adults now, professionals, and FitzWilliams, I discovered, was a letch with a penchant for young campaign staffers. There was no choice, I had to out him and in so doing, ruin Michael’s career.

He never forgave me for not holding the story until he could finish his own inquiries, as he requested. And I never forgave him for asking. After his venomous diatribe chastising me for “selling out,” all communication between us ceased.

I haven’t spoken to him for six years.

As for the night I declared my undying love when I was a tender seventeen? That’s why I have to talk to my best friend, Liza, the only other person who knows my awful secret. Besides Michael, of course.

He, I pray, will forget.

“You set me up!”

“I did not. That’s a blatant lie and you know it,” Liza declares when she answers the door half dressed in a white terry cloth robe, her flowing hair dripping wet and curly.

She’s one of those sexy big-boned women whose breasts are so generous and brown eyes so smoky most men don’t notice she is, according to those stiffs in the insurance industry, fat.

“By the way,” she asks. “What are we talking about?”

“You know perfectly well what we’re talking about.” I step over a suitcase and make my way into her incredible apartment with its twelve-foot ceilings, fireplaces, and view overlooking Commonwealth Avenue. “Your sneaky dessert class.”

“Oh, that,” she says. “Yeah. You’re right. But I got more important things to worry about right now, kiddo. My life is over. Walk with me.”

I follow Liza down the carpeted hallway, past her massive red and white kitchen, where Marisol, her assistant, a plucked weasel with hair yanked so tightly into a ponytail the veins on her forehead throb nervously, is furiously thumbing a BlackBerry while simultaneously barking into a cell phone something about hotel reservations in Skopje.

Tonight Liza leaves for a monthlong pilgrimage to search for authentic recipes in the old Yugoslavia and Romania. Serbia and Bosnia are the dernier cri cuisines on the horizon, according to her, and so easy to modify with shortcuts.

Whenever she says this, I picture yak smothered in Campbell’s Creamy Mushroom and nearly barf.

This is Liza’s forte: writing The Hot Cook’s Guide to Haute Cuisine series on how to make international dishes with six cheap ingredients, no more—for people who just don’t give a damn.

Think Chateaubriand served with a Lipton’s Onion Soup mix demi-glace or, as in the case of Liza’s last mega best seller
Hot Haute Indian!
, chana dal made with chickpeas and a can of tomato rice.

I know, disgusting, but the woman sells by the truckload. She’s the Queen of Costco, where her cookbooks are stacked by the foot next to a large cardboard cutout of her (trimmed down) proudly displaying a can of creamy celery soup—her favorite standby.

“My tenth trip in two years and you’d think it was our first, we’re so disorganized,” Liza says, scurrying into her bedroom and into her all-white master bath. Slamming the door, she adds breathlessly, “I’m so glad you’re here. You can be a witness.”

“To what?”

“To me firing Marisol.”

Oh, no. Here we go again. Liza going nuts before one of these recipe excursions.

Partly it’s the stress of packing up and going abroad for weeks and weeks. Partly it’s the fact that for all her traveling, Liza is the worst flier alive. Passengers in first class have been known to volunteer to sit in coach after an hour of my best friend yelling, “We’re going to die!” at the top of her voice and clutching the hand rests so fiercely, she once broke one on British Airways.

“You’re not going to fire Marisol. She’s your right-hand woman.” I drop the toilet seat and push Liza onto it. “Where’s your Valium?”

“You don’t know. She completely screwed up the Budva end. We were supposed to meet with Herzy in Montenegro on the second and it turns out he’ll be in Paris and there’s no way we can get together now. The most cutting-edge chef in all of Serbia and I’ll be stuck in the Riviera. I can’t take Valium. I’ve got too much to do. Our flight leaves at ten.”

“Okay.” I spy the Valium bottle by the sink and pop it open. “Do you want one or two?”

She holds up a finger and I tuck a little V tablet under her tongue. Psychosomatically it does the trick. Liza instantly chills.

“Thank you,” she says.

“You’re welcome.”

“I won’t fire Marisol. You’re right. She’s a doll.”

“Good girl.” I pat her on her wet head. “That’s wise.”

Then, as if just registering my complaint, she says, “How’d you find out I arranged the dessert class?”

“I’m a reporter. I got instincts. One of them being that no way would Mom have chosen the high-falutin’ Boston Cooking School on her own. Then, when I checked online and saw the price for three classes was two hundred and fifty dollars, my suspicions really took off.”

Liza hops up and digs into her makeup bag, slapping on moisturizer, dotting on foundation, running sticks around her eyes‚ and lining her lips in bright red as I go on.

“A few calls, a few emails, and lo and behold I discover Our Lady of Miracles raffled off Boston Cooking School dessert classes last month to raise capital to remodel the parish kitchen and who should be head of the fund-raising committee? My oldest and dearest friend, Liza Librecz, she the descendant of traveling, deceiving Gypsies.”

Liza flicks on the blow-dryer and shouts, “So your mom won the classes for fifty bucks. Big deal. Doesn’t mean she can’t give them as a gift. It was a good cause.”

“You’re missing my point,” I shout back. “I know you rigged that raffle, Liza, and not because you were desperate for me to learn how to make cherry flambé. As always, there’s a man involved.”

“Hah! How true.”

“So you admit it.”

“Sure.” She turns off the blow-dryer and fluffs her hair, frowning at her reflection in the mirror. “I like him. I think he’s drop-dead sexy and eminently fuckable. Is that a crime?”

“You haven’t seen him in . . .” I have to count back to the last time Liza would have run in to Michael. Probably the night I attacked him. “In thirty years. You have no idea if he’s eminently fuckable.”

“For your information, I ran in to him last week, right after I taught my last recreational class at the cooking school. Six-Ingredient Meals Under an Hour.”

“What was Michael doing at the cooking school?”

“Michael?” Liza wrinkles her nose. “I was talking about Chef Rene D’Ours. You know, your instructor? The father of my future children?”

I’m flummoxed. Throughout my entire rant we’ve been talking about two different men.

“Have you ever seen Chef Rene?” Liza bubbles, skipping over our misunderstanding. “The spitting image of Fabio except he likes real butter, not the fake stuff, being that he’s French.”

“An I-Can’t-Believe-He’s-Not-Fabio.”

“Exactly. Better yet, he just broke up with his girlfriend, an obnoxious Italian prima donna with a spoiled little dog. This is my window of opportunity and you’re the woman to push me through it. When you take that class, talk me up to Rene, make me sound dangerous and sexy so he’ll ask me out, okay?”

Hold on. Hold on. I have to press my fingers to my temples to stop the whirring within. “This is not what I came here for,” I say, sitting on the edge of her Jacuzzi. “I came to chew you out for setting me up with Michael at a time when I need to distance myself from him as far as possible.”

Liza blinks and says, “Why?”

“Aha!” I snap an accusatory finger. “So you knew Michael was taking the class.”

“Of course I knew. I sold him the raffle ticket.”

“You did?”

Twirling up a lipstick she goes, “Uh-huh. Hunted him down at his consulting headquarters and everything.”

She’s amazing. Where does she find the time? “And then you rigged the result so he’d win the class and I would, too.”

“Duh. You think you two ended up in that class by chance?” She caps the lipstick and tosses it back into the bag. “It’s Our Lady of Miracles, Julie, not Our Lady of the Ridiculous Statistical Coincidences.”

Even for Liza, who’s legendary for throwing surprise parties and playing pranks, this is a topper. Still, something’s off. I haven’t spoken of Michael in years and while she must remember him from our childhood, I doubt she would have gone out of the way to track him down at his office and sell him tickets to a church raffle without the prodding of another party.

“Someone put you up to it,” I say. “Who?”

“Uh . . .” Biting her lip and ruining her fresh lipstick, she says hesitantly, “That’s a secret. I’m under strict orders not to reveal his or her identity.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Don’t. You can go to jail for that. Come on.” Throwing open the bathroom door‚ she marches into her climate-controlled walk-in closet with its electronic coat hangers and luscious cedar shelves. “All I can tell you is that the person who asked me to set you up had your best interests at heart.”

While she figures out which of the one hundred black pants to change into, I try to figure out who could have been behind such a scheme. Not Em. Not Donald. Not Paul because, well, he’s an idiot. Not anyone at work. And then it hits me—the most obvious choice.

“Mom. This was her idea.”

Liza throws off her robe to reveal blindingly pink lace underwear. “Your mother? Get real. You know how she felt about you going after Michael back in the day. She was dead set against it.”

“Yeah, but that was years ago when she called me a tramp and said he’d never respect me if I threw myself at him, that I should keep a safe distance whenever he was around. Maybe she’s changed her mind.”

Liza snorts and steps into a pair of Nanette Lepore striped trousers. “Betty Mueller change her mind? She’s always had a bee in her bonnet about Michael, admit it. Anything Slayton was never good enough for her daughter. She wanted you to marry a doctor from an old Boston family, not the wild offspring of the neighborhood drunks.”

“And look where that marriage got me.” Donald was a big baby of a man who got freaked out by fatherhood. “Nowhere.”

“It got you Em, don’t forget,” she says quietly.

“Touché.” I’m dutifully humbled.

“Your problem,” she goes on, flipping between white silk blouses that, from where I’m sitting on a bench, seem perfectly identical, “is that you are still lugging around a case of sour grapes because Michael rejected you when you were seventeen and then had the audacity to marry another woman, even though they have been divorced for years now.”

“That’s absurd. I do so not have sour grapes.”

Yanking a blouse off a hanger, she says, “Possibly not. But you know that’s what Michael thinks. You told me so yourself.”

“It was only a theory.”

“Have you ever asked him?”

“Would have been hard to do considering we’re on nonspeaking terms.” There’s a tag hanging off her sleeve that’s bugging me. Opening my purse, I search for my nail scissors to cut it. “The only thing I’m going to ask Michael is to keep his trap shut when they do my background check.” Aha. Found it.