Aftertaste (14 page)

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Authors: Meredith Mileti

BOOK: Aftertaste
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I let Jake's words wash over me. A civil suit on top of everything else? The whole offer to pay me the extra money was part of a ploy? I'm so overwhelmed that, for once, my reliable temper has failed to ignite. I sink into the sofa.
“Look,” Jake says. “Don't worry about it. I've found another alternative. The money is no longer as much of an issue. I just want this to be over. Ethan tells me you're offering to leave New York. If I can convince Nicola to drop all of the charges and claims against you, make this whole Order of Protection violation go away, will you just . . .” He lets the sentence hang there, as if I'll somehow understand the perversity of his suggestion without his having to sully himself by uttering the words.
But I refuse to spare him. I stare up at him, our eyes locked in a grim face-off until Jake is forced to turn away. I suppose I should find it encouraging, evidence that he has some remaining scruples, that he can't look me in the eye as he gathers the courage to sell his daughter.
“We will drop all charges and claims against you if you agree to leave New York for at least six months, grant an immediate divorce, and forego all child support.” He says this quickly, as if he has rehearsed it many times, and exhales deeply once he's finished. “You still walk away with well over a million dollars, plenty of money to take care of you and Chloe until you decide what you want to do next. I'm not going to try to be an involved father, Mira. You're free to walk away. Go away. I'll relinquish my parental rights, if that's what you want. She doesn't need to be one of those messed up kids with two families who are constantly battling each other.”
“Jesus Christ, Jake! Don't you pretend for one minute that what you're doing is good for her or for me. Just tell me one thing. Is it true? Is she pregnant?” He turns away and reaches for his raincoat. “I'm sorry,” is all he has to say.
A couple of hours later I make one last call to Jake. By nine thirty I'm on the phone to Jerry, telling him I want to settle and filling him in on the substance of Jake's offer. I'm efficient and businesslike, and if Jerry is startled by my composure, by the way I have just been able to let go of everything I had fought so long and so hard to keep, he doesn't let on.
“Mira, I think this is the best thing for you to do under the circumstances,” Jerry says. “You're going to be fine, you know.”
“I know, Jerry. Thanks.” When I hang up I'm numb, and I wonder if this is what it feels like to die, this feeling of letting go of almost everything you've ever cherished.
 
I spend Christmas Eve packing up the last remaining bits and pieces of my life into four large boxes, which I lug, one at a time, to the post office on Hudson Street, each time standing in a long line of procrastinating New Yorkers cheerfully waiting to mail their Christmas presents, none of which has any chance of arriving on time.
With the exception of my dining room set, which Hope has volunteered to keep for me, I've arranged to put most of my remaining furniture in storage. Hope has also enthusiastically agreed to sublet my apartment, and I can tell by her speculative gaze as she appraises the room that she's anxious to move in. Her apartment is small, a one bedroom, which she, in turn, has sublet to a newly married couple she met in her romance writers group. This is good news, because I'd rather sublet my apartment to Hope, who has promised to give it back to me when I return.
Renata and Michael insist that Chloe and I stay with them over Christmas. On Christmas Eve, Renata prepares the traditional Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes. We dine on fresh lobster, crab, and shrimp, clams casino, calamari, baccalà, and mussels—none of which I have any appetite for, but, touched by her thoughtfulness, do my best to eat. Michael fills up an entire memory card with photos of Chloe opening her presents and of me reading her “The Night Before Christmas.”
The day after New Year's, Renata and Michael arrive at my empty apartment to drive Chloe and me to the airport. As we fight to make room for the suitcases in the trunk of Michael's Prius, Renata removes an insulated food carrier containing two freshly smoked mozzarella di buffalo and a small round of Pecorino Romano.
“A little comfort food,” she says, handing it to me. “To remind you of home.”
What is she thinking? That I'm going to the ends of the earth? Does she think I'm never coming back? When I remind her that some of the world's best cheeses come from the United States, actually west of the Hudson, she snorts. I tell her she should give Arthur Cole a call. I feign annoyance because I don't want Renata or Michael to see how touched I am that they will actually miss me. Michael holds Chloe while Renata and I reorganize the luggage.
“I give them six months, tops,” Renata says, referring to Jake and Nicola. I'm not sure if she means the relationship or the restaurant. “I've taken them off the list of preferred customers. No more advance notice on special imports.” It's a nice gesture on Renata's part, though I don't really believe her.
Later, on the way to the airport, Michael tells me that Arthur Cole has finished his tome (at close to a thousand pages) on the history of culinary science and is already busy planning his next project on American regional cooking, an idea, Michael reminds me, that I inspired.
“You're his editor, Michael. For God's sake, don't encourage him.” I'm imagining at least three hundred pages devoted to the evolution of the breakfast cereal.
“He must really like you. Arthur is the kind of guy who doesn't change his mind very easily.”
“Tell him that if he's ever in Pittsburgh, I'll take him out for a Primanti sandwich.”
Michael laughs and shakes his head. “If only Arthur Cole had your sense of humor, Mira. A food writer
needs
a sense of humor. You, Mira, deserve someone with a sense of humor,” Michael says definitively, giving my arm a squeeze.
I want to cry.
Standing in front of the Jet Blue terminal at JFK, Renata and I both dab away our tears. “You're going to be fine,” Renata says, holding me at arm's length and giving me a searching look. “Yes,” Michael echoes, “you will.”
“Of course I will,” I tell them, my voice bright and filled with false bravado, as I pull them both close into a final embrace. “Thanks for everything,” I whisper in Renata's ear, my voice husky with unshed tears. “Take good care of Grappa for me, please. You will, won't you?” I know in my heart that Renata will do what she can, with what little influence she has, and this, in the end, is exactly how I want it.
Secondi
She who forgets the pasta is destined to reheat it.
—Anonymous
chapter 13
“Look,” he says, “so thin you can see through it.” The man behind the counter holds up the piece of prosciutto draped over the back of his hand, a gossamer wisp of meat for me to admire. “Melt in your mouth, this will,” he says, curling his lips into a smile.
“Yes, it's beautiful,” I agree.
“I'll put a paper in between each piece 'cause if I don't they'll all stick together. At twenty bucks a pound, I know yins don't want that.” He speaks slowly, as if he means to teach me something, his accent pure Pittsburghese. He curls his hand into a fist and allows the wafer thin pieces of ham to drape over it.
Then, with a bravado-infused flick of his wrist, he delicately transfers the wisps of meat onto the sheet of butcher paper. With one fluid motion he wraps the package, ties it neatly with butcher's string, and hands it to me.
“A piece for the little one? I got something she gonna like. No prosciutto di Parma. Don't waste that when she got no teeth,” he chuckles.
“How about this,” he says, thrusting a large, fat-flecked sausage at me over the counter. “Mortadella, a good mild taste. Not spicy.” He cuts Chloe a piece and removes the casing before putting it into her outstretched hands. She begins to gnaw.
“Look,” he says, laughing. “She know what's good, that little girl.” We both look at her admiringly.
Chloe and I have spent the first few days settling in, buying the various things I didn't own or hadn't packed, which, as it turned out, was a lot. In addition to things like shampoo and conditioner, which my father hasn't needed since roughly 1979, we also had to pick up safety gates for the stairways, little plugs for the electrical outlets, and corner protectors for the coffee and end tables, necessities now that Chloe is becoming mobile.
We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's
Naples at Table
and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal.
The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments.
If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, tourists, and various passers-through begin to clog the Strip, aggressively vying for the precious few available parking spaces, not to mention tables at Pamela's, a retro diner that serves the best hotcakes in Pittsburgh.
On weekends, street vendors crowd the sidewalks, selling beaded necklaces, used CDs, bandanas in exotic colors, cheap, plastic running shoes, and Steelers paraphernalia by the ton. It's a loud, jostling, carnivalesque experience and one of the best things about Pittsburgh. There's even a bakery called Bruno's that sells only biscotti—at least fifteen different varieties daily. Bruno used to be an accountant until he retired from Mellon Bank at the age of sixty-five to bake biscotti full-time. There's a little hand-scrawled sign in the front window that says, G
ET IN
H
ERE
! You can't pass it without smiling.
It's a little after eight when Chloe and I finish up at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company where, in addition to the prosciutto, soppressata, both hot and sweet sausages, fresh ricotta, mozzarella, and imported Parmigiano Reggiano, all essential ingredients for pizza rustica, I've also picked up a couple of cans of San Marzano tomatoes, which I happily note are thirty-nine cents cheaper here than in New York.
I'm planning a feast. Today my father and I will cook Italian peasant food, fried, heavy, greasy stuff. We will make Chloe a fried pizza with plain tomato sauce. She'll get it all over her face and love it. Kid food. It will take all day, and the smell of garlic, oil, and the fried dough will hang in the air for a week. I can already feel my spirits begin to lift.
There's already a line at Bruno's coming out the door and snaking its way along Penn Avenue. Chloe and I join the line, which, this particular Saturday morning, looks to be made up of mostly the well-heeled sipping their Starbucks lattes while waiting for the biscotti flavors of the day.
Bruno's opened years ago, when I was still in high school. I used to come here often then, mostly to do my homework on the worn wooden tables, sipping lattes and nibbling the biscotti ends, the burnt, crusty little bits that Bruno sold for a dollar a bag because they were too small and too well-done for most people to want them.
I'm sure Bruno won't remember me. After all, it's been over twenty years, and even if Bruno is still around, he'll be well over eighty. Chloe and I brave the long line anyway and are finally rewarded a good fifteen minutes later with a black pepper biscotti for me and a vanilla one for Chloe. We are waited on by a young woman who has a thick hoop running through her top lip and another at the top of her ear. No sign of Bruno. Although I'm tempted to ask about him, I don't.
When we arrive home, my father is sitting in the kitchen, the newspaper open in front of him, putting the finishing touches on the crossword. “Good morning, ladies,” he says with a smile.
Chloe strains in her stroller, arching her back and reaching for me to release her. Seeing my hands are full of groceries, my father moves to free her. “Watch out, Dad, she's a mess. She'll spoil your sweater.” Chloe's hands are greasy from the sausage and the biscotti, which she has managed to completely dissolve by gumming it into a glutinous paste, most of which is now smeared all over her face.
“Ah, I see you've been to Bruno's,” my father says, dampening a paper towel and handing it to me.
“Yes,” I tell him, wiping Chloe's face and hands. “We brought you some. Black pepper and cornmeal are still my favorites.” I put the packages down. “We didn't see Bruno, though. Is he—”
“Retired. Or semi anyway. I see him there every once in a while. His family, a son and a couple of grandkids, run the business now.”
“Hey,” I say, fishing around in the groceries for the bag from Bruno's. “I got the fixings for pizza rustica. Want to help?”
“Well, okay, but I've got a few things to do this morning,” he says, studying his watch. “If you start the dough, I'll help you when I get back.”
Once my father leaves, I finish putting away the groceries, taking inventory, as I do, of the contents of his refrigerator. As a cook I generally believe that you can tell a lot about people by what they keep in their refrigerators. What comforts them, what they need to have on hand to sustain them.
Bon Appétit
magazine publishes an interview with a different famous person each month, and often the interviewer will ask the celebrity to name three things that can always be found in his or her refrigerator. The answers are generally too finely crafted to be believable. “A bottle of Stoli, fresh raspberries, and beluga caviar,” or, “San Pellegrino, fresh figs, and key limes.”
Doesn't anyone else in the world have the wizened carrots and limp celery, the perpetually moldering Tupperware container with last month's leftovers? The kind you finally throw away, unopened, because the contents are simply too disgusting to deal with? It has been a point of honor with me that every professional refrigerator I've been in charge of has always been scrupulously clean, but my home fridge, well, that's another story. It had been one of the bones of contention between Jake and me. I have trouble letting go of things. I hold on to them until they rot. Not a pleasant thing to admit about oneself and probably, in Jake's defense, not an easy thing to live with either. If I'm ever interviewed by
Bon Appétit
magazine, will I have the courage to admit to my own bulging Tupperware? Certainly not. “A bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, Niçoise olives, and a wedge of camembert,” I'll gamely respond.
My father, however, belies what I refer to as the Tao of the Fridge. He's a scientist, which, I suppose, explains the neatly stacked rows of Tupperware containers in the freezer, labeled with the contents and the date in clear, block printing. But he's also a cook, though you might not know it from examining the contents of his refrigerator: a carton of skim milk, two lemons, a container of low-fat cottage cheese, an unidentifiable cheese wrapped in several thicknesses of plastic wrap, a loaf of Jewish corn rye, a large bottle of kimchee hot sauce (for the Chinese takeout), and, in the door, a bottle of red nail polish.
He has lived alone for eighteen years and has gotten used to cooking for himself. From the many years of living with my mother he learned to shop the European way, going to the market every day. Buy only enough lettuce for the evening's salad, only enough bread for tonight and perhaps tomorrow's breakfast. Buy fresh herbs only when you need them. This explains everything currently in his refrigerator. Except the red nail polish.
I work for the next couple of hours while Chloe plays on the floor by my feet. I spread out a blanket and put out some toys. I talk to her as I cook, describing the ingredients and what I'm doing with them in that foolish, unnaturally high-pitched voice mothers use. When the dough for the pizza has risen, I retrieve Chloe from under the kitchen table where she has settled and sit her on my knee. Together we punch down the dough, burying our fists in its luxurious folds.
We stop for a snack, a couple of slices of prosciutto, some cheese, and the heel of a loaf of Italian bread. Because I'm training Chloe to have a sophisticated palate, I do not heed the butcher's maxim that prosciutto di Parma shouldn't be wasted on someone who has no teeth. Besides, she has four. Not that she needs them, anyway. The meat really does melt in your mouth.
Sometime later, there's a knock at the back door. It's Richard, holding a small potted palm and a little, stuffed teddy bear. I fling open the door and throw my arms around him.
“Welcome home, sweetie! Careful,” he says into my neck, where I've imprisoned him in a hug, “or you will squish these expensive silk leaves. I knew better than to get you a live plant. And this,” he says, holding out the teddy bear and stepping into the house, “is for
la diva
. I'm sure she has forgotten me by now, so I have decided to bribe my way back into her heart. Where is she?”
Richard follows me into the kitchen where Chloe is again playing under the table. He gestures for me to be quiet as he pulls out one of the chairs and sits down, dangling the teddy bear in between his knees. To Richard's delight, it takes Chloe about five seconds to crawl over and reach for the bear, and when she does, he leans down, puts his head under the table and smiles at her.
“Hello, you. Remember me?” Chloe gives him a tentative half smile and tugs gently on the bear's leg. It seems that the measure of her response will be dependent on how quickly Richard will release the bear into her custody. He lets go at once, and she gives him a smile showing all four of her new teeth.
“Settling in?”
“Yes, well enough. Dad set us up a nice little apartment on the third floor. Decorated it and everything. He hung some pictures and polished my old bedroom furniture. Really nice.”
For as long as I could remember, the third floor had been my father's haven, filled with all his books, his drafting table, and other assorted tools of his trade. I was touched to find he'd converted my old bedroom on the second floor into his new office and taken great pains to set up a little apartment for Chloe and me on the third. There are two rooms, one a little sitting area with an old couch he dragged up from the basement and a couple of bookshelves which he emptied for me. He put my old bedroom furniture in the adjacent bedroom. Nice Danish Modern stuff that I'd thought hopelessly faddish when I was growing up, but which now had taken on a kind of chic mid-century patina. He'd also borrowed a crib from somewhere—he was vague about it when I asked where it had come from—complete with (used, but clean) Winnie the Pooh quilt and bumpers.
“But you know I won't really feel settled until I cook something. So,” I say, gesturing to the dough into which I have just again sunk my hands, “pizza rustica.”
“Mmm. Sounds great. I'm starving.”
“Well, you better have a little snack or something, because this won't be ready for a while. Dad must have gone into the office. He left hours ago. I kind of thought he would enjoy helping me make it.”

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