Comfort Food (12 page)

“We’ve got tons like this—even a group who made your first dish in real time with all of you and it’s hilarious,” said Porter. “What’s amazing is how much viewers are responding to the real-time, real-world, real-people aspect of the inaugural show of
Eat Drink and Be
.”

“I’m delighted,” cooed Carmen. “I love real people.”

“How charming,” said Gus drily. “I’m fond of them myself. So how”— Gus subtly motioned in Carmen’s direction—“is this thing really going to work?”

“Ah, I have a plan for that!” Porter was up and pacing the floor. “We’re going to bring them all back—Troy, Hannah, Aimee, Sabrina—and we’re going to do it all again. A bit more organized, of course.”

“Sabrina is apparently engaged. Again.” Porter had known Gus and her girls for a long time. He knew well that Sabrina loved to fall in love.

“Engaged
again
? ” asked Carmen. Gus pretended not to hear her.

“Knowing Sabrina, this guy’s a hunk,” said Porter. “We could bring him on, too.”

“Actually, no, we can’t,” Gus replied coolly. Porter stopped moving long enough to glance at Gus’s face.

“Okay, scratch that,” he said. “Hey, where’s Oliver? I wouldn’t expect our culinary producer to be late to our first group meeting.”

“Ooooh, yes,” said Carmen. “I just asked him to do me a weensy little favor. I didn’t think anyone would mind.”

Gus opened her mouth and then closed it again. Porter got the message: she did mind. But she wasn’t going to give in to the temptation to say so.

8

Don’t get stuck in the elevator: that’s what Oliver’s favorite professor,Dr. Randall, always said in business school. Only he’d never meant it literally.

Oliver Cooper reached out his arms to estimate if he could touch both sides of the elevator at the same time. He couldn’t reach but still he came impressively close. His arms, like his legs, were long and well muscled, and his skin was lightly tanned from a recent ski weekend. At six-five—and with a smoothly shaven scalp, his answer to the dreaded thinning hairline— Oliver cut an imposing figure. Thankfully he was the sole occupant of the elevator—the doors of this square box didn’t seem to be budging and he didn’t relish the idea of making small talk. (“This is crazy, huh?” would be the theme.) He punched the “emergency” button several times, the loud ring reverberating in his ear. He reached for his cell phone before rememberinghe’d left it at home—of all days!—then slid down against the wall and squatted over the heels of his brown leather loafers.

A glance at his Swatch watch revealed it was 4:05 PM. He had been trapped for eleven minutes; he was supposed to be in Porter’s office five minutesago. And he could have been. If only he was better at saying no. There were just so many times when Oliver couldn’t turn down what was requested of him; it simply wasn’t done.

“Oh, Oliver, I’m so happy to see you!” That’s what she’d said in the lobby, quickly sweeping her eyes down and then gazing at him full in the face with her wide brown eyes, those long dark lashes. Carmen. Always pretty, always sweet, ever so slightly feigning helplessness. “I have all of this stuff to take upstairs and no one’s around to help.”

“Couldn’t you get a dolly? From the doorman?”

Carmen shrugged as though she couldn’t be bothered to find out.

“They’re not heavy for you.” She touched Oliver lightly on the arm. He was carrying a Frap from the coffee shop across the street. It was a guilty indulgence—he’d been trying to cut back on his caffeine—and the cup was mostly full. “It’s just too much for me, Oliver.” She tilted her head in a practicedway and left the question in the air. Her red satiny blouse highlighted her warm olive skin and her red lips drew attention to her even, white teeth.

He took a long sip of his drink and tossed it in a wastebasket. Too late he realized the bin was meant for recycling. Oh, well, no wonder the earth was going to destroy itself; too many careless humans who couldn’t be botheredto read the recycling arrows. Oliver considered removing the cup but thought that would seem even more distasteful. Instead, he spun around to face her.

“So what do you have for me?” he asked, trying to be chipper. Of course he’d consented. Only a complete jerk would leave a delicate thing like Carmenstanding in the lobby of the CookingChannel offices surrounded by heavy boxes.

Carmen mouthed her thanks but didn’t look a bit surprised. Her lack of genuine gratitude annoyed him, just a bit. She knew he’d do it even if he didn’t want to—knew he’d say yes even when he pretended to himself that he was mulling it over. It was almost socially impossible for a man to refuse a woman’s request for help. That was one of the little inconsistencies of professional life that drove him rather nuts, to be honest: the assumption that it was okay for a woman to ask a man to do physical labor. Never the other way around, mind you.

“You’re welcome, Carmen,” he pretend-shouted. Oliver rolled up the sleeves of his French blue Oxford shirt. He knew he’d agreed to carry up Carmen’s belongings because she was attractive and funny and, as much as he was annoyed, because it also appealed to him to be seen as strong. And because he owed her much more than a bit of manual labor. She knew food had saved him, had nourished his spirit when he looked deep within himselfand saw what was missing. She shared a similar respect for the power of flavor. And because she knew about the problems he’d had with his wrists working as a restaurant sous chef, she’d whispered his name to Alan Holt as someone who would be a good candidate for culinary producer.

Oliver had known Carmen for years now—had bonded with her when he showed her the genuine
jamón serrano
he’d smuggled in after a trip to Barcelona, had even briefly dated her until they mutually decided to stick to being pals—and, as friends went, he knew the former Miss Spain wasn’t a bad one to have.

But there were still things to put up with: the baby doll act, the wheedling,the expectation. Carmen was accustomed to getting her own way. It might have always been that way for her, growing up as her mother’s favoritechild in Seville, attracting the attention of photographers as she rose through the beauty pageant scene, winning the hearts of the paparazzi when she sent sandwiches out to them when they waited for a glimpse of Carmen and her Hollywood singer. That type of attention can alter a person, there was no doubt about it. The same way that suddenly earning a huge pile of money had changed him. Oliver tapped his fingers on Carmen’s boxes: he wouldn’t have carried someone’s stuff back when he was on The Street.

"Just keep your head down and do your work,” his father said to him the day he left for college.

“You’re going to make something out of yourself,” said his older brother Marcus, who had returned from school to work with his father.

“Be sure not to forget about us when you’re all big and fancy,” said his oldest brother, Peter, who was a bookkeeper for a local company.

Oliver hadn’t expected to forget where he came from. He hadn’t expected his career successes to have such an effect. He’d assumed he was stronger than that.

His mother had always said he had a good head on his shoulders. And he did. They’d called him Ollie back in those days, growing up in a farm town in Indiana. He was only the third member of his family to go to college, Marcus and Peter getting there before him. But he had been the first to get a full scholarship. The first to move out of state. The first to get an MBA. The first to get to New York and earn promotion after promotion. To make money. That’s what he’d done. He made money.

Certainly the initial years working on Wall Street had been solid, more than healthy, and the update in his wardrobe, the widening of his palate (he had fond memories of his first bite of tripe, of the eating tour of Italy, of the cycling trip in Napa), the choices for his vacations all reflected his well-padded bank account. He remembered well the awkwardness of realizingthat he was earning more in his first full-time job than his father, a mechanic who repaired tractors and cars. The Cooper family farm had been sold to a conglomerate a while back.

The expensive gifts he bought to bring a little luxury into their lives— the Cadillac his father always said he wanted, a trip to Aruba for the entire family—only highlighted his new position. It was hard to play the little boy when he had an overstuffed wallet and a Bulova watch; it made the pretense within the family difficult to continue.

His plan, the day he arrived in Manhattan with his tired-looking suitcasesand his bike, was to make a tidy sum and then move on to doing somethingthat fed his soul. It’s not like he’d always wanted to be an investment banker or anything.

His intention was never to stay long in the city.

“These are my capital accumulation years,” he told Peter when he hit twenty-eight. “I’m going to make the most of them. I’m not going to get distracted.”

And he didn’t. He worked long, long hours. Oliver was good at what he did. Still, at quitting time, he found that he avoided his Tribeca apartment.Oliver wanted to be around people even as he wished to remain disentangled,separate. Instead, he focused all his considerable extracurricular energies on trying out the latest restaurants, sampling the tastes and hidden delights of new cooks. Eating alone never intimidated him: he didn’t even bring a book with which to shield himself, but simply allowed himself to be entertained by the food itself.

From the tiniest neighborhood bistro to the pinnacle of Le Bernardin, Oliver Cooper’s most intense love affair was with food. (And, as a consequence,he also maintained a slavish devotion to his personal trainer.)

His life was just what he’d ordered up: work that paid well and food that tasted good. He’d had the occasional girlfriend, pretty and pleasant, and his family—whom he saw rarely but cared about deeply—was in good health. It was all good. It was better than he expected.

But the novelty—the appreciation—had lessened. And thus began Oliver’s gradual transition from earnest, hardworking, wide-eyed Midwestern boy to world-weary, multimillionaire Master of the Universe. Oliver could still make chitchat with the cashier at the bodega, could still open the door for an elderly person without making a huge fuss. Those moments helped affirm that he was a good guy, still the same Ollie Cooper who had played kick the can on warm summer nights and rode his bike to school. Back when his hair was thick and full, when baldness seemed like something that only happened to other men. Back when he divided people up between the ones who were kind and the ones who were not.

But he lost his manners little by little. Cutting off cars as he changed lanes on the Sunday night drive from his country house, his arm—and middle finger—raised in the universal salute. Needling waiters about taking milliseconds too long to bring water, although he eschewed free tap water altogether when sparkling was in fashion. Oliver stopped saying “goodbye” when he finished up a phone call, merely clicked off when he was done sayingwhat
he
had to say. He neglected to ask “How are you?” when he met one of those pretty girlfriends for dinner, instead talked fluidly and at length about how stressed he was. Busy busy busy. The code word for important.

He laughed with his parents the Christmas he told them that he had made more in one year than his father had made in a lifetime. He figured they’d be proud. And they were, no doubt. But also embarrassed. He chose to believe he didn’t understand why.

And so it went for years. Ambitious Oliver morphed into an older, far less interesting man. Only he was the only one who didn’t know it.

The food in his life was the one thing that remained consistently exciting—from the most expensive black truffle to the freshest apple pie at the bakery around the corner, the scent of cinnamon wafting through the pastry lattice. But everything else was rote. Blasé. Oliver spent long days in his large office, earned generous paychecks, cleverly turned his pennies into dimes, and so on. He had purchased a ticket on an endless rat-race merry-go-round, never even thought about getting off.

It took a while to notice that his buddies from back home had fallen out of touch, simply sending cards at Christmas. (Or, to be precise, their wives sent the cards, signed
Joe and Cindy
or
Gord and Ricki
, and he’d have to think long and hard to remember if he’d met the wife, if he’d asked his assistant to send a wedding gift. Later, he would realize he hadn’t even been invited.) His brothers rarely called, when his nieces and nephews would get in touch to thank him for the belated but extravagant birthday gifts. He dropped a hefty load of guilt and dollars at FAO Schwarz every year.

“You think we’re all hicks,” said his brother Marcus in a rare phone conversation.“You’ve convinced yourself that living in Manhattan makes you better.”

“Doesn’t it, though?” Oliver had meant it as a joke.

“Man, what happened to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“When did you become such a pompous ass?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Let me tell you who you are: Mom’s seventy-fifth birthday and you’re nowhere to be found. You’re the kind of guy who sends his mother the biggestbouquet on her birthday but can’t find the time to visit her more than once a year.”

“I was busy.”

“She cried, Oliver.” Marcus was clearly furious. “All night she thought you were going to make a grand gesture and walk through the door.”

“I said I couldn’t make it.”

“What were you doing?”

“Working.”

“You always said you’d get in, get out, and get on with things.” Marcus sighed. “I’ll tell it to you straight: you act like you’re the king of the hill but you’re a sorry loser, if you ask me.”

“Screw you.”

“When was the last time you were nice for no reason? When was the last time you felt happy?”

“Last night, my friend, as I downed a ’ninety-five pinot with pork belly in maple glaze.” Oliver’s voice was triumphant. “So there you go.”