Georgia's Kitchen (34 page)

Georgia glanced at Huggy’s plump shopping bags. “Oh.”

“This is the first time I’ve been shopping all season. Everything else I’m wearing is at least a year old, the bag is almost five.” She cupped her hand over her mouth. “But it’s true what they say about Hermès. Worth every penny.”

Georgia tried to smile.

“Don’t look so crestfallen, Georgia. All is not lost, it never is. You do remember my son, Andrew?”

Of course she remembered Andrew: the golden voice, the soulful eyes… the stunning girlfriend.

“Andrew’s a venture capitalist. He invests in small businesses, usually tech companies, but he’s dabbled in the odd off-Broadway show or nightclub. I happen to have his card.” Huggy pulled out a different leather card case and handed over Andrew Henderson’s card. “I’ll tell him to expect your call.”

“Thanks, Huggy. I appreciate your help.”

“Of course. Now I’m afraid I must go. I’m late for my training session at Brownings.”

“What about your truffles?”

“Take them home with you.” Huggy stood up and swung her cape over her shoulders. “Because the truth is, dear, the best thing for the tummy is really no food at all.”

Hot water spilled from the spout, bubbling when it hit the eucalyptus bath salts sprinkled in the tub. The tiny bathroom quickly grew steamy and saunalike, and the scent of the lime, basil, and mandarin candle Georgia had bought at Saks filled the air. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun and a sticky clay mask covered her face. A month-old
US
magazine, a glass of ice water, and the phone rested on the floor between the tub and Sally, who had stretched out on the bath mat and was intensely gnawing her paw. Georgia couldn’t risk missing a call from Bernard.

She settled into the bath and gingerly leaned back onto the cool porcelain, relieved she’d arranged for the sous-chef to cover her shift at the Oven. She’d correctly predicted that after sweating rivers in front of Luca at the pitch meeting, the last place she’d want to be was sweating rivers in his kitchen during dinner rush. When she’d gone back to the Oven after Saks to retrieve her coat, Pablo met her at the door, coat in hand. Though he was too discreet to ask any questions about the meeting, he did mention something about Bernard sprinting down the street in what looked like a high-speed chase. Of what, he didn’t know, nor could he say for sure whether Bernard was the chaser or the chased. Whichever it was, it didn’t sound good.

The bathwater started to cool, and she pushed down on the drain release with her big toe and leaned forward to blast the hot. A good, long soak was just what she needed. When the phone rang, she pounced on it and it slid from her soapy hands, bouncing off the tile floor.

“Georgia.” It was her mother.

The door on her relationship with Dorothy had creaked open in San Casciano, and Georgia didn’t want to be the one to kick it shut. Still, she always had to be wary with Dorothy, and she braced herself for her mother’s usual line of questioning—dagger-sharp, double-edged, and designed to make her only daughter feel like dirt—to begin.

Strangely, it didn’t. Sure, she grilled Georgia about the meeting, but she actually seemed interested in her responses. So while Georgia spilled out her story in a rush of run-on sentences and mangled clauses, Dorothy did the unthinkable: she listened.

“Well, Georgia,” she said when her daughter had finished, “from where I sit, it sounds like you aced the pitch. Even if Luca doesn’t come through with the financing, you should be proud of yourself for a job well done.”

Georgia was shocked into silence.
Aced? Proud? A job well done?
Was this the same woman who’d accused her thirteen-year-old daughter of plagiarizing the Harriet Tubman report that won the eighth-grade essay contest?

“Thanks, Mom,” she said at last. “I guess I am sort of proud. But I need the money. I really want the restaurant.”

“If the restaurant is what you want, you’ll get the restaurant. Maybe not from this Luca guy, but you’ll get the money somehow.”

“I hope so.”

“Oh, and by the way, your father and I will be in New York in a few weeks, early January. We’re coming for the opera,
Rigoletto,
on Saturday night. Unfortunately, it’s sold out, otherwise I’d offer you a ticket.”

“That’s fine, Mom, I’ll probably have to work anyway.”

“But we’d love to see you for dinner that Friday.”

“Okay.”

“Your place?”

Georgia was silent for a second. “Sure, Mom, my place sounds great.”

They hung up the phone when Dorothy sparked up a cigarette. As Georgia now understood, she drove Dorothy to smoke just as Dorothy drove her to eat. Maybe they were more alike than she realized.

With her toes beginning to prune, she climbed out of the tub and slipped on her robe. The buzzer sounded. Unannounced visitors were as common as rent-controlled apartments and as welcome as bedbugs. She padded to the intercom, leaving liquid footprints in her wake.

“I been buzzing you for ten minutes. Your boyfriend’s on his way.” It was the unfriendly doorman, whose name she still didn’t know.

“My boyfriend?”

“Yeah. He’ll be there in a sec.”

Before she’d hung up, there was a knock at the door. Her stomach dropped. Please, she prayed to any God who would listen, not Glenn. Not now. Not ever again.

“Georgia! Open the door!”

Bernard. She’d called his cell a dozen times since leaving Saks and had heard nothing back. Despite her most Zen-like intentions, the incommunicado thing was infuriating her.

“Georgia, come on. I can hear you fuming.”

She opened the door and stared at him, her hands resolutely on her hips.

“Wow. Green’s your color, George.”

“What?”

“Brings out your eyes.”

“What are you talking about? And how about answering your phone for a change? I’ve left you a million messages.”

Bernard stifled a smile and pointed to her face. She drew a hand to her cheek, still tacky from the green clay mask.

“Oh, please,” she said. “As if you’ve never seen a girl in a mask.”

“Georgia, you could wear a hockey mask for all I’d care right now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Am I allowed in? Or do I have to report from your smoky hallway?” He waved a hand under his wrinkled nose.

She turned without saying anything and he followed her into the living room.

“This better be good,” Georgia said, tightening the belt on her robe and sitting on the chair, the very one on which she’d sat when Glenn dumped her. If Bernard’s story ended badly, it was going straight to Goodwill.

“Oh, it is,” Bernard said. “Just listen.”

He’d left Saks and hightailed it to the Oven, hoping to catch even two minutes with Luca. Had he not got stuck behind side-by-side double strollers for an entire block, he might have stood a chance. Instead, he arrived at the restaurant seconds after Luca’s car picked him up, according to his assistant, who was even more obnoxious when his boss wasn’t around. Bernard explained who he was and pressed him for the name of the car-service company, but the assistant feigned ignorance. Fortunately, the coat-check girl knew the name of the car company and had seen a black Mercedes S500 with tinted windows cart away her boss just moments earlier.

Georgia’s eyes widened. This
was
good.

Bernard hit the street where, for the first time in his life, he hallelujahed the rush-hour traffic. Cars crept forward, horns blasted, the occasional one-finger salute was raised and returned. To get to Teterboro, Luca would have to take the Lincoln Tunnel, and Bernard plotted out the most sensible route: down Fifth to Forty-second. When he realized he was as likely to hail a cab as he was a helicopter, he started running. Fast. By the time he got to Forty-second Street, he could barely breathe. Which is when he spotted the tinted-windowed black Mercedes pulling a cool pick-and-roll onto Forty-second. A bicycle taxi rolled to a stop next to Bernard, and he knew what he had to do. He climbed in, pushing out the teenaged couple snuggling under the faux-fur throw, placating them with a pair of twenties. Ride like fucking Lance Armstrong, he told the driver. The little pedicab, powered by quads of steel, closed in on the hulking Mercedes. The car stopped at a yellow light, and the pedicab rode up alongside it, victorious. Bernard tossed the driver a bill he hoped was a twenty but later discovered was a hundred, and rapped on the Mercedes’s back window. Nothing. He rapped
again, holding up the business plan he’d stuck halfway down his pants for safekeeping when he began his pursuit. The window inched down.

“Hello, Mr. Santini. I’m Bernard Lambert, Georgia Gray’s partner. If I can just have a few moments of your time—”

“Who?” a man’s voice growled.

“Bernard. Georgia’s partner.” He held up the business plan, smiling as charmingly as he could muster after hijacking a pedicab.
Grand-mère
would not have approved.

“Bernard Lambert? You’re French?”

“Yes!” The light was about to turn green, and Bernard was pretty sure he’d get mowed down by the pissed-off driver of the van behind him, who looked none too pleased at having been cut off by a bicycle taxi.

“Est-ce que tu parles français?”
Luca asked.

“Oui!”
Bernard shouted. The light turned. He was a dead man.

Miraculously the door opened. “Get in,” Luca said in French. “And tell me about your restaurant.”

Bernard rode with Luca all the way to Teterboro. He spoke, in French only, at Luca’s insistence, for the duration of the fifty-five-minute drive. Luca didn’t look at him or nod his head or give any indication that he so much as heard a word Bernard said. So he kept talking. First he talked about the restaurant, then he talked about himself, and when he’d exhausted that seemingly inexhaustible subject, he talked about Georgia. By the time they pulled up to the jet center, his tongue was so swollen he could barely close his jaw around it.

“Your really think this will work?” Luca asked as he stepped out of the car.

“Oui”
was all Bernard could say.

“You’ve got your money,” Luca said, reverting to English. “All
but a hundred grand. That needs to come from management. It’s gotta hurt your pocket if you lose. Go to your friends, the National Bank of Mom, a fucking loan shark for all I care. But get the hundred grand and you’ll get your restaurant.”

Bernard ended his story and looked at Georgia, whose green face was frozen, the mask having finally dried. “Did you hear me, Kermit? We got the money.”

“Oh. My. God.” Georgia sprang from her chair. “We got the money. We got the money. Bernard, we got the money.” She grabbed his hands and pulled him up from the couch. “We got the money!”

They bounced up and down together, holding hands like toddlers on a trampoline. Sally joined the celebration, barking her approval.

“Wait a minute,” Georgia said, dropping his hands. “We have to come up with a
hundred
grand? How are we going to get a hundred grand?”

“I have no idea.”

Georgia fell onto the couch. “Shit.”

Bernard plopped down next to her.
“Merde,”
he said. “The word is
merde.
”

T
he skinny guy with the scraggly soul patch and dirty white jeans pawed through the loot covering Georgia’s dining table, a Chippendale knockoff that had belonged to Grammy. Dorothy had no need for repros in her authentically midcentury modern home, so the table had passed to Georgia. She loved its scratches and scars, the pale rings where Grammy’s mugs of tea had rested, the gash where Georgia had dropped a rolling pin—and nearly crushed her pinkie—during one of their annual Christmas-cookie baking marathons.

“Not this, maybe this, definitely not this, ooh, I love this.” The guy, called Lemming, smiled twitchily at Georgia, who looked away.

Her entire relationship with Glenn was strewn out across the table, seven years of highs, lows, and in-betweens reduced to a pile of merch; a romance that almost ended in marriage for sale to the highest bidder. The whole scene was slightly unsavory, beginning with the ratlike Lemming rifling through things that had actually touched her skin and ending with the (hopefully huge) check he would write to scoop it all up in his Nike duffel.
Lo swore she’d do better selling directly to Lemming than going to one of the established consignment stores, plus she’d get the money right away. Since Georgia’s entire future now rested on securing a fast fifty grand (providing Bernard covered his half), she cast aside her moral doubts about the whole ordeal and set up the appointment with Lemming.

“This is great.” He held up a red cashmere sweater decorated with a black skull-and-crossbones to his emaciated frame. “I might keep it for myself.”

“You definitely should.” Georgia had worn the sweater twice, the last time to a Halloween show at the Bowery Ballroom, where some drunk guy had spilled a beer on her. Later, a falafel-hummus-and-tabbouleh pita exploded as she bit into it, sending green and orange bits all over her—and the sweater. He was welcome to it.

Lemming flung the sweater to the floor and fluttered his fingers over her jewelry, which Lo had neatly arranged into separate but equally glittering groupings of earrings and necklaces. As a chef, Georgia never wore anything beyond sleeves or gloves on her arms or hands, which meant no bracelets, watches, or rings, until
the
ring.