Georgia's Kitchen (5 page)

“Of course not. It was business, George.” He folded his arms across his chest. “You know if it weren’t for Tee, you wouldn’t be wearing that rock on your finger.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I told him I wanted to propose and he hooked me up with his jeweler. He did Tee a favor and gave me a sick deal on a sick stone. You think I just took a stroll down Forty-seventh Street and bought that?” He pointed to her left ring finger.

“He did Tee a favor? And Tee did you a favor? Well, he didn’t do me a favor.” Georgia tried to slide the ring off her finger, but it got stuck on her knuckle. “I didn’t even want this ring, Glenn. How much more explicit could I have been? Chefs don’t wear rings!”

Glenn’s eyes, which were planted firmly on the kitchen’s terra-cotta tile floor, snapped up at this revelation. “You didn’t? They don’t? You mean, you didn’t want a ring?” He paused. “Did you want to get engaged, Georgia? Do you want to get married?”

“Is this your way of avoiding talking about your coke problem?”

“I don’t have a fucking coke problem!” He stared at her, hands on hips, before storming into the bedroom, where he cursed at the kilim carpet he constantly caught his toe on. Seconds later he flew through the living room before the apartment door slammed shut.

Georgia stood frozen in her tangerine kitchen, feeling as if
the walls would swallow her up and wishing they would. What should have been one of the happier days of her life was registering red-alert disaster. In nine weeks she’d be the wife of a cocaine-snorting attorney who bought her engagement ring—the one she never even wanted—from some gangster diamond dealer. She dialed Clem on her cell, relayed the crucial details, and left the apartment as quickly as she could to meet her.

More sprawling French château than tony Central Park West co-op, the Dakota would forever be known as the place where John Lennon was shot. It was also the superluxe home of Clem’s current charge: an oversize pug with an attitude problem. Georgia arrived at the fabled building, cheeks slightly damp from the persistent spring drizzle, and gave her name to one of four uniformed doormen manning the entrance. Clem lived in a tiny studio in Hell’s Kitchen and offered her dog-sitting services to anyone and everyone, so long as the deal included park views and an elevator operator. She poked her head into the marble-floored hallway as Georgia made her way from the elevator.

“Sit down, Petal. Sit. Come on in, Georgia. Hurry!” Clem hissed. Her hair was pulled back in a stumpy pigtail, and her freckled face was makeup free. She wore a red hoodie and matching yoga pants and was the only redhead Georgia knew who wore red almost every day.

Georgia sneaked past the dog and whistled as she took in the Bordeaux-colored walls, egg-and-dart moldings, and cast plaster medallions on the ceiling. “So this is a classic eight, huh? Not bad for a pug.” She took a seat on a zebra-print-covered ottoman and jiggled her foot impatiently. “What’s our plan?”

“Bloodies at Lenny’s? Mimosas at Mars? Or maybe just a stroll through the park with my new horse?” Clem gestured to Petal, who eyeballed her from his crushed-velvet bed. “Although”—she
gestured to Georgia’s haloed hair, frizz factor at least eight—“I guess it’s still raining.”

“Whatever you want to do. I don’t care. My fiancé is a cokehead. Even worse is that he lied to me about it. How do you lie to the woman you’re about to marry?”

“I knew there was something up with him last night. At least you found out before the wedding.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t marry him? Because of the coke?”

“I’m not going to tell you what to do, Georgia. But even without the coke, things haven’t seemed so great between the two of you. Ever since he proposed, you’ve seemed, I don’t know, anxious.”

Georgia stood and walked to the window. “Glenn’s a great guy,” she said slowly. “He is. He’s smart, successful, funny—he’s everything any girl would want. It’s just been hard to see lately.”

“But is he what
this
girl wants?” Clem pointed at Georgia.

“Yes. At least I think so. I don’t know.” Georgia stared at the treetops dotting Central Park, full and verdant after the barren winter. The rain had stopped and the sky filled with a dim light. “Maybe I’m just suffering from a severe case of cold feet.”

“Maybe,” Clem said doubtfully.

“Where’s the kitchen?” Georgia asked. “I’m starving.”

Clem directed her to the kitchen, easily the size of her entire apartment, and she took stock of her ingredients. Some people smoked when they were upset, some did yoga, or drank, or paced, or picked fights, or counted to one hundred. Georgia cooked.

As a small girl growing up in Massachusetts, she’d spent most of her time in her grandmother’s kitchen, watching wide-eyed as Grammy kneaded the dough for her famous pumpernickel bread, sliced up parsnips and turnips for her world-class pot roast, or, if she was feeling exotic, butterflied shrimp for her
delicious Thai basil seafood. A big-boned woman of solid peasant stock, as she herself used to say, Grammy moved around the cramped kitchen with grace and efficiency, her curly gray hair twisted into a low bun. Humming pop songs from the forties, her cheeks a pleasing pink, she turned out dish after fabulous dish from the cranky Tappan stove she refused to replace. Those times with Grammy were the happiest Georgia could remember. It had been almost a year since she died, and not a day passed that Georgia didn’t miss her.

She pulled out half a dozen eggs, sliced supermarket Swiss and some bacon from the double-width Sub-Zero. A quick scan of the spice rack yielded a lifetime supply of Old Bay seasoning, three different kinds of peppercorns, and
sel de mer
from France’s Brittany coast. People’s pantries were as perplexing as their lives. Whisking the eggs, Georgia considered Clem’s words. Marriage
was
a huge step. Had she accepted Glenn’s proposal because she wanted to marry him or because she wanted what came with marriage: a baby, a family, security? Or maybe she was scared of what would happen if she didn’t marry him. But how could she build a life and family with someone she couldn’t trust? She turned on the stove and listened for the whish that signaled the burner was on.

The eggs sizzled in the sauté pan. Her brow moistened and she preemptively twisted her hair into a bun, knotting it at her neck. During her yearlong break from Glenn, Georgia had dated a dozen men, sleeping with four. There was Marco. And that truffle purveyor who had always flirted with her. And Jim, the singer-songwriter Lo was friends with, the one who lived in corduroy suits. And Paul, the really cute guy who, it had turned out, had a really scary girlfriend.

The thing was, Georgia loved being half of a couple. Waiting in line for overpriced brunches, soaking up sun in Sheep
Meadow, late-night flicks at the Angelika—she felt her best when part of a pair. And in that whole year, she hadn’t met anyone, not anyone, she could pair up with. So when Glenn came knocking on her door a year after she walked out of his, bearing a bouquet of out-of-season ranunculus, she welcomed him back with cautiously open arms, sick of hoping to meet
him,
ready to be an
us
again.

The smell of crackling bacon lured Petal into the kitchen, where she licked imaginary food drippings from Georgia’s sneakers. Ignoring her, Georgia flipped the omelet, trying to recall the last time she and Glenn had sex. With their equally grueling but opposite schedules, they barely had time for a kiss let alone a romp. Every girl who’d read
Cosmo
even once knew that once the sex is gone, you may as well kiss the relationship good-bye.

Their first time was that summer in Newport on
Mysterious Ways,
a sixty-five-foot burled-wood beauty that looked as if it belonged in a Bond movie and was docked at the Yacht Club where they both worked. Easy access to unattended boats was a perk of being the head launch driver. Save for the waves of nausea rippling through Georgia’s belly with each pitch of the boat, it was amazing. After, he sang the Beatles’ “Julia” only semi-ironically, replacing the title name with hers. Somehow she managed to smile serenely as bile danced in her belly, never letting on how close she was to spewing her guts all over her unsuspecting lover. By summer’s end they had inaugurated nearly every boat in the harbor—plowing through three albums’ worth of Beatles songs—and she hadn’t thrown up even once.

Clem walked into the kitchen and pulled up a stool at the center island. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Just trying to figure out if it’s really possible that I haven’t had sex with my fiancé in five weeks. And I’m part of the problem too, so I can’t blame it all on the coke. What is happening
to us? And why am I just noticing it now? Here”—Georgia slipped the omelet onto a plate—“have an omelet.”

“You know, sometimes nothing happens,” Clem said with her mouth full. “Sometimes you just grow apart. Happened to me, happens to everyone. There’s probably even a Hallmark card for it.” She popped another bite into her mouth and rubbed her tummy. “Now this is good. Even with these lame ingredients, this is good. Open up Georgia’s Joint, and it’ll be a huge hit, no question. Just make the kind of food you like to eat, and they will come.” Clem was the food and wine editor for
Happenings,
a weekly magazine about the city, and even more obsessed with the restaurant scene than Georgia.

“That’s the plan, minus the Georgia’s Joint part. The Mercedes review definitely doesn’t suck as far as financing is concerned, but first I need to figure out my life. I have a date with a white dress and a judge in nine weeks, with a guy I’m neither sleeping with nor, as it turns out, talking to.”

Clem put her arm over her friend’s shoulder. “Cheer up, George. Everything will work out the way you want it to. You just have to figure out which way that is.”

Georgia ate her omelet and left the Dakota, turning down Clem’s invitations for a shopping trip on Columbus or a bad teen movie on Vudu. Walking through Central Park, she settled in front of the William Shakespeare statue on Poets’ Walk. The crocuses had come and gone, grape hyacinths and daffodils pushed through the dirt, the tulips would soon follow. Anything could happen in springtime in New York.

Fishing through her bag, she pulled out a red leather Smyth-son journal, a Valentine’s gift from Glenn. Thanks to his mother, who basically shopped for a living, Glenn was privy to all the
finer things a girl could want, and generous as well. As Mrs. Tavert said, almost everything worth buying could be purchased at the four Bees: Bergdorfs, Barneys, and Bendels, in that order. Bloomingdale’s, the last of the Bees, was a distant fourth, unless you happened to be on the hunt for an electric toothbrush.

She scrawled
Pros
and
Cons
across the top of a page and drew a line down the middle. When in doubt, her father, the physics professor, always said, make a list. This was one of the few points on which she wholeheartedly agreed with him.

Under
Pros
she wrote:

Smart

Sexy

Good hair

Good in bed

She crossed out
Good
before
in bed
and wrote
Great,
then added an arrow indicating it should sit before
Good hair.
Still not satisfied, she added, (
when available/in the mood, i.e., never
). Which was actually a con. She crossed it all out, rewrote
Good in bed,
and moved on.

Successful

Funny

Plays guitar

Athletic

Good taste (gifts)

Makes great burger (and steak)

Loves good wine

And cocaine, she thought. Which brought her to
Cons:

Cokehead

Not trustworthy

Workaholic

Sketchy clients

Doesn’t like my hair/offered to pay for crazy expensive Japanese

straightening.

She stopped writing. He sounded like a white-collar criminal who might or might not knock her socks off in bed, feed her a postcoital steak au poivre, then take off for a game of pickup basketball, but not before strumming a ditty on his gee-tar, snorting cocaine from the glass coffee table in her living room, and leaving behind a wad of cash for an overpriced beauty treatment. So much for lists.

Maybe the coke was just a passing phase. Maybe, as he said, it really wasn’t a big deal. She’d get home and he’d be waiting, and before she could even ask him to stop, he’d say he already had. Then they’d kiss and he’d tell her she was way more important than the coke, or his clients or even his career. She’d believe him… wouldn’t she?

A sax player wearing dark shades and a tweed newsboy cap played “From This Moment On” and Georgia looked up, taking note of all the happy-looking couples strolling and laughing. Euro tourists, she thought, eyeing one especially stylish couple. Lousy with love, the pockets of their his-and-her Helmut Lang jeans lined with euros just waiting to be spent on fabulous clothes, meals, and shows. She was suddenly desperate for a trip to the Italian countryside she loved, for the rolling, green vistas, the quaint hill towns, the alfresco meals. In between her two years at the Culinary Institute, she’d done an externship in Florence with Claudia Cavalli, the famous chef, unearthing a love of all things Italy. Her last visit there was with Glenn, to the wedding
of American friends who were married at the former villa of Dante Alighieri. The couple recited their vows in a garden overlooking the Duomo, and she and Glenn had squeezed hands thinking, next time, maybe us.

Her eyes grew heavy and she felt a knot in her throat. Do not cry, she told herself. Do not do it. She stared at the elm trees looming overhead, having once read it was impossible to cry while looking up. Only when she was certain her tears wouldn’t fall did she pick herself up and begin the walk home.

Sally greeted Georgia as she stepped into her apartment, tail wagging, pink tongue lolling happily out of her mouth. Georgia wrapped her arms around Sally’s head, pressing her nose against her dog’s wet, black snout; she had never felt so glad to see anyone. There was no sign of Glenn, no message, no note. Sally nudged her hand and Georgia sank down next to her on the floor. The phone rang.