The Captive Condition (10 page)

After months of waiting tables, she knew that the key to success was to concentrate on her work and to ignore the peevishness and stupidity of her fellow townies, their belligerent comments, their nasty insinuations. Irascible by nature, eager to unleash their pent-up vitriol, the ornery customers made her job a constant challenge—the entrées were too rich, too salty, too bland, too hot, too cold, too clumpy and metallic-tasting like dog food scraped from the bottom of a rusty can. Strangely, this never deterred them from shoveling every last morsel of the repulsive grub down their greedy gullets. They belched, coughed, picked their teeth. They dabbed their lips with napkins dipped in the water glasses, and with great reluctance they reached into their wallets and change purses to produce a couple of crumpled bills and a handful of coins that they ceremoniously dumped on the table.

Most terrible of all, however, were those rowdy assholes from fraternity row. Drawn to the bright beacon of the bistro's blue neon light, the boys stopped in before going to the demolition derby at the edge of town. Evidently, Xavier had been hard at work advertising his wares on campus. Crammed into a corner booth, they looked like dissolute prep school boys who'd been cast away on an uninhabited malarial island and, after a long monsoon season, had turned into a tribe of howling, bottle-tossing, fist-swinging, spear-wielding savages.

“Hey, baby,” they said to her, “how about a little pie?”

Morgan tolerated their obnoxious banter and suppressed the anger building deep at the center of her soul because if she delivered a spot-on performance, batting her eyes and offering the customers her most obsequious smile, she might make a few extra bucks. She also had a natural gift for coquettish conversation, an infuriating way of laughing too loudly and too lustily at every dirty joke that popped into the minds of those drooling brutes yearning to nuzzle her perfumed throat. She stroked and squeezed and slapped their arms in such a way as to suggest that, if they played their cards right, they might enjoy more intimate physical contact later in the evening. With a salacious smile she swept aside her hair to reveal those delectable earlobes and continued to tease and tantalize until those fumbling jackrabbit boys emptied their pockets.

On a good day she could bring home a hundred dollars, but of late that nice round number had started to dwindle, and she suspected her employer of garnishing her tips. A part of her believed Xavier D'Avignon, the chef and proprietor of Belleforest, was determined to keep her financially shackled to the bistro as his indentured servant, but the real reason he took some of her tips was because, several days ago, she'd dared to swipe a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape from the wine rack and smuggled it home in her purse. He'd also caught her giving away free coffee and dessert to one of the dancers who, between acts, hurried from the cabaret for a quick bite to eat, an
éclair,
an espresso, anything so long as it had plenty of sugar and caffeine. Today was no different. After dancing for the carousing G.O.N.C.s, Lorelei, to conceal her tattoos and thus her identity, donned a black cloak with a hood and took a seat in a far corner, where she glanced at a menu and waited for the waitress to take her order.

Morgan battled her way through the heat and havoc of the kitchen, feeling the grease and oil seep into her pores, through her hair, between her teeth, under her bra. She prepared a fresh pot of coffee and tried to avoid the chef's accusatory gaze.

Without looking up from a sizzling skillet, Xavier said, “Thick as thieves, you two. A couple of working-class girls looking out for each other, huh?”

From beneath his soiled apron he produced a half-empty bottle of wine. Slowly stroking the neck and grinding his groin into the shallow punt, he let out a groan of gastronomic pleasure and then splashed the skillet, incinerating the unidentifiable hunks of butchered fowl in flames.

“Were you perhaps looking for this? Forgive me,
mademoiselle.
It seems I've uncorked the last bottle to marinate my medley of mushrooms and succulent
coq au vin.
Ah, but perhaps together, if you cared to join me upstairs in my quarters, we can hunt for an unopened crate.”

Morgan sniffed. She had trouble believing that he could fit through the narrow stairwell and successfully climb the steps to the dark warren of rooms without tripping over his own swollen feet and tumbling to the ground floor, snapping his neck, rupturing his spleen. In the last year he'd put on an enormous amount of weight, and she marveled at his size, the bulk of him, the heft, the way his bones buckled and bent under his rippling rolls of fat, a positively gelatinous creature, wide and waddling, every inch of him jiggling in a different direction. Now, despite his monstrous girth, he managed to do a nimble pirouette behind the burners and looked through the window of the swinging door.

“My future sister-in-law is back again, I see. A real beauty, that one. A temptress. I think she might be a witch. Dabbles in the black arts, sorcery, that sort of thing. Maybe that's why she's draped from head to toe in a cloak. She's trying to disguise something more than those tattoos.” He sidled closer to Morgan. “Did you hear the news? Sadie kicked her out of the house a few weeks ago.”

“Really?” Morgan grabbed a handful of napkins. “Because Lorelei told me she left on her own. Ran away.”

Xavier stared at her with the glazed look of a man approaching sleep. “Sadie refuses to tell me the reason for Lorelei's overhasty departure, but there is certainly something
fishy
about that girl, if I may be permitted a
bon mot.
Maybe you can find out what happened. And where she's staying these days. After all, you seem to be friendly with her. Very friendly.”

Though it took a great deal of willpower, Morgan managed to suppress a sneer, turning it into a smile that too many men mistook to be not merely politeness or professional courtesy but flirtatiousness and, more and more often, a thinly veiled proposition. While it was certainly true that most men, on average, were emotional cripples who couldn't understand the difference between a kind gesture and a come-on, Xavier's innuendos went beyond bad taste.

A true connoisseur of turpitude, he pinched the ends of his preposterous waxed mustache and then, using a dripping spatula, tapped out a competent bossa nova beat against his ever-present glass of carrot juice. He spiked the juice with a combination of chemicals that smelled like gasoline, and he drank so much of the stuff that a deep flush of orange suffused his cheeks. Of course, people who worked in kitchens the world over, in big cities and small towns alike, were notorious drunkards and dope fiends, but Xavier was more self-medicated than most. He often whispered to himself and stared into the distance. Spaced out, that was the best way to describe him. Drugged, numb, unstrung. Whatever combination of pills he'd already popped that day, whatever illicit substances he regularly smoked, huffed, snorted, or mainlined had evidently robbed him of the capacity to reason properly, leaving him with a malfunctioning hemisphere of gray matter that rendered him incapable of communicating with anyone other than the denizens of some fourth dimension—gods, ghouls, goblins, who knows what, just so long as reality remained concealed behind the curtain of an impaired mind.

Again and again he'd proven himself to be an utterly inept restaurateur who depended absolutely on Morgan, a serious woman who anticipated and prepared for daily catastrophes. Need to order more napkins, straws, paper towels, toilet paper, lightbulbs? Have Morgan take care of it. Need to have the tablecloths laundered? Tell Morgan. She knew the business better than anyone else, and as senior staff member she'd become the de facto manager of Belleforest.

“I'm considering enrolling in a few business classes at the college,” he told her. “Management and accounting. Always a good idea to have a backup plan.”

Morgan laughed. “Before you finish a single class, you'll poison everyone in this town with your awful cooking. Or with that junk you peddle in the alley. Lucky for you the county health inspector hasn't shut the place down. Or the cops.”

“You're an alarmist, my dear. And speaking of school, have you registered for classes yet? I'm sure there's time to enroll. The fall semester starts Monday.”

“I'm still saving up.”

With another birthday looming on the horizon, Morgan had to accept the fact that school was definitely out for good and that she was in danger of growing old in this unsanitary dump, slowly and inexorably turning into an emblem of modern spinsterdom—the sexually irrelevant, waddling, wide-hipped, wisecracking, worn-out waitress everyone pitied and secretly scorned, the loneliest person in town, with no family at all to speak of: no children, no husband, no mother, no father, no siblings, no prospects. It troubled her that in so short a time she'd gone from being a high-minded idealist to a low-class cynic, and like some underpaid village soothsayer she could see her future just as clearly as she could see her past.

“It's tough times for everyone, Morgan. Especially around here.” Xavier slid beside her and touched her shoulder. “I know we've had this conversation before, but I've always thought you were an intelligent woman, plus you have your shit together, which is more than I can say about the other servers. You'd like to continue your education, I understand that, but we both know there's no future in art history, just like we both know I'll never become a highly regarded chef in a reputable four-star restaurant. I'm presenting you with an opportunity to earn some serious cash. I'm talking an extra two hundred dollars a week. Maybe even three hundred. There are a dozen suckers waiting in the alley to part with their paychecks. Why not use the situation to your advantage?”

Morgan smirked. “Is that why you've been walking off with my tips?”

“Listen, when the time comes, I don't intend to leave you high and dry. I still have a plan in the works to build a beach bungalow on Delacroix Cay. I'm even brushing up on my French,
ma petite putain,
to better interact with the natives.” He produced one of the faded brochures that he kept handy in his apron pocket. “See, a beautiful island in the West Indies where the sea and sky are always blue and—”

“I've heard this speech a hundred times.”

“—and where the sun always shines on the smiling faces of its friendly people. You can stay there with me for as long as you like. We can start a little beachside restaurant.”

Morgan laughed. “But you're engaged to the Gonk's ex-wife.”

Xavier poured himself another tall glass of carrot juice. “Ah, yes, Sadie is a sweet woman, but she's better at spending my money than managing it. Besides, you do realize,
mademoiselle,
how intolerably hot it gets behind the grill?” He moistened his lips with a tongue that resembled a piece of marbled meat, fatty and purple and just a little translucent, and, judging from the way he smiled, he seemed to delight in the taste of his own corporeality. “It's a veritable inferno back here, positively scorching, and I've developed a serious thirst, one that's difficult to quench.”

Morgan gestured to his pitcher of carrot juice. “One of these days you're going to set fire to this place. You're starting to look like a pumpkin, do you know that? And if the Gonk doesn't carve you up like a jack-o'-lantern, I will. A single deep incision, that's all it would take, and an orange ocean will spill out of you.”

At these remarks his eyes danced. “If I'm a pumpkin then you're Cinderella, both of us
sans
fairy godmother, and until you receive an invitation to the ball, my dear, you better learn a little humility. Sometimes a princess has to get down in the dirt and sweep up the ashes.
À votre santé!
” He raised his glass and drained it in one, long swallow. Returning to his pots and pans he said, “Oh, don't forget the
crème brûlée
for Lorelei! And please tell my future sister-in-law it's on the house.”

When it came to the preparation and presentation of haute cuisine, Xavier D'Avignon felt an intellectual, spiritual, even sexual empowerment that far surpassed anything he'd ever experienced, and he often boasted that his perfectly executed recipes were not only manna from heaven but also potent aphrodisiacs raining down from the sky like Cupid's arrows, and while his cooking didn't always conform to the precepts of contemporary nutritional wisdom, it did offer alternative forms of wisdom, as that feebleminded minx was about to discover. Though she was young and beautiful and would soon be blood, Lorelei was not entitled to free meals and needed to be taught an invaluable lesson. From the container of goodies he kept beneath the counter, Xavier added a dangerous dose of
jazar
extract to the sweet vanilla and smooth, concupiscent curds of a
crème brûlée.

Lorelei was a lost cause, but he still held out hope that Morgan might share his growing fascination with “mind manifestation” and help him sell his
jazar
juice. Sooner or later moralists like Morgan had to accept the fact that drugs were no different from the genetically modified soybeans the farmers grew in their fields on the outskirts of town, basic commodities that would always be controlled by market forces, and he couldn't understand why anyone would begrudge him for temporarily alleviating the spiritual torments of so many people. Doctors had a diagnosis for these symptoms and could treat them with expensive pills and injections, but the medicines Xavier concocted in his kitchen, though a bit crude, proved nearly as effective. If only Morgan could find a similar form of release from her troubles. A soupçon of carrots might weaken her inhibitions, but so far she had only scoffed at his weird obsession, calling him a madman and worse, but Xavier firmly believed the greatest accomplishments—the composition of grand operas and sonnet cycles, the sudden, rapturous seizure of mystical insights and scientific breakthroughs—were symptomatic of madness. After all, who else but a lunatic and reigning god of gastronomy would devote his life, year after year, to the preparation of carrot juice, heavy on the ginger, light on the orange peel?