The Last Good Paradise (3 page)

The pig slaughter set him back years.

Everyone knew it. The French were cruel eaters:
foie gras
, veal, live-boiled lobsters. Their philosophy affected all dishes, and all of it bothered Richard. Even tomatoes were blanched, peeled, cored, seeded, and whatever remained was then pureed and strained until all tomato essence had been deracinated. If there was a God, how could people peel asparagus? He considered switching to the pastry track, but the truth was that for all his modesty, his “Aw, shucks”-ness, his love of the anonymity and camaraderie of the kitchen, he wanted Emeril Lagasse superstardom. There had never been a celebrity vegan chef in the history of the world for a reason. One didn’t open a restaurant on the strength of puff pastry and ganache. In the testosterone-filled world of chefdom, pastry was for pussies. So he cooked meat and suffered in silence.

When Javi left the table and disappeared after the main course, Richard grabbed Ann’s hand and pressed it against his chest. “This is the happiest time in my life. Or it will be soon when we open. And it would mean nothing if you weren’t by my side.”

Ann wiped at her eyes. The serranos were killing her.

“You’ve sacrificed a lot. It hasn’t been easy. Pretty soon it will be your turn.”

“Her turn for what?” Javi yelled, out of sight, deep in the bowels of the walk-in refrigerator. “You two will finally have babies and make me an uncle?”

“My turn to go to art school,” she answered. “A solo gallery show. Then children.” Because even after the financial sacrifice of law school, the ungodly hours that hopefully soon would come to fruition in an offer of full partnership, Ann already had the sinking knowledge that this was not the life she wanted to be pursuing for the next thirty years. She was ready to spit the bit of family tradition.

Richard scowled at Javi’s eavesdropping. He shrugged and gave Ann that goofy, lopsided grin that still had the power to charm her—he was her big, helpless, fuzzy puppy. “With the help of a little whipped cream?” Richard whispered.

*   *   *

The whipped cream foreplay had started during their days of courtship while he was still at culinary school. He was in downtown St. Helena during a sudden thunderstorm when he ducked under the overhang of a building to get out of the rain. Cowering in the corner was a thin young woman with the most intense green eyes he had ever seen. Inexplicably, she was wearing a pink satin dress and matching shoes that were drenched. She looked like a fairy gone bad. He said hi, and she bit her lip. He saw she was shaking.

“Can I help?”

“I’m scared of thunder.”

Amazing. This Richard could do. He took off his jacket and wrapped her up, put his arm around her for warmth, then led her down the street to the best bakery in town where he fed her floury, raisin-studded sweet rolls and coffee while telling her cooking stories until the rain stopped. She was not a defrocked fairy, he found, but was in town for a wedding that she had now missed. Hours passed, and next thing they knew the sun was out.

“Can I cook you dinner?” he asked.

Back at his apartment, as he unpacked groceries, she opened his refrigerator to confront four shelves piled with cartons of whipping cream. He was on dessert rotation, and overachiever that he was, he practiced at home.

“But what do you do with bowl after bowl of whipped cream?” she asked.

She dipped her index finger deep in the bowl and swirled it. Then she raised her creamy finger to her lips and licked it clean. Slowly. She dipped and swirled again, dabbed it on Richard’s lips until he caught on and began to lick her finger. The girl was afraid of thunderstorms but not calories. After that night, they flew up and down the state to see each other whenever a night opened up. By the time his dessert rotation was finished, they had both gained ten pounds, Ann’s skin was milky soft, and they were in love.

*   *   *

Now she leaned over to return Richard’s kiss as Javi began singing. They stopped before their lips touched, turning toward the gaping refrigerator door where he stood holding Richard’s cake of green-tea ganache between layers of rosewater-scented sponge cake, which blazed with candles as the room plunged into darkness. Richard joined in singing “Happy Birthday” and then “Feliz Cumpleaños.”

The bonfire of flames in the sudden darkness blinded Ann. She felt grateful even though all this fuss embarrassed her. She took a huge breath, closed her eyes, and dreamed that soon her life as a painter would start, or her life as a mother, or as co-owner of a successful restaurant, even if she kept her law day job, which was really a day-and-night-and-weekends job. At least she had delivered Richard safely to a success that he so wanted. Ann felt that happiness rubbed off, like newsprint but in a good way. Once the restaurant took off, she hoped to finally quit the firm and work the front of the restaurant. At home she would convert the extra bedroom into a studio looking out over the canyon. Real life would finally begin. She wouldn’t allow for the thought that perhaps she didn’t have the talent, because why would someone have a desire for something that she wasn’t good at?

Every firm Christmas party, Flask Sr. put his canvases up for the charity auction, and under his vengeful eye the rest of them were forced to bid. By playing it safe, had she already proved that she wasn’t the real thing? But one had to eat, right? After all, wasn’t that what all the last years of denial had been about? To achieve Richard’s dream first, and then parlay his success into her own? Was that too crass? She couldn’t imagine van Gogh or even Pollock thinking like this, but being an artist in the twenty-first century was financially becoming more and more a hobby, like poetry or scrapbooking. She closed her eyes and blew the candles out in a single hopeful puff, and they were plunged back into total darkness.

The truth was, she would settle for being the first face people saw when they came to the restaurant. She loved the idea of making people happy, even if it was as temporary a fix as a good meal.

“You can turn the lights back on,” Richard said.

“I didn’t turn the lights off,” Javi said. “You did.”

“Shit, a fuse,” Richard said.

“Don’t spoil the mood,” Ann begged.

More candles were lit, a slightly lesser bottle, a 1998 Philipponnat Clos des Goisses Brut, was opened, and Ann made a prophetic toast: “May this restaurant’s success be everything you two deserve.”

“May it make us famous,” Javi added.

Richard and Javi made a sloppy vow that they would remain lifelong friends. Running a restaurant wouldn’t sunder that, as it had the relationships of so many of their peers from CIA.

“Besides,” said Richard, stifling a belch, “I don’t need to be the star.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence opened into which Ann rushed to exclaim about the deliciousness of the cake because the truth that all three of them acknowledged, separately and in various combination, was that Richard wouldn’t be a star even locked in a room by himself. Among his quiet charms, charisma was not one of them. He had no choice but to hitch his wagon on the psychopathic joyride that was Javi to even have a chance of creating culinary buzz. A restaurant was about more than just food, sacrilegious as that sounded. It was about branding, cloning copies across the gastronomic map in San Francisco, Honolulu, Las Vegas, New York, Miami, with the goal of later branching out into cookbooks, signature tableware, maybe even a show on the Food Network, etc.

They talked and drank another hour. Ann would later look back and consider that night the death knell of her innocence.

“I love you guys,” Javi said, the alcohol turning him maudlin.

“Time to get home.” Ann yawned. “I’m exhausted and have to be up early for a briefing.”

“The little lawyer,” Javi said, hugging her so hard that her shirt stuck to her sticky back. “You smell like
dulce de leche
.”

“Let me fix that fuse first.” Richard jumped at the chance to go outdoors in privacy and release some of the noxious gases building up inside him. The chilies were burning his esophagus, and there was a scary liquid rumbling in his stomach. He got a flashlight and went out to the alley.

Alone, Javi stared at Ann in the candlelight, his eyes made dreamy by too much alcohol.

“Stop it,” she said.

“I’m remembering you also tasted like
dulce de leche
.”

Richard came back in. “That’s funny—nothing flipped.” In the dim candlelight, he couldn’t detect Ann’s flushed face.

“Probably something electrical. I’ll call someone in the morning,” Javi said. “You two go on home.”

“Are you sure?” Ann asked.

“Go be lovebirds.”

*   *   *

But the next morning when Richard (recovering from last night’s dinner with a panade of aspirin and antacids) got to the restaurant, Javi was still sitting at the table in the middle of the kitchen, drinking out of a bottle of their best tequila. A large ceramic cutting knife lay on the table in front of him, although so far he had only used it on limes. Clearly he had not been home yet.

“Did they fix it?”

“Seems I forgot to pay the bill. I put it on my credit card this morning.”

“You could have written a company check.”

Javi’s handsome face darkened. Now it was Richard’s turn to look at his partner more closely. He did not like what he saw. Purplish circles under his eyes, the eyes themselves bloodshot, not to mention his breath, which was both sour and alcoholic and vaguely canine. Richard worried about lighting a match too near him.

“Have you slept?”

In answer, Javi, ham actor, pushed a pile of bills across the table.

“Tell me it isn’t as bad as it looks. Do that. Tell me,” Richard said.

“It’s fucking Armageddon!”

It was an acknowledged fact that if you knew Javi, you knew he was a spendthrift. Richard’s mistake was in not learning the true scope of his debt before going into a partnership, which was in every bad way akin to a marriage without even the conjugal perks. As he flipped through the bills, his temples began to pound, his skin was drenched in a malarial ooze, and then Javi made it worse.

“Inez, that greedy sow, is suing me for more money. She says I lied and hid income. They froze the restaurant’s account.”

Javi had always been the wild playboy with women problems all through CIA. After he married Inez, Ann and Richard thought he’d calm down, especially after the baby was born, but he still stalked the pretty young sous chefs, the hostesses/wannabe actresses. Javi joylessly womanized all through his divorce, and this pile of bills was an ugly diary of debt for back alimony, child support, health insurance, workers’ comp, rent, credit cards, utility bills, car payments, and a whole slew of unpaid disasters going back to and including student loans at Culinary Institute, going back even further to student loans for his first year of medical school, which he dropped out of, going all the way to the primordial debt of UC Riverside undergraduate. The ex-wife had sued and filed an injunction to freeze the restaurant’s accounts, claiming he had misrepresented income, although the money was Ann and Richard’s life savings, earmarked for a year’s worth of rent, payroll, purchase of kitchen equipment, dining tables and chairs, china and stemware, cutlery, the services of an interior decorator and florists, all of which had already been contracted out. They had committed to a five-year lease, signed with personal guarantees. In the parlance of the food industry, they were cooked.

Things were so dire, Richard was actually roused to action. “I’ll talk to Inez. I’ll explain it’s our life savings. She’ll understand.”

“Maybe not.”

“Inez likes us.”

“I might have misstated things, like that you embezzled money from me.”

That Richard didn’t even blink at this admission was an admission itself of how deep the trouble was.

“Just so you know, I need to leave town for a few days.”

“Now?” Richard was going to kill him with that ceramic knife.

“I borrowed from some loan sharks to keep us afloat.”

“Us?”

“And I took the rest of the petty cash to the casino last night. Guess what? I lost.”

“That’s the thing. I could win betting that you would lose.”

Javi took a slug from the Cabo Uno Anejo. “Javi says, ‘Let them eat blinis.’” He cackled, the careening laugh, hysterical and threatening, then veering over into self-pitying sobbing.

“They can’t do this,” Richard said, now considering using the knife on himself. “Ann will never forgive me. She’ll leave.”

“Ann will never leave you. Trust Javi on this.”

Richard’s insides had now gone to the last stage—hot, molten lava in danger of erupting any moment—the divergent tectonic plates of Javier (why was he suddenly referring to himself in the third person?), Ann, divorce, failure, penury, and possibly a future bout of shingles tearing him apart.

*   *   *

After Richard called Ann at work, she consulted with the only senior partner still there on a Friday, Flask Sr. Waiting while he finished up a phone call on a long, tubular Bang & Olufsen phone that came out from his ear like an ice pick, she stared at his latest artwork hanging directly behind his head on the wall—a grove of arthritic eucalyptus trees that looked as if they had a bad case of infectious skin disease.

“So before we start, since we are fellow artists, how do you like my new plein air piece?”

Ann nodded appreciatively, searching the canvas for something non-career-threatening to say. She was furious her artistic aspirations had somehow leaked out, and especially to a senior partner, who might use it to deny her the partnership that she didn’t want. “It’s like … I can actually smell the trees.”

Of course. There had been a stupid morale-booster seminar months ago in a downtown hotel ballroom. Each of them had to stand up and tell what his or her hobby was, which was essentially a joke because, except for the senior partners, no one had time to sleep, much less have hobbies. “I’m a painter,” Ann had said. “I mean, I’d like to be. Paint on weekends, that is. Someday. When I’m not working.” She had kept on standing there, qualifying, like a punctured tire slowly leaking air.