The School of Essential Ingredients (21 page)

“Good?” she asked. He nodded gratefully.

Her hands gathered the dishes roughly together into a stack. “You come back again,” she said.

He did, and never once got what he ordered. He considered acknowledging the situation and simply declaring himself at the mercy of the kitchen, but then again, he realized he already was—his order simply a line in a play already written, without which the rest would not be the same. And so, each time, he stated a request he knew would be ignored and laid his trust at the doors of the kitchen, out of which, as if in recognition of a test he had passed, came dishes of delicate complexity and scintillating tastes, rarely if ever to be found on the actual menu.

The night of the soggy rice, Ian left his failed culinary experiment and went down the faded red stairs of his apartment building to the restaurant below. The waitress pointed to his usual table by the window.

“Do you know how to cook rice?” Ian blurted out as he was sitting down.

The waitress stared at him.

“I mean, of course you do; I just wondered if you could tell me how.”

“Why? You eat rice here.”

“I want to learn how.”

The old woman noted the urgency in his voice; she looked at him more closely, nodded. “You don’t cook rice, you take care of it,” she stated. “I’ll get your dinner now.” She returned to the kitchen without even the pretense of asking him for his order.

Back in his apartment, Ian held a large metal bowl with a layer of rice lying like an ocean floor underneath several inches of cool water. He dipped his hand into the liquid and swirled his fingers in a clockwise motion. He felt the delicate grains slipping between his fingers, watching pearlescent white clouds of starch enter the water like the changing of weather in the sky.

When the water was so thick with starch he could barely see the rice, he placed a colander in the sink and poured the contents of the bowl through it, the rice running out with the water like thick oatmeal until the last of it finally fell into the colander with a thud. He put the rice back in the bowl, filled it with water, and repeated the process, again and again, until the water stayed clear and he could see each grain of rice in the bottom of the bowl.

He drained the rice one last time and put the pot on the stove. He looked at the rice in the colander, plumped from its immersion, thought for a moment, then poured a bit less than two cups of water into the pot and turned on the heat.

Once Ian had perfected rice, he turned to polenta, then to fish lightly grilled on the hibachi he balanced on the pint-size balcony outside his kitchen window. By the end of August, he had placed small pots of herbs out on the balcony as well, the smell of basil and oregano and chives greeting his nose when he opened the window in the morning. He discovered a farmers’ market near the bus stop on his way home from work downtown. He bought a good, sharp knife at a culinary store and began experimenting, slicing vegetables straight and julienned, cutting meat with and across the grain, taking scissors to his basil, then ripping it with his fingers, to see if it varied the taste.

He found a store that sold spices in bulk, buying just as much as he needed, which allowed him the excuse to return and wander through the store, smelling containers with names he didn’t recognize. One time, he took a packet of an especially intriguing spice into the Chinese restaurant and showed it to the waitress. She inhaled deeply; then, with a look of amusement, she took the packet back into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a dish redolent in its fragrance. Over time, it became a game of sorts. At first frustrating, the recipes for the dishes became something he looked forward to figuring out, a challenge keeping him company, entertaining him in the middle of a traffic jam or while he waited on hold for a service call. He found himself eating more slowly, each bite a chance to understand a part of the puzzle, until finally the puzzle wasn’t pieces, simply the feel of a warm sauce sliding down his throat, the crunch of a water chestnut against the edge of his teeth.

BY the time the cooking class started, Ian had more questions than answers. He found himself reading chemistry books after the cake-baking class, trying to make pasta on his own after the Thanksgiving dinner. Watching the other members of the class, he found himself wondering where they had come from, what it was they brought with them, as if they, too, were recipes he might come to understand. Where Claire’s face, that first night, had gotten its mixture of excitement and distrust, what made Isabelle recall the things she remembered, or what had placed Tom inside such an untouchable circle of sorrow. And then there was Antonia, always Antonia, with her olive skin and dark hair, her voice carefully finding its way around the American sounds and syllables that seemed too flat and awkward for her sensuous mouth.

He had found Antonia’s hesitancy with his language endearing, and his desire to protect her was strong until the day he had encountered her at the farmers’ market. He had recognized her from some twenty feet away and walked over, hoping he could help her past some language barrier, his assistance a worthy introduction to some other conversation. But as he got closer, he could see her hands flying, as if released. She was laughing, her words unintelligible to him but completely comprehensible to the Italian produce man in the stall, their faces beaming at the joy of playing in the waterfall of their own language.

Ian stood behind Antonia, breathing in her happiness, until the produce man sent him a sharp look and said something rapidly to Antonia, who turned to him, her face still lit from her conversation.

“Sì, sì,”
she responded.
“Lo conosco.”
I know him. “Hello, Ian.”

And without a thought, Ian’s soul stepped into the radiated warmth of her expression.

A FEW Weeks later, Antonia had called and asked him to help her. There were floors, she said, that needed to go away. So her clients would understand how important it was to keep things that were good and true. Ian didn’t mention the apparent irony of getting rid of something in order to keep it; he just agreed and thanked the fates that had sent him a construction job that last summer before college, years earlier.

They had spent a long Saturday, pulling up squares of linoleum, downing cup after tiny cup of the espresso that Antonia made on the big black stove and that he hardly needed to get his pulse running. Midday, they took a break, and Antonia got out the lunch she had brought for them—hard-crusted bread and prosciutto and fresh mozzarella, a bottle of red wine.

“This is how we make a picnic in Italy,” she told him, beaming.

“No peanut butter and jelly?” he asked.

“What is that?”

Ian smiled. “So, why did you move here?” he asked, curious.

She pondered the question for a moment. “Well, Lucca—the place where I grew up—it was wonderful, like a warm bath. So beautiful and everyone so loving. All the time, I knew what to do. If someone invited me to dinner, I knew what to bring. I knew the hours for the market. I could tell you, right now, when to catch the next train to Pisa. There was nothing wrong. I just wanted—how do you say? a cold shower?—to wake up my soul.”

Ian tried to imagine being so sure of what to do that he would leave everything, go somewhere else, just to be uncertain. She spoke so confidently, as if a warm bath was something you could to turn on any faucet to find. Perhaps, he thought, for her it was. Listening to her, Ian realized that he had spent his life in search of exactly what she had stepped out of. He was going to tell her this, but he stopped. Her face was changing expressions like sun moving over water, and he realized that more than telling her what he thought, he wanted to hear what she would say, wanted to watch her hands move in the air like sparrows.

“I remember,” she said, “getting off the plane in New York. All those big American voices banging into each other. I had never heard so many. I thought I knew English, but I couldn’t understand—the words would fly by and sometimes one would hit me and I would try to hold on to it. But they were very, very fast.” She shook her head ruefully. “I felt so stupid.”

“You are not stupid,” Ian said emphatically.

“No,” she responded, her eyes clear. “I am not. But you see, in the end, I think it is good to not know things sometimes.”

“Why?”

“It makes everything . . . a possibility, if you don’t know the answer.” She paused. “I am sounding brave. I am not—I was scared. And it makes you tired, not knowing things. When I got here, I drank half-and-half for three weeks. I thought, Americans are so rich, maybe their milk is, too.” She laughed.

“How is it now?” Ian asked.

“Better. I buy milk now.” She smiled. “I am joking. But it is better. Every year I am here, I see more things that are familiar. I know that Americans carve pumpkins for Halloween, or send each other Christmas cards, or cook those big turkeys . . .” Her nose crinkled.

“You know what is best?” Antonia asked. Ian shook his head. “The cooking class. All those people, they all want to see something in a different way, like I did, but we are together.”

She stopped, embarrassed. “I talk too much.”

“No,” Ian replied. “It is wonderful.” He looked at her for a long time. “You know, I have always felt exactly the opposite. No, really”—he laughed, seeing her face—“all I ever wanted was to be certain of things. I listen to you, and it reminds me of this puppy I saw in the park the other day. He just leapt out into the lake after this ball. He never wondered if the ball would float, or if there was a bottom to the lake, or if he would have enough energy to get back to the shore, or his master would even be there when he got back . . .” Ian slowed, flustered. “Not that I think you are like a dog.”

“Certainly not,” answered Antonia, amused. They continued pulling up the linoleum for a time; the fir floors were showing clearly now, the glowing oranges and yellows in the wood changing the room, making it feel warmer, more alive, a part of the world outside as well as in.

“You know, Ian,” Antonia commented, “my father always said a person needs a reason to leave and a reason to go. But I think sometimes the reason to go is so big, it fills you so much, that you don’t even think of why you are leaving, you just do.”

“And you just believe you’ll make it back to shore?”

“With the ball.” Antonia laughed.

After the linoleum date, as Ian preferred to think of it, he had a hard time concentrating on anything other than Antonia. Even so, it had taken him months to get up the courage to ask her to dinner. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Lillian, and a vigorous poke in the ribs from Chloe, Ian might never have worked up the courage to ask Antonia to dinner at all.

But Antonia had said yes, as if perhaps she had been waiting, as if perhaps she had found his own hesitancy endearing, which only made him more nervous as the evening approached.

Ian picked up the phone and dialed his mother’s number. When she answered, her voice had the excited quality that Ian knew meant she was in the middle of a new painting.

“I can call back,” he said quickly.

“No, I saw it was you.” His mother’s voice was happy. Ian pictured a painting filled with yellows and blues.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Everything’s fine. Work is fine.” He paused. “I’m taking the cooking class.”

“How’s it going?”

“Why did you give me a cooking class?” The words jumped from his mouth, unbidden. “I mean, you never cooked.”

“No, not so much.” Ian could almost hear his mother smiling.

“Then why did you give it to me?”

“Well”—his mother paused, searching—“when I paint, it brings me joy. I wanted you to have that, too.”

“I’m not a painter, Mom.”

“Perhaps not, but you are a cook.”

“How did you know that?”

“Maybe it was your expression when you would taste what I made.” His mother’s laugh rang across the phone lines. “Don’t worry, you really did try to be polite about it.

“So,” she continued, “what are you going to cook for her?”

“Who?”

“The woman.”

“How do you know there’s a woman?”

“Ian, I may be a visual woman, but I do have ears.” There was that smile again. “Besides, your sister told me. What are you going to cook?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Ian hesitated.

“But you have an idea . . .” his mother coaxed.

“Yes,” replied Ian, and suddenly he knew. “I was thinking beef bourguignon. Something rich and comforting. With a deep red wine to match it. She’s like that. And maybe a tiramisù for dessert, all those layers of cake and whipped cream and rum and coffee. And espresso, no sugar, for contrast.”

He stopped, embarrassed. He realized he sounded like someone he knew, and then realized he was talking to her.

Ian’s apartment was small, the distinction between dining and kitchen table a psychological rather than physical one, and in any case only large enough for two. But Ian had bought a round white linen tablecloth and borrowed heavy silver candlesticks from his elderly neighbor downstairs who required only that Ian tell her every detail the next day, a payment Ian sincerely hoped he would be able to mortgage. He had debated for a long half hour at the florist shop over what he should buy until the exasperated store owner had simply opened the huge refrigerator full of roses and daisies and carnations and shoved him inside.