Milena wasn’t mingling either. She had flitted in like a summer breeze, put a pack of square Russian biscuits on the table, and sat down on the edge of one of the desks, not looking at anybody, one leg over the other. Summer breeze with creaking joints, Luda thought, but she was worried. One passing look from Milena told her that she did appear stupid in her scarf and her caked lipstick. Luda knew that look very well. Mocking, condescending, sometimes pitying. She had seen it all too often on the faces of her husband’s countless secretaries, all attractive single women.
Milena smoothed the folds on her skirt and looked out the window. She thought she’d just sit and wait until Aron noticed her. “Impress and ignore” had been her strategy for years, but she wasn’t sure if it still worked. It had been awhile since she’d lost her ability to turn heads, and sometimes she thought that the saddest thing about it was that she couldn’t say exactly when it had happened. Men used to look at her, and then they didn’t. Something used to be there, and then it was gone; it was as if a part of her died and she hadn’t even noticed when. Still, Milena couldn’t think of any other strategy. She knew that trying to approach other couples was pointless — married women of her age looked at her as if she were a disease. Their warning stares reminded her of the expression on the face of her lover’s wife in the photograph he kept on his desk. Every time Milena happened to see it, she felt that the wife was staring directly at her, at times begging her to leave her husband alone, at other times threatening. Luda looked a little like her. The same heavy features, the same stupid scarf. Respectable, boring, the very picture of righteousness.
Oh, really? Luda thought to herself, having caught Milena’s stare. Respectable? Boring? For your information, I have had lovers too. Lovers was stretching it a bit, but Luda had had one encounter, with a colleague, on the last night of the three-day conference in Bulgaria. The man’s name was Stoyan; he was heavy and dark, with jet black hair spurting above his collarbone. He offered to see her to her hotel, and as they walked, discussing the problems of the advanced Socialist economic system, Luda couldn’t help but marvel at the linguistic similarity of his name to the Russian word for erection. Later, in bed, he had wanted her to yell out his name, but she wouldn’t; she was too bashful for that. I’m not as innocent as you think, Luda thought, fixing her scarf with defiance. Let’s just see.
But then Angie announced that it was time to eat, and the students ditched their conversation partners and rushed toward the food. Plastic tops covering the dishes were removed, foil was peeled off, paper containers unclasped, and the room filled with happy clatter and the air with culturally diverse aromas of curry, ginger, garlic, and basil. The spring rolls were the first to go. It seemed as if one moment there was a whole plateful of them, and the next there was nothing but the oily stains on the students’ fingers and a wonderful shrimp-and-scallions aftertaste in their mouths. Tostones and pastelitos followed suit. The Dominicans and the Russians were a little skeptical about duck gizzards but soon learned to appreciate them. Nobody was particularly enthusiastic about the two varieties of potato salad, so the two Russian couples who brought them ate each other’s offerings. And the extra-value-meal couple ate their extra-value meal. By the end of the feast there were only two items left, the hard, round pretzels and the hard, square biscuits. Angie ate one of each and politely pronounced them authentic and interesting, but nobody else appeared to share her interest.
Both Luda and Milena saw they’d made a mistake: they should have brought something more exciting. They knew it as soon as they saw how Aron’s face changed when the food was uncovered. At first his expression was hopeful but uncertain, as if he were a child seeing his favorite toy but wasn’t sure if it was meant for him or not. But as he filled his plate, his cautious grin disappeared in the deep furrows of a beaming smile. He chewed slowly, with his eyes closed, making sounds similar to the drone of a happy electric appliance. His cheeks became flushed and tiny beads of sweat gathered on the bridge of his nose. “Who made this? This is divine!” he would exclaim from time to time. Aron finished the last spring roll, crinkled his nose, and laughed. He looked radiant; he looked twenty years younger; he looked — Luda couldn’t think of a word right away, and then it hit her — he looked inspired. You couldn’t help but smile when watching Aron eat. And so Luda smiled. And Milena smiled too. Luda and Milena had heard that the path to a man’s heart ran through his stomach, but they’d never believed it. Aron Skolnik proved them wrong.
THE PROBLEM was that neither Luda nor Milena cooked. Milena had a particularly tortured relationship with food. For years and years, her life had been structured around her lover’s visits. He would come to her place after work, twice a week, to spend about an hour with her. “No, no,” he would say, when she offered him food. “Let’s not waste time. My wife is waiting for me with dinner anyway.” Milena would attempt to cook for herself at times, out of spite, out of defiance. She would mix the ingredients in the bowl, telling herself that she didn’t care; she would cook and enjoy a good meal by herself. “I don’t care, I don’t care,” she would still be saying as she scooped the contents of the bowl into the garbage pail.
And Luda? Luda had always been too busy working. Moreover, for most of her married life she had lived with her mother-in-law, who cooked a lot and enjoyed cooking, especially if she could come up with a dish that Luda couldn’t stand. Once Luda figured that out, she learned to fake her culinary partialities. To confuse her mother-in-law, she would feign great enthusiasm for the food she hated (“Zucchini pancakes! Can I have another helping?”) and appear indifferent to something she really liked. She mastered the art of faking so well that by the time her mother-in-law died and Luda could finally start eating according to her real partialities, she found that she no longer had partialities. Her sense of taste was ruined, her interest in food gone.
Which didn’t mean that she couldn’t learn how to cook, Luda thought, on the Thursday before the next feast, while flipping TV channels at home. Learning how to cook was a challenge, and she was used to meeting challenges head on. The first three shows of Food Network were a complete waste. Luda couldn’t care less about the chili cookoff, nor did she need information about candy-making technology. In the third show, the host explained how to make tiramisu, which could have been helpful if not for her cleavage — so prominent that Luda couldn’t concentrate on the movements of the woman’s hands. The fourth show, however, turned out to be much better. The host was making Greek feta and spinach pie, and she seemed to know what she was doing. Besides, the cleavage, if there was any, was well hidden under her chef’s jacket. Luda opened her brand-new notebook and prepared to write down the instructions.