“But why—?” He could see the appalling vision of that desecrated steak dancing before her eyes. “It’s, it’s like suicide.”
A saucepan had appeared in his hand. He was so close to her he could feel the grid of her dress through the thin yielding cloth of his apron. “Hush,” he purred, “don’t think about it. Don’t think at all. Here,” he said, lifting the cover from the pan, “smell this.”
She looked at him as if she didn’t know where she was. She gazed down into the steaming pan and then looked back up into his eyes. He saw the gentle, involuntary movement of her throat.
“Squid rings in aioli sauce,” he whispered. “Try one.”
Gently, never taking his eyes from her, he set the pan down on the table, plucked a ring from the sauce, and held it up before her face. Her lips — full, sensuous lips, he saw now, not at all the thin stingy flaps of skin he’d imagined — began to tremble. Then she tilted her chin ever so slightly, and her mouth dropped open. He fed her like a nestling.
First the squid: one, two, three pieces. Then a pan of lobster tortellini in a thick, buttery saffron sauce. She practically licked the sauce from his fingers. This time, when he asked her to sit, when he put his big hand on her elbow and guided her forward, she obeyed.
He glanced through the porthole and out into the dining room as he removed from the oven the little toast rounds with sun-dried tomatoes and baked Atascadero goat cheese. Jock’s head was down over his plate, the beer half gone, a great wedge of incinerated meat impaled on the tines of his fork. His massive jaw was working, his cheek distended as if with a plug of tobacco. “Here,” Albert murmured, turning to Willa Frank and laying his warm, redolent hand over her eyes, “a surprise.”
It was after she’d finished the taglierini alla pizzaiola, with its homemade fennel sausage and chopped tomatoes, and was experiencing the first rush of his glacé of grapefruit and Meyer lemon, that he asked about Jock. “Why him?” he said.
She scooped ice with a tiny silver spoon, licked a dollop of it from the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “I guess I don’t trust my own taste, that’s all.”
He lifted his eyebrows. He was leaning over her, solicitous, warm, the pan of Russian coulibiac of salmon, en brioche, with its rich sturgeon marrow and egg, held out in offering.
She watched his hands as he whisked the ice away and replaced it with the gleaming coulibiac. “I mean,” she said, pausing as he broke off a morsel and fed it into her mouth, “half the time I just can’t seem to taste anything, really,” chewing now, her lovely throat dipping and rising as she swallowed, “and Jock — well, he hates everything. At least I know he’ll be consistent.” She took another bite, paused, considered. “Besides, to like something, to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I’m wrong? What if it’s really no good?”
Albert hovered over her. Outside it had begun to rain. He could hear it sizzling like grease in the alley. “Try this,” he said, setting a plate of spiedino before her.
She was warm. He was warm. The oven glowed, the grill hissed, the scents of his creations rose about them, ambrosia and manna. “Um, good,” she said, unconsciously nibbling at prosciutto and mozzarella. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, her fingers dark with anchovy sauce, “I guess that’s why I like fugu.”
“Fugu?” Albert had heard of it somewhere. “Japanese, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “It’s a blowfish. They do it sushi or in little fried strips. But it’s the liver you want. It’s illegal here, did you know that?”
Albert didn’t know.
“It can kill you. Paralyze you. But if you just nibble, just a little bit, it numbs your lips, your teeth, your whole mouth.”
“What do you mean — like at the dentist’s?” Albert was horrified. Numbs your lips, your mouth? It was sacrilege. “That’s awful,” he said.
She looked sheepish, looked chastised.
He swung to the stove and then back again, yet another pan in his hand. “Just a bite more,” he coaxed.
She patted her stomach and gave him a great, wide, blooming smile. “Oh, no, no, Albert — can I call you Albert? — no, no, I couldn’t.”
“Here,” he said, “here,” his voice soft as a lover’s. “Open up.”
MODERN LOVE
THERE WAS NO EXCHANGE of body fluids on the first date, and that suited both of us just fine. I picked her up at seven, took her to Mee Grop, where she meticulously separated each sliver of meat from her Phat Thai, watched her down four bottles of Singha at three dollars per, and then gently stroked her balsam-smelling hair while she snoozed through The Terminator at the Circle Shopping Center theater. We had a late-night drink at Rigoletto’s Pizza Bar (and two slices, plain cheese), and I dropped her off. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.
“It’s been fun,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, taking her hand.
She was wearing gloves.
“I’ll call you,” she said.
“Good,” I said, giving her my richest smile. “And I’ll call you.”
On the second date we got acquainted.
“I can’t tell you what a strain it was for me the other night,” she said, staring down into her chocolate-mocha-fudge sundae. It was early afternoon, we were in Helmut’s Olde Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in Mamaroneck, and the sun streamed through the thick frosted windows and lit the place like a convalescent home. The fixtures glowed behind the counter, the brass rail was buffed to a reflective sheen, and everything smelled of disinfectant. We were the only people in the place.
“What do you mean?” I said, my mouth glutinous with melted marshmallow and caramel.
“I mean Thai food, the seats in the movie theater, the ladies’ room in that place for god’s sake…”
“Thai food?” I wasn’t following her. I recalled the maneuver with the strips of pork and the fastidious dissection of the glass noodles. “You’re a vegetarian?”
She looked away in exasperation, and then gave me the full, wide-eyed shock of her ice-blue eyes. “Have you seen the Health Department statistics on sanitary conditions in ethnic restaurants?”
I hadn’t.
Her eyebrows leapt up. She was earnest. She was lecturing. “These people are refugees. They have — well, different standards. They haven’t even been inoculated.” I watched her dig the tiny spoon into the recesses of the dish and part her lips for a neat, foursquare morsel of ice cream and fudge.
“The illegals, anyway. And that’s half of them.” She swallowed with an almost imperceptible movement, a shudder, her throat dipping and rising like a gazelle’s. “I got drunk from fear,” she said. “Blind panic. I couldn’t help thinking I’d wind up with hepatitis or dysentery or dengue fever or something.”
“Dengue fever?”
“I usually bring a disposable sanitary sheet for public theaters — just think of who might have been in that seat before you, and how many times, and what sort of nasty festering little cultures of this and that there must be in all those ancient dribbles of taffy and Coke and extra-butter popcorn — but I didn’t want you to think I was too extreme or anything on the first date, so I didn’t. And then the ladies’ room… You don’t think I’m overreacting, do you?”
As a matter of fact, I did. Of course I did. I liked Thai food — and sushi and ginger crab and greasy souvlaki at the corner stand too. There was the look of the mad saint in her eye, the obsessive, the mortifier of the flesh, but I didn’t care. She was lovely, wilting, clear-eyed, and pure, as cool and matchless as if she’d stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and I was in love. Besides, I tended a little that way myself. Hypochondria. Anal retentiveness. The ordered environment and alphabetized books. I was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor, I carried some scars and I read the newspapers — herpes, AIDS, the Asian clap that foiled every antibiotic in the book. I was willing to take it slow. “No,” I said, “I don’t think you’re overreacting at all.”