“To prove you’re one of the gang,” she said.
Adrienne agreed to go with Caren and Duncan in Caren’s Jetta. She would stay for one drink then call a cab and be home in bed by three o’clock at the very latest. It wasn’t until Adrienne was already ensconced in the backseat of the car that she realized Wet Hair Charlie was coming with them. The opposite door opened and he climbed in. Adrienne’s enthusiasm flagged.
“I don’t know about this,” Adrienne said. “It’s getting late.”
“I figured you for a stick-in-the-mud,” Charlie said.
“Come on,” Caren said. “It’ll be fun.”
During the ride, Charlie pulled out a joint, lit up, and passed it around. Adrienne refused, then cracked her window. This was what she’d always thought the restaurant life would be like: two o’clock in the morning doing drugs on her way to a party where she would proceed to drink even more than she had drunk during her eight-hour shift. She laughed and then Charlie laughed, though he had no idea what was funny.
The Subiaco house was huge and funky. It had curved steps that led up to a grand front porch with a swing. The house had diamond-shaped windows, some panes of stained glass, and a turret. Inside, though, it was a bad marriage of down-at-the-heels beach cottage and urban bachelor pad. In the first living room Adrienne entered, the furniture was upholstered in faded, demure prints, there was a rocking chair and a few dinged tables. There was a second living room with a cracked leather sofa and a state-of-the-art entertainment system: flat-screen TV on the wall, surround sound, stereo thumping with ten-year-old rap. Adrienne couldn’t stand the noise. She headed out to the sun porch, where there was wicker furniture and an old piano. She took a seat on the piano bench. Caren appeared, bearing two bright red drinks, and she handed one to Adrienne.
“What’s this?” Adrienne asked.
“I don’t know,” Caren admitted.
Adrienne took a sip. It tasted like a mixture of Kool-Aid and lighter fluid. She put the drink down on the piano.
“Duncan didn’t make this?”
“No,” Caren said. “It was in a punch bowl on the kitchen table.”
“They’re trying to poison us so they can take our money,” Adrienne said. She had left her change purse, with three hundred dollars in it, in Caren’s car.
Duncan came onto the sun porch and he and Caren settled down on the wicker sofa. Then Charlie walked in and after looking around the room-no doubt hoping for better company-he plopped down on the piano bench next to Adrienne. That was all she needed.
“I’m getting out of here,” she said.
“Stay,” Caren said. “It’s fun.”
“Stick-in-the-mud,” Charlie said.
Adrienne peeked into the next room. Elliott, Christo, and a few of the unidentified Subiacos were smoking cigarettes watching Apocalypse Now to a soundtrack of Dr. Dre. Fun? In the kitchen, Tyler and Roy, the most definitely underage busboys, were doing shots of Jägermeister. Adrienne thought she might get sick just watching them.
“Phone?” she said.
They pointed down the hall. She located a wobbly pie crust table where the last rotary phone in America rested on a crocheted doily.
Adrienne called A-1 Taxi but was unable to give them her exact location. “Out by the airport?” she said. “Surfside? It’s a big house at the end of a dirt road? The Subiaco house?”
“Subiaco?” the cab driver said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Okay,” Adrienne said. She went outside to retrieve her change purse from Caren’s car and decided to wait for the cab on the bottom step of the porch. Then she heard someone whisper her name. She turned around. Mario was lying on the porch swing, drinking a beer. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I came to the party,” she said, wondering if because she was a manager this would sound weird. She climbed the steps to the porch and leaned back against the railing, checking it first to make sure it wouldn’t give way, dumping her into the bushes. “But I have to go home. I’m tired.”
“You can sleep upstairs with me,” he said.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve been warned about you.”
“Oh, really?”
“The King of the Sweet Ending?”
Mario laughed. “Please,” he said. “Just call me King.” He drained his beer then sat up. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt. There was something about him, Adrienne thought. He emanated heat. Smoldered, like all the other womanizers she had ever known.
“How’d you get that scar on your neck?” Adrienne asked.
“Pulling a cookie sheet out of a high oven,” he said. “A million years ago, in culinary school.”
“You went to school with Fiona?”
“Met her in Skills One,” he said. “It was a very tough class. We bonded.” He laughed. “She’s a big hotshot now but when I first met her she couldn’t even carry a tray of veal bones, okay? We had to roast fifty pounds a day for stock and that’s more than half Fee’s body weight. Our instructor did a double-take when he saw her. He was like, ‘How did a fourth grader get into our classroom?’ ”
Adrienne turned around to search the darkness for the lights of her cab. It felt dangerous to be talking about Fiona like this, though of course Adrienne was enthralled. “Was cooking school tough?”
“A killer,” he said. He patted the spot next to him on the swing. “Sit here, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“I’m fine,” Adrienne said.
“You got that right,” Mario said. “If you’re wondering how an inner city Cuban schlub like me got into the CIA, the answer is, I’m a minority.” He laughed again. “And a fucking genius, of course.”
Adrienne tried to smile but she was too tired. She checked behind her. Nothing.
“I’m only kid-ding,” Mario sang out. “My whole family works in kitchens. My old man and his three brothers worked the line at the Palmer House in Chicago, and all the brothers had sons. There are eleven of us altogether and we all work in kitchens. My brother Louis was a prep cook at Charlie Trotter, Hector worked at Mango, Eddie flipped eggs at the North Side. I worked at so many places I can’t even remember them all, but after high school I got tired of making five bucks an hour. I wanted to learn technique. So off I go to the best cooking school in the country and it kicked my ass. I nearly quit.”
“Really?”
“I hated the hot line. Hated it. Now Fiona, she loved the hot line. The hotter and the busier it was, the more she liked it. The other guys worshipped her. Tiny little thing like that couldn’t even get the veal bones from the oven to the counter and here she is doing eighty plates an hour, swearing like a sailor. She was the one who told me I belonged in pastry, but you know what I thought? Pastry is for chicks. So I got a big, brawny externship at the Pump Room back home and that made school look like Sesame Street. When I went back to the CIA and tried pastry, I realized there’s worse things in life than being in a room full of chicks.”
“I guess so.”
“You like dessert?”
“Of course I like dessert.”
“Everybody likes dessert,” Mario said. “And pastry is cool, okay? It’s quiet. It’s solitary. It’s a place where you have the time and space to lavish the ingredients with love. I’m all about the love.”
He made the word “love” sound like a big soft bed she could fall into. Adrienne gripped the railing. Rule Three! She took a big drink of night air. It was absurdly late. She checked the gravel driveway and the dirt road again. She couldn’t tell if the glow in the distance were headlights or lights from the airport.
“So you brought everybody here?” Adrienne said. “All your cousins.”