Brian had placed strong cryptic ads for the Generator in the local weeklies and monthlies and had put the buzz out through his network, but 26 covers on the first day of lunch and 45 that night did not exactly tax Denise’s kitchen. The glassed-in dining room, suspended in a blue Cherenkov glow, sat 140; she was ready for 300-cover evenings. Brian and Robin and the girls came to dinner on a Saturday and stopped briefly in the kitchen. Denise did a good impression of being at ease with the girls, and Robin, looking great in red lipstick and a little black dress, did a good impression of being Brian’s wife.
Denise fixed things as well as she could with the authorities in her head. She reminded herself that Brian had dropped to his knees in Paris; that she was doing nothing worse than playing by his rules; that she’d waited for Robin to make the first move. But moral hair-splitting could not explain her complete, dead absence of remorse. In conversation with Brian she was distracted and thick-headed. She caught the meaning of his words at the last moment, as if he were speaking French. She had reason to seem strung out, of course — she routinely slept four hours a night, and before long the kitchen was running at full throttle — and Brian, distracted by his film projects, was every bit as easy to deceive as she’d anticipated. But “deceive” wasn’t even the word. “Dissociate” was more like it. Her affair was like a dream life unfolding in that locked and soundproofed chamber of her brain where, growing up in St. Jude, she’d learned to hide desires.
Reviewers descended on the Generator in late June and came away happy. The Inquirer invoked matrimony: the “wedding” of a “completely unique” setting with “serious and seriously delicious food” from the “perfectionist” Denise Lambert for a “must-have” experience that “single-handedly” put Philadelphia on the “map of cool.” Brian was ecstatic but Denise was not. She thought the language made the place sound crappy and middlebrow. She counted four paragraphs about architecture and decor, three paragraphs about nothing, two about service, one about wine, two about desserts, and only seven about her food.
“They didn’t mention my sauerkraut,” she said, angry nearly to the point of tears.
The reservation line rang day and night. She needed to work, to work. But Robin called her at midmorning or midafternoon on the executive chef’s line, her voice pinched with shyness, her cadences syncopated with embarrassment: “So — I was wondering — do you think — could I see you for a minute?” And instead of saying no, Denise kept saying yes. Kept delegating or delaying sensitive inventory work, tricky preroastings, and necessary phone calls to purveyors to slip away and meet Robin in the nearest strip of park along the Schuylkill. Sometimes they just sat on a bench, discreetly held hands, and, although non-work conversations during work hours made Denise extremely impatient, discussed Robin’s guilt and her own dissociated lack of it, and what it meant to be doing what they were doing, how exactly it had come to pass. But soon the talking tapered off. Robin’s voice on the executive chef’s line came to signify tongue. She didn’t say more than a word or two before Denise tuned out. Robin’s tongue and lips continued to form the instructions demanded by the day’s exigencies, but in Denise’s ear they were already speaking that other language of up and down and round and round that her body intuitively understood and autonomously obeyed; sometimes she melted so hard at the sound of this voice that her abdomen caved in and she doubled over; for the next hour-plus there was nothing in the world but tongue, no inventory or buttered pheasants or unpaid purveyors; she left the Generator in a buzzing hypnotized state of poor reflexes, the volume of the world’s noise lowered to near zero, other drivers luckily obeying basic traffic laws. Her car was like a tongue gliding down the melty asphalt streets, her feet like twin tongues licking pavement, the front door of the house on Panama Street like a mouth that swallowed her, the Persian runner in the hall outside the master bedroom like a tongue beckoning, the bed in its cloak of comforter and pillows a big soft tongue begging to be depressed, and then.
This was all, safe to say, new territory. Denise had never wanted anything, certainly not sex, like this. Simply coming, when she was married, had come to seem like a laborious but occasionally necessary kitchen chore. She cooked for fourteen hours and routinely fell asleep in street clothes. The last thing she wanted late at night was to follow a complicated and increasingly time-consuming recipe for a dish she was too tired to enjoy in any case. Prep time a minimum fifteen minutes. Even after that, the cooking was seldom straightforward. The pan overheated, the heat was too high, the heat was too low, the onions refused to caramelize or burned immediately and stuck; you had to set the pan aside to cool off, you had to start over after painful discussion with the now angry and anguished sous-chef, and inevitably the meat got tough and stringy, the sauce lost its complexity in the repeated dilutions and deglazings, and it was so fucking late, and your eyes were burning, and OK, with enough time and effort you could fairly reliably get the sucker plated, but by then it was something you might hesitate to serve your floor personnel; you simply bolted it (“OK, there,” you thought, “I came”) and fell asleep with an ache. And it was so not worth the effort. But she’d made the effort every week or two because her coming mattered to Emile and she felt guilty. Him she could please as adroitly and unfailingly (and, before long, as unthinkingly) as she clarified consommé; and what pride, what pleasure, she took in the exercise of her skills! Emile, however, seemed to believe that without a few shudders and semi-willed sighs on her part the marriage would be in trouble, and although later events proved him one-hundred-percent correct, she couldn’t help feeling, in the years before she clapped eyes on Becky Hemerling, enormous guilt and pressure and resentment on the Ο front.
Robin was prêt-à-manger. You didn’t need a recipe, you didn’t need prep, to eat a peach. Here was the peach, boom, here was the payoff. Denise had had intimations of ease like this with Hemerling, but only now, at the age of thirty-two, did she get what all the fuss was about. Once she got it, there was trouble. In August the girls went to camp and Brian went to London, and the executive chef of the hottest new restaurant in the region would get out of a bed only to find herself down on some carpet, would dress only to find herself undressing, would come as close to escape as the entry hall and then find herself coming with her back to the front door; jelly-kneed and slit-eyed, she dragged herself back to a kitchen to which she’d promised to return in forty-five minutes. And this was not good. The restaurant was suffering. There was gridlock on the line, delays on the floor. Twice she had to strike entrées from the menu because the kitchen, doing without her, had run out of prep time. And still she went AWOL in the middle of the second evening rush. She drove through Crack Haven and down Junk Row and past Blunt Alley to the Garden Project, where Robin had a blanket. Most of the garden was mulched and limed and planted now. Tomatoes had grown up inside bald tires outfitted with cylinders of gutter screen. And the searchlights and wing lights of landing jets, and the smog-stunted constellations, and the radium glow from the watch glass of Veterans Stadium, and the heat lightning over Tinicum, and the moon to which filthy Camden had given hepatitis as it rose, all these compromised urban lights were reflected in the skins of adolescent eggplants, young peppers and cukes and sweet corn, pubescent cantaloupes. Denise, naked in the middle of the city, rolled off the blanket into night-cool dirt, a sandy loam, freshly turned. She rested a cheek in it, pushed her Robiny fingers down into it.