Denise’s phone rang and she let it ring. Her head felt close to cracking open. She couldn’t stand to hear Robin say Brian’s name.
Robin raised her face to the ceiling, pearls of tear beading in her lashes. “I don’t know what I came for. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just feeling really, really bad and incredibly alone.”
“Get over it,” Denise said. “That’s what I’m going to do.”
“Why are you being so cold?”
“Because I’m a cold person.”
“If you’d call me, or say you loved me—”
“Get over it! For God’s sake! Get over it! Get over it!”
Robin gave her a beseeching look; but really, even if the matter of the condoms were somehow cleared up, what was Denise supposed to do? Quit working at the restaurant that was making her a star? Go live in the ghetto and be one of Sinéad and Erin’s two mommies? Start wearing big sneakers and cooking vegetarian?
She knew she was telling herself lies, but she didn’t know which of the things in her head were the lies and which were the truth. She stared at her desk until Robin yanked open the door and fled.
The next morning the Generator made the front page of the New York Times food section, below the fold. Beneath the headline (“Generating Buzz by the Megawatt”) was a photograph of Denise, the interior and exterior architectural shots having been relegated to page 6, where her country ribs and sauerkraut could also be seen. This was better. This was more like it. By noon she’d been offered a guest appearance on the Food Channel and a permanent monthly column in Philadelphia. She bypassed Rob Zito and instructed the reservation girl to start overbooking by forty seats an evening. Gary and Caroline called separately with congratulations. She dressed down Zito for refusing a weekend reservation to the local NBC-affiliate anchorwoman, she let herself abuse him a little bit, it felt good.
Expensive people of a sort formerly scarce in Philadelphia were three-deep at the bar when Brian came by with a dozen roses. He hugged Denise and she lingered in his arms. She gave him a little bit of what men liked.
“We need more tables,” she said. “Three fours and a six at a minimum. We need a full-time reservationist who knows how to screen. We need better parking-lot security. We need a pastry chef with more imagination and less attitude. Also think about replacing Rob with somebody from New York who can handle the kind of customer profile we’re going to get.”
Brian was surprised. “You want to do that to Rob?”
“He wouldn’t push my ribs and sauerkraut,” Denise said. “The Times liked my ribs and sauerkraut. I say fuck him if he can’t do the job.”
The hardness in her voice brought a glow to Brian’s eyes. He seemed to like her like this.
“Whatever you think,” he said.
Late Saturday night she joined Brian and Jerry Schwartz and two cheekboned blondes and the lead singer and the lead guitarist from one of her favorite bands for drinks on the little railed-in aerie that Brian had rigged on the roof of the Generator. The night was warm and the bugs along the river were nearly as loud as the Schuylkill Expressway. Both blondes were talking on their phones. Denise accepted a cigarette from the guitarist, who was hoarse from a gig, and let him examine her scars.
“Holy shit, your hands are worse than mine.”
“The job,” she said, “consists of tolerating pain.”
“Cooks do notoriously abuse their substances.”
“I like a drink at midnight,” she said. “Two Tylenols when I get up at six.”
“Nobody’s tougher than Denise,” Brian bragged unattractively over the antennae of the blondes.
The guitarist responded by sticking his tongue out, holding his cigarette like an eyedropper, and lowering the coal into the glistening cleft. The sizzle was loud enough to distract the blondes from their phoning. The taller one squealed and spoke the guitarist’s name and said he was insane.
“Well, but I’m wondering what substances you’ve ingested,” Denise said.
The guitarist applied cold vodka directly to the burn. The taller blonde, unhappy with his performance, answered, “Klonopin and Jameson’s and whatever that is now.”
“Well, and a tongue is wet,” Denise said, extinguishing her own cigarette on the tender skin behind her ear. She felt like she’d taken a bullet in the head, but she flicked the dead cigarette toward the river casually.
The aerie got very quiet. Her weirdness was showing as she didn’t use to let it show. Because she didn’t have to — because she could have trimmed a rack of lamb now or had a conversation with her mother — she produced a strangled scream, a comical sound, to reassure her audience.
“Are you OK?” Brian asked her later in the parking lot.
“I’ve burned myself worse by accident.”
“No, I mean are you OK? That was a little scary to watch.”
“You’re the one who bragged about my toughness, thanks.”
“I’m trying to say I feel bad about that.”
She was awake in pain all night.
A week later she and Brian hired the former manager of the Union Square Café and fired Rob Zito.
A week after that the mayor of Philadelphia, the junior senator from New Jersey, the CEO of the W — Corporation, and Jodie Foster were in the restaurant.
A week after that, Brian took Denise home after work and she invited him inside. Over the same fifty-dollar wine she’d once served his wife, he asked if she and Robin had had a falling-out.
Denise pursed her lips and shook her head. “I’ve just gotten very busy.”
“That’s what I thought. I figured it didn’t have anything to do with you. Robin’s pissed off with everything lately. Especially with anything that has to do with me.”
“I miss hanging out with the girls,” Denise said.
“Believe me, they miss you,” Brian said. He added, with a slight stammer, “I’m — thinking of moving out.”
Denise said she was sorry to hear it.
“The sackcloth business is out of control,” he said, pouring. “She’s been going to nightly mass for the last three weeks. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. And I literally can’t say a word about the Generator without setting off an explosion. She, meanwhile, is talking about home-schooling the girls. She’s decided our house is too big. She wants to move into the Project house and home-school the girls and maybe a couple of the Project kids. ‘Rasheed’? ‘Marilou’? Which, what a great place for Sinéad and Erin to grow up, a brownfield in Point Breeze. We’re verging over into the loony, a little bit. I mean, Robin is great. She believes in better things than I believe in. I’m just not sure I love her anymore. I feel like I’m arguing with Nicky Passafaro. It’s Class Hatred II, the Sequel.”
“Robin is full of guilt,” Denise said.
“She’s verging on being an irresponsible parent.”
Denise found breath to ask: “Would you want to take the girls, if it came to that?”
Brian shook his head. “I’m not sure, if it came to that, that Robin would actually want custody. I could see her giving up everything.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
Denise thought of Robin brushing Sinéad’s hair and suddenly — keenly, terribly — missed her crazy yearnings, her excesses and accesses, her innocence. A switch was flipped and Denise’s brain became a passive screen on which was projected a highlight reel of all that was excellent in the person she’d driven away. She reappreciated the least of Robin’s habits and gestures and distinguishing marks, her preference for scalded milk in her coffee, and the off-color cap on the front tooth that her brother had broken with a rock, and the way she put her head down like a goat and butted Denise with love.