Ann turned a shade whiter under her zinc oxide. The memory of the dark shape underneath her, taking her measure, proving that it was master, that it chose the time and place of mortality before swimming away, spooked her.
The ride, as promised, was long and bumpy. Loren rode at a fast clip, carelessly plowing the nose of the boat into each wave crest, dousing them with spray. Wind whipped the water from blue to green and back to blue. In every direction, the world spread out — a horizontal, watery desert.
Under the roar of the engine, Ann whispered into Richard’s ear: “I think this is a mistake.”
Richard shook his head. He hated this about Ann, how she took a headstrong position and then reversed herself. “It’s paid for. We’re doing this.”
The truth was that Richard had been so stressed by the restaurant opening he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but now that the obstacle had been removed, he felt … empty. What did one do without crushing pressure every waking moment? The lack of tension scared him, but there was a moment yesterday while he was deep underwater when he had felt curiously at peace, as if the pressure of the water both held him down and together; without it he was in danger of flying apart. He still hadn’t processed the experience and was shy to describe it.
He had never imagined the sun from underwater, had never seen such brilliant tropical fish — not in a pan, or even baked whole — but alive, swimming. It was a mystical experience to be at the source of one’s food, swimming in the same element it did. For twenty minutes, he forgot about everything, including, blissfully, the disaster of his career. Not quite true. Underwater, the words of his hero, Brillat-Savarin, came to him and made sense for the first time: The universe is nothing without the things that live in it, and everything that lives, eats.
He was so mesmerized that the dive master had to bang on his tank and angrily signal for him to ascend. It was a moment as pure as his first discovery that food could be something more than mere sustenance.
* * *
Richard’s parents were first-generation immigrants from Ireland. They had squatted down in a nondescript suburb of Stockton, California — his father, a mechanic; his mother, a schoolteacher — and never looked up again. Richard’s childhood was a long, devastating rotation of Hamburger Helper, Wonder Bread, Jell-O, and tuna melts blanketed in Velveeta cheese.
His parents took no joy in eating. Food was simply ballast. Taught by their parents to prepare for a rainy day (and all the days in Ireland were rainy), Richard’s parents felt the necessity of building a fortresslike nest before starting a family. First they saved to buy the garage Richard’s father worked in (becoming a small-business owner was the holy grail they had come to America for). Then they decided they needed to own a house. Substantial savings were essential, and after that a college fund, which ended up half filled by the time Richard was finally born to now very middle-aged parents. As a teenager being raised by the near elderly, gray hair and bad knees the norm, Richard himself developed a preternatural maturity about him. At fourteen, he monitored his salt intake and watched The MacNeil/Lehrer Report every night, wedged on the couch between them.
Going back to Ireland during summer vacations, Richard confronted the dark sources of his parents’ parsimony. His grandparents had slogged through a carb-laden adulthood in a postwar Europe marked by lack. The apartment they lived in all their lives was dark, with small, high windows that blocked the cold, as well as air and sunlight; the place had the permanent odor of root vegetables and things kept beyond their prime. His grandmother tortured him with an unimaginable repertoire of family recipes passed down through the Dolan generations: mutton broth, nettle soup, rarebit, white pudding sausage, cabbage-and-bacon pie, skirlie, boiled or fried or baked boxty, potato champ, more potatoes, potatoes on potatoes, on and on. A sadistic, starchy, leaden nightmare.
But salvation finds us wherever we are hiding.
Back in Stockton, new neighbors moved in across the street: a professor at the local college with his FRENCH! wife, Chloe, and their son, Claude, who was the same age as Richard. Richard’s first meals over at their house, as Claude’s new best friend, were remembered more fiercely, were more formative, than his first sexual experiences: melted Brie on a toasted baguette with fresh arugula on top, for dessert meringue over a plain vanilla custard. The first time he tasted Chloe’s baked zucchini — topped only with extra virgin olive oil, fleur de sel, pepper, lemon juice, and Parmigiano-Reggiano — he felt the force of religious conversion. The transubstantiation of simple ingredients into divine, gourmet manna convinced him that there was more to life than he had previously guessed. He went home, walked into the pantry, and threw out his mother’s green can of Kraft Parmesan Cheese.
Chloe was much ahead of her time in the ’70s, searching out local farms and backyard enthusiasts to purchase produce directly, a precursor to the ubiquitous farmers’ markets of today. Richard went with her and learned to buy only fresh brown eggs; to hunt out heirloom varieties of lettuce such as Red Deer Tongue, Bronze Mignonette, and Black-seeded Simpson; to smell tomatoes and cantaloupes for their sugar level. He never looked back, and long after he had lost touch with Claude, Richard and Chloe continued to exchange recipes and food gossip. She was the proudest person at his graduation from culinary school. Unfortunately, she was also the person responsible for his meat aversion.
Chloe, like all dedicated gourmands, insisted on close contact with her food at its source. It was one thing to get vegetables at the farmers’ markets, or even search out eggs and milk at nearby farms; it was an entirely different thing to go to an old-fashioned butcher. Richard, middle-class, sheltered teenager, had never thought of beef, chicken, and pork past the fact that they came in neat little sanitized packages of Styrofoam and cellophane. At the worst, there was the absorbent pad underneath that would be pinkish when you lifted up the meat, giving off a sour whiff of mortality, but that could be quickly buried away in the garbage. Chloe had wanted special parts not available at S-mart, and so she researched and found a local butcher operation.
As they walked through the door — Chloe in her bulky, lumberjack hiking boots that she wore bare-legged with shorts decades before it became fashionable — Richard broke out in a sweat. The chilled air had a heavy mineral smell of blood. Oblivious, Chloe went to the case and began to talk with the owner about offal, oxtails, baby lamb, and the possibility of French cuts such as roti, cotelettes, jambon, jarret. She was excited as they were ushered to the back, a warehouse filled with wooden tables and a sawdust floor. The walk-in meat locker had the expected upside-down carcasses of cows and pigs, but also the grayish body of a dog-sized baby lamb. Richard looked at its head, saw the curled-back lips revealing teeth the size of corn kernels. He felt dizzy and concentrated on not upchucking in front of the skinny man with the mitt-sized hands. Butcher’s hands.
Suddenly he hated Chloe for her casual cruelty, her toned, pale legs that disappeared into the netherworld of her faded denim shorts. A pig carcass had been hauled in and set down on the table. A bone saw lay next to it, with a disembodied swine’s head, which, to Richard’s horror, Chloe had ordered to make fromage de tête. He ran out of the place, bawling like a little kid. They drove home in silence, Chloe chewing on her lower lip, her paper-wrapped plunder hidden in a liquor box in the trunk.
At Culinary Institute, talented but plodding Richard almost immediately fell into the orbit of Javi of the mercurial temper, whose dishes vacillated between sublime and inedible. Javi had satyric dark good looks, and didn’t wash often enough, but women lined up. Teenagers, middle-aged housewives, wealthy tightened socialites, all were after him. When Richard confided to Javi his dad hadn’t been thrilled to find out his only son wanted to be a cook, Javi laughed.