CHAPTER 2
DESCENDING DUSK AND COLD WEATHER and heavy snows and gusty wind—back when this was what January meant, I didn’t actually know anything about the weather outside or the drifts of snow or wind. I was always behind windows, cradling in my hands a steaming cup of French-pressed coffee or a mug of cognac-enhanced hot chocolate. I would watch the heavy snow coming down in the late afternoon, dip a piece of warm buttered baguette in my hot chocolate, take a bite, and exclaim, Wow, there’s so much snow! And that would be it. Hot and sweet—that was January. Heat and sweetness were also the first sensations to go.
I can’t taste the bitter and full-bodied French Valrhona chocolate or the flavorful bite of the cognac. My entire body is tense, the way it is when I have to open my mouth for the first time in front of a man. I swallow a mouthful of freshly made hot chocolate, the liquid coating my throat. The snow is letting up and slender rays of light slice through the dark clouds. But the inside of my mouth remains numb. I ask myself, is this drink hot? Or cold? That feels as meaningless as if I’m asking myself whether I’m hot or cold. The state of being neither hot nor cold—this is the first step toward the path of rage and fear.
Only four genes control vision, but more than one thousand genes are involved with smell and taste. But one thousand genes can disappear faster than the four. I’ve already lost two things—this kitchen and the taste for sweet, hot liquid. I may lose everything I have, but I want to be able to keep just two things. It doesn’t feel odd that he isn’t one of them. I know of people who chose death when they lost their taste buds. I need a kitchen even if it isn’t this one, and it’s crucial that I keep working.
I push the now-cold mug onto the table, casting it away. I have to think about what I can do right now. And about how I can emerge from this funk. I swallow, thinking of the freshness of a winter carrot and the spirited crunch of a radish. Some people like to eat anything soft and pliant, or food that bursts in their mouths when they bite into it. Some enjoy meat juices slowly seeping into the spaces between their teeth, and others like to crunch on plain raw vegetables. I can’t live without vegetables. When I think of raw carrot salad—a fresh carrot just pulled from the ground with leafy green fronds still waving from its top, julienned, dressed with olive oil, minced garlic, lemon juice, salt, ground black pepper, chilled in the fridge for about four hours, then sprinkled with chopped parsley right before you dig in—I can feel saliva pooling slowly from the back of my mouth. His favorite dish is steak, rare and tender and moist, seared just enough to elevate it from its primal rawness, with a side of baked potato. It’s the first dish I made him. The carrot, the sweet, cold carrot salad, as refreshing as crunching down on a cube of ice—I’m okay, for now.
Restaurant Nove. In Italian, it means the number nine. It’s the only restaurant I’ve cooked at. I didn’t know I would be back here. When I first started working here at the age of twenty, I named the persimmon tree outside the two-story building Caper, because the persimmons dangling from the branches in the fall looked just like the flower buds of capers on the cusp of blooming. I slowly climb the stairs and look through the floor-to-ceiling glass of the restaurant. There must be something that’s different, but everything seems the same—closing at this time of day to prepare for dinner service, setting the table with light-gray linens instead of white from September to February, and Chef sitting at a table by the window, staring outside or scratching away on his pad with his head bowed, coming up with a new menu. If only I could open that door and walk in as if nothing had happened. Then would I believe I’m happy? I ask Chef in my head, the glass window between us.
Chef is a big man, with especially brawny shoulders and a back like a kendo player, but a little bent over. If he were an animal he would be a bull, with intense eyes and his entire body radiating power. A bull—one that doesn’t compromise and moves with determination and is brave. If he were a fish, he would obviously be a large, thick, saw-edged perch that weighs over forty kilograms, the carnivorous fish that keeps to itself. The first time I met him, he was slouched at a white-tableclothed table, smoking a cigar as leisurely as if he were merely the owner, not the chef. Back then, he tied his long hair back in a ponytail. Now his graying hair is buzzed like that of a soldier. I’m relieved—it must not only be children who are reassured when surrounded by familiar sights. Like a cook who’d gone on break after lunch service and was returning for dinner service after changing into clean whites, I pull open the heavy glass doors and burst in.
Chef looks up, surprised.
“Can I have some tea too?” I nod at the large white porcelain café au lait cup in front of Chef and sit down. This would be easier if he asked why I’m here, but Chef doesn’t say a word.
“I just came by to have some tea,” I continue.
“What?”
“Huh?”
“Do you have something to say to me?”
I don’t say anything.
“It’s almost time for dinner service.”
“I want to work again.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“You said nothing was going on.”
“Nothing’s going on.” Chef has known me for thirteen years, since I was twenty. It’s impossible to lie to his face, sitting here across from him.
“So what’s the matter?”
I can’t say anything.
“What about the cooking classes?”
“I’m wrapping them up.”
He stands and stalks into the kitchen, annoyed. The kitchen isn’t a place just anyone can walk into, not even me. The pass dividing the dining room and the kitchen isn’t long, but the two areas are completely different in character and purpose—people waiting for food and people making it, people being waited on and people serving them. Right now I’m not waiting for food or making it, nor am I being waited on or serving someone, and the distance between the kitchen and the dining room feels vast. It’s hot in here, even though the snow on the ground outside is starting to freeze. I look around in a manner that might make an observer think I’m bored.
Three years ago they took down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room to create a more airy interior, but when I worked here, the kitchen was as stuffy as a preheated fourhundred-degree oven. If you stood in the kitchen for five hours, where the window was closed even in the middle of summer to keep the food hot, the threads of your uniform melted and stuck to your skin. Nobody said things like It’s too hot in here. Even big restaurants don’t have spacious kitchens, because you have to save space in order to squeeze in another table.
If nothing has changed since my days here, I can still tell you everything about the place, even the number of glasses lined up in the kitchen right now. But something has definitely shifted, just like the way I couldn’t brazenly follow Chef into the kitchen. Now, for me, the kitchen is no longer solely the place that delicious food comes from.
Chef reappears and sits across the table, pushing a large porcelain cup in front of me. I blow on the tea to cool it and touch my lips to the edge of the cup. Bitter and nutty and sour and sharp—tea with coffee, milk, and ground dried chicory. When I worked here, I always made myself a cup of this tea in the middle of the afternoon.
“I don’t know whether I should say this…” Chef said.
“Go ahead.”
“This kind of desperation—”
I don’t want to hear that mine is a desperate love.
“—is always hard to get through.”
In a situation like this, it’s uncomfortable to talk to someone who’s older. Chef’s tone is that of a person who’s lived his entire life according to his convictions and beliefs. Afraid that his voice will grab me by the throat and shake me as if with a big hand, I quickly ask, “So I can start tomorrow, right?”