Cooking as Fast as I Can (22 page)

Suddenly, life was not just good but great. I was finally an executive chef with no strings attached, making good money. I'd extricated myself from Don Giovanni, and had finally moved on from Hannah. I felt free, suddenly, and filled with a wild joy.

After I left Bistro Don Giovanni, Jean-Pierre, my swashbuckling French partner in olive oil creation, had kept in touch. On those desperate, unemployed nights when I spent hours calculating in my head how I was going to make it through the month, he would take me out to eat. He was gracious enough to pretend that he was starving and I was doing him a favor by joining him. I was so grateful for his friendship, and not unattracted to him, so we started sleeping together. I had had very little experience with men, but the unspoken agreement was always that in exchange for their care and companionship I would try, to the best of my ability, to make them happy. I wasn't turned off, but there were limits. Every time we had sex, I couldn't wait to jump out of bed and move on. There was never any cuddling, secret sharing, or planning for the future. I could only do those things with a woman.

After I'd started at Postino and our fling had played itself out, Jean-Pierre did me another favor by turning Lorilynn and me on to a great place to live. His ex-wife had a huge house, with a lot of empty rooms to rent. She was rarely there, and Lorilynn and I would have the run of the place.

I worked harder than I ever had, and played harder, too. I hadn't been single in eight years and hooked up with pretty much everyone who caught my eye. There were a few servers
at Postino, including a lovely guy named Chase, an aspiring opera singer with whom I would remain friends, and a number of avowed straight ladies who were interested in experimenting and felt I was a safe bet. One was Alexa, who was sharp tongued and had a crazy head of curly hair.

Lorilynn was forever rescuing me from situations with chicks that were probably against my better (i.e., sober) judgment. Once I was invited back to an employee party at Bistro Don Giovanni and I invited Lorilynn to come along. Donna and Giovanni were always generous with the alcohol, and the drinks were flowing. Around 1:00 a.m. Lorilynn was ready to leave, and I was nowhere to be found. After searching the dining room and patio, she found me in the kitchen, sandwiched between two hot Latina waitresses, making out in the back of the pantry. She pulled me out by my collar. I stumbled along, throwing kisses back at my new girlfriends and promising to call. She said, “Come on, lover girl, it's time to pour you into bed.”

Another night I went out drinking with some friends at a bar in Berkeley, and started flirting with the bartender. She was Italian, funny and sexy, and reminded me of Penelope Cruz. If memory serves, her name was Carmen. Since I was living in this big, gorgeous house, I thought why not invite her over for dinner? I'd never forgotten the blueberry muffins Blake made for me on our first date, and the effect they'd had on me. I set about using all of my by-now top-notch culinary skills to make Carmen a meal she'd never forget.

I pulled out all the stops. Olive oil roasted artichokes with shaved Reggiano cheese. Sliced prosciutto and lightly grilled peaches with a drizzle of rich vincotto. Pillowy potato-truffle gnocchi with fresh summer truffles and light cream sauce, topped with more truffles. Succulent lemon-and-herb-roasted chicken, the juices still running. Fresh pulled mozzarella, still
warm and weeping milk, that melted the moment it touched our tongues.

We drank wine and flirted over antipasti, then sat down to a beautifully set table. I was proud of myself for thinking about the table setting ahead of time, because it would have been criminal to break the mood with the need to locate place mats and clean flatware. Did we make it past the second course? I have no memory. What I do recall is the movie moment when I stood up, pulled her up by her hands, swept our glasses and plates to the floor, and pushed her onto the table. I straddled her, and after some desperate kissing and groping, she simply stood up, me with my legs wrapped around her waist, and carried me into the bedroom.

Lorilynn came home a few hours later, very annoyed at the mess we left on the dining room floor, and the moans and cries that issued from my bedroom all night long. That was surely the epic sex of my life, and I wish I could report that Carmen and I had one of those great passionate affairs that come along once or twice in a lifetime. We went out a few more times after that, but it was clear the meal had been more of an aphrodisiac than I'd ever imagined.

Now that I could pay her, I set up weekly phone appointments with Robin. I gave her the basics of my childhood abuse, and I came to understand the depths of my shame. I remembered things I'd worked hard to forget. How AH said my parents would be disgusted with me if I ever told them what
we
were doing. Meaning, of course, what he was doing to me. He'd used that word, “disgusted.” A word so powerful that it stuck. Deep down, I was disgusted with myself. For how many years had I hurled myself into clubs, classes, training,
working in an effort to escape this? Cooking, my vocation and life's work, was conveniently physically demanding and all-consuming. I'd do sixteen-hour days in a hundred-degree kitchen and three hundred covers over soul-searching any day of the week, but now it was time to stop and examine the very thing that had driven me all these years: proving that I was good enough.

They say that cooking is love. The love in question might be for earth's bounty, or the perfection required to assure that every plate leaving the kitchen is flawless, or the stamina, discipline, and fortitude required to cook at the highest levels. Maybe it's love for the people you are nurturing with your food, or the ancient, communal experience of breaking bread. Before I began working with Robin, I secretly believed I cooked because without a plate of delicious food to offer someone, I was essentially unlovable.

After our May opening I worked six months without two consecutive days off. Whenever I called home Alma got on the phone and forced me to admit my sixteen-hour days had actually inched upward to eighteen-hour days. After my mom earned her PhD and came back home, no one saw any reason why Alma should leave.

She was ninety-six by then and saw no point in mincing words. I was a fool to work so hard, she said, and to ensure that I would take some R and R she was sending me some money to go visit Lorilynn, who'd just landed a great job on the island of Lanai, in Hawaii. Alma liked to say that her attitude about money was that when her purse was open, it was wide open, but then it slammed shut. Meaning, when she was feeling generous she was very generous. She deemed my exhaustion a crisis, and opened her purse wide. I was bowled over by her compassion. I can be stubborn and disagreeable, but it never
occurred to me to cross Alma. After ensuring that Max, my sous chef, would be able to cover the restaurant, I bought my ticket, took the shuttle to SFO, and got on the plane.

Meanwhile, back on Swan Lake Drive, someone with good if not well-thought-out intentions had given Alma a swivel chair for her desk for Christmas. For some time Alma had had trouble getting in and out of chairs, and moving them up or away from the table. Alma was overjoyed with her present, went to sit down, the chair seat bobbled beneath her, and she fell, breaking her hip.

I was waiting for my return flight at the Honolulu airport and called home to let my parents know I was getting ready to board. My dad answered, and assuming that I was already home in California, mentioned Alma's fall and that now she was in the hospital.

I got hysterical. I was so far away, and Alma was so old. I stood crying noisily outside the newspaper stand. I wiped my eyes, then saw a familiar face across the concourse: Chase, the server at Postino with whom I'd had a fling, and who'd become a good friend. He was there with his mother, also traveling back to the mainland. He rushed over and took me by the shoulders.

“Cat, hey hey hey, what's going on?” he said.

“It's my grandmom. She broke her hip and she's in the hospital,” I blubbered.

“Aw!” said Chase, wrapping me in his arms. “It'll be okay! It'll be okay!”

Why do we always say that when we have no idea what we're talking about?

Alma came through the operation better than her doctors expected. By then a few days had passed and I was back at Postino. I called my mom during a break.

“You don't need to come home,” she said. “She's stable and
improving. Just call her and say hi and tell her you're thinking about her.”

“Mom, I should be there.”

“Just wait. She's going to be fine.”

My impulse was to go back into the kitchen, tell Max to take over, drive to the airport, and take the first plane out. It was just the sort of thing I would do, but I told myself to stay put. My mom had seen hundreds if not thousands of people at all stages of recovery and decline, and she was sitting at her mother's bedside. Surely she knew better than me. Plus, I'd just returned from a long vacation in restaurant time—a week—and was in charge of service that night. I couldn't up and just leave.

The next day I called Alma during a break. Her heart was old and weak, and I could hear that she was struggling to breathe, and I knew without anyone having to tell me that she was in her final moments. I controlled my sobs enough to tell her what she'd meant to me, that no one had ever loved and supported me the way she had. I was only where I was in life because she had introduced me to the nurturing magic of good food. I told her that when I thought of my best friend, it was the image of her face that came to mind.

I could tell when she'd gone. Just like that, it was clear there was no one on the other end of the line. I sat with the receiver to my ear for I don't know how long. I stood up and closed the door to my office, then exhaled a great gulping sob. I could feel my swollen eyes, my raw throat. My head was throbbing with the sheer exertion of it all. I had known people who had died before—a childhood friend who'd committed suicide, a pair of friends from high school who'd died in a car crash, a boy I'd liked who'd died from leukemia—all tragedies to be
sure, but it was nothing like this. Without Alma, how would I go on?

One thing you can always count on in this life: people have to eat. You may be barely upright, but dinner service still begins at five thirty. Fish needs to be boned, onions chopped, stock made, sauce reduced and deglazed, orders expedited, food plated. As a partner in Postino and also the executive chef, my job was largely managerial. My tools were lists on a clipboard and the telephone. But Max, my sous chef, knew that some days the only thing that got me through was making food. When I emerged from the office, eyes red and puffy, he stepped aside without question. I picked up a knife and started prepping. I julienned carrots. I chopped up everything in the kitchen that could be chopped, and then, at around midnight, Max placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Chef, service has been over for a while. We got this.”

Grief is never what you expect. All that sobbing in the movies and on TV, and then, after the commercial break, the healing begins. In my experience, losing someone is more like a lifetime of open-wound management. So much of who I am is because of Alma. I miss her every day.

In 1999 my birthday fell on the day before Easter, April 3. Wild-haired Alexa had wound up becoming a good friend. She's since gotten married, and she and her then boyfriend, Tim, were going skiing at Lake Tahoe with their families and they invited me along. I was still in a fragile state, and didn't dare venture too far away from the kitchen. We were serving a special brunch menu on Sunday and I saw no point in making the three-hour drive on Friday night, just to turn around and come back Saturday afternoon. Had it been any other
weekend, I might have been able to talk my way out of it, but three months had passed since Alma's death, enough time for me to accept that working every day until I was also in the grave wasn't going to bring her back or make my life better, so I allowed myself to be persuaded.