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Authors: Janice Weber

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BOOK: Devil's Food
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“Sure.” Emily peeled a banana, chewing pensively as Ross returned to the newspaper. “What’s new in the world?“

“Nothing at all. The rich are getting poorer and the poor are having triplets.” He scanned a few obituaries. It was always
interesting to read how people had died. Cancer and cardiac arrest got most of the old ones. The young and foolish had drowned,
contracted AIDS, or tried to ride motorcycles. Ross read through to the last paragraphs, checking if he knew any of the survivors:
none today. When Emily’s toast popped up, he passed her the marmalade. “What’s on your agenda?”

“Food.” Cafe Presto, where Emily worked, was one of the busiest eateries in the financial district.

“That’s all? You look very businesslike. I haven’t seen that blouse before.”

“I’ve been reading a book on power dressing,”she said.

“Oh? You look pretty powerful in your regular gear.”

“Aprons and T-shirts are not powerful, Ross.”

“You’re a chef, honey. No one expects you to look like a stockbroker.”

“Just give it a chance, all right? I wanted a little change.” Emily concentrated moodily on her toast as Ross waited for her
to elaborate. “Busy today, sweetheart?” she asked after a few moments.

He sighed; she had deflected the conversation away from her clothing and makeup and mischief. “George Kravitz is coming in
to see sketches of his new office park.”

“Think hell like them?”

“For two hundred thousand bucks, let’s hope so. Then I’m taking Dagmar Pola out to lunch.”

Emily stopped chewing. “Who’s that?”

“Pola’s Pretzels. Or should I say, the widow of Pola’s Pretzels. Good old Joe checked out last week. Now Dagmar wants to build
some sort of gallery for his art collection.”

“What did he collect?”

“Nudes, I hear.”

“Male or female?”

“Female, of course. Joe was never without a woman on his arm.”

“Wife, you mean.”

“No, Dagmar was his only wife. We’re talking about the five hundred mistresses. All those salty pretzels must have affected
his libido.”

“Maybe Dagmar did.” Emily brushed a few crumbs from her lapel. “By the way, you haven’t slept with me in three weeks.”

Eh? How did she get from pretzels to their sex life? Did she really count the days in between? He must be better than he thought.
“We’ll go to bed early tonight. Catch up.”

“We have theater tickets tonight.”

“Oh.” Done with the newspaper, Ross put it aside. “Do you think you could arrange a table for Dagmar and me at lunch today?
I’m sure she’d like the fish chowder you serve on Thursdays.”

“Then she should have made a reservation two weeks ago.” Emily didn’t need to remind her husband that Cafe Presto was always
packed from eleven till two. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He followed her to the bathroom, watching as she vigorously
brushed her teeth and applied a second layer of that heavy eye shadow. When she began painting her lips vermilion, he considered
following her to work. “Are you all right?”Ross asked. “That’s such strange makeup.”

Finally she looked at him. “What’s so strange?”

“Its a little tarty.”Whoops, mistake. “Well, not tarty. It’s a little strong. For the morning, anyway.”

“Do you mind? I’m turning over a new leaf.”

“What was the matter with the old leaf?”

“Just that. It was old.”Emily again checked her watch. “Like me. Have fun with Dagmar, dear.”

She grabbed her raincoat and hastily left, obviously not wanting him to walk downtown with her. As Ross was thinking about
that, the phone rang. “Hello?”

Hang-up. Ross called his wife around noon, wondering if a table for two had unexpectedly turned up at Cafe Presto. The pastry
chef told him that Emily had left at eleven and would not return until three.

Emily stepped onto Joy Street just as the thick, warm air coalesced into drizzle. It had been a cloudy, listless summer and
she was glad it was almost over. Seven out of ten weekends had been wet, soddening getaways to their cabin in New Hampshire;
by the middle of August, even Ross refused to drive two hours north to stare at a fogged-in lake and a cupboard of wilted
jigsaw puzzles. Instead, they had flown to New York to see a matinee and a few exhibitions; that weekend turned out to be
the sunniest of the season, of course.

Emily ducked into the subway at Park Street, avoiding the stagnant pools blotching the steps. The station smelled of yesterday’s
sweat and today’s doughnuts. Not having slept well, she felt heavy and slow, stalked by a headache. Several commuters looked
up from their newspapers as she walked to the center platform; maybe these bluish lamps fluoresced her makeup. As a wayside
musician pipped into his flute, she watched a mouse scurry along the third rail. Behind her, two men discussed a local bank
failure. Only as her train rumbled in did Emily finally
focus on the poster across the tracks. It was a provocative closeup of Philippa, her twin sister, eating a green olive.
CHOKE HOLD
, the title of Philippa’s new movie, splashed across the poster in green letters matching the olive. Philippa’s name floated
under-neath in red letters matching her lipstick. Opening next week.

Emily smiled wanly; she had been thinking about her sister last night. They hadn’t talked in a while. Philippa had just divorced
her fifth husband. Five! Was she already considering a sixth attempt at Everest? Emily hoped not. Philippa was not made for
marriage. Made for men, yes; marriage, no. Not that Philippa hadn’t made a sincere attempt. In each case she had tried very
hard to be a perfect wife, like Emily. Then temptation, usually in the form of another man, had tripped her up. Too bad; Philippa’s
first husband had been fairly decent. Thereafter, she had chosen less and less wisely. The last challenger was a total loser,
all eyelash and mustache, zero brain. She had tossed him out after a few weeks. But no man held on to Philippa for long. She
was a bonfire, born to emit millions of cinders, burn a few fingers ... and move on. Ever since they were children, Philippa
had attracted men who were a trifle too handsome to be reliable. And they always swallowed that line about her mother dying
in childbirth, as if it explained and excused everything.

Several months ago, the last time the twins had seen each other, Philippa had been very blond. She had not been a brunette
for years, perhaps in a tacit, merciful gesture to Emily, who was constantly mistaken for her famous sister. The confusion
was understandable; they had the same face, the same graceful figures, the same enunciations. But their lives had taken very
different paths, mostly because of the men they had met. Philippa’s first lover had been an actor in soap operas; Emily’s
had been her aesthetics professor. On his account, she had stayed in school, earning a master’s degree in art history. She
had fiddled around Europe in his wake for another two years before realizing that academics rarely divorced wives to marry
their pupils. Crushed, she went to New York and worked in a museum. One overcast March afternoon, she met Ross in front of
a Whistler. After their first date, she knew this man could become
Permanent. He was very intelligent. He worked hard and aimed high. He came from an accomplished family and was not too shy,
not too confident, not too poor, not too rich, neither plain nor perilously handsome; he was one boiling mass of superb potential,
in need only of a woman’s refining hand. And he adored her. Marrying him had been the most positive move of her life. It wasn’t
a flamboyant life, like Philippa’s. It wasn’t a particularly fearless life either, not compared to Philippa’s. Ah, always
back to that famous sister. Now that their hair was different, people were always telling Emily that she reminded them of
someone else, but they couldn’t quite figure out whom. She had finally learned to accept it.

So
Choke Hold
had made it to the box office; last time Emily had spoken to Philippa about it, the film was throttling its third director.
Emily resolved to call her sister that evening. Maybe they could meet at a health spa and exchange a few secrets, give the
other a little bad advice ... forget men for a while.

The oncoming train screeched to a halt. Emily took a seat and pulled the September issue of
Gourmet
from her briefcase. Most other commuters were reading about the Red Sox, who had startled the bejesus out of everyone last
night by almost holding on to a four-run lead through the bottom of the ninth inning. Across the aisle, an Asian student was
reading the
Wall Street Journal;
off in the corner sat a woman with a few bags from Filene’s Basement. She was probably going to charge the Returns line the
second the store opened. Emily skimmed through some recipes and left the car after two stops.

The drizzle had now amplified into rain. Along State Street, a legion of umbrellas jousted for space six feet above the narrow
sidewalks. Emily could smell the ocean. She took a deep breath: This was going to be a good day, damn it. In two hours her
life was going to make an abrupt about-face. Stepping over the puddles surrounding Quincy Market, she noticed that the Yuppies
seemed to have stopped wearing seersucker suits; summer’s lassitude was perhaps over.

As she entered the kitchen of Cafe Presto, the familiar aroma of yeast and cinnamon enveloped her. “Hi, Bert,”she called to
the pastry chef as he eased a tray of scones from the oven. “Everything under control?”

“You’re late.”He had deeply resented all eight minutes. “Start grinding the coffee. There’s just so much one person can do
all by himself around here.”

In the seven years since she had taken over, Presto had gone from a sleepy muffin dispensary to one of the busiest cafes in
Boston. Emily’s pistachio twists, a recipe she had brought back from Turkey, had put Presto on the map; thereafter, hers was
the typical seventy-hour-week success story. Whipping off her jacket, Emily donned an apron and prepared to face the first
rush of die-hard workaholics. That was the danish and black coffee crowd. Afterward, the bran muffin and decaf contingent
would start filtering in; then came the cheesecakers, who usually felt compelled to explain that they were combining breakfast
and lunch. Lois, the cashier, arrived at seven-fifteen and dove into the ladies’room to apply her final two coats of hair
spray and face powder; like Mass, it had been part of her morning ritual for the last umpteen years. She emerged just in time
to open the registers.

“Where are Lucy and Randall?” she called, counting dollar bills.

The counter help had been fairly reliable until a month ago, when they had started sleeping together. Now they were either
both late, both in a snit, or speaking a slobbery goo-goo to each other. Their co-workers, not in love themselves, were losing
patience with the couple, who kept blaming everything on Not Enough Sleep Lately. “They’re not here yet?”Emily cried, up to
the elbows in pancake batter. “Call them at home.”

“They went to the Cape yesterday,” Bert reminded her. “Right now they’re probably screwing on the beach as they look for whales.
They couldn’t care less about serving breakfast to people with clothes on.”

“Call them up,” Emily repeated. “Maybe they got home early.”

Lois tried both numbers. “No answer.”

“Then call Guy at the gym,” Emily said, mounding croissants into the display cases. “Tell him to get over here and start pouring
coffee.”

“The boss? He’s going to be furious! You know what he said last time we interrupted his workout!” Lois became so upset that
she slammed the cash drawer shut on her finger. “Goddamn it!” She began dancing profanely behind the register, snapping her
injured hand through the air.

The man standing first in line outside of Cafe Presto knocked on the glass and pointed at his watch. “Unlock the door,”Emily
ordered Lois. “You can serve, can’t you? I’ll take the register.” As the first wave of customers tumbled in, Emily called
the gym and was put on hold. She was still on hold twenty danishes later.

A fortyish woman in exhausted jeans came to the register. Her graying hair looked as if it had been blow-dried by a Boeing
747. Maybe she had been trying to polish hubcaps with the front of her sweatshirt. Odd face, disproportionately small for
her neck. Emily looked again; no, the face was all right. The neck was too thick. The woman had the shoulders of an ox. “Three
scones, two milks, one coffee,” she rasped.

Emily’s ear was beginning to burn from clamping the phone to her shoulder. “Seven-fifty, please.”

The woman paid and left. Soon she was back at the register with corn muffins and orange juice. Now a dot of raspberry jam
gleamed on her sleeve. She leaned toward Emily. “Aren’t you usually in an apron behind the counter?”

“I got promoted.” Emily finally heard Guy’s voice on the phone. “Get over here,”she hissed. “Romeo and Juliet are late again.”
She slammed the handset down, rubbed her neck, and stared at the food on the woman’s tray. “That’s four dollars.”

The woman fished some damp bills out of her sweatpants. “Do I know you?”

“No.” Emily looked pointedly at the next person’s tray. “Five twenty-five.”

Soon the woman was back with a couple of bagels. “Me again. When are you going on break?”

Come on! Why didn’t any of this crap happen when Lois was at the register? “Never,” Emily said.

Sighing, the woman placed a red business card on the counter. “Do you know the restaurant Diavolina?”

“Vaguely,” In the South End. It served things like lobster with blueberries.

“We need a new chef. Tonight.”

“What happened to your old chef?”

“He blew town.”

Emily collected six dollars from the next person in line. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled. You never know when a reject from the
Cordon Bleu might wander in here looking for work.”

“Very funny. I’m serious about that job.”

“I’m serious about this one. Good-bye.”

Shrugging, the woman left. Lucy and Randall appeared around eight-thirty, after the run on bran muffins had ended. Guy Witten,
proprietor of Cafe Presto, sauntered in at nine. Taking a scone and a cup of coffee, he made the rounds of his employees,
greeting Bert and Lois, chewing out the inamorati. When he stood behind Emily, who was making chicken salad, he stopped. “Good
morning.”

BOOK: Devil's Food
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ads

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