Food Whore (26 page)

“That moment of greatness,” she said with a little smile. “It's crazy he paid so much attention to you.”

Suddenly I got excited that we had this connection. It was barely anything, but at least that shadowy part of my life had gotten an inch of light. I thought about telling her everything about Michael Saltz. Unlike Melinda, she'd try to understand. I was sure she'd relate. I could tell her about Pascal and maybe mollify her worries about Matthew. Tell her that sometimes these types of guys need space and that's why you fall for them in the first place. If Matthew and Pascal were always available, would we still love them? Probably not.

She seemed to be giving me an out, a safe place to relieve myself of this double life.

But I couldn't. I had a promise to keep to Michael Saltz and he had a promise to keep to me. But more than that, I knew Carey, with her Wiki and algorithms, might see something I didn't want to see. Michael Saltz wasn't a regular
piston,
launching me into something with a minor push. With him, the rules changed. I had changed.

Instead, I backed away and said good-­bye with embarrassed bowing and waving and rushed to the bathroom. I worked on plumping the volume of my hair using a circular motion the stylist had taught me. I reapplied my makeup and stared at my reflection for one beat, two, three. I didn't look like myself anymore. And that was fine by me.

A
FEW
MINUTES
later, I joined Pascal and his friends in a semiprivate back room. Around last call, they begged him to relocate to another after-­hours place. They shook him and threatened to steal his leather jacket, and Pascal laughed, which only encouraged them. I suppose they had switched from weed to coke and I think he thought about joining them, until a guy who wasn't in Pascal's group but who was also probably high out of his mind came up behind me and spun me around.

“Hey—­don't I know you? I know you! I know you!”

He waved his hands in the air and with his red nose, he looked like a crazy druggie coming in from the street. Pascal's face sobered up and his stance stiffened.

“I don't think so . . .” I said, clinging to Pascal.

Pascal put his arm around me as more of the chefs crowded around us.

“You don't remember me, do you?” Then he stood up straight, took off his knit beanie, and brushed his hair back. “You know I used about five hundred dollars' worth of truffles on you and Saltz that night. But we only got three stars.”

For a moment he controlled his maniacal eyes and gave me a flirtatious wink. The same twinkle he had given me at Tellicherry. Felix, our server.

His eyes blazed to Pascal. “But Chef Fox, you clearly knew what you were doing,” he hissed. “She wanted more than truffles, didn't she? So congratulations on the four-­star. You deserve it for fucking the slut first.”

A girl next to Felix spoke up. “Hey, don't talk to her like that, asshole.”

Felix laughed and I squeezed Pascal's arm, scared.

“Pascal, everyone knows your restaurant is shit. But I have to give you props. Why bother improving your dishes when you can get this?” He gestured to me, and not in the elegant way of fine dining, but with a vulgar flinging. Then he gave me an ugly look and turned away.

My mind was just trying to catch up.

Pascal took me by the shoulders and shoved me through the main room, toward the door. ­People still came up to him, trying to congratulate or recongratulate him in their now totally drugged and drunk states. But Pascal kept pushing me forward, bulldozing through his oncoming fans until we were through the front door and out on the street. We walked quickly toward his apartment, but my bare legs were freezing and I couldn't keep up in my heels. He kept walking, practically dragging me.

It took me a while to figure out what Felix had said. I wasn't in that mind-­set.

Felix somehow knew that I was responsible for Tellicherry's three-­star review. He knew that he'd been serving Michael Saltz and me. And he also knew Pascal and I were somehow involved and that . . . what?

We got back to Pascal's apartment and neither of us said anything for a while. I looked up at him, for some reassurance. Something like, “Felix is a cokehead and everyone knows it.” Or, “Baby, I love you, that guy is out of his mind.”

I made room for him on the couch, but he didn't sit. He paced along his kitchen counter, wringing his hands.

And then I connected the dots.

“You deserve it for fucking the slut first.”

“Pascal . . .” I started. “Why did he say those things to you?”

He inhaled and approached me gently. “Tia, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have taken you there. I think you're great but I don't want to lie to you.”

I sat up and looked him in the eye. He looked away and sat down on a stool. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

The tears came out slowly at first. I thought about losing Pascal. The man I'd thought I loved was actually using me.

And apparently ­people in the restaurant industry knew about it. I wasn't just a slut
,
but something even worse: an ignorant slut.

I would have wanted to cry alone, but what did it matter now if Pascal saw me? Everything I had, I put into those tears. They gushed out of me like a waterfall and there seemed to be no end.

I thought about my family and friends. I thought how I had wasted this semester and important relationships so I could—­what? Be a pawn in Pascal's game?

I thought of Elliott, poor Elliott. He deserved someone better than me. Of all the guys to see me kiss—­this jerk? This scum who had taken advantage of me this whole time?

Pascal sat next to me and put his hand on my thigh. And even that killed because it still felt so good. Unbearably good, a touch that sizzles in your skin. Even when I knew it was a ploy, something else not anything like love.

“Chris­tian, my friend at Tellicherry, tipped me off,” he said over my crying. “We worked together at Veilleurmet Kitchen. I lied to you when I sat down at your table—­I didn't have the night off. Tonight is the first night I've taken off since Bakushan opened. I couldn't rest until that review came out. You must understand that, right?

“For a while, the restaurant industry lost track of him. He went off the radar. But then we heard from some ­people at Madison Park Tavern that he had gotten super thin. Chris­tian spotted him at his place and told me. I dropped everything and went to study him. He was the one and only reason I'd ever leave the line. And that night, I saw
you
there with him.”

I hushed myself, hiccupping my sobs so I could hear him explain himself. He couldn't even say his name. I wanted him to just say it. To admit that he'd been using me for Michael Saltz. Say it while I was sitting on this couch smelling of our sex.

Sit across from the girl at Tellicherry, get her number, get her in bed.
I had made it too easy.

“There'd been buzzing among some chefs that Michael Saltz had taken up with a young woman, which came as a surprise because everyone knows he's gay. But there was a picture taken at Panh Ho, and it's been making the rounds among some of my chef friends. I recognized you from the other time you came to my restaurant.”

The click I'd heard as we left Panh Ho—­I had been “made” from the very beginning. I had thought I was secret, special. I'd thought I could play NYC any way I wanted. But now I realized with gruesome clarity that the city had been playing me the whole time.

I wished more than anything that this was a bad dream. Maybe I'd had an allergic reaction at Room 113. Some high-­proof lobster cocktail.

“Everything between us was a lie,” I whispered to myself. “So you never liked me? All those times we went out, and Whole Foods . . . and earlier tonight, when we . . . ?” I ran my hands over my filthy dress. I looked down at Pascal's couch, the pillows we had thrown aside earlier in the evening, and the room started spinning.

“It's not that simple,” he whispered back. “Not many ­people know, and even fewer believe you have any influence. Like, what do you do for him? Are you his secretary? His . . . cover of some sort?”

I smacked a pillow. Now he was calling me Michael Saltz's secretary? He didn't know anything. He didn't know that everything the man wrote was mine. I was no secretary. I was the one in charge.

And yet. Now I was a puppet who finally saw her miserable strings.

I lost the will to sit up and slumped over on the couch. Pascal took me by the shoulders and sat me up again. “You've probably heard how Bakushan has been getting mixed reviews. I had to do something about it.”

“Oh, I don't know. . . . You could have made better food!” I screamed. “Trained your staff better. Made sure there was no sand in your fucking dumplings! What did you think you'd get from me?”

Pascal looked at me like,
Do you really want me to tell you?
But he relented.

“Tia, it wasn't just me. Didn't you notice when the restaurants always sent you and Michael a good-­looking male waiter? Couldn't you tell when ­people played you? You knew it came with perks, right? You've always known that.”

“I didn't do this for the perks!” I said in a teary, wet voice. “I did this . . . for you. I did it because Michael Saltz told me that I'd be able to work with Helen Lansky. Did you know that, too?”

He looked confused with a tinge of fear, like he wasn't sure if I'd snap. I wasn't sure, either. “Know . . . what?”

“About Helen. About why I did all of this!” I shrieked.

He backed away. “No, I didn't know anything about Helen. I just knew that you were involved somehow with Michael.”

“Yeah, well, I didn't ask for that. I just wanted to work with Helen, and help her with her cookbook—­”

“Wait, wait, a cookbook? That sort of recipe-­testing drudgery? Tia . . .” He started laughing but then stopped himself. I realized then that even though he was just six years older, he was talking to me like a child. He
saw
me as a child, someone he could toy with.

“Maybe you thought you were doing this for Helen. But I'd venture to say you played along with Michael Saltz for other reasons.” He looked me up and down: my dress, my shoes, my hair. I closed my eyes and felt as if I had vanished, become a total fabrication made of nothing but falsehoods.

I picked up my coat and started to leave. But as much as I hated him, part of me just wanted to stop time, to keep this hurt where I could see it and understand it. I knew once I walked out that door, it'd get a lot worse. I'd see the world in its true colors.

“Tia, no. Don't go,” Pascal said. “Can you blame me for seeing an opportunity and taking it?”

I just stood there, tired. Tired of staying up late, for him, so I could get to know him and be in his world. Tired of standing in these stupid high heels and this tight, ridiculous dress. I wanted to go back to the way things were.

“If you're going to leave, I want to give you something.” He opened his fridge and pulled out a plastic quart-­size container of something bright green.

“It's my pea shoot puree. The same one encased in the foie gras.”

“So?”

“I know you loved it.” I had said as much in my review. “Here, you can have it.”

“Oh. Oh! Really?” I started to chuckle, then giggle, then laugh hysterically. “Is that, like, a doggie bag?” My words slurred but Pascal stayed alert, even concerned.

“I could give you the recipe. Every press outlet asks me for it, but I've never given it out. Here, I'll print it out for you.” He walked to his laptop. “You can reprint it in the
Times.
”

“No!” I yelled. “No! No!” I smacked the container off the table and it blew open, spilling green ooze on his white rug. “You do not get to do that to me. You've fed me nothing but bullshit this whole time. How do even live with yourself?”

Pascal plopped onto the couch. “I'm sorry, Tia. This is the game. I didn't make it up.” He opened his arms, inviting me to sit next to him. “Come on, please, don't take it so hard.”

His voice sounded so sincere. It didn't seem like he had wanted to harm me, but what did I know?

“We were just hanging out.”

I exhaled sharply. This had never been “just” anything—­“just” grad school or “just” Helen Lansky. I hadn't “just” been hanging out with Pascal, and most of all, this hadn't “just” been sex to me.

When I'd said I loved him, I thought it had come true. For me. For both of us. And now this loss had gutted me from the inside out.

“Here, take this.” He held out my crumpled La Perla underwear. So maybe I hadn't lost them, maybe he'd taken them from me as a kind of bounty.

I looked around his apartment. The table where he'd first poured me wine and where I'd happily—­naïvely—­watched him read his review. The couch where he'd fucked me. When I had first arrived, I'd thought this empty apartment was everything, that he was an open book. But now I realized that I'd never even seen his bedroom. This whole time, we had only ever stayed in his living room.

I knew tomorrow I'd see the Bakushan review in print and the blogosphere would go crazy over it. There would be lots of naysayers, but for the most part, ­people would take my word as truth. I'd thought that feeling would never get old, the thrill of my words rippling across the world. But now the hype terrified me. I could only wait for its crushing force, like a tsunami arriving the day after an earthquake.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

I left his apartment shattered and raw. A rancid feeling started in my mouth, then went down to my stomach and finally the space between my legs. The only upside was that I doubted my heart would survive. Good riddance. I couldn't trust it anyway.