Frannie in Pieces (13 page)

“No.”

He sticks the key in the starter. I wait for the sound of the motor. Nothing. I stretch my neck to get a view into the front. He's just sitting there. James the Albert-Waldo might be waiting for a herd of goats to cross the road. “What's going on?”
he asks. “Is this about me?”

“It's not about you,” says Jenna. She throws me another desperate look.

“Okay, I'll tell you, but you have to keep a secret.”

“James is so great at that.”

“Actually, I am,” he says.

He opens the refrigerator,
tunnels through. “Aha.” He unearths a plastic container. “Ricotta.”

“Cheese,” Jenna tells me.

He pops off the top, sniffs, and sighs. Jenna checks to see if I'm digging him. He opens the crisper, dives in, and surfaces with a bunch of weeds that he waves under my nose. “Parsley, dill.” Out comes a lemon.” He closes the crisper with his knee, extracts a box of eggs from the top shelf, and asks Jenna to “grab that half and half, and take two eggs
out of this.” He shoves the egg box into her arms.

“What are you making?” she inquires.

“Ricotta tart.”

Jenna looks my way, chin tucks down, eyebrows rise. Translation: I hope you heard that, I hope you're impressed.

“Cut this in half.” He hands her a lemon. “You relax, Frannie.” He cracks the eggs and empties them one-handed, selects a whisk from a host of kitchen doodads, and starts beating. “You should always eat when you unburden your heart.”

Jenna's eyebrows nearly fly off her forehead. I pull a long face, dittoing “impressive” in our silent conversation, but frankly I think James read that line somewhere and is quoting. What normal guy says that?

“James's parents are never home,” says Jenna.

“Never home,” James echoes.

“His little brother's at day camp. His mom and dad own a hardware store in Cold Spring, and they work all day.” Jenna does a split. The kitchen's a galley, and when she sinks down and raises her
arms, each hand proffering a half lemon, she pretty much takes up the space.

James accepts the lemon from his balletic assistant and, with one twist of each half, squeezes the juice into the eggs. He's in constant motion. He may be awkward and gangly to the point that no limb appears to be aware of another when he lopes around in regular life, he may drive a car in fits and starts as cautious as a canary in fear of a cat, but here in the kitchen he's as graceful as Jenna: reaching for this and that, sometimes simultaneously, spinning from one spot to another, deftly slicing/ dicing/whipping. The fish has found water, or maybe the octopus has: He beats the cheese into the eggs with one hand while he reaches for a glass with another and knocks a lower cabinet closed with his foot. Signor Waldo the Italian chef has another moniker now: Octopus Man.

He works with total concentration. His teeth seem less rabbit size even with his mouth hanging open; his normally placid eyes flash. Must be, yes, I
spot it: passion. I remember Dad in his studio. The excitement, the lack of awareness of other people, total immersion.

Lunch was James's idea. When I warned him, “It's a long story,” and Jenna injected, “It's amazing, James, totally amazing, wait until you hear,” that's when he suggested that we all hang out at his place.

While his sous chef rubs suggestively against him every time she wiggles past in the narrow kitchen, I hang in the breakfast nook. Out the window, the parking lot is something I might draw: endless asphalt striped with white, one car with its hood up parked crazily across two spaces. A pizza box discarded nearby.

Looking at this vision of dullness (rife with suggestion), I could doubt my last night's adventure, doubt it utterly, were it not for my tortured calves, pinging thighs, and a hip that wants to cry. Simon's naked chest, sun-splotched pink, invades my ruminations. I wonder if he's peeling. I even get a vision of him scraping away dead skin with his thumbnail. Jenna tugs my sleeve. “Frannie, look.”

James's knife chatters across the wooden board as he mows down parsley. “Mincing,” she boasts.

Soon we all settle down together while the tart bakes. I have to begin at the beginning, for James's sake. He keeps refilling wineglasses with lime zingers (lime and club soda) so sour my lips shrivel, but they do go extremely well with olives and some tasty glop he calls red-pepper paste. Jenna listens avidly, as if she's never heard any of my tale before. When I get to the boat episode, new to her, she squeezes my arm for encouragement and sometimes from excitement. The incredulities mount, I'm painfully aware, even though this time I don't
embroider, not one bit. When I get to splashdown, my chest is so tight with anxiety that I rush through it: “Then I'm on the floor of my bedroom, soaked, flailing, coughing up saltwater—saltwater, I swear. My mom can tell you that I was sopping wet, if you want to ask. But the tub and shower were dry, so then I knew there was no way, absolutely no way that I dreamed or imagined it.”

“I believe you totally,” says Jenna instantly.

We wait for James. He picks some olive between his teeth.

“You don't believe me? You don't buy any of this, do you? You think I'm crazy.”

“No he doesn't,” Jenna assures me while I bet she's kicking him under the table.

“Can I believe you and not believe you?” he asks finally.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Well, it's weird, you know.”

I have to admire that. I really do. Let's face it. If someone unloaded those tales on me, I'd want to
cart O Delusional One to the nearest looney bin, but James is cool with me. It is weird, but he's listening; that's fair. I feel secure enough to ramble on about the GWW, how it tucked and turned around the edges of the water when I was in the puzzle, about the next trip in—the restaurant, the waterless lagoon (that crater) belching smoke in the ancient garden. All sorts of thoughts fall out as I try to make sense of things, impose logic on madness. “When I studied the puzzle this morning, I realized that I hadn't completed the garden. I fell into the puzzle too soon. That crater wasn't a crater. It was the missing part of the puzzle, and the jagged edge, well, it would be jagged because puzzle pieces end arbitrarily. I bet one missing piece had a little knob right where that man's back was. That why he had ‘crater back.' I mean, the guy was missing his lower back, but he was still smooching away.” I gulp some zinger, forgetting that a little goes a long way. My insides contract.

As I rant about the restaurant and the garden,
James shifts in his seat, scratches his neck, and wings his elbows back. Finally he spikes a fork into the red pepper paste, so it stands straight up as if he's stuck a flag in the moon, claiming it for America. I stop. “Now you really don't believe me, right?”

There's a pause long enough for a flower to wilt.

“Well, it's weird,” he says again.

Jenna titters from nervousness—I think it was her, but it might have been me. A little laughter begets more—and more. Soon we're stomping around the kitchen in pain holding our stomachs, trying to stop. I'm gasping, protesting it really is true, and Jenna holds up her hands to push the giggles away, and James sighs against the counter, overcome, until finally, it all dies out, and what's left is awkwardness.

I can't help myself, I have to fill it. “My dad's there, I know he is.”

No one contradicts me.

“The tart's almost ready,” says James.

“It smells fabulous,” says Jenna.

James gets some salad greens out of the refrigerator, tosses in some pine nuts, and slices in slivers of pear. After mixing oil and vinegar right into the salad, and tasting a leaf, he puts on two oven mitts, boxes Jenna's ears with them, and slides the tart out of the oven and onto the counter. With a flick of his hands, both mitts fly off. He taps the tart with his finger. “Perfect.”

“Isn't he hot?” Jenna mouths.

I'm starting to sweat. I drank out of a glass. I scooped red pepper paste onto a cracker, but I used the cracker to do it. Now I have to use a fork and a plate. Jenna hands them out.

“Were these in the dishwasher?” I could ask. Of course they were. I see the dishwasher in front of me. James cuts the tart and serves it. Jenna takes a bite and moans, “Oh, James.”

He tries it and smiles. “Not bad.”

They wait for me.

I won't let the fork touch my mouth. Tart
touched fork, and both tart and fork touched plate, but still… this feels safer. Using my tongue, I nudge the bite off the prongs without making contact with metal. Fortunately neither Jenna nor James thinks my eating technique is the least bit strange, or else they're polite. I've never had a cheese tart. It's pretty tasty even consumed this tricky way. “Fantastic,” I tell James, and he points out how the salad complements it, especially the sweetness of the pears.

“The air rippled,” I say.

“What air?” says Jenna.

“In the puzzle. I call it the GWW, the Great Woolly White. Didn't I mention that?” I'm getting mixed up about what I said and what I didn't. “Sometimes it looked misty like steam and sometimes thick like fog, but there was no wind, and the steam rising out of that missing section of puzzle—”

“What missing section?”

“What I thought was a crater wasn't hot or cold. In the boat it was far away, so it appeared solid; in
the garden it was at my feet. Maybe it isn't air.”

“It has to be air,” says Jenna, “or you'd die.”

“Maybe it's not weather,” says James. “Can there be air without weather?”

No one knows the answer to that.

“I think it's void. Where the puzzle doesn't exist, nothing exists but the GWW. I haven't done the blues.”

“They're the hardest,” says Jenna.

“Sky and water,” I tell James.

We can't go anywhere because I might be spotted, so we hang out, listening to Julio Iglesias, an oily singer James loves. “I want to hold you close under the rain.” I imagine Julio slinking around the stage, gyrating his sexy torso, flexing his muscled arms sun-blotched pink… oops, not Julio's. Scratch that fantasy. It got out of hand. I settle in sideways, lopping my legs over the arms of a cushy chair. I face away from Jenna and James snuggling on the couch, but every now and then I hear noises that might be kisses. As I laze about, stuffed and
tired, for once my heart doesn't ache (although other body parts do).

“When you were in the garden, could you see the other sections of the puzzle you'd put together?” Jenna asks. “The way you saw the house from the boat?”

“No.”

“I wonder why.”

“Maybe because the restaurant and the garden were halfway up a mountain. The house or boat wouldn't be visible from there, but if I were in the boat, then I could see the house because it's on the cove. Does that makes sense?”

“I guess.”

“What were you looking for at your dad's?” says James.

“The restaurant had a mural of grape vines. The mural was like from a kid's coloring book, black outlines colored in. When I saw it, bells went off. Where have I seen this? Then the busboy laid down a placemat, a white scalloped paper placemat like the
one on Dad's wall, the one with the watercolor grapes. Those grapes—mushy, vague—”

“I thought they were balloons,” says Jenna.

“—are completely different from the grapes on the wall, but the same. I realized it this morning. I swear that the person who painted the watercolor was in the restaurant and maybe even painted it on one of their placemats. Now the placemat is missing. What does it mean?”

Only Julio has something to say. “Here in a world of lies, you are the true.”

“I'd like to see the puzzle,” says James.

“Would you show it to him?” asks Jenna.

“Sure.
Uscita.
U-S-C-I-T-A. That word was everywhere. It's either the name of the café or the family's name, or it has some other Irish meaning like ‘bathroom.' Oh, and this woman kept saying,
‘Troppo salato.'
”

“Too much salt,” says James.

“Honey, it wasn't too salty. The tart was perfect. He's such a perfectionist,” Jenna scolds and
brags simultaneously.

“Not the tart,” says James. “
Troppo salato
means too much salt. In Italian.”

“That's impossible.”

“So they were speaking Italian?” says Jenna.

“No, it's Ireland. They were speaking Irish.”

“
Troppo salato
means too much salt in Italian,” James insists.

I swing around to look at them lying there all tangled up. “Maybe it's Irish too.”

“No way,” says James.

“No way?”

“Maybe it is, James,” says Jenna.

“Spell
uscita
again.”

“U-S-C-I-T-A.”

“I'll look it up on the web.” He disappears down the hall, and while we wait, Jenna straightens her clothes and pushes her hair around. “
Uscita
means ‘exit' in Italian,” he shouts.

“I guess that settles it.” Jenna applies some gloss.

“Whose side are you on?” I ask her.

“Side?” Jenna's face contorts in misery while I rant about what a know-it-all James is because he's a C-H-E-F, forcefully but quietly so James can't hear.

He returns, oblivious, “If it's Ireland, why were the signs in Italian? You're all mixed up.”