I'll Take Manhattan (19 page)

“I’m not complaining,” Maxi said bitterly. “I’m just so fucking mad at myself. Joan of Arc saving the skin of the
man who owns Rancho Mirage … to say nothing of thirty years of free lunch. If only I thought Cutter were capable of laughing himself to death.”

“Look, you’ve still got a magazine, an office, and a year to do anything you like. Only your pride is wounded, Goldilocks.”

“It’s not a magazine, it’s pure vanity press. The office … well even
you
would have to see it to believe it. Your cane would blow its gasket. How many apples are you buying, for heaven’s sake?”

“This is
Tarte Tatin
time, babe, and that means thousands.”

“Why the hell didn’t I at least have the sense to ask Pavka or Nina Stern before I picked the magazine I wanted? I could have had any one of them! Why did I have to rush into it?”

“Ah, the mystery of human personality. If you’d been slightly cautious you wouldn’t be Maxi and if you weren’t Maxi the whole world would be a sadder place.”

“But wiser.”

“Maybe. But wiser isn’t all that it’s touted as being. Wiser is like celibacy … put it off as long as you can.” Tobias ordered his apples and led the way out of the huge, ugly complex that supplied at least half the food of Manhattan. He no longer did his daily buying himself, relying on assistants, but from time to time he visited Hunt’s Point to check out new developments there for his three local restaurants. He owned two others in Chicago and four on the West Coast, all equally successful.

Tobias had discovered the kitchen sometime before he was eight. It was forbidden territory to him although his day vision was still relatively good. Lily was irrationally terrified at the idea of his being near any kind of fire, which only made him more determined to invade the mysterious room.

One night he waited until the entire household was asleep and then crept downstairs, along all the familiar passageways, and entered the big tempting space. Turning on the light, he began to explore, inch by inch, starting with
the lower cabinet and drawers, subjecting every object to his five senses. Already, there had been enough deterioration in his sight so that he used all his senses to investigate strange objects. Each cooking utensil, each empty pot and pan, the chopping blocks and the cooking knives and forks and spoons were all applied to his nose and his fingertips. He smelled the knives, touched them with the tip of his tongue, licked their noncutting edges, ran their cutting edges gently over his hand, pressed them to his cheeks. He shook all the objects, and listened to the noise they made, he hefted their weights and compared them to each other, and, as he learned each one, put it back in its place. On the next night he ventured farther, to the refrigerator, and there, during the long quiet hours of the night, the over-protected little boy fell in love. An egg was a world to Tobias, an artichoke a galaxy, a chicken a universe.

Night after night he spent hours in the kitchen until every corner of it was utterly familiar, until there wasn’t a wilted piece of parsley he hadn’t tasted, although, obedient to his mother’s interdiction, he had never lit the stove, but only swarmed all over it, inside and out, until it was imprinted on his sense memory.

One night he hadn’t been able to forbid himself from cautiously cracking an egg into a bowl. If the outside of an egg was fascinating, the inside was utterly irresistible. Another egg followed the first until a dozen eggs swam in the large brown crock, their shells, stacked inside each other, neatly piled on the side of the kitchen table. Obviously they were meant to be mixed with a fork, Toby told himself. He had almost finished, mixing neatly, methodically and vigorously, when the kitchen door opened and he was discovered by the cook. His first cooking attempt proved only that it wasn’t possible to mix eggs in complete silence.

Zachary insisted that Tobias be taught to cook and a chef from the Cordon Bleu School was engaged to work with him every afternoon after school.

Soon Tobias could tell if olive oil was pouring at the proper rate into a mayonnaise he was beating by listening to the noise the drops of oil made as they fell. He could hear that particular second when an omelette was ready to be rolled out of its pan, he could smell the exact moment
when an onion had been properly browned, he didn’t need a timer for boiling eggs or anything but a sharp knife for cutting the thinnest slices of any fruit or vegetable.

However, as he grew into his early teens Toby was having increasing problems with his vision. In spite of his natural grace he appeared awkward and clumsy, constantly bumping into people and objects he should have been able to see clearly.

Lily, who still refused to accept the fact that Toby would one day be almost, if not entirely, blind, somehow managed to make herself ignore these incidents, but Zachary, who frequently took the children to the movies on Saturday afternoon, realized that in a darkened movie theater Toby was helpless, lost until the house lights went up. Soon it was obvious that he couldn’t play team sports, with his poor side vision, couldn’t follow the path of a volleyball or a hockey puck, and in spite of Lily’s determination not to warn Toby of what the future held—why should he know until it was absolutely necessary, she said—Zachary decided that his son had to be prepared.

Almost nothing was known about retinitis pigmentosa in the 1960s and Dr. Eliot Berson of the Harvard Medical School, to whom Zachary took Toby for an ERG exam to measure the strength of the signals given out by the nerve cells of the retina, couldn’t tell him what the prognosis was, except to say that if Toby were lucky he would still have some functional vision after his late twenties.

Even Zachary couldn’t bring himself to say these precise words to Toby but he did his best to explain why Toby should concentrate on nonteam sports like swimming and gymnastics, choosing to discuss sports rather than life, referring to the rods and retina rather than to tunnel vision.

“Am I going to go blind, Dad?” Toby asked, after the few minutes of silence that followed Zachary’s confused exposition.

“
No
! No, Toby! Not completely, never completely, and not for many years.” Zachary’s heart broke as he said the words in a manner that he kept as unemotional as possible.

“Still I’d better learn Braille, hadn’t I?” Toby asked after more silence. Zachary couldn’t answer, couldn’t say
no. “Braille and touch-typing then,” Toby said and rose and went to his room. What he suffered there, no one was ever to know, but he emerged with his whole young soul determined to make the most of his life even if he couldn’t conquer his fate.

Braille, which he did not yet need, was best learned as young as possible, and soon he went regularly to Braille classes. He swam with a private instructor in the covered pool that was built for him in the Ambervilles’ town garden, with the same energy as he continued his cooking lessons. Toby lived as if he had two lives, one sighted and the other in darkness, and for a dozen years the disease, as was often the case, seemed to grow no worse. By the time Toby had graduated from the Hotel School at Cornell, he had spent eight summers apprenticed to great chefs in France, Italy and Hong Kong and he was ready to open his first restaurant.

For years, like a knight sharpening his weapons and oiling his armor against a far-distant battle, he had investigated the myriad of kitchen aids for the visually impaired, and whenever he found one he liked, like the Magna Wonder Knife, he would adopt it, even though he didn’t yet need it. The kitchen of his first restaurant was unique in its impeccable organization. No obsessively neat housewife would ever achieve the absolute rigidity with which Toby, using his common sense, arranged his tools. His trusty war-horse was a pair of bakers’ balance scales from the Acme Scale Company, one of them fitted with an electronic detection device that could measure spices from zero to sixteen ounces, another that could measure up to one thousand pounds of other ingredients, both with weight indicators that had been brailled at half-inch intervals.

His gauntlets were a pair of oven mitts that were seventeen inches long and protected him from heat on the backs of his hands as well as on the palms and fingers; his swords were non-heat-conducting wooden spoons, his double spatulas, his nested measuring cups that could be monitored by his fingers, eliminating the line calibrations of glass. His jousting pole was a battery-operated “Say When” liquid level indicator and his helmets were mixing bowls
from Dansk and Copco, all of which had rubber rings at their bases to stabilize them.

In his late twenties, with two restaurants operating successfully, Toby realized that the blank spaces in his view of the world were growing larger; people and objects swam in and out of them bewilderingly, in a faint, fragmented and increasingly colorless fashion. He had trained himself to make his problems as inconspicuous as possible but now he realized that he needed highly professional help.

For a period of four months Toby went for training to the St. Paul’s Rehabilitation Center in Newtown, Massachusetts. There, all the students, no matter what degree of vision they had, were blindfolded for instruction which ranged from such mundane matters as table manners and counting money to more challenging cane technique. He took fencing lessons that helped in the location of sound, and “videation” or learning orientation and mobility through extravisual means such as judging the speed of wind, the feeling of sun on the face, the textures of whatever was underfoot and all other possible perceptions of the sounds of nature and man and automobiles. By the time he left St. Paul’s Toby felt as well skilled as he could possibly be for the future.

He returned to New York and continued to experiment with the enormous variety of systems which had been developed for the blind who work in kitchens. Each time he opened a new restaurant he installed a kitchen that was an exact duplicate of the others. His corps of chefs, all sighted, were trained by him to cook in his way, using his weapons, and soon, if need be, they could all cook in the dark.

Now Toby still cooked from time to time in his first restaurant, inventing new dishes, but the others were run by his chefs, whom he visited, unannounced, on trips to Chicago or Los Angeles. Within twenty minutes of inspection he knew if the most insignificant compote dish had been misplaced. Woe to the
sous-chef
who had been skimping on the wild mushrooms; woe to whoever had misjudged the ripeness of a Brie; woe to the roast cook whose chicken was not moist to the wingtip; woe to the
saucier
who had used an eighth of a pinch too much salt. Woe,
woe, to the restaurant manager if the tablecloths lacked a certain crisp finish, if the crystal wasn’t like satin to his touch, if the candles were an inch too short or the flowers an hour too old. “Tobias the Terrible” they called him after one of his raids, but afterwards his teams worshipped him even more than before.

Toby nudged Maxi as she brooded. “I’d have had more fun taking Angelica shopping,” he said. “Look, you’ve blown it but it’s not the end of the world. Pick yourself up off the floor and pack it up. Don’t piss into a violin. Forget the whole thing. Obviously you can’t rescue
Trimming Trades
any more than you can bring back high-buttoned shoes and there’s no point in your wasting your time for the empty exercise of fighting Cutter. He’s won and you might as well accept it. Put it behind you, take that ‘kick me’ sign off your back, and start being Maxi again.”

“For a bat you sound like a wimp,” Maxi answered angrily.

“I am a brilliant businessman, which means I face reality every day. I’d like a little respect from you since I’m probably the most eligible bachelor in New York, but hard to get because I don’t give a shit about what a girl looks like and I still haven’t found anyone whose soul I want to hang out with for the rest of my life.”

“A vain, tactless, mean old wimp who isn’t even thoughtful enough to offer me a drink when I need it most,” Maxi said mournfully.

“It’s more like time for Saturday breakfast, babe, or hadn’t you noticed?”

“The trouble with you, Tobias, is you’re too literal-minded, as your mother would
never
say to you,” Maxi said angrily.

“Breakfast calls for a drink, don’t you agree?”

“Now that you mention it, why not?”

India West glared at herself malevolently in the mirror on the dressing table of her Beverly Hills bedroom. She made minuscule adjustments in her mind, and her eyes,
which were that special brilliant blue of rare Persian turquoises, seemed to deepen or lighten to her order. Supremely delicate muscles moved under her skin and enough happened there to fill the pages of
Les Cahiers du Cinéma
. She fell deeply in love, she endured a quiet depression, was tormented by a secret terror, grew joyful, changed from wanton to nun and was illuminated by a gentle anticipation of rapture. All systems, she noted lugubriously, were still functioning at will, in spite of her catastrophic hangover.

As she gazed, deeply unimpressed by her image, unmoved at that composition of extraordinary features whose perfection bored no one but India herself, she decided that there was something fundamentally and deeply
dumb
about being called the most beautiful movie actress in the world. What kind of a job was that for an adult? Did anybody have any idea what a racket it was? She reminded herself of nothing so much as a Greta Garbo film, with that divine face hardly registering a change of expression and the conditioned response of an audience reading vast emotions into it. Had Garbo ever felt the same way as she did about herself? India suspected that she had, and had quit before anyone else caught on.

“You’re no Meryl Streep, you silly bitch,” she said out loud to her glorious reflection, “but you
can
do that thing they call acting.” She tied back her shivery waves of amber blond hair and looked in disgust at the Bloody Mary on the table. India West almost never drank but last night had been a horrible exception for which there was only one remedy which would make her liver consider the possibility of going back to work. She swallowed the drink, a goddess resigned to her minute of mortality, shuddered and tottered back to bed.