Life Among Giants (21 page)

In new spare hours, I entered the one-year graduate restaurant
program at the perhaps somewhat less than renowned Miami University Hotel School. I learned sauces. I learned reductions. I learned butchering and that meat was king, also salt. I learned accounting and marketing. By November I was a proud member of the class, rushing back to Etienne with knowledge to share.

One morning he brought me a newspaper item, propped it at my station. Just a little AP squib with a beautiful photo:
Th
e internationally renowned choreographer Sylphide, 42, had separated from her husband, Percy Haverstock, “the Bell-Curve Billionaire.” He'd been caught in an elaborate sting on a trip home to Australia: hotel room, seven underage girls, two kilograms of cocaine.
Th
e dancer stood to reap a multi-hundred-million-dollar settlement, the highest in history: there'd been no prenuptial agreement, and apparently criminals did poorly in Australian divorce courts.

“Don't get your hopes up,” Etienne had written in the margin. But there were long nights to get through and of course I did get my hopes up, elaborate fantasies: Lizard dancing beside Sylphide, the only man tall enough for her new ballet, whatever it might be, ha. And of course, one thing would lead to another.

Meanwhile, the ongoing physical renovations at Floridiana reached the kitchen. Lionel and Carter (whom Etienne had started calling Ma and Pa) shut us down for three glorious weeks, gave us both a paid vacation. E.T. and I did something we'd talked about for a year, flew to visit his first mentor's restaurant in France, traveled to Italy to sit at the feet of several masters, studied beans of all things, also lentils, studied plant-based sauces, mushroom hunting, looked at kitchen gardens, ate huge meals, twenty-one heavenly days, long conversations about dream restaurants we might open one day, brothers on the road. He got a new tattoo somewhere in Marseilles when I wasn't looking: a lizard on the blank spot on his calf, the place he'd always said was reserved for true love.

M
A AND
P
A
were in the kitchen one August morning when I got in. I knew Carter had just come back from New York, a visit with Emily. She hadn't told him, and so I didn't, that that she and I had once been lovers. I'd pretty well gathered that they were lovers, not much of a leap given the spread in
People
magazine, the rights to which Carter had actually sold to benefit the Police Athletic League.

“Time to talk,” Carter said.

“We're letting Etienne go,” Lionel said more gently.

And suddenly, I figured it out:
Sergeant Bright.
Th
at was the attraction! I laughed with discovery despite myself: the beauty and the beast, both bald!

“Quit the giggles,” Carter said, and I stuffed it.

“We need to move past the current clientele,” Lionel said.

It wasn't hard to say: “If Etienne goes, I go.”

“We would like a friendly parting,” Lionel said. It was he who'd stopped in after hours the Friday night previous to find the bar in full swing: buncha homos, Etienne's already vast network of new friends.

“So we will friendly say good-bye,” Carter added.

Th
at day was my last. Etienne, too, all done. He got three months severance, very generous. I was to be bought out based on a bank appraisal, hoped at least to double my original stake, though the recent construction would no doubt limit the payout. Etienne, superstitious but cheerful still, lowered the lights, emptied the seeds of several dried peppers onto a dish, stirred them with the joss stick on his necklace, read the signs, licked his fingers, announced his decision: he would go back to Mobile, Alabama. His ailing mother had been moved back there after his father's death in New Jersey, back to her old hometown. And then he simply bought himself an airline ticket and left.

I sat by the pool at my condo three days, four, trying not to think. I called my sister, really needed to talk with her, got their new housekeeper, who informed me that Kate and Jack had at long last gone off to the sunny Balearic Islands of Spain for their honeymoon. I had the team travel agent estimate the cost of such a trip, rounded it up, and sent them a check with a cheery note. I tried in that season of bruises not to feel hurt by their secrecy. A honeymoon was a private thing, after all, as was Kate's recovery, apparently.

I
DIDN'T HAVE
a joss stick, but took it as clear augury when the tenant who'd been in the old family home in Westport for over ten years called: he and his wife had finally gotten their U.S. citizenship and had found a house of their own to buy, would close six weeks hence, mid-October. At first I felt panicked by the news, but then thought, Hochmeyer Haven, why not?
Th
e place that made Kate's stomach turn had always given me a kind of security, an unspoken feeling that somewhere I had a home, that I wasn't entirely untethered.

Or maybe I thought I could drift back in time and change it all: I would cut my hair at seventeen, play the complete senior year as per boyhood plan, win the season for coach and father, fail to meet Sylphide, never get interested in Emily, meet the love of my life at Princeton, someone frisky and solid named Cookie or Weezie, a subtle beauty with no interest in dance, a business major, more than likely, invite our four parents up for football games, a regular career of wholesome dates and good grades, better luck in the pro draft, a team I could actually start for, marry the college sweetheart, two children leaping from her loins, a girl, a boy. And after my big career I'd announce games on NBC and model fancy underwear, never so much as peek into a restaurant kitchen. Or, while we were using the Way-Back Machine, I could recede a little further, to a particular morning during high-school days, and padlock Dad's briefcase to the cast-iron porch railing, or further yet, and keep Kate from taking a job at the High Side so she'd never meet Dabney.

My condo in Miami sold immediately, nice profit, such were the times. I closed it up, loaded the latest Volvo wagon and spent one final night in Kate's stripped bed. Next morning, my last scheduled bodywork session with Benedikta, who acted as if I were just one more long-term client coming to termination. And maybe I was. Anyway, our clothes securely fastened, we assessed where I'd come in three years of treatment—a long, long way in her estimation, less in mine—and I wrote her a check, shook her hand good-bye, her boundaries suddenly like blast walls around a third-world embassy. In the parking lot I leaned my head on the Volvo steering wheel till once again thoughts began to enter my brain.

And then it was the long road to Connecticut, mile by mile, afternoon by evening by night by morning and repeat, six diners, two motels.
Th
e old family house when I finally arrived felt very different after Florida. Dry, for one thing. Dusty, for another. Also drafty, very cold.

Alone for a couple of winter months in the little place, I kept myself busy painting the walls and fixing the plumbing and scrubbing madly, brought down all the old possessions from the attic where I'd stuffed them. Within a week I was sleeping in my old bed under my old model planes on their old threads and thumbtacks, and Mom's blender was back in place in the kitchen. I hung all the old prints of paintings, all the old photos, placed the grandfather clock, filled the kitchen cabinets with the kind of stuff I recalled: plenty canned goods, a year's supply of paper towels. For a while I slept a lot, didn't know what to do with myself when awake. But gradually my mood improved, my spirits rising along with the length of the days.

You really had to get on to the next thing, and what better place to start than home?

10

Kate and Jack returned from Ibiza—a three-month honeymoon!—and were my only contacts with the world, weekly dinners at their house, the two of them on some new plane that seemed to involve even more constant sex than before, or anyway more showers. Jack returned my honeymoon check after I asked why it hadn't been deposited. Pulling me out into their driveway, as angry as I've ever seen him, he said, “You can get us something concrete. A piece of furniture, if you like. Something real. Something we can use. We need outdoor stuff. Nothing symbolic. Kate doesn't do well with symbolic.”

I didn't understand, not a glimmer, and said so.

And Jack, terse and unyielding, said, “David, you don't need to understand.”

I brought them a teak deck set. I bought them an enormous, striped umbrella. I bought them a barbecue kettle. I cooked for them out there. I never brought or mentioned alcohol of any kind. I avoided the symbolic, didn't talk in abstractions, still puzzled as to the problem. Jack slowly softened up, let me sail with them on his boat, a Concordia yawl called
Deep Song,
which he claimed he'd named for Kate before he ever met her, romantic guy.

Come fall, I cooked for them in their house. I cooked for them a lot. I bought them a couch and sat with them upon it as fall came in, no football. But I was forbidden alone time with Kate. Not expressly. It just didn't happen—Jack was always there, and I mean always.

I stayed in Westport, always alone, supposedly developing a business plan, some sort of consulting. Maybe something to do with wine, which I knew well by then, and furnished for myself without limits. A restaurant seemed out of the question—with wine, at least, someone else had done all the hardest work. Across the pond the High Side was dark. Dad's rowboat was still on the shore. I sometimes got in it under moonlight, rowed back and forth. I ran, ten and fifteen miles a day. My physique was the one thing I still had from the former life. I joined a very expensive gym, where occasionally people recognized me, made inane conversation. I didn't mind. Inane was fine with me. I could work out endlessly, discuss Miami football endlessly.

Etienne called monthly. I'd invested twenty thousand dollars of my savings with him, and he'd started a proto-vegan restaurant called Health Spot back in Mobile, a clientele of weight lifters and elderly women, all while his mother lay sick in her tiny house. Month five, she died. Month six, he met a man and fell in love, first time in years. RuAngela, no last name, who, like all of E.T.'s serious boyfriends, was a masculine cross-dresser, five-o'clock shadow, sassy skirts. Month seven, and RuAngela was running the Health Spot dining room, doing the books. Month eight, and they'd made their rent out of revenues for the first time. No dividends as yet. Month nine, they had a fire-code violation and had to spend some money, or there would have been a disbursement for me. Might have been nice, too, as I'd gotten no payment from Lionel and Carter on Floridiana. Month ten, and a call from RuAngela, whom I'd come to love and trust: could I invest just a couple thousand more? Like twenty thousand more?

Of course I could, of course. It was only money, and more was coming once Floridiana got settled. Also, Etienne was my only real friend.

I
MISSED THE
Cuban beat, the bikinis on the street. In Westport, I wasn't going to let myself be anyone's most eligible bachelor, made no attempt to meet women. Our old neighbor, Mrs. Paumgartner, had passed away a few years back, and in her place was a Catholic priest who seemed to be shacking up with his housekeeper, an immensity who walked in front of their kitchen windows in her bra and big panties, gave him hugs and squeezes out in the driveway. Westport was completing the generations-long conversion from fishing and farming village to suburb, a place where most of the money was made elsewhere, where beautiful housewives had nothing whatever to do, the old cow-path streets jammed with aggressive drivers in gigantic tanks flipping you the finger for driving too slowly. I'd forgotten the sea smell, the huge estates along the water. I avoided the road that went by Staples High, hated the sight of the train station. I avoided old acquaintances. I was still the kid whose parents had been murdered, though on any given day I could forget.

Th
e town thought of itself as artsy, but it was too expensive for any real art scene.
Th
e restaurants were meat and potatoes, attached to threadbare inns.
Th
e one exception was Che Guevera's Attic, lively and alcoholic, the Mexican food an unfortunate afterthought, and where but Westport would Che Guevara be imagined to have had any sort of attic?

One night as summer was fading the old rotary phone in the kitchen rang. It was Etienne, crying so hard that RuAngela had to get on.
Th
ey'd lost the Health Spot. I guess I don't mind saying that I thought of my money first, managed not to blurt anything about it. “I'm sorry,” I said instead.

“I saw it coming, Mr. Hochmeyer, saw it coming a mile away, tried to protect him, you know, but it got so bad I just pulled the plug. If we'd paid bills one more month, we would have lost everything. My house, Mr. Hochmeyer, it's mortgaged to the roof tiles, all so these people could eat the
best food they ever ate.
”

O
NE DAY IN
late September that year I took a long run, all the way down to Compo Beach, a rare public strand, stone breakwater and tennis courts, not much to explore there except memory, and no one around, couple of furtive teenagers at a picnic table, sweet aroma of pot in the air. Even their boom-box music took me back: Led Zeppelin. I wanted to tell them that I'd met Jimmy Page, sat at a table with Robert Plant. I wanted to tell them the famous dancer Emily Bright had sat right there on that very bench, and not so many years before—perhaps about the time they were born, think of that.

Jogging homeward along the water I spotted a large rectangular building for sale, an undistinguished wooden structure all alone on the shore side of the road, shuttered and forlorn.

Slowly, I realized it was Trompetta's, which had been a pretty good little Italian restaurant in its day, nothing but a dive by the time I was in high school, one of Dad's hangouts, at least before it was shut down by the state.

I forced the broken back door, looked around inside, just a big empty space, a few of the old restaurant chairs in there, graffiti on the walls.

Th
e next morning I called the agent listed on the broken sign.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Let me find some paperwork here for you.
Th
at's waterfront. No certificate, and that's reflected in the price. You cannot live there. No one can ever live there. Food service only. Uh, so, you cannot have a beach or boat club, no dockage. Town water and septic, that's good, one good thing. You cannot have takeaway food. It's table service only. So like, no clam shacks. No live music. No dancing.
Th
ough you can have alcohol. Ten p.m. closing, midnight weekends. Parking lot dimensions are fixed. Signage fixed. Price is six.”

“Six what?”

“Six hundred thousand.”

I'd learned from E.T. that silence was the best negotiating tool, and I let one stand.
Th
e place had been for sale seven years.

He didn't hold out long: “But here in this situation I'm gonna say make the lowest lowball offer you can imagine—Chase Manhattan's not gonna be insulted. Couple hundred thousand, it's yours.”

Long silence.

Th
e salesman sighed heavily. “
Th
ey'll carry your mortgage,” he said. “I'll bet they'll take sixty grand. I'll bet they'll take two down. Even less. What do they care?”

And in my mind, at least, Restaurant Firfisle was born.