The Inseparables (21 page)

Henrietta went to see Jerry Stern at his club at Mount Pleasant. She knew what he would say. It always came back to money. Harold had none, spent too much, always needed more. The Feast had been the biggest drain. The rent had been exorbitant, the bills from the vendors excruciating. Harold refused to skimp on ingredients. Refused to move the restaurant to the suburbs. They kept the animals until there was no point. The day they were trucked off, Jerry had to come because Harold knew that if Jerry was there he would never allow himself to weep. Despite all of this, he'd kept on with the place. How the hell could she ever tell him not to? For months, it went on like this—dripping, then bleeding, then hemorrhaging money. The empty restaurant, the wasted food, the electric bills, the staff salaries—she kept the books and watched the debt grow. Eventually she stepped in to pay everything. It bought Harold another half a year and ruined their finances. She'd had to explain all of this to everyone lately—the lawyers, the creditors, the real estate agents, the motley collection of doomsayers analyzing her future prospects—because everyone assumed she was rich. Money from the book had been good in the beginning, it was true, and it was also true that there was a horrendously bad movie with Loni Anderson, in which Anderson, or a body double, went topless in a hot-air balloon, but it was also true that this was 1977 money, Jimmy Carter–level currencies, stagnation dollars. But over twenty years,
The Inseparables
had slowly stopped selling and then had eventually gone out of print, its supposed pornography eclipsed by books far smarter and smuttier than hers and by the digital torrents of actual pornography. She loved Harold and so she gave him everything until she had nothing left. It always came back to money.

Jerry did not seem surprised. “Since he's dead, and since you loved him, I don't want to say exactly that he was an idiot.”

“Seems like you just did.”

“Just with money. That was all.”

“Most people are idiots with money.”

He pointed at himself.

“Not you, Jerry. I know. Mazel tov. You're the king of aluminum siding. You should be nominated to run the Federal Reserve. You win.”

“Both of you were uninterested in money. That was the problem. Disinterest leads to ignorance. Then, before you know it, you're pouring all your money into some restaurant that nobody's eating in.”

She shook her head. Every time she was with Jerry they talked about money, and every time she talked about money she felt the need to articulate the fear. Because this was what these last few months had meant. All at once, the shape of things had collapsed. Her husband, her house, all her money, her daughter's marriage, and then, week by week, the idea of her future.

“I always told Harry two things. I said don't ever borrow from someone you don't know. And don't start selling shit.”

“It seems so desperate,” she said. “Birthday gifts?”

“It's pathetic,” he said.

“A pen is a bad birthday gift, I admit it. But—”

“At least he didn't sell his blood,” he said. “Or his semen.”

When she winced, he put up his hands.

“For the record, I'm positive he didn't do any of that.”

Jerry had lived at Mount Pleasant for sixteen months, and for the past seven he'd been after Henrietta to move in. It wasn't as bad as it looked, he told her, which was almost certainly impossible. He could get her a deal. Skip the wait list. He could get her into the Ladies' Group, whatever that was. He told her about the greens fees, about the electric golf carts, about the carbon neutrality of the dining facilities, the performances that the local children's choruses put on this past weekend. A bunch of miniature Maria Callases, he claimed. Honestly! Voices like birdsong! She understood the attraction to the promise of an institutionalized decline. The opposite had the potential to be horrifying. Here, at least, there were things to look forward to. The structure of the place promised escalators on the way to death. And when the time did come, nurses would live in your spare bedroom, or wheel you across the ninth fairway to the on-site hospice. In the meantime, you could sit back and enjoy the mahjong tournaments or the piped-in sound track that somehow always played the hits from when you were seventeen.

Henrietta felt the men around her staring. If she needed any other reason to resist this place, here was one. The men here were the perfect age to have known of her when she first published
That Motherfucking Thing,
to have acted scandalized by her, to have written sanctimonious op-eds in the
Aveline Beacon
decrying the diseased state of her soul, and then to have gone home and devoured her book in private before fucking their wives with a new vigor. Jerry knew all of this, certainly, but he kept trying to sell her.

“Let me just show you around,” he said.

“This again?”

“It'll be better than wherever you're moving, Henrietta. Plus, you'd have all this land. Just like at the house. You could still see animals out your window. It's just like the wilderness.”

“Do you hear yourself? Just like the ‘wilderness'?”

“Look around. Picture this in summer. There are birds. We have buttercups in the grass.”

“It's a golf course, Jerry. There'll be men in shorts swinging huge clubs at a tiny ball, breaking my living room window.”

“That does happen,” he said. “I can't lie.”

“I don't see myself at home here,” she said.

“You like birds, though!”

“I do,” she said. “That's true. I really like birds. I especially like them with teriyaki sauce.”

“You'd have a
community
of people here.”

“Like I need a bunch of old codgers harassing me day in and day out,” she said, looking back at a particular group of men in white Lacoste and plaid trousers, all of them smiling at her.

“It's all fun and games with that bunch,” he said.

“They'd make lecherous comments to a mannequin, Jerry.”

“Probably.”

“So you're saying I should move here and have my beautiful granddaughter come to visit me? The girl's getting harassed already as it is. And that's at her fancy school.”

“Is that true?” he asked with genuine concern. “That's awful.”

“She barely talks to me as it is, Jerry. If I move here, and she has to contend with all these degenerates, she might never speak to me again.”

He grimaced at this, knowing that she was right. She thought to mention to him everything about what had happened with Lydia and the picture, but what would a guy like Jerry know about something like this? A guy who, for an embarrassingly long time, believed that the Internet was a physical product you could buy in the store, like a television. Henrietta missed Jerry's wife at moments like this. Shirley made Aveline tolerable those first years away from Manhattan, especially after the book was out in the world and it became impossible for Henrietta to do the simplest things, like go to the grocery without being accosted by strangers. Shirley came every Saturday afternoon, did so for decades, bringing along her dogs, or bags of candy, or Bogart movies that they watched together.

It was late morning. A fire lit up the big stone hearth. Their table sat beside a window overlooking the tenth green, blue with ice, the sand traps like lunar craters. Men at the bar to her right were already onto their second cocktails. Jerry leaned back. He had on a red and white necktie, tied too short, resting on his belly. Henrietta remembered his wife's funeral. Afterward, they had gone back to the small apartment in the city. Henrietta had excused herself at a certain point and gone into the kitchen for wine or food or merely to escape the shivah. The back porch was crowded with wisteria. When she opened the refrigerator she saw that Shirley had packed it full of homemade food for him. As if she had been going away on a trip.
Spaghetti sauce,
she'd written on one small tub.
Reheat in microwave, two minutes, stir, reheat thirty seconds.
Or:
Chicken Kiev—bake on low temp.

“Did you bother with the police?” he asked. “About the weathervane.”

She shook her head.

“It's lost,” he said.

“I appreciate your optimism.”

“I'm a Jew. Fuck optimism. The world is bleak. It's gone.”

“To be honest, I probably would have thrown it away anyway when I moved.”

“Maybe you did and you just don't remember. When was the last time you even saw the thing?”

She closed her eyes.

“It's not an insult to suggest you forgot something,” he said. “Even the great, brilliant Henrietta Olyphant could forget things.”

“Who ever said I was great or brilliant?”

Jerry turned in his seat. Across the room, a table full of men were looking at Henrietta. “Your fan club here is thriving.”

“Throbbing,” she said.

He smiled. “That's exactly my point.”

This year would mark forty-one years in Massachusetts, which was almost twice as long as she had ever lived in New York, which meant, more or less, that this idea of herself as some cosmopolitan émigré, imported here to the country without her books and her women's studies classes and her occasional pitch meetings with the editors of
Ms.
magazine—all of it was officially ancient and dead. She had begun her adult life writing about the female figure—about the shifting standards of acceptability, and about who exactly shifted those standards, and about which came first: the high heel making you feel sexy, or a man designing a high heel to make you appear sexy to him. And here she was, searching for a tiny little figure of a woman that someone in an auction house wanted to buy.

“How much do you think he got for the pens?” she asked.

Jerry took out his pipe and fiddled with the stem nervously.

“Oh,” she said. “You know exactly how much he got.”

“You should know I took him around to every bank. But nobody was loaning money then. Housing market collapsed. Commercial paper market collapsed. Fucking Bear Stearns. Fucking Lehman Brothers. Every one of these bankers told him the same thing I told him. Cut your losses, go home, retire, be with your wife, talk to your pet rooster, or whatever. He wouldn't listen. You go to sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas. I told him that. He thought people would come back to the restaurant. He thought people were ready to eat good French food again. Did I think he was right? No. Did I think, you know, people maybe want to eat less butter? Yes! Yes I did!”

“He didn't tell me any of this.”

Jerry laughed. “Why would he?”

“Because we were married,” she said.

“So?”

“And because we lived together.”

“Like that's ever been an excuse for any other married person in the whole history of people.”

“Because I paid for everything at the end,” she said.

He pointed the end of his pipe at her. “There you go.”

The first night no one came for dinner—no one, from open to close, not one single person—Harold hid in the kitchen. He'd been fussing over a veal stock, skimming for hours, simmering and skimming, watching, skimming, timing, skimming. It was a task he usually assigned to a line cook, but Henrietta knew that he'd had a feeling about tonight. In the car on the ride from Aveline, he'd told her. All month, the dining room was thinning. A man's head in the final stages of balding. Two women would come in, fresh off the train from Philadelphia, eager to see the Boston Pops, with coupons, with traveler's checks, of all things, as if this were the 1980s, and they'd get the table by the window, just so the place didn't look so empty from the sidewalk. No drinks. No wine. No sparkling water. Nothing to start. Not even a Caesar salad. They'd send everything back. Henrietta handled this. The
boeuf au poivre:
too bloody, too spicy, too small. The duck: too fatty. The quiche: too rich. She was always the one who had to tell Harold. Customers would haggle over the check. That much? For this? It was six bites. Honestly. Six small bites. This, too, she needed to relay to him. Daily, the waiters would idle by the bar, obsessing over their phones, sharing the new online reviews. It used to be that you got one review every other year. Now a review came every day, sometimes more than one, and all of them were worse than any printed review Harold had ever received. She tried to hide them from him. Such venom. Such pointed cruelty.
Apparently this restaurant used to be famous but now
it's just sad.
Or:
So much butter I probably needed an angiogram afterward.
Or:
We were the only people in the place.
Or:
The chef just lingered in the kitchen window, sulking. Don't go here. Such a creepy vibe.
Or:
Did we mention the butter?

It was a Friday evening. The very beginning of spring. The city felt alive finally, after a long winter. Across the road at Symphony Hall, Beethoven's Ninth played all week. From the kitchen Henrietta could hear the afternoon rehearsal, the spots in the score where the conductor stopped the orchestra, the spots they ran through again.
Ode to Joy
a hundred times a day. A glorious week. She helped out, swept floors, changed broken lightbulbs. In the afternoon the young ballerinas from a local ballet lingered on the sidewalk after class, some of them still in their leotards, all of them smoking, making kissy faces at Harold's cooks, speaking bad French, smoking more cigarettes. These first few days of spring, the whole city had a collective libido to exercise. The streets buzzed with sex. Everyone's body reemerged from their winter layers. They'd always done the best business this week. People ate, drank, flirted, went home with people they shouldn't have been out with in the first place. She'd tried to get him to temper his expectations. She'd made him order less food. For tonight, they'd taken only six birds, less than the usual full dozen. One lamb instead of three. They got their veal from a farm in a town a half hour from Aveline. There were men there who could birth a breech calf and also, six months later, kill that calf. Hard men, all of them, free of any sentiment, they'd urged him not to kill the animals if he didn't need to. Henrietta had gone with him and tried to mediate. One of the farmers had read online that the Feast was empty most nights. A grizzled Mainer, he'd cocked his head toward the pens. “They're all doing just fine the way they are. No need to kill 'em dead if you're just gonna throw it away.”

The stock took three days. A day for the first bit of flavor. A second day with the same bones. A third day to combine the two. This wasn't the classic preparation—the way Harold had learned, the way he loved, the way with the roasting and the good color. She'd been with him when he decided to change something up. As if this was the reason nobody came to eat here anymore: the fucking veal stock. He stole the new recipe from
The French Laundry Cookbook.
Something needed to give, and so he stole recipes. He bought Keller's book, the big white thing, fifty dollars, just like a home cook, and there was so much skimming. Skim, skim, skim, it said, and so he did.

Harold tried to get the staff to respect the animals. His staff was careless. They burned the meat. Or else they seasoned it wrong. Killed it with salt. He couldn't get the best people any longer, not even close, not with the competition, not with Thomas Keller and his beautiful clear veal stock, and so he got cooks who burned the meat. He gave a speech that day over the stock. This was my calf, he said. He knew this animal, saw it birthed, actually, had stroked its head, fed it with a bottle. If you had a gun to his temple, he'd admit that he had kissed it that first night, before he penned it. Have you ever seen how lively a young calf is? How they run and play, like dogs? He stood over the stockpot, skimming. Henrietta stood off to the side, watching. Now she had the marks of a chef on her arm. Burn marks. Knife nicks. I fed these calves by the bottle, he told them. They've sucked on my fingers. She wanted to step in then to stop this charade, to keep him from embarrassing himself, but something in her held her back.

The dining room sat empty. It was nine. Ten. He kept skimming. A good stock shouldn't overwhelm the senses, he told her. It was a fine balance. Ten thirty. He stopped, looked out. The waitstaff was at the bar, sitting, playing games on their phones. “The symphony will get out in five minutes,” he called out. “Be ready. There'll be a rush.”

Some of them believed him.

“Henrietta,” he said, pointing to her. “Stand. On your feet. Be by the door.” He pointed. The bartender. “Peter. Do you have your bases mixed? Do you? Be ready.” Behind him, on the grill, Philippe. “Mark the pork. Mark the filet. Mark the chicken thigh.” Others wouldn't move. Henrietta watched, grew nervous. The dishwashers, all of them Ecuadorian, sat playing cards. There'd been a time when he employed a huge kitchen staff. Teams for the meat. Teams for the vegetables. They'd prepare forty of everything on the menu, and then, before the night was through, they'd run out. Everyone had feared him. Men happy to be screamed at. He took young chefs straight from the Culinary Institute, trained them rough for eighteen months, traded them with chefs in New York or Paris. All that was gone. He had only ten people. Everyone had to do everything. Even Henrietta broke down meat. “Be ready,” he yelled. But there was nothing to wash. Nothing to prep. The place was spotless. Everything was clean. To his right, a neat
mise en place.
Large mirepoix, small mirepoix, carrots turned, carrots in neat batons, carrots julienned. She waited for the jolt of energy. Watching her husband summon his kitchen into chaos was less like seeing a conductor striking up an orchestra and more like seeing a conductor commanding that orchestra to fight one another. At its best, this place had been loud and vulgar and filled with so many vats of boiling stock and fire, with everyone sweating for hours. She loved to see it then: he would raise his hands and people would rush to work. Later that night, he'd raise his hands and the kitchen would be gleaming.

He'd been in a kitchen since he was a boy. When they met, he told her that he had the typical biography of a chef. His grandmother's lobster shack in the summer. Old Orchard Beach. Feeding the fishermen, the bikers, children fresh from the water, sand everywhere, even in the food. He had a simple job. Reach in, grab the lobster when someone ordered one, drop it in the boiling water. He was the executioner. Even then, he told Henrietta, he'd been able to hold both thoughts in his head. One being that he loved these animals when they were living. Even a lobster. Even a bug. The other being that he had no problem killing them.

Ten forty-five. “Show's out,” Henrietta announced. She had her face pressed against the glass of the front door. The doors opened at Symphony Hall. “Okay,” she shouted. “A good crowd coming our way. Five couples.” This last year she'd been on full-time. “Okay, four couples.” Last week it had been a young Chinese pianist doing all of Chopin's nocturnes. Such beautiful afternoons listening to the rehearsals. Chopin fans loved to eat good French food, and they'd had a decent run this late in the evening. Some dedicated Francophiles, white-haired, scarves around their necks, ordering in Bronx-accented French, in Quebecois, ordering three bottles of Côtes du Rhône. “Okay,” she called out. “Losing people.” Through the reflection in the glass she could see Harold tightening the ties on his apron.

“How many?” he called out.

She turned back. “Waiting on one couple right now. They're standing outside. Discussing.”

He tightened the ties even tighter.

“Should we go outside and invite them in?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “They'll come.”

This did not happen at a restaurant with the pedigree of the Feast. They'd had two stars, and then one star—a matter of bad service and a partially undercooked duck—and then no stars at all. By the door, they had the first reviews tacked to the wall. Just this, putting these up, violated certain rules of decorum. In a fine dining establishment, one simply did not hang one's press on the wall as if it was a pizzeria. Oona had suggested it. Let people know you mean business, she'd said. And here it was: October 1976, two stars. This had been the height. He could do no wrong. A young man cooking in the grand tradition, waiters in tuxedos, Vivaldi on the hi-fi. October 1979, one star. The business with the duck was a scandal. He had fired the entire kitchen, replaced it entirely with men from Paris and Lyon. This alone, this commitment, this evidence of the tyrannical artist-cook, kept people coming back. Farther down the hall, the photos of Sinatra were tacked up. The photos of Brando, Jackie Onassis, Cronkite, Katharine Hepburn, even Nixon. Again, this was Oona's idea. Never mind that every one of them was dead.

Behind her the cooks waited. A dozen filets, marked. A dozen chops, marked. A dozen chicken thighs, marked. The stock. The quiche. The custards. The
mousse au chocolat.
The madeleines. Hotel pans of canapés, tomato terrine, foie gras. The cold bourbon-vanilla glaze in a squeeze bottle. The duck. The duck fat. The quail. The quail eggs. The smaller saucepans, simmering. Pepper in the air. Butter softening. Olives Provençal at room temperature.

She peered. “Okay,” Henrietta said, her voice falling.

She turned back.

“Okay what?” Harold asked.

“We lost them.”

He tightened. “What? All of them? How?”

She stepped away, following him into the kitchen. “What do you want me to say, Harold? We lost them. They stood. They discussed. They left. Julius Caesar in reverse.”

He shook his head. “Then go get them! Go!”

She frowned.

One of his line cooks stepped forward. “Chef, no.”

He pointed at the kid. “If she won't go, you go!”

“We don't do that, chef.”

Behind Harold stood another young line cook. A Jersey guy. A guy who showed up the first day thinking that a ball cap was an acceptable substitute for a hairnet. “I've never actually worked a shift where no one came.”

Harold turned, fired him. “Anybody else?” he yelled.

Two line cooks took the opportunity to fire themselves. Aprons and hats on the clean, empty countertop.

Finally, from the corner, his grill man, Philippe. Long tenured, elegant in stature, Napoleon's nose, a true genius with fire. “What do I do with the meat, boss?”

On the grill were pieces of animals Harold had raised. Three pigs, three lambs, three of his own chickens he had seen hatch and who had buzzed around his feet in the mornings while he fed them. A sign hung near the freezer: No Protein Allowed. He would not freeze the meat. He had never done it. You could taste the difference, he told Henrietta. Anyone who ate here, he told her, would be able to taste the difference, too. And even if they couldn't, he would know, and he wouldn't allow it. Philippe pointed at the steak.

“This,” he said, “this we can keep. Freeze. Serve it tomorrow. It's a great cut.”

Harold untied his apron.

“Or, we can make a staff meal.”

Harold shook his head. “You already ate.”

Behind him one of the Ecuadorians spoke. “We can always eat. We're men.”

From the front, Henrietta frowned. “We're not all men. But I can always eat, too.”

Harold went back to skimming. She came over. The stock looked intermittently clear and then murky. She knew what was in his head. Every night now they had some form of the same conversation. What do we owe? Who's waiting on payment? What kind of promotion can we do?

“No,” he said. “Toss it.”

Henrietta threw up her hands. “Don't toss it.”

“Toss it,” Harold yelled.

“Freeze it, at least.”

“Have you not seen the sign?” he yelled. “We don't freeze!”

“Donate it, then.”

He shook his head. “To who?”

“To homeless people.” She held up a hand and started counting. “To battered women. To college students. To a culinary school. To the VA cafeteria.” She lifted another hand. “The Hare Krishnas will take the veggies. I know that.”

He threw his hat. “Fuck off.” He threw up his hands. “Fucking Hare Krishnas? Are you kidding me?”

“Seriously. Everyone in the city does it. The food banks here offer better food than most of the restaurants.”

Harold scoffed.

“Even Thomas Keller does it!”

“Do not mention Thomas fucking Keller!” He smacked the counter with an open palm. “I will not give this food away. Not this food. No. This is my food. This is great—”

“It's not great anymore,” she said. “It'll be trash in a second.”

She knew this was not what he did here. Throw away food. Freeze food. Donate food. He birthed the animal, raised it, fed it, watched it play, gave it medicine, and then had it packed humanely. She knew all of this. No gigantic killing floor. No overwhelming stench of blood that sent the animals into a crazed frenzy. After that, he treated the meat right. Treated it as though it was valuable. His meat, he said once, was like the color a painter had to extract from a berry that grew only on one bush, and bloomed for only one week. She had laughed at him. He sounded so pompous! But he meant it. His pomposity was genuine. He cooked slowly. He watched through the kitchen doors as people ate. He wanted to see the satisfaction. Wash their dish. Send them home happy.