The School of Essential Ingredients (20 page)

“I feel completely alive,” commented Claire. “I could run five miles.”

“Perhaps that was not entirely the idea,” Carl noted, smiling.

“And now,” Lillian announced, “it is time for dessert.” She displayed a long, slim chocolate bar. “The name for the cocoa tree is
theobroma
, which means ‘food of the gods.’ I know that chocolate is meant for us, however, because the melting point for good chocolate just happens to be the temperature within your very human mouth.” She broke up the chocolate into bite-size pieces and put two on each small white plate.

“This is dark chocolate, which contains the most chocolate of all. No milk and not a lot of sugar added. At first you may think it is not sweet enough, but sweetness isn’t everything. Let the chocolate dissolve on your tongue and see what happens.”

She started handing the small white plates to each member of the class.

“Lillian, Helen doesn’t eat chocolate.” Carl spoke in a low voice as she reached him. “She gave it up years ago.”

Lillian gave Helen a considering glance. “People change,” she commented mildly.

Helen met Lillian’s eyes, and took the plate she was offering.

The chocolate entered Helen’s mouth, and the taste was there, as she remembered it—as if it was some deeper, richer part of herself, all that was mysterious and yearning and passionate and sad somehow come together, washed up on the shore of her imagination. And there in her mind, as she knew he would be, in the place where she had hidden the memory apart from the rest of her life, was her lover, his eyes dark, his hands smooth as the sea, bringing her hot chocolate in bed on a cold afternoon. An image held aside like a child’s last piece of Halloween candy, encapsulated, whether to protect it from her marriage or her marriage from it, she could never have said.

Sitting in the restaurant kitchen, she heard as much as felt the intake of her breath, then she stilled, holding her lover in her mind, a perfect balance between pleasure and sorrow, as the bite she had taken dissolved in her mouth and the memory, released, flowed into her and became not the beginning or end of anything, but a part of who she was and had always been.

She let out her breath and brought the chocolate to her mouth again, inhaling its soft, dusty-sweet smell, like an attic hung with dried lavender. And this time, what she saw was the wide, white bed in Provence, the cool stiffness of the starched sheets against their bodies still wet from the shower, as she rolled on top of Carl and his eyes grew wide at her unexpected daring, then dark with pleasure as she moved gently, then insistently, and his hands slid up her legs to grasp her hips. The hours after, while Carl’s tongue found its way across the drops of water, then the sweat on her skin, as if she was both completely new and utterly known to him.

And then another memory, as effortlessly as one wave following another—years later, Carl in her arms, his body pounded by sobs, her lips on his hair, whispering into its hot, damp depths that his father had loved him so much, that she was sorry, so sorry, that she was there would always be there, while he sobbed as if crying was a new kind of breathing and always would be until finally he slowed and she had held him, quiet, through the end of the day, while the noises of the road and houses and dinnertimes around them rose and fell.

And another—coming home one day to find a blank canvas and a box of oil paints—blue and violet and sage-green and white, terra-cotta and umber and brown—laid out on the small desk he had made for her that fit in the niche at the top of the stairs. Looking out the window above the desk she had seen an easel, set in the garden, spare and strong in front of the overgrown tangle of green and pink and white and yellow of their flowerbeds. She remembered the feel of the paint moving through the tube to the palette that first time, the brush meeting the canvas like a hand touching silk, Carl’s pride when she had shown him her first painting, her own face lit with joy.

And finally—the sound of two pairs of pajama-clad feet coming to their bed early on a Christmas morning. Too small and, of course, too early. Carl’s low, deep voice welcoming the toddlers into the warm circle of their two bodies, her arms reaching to enclose the sweet smell of her grandchildren, her hand touching Carl’s face. And after, her thoughts too large for sleep, as she lay and watched them while Christmas morning came in through the windows.

“C’EST FINI?” Lillian was touching her shoulder gently, a stack of used plates in her hand.

Helen raised her eyes to meet Lillian’s.

“Oui,”
she replied, her voice soft.
“Merci.”

And passed her plate to Lillian.

Class Was over—the chocolate long gone, several more wine bottles emptied. Claire and Isabelle were on dish-duty, elbow-deep in warm water, washing the fondue pots and talking about tricks for helping a baby sleep through the night. Tom was helping Chloe with the recycling. After they finished wiping down the counters, Helen and Carl bid the rest of the class farewell and walked down the brick pathway from the restaurant toward the gate.

Ian stood in the kitchen door, watching them. In the mixed light, it looked at first as if Carl and Helen were following each other, but then Ian saw that their hands were linked, the edges of their coats brushing against the lavender bushes that lined the path.

“They are lovely together, yes?” Antonia came up next to him.

“They are.” Ian paused. “I was wondering. I mean, I’d like to cook you dinner. Lillian is always saying we should practice and....”

“Yes, Ian,” Antonia replied. “I think I would like that.”

Ian

Lillian’s.” The voice that answered the restaurant kitchen phone was young and masculine. The sound of dishes and voices clattered in the background. “How can I help you?”

“Is Lillian there? Tell her it’s Ian.”

The phone clunked down on the stainless-steel counter and Ian listened to the voices of the cooks in the background, their conversations slipping in between the sounds of chopping knives and water running over dishes and vegetables. Lillian’s voice came on the line.

“Ian? What is it?”

“She said yes to dinner—what do I do now?”

“You cook, Ian.”

“I know, but what?”

“Well . . . how do you feel about her?”

“She’s beautiful and smart and . . .”

“I mean,” Lillian’s voice was patient, “what do you want?”

“I want . . .” Ian paused, and then his voice cleared. “I would want her for the rest of my life.”

“Then that is how you cook.”

The gift certificate for Lillian’s cooking class—a thick, elegant, chocolate-colored card—had come in a birthday letter from Ian’s mother the previous July. Ian had called his sister after opening the envelope.

“Do you know what she gave me? Cooking classes. Is there enough irony for you there? Cooking classes from a woman who almost never cooked—and when she did she burned what she was making because she’d get all wrapped up in some painting she was working on.”

“Ian, I love you.” In the background, Ian could hear the sound of toddlers claiming victory or possession, it was hard to tell. “It’s your birthday. Why don’t you give yourself a present and let go of some of that? She was an artist.”

“But why cooking, of all things?”

“I don’t know—maybe you should ask her.” Ian’s sister paused, and he could hear her taking the object of contention from one toddler, sending both howling companionably into the other room. “Are you going to go? To the classes?”

“Of course”—Ian’s voice sounded defiant, even to himself—“someone has to learn how to cook in this family.”

When Ian Was Young, he would sneak up to the attic space his mother used as a painting studio. After the darkness of the steep, narrow stairs, the light in the room glowed like sunshine through flower petals, luminous and golden. His mother would be standing with her profile lit by the window, brush poised in one hand, surveying the canvas in front of her with an appraising eye. Still hidden by the partly closed door, he would wait, not breathing, for the moment he knew would happen, when her expression would clear and become joyous and the brush would reach first for paint and then toward the easel.

During those early years, Ian associated the smell of paint, thick and intoxicating, with that happiness on his mother’s face. The only time Ian had ever been scolded as a child—for he was, in the main, a very good boy, never in the way, the kind of boy who would always get the straight A’s his parents cared little about—was the time when he had snuck up to the attic while his mother and father were talking one evening and painted his hands so he could carry the smell with him, thinking it would bring him the elation he saw in his mother. His father was a bit taken aback by his blue-handed boy; his mother, after explaining about the need to be careful with special paint, had set him up with his own easel in her studio, where for years he had worked beside her—caught up in the swirls, the shapes, the oranges and greens and yellows and reds, the way the brush moved the paint across the thick white sheets of newsprint—until he realized that other people never saw on the paper what had been in his mind.

“It doesn’t matter, darling,” his mother would tell him. “That’s not the point of art.”

But for Ian, who worshiped at the altar of clarity as only a boy careering toward adolescence can, it was exactly, precisely, the point.

When he Was ten, Ian had discovered computers. There were no computers in his house back then; his mother was more amused than interested by the concept and his father used the one in his office at work. But a friend from school had one, and Ian was smitten from the moment his hands touched the keyboard. Here was a partner of unceasing consistency, whose rules were inviolate, if only you understood them. And Ian did.

He badgered his parents for months, until the next Christmas there was a present just the right size under the tree. Ian sat by the box from the time he spotted it at four o’clock on Christmas morning until the time his family finally opened their presents and he could take his prize from its Styrofoam packaging and bring it alive. From then on, the computer, or one of its various successors, held court in his room. Over the years, more computers entered the home, but they were mere functionaries in the life of his family—mail carriers, research assistants. Ian regarded his computer as the best of friends, one that would unselfishly step aside for a new model with a better memory, a quicker wit. In a house filled with the ambiguities of color, Ian’s first computers offered a reassuring world of black and white.

Ian had Been determined not to walk into Lillian’s cooking class unprepared, so he had spent the month of August in his apartment kitchen. As a software engineer, he reasoned that cooking, like any other process, could be approached as a series of steps to be mastered, fundamental skills that could be applied even, or perhaps especially, when one was confronted by the chaos of complicated recipes, sinks overflowing with pots and pans, shelves of red and silver-green spices, hiding in small, round glass jars like memory land mines.

He started with rice—pure, white, elemental, an expression of mathematical simplicity: 1 part rice + 2 parts water = 3 parts cooked rice. Nothing extra, nothing lost. Cooking it required only a heavy pot and discipline, both of which he had.

It was a disaster. First he had too much discipline, and the rice on the bottom of the pot scorched, sending a sad, brown smell throughout the apartment; then he had too little, and the rice was soggy, refusing to be roused no matter how much he fluffed and encouraged. He added salt and butter, which at least gave the mush a vague resemblance to popcorn in terms of flavor, but it still was not rice. Not the way he wanted it.

It was abundantly clear that he was going to need help.

Ian’s apartment was above a Chinese restaurant that he frequented more often than he would have cared to have his mother know. The dining room was small, its walls painted a color that Ian guessed had once been red, the menus faded almost to the point of illegibility.

The first time Ian had ventured downstairs to the restaurant was two years earlier, after a long, hot summer day spent moving into his new apartment. He had been tired and hungry, and after being seated by an ancient waitress whose formidable expression made him look surreptitiously at his watch to make sure he wasn’t past closing time, he had opted for the safe choice and ordered sweet and sour pork and rice. When the plate arrived, he looked down at a fragrant mix of chicken, ginger, and the brilliant green of barely cooked broccoli tips.

“This is not what I ordered,” he told the waitress, as politely as he could, not yet sure how varied his eating options would be in his new neighborhood.

She raised one impressive gray eyebrow at him, and left.

It was nine p.m. and he was the only customer in the restaurant; as the swinging door closed behind the bowlegged gait of his waitress, he found himself alone with the plate in front of him. Uncertain if she would ever return and distinctly unwilling to follow the woman into the kitchen, Ian picked up his chopsticks and took a bite. The chicken was soft, delicate, the broccoli crisp and distinctly alive, ginger seasoning the mix like the provocative flip of a short skirt. The ache in his muscles from hauling and carrying moving boxes, the general anxiety that always encompassed him when he was confronted with the new and unfamiliar, left him like the last train of the day, leaving him calm and refreshed. He ate slowly and thoughtfully, disregarding any thought of a take-home container for the next day’s lunch. As he finished, the old woman returned.