Turn Up the Heat (18 page)

“Did he really do that?” Blythe sounded genuinely surprised. “I had no idea he was that bad to you. I know what I’ve heard him say to the servers, but I didn’t know he treated you like that, too.”

“Gavin doesn’t give Josh credit for much.” Snacker patted Josh’s back. “One time, one time,” he held his finger up in the air, “he told Josh he was the ‘heart and soul’ of the restaurant. But the few times he’s been interviewed for articles or reviews on Simmer, do you think he sings Josh’s praises? No way. All he tells reporters and reviewers is how Simmer was
his
dream,
his
vision, and he takes all the credit. That’s why you never see Josh’s name in the paper. Gavin doesn’t want to share any of the credit.”

I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t noticed the omission. There had been only a few reviews of Simmer since it had opened. The first review, a memorable one,
had
mentioned Josh. For some reason, it hadn’t dawned on me that the subsequent reviews had been about Gavin Seymour’s new restaurant and not about Simmer’s brilliant chef. The reviews and articles had described and praised the decor, the atmosphere, and the food, but Josh’s name had not appeared. Josh must have noticed. I felt guilty that I had not.

“Snacker, that’s how it works. You know that.” Josh tried to wave off his friend’s words. “Gavin’s attitude is that he put me in a position to do what I want to do, but he gets to reap all the glory. He’s not going to allow anyone to write an article about Simmer that doesn’t feature himself. Who cares about me, right? He wants the credit for how good the food is. Like he had something to do with it.”

I felt terrible about how underappreciated Josh was. “Does Gavin ever pull you out of the kitchen to meet customers?”

“Oh, sure. When it’s larger parties, or he wants me to explain the specials. If it will make him look good to diners, then he’ll bring me out and say wonderful things about me in front of people. But mostly he pushes the fact that Simmer is
his
restaurant. Which it is, right? It’s his money, his power, he’s the boss, right? I’m just a cook.” Josh spat out the word
cook
as if it meant that his talents extended only to frying eggs and slinging hash.

I didn’t know whether the beer was causing or simply revealing such bitterness, but I suspected that hidden truths were creeping out. I was slowly learning that Josh had been protecting me from how tough things were for him, and I guessed that he had been working overtime to maintain my impression that life at Simmer was great. Not that I blamed Josh for resenting Gavin’s brushing aside his significant contribution to Simmer’s success. But I had had no idea how difficult Gavin was behind the scenes. Josh worked himself to chronic exhaustion for a penny-pinching salary with no benefits, while Gavin paid himself generously, took all the credit, and saw to it that he got all the recognition. The overall picture was nasty. The stories about sexism in the culinary world had been bad, but I now saw them as depicting only one part of a pervasively ugly scene. I’d intended to ask everyone here why the dishwashers and the cleaners were the only Hispanic employees at Simmer, but I decided to tackle that issue another day.

I threw my hands up. “Why do you guys do this to yourselves? Why don’t you get out of the business?” Stupid question. I knew what the answer would be.

Josh softened a bit, and I saw some of the twinkle return to his eyes. “I’m a chef. It’s who I am, and it’s what I do. I don’t know anything else. And I’ll put up with what I have to until I can get my own place.”

It was what Josh wanted more than anything else: a restaurant of his own that he could run
his
way. But I couldn’t imagine how he’d ever get the money together, especially with the salary he was earning now. A bank loan would be a gigantic risk. Would Josh take that risk? Probably. And would a bank even give him a loan?

The four of us spent a few more hours talking together and listening to music before Josh and I decided to call it a night. We crashed in his room and left Snacker and Blythe on the couch in the living room. I still didn’t know what to think about Blythe’s auctioning off stolen goods on eBay, and didn’t know whether the thievery connected her to a greater crime. But I fervently hoped that Snacker wasn’t literally in bed with the enemy.

FOURTEEN

MY
cell phone shrilled loudly and woke me early on Monday morning. Man, did I have a raging headache! Must have been all those tamales…

I rolled over in bed and fished my phone out of my purse. Shit. It was Naomi Campbell, my field placement supervisor. The sight of her name on the cell phone always made me feel slightly anxious; no matter how often I reminded myself that my Naomi Campbell merely shared a name with the phone-hurling model, I could never completely shake the expectation of bizarre abnormality. I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to meet Naomi at the office for my final student evaluation.

“Hello,” I murmured into the phone. My voice was almost inaudible, but faintness was all I could muster.

“Good morning, Chloe! Are you ready for your performance evaluation this morning? Can you come in at ten instead of noon?”

I did my best to silence the enormous belch that erupted from my stomach. “No problem. See you soon.”

I’d totally forgotten about this evaluation. The absolute last thing I felt like doing was hauling myself out of bed to hear Naomi tell me what a failure I’d been in my field placement. Naomi was deeply, even spiritually, devoted to the Boston Organization Against Sexual and Other Harassment in the Workplace, and I was sure that she had spent the past year in constant disappointment that she had ended up with an intern far less devout than she was. Unfortunately for Naomi, I was the only intern she had. In fact, since Naomi and I were the only people who worked at her so-called organization, the term itself was somewhat misleading. Anyway, as Naomi’s intern, I’d done my best. Okay, maybe not my
very
best or even my ordinary best. But I had definitely improved during the year, hadn’t I? Well, I’d improved, although probably less definitely than Naomi had hoped I would.

My major task at the BO, an acronym I never used in front of Naomi, had been to respond to hotline calls. When Naomi had first referred to the hotline, I’d envisioned a red phone with flashing lights that would ring nonstop with calls from women in need of help. Despite our efforts to “get the word out,” as Naomi always said, I was lucky to get one call a day from a woman experiencing harassment at her job. I enjoyed the few calls that came in, and I learned to handle them pretty well, but I’d filled my two days a week at the BO largely with attempts to look busy: I’d tossed papers around the office and pretended to do research on the Internet. I could imagine all too well Naomi’s evaluation of my performance.

I looked at the clock. Eight thirty. Josh was long gone, and Snacker probably was, too. I had to get moving. Stumbling to the bathroom, I could barely tolerate the sense that my brains were bashing against my skull. On the sink, I found a large bottle of aspirin—probably stolen from somewhere, too—and swallowed two while I gulped water from the faucet. I took a steaming shower and sulked about the hangover from hell, the impending meeting with Naomi, and Leandra’s memorial service, which I’d have to attend later today at Simmer. I wrapped myself in what I hoped was a semiclean towel and opened the bathroom door.

“Hi, Chloe.” In front of me stood Blythe, who looked as bad as I felt.

“Oh! Hi. I didn’t know you were still here.” I pulled my towel up a bit.

“I had way too much to drink to drive home, so I really had to sleep here,” she said sheepishly.

“Uh-huh…and…?” Something must have happened between Blythe and Snacker. I did my best to pretend that I was hearing wonderful news. In fact, if Blythe was the thieving eBay seller I thought she was, then the news that she and Snacker had spent the night together was thoroughly bad.

Blythe shook her head. “No, nothing like that. Well, okay, a little maybe,” she admitted with a small smile. So much for my garlic vinaigrette warding off Snacker. “But nothing serious. I like Snacker, but he’s probably too much of a playboy for me. Anyhow, can I use the bathroom? I have a class that I’m going to be late for.”

I stepped into the hall. “Yeah, sure. Sorry. I have to get going, too, so I’ll see you at the memorial thing this afternoon?”

“Oh, God. That’s right,” Blythe said with a sigh. “I’ll be there.”

I filled a plastic bag with tamales, sped home, breaking a lot of traffic laws on the way, and, in an attempt to look professional, threw on good pants and a blazer. With no time to dry my still-wet hair, I slicked it back into a tight ponytail, grabbed the term paper that I had to drop off at school later, and fought my way through traffic to make the ten o’clock meeting with Naomi.

“Your last day!” Naomi’s voice bounced off the concrete office walls. She spun around in her chair and looked at me with a mix of what appeared to be pride and sadness.

This
was
my last day. The reality hadn’t hit me before. Now it did: I wouldn’t be coming to this gloomy, windowless cell anymore. I wouldn’t be staring at the phone waiting for it to ring, or taking lunch breaks that were too long, or fretting over how to transfer calls from my phone to Naomi’s. Maybe I would miss these two cramped rooms, the cafeteria tables that served as desks, the smell of Naomi’s patchouli incense. Probably not.

But I would miss Naomi. Although we were polar opposites, I had grown to like her. Her die-hard social worker style had initially put me off, but I’d learned to appreciate how great she was at this job and how many women she rescued from horrendous harassment.

“I can’t believe it’s over. I’m going to miss you,” I said to Naomi. God, she did look weird today, though. Her long hair was, as always, done up in clumps of braids that hung down her back. She wore her favorite Birkenstock sandals and a bizarre peasant dress patterned with purple and orange swirls. Her chunky wooden-bead necklace was such an unfortunate fashion choice that I had to restrain myself from reaching out and yanking it off her neck.

“And I am going to miss my favorite intern! Come sit down. Let’s get this evaluation over before I fall apart!” Naomi’s eyes glistened slightly.

I took a seat on a dining room chair that Naomi had bought for three whole dollars at a yard sale. My supervisor opened a thick binder and leafed through page after page of irrelevant letters, flyers, notes, and articles before she eventually found my evaluation form.

“I have to say, Chloe, that I was a little skeptical when you first started here last fall. But I’m happy to say that I have seen such growth in you! I feel that you are really on your way to becoming an exceptional social worker.” Naomi beamed at me.

Was she kidding?

“You and I have very different work styles, but that doesn’t mean that you aren’t able to do anything you want in this field. It’s taken you some time, but I can see that you are really beginning to define yourself in this profession. I’ve given you very good marks in most areas.” When she held out the evaluation form, I could see that she had, in fact, scored me high. “We don’t have to go over all of this. I think we have spent enough time each week discussing your performance in our staff meetings.”

Another thing I wouldn’t miss: staff meetings! With only two of us working at the BO, we could hardly have avoided meeting, but Naomi nonetheless insisted that we hold regular staff meetings to discuss the organization.

“Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me, Naomi. You have really been great, and I’ve learned a lot from working with you, and—”

Before I could finish my sentence, Naomi threw her arms around me and started rocking me back and forth. Luckily, my hangover was subsiding. Otherwise, I might have hurled all over the horrid industrial carpet. I should have known there was no way I’d escape one of Naomi’s hugs. In her view, this stressful line of work demanded that we offer support and express our solidarity by reaching out to each other. In other words, she was incessantly engulfing me in hugs and insisting on holding hands. I vaguely wondered whether I’d spent the year being harassed at an antiharassment agency, but I hugged her back, nonetheless.

“Now, before you leave, you must tell me what’s going on with you. How are you handling finals? Are you reaching out for support from your fellow students? And from your friends and family?”

“Finals are looking okay. I think I’m ready, but we’ll see when I actually get into the room to take those tests.” I considered telling her about my goal of correcting sexism in the culinary industry, but I couldn’t face the hyperenthusiastic response I’d be doomed to endure. Naomi was the sort of person who would fly onto the bandwagon and have me calling senators and organizing boycotts of restaurants before I knew it. As she’d just pointed out, we had very different styles. “But there is actually something bigger going on. Do you and Eliot know what’s been going on at Simmer?”

Naomi’s boyfriend, or “partner” as she preferred to call him, owned an art gallery right near Simmer. His name was Eliot Davis. Now that Naomi and Eliot were together, she was a frequent visitor to Newbury Street. Naomi was not Newbury Street material, and I was always deathly afraid that some Prada-wearing, size-zero woman would point and scream at the sight of my tree-hugging supervisor and that the fashion police would then scoop Naomi up and haul her off for an extreme makeover. So far, I’d heard no reports of any such happenings, but it was only a matter of time.

“Eliot told me about the tragedy. Everyone must be in incredible pain right now. This is a perfect opportunity for you to hone your skills by making yourself available as a resource to everyone at the restaurant. You may want to organize a few support meetings with the staff until the immediate feelings of anguish pass.” Always the social worker! It was vintage Naomi advice.

“Oh, of course. I’m definitely doing that.” I nodded my head sincerely. “How is Eliot? How are you and Eliot?”