Everything. It was all so unbelievable. Taking her coffee and toast into the great room to wait for Alvin to be finished with his romp, she tried to print it all into her memory for the day when she would only be looking back on it. Would this be the moment of remembrance? Sitting alone in Julian"s house?
Moments, moments. It was something she"d done through each of the episodes of her life-pressed memories into the folds of her mind for later. It started when she had to part with her grandmother Iris, a funeral on a hot day. Then, not even a month later, her mother told her to go say goodbye to the cooks at the restaurant where her grandmother tended bar all of Elena"s eight years of life. She stood in the kitchen, smelling the strong morning scent of bleach and commercial dishwasher detergent and bacon frying on the grill, and hugged Pedro, her buddy, a fat man with a good heart who looked after Elena like she was his own.
So many places, so many people since then. So many men, in particular. She"d tasted them for her sister and her cousin, living lives for three women. No wonder she was so tired! And yet, didn"t she love them all, hadn"t they all brought gifts to her, one at a time, each one opening his hand to offer her a delight that was his alone to share?
Moments, she thought, pouring coffee on this still and quiet snowy Aspen morning. Gifts.
There was a bluesman named James in San Francis...o...b..fore she got involved with Dmitri. A tall, lean man with broad shoulders and hands like dinner plates. He was a good deal older than she, and came into a club where she partied sometimes, and ordered fried fish they wrapped up in newspaper. His feet were long and thin, encased in neatly tied, expensive leather shoes, and he wore a pin-striped suit, which Elena had never seen a man wear before. He spied her and made some earthy comment in his low, rich, bluesy voice, and Elena glimpsed something in his eyes, some knowledge she didn"t have. He was too old for her, nearly twenty years older, close to fifty at the time, she thought, with his age showing on his neck, and in the thin flesh around his eyes, but not in his hearty body, which he shared generously, and not in his lush, seasoned, and delectable mouth, which offered the best kissing she had ever done. Long kisses, and his long fingers, and his deep and all-encompa.s.sing laughter. He had come from somewhere in the South, and lived in a small house in a neighborhood full of trees, and he liked to barbecue on summer Sundays, cooking ribs and chicken in a converted fifty-five-gallon drum. His sauces were made with coffee and vinegar, and he served it in a big messy pile on paper plates with white bread and American beer. James. Yes. She thought of him sometimes when the blues played and when she smelled chicken barbecue and when someone laughed just right. The happiest man she"d ever met-happy in his skin, happy in the world, happy singing or drinking or making love. In the end, too old for her and maybe too simple in his ways. She thought too much, he said, and he hadn"t liked her attention to her career, to the restaurant, where she sometimes spent sixty or seventy hours a week. He wanted more of her.
She let him go, but there were moments she liked taking out sometimes-sitting with him in a fish house on a hot summer day in Oakland, with no fans and no breeze and the fryers making it even hotter. The fish was fried perfectly in a crisp, thin batter, salted and rich, whitefish they called it, and sprinkled with hot vinegar. Everyone knew him and liked to sidle up to him, the bluesman who played the clubs downtown, and talk to him about music. He looked over at her and winked, and she grinned back and that was that.
Thinking of James led to thinking of Timothy, her st.u.r.dy English lad, and his version of fried whitefish, cod from the fish and chips shop, greasy and hot and salty and sprinkled with vinegar. She met him in Paris, at school, a dark-haired youth of twenty-four with the whitest skin she"d ever seen-it was as thin and pale as milk, delicate skin that was easily irritated by soaps and powders and chemicals, which caused him challenges in the kitchen. He was plumpish and by now was likely quite fat, but then he was still a luminous boy, his beauty in that coloring, that paleness and those vivid blue eyes and the glossy thick darkness of hair. He loved her exotic background-New Mexico!-and the strangeness of her Spanish, a language he spoke quite well, and the warmth of her skin. They traveled together, young lovers sure of the possibilities in front of them, eating octopus on Spanish beaches and drinking ouzo in the Greek islands. Sometimes they found work enough to stay for a few weeks or a few months if they liked it. Sometimes they traveled back to Paris for a respite with Mia and Patrick, who had stayed longer in the city to learn their particular techniques-Mia in an apprenticeship with a patisserie, Patrick as understudy to a sommelier in a three-star restaurant in the Marais district.
Moments with Timothy: in Paris, when they first met at cooking school, cuddled together in a cold loft, a garret, really, so tiny you could barely stand up in it, with a shared toilet down the hall. The long window looked out over the fabled rooftops, medieval and golden in the late afternoon, pale and pink in the mornings like this. Timothy snuggled. He liked holding her all night. She liked waking up to him in the morning, his arms looped around her, his breath on her shoulder.
They were together for three years, and she thought they would be together forever, but they moved back to England and Elena hated the dullness of the gloomy, dark English winter, and she didn"t fit in with his old school friends and their girlfriends and wives, and Timothy, doing what Elena had no courage to do, simply, plainly broke it off. Elena had limped back to Paris, devastated.
But thinking of him now, she could smile. It would be fun to track him down and see how he was, if he still cooked and where. She imagined him living in some English village with a busty wife and a tangle of children and a long commute into the city where he cooked for lords. His gift...oh, their gift to each other!-had been youth. They had been young together, and free, and full of adventure. She would like to find him and find out if those Greek island adventures, those Spanish beaches, had shaped him as much as they"d shaped her.
But perhaps his biggest gift to her had been what came after. Heartbroken and unwilling to even date anyone else for nearly two years, Elena flung herself into cooking, moved to New York, devoted herself entirely to study, to understanding and incorporating everything she"d been picking up here and there, in this restaurant and that cafe, from this cuisine and that open fire. In New York, she met Marie, the spice lady, and stumbled into the pleasure of working for a famous and demanding and obnoxious chef who did his best to break her; when she didn"t break, he promoted her. For three years, she had allowed men into her bed as required, but none had made it past the walls of her heart.
When she was not quite thirty, she moved to San Francisco and landed a sous-chef position, where she met Andrew, her redheaded Australian, whom she loved for the next two years. That was when her career had taken first place, finally. After Andrew had been her bluesman, and then she met Dmitri at Julian"s San Francisco restaurant, the Yellow Dolphin.
Dmitri.
At first, it had been strictly a working relationship. They worked brilliantly together, their work styles and visions of the food complementing and expanding the other"s. He"d been promoted to executive after the original chef departed, and when he was offered the development opportunity at the Blue Turtle, he"d leapt at the chance. He and Elena had worked hard.
Funny, she thought now, carrying a second cup of coffee upstairs. Julian must have been around some during the opening of the Blue Turtle, but she"d never met him-and really, that was hardly unusual. Owners were owners. They didn"t necessarily get involved in the details, especially to the level that Julian had been involved in the Orange Bear. He was here in Aspen for other reasons. The restaurant gave him something to do.
When she had to give up Julian, what would she recall?
His closet, as big as the room she had shared with three sisters, lined with elegant clothing, a top hat and tails in white and black, and designer suits and linen shirts and cotton shirts and drawers with socks lined up by fabric and color and style. Black silk for fancy dress. Running socks with little numbers on the ankles. Acres of shoes, running shoes and patent leather and boots so old and worn that Elena couldn"t begin to guess their age.
Running her fingers along the sleeves hanging down in the closet, she thought she might remember the small vulnerabilities about him. He was older than she by quite a bit. He wouldn"t say, and although she could look it up, she didn"t. It was a subject too tender-why tease him that way when he was so kind to her? But when he was sleeping, she could see threads of purest silver weaving through the curls. On his head and below, too. Only a few, here and there. When the light was full on his face, she could see that the skin on his throat was going just the barest bit thin. Just the barest bit. He sometimes limped a little upon rising in the morning, his feet sore from being still.
With her arms over her chest, she went to stand by the window-a window in a closet!-and recognized the hollowness in her belly for what it was. Love. And not even a wild, rushing, insane river of it, but something quieter, deeper, finer. Steady, like a flame. If she believed, she would say that here, in this man, she really had found a soul mate.
If she believed.
But that was a foolishness reserved for the young and yet-to-be disillusioned. The facts were sobering. He"d been divorced four times. She"d had six long relationships. They knew these things didn"t last, and in this case, with a man so famous, a man who wielded power and faced the endless, endless temptation of women all day, every day, well...what chance did they have?
None, really. Not for the long term.
But maybe that was the secret of happiness-not expecting any one thing to last forever. Maybe, instead of borrowing trouble from the future, she could just stay in this world, in this moment, and enjoy what fruits there were here. Love him for now. Let him love her in return and accept that it would not always be this way.
On the next-to-the-worst day of Elena"s life, Julian awakened abruptly in Elena"s bed. It was morning and snowing, the pale blue light cascading through the line of square windows over the loft. Snowflakes piled in little drifts at the corners, like a drawing of a snowy day, as prosaic and peaceful an image as any he"d ever seen. He lay on his back, naked beneath the duvet, his foot against Elena"s ankle. Next to him on the floor, Alvin snored.
It was very early. No sounds came from the complex or the street beyond, a slow weekday morning, the skiers already up on the slopes or not yet awake after their party.
He turned over. Next to him, Elena slept, very deeply, utterly still, one arm flung over her head. The duvet covered the other shoulder and most everything else up to her neck. Her face was angled away from him, the flawless line of her jaw catching the light. He lay still on his side and simply looked at her, his member lying heavy on his thigh in exhausted slumber, spent from the night before.
Her hair was too fine to tangle much and simply scattered over the white pillowcase. Her mouth, plump and pink as a baby"s, pursed slightly in sleep, faintly open. He could just glimpse the edge of a tooth and thought of the inner flesh of those lips, flashed on the taste of them in his own mouth, against his tongue. His organ thickened against his thigh, and he imagined, remembered, licking the tip of that sleeping tongue. A little buzzing in his ears made him reach for the cover and carefully, carefully ease it downward. The heat had come on, and it rose to fill the little loft almost too much, so her nipples did not pearl in the air as he tugged the quilt away, her naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s spilling over her chest, the flesh as white and smooth as boiled eggs. Plump eggs, one resting on her upper arm, the nipple angled toward him, the other pointed at the ceiling, round and high as a girl"s.
He did not allow himself to touch the nipple closest to him, but only looked. It was a pinkish brown, and pointed. He imagined licking her there, too, and up over the slope over the white flesh, into the hollow of her throat, and over her shoulders.
She did not stir. Her breath moved softly in and out. He pulled the duvet down her body, an inch at a time. Revealing the belly, soft and white. Her crisp, thin pubic hair. Her thighs, her- At the edge of his perception was a sound that didn"t quite make sense, tugging and nudging him, but he was engrossed in his exploration.
Several things happened at once-the noise grew, a weight suddenly landed on his legs, and there was a screech, and an incomprehensible, explosive sound. Instinctively, he gathered Elena to him, diving under the covers, and he realized that the weight was Alvin, burrowing under the covers with them. Or on top of them.
It all made sense, Julian suddenly thinking, I didn"t know they had earthquakes in Colorado, I didn"t know they had earthquakes in Colorado, and maybe they never did, but the bed and house shook all around them and he kept his arms around Elena, who awakened, rigid and terrified, and she gripped him, and her dog, and cried out, "What is it? What"s happening?" and he said, "I don"t know, hang on." and maybe they never did, but the bed and house shook all around them and he kept his arms around Elena, who awakened, rigid and terrified, and she gripped him, and her dog, and cried out, "What is it? What"s happening?" and he said, "I don"t know, hang on."
The dog whimpered, the most pitiful, terrible noise, and there were crashing noises and something fell from overhead and Julian scooted farther down from the wall, dragging Elena with him, in case pictures fell off the wall. In the bathroom were crashing noises, gla.s.s breaking, a lot lot of gla.s.s, and he thought, of gla.s.s, and he thought, This is bad, maybe more than a 6.6 This is bad, maybe more than a 6.6-he"d been in the Northridge earthquake of 1994, and that had been a 6.7. This felt worse; he could feel the floor shivering beneath him, and knew a deep, true sense of dread. These buildings were not built for earthquakes-they might as well have been built in Pakistan or some other third-world place-and what if the floor of the loft gave way?
But finally, the shaking stopped, almost abruptly, and there were settling sounds. Quiet. Shouts from far away. In his arms, Elena trembled, or maybe it was Alvin, who cowered in her arms beneath the covers. "It"s okay, baby," she said, petting him, rubbing him. "It"s all right. You"re safe."
Julian pulled his head out from under the covers. The light was wrong, and he couldn"t immediately figure out why. Everything was a mess, pictures down, furniture fallen sideways. The gla.s.s had shattered out of the bedroom window, and there was a hole in the bathroom he couldn"t quite make out.
Close by, someone said, "f.u.c.k. What happened?"
"Julian," Elena said, sitting up. "Look."
He peered over her shoulder.
And Julian saw a kid, a boy about sixteen, who was lying across the bottom of the bed. But that wasn"t where Elena was pointing. Where the living room wall had been was a perfect, open-air view of the trees beyond. A car had come through it, a heavy, eighties-model sedan, the kind of car a grandmother might drive. The windshield was shattered. The crumpled nose ticked in the quiet.
"Jesus!" he whispered.
Elena bent over the side of the bed and threw up. The scar on her back seemed almost to writhe as she heaved. He touched her shoulder. "It"s okay."
"Call 911," she said, collapsing on the bed.
The boy, sh.e.l.l-shocked but appearing to be fine, blinked at them. "What the f.u.c.k? How did I get here?"
Grabbing his cell phone from the night table, Julian shook his head. "You are one lucky lucky son of a b.i.t.c.h." son of a b.i.t.c.h."
THIRTY-TWO
To: [email protected]: [email protected]: re: fireElena, thanks for yr interest. The kitchen is wrecked. Probably take a couple of months to rebuild. I have been talking to a television person I met at a show a couple of months ago, and she has offered me a job, so I am not as upset as I might have been. I will let you know more when it is all final, but I will be moving to Los Angeles in the next month or so.DmitriPS Liswood speaks v. highly of you, like a lover speaks of his woman. Sure you"re not f.u.c.king him?
THIRTY-THREE
Elena felt overcome by nausea for several long minutes. Each time she tried to move, she was overwhelmed and threw up again, until there was absolutely nothing left in her stomach. Julian slipped into his jeans after he called the police, and he made the boy stay still-"You have no idea what else might be wrong with you"-while he found some clothes for Elena to put on. Shakily, she managed to shimmy into some heavyweight yoga pants and a sweatshirt. Given the amount of gla.s.s on the floor, she asked him to find her shoes, too.
"Was anyone with you?" Julian asked the kid.
"No. Just me." He turned a little green when he looked downstairs. The smell of beer filled the room.
"Thank G.o.d."
Elena had to pee. When Alvin trotted downstairs, she gingerly made her way to the bathroom, her body revving with adrenaline. The bathroom was a mess. As in the bedroom, the window had shattered, but the impact had also knocked loose some of the gla.s.s brick around the shower, and the door to the steam shower was shattered as well. She peed and brushed her teeth and looked at her face in the mirror. Behind her in the reflection was Isobel, and it had been so long since she"d seen her that Elena whirled.
She was gone. She looked back to the mirror. Still not there. Elena put her toothbrush back in the holder and realized she probably wouldn"t be sleeping here tonight.
Another home wrecked.
And today was their grand opening! f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k. f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k.
Irritably, she stomped back into the bedroom and glared at the boy, who lay on her bed looking sick. "Has it started to sink in yet?" she cried. "That you should be dead right now? You got thrown out of your car and you could have landed on the roof, or in a tree or drowned in the river. And where did you land? On my f.u.c.king bed. bed. With me in it! On the day that my restaurant has it"s grand opening, you stupid little b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" With me in it! On the day that my restaurant has it"s grand opening, you stupid little b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"
Julian touched her shoulder. "Come on, Elena. Let"s go downstairs. The EMTs are here."
And she saw that they were, indeed, right there. A young man and a hard-looking woman with a stretcher, blinking at her. "Sorry," she said, suddenly ashamed. "I"m just mad."
They didn"t say anything, just came upstairs and moved by her and knelt next to the kid on the bed.
"Let"s get some of your things together, Elena," he said, giving her a small carry-on bag she kept in the closet.
She looked at the dresser, lying on its side, and her underwear scattered out of one drawer and onto the floor, and she couldn"t even think of what she might need. Where would she go? Where would she live? "I really liked this place," she said plaintively to Julian. "I hate this."
"I know." He gently took the bag from her and put it on the floor, then gathered up a handful of panties and bras and tossed them in. "What else? Which drawers have socks?"
Elena knelt and pulled open the drawers methodically, grabbed socks, T-shirts, sports bras for work because they absorbed sweat and let her move freely and also bound her a little more fully in the active environment. From the closet, she took her black jeans, her good boots, a pair of other jeans.
"That"s about it for clothes," Julian said, pressing neatly folded jeans into one corner of the suitcase. "Toiletries?"
Robotically, Elena moved into the bathroom. Beneath the sink was a makeup bag and she filled it with her small cache of cosmetics-face lotion and cleansers and heavy-duty hand cream and bag balm for when the splits got worse in winter, and cotton gloves she slept in, and a cache of prescription pain pills of varying strengths and a brush. And her toothbrush.
"Come on," he said. "The police are here, and then we can go get some breakfast."
"Is he going to be okay, that boy?"
He rubbed her back. "Yeah. He"s fine, Elena. Scared. But fine."
"That"s good," she said, and swallowed back a weird swell of tears. "Let"s get this over with."
After a shower at Julian"s house, Elena shook her head, wincing at Julian"s offer of food. She couldn"t even drink a cup of coffee yet, not until her stomach got over this-whatever it was.
In the meantime, she had to get out of here. Out of Julian"s house. She"d put her bags in the back of her car, had only brought in a change of clothes and her makeup bag. It might be hard to find a new place to rent at the moment, but she knew Patrick had a spare bedroom.
Carrying her cell phone to the snowy deck, she wrapped her scarf around her neck and blew a soft foggy cloud into the sharp morning.
"Good morning, Chef Alvarez," he answered in a round, orange voice, all juicy happiness. "Are you ready for your big day?"
"h.e.l.lo, Prince Patrick. I am so so ready. How about you?" ready. How about you?"
"Yes, yes, yes." He m.u.f.fled the receiver and spoke to someone in the room with him. A chuckle. She thought she recognized Ivan"s low drum voice, and that made the whole reality of what she was thinking-that she"d just go stay with Patrick in his two-bedroom house-completely unthinkable. Not with a love affair going on between her sous chef and her best friend.
She shuddered faintly, thinking of the night she"d glimpsed Ivan licking Patrick"s face, his long fingers curling up around his skull, as if he were getting ready to devour him, one long lap at a time. No. Not when she had to look at them both at work all day.
"Ivan says h.e.l.lo," Patrick said. "And asks what time you"ll be getting in this morning."
"Well," Elena said, improvising madly, "that"s why I"m calling, actually. There"s been an-uh-incident and I"m running behind. I need Ivan to get over there and make sure the kitchen staff is there and functioning. I called a little while ago and n.o.body answered."
Patrick repeated her request, then said, "He said it"s still early, really, but he"ll head over in just a little while."
"Thanks."
"What incident, Elena? Are you okay?"
She took a breath, feeling a thick, primeval shudder nudge her bowels, the bottom of her stomach again. "Yeah. My condo is gone, though. Some kid drove into it, right through the front window."
"No way!"
"Bizarre, huh?"
"Are you okay?"
"I"m fine, Alvin"s fine. Ju-we"re all fine," she said. "The kid isn"t even hurt badly, because he was thrown over the railing of the loft onto the bed."
"You"re kidding."
"No," she said, crossing her arms. A slithering feeling ran down her back, settled into her hip. She shook her shoulders, trying to loosen it all, but the cold was making her hunch. "Look, I"ll give you the rest of the details later. I"ve got to get some more stuff and make sure everything-that I-" She took a breath. "I"m freezing, Patrick, my love. I"ll talk to you later, okay?"
"Elena, are you okay, honey?"
"Yeah," she said. "Really. I"m fine. See you in a couple of hours. Call me if there are any problems."
She went back inside, letting go of her breath. Julian was typing on his laptop at the kitchen counter, looking slightly disheveled and ordinary with his black horn-rimmed gla.s.ses and a heathery blue long-sleeved T-shirt. He looked both ordinary and not quite-like a record executive maybe, or the publisher of some alternative, hip publication, or maybe a hotshot doctor that all the nurses l.u.s.ted for secretly. He looked like a husband, with his flat wrists brushed with black hair, and his focus so intently on the screen, and a cup of coffee sitting at his elbow.
f.u.c.k, she thought, emphatically. she thought, emphatically. I cannot stay here. I cannot start wanting I cannot stay here. I cannot start wanting this. this.
Tossing her hair out of her eyes, she marched across the room and made a show of sipping her coffee. "I"m going to head over to the apartment and see if they"ll let me get some of my kitchen stuff," she said. "I guess I"ll see you at the restaurant later, right?"
He looked at her without speaking for a moment, his jaw newly shaved. "Have you eaten?"