Comfort Food (21 page)

16

In no time at all, the message boards on the CookingChannel Web site were overrun with viewers trying to suss out if the girl in the hoodie really was Hannah Joy Levine, one-time Wimbledon champion forever banned from tennis.

It was the first question Alan asked when he called, barely two minutes after they went off the air. Not a “Hey, you all okay?” or even a “Don’t worry about the damage” for Gus. Nope. He moved right in to the big question: How come no one had told him Hannah Joy Levine worked on his camera crew?

“She’s doesn’t work for us, Alan.”

“It’ll be great to have her on the air.”

“Uh, she still doesn’t work for us.”

“I don’t get it,” Alan said, his voice breaking up slightly over the phone. He was probably in his car. “Surely she hasn’t been hiding out in Gus Simpson’s cupboards for over a decade?”

“No, they’re neighbors.”

“Well, having Hannah Joy Levine on Gus’s last show would have been a huge help when the ratings were in the toilet.”

“I’ll be sure to pass along your message of concern,” Porter said, giving Gus the a-okay sign.

“Well, whatever,” Alan said to Porter. “This is like finding Amelia Ear-hart.Al Capone’s vault. Following up with the kids from
Diff’rent Strokes
. It’s beautiful.”

“No, no one had smoke inhalation.” Porter faked a chuckle as though he was reassuring his boss.

Alan ignored Porter’s running patter. “The important thing is how we’re going to play it. Get that Hannah signed to something, then start running promos about our new mystery guest on
Eat Drink and Be
. Is she or isn’t she you-know-who? I’m just going to sit back and count the ratings.”

Hannah appeared shaken when Porter expressed Alan’s personal “invitation” to be on the air and looked plaintively at Gus.

“This is turning into a freaking circus,” Carmen yelled before Gus could speak, slamming pots around for effect. “No, no, no! I am not having one more person on this damn show. Alan promised me he’d put
me
on television,and instead I’ve got half a show and a team of idiots who don’t know what they’re doing!”

“Oh, I don’t think so, my dear,” said Gus. “I’m the one who’s been stuck with the idiot. They’ve clearly brought you to me because you couldn’t hold your own program.” She lowered her voice and spoke slowly. “No one with any sense would make octopus in their very first episode of a new series.”

“I don’t care about middle of the road,” said Carmen. “I want to be creative.”

“There’s creative, and then there’s experimental,” said Gus. “Open a restaurantand experiment all you want, but not on my show. We’re lucky any viewers came back after putting on that octopus salad.”

“Well, if they did watch tonight, then they picked a heck of a night,” shouted Carmen. “We nearly had a fantastic episode—for once you weren’t messing it up! But then your frowny little daughter ruined it with her fire starter routine.”

She ran over to Aimee and grabbed her by the collar, half-dragging her toward Porter for several steps before Aimee shook Carmen’s hands off her blouse and, with a well-placed kick, swiped Carmen’s feet out from under her.

“I want her off the show,” Carmen demanded, having landed on her butt. “Now!”

She was strong for such a slight woman, Aimee thought, trying to catch her breath. The neckline of her shirt was torn.

“Absolutely not,” said Gus, knowing full well that Aimee would have been thrilled to be off the air. “You sit down,” she said to Aimee, hustling her into one of the wing chairs in the bay window. She wasn’t about to let the beauty queen take on her kid, thank you very much.

“If you touch my daughter again, I will boil you in oil,” she said quietly, her face very close to Carmen’s. “And don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s Spanish olive oil.”

“Get the hell away from me, you
zorra
!” Carmen began to cry and scream at the same time. “Get out, get out!”

Gus began talking to no one in particular. “I had a nice show,” she said, addressing the room at large. “I worked hard. I kept long hours. For twelve years. And how do I get repaid? With a Carmen Vega. A silly prima donna who can dish it out but who can’t take it.”

“Get out!” hissed Carmen.

“No,” Gus said, pretending to be calm though her red ears gave her away. “Because not only is this my kitchen—and believe me, every viewer knows it’s
my
kitchen, Carmen—we’re all still actually in my house. The one I own. The one where I am going to kick your sore little butt to the curb. Unless Aimee wants to do it, of course. Dear?”

Speechless for once, Aimee sat in her chair, watching her mother with wide eyes.

“You don’t have to fight,” piped up Hannah. “I don’t want to be on TV. Really. It was an accident.”

“Oh, no it wasn’t,” Carmen said, still on the floor. “Gus had Aimee do that on purpose.”

“You think I tried to burn down my own kitchen intentionally?” Gus shouted “You know what you are? Crazy. Unbalanced. Unhinged.”

“I think we all just need to go home and get some rest,” Oliver suggested pointedly, holding Carmen by the shoulders. He was at least a foot taller than she was and it didn’t require much exertion on his part to keep Carmen still.

“Let go,” she wailed.

“Look, let’s all cool it,” said Oliver. “We’ve just had a bit of a crazy night, that’s all. By tomorrow it’ll all be behind us.”

But Monday found the entire PR staff of the CookingChannel working in overdrive, trying to dance around the issue of Hannah’s sudden appearance on the show.

She and Gus sat in their chairs in the bay window, Salt and Pepper in laps, and watched a clean-up crew that Porter had sent over tidy up the stove and ceiling.

“It’s out there,” said Hannah. “Me.”

Is it liberating when what you’ve dreaded most comes to pass? Does it make you feel as though all the agita and bad sleep was silly somehow? A wasted effort? No, Hannah thought, it doesn’t. It made her feel as though she’d been punished for dropping her vigilance. She’d spent all night watchingthe news on her computer and on her two televisions in her dining room office, braced for the past to be dredged up again.

“Sometimes suffering is just suffering,” she told Gus. “It doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t build character. It only hurts.”

“I know,” Gus said, and Hannah felt like hugging her friend, though she didn’t, of course.

They sipped their coffee as the workmen scrubbed the white ceiling, clearing off all the dark smudges and leaving it spotless again. No trace of the ugly. All cleaned up.

Hannah wondered if her father watched the CookingChannel, if he would get back in touch with her, would send her a letter or email. Though it seemed unlikely, and not just because he didn’t have her email address.

Porter pushed the PR team to reframe Aimee’s blaze as part of a very special episode on fire safety.

“That’s insane,” Gus told Porter when he called her at home to tell her not to answer her phone if media called. “We nearly blew up my kitchen!”

“If the public buys it, then that’s what we’re selling,” he said. “Look, we’re getting calls from everywhere: one night of a burning kettle has gotten
Eat Drink and Be
noticed by everything from
Entertainment Tonight
to CNN. Not to mention it’s the number one clip on YouTube.”

“Yippee,” said Gus. “Must be a slow news day. I’m so glad all my years as a television host have led me here. My reputation is going to be ruined.”

“Oh, no, Gus, you don’t get it,” said Porter. “This is going to boost your cool factor in a big way.”

“Do I need to be cooler?”

“We all need to be cooler. It’s the new publicity. You and Carmen and all the rest are becoming famous just for being stupid.”

Gus was speechless.

“Look, you’ve been booked on
Regis and Kelly
to talk about the importanceof fire extinguishers in kitchens,” explained Porter. “The two of you are going to go out there—happy to be together, I might add—and be upbeat. And whenever anyone asks if the woman who put out the fire was Hannah Joy Levine, I want both of you to just smile like the Mona Lisa.”

By the end of the week, Carmen and Gus had done morning shows and late-nightchatfests and been forced to write heavily sanitized “behind-the-scenes” blogs for the CookingChannel Web site. (
Carmen is certainly unique,
Gus wrote, as Hannah munched on licorice twists and edited over her shoulder.)

They’d even been informed, by Alan via Porter, that the two of them were expected to be judges on the current episode of CookingChannel’s
Kitchen Kingdom
, in which two restaurateurs squared off to create competingmeals with one unusual ingredient and win the crown of Royal Chef.

It was not one of Gus’s favorites on the CookingChannel roster, a fact that she had previously kept discreetly to herself.

“I assume,” she said to Porter, “that the secret ingredient will be octopus?” She even managed to look amused.

“I can put in a special request with the producer there,” said Porter.

“No thanks,” she replied. “I’ve been using enough of my considerable energy to ward off Carmen’s evil. It’ll be a while before I can enjoy octopus in the same way again.”

On
Kitchen Kingdom
, the two hosts of
Eat Drink and Be
were seated side by side, glued at the hip as they had been for over a week. The two sat grimly next to each other until either one spotted a camera moving to the judges’ table and banged the other on the knee. Then, in unison, they would look up and flash toothy grins, mouthing words at each other as though engaged in scintillatingculinary conversation. In reality, they were literally not speaking.

Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic from the
New York Times
, rounded out the judging panel, and he quite openly stared at their silent “talking.” A pair of odd ducks, he’d called them, which embarrassed and irritated Gus. She told him she was saving her voice for when she was on-screen.

The previous week’s winner of
Kitchen Kingdom
, who owned a restaurant in Chicago, was paired against a popular Spanish chef, Karlos Arguinaño.

“Don’t you vote against him just because he’s from Spain,” hissed Carmenwhen it came time to write down their scores, covering the mike clipped to her dress.

“What you don’t realize, Carmen, is that I’d be quite happy to eat your food if I never had to see or speak to you,” said Gus. “Just because I don’t like you—and I don’t—doesn’t mean I don’t like your food.”

But the public la-di-da act was draining: she was more unhappy about Carmen’s presence than ever. Carmen had made it quite clear she was not going to make working together easy. Sabrina continued to be evasive. And Aimee was mortified by the nonstop emails she was receiving from old high school classmates who saw the clip online. Gus was mad and fretted that everyone she cared about was mad at her. Only Troy, who’d seen a huge increase in hits to the FarmFresh Web site, was remotely happy. And he was still pining for Sabrina; she could hear it in his voice when he refused to talk about it with her.

She took to crying in the shower, where it felt safer to sob, and stayed up late at night, baking chocolate cake and oatmeal bars and chewy cookies, when she couldn’t fall asleep. Salt and Pepper enjoyed the late night company,and Hannah came over dutifully every morning to eat her midnight productions.

Overtired and cranky, Gus found herself wishing that some teen starletwould drive over a paparazzo’s foot or that a movie star—anyone would do—would wear a loose-fitting shirt to jumpstart another baby bulge countdown.Anything so that the celebrity journalists had something else to write about instead of her and Carmen and their great, great show together. It was ridiculous. Kelly Ripa had even told them they were a super example of girl power.

“Girl power?” Gus had said. “How interesting.”

“Gus isn’t actually a girl anymore,” Carmen had interjected, with saccharinesweetness.

Every interview had been like that with Carmen. It was exhausting.

“Why is everyone making a big deal about this fire thing?” she asked later in the week, as she dragged herself into the CookingChannel studios to shoot some promotional commercials. Alan had started advertising
Eat Drink and Be
heavily during other programming, and had even bought spots on other cable channels.

“Because it’s funny when no real damage was done,” said Oliver. “And then there’s the fact that Carmen’s pretty and you’re hot.”

“Ha ha ha,” Gus said, before calling out to Porter. “Why doesn’t Mr. Clean over here have to do any of the interviews?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll exploit him when the time comes,” replied Porter. “But right now the fans want you and Carmen. Well, and Hannah, but that’s another situation.”

“She’s not going to do it, Porter,” said Gus, who had already phoned Alan to try to convince him.

“Smart cookie,” Carmen said through gritted teeth as she put on a well-practicedfake smile for the camera.

“We all love to watch great television,” Porter was saying to Alan in his office later that day. “But we also find ourselves rubbernecking when we see a roadside accident. And
Eat Drink and Be
is turning into just that.”

“Switching up the menu was an interesting tactic,” Alan said, as though it hadn’t been his idea. “It forced Gus to break out of her shell.”

“She was excellent,” said Porter. “Sharp, like in the old days. I liked that.”

“When she’s on, she’s on. I’m rooting for her even when she doesn’t know it.”

“And we couldn’t have scripted anything better than the kettle fire,” added Porter.

“The media frenzy has been good for the network,” agreed Alan.

“But I don’t want this to become about stunts, intentional or not. We’ve got to find our rhythm. And Carmen and Gus . . .” Porter let his words trail off.