Hatched (7 page)

“What is it supposed to mean?” asked Jessica.

“Unfertilized,” replied Nate. “Like Fabergé Restaurant. And like you and me.”

She blushed, but the scant light wouldn’t reveal it to his probing gaze.

“In Wordsworth’s version it’s ‘unripe.’”

“I guess he didn’t know about this pastoral farm,” said Jess.

It was Nate’s turn to redden, but his color, too, was imperceptible in the darkness.

“At this season,” he continued, “with their unripe fruits, among the woods and copses lose themselves. Also like us.”

“Copses?” she inquired.

“Um, bushes, clumps of trees. Like those.” He motioned towards other buildings, adjoining those that demarcated their little alleyway.

“It’s a really beautiful poem,” uttered Jess silently.

“Not done yet.” Nate knew when he was onto a good thing.

“Among the woods and copses lose themselves, nor, with their green and simple hue disturb the wild green landscape.”

“Do they ever!” exclaimed Jess, motioning back to the buildings surrounding them.

Nate was now looking at her intently, as though he wanted to make love to her with his gaze. Which he did. Uncertain of what could bring on such joyful copulation, he simply continued his soliloquy.

“This is my favorite part, Jess. Once again I see these hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines of sporting wood run wild.”

“Beautiful! That is beautiful, Nate. Why is it your favorite part?”

“Because I love how he corrected himself but didn’t take away the first thought. I think about that sometimes when we are in there.” He motioned to the Fabergé egg. We taste something we’ve just made, and it’s good. We add a bit more, um . . .”

“Vanilla?”

“Vanilla, yes. We add more vanilla. And it’s better, but it’s also different. We know that it’s different, but the, um, the waffle doesn’t. We correct it, but now it’s not corrected, it’s just different. Nobody except us knows how it tasted before the extra dash of vanilla.”

All of New York grew silent.

“That’s really beautiful, Nate.”

He moved a little closer to her and gently touched her hand. He was almost always either joking, or instructing, he seldom just let go as he did then. He didn’t dare go any further, but had no way to respond that wouldn’t destroy this special moment. And so he continued, but looked once again to the words that had brought him to her warm skin for strength.

“Once again I see these hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines of sporting wood run wild. These pastoral farms, like this one, Jess.”

She smiled softly. She was almost weeping at the joy of this moment.

“These pastoral farms, green to the very door. And wreathes of smoke.” He motioned upwards to the nearly obscured sky, intimating that Fabergé Restaurant was emitting smoke, which it undoubtedly was, but invisibly.

“Smoke sent up in silence, from among the trees.” He motioned to the buildings around them once again. “With some uncertain notice, as might seem, of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, or some hermit’s cave, where by his fire the hermit sits alone.”

Silence. Calm. The endless clamor of the city had been turned into a distant din.

“I’m the hermit, Jess, on this pastoral farm.” He raised his hands and opened them towards her body. “You are my fire.”

This was the type of moment that had led them to imagine a future for themselves, together, in some place that could resemble an actual pastoral farm. In moments like these, Nate was so tender, so eloquent, and Jess so open, so giving, so generous. But Nate was also a wandering soul, and although he could describe rootedness, he was always onto the next thing, the next idea, the next challenge. He had dreamed of being alongside her, with her, inside of her, but then alongside her again, and then in front of her, and then off somewhere, and then . . . And so in that walk-in on that momentous day he was inside her, and she wanted him, but not like that, and he pushed her into those cartons of eggs stacked up for consumption, and he pushed her, and her body succumbed, and the eggs shattered, onto her chest, into her chin, upon her forehead. Smashed.

The rustling sound returned, and they were both suddenly made aware that the animal near them was large and powerful, one of the thousands of raccoons, as it turned out, that roamed the streets of New York, like foragers in the jungle of wildlife that had managed to make this artificial island into a commodious home. This was a good decision on the part of New York’s wildlife. The trash in Fabergé Restaurant was comprised of discarded golden nuggets, either prized sumptuous creations that were too much for overstuffed clients, or somehow flawed according to John’s wildly ethereal standards.

Not knowing how to stay in this moment, particularly in light of the interruption of this masked intruder, Nate continued in his quest to articulate his philosophy. “Jess, it goes beyond resentment.”

She had been transported, and could barely recall what they’d been discussing before pastoral farms. Nate barreled on.

“These are very special relationships that can only be formed in places like Fabergé Restaurant. We are in the bowels of paradise, slaving away to satisfy the most far-flung desires of a class of people who exceed in their resources even the aristocracy of previous eras. That creates resentment.”

“Indeed,” she said. She looked through the darkness at him, inquiring as to his very existence.

Nate, who was Nate-the-Prep-Cook, had but a single public life, which he spent working. The rest of the time, he read copiously, particularly in genres of social history, the application of political theorems—especially radical ones—and of course fiction, realist novels mostly since they, when written by the likes of Balzac or Zola or Dickens or Steinbeck, were the best kind of social, political, activist history and practice. Or so thought Nate. But he had this rather magical knack for memorization, and he applied it, mostly, to poems. He’d learned long ago that this ability, whatever he thought about the poem itself, gave him a kind of magical pass, particularly in conversations with girls. He wasn’t particularly handsome or desirable, but he was passionate about ideas, mostly ideas that very few people cared about. And so poetry was the medium for his intellectual seduction. He loved Jessica because she appreciated him as a thinker, as a talker, as a cook. And the fact that he knew many hundreds of lines of poetry was, for moments like this one, the difference between being interesting and being desirable. He wanted to be desired, despite everything, by Jessica.

Jessica loved Nate in her own way, very differently from how she’d loved Tina, or other loves she had taken into her embrace over the years. She appreciated Nate, but knew that Nate had bigger fish to fry, as it were, and although they’d spent many hours together, including precious hours in this pastoral farm, his gaze went beyond hers. She knew that each meal that Nate helped prepare was another brick in a wall of resentment that he was building in order to someday entrap the world’s wealthy clients. And so she was for him the earth from which all nourishment came, and he for her the purveyor of regrettable sentiments about where nature’s bounty was headed. This was a match that was bound to crack, smash, and end badly.

“We toil, Jessica, we build and craft and create and tenderize and flavor nature’s masterpieces for the underdeveloped palates of those who have earned the money required for our creations, but not the discernment that would be needed to appreciate them. And so we feel them to be our inferiors.”

Jessica dropped her head down in modest disagreement, and then looked back into his visage, for she loved knowing that his relationship to this place was so philosophical, so engaged, so much more than cracked eggs and stirred yolks.

“We are their superiors, because they know nothing of the process, even if they can appreciate the products. They are the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, we the workers and the craftspeople. And so we toil, we sweat, we grind, we suffer, but in our actions we become their superiors, because they are but the passive consumers of our genius. We know this, but in the paltry rewards we receive, in paychecks that barely cover the appetizers in this place, we feel scorn for those who can amass the world’s bounty and grind it into their palates for the eventual mindless expulsion from their overused anuses.”

Jessica grimaced, but Nate continued, unabated.

“That, my dear Jess, is resentment. It’s what you feel, it’s what I feel, it’s why we hover between despair and sublime fulfillment, between revolution, and Wordsworth!” He paused. “And they, in their weakness, their vulnerability, their undeserved dominance, feel to be our superiors precisely because they are weak and incapable. They patronize us, literally, and we take it. But we also dish it out, because in our gaze we bear the truth of their helplessness, and we know it, they know it; and if the artifice upon which their world has been erected were ever to crack and then crumble, they know perfectly well who would dominate them. And so they gorge themselves, they fill themselves up, pretending to be squirrel-like and thus capable of storing up the ephemeral pleasure of wasting precious resources. They do so because when the inevitable diarrhea pisses from their burning assholes, they are reminded of their profound fallibility, and of the superiority of those who know the recipes for their decay, decline, and death.”

Jessica looked straight into Nate’s eyes, but said nothing.

“That’s us, Jess. Us.”

I had seen these scenes of miserable revel, and always knew that it was in those moments that Jessica had wanted to embrace Nate, to hold him, to give meaning to his body and his soul, to reassure him that somewhere, in a warm and caring place, his life had meaning and his words had effect. But she never did. When within the very bowels of the Yolk, he took her, he froze her sentiment, and then smashed it, just as she had obliterated those eggs upon which she laid, open, vulnerable . . . crushed.

Chapter 6

Jessica stood before John. She had emerged from that pastoral farm, from her daydream, from one of the many moments and worlds that she held inside of her, eggs to her thoughts, the yolks of her memories. She looked at this powerful, strange, genius of a man who was still scrubbing—or perhaps stroking—the Hobart washing machine, as though he was somehow responsible for all this inequality, all of these wasted efforts. She felt as though she’d been transported by her thoughts to the very scene of her discontent with Nate, and was veritably amazed to find herself still in Fabergé Restaurant, still at the dishwashing station, still standing before John. He seemed oblivious to her past, and to his own, and seemed to be unaware of everything going on around him.

But Jessica knew that he was not oblivious. Although he now spent most evening shifts washing dishes and whistling, he still owned this sumptuous place, he still overheard and oversaw everything in his bizarre way. He was a culinary genius, who had laid all of the famous Fabergé Restaurant delicacies, but he was also a little eleven-year-old boy, the same little boy he’d been all those years ago when he started working in restaurants in the North End of Boston. He was today, as he was back then, scrubbing dishes, and he was polishing the machine that washed them, and he was doing so with the vigor of his younger self.

Jessica also knew, from speaking with Doris, the bookkeeper, that in spite of his half-century career, if John were to stop washing dishes and shutter this place up tomorrow, the bank would take it all over, all of it, and he’d be left with nothing but the incomprehensible tune he always whistled. No matter what the bank might seize, however, the strange aura of a giant egg in Manhattan that John had designed and built and occupied would remain. And so, too, would all of the culinary offspring, the palate’s memories of eggs that had been beaten and whipped and fried and boiled and spiced for the consumption of the many wealthy customers who had visited and savored the Yolk’s creations.

In moments like these, Jessica would feel a wave of compassion, almost desire, for John, particularly when she thought back to her short stroll around the block with Tom, the man in black, prior to returning to work. Tom was staking claim to her luscious body, and to her maternal touch. Tom, that resentful and powerful man, didn’t know how to take “no” for an answer, any more than she knew how to utter it to him. Tom frightened Jessica with his silent persistence and his calm persuasiveness. She still bore the odor of the calf-leather glove with which he had stroked her cheek when she gave in to a quiet kiss in front of his hovering limo. Seemed like years ago. Now she needed to worry about sauces for tonight’s meals.

“Where’s Nicky?” she asked.

“He’s showing the new guy the walkins,” replied John.

“Hmmmm,” she sighed. She wondered if the ‘new guy’ had ever worked in restaurants. If so, had he spotted the crate of whipping cream canisters that arrived this morning? And if he had, she wondered, had he been into any of them yet? She decided to make her way over to the walk-in for a surprise appearance, just as Nicky and the new guy pushed the heavy door open towards her. The result was very nearly a bruised nose.

“Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha-ck up!” said Nicky with his huge Greek grin and an exaggerated Greek accent. “So sorry, Jessica, we were just seeing if the sheep fit!”

Nicky-the-Sous-Chef brushed passed her, pressing his stomach out so as to be able to bang into her taut midsection in a way that might resemble the collision of an inflated airbag and a captive body. Jessica didn’t mind. Nick was harmless, and he was cute, with his dark, curly hair, his bushy eyebrows, his eternal smile. Besides, she secretly enjoyed the banter he constantly maintained to keep the kitchen staff abreast of his gallant efforts to impregnate his wife.

“Ooops, Jess! Jeez, if you get too close to me I might spill the spermies I am saving for my wife tonight!” His passing left Jessica in the fact of an awkward newbie, who looked to be fourteen years old.

“Hi, I’m Russ,” said the new guy.

“Pay not attention to her Rusty!” proclaimed Nicky. “On second thought, why not? You know what they say . . .,” he paused for dramatic effect. “If the sheep fits, wear it!”