How to Cook Like a Man (16 page)

I didn't even run, back then.

With dinner due on the table at seven o'clock sharp, to allow the Massachusetts couple time for the drive home to San Francisco, I put Liz in the station wagon and drove twenty minutes away to buy shoes that brought me no satisfaction, and for reasons that remain to this day utterly mysterious.

Then we drove back, I pulled the chickens out of the brine, I dumped out the brine, and I discovered that I was now supposed to truss the chickens, yet another move I'd never attempted, but would not consider forgoing. I went through twenty feet of string
trying to follow the
Bouchon
directions, and once I'd gotten it I asked Liz to preheat the oven and put in the birds while I got banging on those vegetables. At ten minutes before seven, Judy came back and set the table frantically and asked how long until the chickens would be done (half an hour, minimum) and quietly started cleaning up the mess I'd created. The other couple, meanwhile, grew visibly anxious to escape.

Hannah, by that point, had completely turned her back on all food except hot dogs, macaroni-and-cheese, and chocolate croissants. So I let Liz whip together a kid dinner while we waited for the chicken. When the timer finally sounded, I opened the oven door, and the birds sat there cold and raw. The oven was not on.

I wanted to leave. I wanted simply to walk out the front door and never come back. I told myself this was everybody's fault but my own.

“Time to order pizza,” I said to Liz.

The woman from Massachusetts said to a mortified Judy, “Hey, you know, it's really okay. You don't have to feed us. We should probably just head on back to the city.”

“No, no!” Judy said. “Don't go anywhere! I'll get steaks! Don't leave!” She grabbed her keys and purse and bolted out the door. Just for the hell of it, I turned on the oven, put the birds in, and took a long solo walk in the cul-de-sac night. I saw a mother deer and a fawn, silhouetted against the blue-black Napa sky, out on the golf course. Liz put the girls to sleep while I was gone, and I returned so ashamed of myself I couldn't make eye contact with our famished and frantic guests, who wished only to be liberated from this family psychodrama. Then we all heard Judy's car honking as she sped up the block, sending out a sonic signal that help was on the way:
Beep! Beep!
She screeched into the garage, honked yet again, jumped out of the Infiniti, and ran inside yelling,
“Steaks! I've got steaks!” Firing up a skillet, she slapped them in there, seared both sides, and set the steaks on the table, somewhere around 8:30
P.M
. I set my cooked chickens right alongside, so that we could all eat in silence.

The next morning, Liz informed me that I was forever banned from cooking anything—ever again—at the Napa place. This stung far worse even than the menu crowd's collapse, and I do believe it triggered in me a deeply helpful upwelling of confusion, a sense that I was still missing some critical lesson. But I responded in the short term by doubling down, certain that my salvation lay only in greater mastery. So I began reading every
Bouchon
recipe, beginning to end, a week in advance, to avoid nasty surprises. Then I'd lay out a plan of action, as with Keller's Beef Bourguignon recipe: days for the beef stock; bottle of red wine reduced to a glaze with mountains of aromatic herbs and vegetables, to provide the base into which all that stock (and still more herbs and vegetables) would then go, for the braising liquid; covering this braising medium with cheesecloth before laying down the browned meat, so the browned meat could later be removed without odd overcooked bits of vegetable. Saturday morning, the day of the dinner, went toward shopping for Keller's grand
Bouchon
shellfish platter, as my first course: giant pot of court bouillon simmering on the stove; said court bouillon used for cooking Dungeness crab, shrimp, clams. Oysters on the half-shell, mussels opened with a little steam. (“Honey,” I said, exasperated, “please don't pull this bullshit
again
. There's no way my shellfish is going to make you sick. Those crabs were trying to kill me five minutes ago.”) Part of being a pro chef, I figured, involved being one's own sommelier; as a result, my drinking scene spiraled toward the dangerous fantasy that wine isn't really booze, it's a form of high culture, even art. Getting plastered on wine, according to
this reasoning, has less in common with, say, getting plastered than it does with evenings at the opera. We'd already fed hot dogs to the kids, and they were happily amusing themselves, so I set out all that seafood and six bottles of wine with only Amy and Martin for guests. I told them we had a rare opportunity for a comparison tasting of non-malolactic Chardonnays from the Sonoma Coast against value-priced Chablis, and this made it almost impossible for them not to get stuffed, drunk, and drawn into our latest little domestic tension.

To wit: I'd suggested building that interior stair myself, to solve our space problems; Liz, as she repeated for Martin and Amy, wanted to say, “Go for it, baby, rip down the interior chimney and tear up our house for six months, make a hash of the stairs and then demolish them in a fit of perfectionist pique and redo them three times until you're satisfied, it's all good, the girls and I want to live right through it all and stand by our man,” but she ached for us to be one of those normal middle-class couples who got to hire contractors and have jobs done quickly and correctly. Amy agreed with Liz's reassertion that this
still
did not make her a spoiled bitch. I told everyone the whole subject (of the stair, not Liz's hypothetical spoiled bitchiness) was moot until we knew exactly where to put a new staircase in the first place, and then baleful screaming erupted from down the hall, sounding like the younger of Amy's two daughters. Amy sprinted in her stiletto heels into the girls' room, and somehow generated a much bigger crash and then a loud, strange, anguished cry of her own. The rest of us ran to find Amy on the floor, eyes dilating, holding one of her wrists limp in the other hand. Hannah and Amy's little girls, it turned out, had together discovered the totally hilarious game of spraying Hannah's hair detangler—silicone lubricant, in
mist form—all over the wood floor, to make it smell pretty. Thus, the little slam and cry, when Amy's daughter had slipped and fallen; and likewise thus, Amy, upon rounding the bed to console her just-fallen youngest, finding herself horizontally airborne, the side of her head impacting in advance of her body. With a dark bruise already clouding her pretty cheekbone, Amy trembled and held that swelling wrist and looked me in the eye and said she was fine—that she really didn't want to miss that braised beef.

Being human, I loved this; I felt a ferocious excitement at what Keller was bringing me.
This food is so goddamned good that even after cracking her head on the floor, my guest wants more
. But I suspected it wasn't just the food; I suspected it was also Amy's intuition about how desperately I wanted everybody to applaud my creations.

I'd only just ladled a serving into each bowl when Amy confessed that her arm really was beginning to hurt.

“Do you think I might have broken it?” she asked.

“Honey, you did not break your arm,” said Martin.

Looking at the wrist in question, I did see a visible bump forming fast, along one of the bones. So I faced a conundrum: lying about my true diagnosis, to make sure everybody experienced my culinary brilliance and then praised it effusively before Amy's arm ruined the night, or putting the meal aside and focusing on a friend. (As Brillat-Savarin would have it, “To invite people to dine with us is to make ourselves responsible for their well-being for as long as they are under our roofs.”)

Speaking directly to me now, Amy said, “Dan, do you think I broke my arm?”

I looked at Martin, afraid to undermine my buddy.

He said, “Ames, come on! It's not broken. Let's eat!”

Amy appeared quite worried, holding that limp wrist.

I asked her to move the hand up and down, and she said that she could not.

“Okay, so here's the truth,” I said. “I'm no doctor, but that's a broken arm. It would totally make sense to find an ER.”

The next morning, we learned that Amy had not only broken her arm, she'd sustained a serious concussion. A few weeks later, suddenly slurring words and losing her balance, she had a new CAT scan revealing unresolved bleeding on her brain. Amy's fine now, but I still felt awful about this when Liz finally made her own trip to the emergency room. She'd invited some architect friends to dinner, looking for advice on placement of the stairs, and although I'd planned my simplest menu in months, I did put out a full
Bouchon
seafood platter, as a main course. Thus, the fateful question, from these putative friends: “So, how do you guys see remodeling the house, long-term?”

“We don't,” I said. And then, catching the look on Liz's face, “I'm telling you, honey, the seafood is fresh.” (Which of course it was; my fish guys were heroes, beyond reproach.)

“That's ridiculous, sweetheart. Of course we see remodeling, in the long term.”

“No we don't,” I replied. “Grab some crab.”

She hesitated, stared at the claws groping off the dish. “How can you say that we
never
want to remodel anything, for the rest of our lives?”

“Crab.”

She glared at me, grabbed some.

“More. Go on, more crab. And I'm not saying
never
. I'm saying it's not on the horizon, so why discuss it? Go on, crack the shell.”

So she did.

“Pull out the meat, with a fork.”

“Honey, I know how to eat crab.”

Putative friend: “I'll actually have some crab, if that's okay. I love crab.”

“The architect loves crab.”

“And by the way, you guys, a total remodel doesn't have to be on the horizon at all. We just always encourage clients to sketch out a vision of everything they might ever want to do to a house, as a way of making sure each little project along the way fits into a bigger scheme, so you don't regret anything. We could easily draw that up for you.”

“That might be great,” Liz said, once again glaring at me, as I passed her the seafood platter. “How long would it take?”

“Few weeks, probably. We're not too busy.”

They left, later that night, with a verbal contract to write up this so-called Master Plan. Liz told me that she really, really did not feel good. I dismissed the complaint yet again, and we fell asleep. Then I woke up alone, in our shared bed, wondering where Liz had gone. I heard my beloved's voice, somewhere else in the flat, wailing about half my too-short name—“Daa …”—before stopping with a distinctive thump much like Amy's body had made in hitting the floor.

So I leapt out of bed—truly spooked, sprinting naked down the hall, not funny in the moment—and I found the mother of my two young daughters facedown in a pool of beige-colored puke, directly in front of the diarrhea-filled toilet, having just blown crab, mussels, and homemade pear ice cream out both ends and then collapsed off the toilet and smacked face-first onto the floor.

“Liz,” I said. “Wake up, baby.”

Nothing.

“Come on, baby. Wake up.”

I'd seen a few spooky things, in all those Labor and Delivery wards, but this was different. She wasn't moving, her dark brown eyes had rolled back in her head, and I couldn't get a pulse, couldn't see breathing. So I turned her over and she flopped to her back like a dead fish, hands slapping the floor. Still nothing, so I began to panic. I slapped her pretty pukey face but she didn't wake up. I grabbed underneath her arms and hoisted her to standing, hoping to hell our two young daughters didn't wake up and see me bouncing their unconscious mommy up and down. But Mommy was absolutely blank and limp and not breathing, so I laid her down again and tried to remember CPR, and I was pressing on her chest and blowing into her mouth and beginning to cry because I was thinking about two sweet little girls and how they really
need
their mommy and how I'm not man enough for single fatherhood but that I'll never remarry because I'll always love Liz and I'll devote myself to a life of selfless suffering to give the girls a great start in the world.

Then I called 911 and told the operator my wife was dying.

Two minutes, tops—they must've been in the neighborhood—four jackbooted EMTs marched up the front stairs and pounded on the door and I was naked and let them in and Liz woke up.

“Hey, honey,” she said, all normal. “Why am I in the bathroom?”

The EMTs called it a vasovagal syncope—a.k.a fainting—and they told me it's perfectly natural, maybe some GI distress, drops the pulse and breathing so an untrained (read “clueless”) civilian might not detect much. I told them all about my ordeal anyway, because I was proud of my CPR and I wanted a little validation that it was really cool and that maybe I'd saved her life, but the EMTs looked at each other like
Can you believe this guy?
I could have done nothing, they said, and Liz would have regained
consciousness at precisely the same moment. As to the cause, they wouldn't guess, but Liz blamed the shellfish, deciding she must be allergic, and in the moment I really did think, in a fleeting sort of way,
She's making it up
.
Typical female resistance to the male zest for life; classic attempt to castrate, emasculate, control. She's already sworn off pigeon and pig liver, and now shellfish? What's next, fucking lettuce?

But then those EMTs loaded Liz into their ambulance and took her to the hospital for observation. The girls slept through the whole nightmare, and I lay awake in my empty marital bed, once again picturing my sweetheart in a hospital gown. By the time she got home, via taxicab, I'd begun muttering,
My Kung Fu is not strong
.
My Kung Fu is not strong. I must go into the mountains, to meditate
. When I finally woke up the next morning, and looked at my sleeping wife, and thought about my sleeping daughters across the hall, I realized that I could no longer kid myself about feeding the family, or putting food on the table. Even I now saw that I'd been up to something far more complicated, and self-referential, and that I might soon have to stop.