How to Eat a Cupcake (12 page)

September

Chapter 11

Annie

“F
arm's just ahead,” Ogden Gertzwell said. He somehow managed to say this while pointing
and
nodding
and
stuffing another long strip of beef jerky into his mouth, all while steering his 1980s pickup truck with his knee.

“Can't wait,” I said, eking out a smile through my clenched jaw.

Ogden looked over and held the bag of jerky out to me for the seventh time. As he did, the truck swerved into the opposite lane and then squealed back into place. He grunted, shifting in his seat.

“Death by jerky,” I muttered. Even if the jerky was locally produced and organic, as Ogden had assured me it was, it wasn't exactly how I wanted to go.

“What's that, Anita?”

“You really can call me Annie,” I said. “Everyone does.” Over the course of the drive, I'd told him this nearly as many times as he'd offered me that bag of jerky.

“Not your grandmother,” Ogden said, chewing thoughtfully. “Bet you a million dollars your grandmother calls you Anita.”

I rolled my eyes but didn't bother to explain that I'd never met either of my grandmothers. I peered down the road, waiting for the Gertzwell Farm sign to appear and put an end to the trip from hell. The truck, while remarkably tidy and rust-free given its age, had no shocks whatsoever. After an hour of driving, my ass felt like Mike Tyson's sparring partner's face must have felt after a few rounds in the ring. Add to that the fact that Ogden had hot-boxed the truck with the uniquely pungent, dog-breath smell of beef jerky and then bored me nearly to tears with his Top Ten Tales from Life on an Organic Farm, and I was more than ready for some fresh, quiet country air.

In San Francisco, where any self-respecting chef was on a first-name basis with her fishermen and farmers, the name Ogden Gertzwell held a certain cachet. If you worked in the culinary microcosm that was the Bay Area, you knew that Gertzwell Farm's figs, apples, pears, persimmons, and lemons were the best of the best, but I'd never met Ogden in person until he picked me up in his truck that day for a tour of his Sonoma farm. Gertzwell produce was far too pricey for the Valencia Street Bakery; Treat, on the other hand, could afford biodynamically grown Asian pears for an exorbitant price. Or at least that's what I'd decided. It filled me with rebellious glee to phone up all of the purveyors I'd been coveting the previous six years working in small restaurants that couldn't afford such high-end ingredients. I figured no amount of fancy fruit could put too much of a dent in Julia's bank account.

I'd heard through the culinary grapevine that Ogden Gertzwell was a bit of an eccentric, but I hadn't anticipated his requirement that prospective buyers tour his farm before he would sign a supply contract. I didn't mind though, at least not at the outset. It was a gorgeous fall day, sunny and still in the city, hotter as we headed north and off the coast—perfect weather for a drive and then a walk among fruit trees. Or it would have been perfect, if my companion hadn't proven to be so bombastic and beef-dependent. Ogden, big and muscular with sandy-brown hair and a prominent nose that was bronzed and peeling like a ten-year-old's, appeared to be in his early thirties, but he barreled his way through conversation like a lonely old man who was thrilled to find himself with a captive audience beyond the usual fruit trees and dirt. He seemed incapable of not moving his mouth—if he wasn't eating, he was talking, though one didn't necessarily preclude the other. Each time he broke his monologue to take a breath, I'd make some minor, throwaway comment about something he'd said, just so he'd know I was listening. But before I could even finish the thought, he'd steamroll over me, passionately disagreeing with each and every benign comment I made. Finally, I gave up and let his words fill up the bouncing, jolting truck cab, feeling pummeled on all ends.

“Here we are!” Ogden said suddenly, wrenching the wheel to swing the truck off the road and onto a dirt driveway.

The abrupt turn sent me on a collision course for the door and I rubbed my shoulder as we bounced down the long driveway. We pulled up in front of a small, neat, buttercup-yellow cottage crowned with solar panels that sparkled blindingly below the bright blue sky. Before the dust had even settled, Ogden hopped out, walked in long strides around the truck, and pulled open my door. Apparently, the sight of the old homestead sent him into gentleman-farmer mode.

“Welcome to Gertzwell Farm,” he said, and offered one of his large hands. “Time for me to show off the fruits of my labor.”

Ah
, I thought, climbing down.
Fruit farmer humor
. I stretched beside the truck and attempted some surreptitious butt kneading.

Gertzwell Farm covered more than sixty acres, of which we walked at least six. I got the sense that if it were up to Ogden we would have walked the entire property. In the hot sun, the soil looked too dry to support anything at all, but we walked down row after row of low, knobby, gray-barked trees studded with apples in shades of deep burgundy and pale green. Ogden pointed out fruit that had a beautiful, rosy, sun-kissed blush, and others that had a smattering of black freckles—a not aesthetically pleasing but harmless mold that apparently became inevitable when it rained in June.

“You can have black specks like these, or you can have apples that have been doused with twelve layers of pesticide,” Ogden said. His voice was arrogant, but I heard a hint of defensiveness in it, too. “That's your choice. But if you have a taste for perfect-skinned, toxic apples, Gertzwell Farms isn't for you. We focus on flavor and sustainability, which, we've learned, go hand in hand.” As he spoke, I imagined organic farmers up and down Sonoma stamping their feet like frustrated children when the air turned ominously heavy and wet in June.

Pears speckled and huge as dinosaur eggs weighed down branches in the next row. Ogden reached up and in one surprisingly graceful motion twisted a pale green orb off the tree, expertly leaving behind its precious stem to allow for regrowth, as he'd instructed me earlier. As he reached up, the unbuttoned cuff of his sleeve flopped back for a moment and I noticed an old scar snaking up the topside of his browned, muscular forearm. I wondered where it stopped. He pulled out a pocketknife and cut a slice of pear.

It was crisp and refreshing, more like an apple than a pear. “It's delicious,” I said, letting its layers of subtle flavor reveal themselves before commenting. “Sweet, but still earthy.”

“Earthy? Not really,” Ogden said, his brow furrowing. He took a bite. “I think you're tasting a hint of citrus.”

I managed to not roll my eyes, but just barely. I was beginning to get used to Ogden's contrarian, superior way of conversing, which wasn't to say I liked it. He was obviously one of those insanely annoying, ever-blithering foodies, which I realized was a ridiculous complaint coming from a baker who was shopping for biodynamic fruit. In any event, I couldn't deny the excellence of his product.

“It's a Twentieth Century,” said Ogden. Somehow, he deigned me worthy of trying another slice. “My favorite Asian pear.” Even as he spoke, I was concocting a recipe for a pear and cinnamon cupcake filled with a molten burst of vanilla-bourbon cream.

“The farm was my father's way back when,” Ogden explained as we continued walking. “But he nearly ran it into the ground. He expected too much of everything and everyone. He wasn't what you'd call a nurturing type.”

I looked over at Ogden, puzzled by this admission.
Not a nurturing type
. Was he giving me the history of the farm, or the history of his childhood? In his mind, they were probably one and the same. In the blaring afternoon sunlight, I noticed a few grays threading through the sandy-brown hair that tufted out of his shirt at the top of his broad chest. His eyebrows were thick and blonder than the hair on his head and were set low over brown eyes lined with lashes as long as a cow's. In another life, he could have been a football coach at some suburban high school, preppy and tan and gregarious instead of dirt-flecked and sunburnt and serious.

“Dad would spray these fields down with pesticides when the bugs hit, never bothering to question whether those tiny living organisms were needed by the land they lived on, whether they—the bugs, the land, the season, the fruit—were all tied together in some harmonic balance.” Ogden released a dark, hard laugh. “ ‘Harmonic balance'—two words my father would not have used, together or alone.

“Anyway,” he continued, “lucky for the land, he died young. That was about twenty years ago. Mom took over, got rid of the pesticides, moved some fields around. She was like a chess player, moving apricots to the back ten, sliding pears up to the southern slope. Within a couple of years, we had rich fruit with layers of flavor that were at once delicate and robust. But that's because we had become self-dependent, which is what every farm should be. The organic compost that feeds our trees is created right here on the farm. We use enzymes that are cultivated  . . .”

As Ogden launched into what might as well be the tree-hugger national anthem—a little ditty I liked to think of as “Our Compost 'Tis of Thee, Sweet Poop of Piety”—my mind wandered. What was Jake Logan up to at that moment? We'd seen each other once every week or two since that surfing excursion, and the lulls in between our dates were punctuated by the ironic little gifts he sent me at Valencia Street Bakery—Mylar balloons with the words “Get well!” scrolled in drippy pink, a mixed cassette tape I couldn't listen to because I didn't have a tape player (who did? Jake Logan, apparently), one of those ridiculous baskets of fruit cut to look like an arrangement of tropical flowers. Compared with Jake, who was full of quirky surprises, Ogden seemed solid and predictable. Just your run-of-the-mill bore. Well, maybe not run-of-the-mill. It wasn't all that often I met a farmer. Still, he didn't have that spark in his eye I found myself looking for when I met a guy. I didn't need, or even want, to be with the best-looking man in the room, but the one who inevitably got my attention was the one whose eyes held a glint of something magnetic—humor, mischief, curiosity, a sense of adventure. It was harder to find than it sounded. Ogden, who seemed tiresomely earnest, was yet another man whose eyes did not have that spark. Jake Logan's eyes, on the other hand, could practically start a forest fire.

“Suddenly, we had the kind of persimmons that editors like to cut open and put on the cover of
Bon Appétit
magazine alongside a scoop of vanilla gelato,” Ogden was saying. “The kind that makes your neighbors jealous. They started calling Mom ‘the Land Whisperer.' That whole ‘whisper' thing is trendy
now
, with ‘the Horse Whisperer,' ‘the Dog Whisperer' . . .” He paused here and looked at me pointedly. “I'm sure you know all about that dog guy with your little side business. But this was back when you didn't really want folks saying that you walked the fields at night, whispering sweet nothings to your trees—”

“I didn't realize you knew I walked dogs,” I interrupted. The snide comment about my “little side business” had pulled me from my reverie. “You've been checking up on me.”

He shrugged. “You have to understand that Gertzwell Farm is a growing brand at a crucial moment. We've got to be careful about who we sell to at this point. We only have so much fruit,” he said, gesturing around him, “so if we sell to businesses that don't succeed, we're not doing ourselves any favors.”

“I'm not sure I follow,” I said, though I had a sinking suspicion that I did follow, and just didn't like where he was headed.

“Well, you're a baker. A somewhat unproven one, if you don't mind me saying. And a dog walker. The two professions don't exactly go hand-in-hand, do they? And now you're opening a . . . what did you call it again? A cupcakery? It's not exactly like selling our fruit to the pastry chef at Chez Panisse, now is it?”

I couldn't believe what was happening. Was I really standing in the middle of bumblefuck being dressed down by Ogden Gertzwell? It appeared I was.

“Listen,” I said. “Not that it's any of your business, but I'm going to stop walking dogs the day the doors of Treat open. Until then, I have to pay my rent, and every little bit helps. It doesn't make me any less talented or committed. Anyway, if you've already decided you're not going to sell your fruit to a silly little cupcakery, why the hell did you drag me out here?”

“I haven't decided anything,” Ogden said simply. He put his hands at the small of his back and leaned into them for a long stretch. His back cracked and two small birds skittered out of the tree overhead. “I'm just glad to hear this isn't some lark.”

So I'd been summoned not to evaluate the farm, but to be evaluated. I was usually all for eccentrics—freak flags were, after all, my thing—but this guy was too much, even for me. “Maybe it's time we head back to the city,” I said.

“Not quite yet,” Ogden said. “I haven't finished telling you about what I've done since taking over the farm from my mother five years ago. I need to explain how biodynamic farming merges the scientific and the spiritual.”

“I've read your Web site, Ogden,” I said, shaking my head. “I can assure you it's sufficiently . . . verbose.”

On the walk back to the truck, I enjoyed the first stretch of quiet I'd experienced since Ogden had picked me up in the city. A light breeze ruffled the leaves on the trees. A dragonfly soundlessly darted and hovered by my side for several steps. The sun warmed my skin and, slowly, melted away some of my exasperation. As we neared the truck, I saw an older woman sitting on the front steps of the cottage. Her long gray hair was swept into a ponytail and she wore a navy hippie skirt that dusted the ground, a white T-shirt, and a necklace of yellow beads. When she stood and smiled and waved, I saw she had Ogden's funny beak of a nose under bright, dancing, brown eyes.