Mediterranean Summer (19 page)

I became increasingly curious about the rest of their lives as well. Each week they arrived on the family helicopter or jet, had a car service bring them to the boat, happily walked up the
passerelle,
came on board for the weekend, then reversed the sequence for the return trip. No public transit for them. I wondered who did all of the coordination, arranged the private air travel, scheduled the different car services, pinpointed the location of the boat. Michele told me back in Antibes that the owners maintained dedicated staff for their nine homes, three yachts, two jets, helicopters, and numerous cars. I made a rough count and figured it ran somewhere in the neighborhood of forty or fifty personal service staff. And that didn’t include the battery of employees who worked in the gardens and on the ranches. I was just a small part of their world, but they exhibited a quality found in so many powerful and successful people: when they spoke to me, I felt as if I were the only person in their employ. I also knew being a good cook satisfied only one requirement of my job. We need not become friends, but the owners had to like me.

In that regard, I did understand my job was ultimately the same as Rick’s job. Both were about keeping the owners happy. Cooking for them in a private setting was very different from having them as customers in a restaurant, where other customers would be competing for the attention of the kitchen and dining room staff. In the situation I was in, the owners’ needs, their schedule, their whims, became my own.

Because
Serenity
was their weekend residence, the feedback was different. The restaurant chef, influenced and informed, is the decisive palate behind the menu. A dissatisfied customer simply won’t come back. In private, it is the owners’ desires that mandate the cooking. And here, communication was up close and personal. As I learned, the owners were not shy about letting me know when something wasn’t right. Even though we were two months into the season, I had not worked for them long enough to be entirely sure if my cooking had yet made the grade. But I did start to get a sense, the more I prepared meals for them, watched their patterns, and took feedback, that I knew how to approach the food when the cooking began. Something as simple as knowing their preference for spiciness paid off with
il Dottore
’s two-handed doorknobs.

I arranged the canapés
in concentric circles on the silver tray we always used for cocktail service. I wanted the small, handmade savory pastries to suggest the artisanal effort by virtue of a neat, symmetrical presentation. Aesthetically, it worked beautifully and fortified my edict that making the first selection visually pleasing also made it more desirable to eat.

La Signora
came into the pantry while winding her watch, dressed up in a casual elegance I had not seen before—dark blue slacks and a crisp white blouse, her open collar giving way to a large pearl necklace. She seemed to be wearing a little more makeup than usual, that is, if she ever wore any. A gold lamé headband kept her long dark hair behind her ears so the matching pearl earrings could show.

“We are going to dine onshore tonight, so no need to cook,” she said as she put her watch on.

“Very good,” I responded, trying not to show surprise or disappointment. But when she left, I threw my hand towel into the sink with a frustrated snap.

Why couldn’t I have been told sooner? She knew I worked all afternoon getting their dinner prepped and ready. Not even a mention of how good it smelled in the galley or an acknowledgment of seeing the components of the main course—my
mise en place
—out and ready for service.

Now what do I do with all of the food? Obviously, my time in planning, shopping, and prepping and the cost of goods didn’t matter. I could hold some for the next day, like the
calamaretti farciti
—tiny calamari stuffed with Romano’s wonderful shrimp-and-vegetable filling, a signature of his restaurant. But I really looked forward to serving the incredibly plump
rombo
—turbot—just caught, gently baked with zucchini and a splash of wine. The rest would go into the crew menu, but I already had that meal ready, too. I made enough of the filling for the
calamaretti
to stuff pasta for baked cannelloni. Oh well, I thought, it’s their boat, their life, their money.

“As soon as I serve the ladies their tisane before they go to bed,” Rick told me upon hearing the news, “I’m outta here.”
La Signora
had provided us with her custom tisane mix of dried herbs, flower petals, and roots blended at her local
erborista,
a concoction prepared like tea that apparently made for better, restful sleep and was a cure for all that ails you.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Back up to Forte dei Marmi! The harbormaster gave me the names of some clubs to hit. Time to play with the Florentine girls!”

“By the way,” I asked him, “what were you doing at the harbor office?” “Making a telephone call. I can’t stand calling long-distance with phone cards,” he said with a flip of his hand. Rick’s use of stock French gestures always made me laugh.

“You just go in and ask to use the phone?” I said incredulously.

“I have it charged back to the boat,” he explained. “I’ll pay the boat back if Patrick asks. Just don’t tell the rest of the crew.”

Monday morning, the owners
were gone, and we threw ourselves into a massive group effort to get the boat washed down and clean. Scott, as if programmed, opened the engine room door first thing and kept it that way for the better part of the next few days. Rick got the laundry out and brought the flowers, at least those still in good shape, to the harbormaster’s office, knowing what he had to do to keep those phone lines open. He left
Serenity
more than slightly hungover, complaining in French, “
C’est con,
” which in Rick’s vernacular roughly translated into: “These stupid tasks are a complete bummer and are taking away from my leisure time.” It was amazing how many large, stuffed laundry bags came out of the aft part of the boat. Much more than the crew. Patrick disappeared, only to return in time for lunch. Interesting, since I’d been on board, I had never seen him clean, paint, or varnish a thing.

To some degree, we all wanted
our
lives back. Ian set up the folding table that fit over the anchor windlass while Nigel rigged the canopy above. Instantly, the foredeck again became our version of a summer porch. It was actually a better place to hang around than the cockpit. The perk of being parked stern-to put our bow a hundred-plus feet from the quay. So not only did we have a jury-rigged summer porch; we had a private one as well.

The weather channel on the ship-to-shore radio,
canale
68, crackled from the cockpit and reported clear skies and fair wind for the next few days as a high-pressure zone steadied itself over the central Mediterranean. Hearing this, Patrick said we should go for afternoon practice sails. “Glitches in maneuver speed” was how he put it. I had gotten used to these practice runs and never minded the fresh air. But others didn’t see it that way.

By Tuesday evening, Kevin’s building frustrations that had started in Lerici could be detected in his eyes and his manner. I asked what the problem was, and he admitted it was over Patrick, who seemed to show a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. Onshore, sharing a drink with us in the bars, Patrick was one of the guys, relaxed and friendly. But back on board, he became short-tempered, demanding, and inflexible.

Kevin was clearly not used to being spoken to that way. And something else was bothering him. Patrick had begun to pull rank to ensure that there was only one way to do things—his way. Invariably, after Kevin finished a job on deck, Patrick wanted it done over, his way. I remembered when Chef Forgione in New York used to tell his cooks, “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and then there’s my way.” I’ve always looked forward to the time when I would have “my way.” Clearly, so did Kevin.

An hour later, Kevin’s aggravation added to the gristmill of shipboard gossip.

“They’re at it again,” Ian told me, taking a break at the mess table to get away from the argument on deck.

“Who?”

“Kevin and the skipper.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Something about the blocks on deck and the way the lines are running. Kevin was concerned about chafing the varnish on the rail.”

“Varnishing is a lot of work. What’s wrong with looking after it?” I asked.

“But Patrick says the new leads hinder our performance because they don’t shape the sails as best as they could be.”

These contretemps flared up with daily regularity. Under way, Kevin continued to stay up front while Patrick drove and kept to the aft deck. Problems began when they met in the middle. I was generally sympathetic to Kevin in these disputes, though, truthfully, not because I had fairly examined the arguments of both sides but because Kevin was great to work with. If he found me struggling, no matter how much he had to do on his own, he always found a way to give me a hand.

Over time Patrick and Kevin began feuding over more than boat maintenance or sailing techniques. Kevin had his sights set on becoming a captain one day, he told me one afternoon. By the time he joined the crew of
Serenity,
he had already become a highly accomplished sailor, having completed two full circumnavigations of the globe. But he didn’t have enough hours on the books to qualify to take the captain’s test. That’s why he was sailing on
Serenity
—to log hours. But when he caught on that Patrick’s weekday training runs were about his desire to compete successfully in the end-of-the-season regatta, he felt the captain was abusing his authority. Kevin could be persuasive, and soon the rest of the crew began to suspect that our practicing was less about pleasing the owners and more about Patrick’s wanting to beat the sailing yacht
Carina
in the Saint-Tropez regatta. Soon the mess table scuttlebutt led us to unanimously decide that Patrick’s desire had slid into obsession and that he was pursuing his obsession on our backs. “It’s a damn yacht, not an America’s Cup racer,” I heard Kevin say under his breath the next day after another sharp exchange.

Patrick continued to press hard, pushing the crew to haul lines faster while he steered more deliberately and monitored the instruments even more closely. The more Patrick barked, the quieter Kevin became. Kevin disappeared one day in port, and I became concerned. He later admitted that he had gone to the Perini Navi yacht-building yard.

“Why?” I asked.

“I wanted to see when the new yachts rolling off will be sailing,” he answered straightforwardly.

Now I worried that Kevin might jump ship mid-cruise, right before the owners boarded for the entire month of August. Everything had been going so well. Why couldn’t Patrick just back off and let us have a happy cruise? I suspected this was only the beginning of the problems. Catching Rick in an unguarded moment confirmed this suspicion.

Rick had not been himself the last few days and was becoming more somber and preoccupied. At first, I attributed it to the open tension between Kevin and Patrick, which was getting to all of us. But one afternoon while we were sitting at the mess table, the real reason came tumbling out. Rick’s divorce had not been amicable, and he was particularly upset about the limited visitation he had been awarded with his son, reduced even more as a result of a court action filed by his ex-wife’s parents. Under that bon vivant persona, Rick actually was a devoted and guilt-ridden father. He began to withdraw.

Rick had let me into a part of his world that he kept hidden from everyone else. And he stowed this other side of himself once we hit dockside. As if he regretted having shown me his true self, the wild Rick emerged with a vengeance. He was all over the party and bar scene, so much so that when I saw him one night at a club in Forte dei Marmi, he was running on psychic speed, sending champagne to every woman he fancied and befriending their jealous boyfriends by buying them drinks as well. But now I knew he wasn’t just a party boy—he had real responsibilities and disappointments that increasingly wore him down.

The next weekend we
met the owners at Portoferraio, Elba, the largest island of seven landmasses in the Tuscan archipelago—or, as they are commonly called, the “seven sisters.” Legend has it, according to the
Italian Waters Pilot,
the seafarer’s bible of port, sea, and weather information I found in the chart house, the archipelago was formed when a necklace fell from Venus, goddess of beauty and love, and splashed into the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea, thus creating the islands.

A good-sized town surrounded the harbor on three sides, the buildings capped with almost flat terra-cotta roofs that cascaded up the hill to the citadel on top. This is the main harbor where ferries from the mainland, mostly Piombino, bring visitors, cars, and the delivery trucks that supply the island. I had to assume they were from Piombino since that was the name of the ferry in whose wake we trailed upon our arrival. We didn’t stay long and headed to the other side of the island, along the way passing beautiful views of rolling hills spotted with vineyards and, on the shoreline, what looked to be many places only accessible by boat.