Sweet (4 page)

You can taste that. I believe you can taste everything
—
tenderness, love, sex, desire, anger, bitterness, passion
—
that goes into the creation of a good thing. A good pastry chef can transmit that. But that means a good chef
feels
that, too, carries those things around in his body, exposes himself through his baking, nurtures other people with all he is and all he feels. A good pastry chef can’t be in the closet, not any of himself. (My assistant ‘Trice would say that becoming a pastry chef is a great way of coming out of the closet. Because, she would say, it’s really, really gay. Like, we should call this place a gay-kery. That gay. She may be right.)

A good chef, if I do say so myself, is probably really good in bed. Or maybe it’s just me.

I had a hard time coming out. I was a milk-skinned, high-voiced teen who spent his time in fashionable hats and large brooches, in a high school full of Neanderthal jocks who took great pleasure in tossing me into dumpsters and creaming me in the face with cold milk (if I was lucky) or fists (if I wasn’t). And that was
before
I came out. Figuring out I was gay meant, to my teenaged mind, a likelihood of losing the love of my friends and family (I didn’t) and spending my teen years alone and pining for beefy Indiana-style straight boys who were just a little scared of me (I did). But come out I did, and then I figured out how to be proud (thanks, Dad), and then I went away to school and figured out how to fall in love (rapidly, deeply), and what made me happy (baking, kissing, trying on clothes, in that order), and what I liked to do with the men I fell in love with when things progressed past tentative hand-holding (a subject for an entirely different blog). And because I had to work so hard at it, and because I had to do so much thinking and exploring and soul-searching to get there, and because there weren’t so many stories out there telling me what I should do or like or want or be because I wasn’t like most of the people about whom stories were written (straight), I figured out how to understand myself and my desires, my lovers and their desires, in a way my straight friends never dared do. I figured out passion, in all parts of my life. And now I often think to myself,
thank god I’m gay!

This week, I’ve been drawn to salt caramel, to its combination of sweetness and richness and wincing bite. I like to pair it with a sexy, espresso-laced chocolate, a little bitter, a little dirty. Butter and earth. Cake and cream. (Like my last relationship: innocent and sweet paired with rich and dirty. I’ll let you guess which one was me.)

It’s worth it to make your own caramel from scratch, and especially so using the really good stuff. If you can get fresh, organic cream and real butter from a local farmer, well, you know what I’d say about that. (I’d say
do it.) Don’t stir the sugar while it’s caramelizing; you don’t want to mix in the crystals that cling to the pot sides. Instead, just watch. Food porn. Sugar burlesque.

I actually get turned on watching caramel form. Is that TMI?

If you don’t use up all the fresh caramel by spreading it onto your lover’s belly (and elsewhere, like I would), then you’ve got enough to make this glorious salted caramel frosting. If you wind up licking it all out of the warm pot, you’re out of luck and probably have to start over again. As for the pot-licking, I don’t mean that as a dirty metaphor, but ‘Trice would take it that way, and I’ve learned that I can’t really control that, so take it as you will
—
I do have to say that I’ve done the pot-licking thing more than once, and generally have to resist even tasting the caramel now when I make it, because that is a really slippery slope. A
nd again, I can hear ‘Trice snorting at me. If you run out of caramel before you’ve made the frosting due to some miscalculation of your licking capacity, you can instead come to see us at Buttermilk and try a salted caramel and chocolate cupcake here.

Though you may want to eat it in privacy.

Unless you like it when people watch.

Which is the subject of a blog for another day.

*

Instead of searching for his lost keys, which he figured were long gone by now anyway, Teddy headed back to his office and spent the afternoon reading through the old posts on Jules’s blog and falling, perhaps, though he’d resist admitting it so soon, rather deeply in love (well, at least deeply in shy adoration) with a certain talented and witty pastry chef whom he’d never met. He composed and erased dozens of comments, all of which looked stupid when they were typed in black and white
(I totally had sex with that cupcake today.
No.
You’re brilliant and brave and funny. Can I meet you?
No.
I bet you were the sweet and dirty one. Is that an option?
Absolutely not.), learning only that he had, for all these years, relied upon the expressiveness and sincerity of his wide eyes to achieve the perfect mix of flirty and charming upon which he’d always depended, and those qualities definitely did
not
translate into print.

anonymous:
Does your axiom also mean that someone who is really good in bed will also be a really good pastry chef? I am going to try one of your brilliant recipes and find out.

He settled on this—just suggestive enough, with a wide margin of deniability and an earnest compliment, he thought, without going too far.

He spent the final hour of his workday fretting that the comment was, after all, trying too hard, quite stupid and otherwise extremely transparent and, on the side, making a list of the ingredients he would need to try the lemon and olive oil chiffon cake, the flavors of which he still couldn’t get out of his head and which, since it was the first thing he’d tasted at Buttermilk, seemed the most fitting place to start his own trials.

When, that evening, he failed spectacularly (a soft peak was completely beyond his reach, especially since he was only working with a fork and a cereal bowl, and folding was for gentler souls than he, and eggs were really meant for scrambling anyway), he returned to the blog and posted, without allowing himself to second-guess or edit:

anonymous:
Epic fail. Unless that was a recipe for hockey pucks. Otherwise, I have empirical proof that only one half of your axiom holds true.

He felt stupid and giddy, even though his comments were anonymous. But he kept his laptop open, kept refreshing the page and jumped so frantically when Jules replied to his comment an hour later that he nearly knocked over the table.

BBChef:
Either way I read your comment about the axiom, you still come out good in bed. Impressive, and probably the best anyone would hope for. Start with cookies, Grasshopper. Nobody gets good overnight.

Four

Jules Burns’s user picture was
a fruit tart.

And perhaps Teddy
had
spent most of his Friday night on his laptop, scouring the blog—and the rest of the Internet—for information, or pictures or some hint of Jules Burns. Perhaps he had. And perhaps, as a result of reading the entire blog twice through (and finding nothing else of use on the Internet), he had begun to find this little fact meaningful. And rather funny.
And one more bit of evidence in favor of his sneaking suspicion that Jules Burns was not only a brilliant pastry chef, but must also be the wonderful, delicious, flamingly man-loving, piercingly beautiful answer to Teddy’s every dream.

A
fruit
tart. A fruit
tart.
A He-Is-Actually-a-Genius
tart.

Teddy looked at the clock and ran a hand over his cheek, which was prickling already with the early start of scruff. In two more hours, he knew, the sun would rise. Teddy thought very seriously for three minutes about pulling a hat over his unslept mess of hair and riding his bike to the bakery to catch Jules on his way in. He’d pull up just as Jules was struggling to roll the heavy metal gate up and out of the window’s way, and Teddy would jump off his bike and help, and Jules would be grateful, and Teddy would be dashing, and Jules would invite him inside to help make the… something… that required the both of them to put their hands into it at the same time, though Teddy could not decide if it would be doughy or creamy. Either way, Jules would press himself to Teddy’s back and wrap his arms around him to show him how to do the squishing, with his breath hot and soft on the little hairs on the back of Teddy’s neck, and he would whisper,
like this, do it this way, your arms are almost too strong for this.
And Teddy, his hands dripping with cream or dough, would turn around in the circle of Jules’s arms and tilt his head and whisper that strong arms were very good for certain things and then he’d lift Jules gently onto the counter and kiss him.

Except. Except that every time Teddy got to this moment in the fantasy of turning around and whispering and softening his mouth (and he’d gotten here at least six times already), he’d want to look deep into Jules’s eyes—and he’d discover that Jules’s head was a giant fruit tart, a detail he’d somehow failed to notice in all the moments leading up to this ridiculous, horrifying climax.

That settled it, Teddy thought. He was going to meet Jules Burns.

*

The bakery was different on a Saturday. There were strollers, and people wearing tracksuits, and a general hubbub to which Teddy was definitely not accustomed. Behind the counter, someone had set up portable speakers to play bass-heavy pop music, and a very blond boy, crammed into denim booty shorts, was wiggling his hips to the music in what Teddy thought was a too-self-conscious way, tossing pastries from the case into brown paper bags and thrusting them at the distracted customers. The whole thing, Teddy thought sadly, was decidedly un-magical. But he’d come on a mission, so he waited in line behind a woman in pink velour pants, whose expensive-looking stroller contained a monstrously oversized baby who looked far too old to be strapped into the apparatus. The baby was wet with something viscous. He looked sticky and unpleasant. Teddy kept his distance.

When the customers ahead of him had cleared out and it was finally his turn, he realized that he’d never chosen his own order at Buttermilk.

“Where’s ‘Trice?” he asked the kid behind the counter, trying not to sound desperate.

“She doesn’t work on Saturdays. That’s always me,” he said, thrusting his hand coquettishly at Teddy. “Avon. What do you want?” He gestured at the pastry case like a game show hostess, cocking one thin, pale eyebrow in Teddy’s direction.

“Oh,” Teddy said. “Well. What’s good today?”

Avon put his hands on the counter and leaned forward. “All of it’s always good, as far as I know. I don’t eat any of it. These hips won’t stand for it.” He ran his hands down his sides, shimmying. Teddy tried not to roll his eyes at the kid, who was making him dizzy. He never seemed to stop moving.

“Coffee, please, black,” Teddy said, suddenly embarrassed, suddenly unwilling to consume anything Avon might think would damage his hips, about which he’d never previously thought twice. “To stay.”

“You got it, sir,” Avon said, grabbing a mug and turning his back.

“And,” Teddy said, reconsidering, and feeling stupid again, “one of those.” He pointed at a jar of chocolate biscotti and held his hand in place until Avon glanced over his shoulder to see. Biscotti seemed like a relatively safe choice, hip-wise.

Avon nodded and finished spilling coffee into his mug, then tossed one of the cookies onto a plate, shoved both things across the counter, carelessly smacked some keys on the cash register and announced the total. Teddy gave him the money (which felt a little sordid, Teddy realized, since he’d never paid for anything here), dropped a bit in the tip jar and took his usual table, which, since most of the traffic in the bakery was takeout, was still empty.

He sat for almost an hour, gathering his nerve and nursing his coffee to no avail. Everything here was off today; without ‘Trice around he felt as if he were in freefall. By the end of the hour, the bakery had mostly emptied, with only the occasional customer rushing in with a pitiful shiver of the door’s silver bells. The space had finally started to feel warm and velvety-safe again. Avon kept to himself, folding scraps of paper into cranes and lining them up on the counter, pouring numerous free shots from the espresso machine and downing each one in a single,
pleasureless gulp while glancing warily at the kitchen door like a hunted dog.

Teddy had given up and was wiping down his table with a folded napkin when it happened.

***

Jules always hid in the kitchen on weekends. Saturdays and Sundays were the worst, not only because ‘Trice had those days off and he was stuck with Avon, whom he neither liked nor trusted but simply tolerated, but also because the bakery was always full and bustling and loud until midday. And Avon insisted on playing that stupid dance music and swinging around the shop like a crazed monkey, wrecking whatever peaceful, lush vibe Jules had otherwise managed to cultivate. So Jules buried himself in work, whipping up buttercream for the week, filing bills in the back office, counting bricks of butter in the walk-in refrigerator.

By early afternoon, however, enough was enough. Every week it was the same routine, to the clock: At noon, Jules would holler at Avon to turn down the music, smack the kitchen door open and parade out, waving his arms dramatically, mostly because he knew Avon appreciated and best understood that kind of expression, and so
it would have its intended effect. Avon would sigh loudly and turn off the speakers. Jules would make himself a cappuccino with two shots, then slink back to the relative peace of the kitchen and leave Avon alone—sullen and quiet—for the next few hours.

You might, if you are listening carefully, think you see this moment coming. Let us tell you up front that, if you are hoping for a first meeting, hoping for Jules to make his diva march out into the shop front and come face to face with Teddy, who has not yet finished mopping the crumbs and condensation from his table, hoping that the two will
find each other this way and that the world will drop away and their eyes will meet and they will each
know,
in their bones, the meaning of the moment, well, you are going to be disappointed.

Here is what happened:

“Avon!” Jules started his usual hollering. “
Please
turn off that stuff
now!
”

Jules wiped his hands on the front of his apron and pulled at the strings to re-tie them more tightly over his waist, kicking the kitchen door open
a little as he did so. As it swung, as he moved to storm out into what he thought was the empty shop front, he saw him, at his usual place by the window, studiously scrubbing the tabletop with a napkin. He wore a plaid button-down shirt, cotton so softened by age it was practically transparent, and graying
jeans and a pair of old once-white tennis shoes, the laces of which had broken and been knotted together many times. The muscles and veins on his forearms stood out in shifting patterns under the skin as he scrubbed. He was focused, looking down, a little flushed, heavy-lashed and so casually
beautiful.

Sunlight was pushing its way under the window awning and into the shop, glancing off the polished tabletops and the steel and glass of the bakery case, tossing itself upward and shattering through the colored glass beads. The shop was spattered with light, and that man was sitting in the middle of it, oblivious, with everything about him shining: his wiry hair and his lightly tanned skin flecked with sun, glowing like a beacon, anchored and still and warm and bright.

Jules saw all of this in the second it took the door to swing open; the light was unmoving and his own breath caught, as if time had skidded to a stop so he could see it all and jump back into the kitchen, clamping
a hand over his own mouth to stop the noise of surprise. The man looked up, briefly, but it was too late; the door had already swung shut, and Jules, hand still against his mouth,
breathed through his nose and watched through the door’s crack as the man bent to scribble something on a napkin, then carefully and precisely centered the napkin on the table, gathered his bag onto his shoulder and left the shop.

The moment he’d left, Jules was out the kitchen door and striding past Avon to grab the napkin from the table. Mindlessly, he let his thumb worry the warm keys in his pocket while he looked, a little amused, a little mystified, at the drawing the man had left.

“What is it?” Avon said.

“I can’t tell,” Jules said and showed the napkin to Avon. “What is it?”

“That’s totally a cricket,” Avon said.

“Oh,” said Jules, more mystified than ever. “A cricket?”

“They’re supposed to be good luck?” Avon offered. “Maybe it’s a luck thing?” Jules looked unsatisfied, but took the napkin with him when he swept back into the kitchen, entirely forgetting to make his coffee.

“Or maybe it’s a praying mantis,” Avon called after him. “The lady mantis bites the head off her mate after they do it!”

As he did every weekend, Jules thought very seriously about just how and when and for which reason he should fire Avon.

***

Teddy’s life had been composed of a series of near misses.

There had been, of course, plenty of times when he had, proverbially at least, smacked the ball out of the park—exams, first dates,
job interviews. But there was something more poignant and telling and truly
him
about the near miss, something more personal, closer to the bone. Perhaps it was the lack left afterward that felt familiar, so apparent, like a lost tooth; perhaps it was that his life so often fluttered in the raw gap, as if he, like the tip of a tongue, were drawn to that vacant place. It was the unsaid words he swallowed before trying them out—
I love you, too,
he’d almost said once, though he hadn’t been sure he’d meant it, and so had closed his mouth and petted the boy’s cheek fondly and sadly, and things had, rather rapidly, shaken apart after that. It was the doors he’d closed when he left home—the dream of a painting major he’d abandoned when his father had worn
that brow-furrowed look, and the question he’d wanted to ask his mother when he hugged her goodbye for what seemed like the last time, leaving her behind in their camel-colored house—
are you happy here?
—thinking better of it and replacing those words with a kiss to the top of her head and a hard squeeze of her shoulders before he turned and left to start his life in New York. It was the lost keys, the missed train, the missed glance, the chance untaken.

He felt it, always, the grate and tug of too-empty space, the missing thing he couldn’t name, the thing that had swept by him without stopping on its way to fill bigger and better lives than his.

That day in the bakery, Teddy knew keenly, had been one of those near misses.

He’d been sitting at his usual table, cleaning up and getting ready to leave, having finally given up the plan to storm the kitchen and meet the chef, when the back door had swung violently open as if to herald the coming of something monumental and then, just as violently, had snapped closed without reveal
ing a thing. He’d felt the strongest sense of presence behind the door, presence that refused to make itself real. He’d felt a kind of slipping-off, a falling-down, an
almost-but-not-quite
that burned him inside as intensely as an unrealized sneeze. He’d known, in that moment, that his life had sustained another near miss. That, had the timing been slightly different, he might have met the man for whom he was looking, or might at the very least have caught a glimpse of him.

Instead, he’d given up to go home, but left a gift, a calling card, the napkin containing the little scribbled doodle of the grasshopper, to say that he’d been there, that it had been
him
. It was a half-step forward into chance. As if Jules might remember and recognize him.

Start with cookies, Grasshopper. Nobody gets good overnight.

He had. Started with cookies, that is. He’d tried them the night following his failed lemon cake. And Jules had been right
—these were more successful, though half of them had darkened too much on the bottom and tasted a bit like soot; but Teddy had managed to mix the dough and dollop it onto the cookie sheet and felt, all in all, fairly accomplished when the oven spat out something that closely resembled a batch of cookies. Nothing so heartbreakingly tender and melty and sexy as the cookie Jules had made, he thought. H
e experienced no rush of blood, no overwhelming flood of desire and longing and decadence overtook him when he bit, with considerable difficulty, into the hard little nugget once it had cooled. At least the cookies were recognizable as food. Hard, burned, sorry food, but food nonetheless. It had been a start; he gave himself that much.