Sweet (7 page)

He took it and the coffee and settled at his table by the window to watch the flash and flap of commuters in their dark coats crossing and re-crossing the street.

The cream puff was petite—nothing like the oversized, bready and tasteless supermarket variety he remembered his mother bringing home in a plastic clamshell on special occasions
. It was tiny and fragrant, with hints of lavender and butter and an airy sweetness, and even a faint note—he bent to sniff a second time—of citrus underneath the flowers. A little of the cream filling—pale yellow, incredibly smooth—oozed from the side of the puff, and he swiped it up with a fingertip and smeared it on the tip of his tongue.
Sweet, floral, light,
he thought, and then it deepened into a satisfyingly fatty bass note of cream as the filling slid down his tongue toward his throat. The pastry itself—here he took a gentle bite, catching the drips of filling on the back of his free hand and surreptitiously licking them
off—was also light. It resembled bread, but in a floating way, lightly mocking: a wink, a sly smile, an echo with a difference. It refused to settle into one taste. In this, it was flirtatious, coy, dancing exquisitely between the coolness of cream and the warmth of honey, the earthiness of bread and the baroque glory of flowers.

With one bite, Teddy understood: this was an answer to his earlier gift, a parody, a parry, a partner,
contrapunto.

He didn’t, he understood, need to get into the kitchen to meet the chef. He’d just met him.

*

Pastry-Whipped: Adventures in Sugar by a Dedicated Crumpet Strumpet

by Chef Jules Burns of Buttermilk Bakery

April 2: What I Learned from Flowers, by a Lifelong Pansy

Flowers in the kitchen are a wonderful thing. You can’t just use any flowers
—
you need to make sure they’re organically grown and non-toxic (the same advice I’d give about anything you choose to put in your mouth… and beyond that, I won’t judge you). Not only do flowers add beauty, color and uniqueness to anything you make—I love to top my creamy-orange butternut squash soup with a bright sprinkling of purple pansies, and a sugared rose petal or a pinch of lavender blossoms does wonders on top of a cupcake—but using flowers gives you the opportunity to add incredible scents and flavors, sometimes spicy, sometimes sweet, to what you make. Plus, it’s absolutely, over-the-top romantic, and that aspect appeals to me simply on principle.

But you have to be careful with flowers. Flowers can, if not used carefully, with a little cynicism perhaps, become cloying and overwhelming. (Oh, and how I wish someone had told this to my high school self, that glorious hothouse flower that I was, wilting away in the flannel jungle that was Indiana!) The showiness of the blossoms can make us forget that flowers need roots, too. They need their green sturdy parts and the secret parts, those snaky, underground, sinuous sides that we never see. The parts all tangled up with worms. The dirty, unpretty parts, the parts
that stay hidden. They need those parts to stay upright, to stay rooted, to stay alive.

Did you know that the roots make up more than half the plant? (I just made that up, but I do base it upon my childhood memory of ripping up my grandmother’s garden in an ill-conceived attempt at gift-giving.) I love flowers not only for their sheer aesthetic appeal, their exuberance and celebration of everything fleeting and beautiful, but also because flowers are fighters. They push up in the harshest environments; they spatter the highway berms with joyous color, undeterred by cars or exhaust or tossed-out trash; they persist despite early frosts and late springs, dry seasons and those too wet; they take in all of our pollution and all of our mistakes, and still they open themselves to the world, delicate and showy, in love with their own beauty and reeking of it, ready to be crushed or uprooted or forgotten. (Oh, and how I wish someone had told this to my high school self, that lonely little pansy fighting his way out of the crack that is Indiana!)

I recently had the pleasure of tasting something
—
bread pudding
—
someone else baked. I don’t often do that. I’m the chef, so I always get to be the one in charge; people rarely want to cook for me. And though it was my own recipe (the one I posted in the last blog, by the way), the dish wasn’t really mine. To truly take it in, I had to let go a little bit. I had to put myself in the hands of the baker
—
to trust
—
to give up a little of my control, to be open and ready for what he might give me. (
Nothing anyone could give me,
I can hear my grandmother saying,
could be as glorious as these flowers, because you picked them yourself, and just for me
.)

I’m glad I could let go a bit. I learned from my tasting experience. It was, in a word, wonderful. Smoky, sweet and a bit rough, more petunia than peony. Grounded. Good.

I think you need both, the petunia and the peony, in this life. Or, at least, I do. You need the heartiness of the day to day, the bread and
butter, someone to hold on to when everything is crashing down around you. But you also need the light and sweet, the flowers for no reason, the headiness, the play. Each balances out the other, and every living thing needs a bit of both to survive. For me, for my lost teenaged self, for my lost mother and grandmother and for my heart, which I thought I may have lost for good not long ago, for all of these, I’m trying to learn this lesson, to honor my roots, to open up again, to be beautiful and strong and vulnerable at once. All of which I know I must do in order to take in a little of this dazzlingly glorious, bright and warm spring sun.

Six

At this point, you may
notice, we have been telling this tale for quite some time, and yet the two men at its center have yet not met. That is no accident.

In life, most things, good
and
bad, are accidental—this is a fact you should always bear in mind. The universe, in its vast and spinning, starry expanse, does not care about you, does not even know that you exist. The universe simply knows its own vastness, its own need to spin, just as you, adjusting your glasses or sipping your afternoon tea or biting the ragged edges of your cuticles, know nothing of the mitochondria that move in you, each one its own little universe churning out pops of energy smaller than pinpricks in your cells, invisible pistons, tiny steampunk organisms that, in their simplicity and in their ignorance of you, give you life.

Life is accidental and you are accidental, and, as we have cautioned before, there is no fate or kismet to effect a cosmic justice
and bring together two people who seem so clearly to belong to each other before they have even met. This belonging, you must remember, is simply a wish one projects onto the hapless world, an effect of the story itself, because stories, by their very structure, convince us that there is order and justice and balance, convince us that everything is meant to fit, that no pieces will go missing or be found extraneous, that the plot of our lives will fall, perfectly, along a beautifully drawn arc.

In this life, most things are accidental. But this is a story, you must remember, and so nothing we might tell you in this tale is an accident. It might be a comfort to you, this care, this control that our story affords. But remember, too, the corollary to this comfort: This is a story; nothing here exists.

Teddy does not exist, nor the humming fluorescent office, nor the legal pads and calla lilies and sticky notes and mahogany-framed portraits. Jules, curled on his couch in the low light of evening, Andy breathing rhythmically against his bare thigh, the light-filled sweep of the city outside and the breathless night, every memory Jules holds of anyone that ever held him or cried for him or caused him to cry: They do not exist. The keys
(ah, did you think we’d forgotten about the keys?), which he polishes with the pad of his thumb while his eyes go glassy and far away and he appears to be thinking of something beautiful, of some hope, those keys do not exist.

Until and unless.

These men, those keys, the evening’s sparkling and dusky sweep, none of it exists until we tell it, call it up in words, and unless those words resonate in you and jar loose a tiny splinter of your belief. And, since we are speaking as honestly and as plainly as we are able, we might say that the condition is, more accurately, quite the opposite. The invisible world will go on spinning without us to narrate it, will spin right on without our belief, but we who are in it, because we are so small and insubstantial, only so many atoms and so much empty space,
we
are the ones who need stories to live. We live—and if we are to be very clear about this, we might say that we
only
live
—through stories.

A memory, as you know, is only that. A memory is simply a story.

Jules lived almost entirely, on nights like this, through his memories. Behind his eyes, he clicked a sensory slideshow, everything he knew and must not forget: the little details of his grandmother (the smell of her perfume, the exact shade of her hair, the words she’d say each night before snapping off the bedside lamp and disappearing through the sliver of bright hallway light at the door) and the little details of Andy (his long, wrinkled fingers, their touch always a bit too cool, and the way he’d seem to grow taller and wider and treelike around Jules to steady him against danger and make him feel held and safe and entirely surrounded); the acrid metal-and-sweat smell of the insides of lockers; the smell of the school latrines and the school cafeteria; Andy’s cologne, and his hair oil, his mouth like minted coffee and his warm
wood-colored skin; his father’s smell when he came home from work, sharp and comforting, house paint and sweat.

Jules murmured each of these again into memory, but the litany had become automatic, thin and without feeling, a numb comfort; and though he spoke the memories to himself over and over like a rosary against loss, he felt them slipping one by one and ceasing to exist.

I want something new,
Grasshopper had written.
Teach me something.

The words were only light and air, flashed over the city and into Jules’s room like magic, but Jules imagined—and this is another form of belief, another form of storytelling—a man somewhere nearby, his hands hovering over a keyboard, his face lit by screenglow, perhaps biting his lip as he typed, perhaps tapping his foot lightly against the leg of the table at which he sat. Perhaps his sweater was too warm for the night, or his socks had holes in the toes, or he sipped gingerly at a mug of warmed milk dusted with nutmeg while he waited for Jules to respond.

BBChef:
The walls have ears, Grasshopper, and then those ears come to work attached to a mouthy, tattooed assistant. I’ve sent you shopping instructions by private message. You have thirty minutes to complete your mission and get back to me.

It was, in truth, nothing private or mysterious. He’d sent a short list for the store and instructions for Grasshopper to send him a private message upon his return. While he waited, he sat and thought and remembered. One hand absently stroked the nape of Andy’s neck, where the tiny locket at his collar jingled in the soft fur as Jules moved his hand; in the other hand, Jules held the set of keys the handsome man had lost under the bakery table, and his thumb rubbed acrid circles into the shining metal. He felt caught between his own hands; his body hung between moments that had been and had, against his will, begun to fade, and those that were just about to be. The future image was still unclear, but he felt it near him like a body, vibrating with its own possibility.

Grasshopper:
Got everything in one go, and back before my time limit, even though it meant I had to stand in line in front of an old lady who was only buying a roll of toilet paper and
not
offer to let her go in front of me, which felt really rude, and I think she thought so, too, and probably thought something about “kids today” in her head, because she gave me a pretty dirty look. Do you see what I do to please you? I’m rude to old ladies, just for you. But please note that, as a result, I am on time… no! I’m early! (Where is my reward for that?) Now what, Yoda?

BBChef:
Do not blame your rudeness to old ladies on me; you were probably just waiting for the chance to do something like that, and I was a convenient excuse. Do you kick puppies, too? Because I have a dog and I’m starting to think I should never let you near him. We’re making something really fun, very easy and decadent. But it will get messy. Everything fun, easy and decadent is a little bit messy, too, I’ve found. (Me most of all.) Go put on old clothes. Wash your hands. Do you have an apron?

Grasshopper:
No apron. And how can I meet your dog before I meet you? I promise not to kick either one of you.

BBChef:
You have a food processor but not an apron? What kind of man are you?

Grasshopper:
I’ve never used the food processor.
Gift from my mom when I moved out here. For making breadcrumbs for meatballs. Apparently, meatballs were my favorite of the stuff she cooked. She hasn’t cooked since I was seven. Our housecleaner cooked dinners for us after Mom went back to work. And anyway, who over the age of seven eats meatballs? So, long story short, I’ve never used the food processor. But I’ve pulled it out, and it’s sitting on my counter now, staring at me expectantly. What kind of dog is it?

BBChef:
First, a food processor is like any piece of your equipment: There are many amazing things you can do with it. (I did not think that would sound as dirty as it does, I promise.) Second, housecleaner? Cook? Are you a Trump? (If so, perhaps I should be a little more cautious in my affections, since bad hair seems to run in your family.) Third, Vito Corleone. (Eats, I’m sure, meatballs on a regular basis and is well above the age of seven.) Fourth, dump the almonds in there and get it going. This won’t take long. Fifth, Andy is a very dignified dachshund.

Grasshopper:
First, I didn’t think that sounded dirty until you said it did. But now it sounds dirty. You did that on purpose. Second, my toupee is way better than his. I’m not a Trump, but my dad is a lawyer and my mom is a financial planner, so I probably come from equally evil genes. The housecleaner, Birdie, hated me with a passion. She used to call me “child,” not my name, like it was the worst word she could come up with. She must have been very bitter, because I was a lovely child. But I’m starting to suspect her name might not have actually been Birdie. Maybe that had something to do with it. Third, touché. But
—
and I hate to break this to you
—
he is not a real guy, so I’m not sure I should give you points for that. Fourth, they are going. How long? And, wait, going back to two… affections?

BBChef:
First, there are no accidents, my friend. Second, I suspect that you may not have been as angelic a child as you purport. And “Grasshopper” is a very long name; “child” is probably easier. Third, what?! Then who was that guy with whom I spoke on his daughter’s wedding day? Fourth, this is getting ridiculous, and it’s about to get really messy and impossible to type. Just call me. It will be easier. And don’t make me regret this.

Jules typed his cell phone number and sent the message quickly, before he could talk himself out of what had to have been, he thought, one of the most rash and stupid ideas he’d ever had.

***

When the line clicked and the connection was made, when the voice, high and sweet and resonant as a cello on its upper string, said, “Hello,” everything inside Teddy dropped two inches and twisted backward. It was not the voice he was expecting. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but that voice made Jules real and living and warm and very present; it mapped a body through its vibrations, up through a not-too-broad chest, a long throat, a delicate aquiline nose. There was, too, a little laughter in that voice, a note of the ridiculous.

“Hello,” Teddy said.

“Grasshopper, I presume,” said the voice, and in the pause that followed, he heard it again, a little chuckle under the breath, deeper in the throat, unconscious, perhaps a nervous habit.

“It’s me,” was all Teddy could say before the breath left him entirely. He swiped at his forehead with the back of his hand and took a deep, shuddering breath. “Is this weird?”

“This is entirely weird,” Jules laughed.

“Yeah,” Teddy said and tried to let himself laugh, too. It came out a bit strangled, a bit forced, a bit too paltry, with no belly or heart to it. He ground the heel of his right foot down hard against the top of his left, just to feel something solid, to pin himself in place.

“Speakerphone.”

“What?”

“Speakerphone. Put me on speaker so you can use your hands. You’re going to need both hands, and I won’t be held responsible for you mucking up your phone.
Speaker.”

Teddy set his phone on the counter and switched to the speaker, then stood waiting.

“Hello?” Jules said. “Is this thing on?”

“Sorry,” Teddy said. “I’m still here.”

“It sounded like you’d suddenly disappeared. I was starting to believe in the rapture,” Jules said, and Teddy heard, again, the nervous chuckle.

Their conversation was awkward and full of strange pauses in which there was nothing right to say, and they focused mostly on how awkward and strange it was until Jules told Teddy to dump the almond paste on the counter and start to knead in the sugar.

“I’m doing it, too, along with you,” Jules said.

“I’m not sure whether that makes it more or less weird,” Teddy admitted, dusting everything in front of him with sugar.

“It’s just like giving a back rub,” Jules told him. “Roll gently into the dough with the heel of your hand; lean in with your upper body. Think loving things. Add a little sugar each time—watch for when it’s ready for more. Not too much at once.”

Several moments passed when all that held their connection was a string of huffed and effortful breaths and the soft thump of dough. Teddy felt Jules pressing and leaning forward into his work, felt the small sweat and ache that had begun to announce itself in Jules’s shoulders, felt it when he held his breath as he pushed and then exhaled in a rush as he flipped the dough, felt it all as surely as if Jules’s body were there next to him, as if he might reach to the side and, without glancing over, brush the sugar from Teddy’s forearm, a gesture which might have been, if real, if the result of many long hours spent in the kitchen together, sweet and familiar and unthinking.

“My grandmother and I used to make this,” Jules breathed after a long silence, “when I was little. Mine would always become flowers. She would always make hers into people.”

Teddy understood that he needn’t reply, that Jules was speaking to him, yes, but speaking more into the empty space in which he stood as a witness, talking a story into the evening around him, and he, Teddy, was lucky to be near, to listen in as the story spun itself out of Jules and into the open, open quiet.