The buzzer goes off again, and I pause for a moment, grabbing some newly-purchased oven mitts. The steak comes sizzling out of the oven, and I let it rest for a few minutes on a plate. It looks gorgeous, and I have an urge to cut it immediately despite directions to the contrary in the cookbook.
I proudly slice open the first steak and am greeted by the red fleshiness of undercooked meat. I panic, fanning back to the steak salad page in the cookbook. Can I put it back in the oven? Serve it semi-raw? Dump it and cry over the wasted money?
The chef gives no directions for this possibility, as if it could never happen if the original instructions are followed precisely. I wonder if my steak is too thick; if I skipped a step. With a deep breath, I drop the steaks back in the butter-laden pan and return them to the oven, biting my lip over this decision as if it holds the same importance as choosing which college to attend or which person to marry. Did I make the right choice?
When the meat comes back out of the oven a few minutes later, the center is a creamy pink, like the photographs. I almost cry, so incredibly proud of the steaks—my babies—and how they have browned in their own juices. I set them aside again, this time with real confidence. I am like a kitchen ninja from an Alton Brown skit, striking out on my own to stave off meat catastrophes.
I throw a pot of water on to boil. The crushed tomatoes in the sauce crackle and splash out, staining the stove top with blotches of juice. I turn down the heat, sprinkle in a bit of sugar for sweetness, some salt for bite, and leave it to putter away while I start on the rest of the salad.
I turn on some music and dance through the apartment, tucking dirty clothes under my blanket and snapping down my air-drying bras from the shower curtain bar. I touch-up my lipstick, give the vinaigrette another shake, and combine the pasta sauce with the drained noodles back in the original pot. I toss in some chopped kalamata olives, some arugula leaves for color. I rummage in the cabinets for something to serve it in.
The memories always comes out of nowhere, when I least want to be thinking about Adam. I’m about to throw my first dinner party, for Christ’s sake, but suddenly, I am reminded of the day he bought me the serving dish I’m holding in a small town in Upstate New York.
We had been on vacation, a small weekend getaway to Bolton Landing on
Lake George
. We spent the day wandering through antique shops and drinking coffee by the water. Right before we got back in the rental car to return to the city, we stopped in a home goods store to pick up a gift for my sister’s birthday.
Nestled between two teapots was a cheery, orange, oblong dish with stripes around the top edge. We often played a game while we were dating where he had to guess whether or not I liked a certain ring or dress as we window shopped. This game strangely stopped soon after the wedding, even though I was obviously dying to play it during all of those excursions to Me&Ro. But in this store, back when he seemed to care what I thought as if he was exploring every nook and crevice of my being, he raised his eyebrows at me and pointed at the dish, “Like?”
“Like,” I agreed.
While the cashier was ringing up the vase we were buying for my sister, he pointed towards the serving piece and asked her to box it for us. “Adam,” I hissed, trying not to let the woman hear me. “We can’t afford that right now.”
“I don’t really think you can wait on happiness,” Adam said, which was such an Adam thing to say at the time. “And when are we going to get back here?”
He had a point, and I had a dish. It was one of the things I debated leaving behind in the divorce because it made me remember that day, but it was my favorite serving piece. Remembering Adam and that day by the lake is a little bit like my longing for children when I see Beckett—this strange mixture of grief and peace and happiness all at the same time.
The truth is that a long time ago, I was more like Adam now, and he was more like I am now, and somewhere along the way, our personalities crossed and transferred like a Freaky Friday experiment. Back in graduate school, where we met, I was the one who worked well into the night. He was the sort of person who loved the minutiae of academics but dreaded applying that to the real world. He liked to argue, liked to read cases and dissect them in the same way he loved his literature books and talking about composition.
One night, he even asked me if I thought he’d be better off being a teacher. But we were too heavily in debt from law school, and he agreed—he’d find a job at a
New York
firm, work the requisite amount of hours so we could pay off the student loans and then have money left over for travel, the suburban house and 2.4 kids. He brought home stories from the office about other lawyers who stayed well into the night while we happily snuggled and ate carry-out dimsum on the sofa.
At first,
he
was the one who suggested that we grab matinee tickets to the off-Broadway shows or check out the latest exhibit at the Met or walk around the funky, bohemian Busker festival as if we had nothing better to do with our afternoon.
And then slowly, slowly, the wardrobe changed, and the jeans and t-shirts were replaced by suits. And then slowly, slowly, his tastes changed until he was telling me that he
enjoyed
the dinners out with other lawyers rather than finding them tedious. And then slowly, ever so slowly, he started stretching out his day until he was working more than he was not working.
At the same time, I was losing my drive and desire to become the best little graphic artist in the world. I was reading house-decorating magazines and talking about which neighborhoods had the best schools and could he
please
come home before nine o’clock so we could have some time together before bed?
And slowly, slowly, my heels and skirts changed to cords and sweatshirts. And slowly, slowly, I started to find things about Adam that annoyed me, like the way he discussed how much he missed the
Hamptons
with his mother or the way he flossed his teeth in the bedroom or the way he left his damp towel on top of our bedspread. And then slowly, ever so slowly, I started wearing out the sofa cushion directly across from the clock which I watched as if it held the answer to when Adam would be returning home.
These are the things I should not be thinking about five minutes before a dinner party.
I throw the noodles in my serving bowl and place the salad into a tacky dish I picked up in
Bar Harbor
,
Maine
, in the shape of a lobster. I work the serving dish a little too hard, lining up the strips of steak to look like the claws, and then change my mind and toss the whole thing together.
At
, the table is set and the food is all cooked and no one is here. I sit down to check my email. I wade through a few comments from my latest blog post—an internal debate on whether or not I should attempt baking projects now that I am the owner of a bag of cake flour. The unanimous vote is “Yes,” though no one can agree if I should begin with the angel food cake or something easier.
There is an email from a PR person wondering if I’d write about her client’s product on my blog, which is ten kinds of weird, and I don’t even know how these PR people find me. A few notes from mailing lists, an email from an online friend, and a recipe contest announcement from the site,
Epicurious
. And then, tucked between a note from Arianna telling me she secured babysitting for tonight and an advertisement from an online bookstore is a note from the Bloscars.
It is obviously a cut-and-pasted message to all nominees, but it congratulates me on being a finalist for the 2009 Bloscars and passes along a series of important dates (the opening and closing of voting being two of them) and a Bloscars icon in case I want it for my blog.
I am fumbling frantically to add it to my sidebar when the buzzer rings.
I buzz the person into the building by hitting the button on my wall and then go back to trying to figure out my blogging software. The icon is a plain grey box, but I am strangely proud to have made it to the finalist round. I finally get it uploaded and admire it for several moments on my site before a knock comes on the door.
“I’m a finalist,” I crow, throwing the door open.
But instead of finding Ethan or Arianna on the other side, I am facing a tall, droopy-eyed man with carefully tousled hair holding a wine bottle.
So, naturally, I scream.
Which causes my next-door neighbor to instantly throw open her door as if she were waiting for this exact moment to happen and hiss at me because she has a baby sleeping. I apologize to her and to the man while my brain catches up with my body, and I realize this must be one of the two men my brother said he would bring along. Silly me, I expected them to come
with
him, as in
at the same time,
so that I didn’t have to entertain a stranger in my apartment, alone. But unless you specify these things with Ethan, it’s always a guess as to how things will play out.
“I apologize,” the man said in a thick accent of European origin. I guess
Spain
. Or maybe
France
. Or
Portugal
. “Ethan told me to come here tonight? To a dinner party?”
“I’m sorry—I just thought you would be
with
him. I thought you were . . . I don’t know . . . a
random
man. I’m Rachel.”
“And I am Gael Paez,” he tells me, as if I should have heard his name before. What I hear is
Gayle Perez,
and the only person I can think about is Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, Gayle.
Except that he doesn’t look anything like a middle-aged woman. He is, by far, one of the most attractive men I have ever met face-to-face (except for Adam, but I shove that image immediately out of mind.) He is about six feet tall with broad shoulders. A quick, lopsided smile, a small scar above his left eyebrow that screams “fútbol accident,” and deep brown eyes that match his equally dark brown hair. The accent also helps. I step aside and give him space to enter the apartment.
“I work with Ethan,” Gael tells me. “On the coffee book. I lent him some of my equipment.”
“Cameras?” I ask, nervously playing with the dish towel hanging off the kitchen drawer.
“Cameras, tripods, lens,” Gael ticks off on each finger. “I am a photographer.”
“For books?” I ask.
“For weddings.”
Of course it would be for weddings.
I pick up a corkscrew and open the bottle of wine. It is white and room temperature and Gael looks at me strangely as I stand there with the cork in hand. “I didn’t mean for us to drink it now,” he admits. “It’s a gift? It’s what you bring to a dinner party, no?”
“It is; thank you. I just . . . I meant to open this bottle of red. I’ll just put this aside for a moment, and I’ll drink it later.”
“By yourself?” Gael asks, and I see him glance at my left hand and my bad-ass middle-finger cuff ring.
I imagine myself, hand around the neck of the wine bottle, drinking straight from the bottle and drooling in front of the television after everyone goes home.
Yes
, I want to answer truthfully, but instead I say, “We can have it with dessert.”
Gael slides himself onto one of the high stools in the kitchen while I switch out his wine bottle for the bottle of red I left on the counter. I glance over at the clock; Ethan, Arianna, and the other mystery guest are now nineteen minutes late.
“What do you do, Rachel?”
I like the way my name sounds coming out of his mouth. Towards the end of my marriage, I was always annoyed when I heard Adam say my name, because he often threw it into the sentence as if it were a curse word.
What do you expect me to do, Rachel?
was a well-worn phrase that I heard every time we argued, precisely after I had complained about something. That always made me clam up for the next several hours. Adam
spat
my name, but Gael lets it rolls of his tongue as if he’s uneager to let it leave his mouth.
The taste of the name
Rachel
.
I pour him a glass of the red wine and pass it to him. “I’m sort of between things right now.” I’ve obviously practiced since my date with Rob Zuckerman. “I’m a graphic artist, but I’m taking a small sabbatical from work. Learning how to cook. Writing a bit.”
“What sorts of things do you write?” He gives me a smile that says he would gladly drag this portion of the evening out indefinitely, making me volunteer every small scrap of information before he turns over whatever he has brewing behind those eyes.
My God, those chocolate-brown eyes.
And that lopsided smile.
I am saved from embarrassing myself by staring for too long by the buzzer jolting me to my senses. I ring the person into the building and stand awkwardly beside the front door. “It’s probably Ethan. Or Arianna.”
A few moments later, there’s a knock on the door, and I can hear a cacophony of voices on the other side. Arianna has arrived with Ethan and another man in tow. She rolls her eyes at me as if to say that it was painful enough to spend time in the elevator with the stranger much less now sit across from him at a dinner table. She disappears into my bedroom area to throw her coat on my bed and adjust her bra. I know her that well.