He dropped her at the Transbay Terminal with a quarter for a phone call. Her mother needed two laps through the premises and a PA announcement before finding Esmerelda sacked out under a bench, unrecognizable, stinking of sugar and shaking like a massage chair. “Look what they have done to you!” Fanny exclaimed. “My baby, my baby! I lose your father to the seas and you to food, and what have I got left? We must go home and put
you back together again.” Fortunately Fanny had taken Harold’s old truck, as her around-town Mustang was getting a new set of brakes in the shop, so she helped her daughter into the flatbed, told her to hang on, and drove well below the speed limit all the way home to the dismay of motorists behind her.
The months in Bruce’s fortress had rendered Esmerelda 150 pounds overweight, incoherent, and sapped. She passed out on the living room couch for two days straight, until the new manager down at Incognito, Michael “Slippy” Sanders, made a swim move past Fanny’s hip block at the door and slapped Esmerelda across the face with his briefcase.
“Worse than I thought,” he said as Esmerelda drifted back to sleep. “Though it could have been horrendous. Took four men and a tractor to wheel out Zoogman’s last lab partner, if you can believe that. Anyhow, we got her back, that’s all that counts; she can get back in shape in no time. We’ll give her a raise too—sales have been sliding without her, something’s missing from the sweets, the girl’s in demand. Think she can be back on the job tomorrow?”
“Asshole!” Fanny cried, breaking an antique serving plate over Slippy’s head. He came to on his stomach positioned diagonally down the front steps, his briefcase in the middle of the street and badly bashed from passing vehicles, a bill for the serving plate in his breast pocket. He limped to his car and drove off without further argument.
For the next half hour Fanny sat on the edge of the sofa and watched her daughter sleep. New deposits undid her once-alluring figure; her limbs were reformed with impossible diameters; her hands and feet looked like inflatable toys. Conclusive proof of a spiritual shellacking. She pulled off Esmerelda’s shoes and socks and rocked her slowly on her spine. “Esmerelda, dear, come, get up,” she prodded. “The sun is shining; you are alive and free. You need a shower, fresh clothes, a walk around the block. And beyond that, Mr. Sanders has a point. You have a job and should
do it. Who knows, perhaps the familiar environment will help snap you from this torpor.”
The lollipop head lolled and blinked. “Ma?” it asked in a new, beefier timbre, “have you got any cake?”
“Only veggies for you,” she declared. “Now quiet.”
It took a week-long fast and detox program to shake the spell from Esmerelda’s bloodstream, a series of enemas to wash out her intestines, and tanks upon tanks of drinking water to flush her body clean. Over the course of a month she became lucid again, walking without the use of crutches and preparing her own salads and using the bathroom by herself. Eventually she noticed the mountain of mail piled next to her bed and started to go through it. Sprinkled among the catalogs and fan mail she found legal notices from Incognito threatening dismissal, an assortment of overdue credit card bills, demand letters from collection agencies, liens imposed on her Ferrari. She reported for work the next day.
Silence descended as Esmerelda nudged aside the kitchen’s swinging metal doors and waddled to her station. Her gait was new and dispiritingly ducklike; her frame appeared hugely oversized; her friendly face was lost in a bog of fat; her eyes emitted fewer lumens; her fresh-out-of-school bod was blitzkrieged and gone. Her hair was less lustrous and locked away in a Puritanical, sexless, librarian-style bun. She wore a dress-slash-hospital-gown thing instead of an apron, covering her whole body except her hands and head. The staff stopped preparing dinner and whispered to one another, wondering what the hell happened to the sweet, perky pastry phenom that had been such hot stuff just eight months before, until Esmerelda leaned against the counter and whaled two Bundt pans together.
“Things haven’t gone so smooth for me lately. Plain bad, in fact. I’m fat, tired, and hungry all the time. My temper sucks too, so approach with caution. But I still want to kick ass, and I got some ideas on how to do it. So here I am. I figure we stay out of
each other’s way and keep the food coming, we’re back on the map in no time. That’s best.”
The staff nodded and smiled quietly, excitement welling in their joints. An hour later a delivery boy out on a drop told a receptionist about Esmerelda’s return, the CEO was informed, the country club was notified, the foodies alerted, and then the media caught wind of it, and before Esmerelda could preheat the oven Incognito was swarmed by journalists scuffling for a glimpse. It hit the six o’clock news, and then the phone system broke down; a line formed six blocks long; reservations were auctioned off for five-digit sums. After surveying the madness, Slippy Sanders ducked into the kitchen and found Esmerelda digging through the refrigerator previously reserved for butter.
“Nuts,” she was saying, “this butter’s old and cheap, and there’s other stuff in here poisoning the pool. Look at this crap.” She tossed a rotting butternut squash over her head.
“Maybe we slipped a bit while you were gone,” Slippy said, invoking the sobriquet he’d earned in his lady-killing days. “What do you need to get back on track? Cheese from China, zucchini from Zimbabwe, hamburger from Hamburg, it’s yours.”
“Well, we could start with some decent butter. Where’s my guy with the stuff?”
“Who?” Slippy thought for a moment. “There was a guy up north who kept billing us for butter, but nobody ever used it, and it was overpriced. Fuel costs alone were more than what we pay now.” He watched deep crevices form in Esmerelda’s face. “But you want him, no problemo,” he added, jogging toward the phone. “I’ll set it up right now.”
Esmerelda waded through the kitchen, counting problems on her fingers. The pans had been swapped out, the seasonings reorganized, the ovens coated with a thick coat of grime. “Hey, guys,” she called, wiping flour on her hands, “somebody get in there and scrub. You’ve been serving dirt, not sweets. Now who took my All-Clads?”
The kitchen staff stared at her, wistfully recalling the slender semi-sexpot hidden beneath her flesh overcoat. “Quit staring!” she called. “Chop chop!”
Her staff moved slowly, unmoored by her snappishness and resentful of her abdication, exasperating Esmerelda with their seeming disinterest in producing world-class desserts. They baked angrily, for too long and too rough, not adhering to recipes, forgetting key ingredients, plating sloppily, sometimes spitting in the batter. Even so, their creations marked a tremendous improvement over Incognito’s recent end-of-meal fare, not quite all the way beyond divinity, diners agreed, but good, damn good, the woman was clearly a difference maker, if a bit rusty. Orders hailed down on the kitchen like hail and, when the oatmeal cookie crumbs had settled and the last of the hangers-on were forced out at 2 AM, the cash register had banked a record haul.
Slippy found Esmerelda in the kitchen, resting on a stool with a glass of skim milk. “Nice day, kid,” Slippy said. “We needed you.”
“My butter,” Esmerelda growled, “what’s the deal?”
Slippy hopped up to sit on the counter, an approachable managerial move calibrated to lessen the blow of bad news. “Jamison won’t answer the phone, and his neighbors say he’s been out of town. I sent a guy up to find him and he said the lights were off, the barn was empty, the mailbox was full. Hell, Esmerelda, I think your man’s done up and skipped town.”
“Fudge,” Esmerelda said, “that guy’s the best. We’d better find him.”
“Or somebody just as good,” Slippy said enthusiastically. “How hard is it to make first-rate butter anyhow?”
The next morning, when Esmerelda and Slippy drove up Highway 101 to Sonoma County and began knocking on doors of prominent dairy farmers, their offers of incentive-laden and unusually producer-friendly distribution agreements were steadily dismissed. The star power and well-tabulated rise in business that came with supplying a celebrity chef could not arouse interest, and, despite Slippy’s most charming cajoles, not
a single dairyman considered making a deal. “Shit,” Slippy said under his breath, “it’d be easier to get our own cows.” Which is precisely what they decided to do after a week of doors slammed in their faces, San Francisco being an ideal climate for bovine residents, and from a marketing perspective a glass-enclosed cow-grazing pasture in the middle of the restaurant would be a compelling attraction for diners. But the cow breeders wouldn’t have anything to do with them either, preferring to ignore calls or pretend to be out or fake violent illnesses or in some cases actually retire at the door rather than turn down Slippy’s request for cattle and face the antidiscrimination lawsuit he was itching to smack them with.
“What gives?” asked Esmerelda after a week of failed cowmen recruitment. “We’ve been blacklisted!”
“Probably your boyfriend Zoogman,” Slippy responded.
“He is
not
my boyfriend,” Esmerelda snapped.
“Well, one way or another he’s screwing us over. I’ll get to the bottom of this, and then we’ll see what’s what.” Slippy headed for his office to type up a cease-and-desist letter while he was worked up, his legal prose spigot open wide. He found a gleaming white device blocking his doorway, skinny and long and outfitted with what looked like finely tuned aeronautics components, potentially a high-tech bomb. After close examination he wheeled the contraption out of the way and flipped on the lights to find Bruce Zoogman sitting in his chair and working on a bottle of Incognito’s most exclusive white wine, an Alsatian Pinot Blanc from the late ’40s, the last of three known bottles ever to grace the earth.
“You!” Slippy exclaimed, hurling the bicycle at Bruce and taking out a desk lamp, a notebook computer, and his collection of classic snow globes in the process. “Away from my pastry chef!”
Bruce picked the bike off the floor, removed a few glass shards, and leaned it against the wall. “I dropped by to tell you that you can have all the butter you need, the embargo is off. You can even put in your little zoo.”
“Why this crap?” Slippy demanded. “What has she done to you, other than sacrifice the prime of her career and her physical well-being in the name of culinary excellence?”
“She’s done more than that. Thanks to Esmerelda’s pep talks, I’m opening a new restaurant to complement my bakery. And, given the strength of the competition, I thought a supply-chain advantage could be beneficial. But it felt slimy and unharmonious, and my karma suffered—as it should. Also, chemical analysis shows my desserts are measurably superior. We’ll let the public decide.”
The air in Slippy’s lungs fractured into rock-hard rage, barely bottled. “When she gets her butter, my girl will run circles around your kidnapper’s club,” he screamed. “And I’ll get the FTC on you for the pleasure. You think you can collude against tax-paying Americans without a little federal interdiction? Think again, amigo.” Slippy slammed his briefcase across his visitor’s face and shoved him out of his office, through the front door of the restaurant, to the curb. “Sayonara, fuckface,” he spat, his loafers connecting with Bruce’s kneecaps. “I’ll see you in chocolate-covered hell!”
With Esmerelda’s hands on high-density butter, Incognito’s desserts leapt back to presabbatical levels, the apple pie rich and savory once more, the profiteroles reclaiming their decadence, the oatmeal cookies again spurring faintness of breath, with a daily rotation of Zoogman-inspired cakes—polka-dot pineapple gumdrop cake, chunky peanut-butter fudgesicle whip cake, avocado horchata Guadalajara cake—that were unveiled each evening on a platinum platter to uproarious applause from diners. But while the overall quality of Esmerelda’s concoctions was superlative, the regulars sometimes noticed tiny chinks in the armor that hadn’t been there before: an oatmeal cookie without its sprinkle of Kerala cinnamon, the occasional hard scoop of ice cream that needed a minute or two to melt, slices of cake served without the secret apricot chutney layer that added the dynamite finish. The joie de vivre was lagging, the foodies mumbled amongst themselves, standards slipping by a hair.
And then Element opened six blocks away and everybody forgot about Esmerelda Van Twinkle altogether.
Element was an instant legend, enshrined in the culinary hall of fame before the first week was out. Bruce had wisely eliminated his cakes’ occasional peyote-like side effects and focused his creativity on a single, unparalleled, easy-to-remember dessert called Mandibles of Chocolate, a luxurious conflagration of chocolate perfection. Not a single person who sampled the dish failed to fall deeply in love with it—even those who didn’t care for chocolate, even those who were allergic and ate the dish anyway, so as they flailed in the throes of cardiac failure, a miniature dessert fork poking from their mouths, they released soft, moving moans of gastronomic nirvana. Critics raved, patrons formed lines around the block, diets were busted left and right. And, thanks to regular exposure to natural light and contact with multiple human beings per day, Bruce was looking pretty good himself, his confidence-inspiring hard features chatting away on the international talk show circuit, his murderous past buried deep beneath his bankrolls.
As Element flew to the top of visitor guides and dessert lore, the bakeries, ice cream parlors, confectioners, chocolate shops, and fine-dessert vendors of San Francisco took a beating. Scores of pastry wizards were let go because people simply weren’t buying. If the sweets weren’t from Element, the thinking ran, they couldn’t hope to hit the expectations set by the reclusive kitchen magician.
Esmerelda did her best to beat the trend. She devised a luxuriously multifaceted frozen yogurt that was indistinguishable from her heavenly ice cream, but with half the calories; she crossbred bees to create a distinctively complex honey hinting of ginger and lemon; she paid international cooking gurus to teach her their secrets. She worked twenty-hour days with an unnaturally energetic, positive outlook and posted motivational sayings in the employee bathroom. The cracks in her technique were cemented over and repainted, and her desserts again left
the kitchen at the consistent level of perfection that had announced her name to the world in the first place. But nobody cared: only Element mattered, Bruce Zoogman done and deified. Incognito chugged along with the customers who couldn’t get in at Element, but they were usually irritated and tipped poorly and badmouthed Esmerelda’s baking because it wasn’t from Zoogman’s oven.