Without Fiction
After years of college and cooking school, after four years of long days building The Crossroad into a respected, affordable place to eat, Mateo Cruz started to read fiction again. He ran through his sorry collection of classics in a month. While his business never suffered—he had succeeded over time by marrying artistry and efficiency—he completely lost himself, in reading breaks as short as five minutes or as long as an entire off-day, to Mark Twain, to Flannery O’Connor, to anyone who would have him, as he liked to think of it, until the books on the entertainment center shelf were all read again and he regained a balance he had not known since walking across the stage to accept his diploma and shake the hands of the university president and Angie Dickinson, the most famous Kasota State alumnus.
On his drives each week up and back from the meat, fish, and produce markets of the Twin Cities, he nearly resented his time away from the current book, each a loaner now from friends or the library, and even though others recommended Books on Tape, he never found the pleasure the same, especially when actors read or when the text had been abridged. Instead, he simply drove, paying attention to the landscape as he always did, but now absorbed too in the life of the book at the point where he left off. The back of the van rattled with cases of wine, with crated quarter-sides of beef and ice chests of whole salmon, while Mateo wondered about Henry, the auto dealer from Lolo, whose wife had disappeared into the Bitterroot wilderness to find evidence of the lost casualties of Lewis and Clark. Or he thought about the self-destructive Catherine, alone in her Brooklyn basement as the feet of 35,000 New York City Marathon runners passed by. Or the condor smugglers of Peru. Or the crack teens of Keokuk, Iowa. Mateo had always been a social animal, always had friends and employees alike that he cared about, but he never felt connected to as many lives as during those first few months after his return to fiction.
We want a julienne carrot tonight. This is more barrot, he said to one of the new chefs, a fistful of orange strips beside him. Mateo meant the criticism to be constructive. He looked across the prep area and through a dangle of hanging pots to make eye contact. We’ve got to be more attractive than Embers, even better-tasting than RiverHouse. Elegant and flavorful—or we die.
The young employee understood and paid more attention to the cut.
Besides, more surface area means more of the veggie sucking up drippings from the pork.
It had always been an act of love to feed people, even after he started charging for it, so Mateo was not surprised to find himself, in the middle of prep or later during a dinner service, daydreaming that those in the dining area included characters from his reading, believing and believable people like the auto dealer Henry’s wife, recovered now from exposure and sitting down for her first solid meal since near-death in the wilderness. He never lost touch with reality in any clinical way—he still talked sense to people and managed the flow in a busy kitchen—but he accepted these waking visions gladly, realizing they might be rooted in some wish to reach beyond the restaurant to offer comfort to others, just as those fictional characters, however flawed or desperate, reached into his own set of predicaments and, in their own way, fed him. Four months after his return to fiction, he wondered if he was happy with his life.
Half an hour to opening, he reminded the kitchen crew. That meant three kinds of red wine to be uncorked, the vinaigrette left out at room temperature, the garnishes all checked, the prep area wiped down. The crew went off in different directions while he crowded around a small table with the waiters, explaining the night’s special. Each took tastes so he or she could speak about the dish with some authority.
Remember to mention the rosemary-balsamic glaze. And the pork is organic—that’s important to some people. And if they ask for more detail, and only if they ask, it means fed without pesticides or antibiotics. As for the sides, they’re a white-wine pilaf and a jumble of lightly roasted vegetables. He looked at each of them and winked. The secret ingredient is parsnips.
Many times since starting the restaurant, he had guessed everything in his life might come down to Kiki Lamonica. He thought that again when, just before the doors opened that evening, he remembered their trip to Moon and Yew House of Fortune after an off-day wine run to St. Paul, nearly four years earlier, back when he couldn’t give a meal away. Neither of them had done anything like visit a psychic before.
Things fall apart, Chloe Rook said, looking deep into the pattern of her tablecloth. She was maybe thirty-five, maybe a dozen years beyond a double major in kinesiology and religious studies. The books on the shelves behind her included a full set of The Collier’s Encyclopedia, but poetry seemed to make up the rest, the titles interrupted in their rows or obscured by glistening stones and lit candles. Mateo wondered if she thought they were a couple. Kiki told him later she had wondered the same thing.
Much success, much success ahead for the both of you, the woman said, smoothing out wrinkles. She nodded to Kiki. You will live to be 101 and die in a Paris rainfall with more self-understanding than you can contain. From somewhere near the window, a dangling crystal shot fingernail-sized rainbows around the room.
She turned her eyes to Mateo and put her hands on top of his. You will be confused but never stop loving your friends. They, in return, will hold you up, and that blessing will be the greatest of many riches.
This still felt like a lark. Mateo hoped people who were in love or thinking of changing jobs or had cancer did not come to her and expect real wisdom back. A television whispered from the room behind the salon.
And as for the two of you, the center will not always hold. Back then, not a day went by when Mateo didn’t ask himself if he loved Kiki, his best female friend in college, the woman he introduced his best male friend to, the woman who married that friend. Sometimes the question made him feel lighter on his feet. It was fraught with possibility, despite unavoidable complication. Sometimes it felt like a weight, as if even asking about Kiki in the quiet of his mind were a form of betrayal.
If you fight this, young man, there will be anarchy. The TV volume amplified slightly. He recognized a game-show theme. A plaster bust of Beethoven rested on the floor next to a potted tree. Mere anarchy, Madame Rook said, looking him in the eyes, everywhere in your world.
Mateo and Kiki drove back to Kasota Bend largely in silence, his tires humming loudly on the scored road surface. And even later, they never really tried to process aloud what either had made of the woman’s words. Those years since, all those years without fiction, their quiet drive home became the dramatic scene he returned to in spare moments between being practical, building a business, and being the best godfather anyone could ask for.
And now, of course, having returned to books, he had the lives of others to consume him. Once the first customers arrived after 5:00, two older couples trying to beat the rush, he allowed the first service or kitchen blunders of the evening to play themselves out while he leaned against the wall by the swinging doors, imagining what would happen to Lamont and Bianca, the crack teens of Keokuk. That their parents were good Lutherans and bulwarks of the community implied nothing, the way fiction ran its course these days. That the boy and girl themselves remained, beneath the ugly face of their addiction, sweet as clover in the field, might not make a difference either, even though he felt them destined, if he had any say about it, to grow strong into their twenties from their early brush with a deathbound weakness, to get married, to make babies together, to run the honest furniture sales or tax accountancy, to build both family and business the only way possible, with tears, laughs, and work, all those things that would prepare them for new grief and joy no human could predict. Their story could really go anywhere.
Boss, they’re claiming the house red tastes like cork, one of the waiters said. His head ticked slightly in the direction of two regulars.
Give them what they want, Mateo answered. Suggest that new Chianti. It’s not as rustic.
Mateo entered the kitchen and nodded whenever the help looked his way. He tasted the broth they kept hot for finishing off risotto. He opened an oven door and picked a shallot from the roasting pan, popping it into his mouth. Without thinking about why, he felt his eyes fill with water, and he turned away from the others so he could blink and then wipe his cheeks.
You guys are terrific, he said. A real dream.
Thanks, Boss, one of them said. You’re the best.
Some years before the fortuneteller, Mateo and Kiki spent a long weekend in his apartment. She hadn’t married Ben yet, but the two had been heading in that direction. On a road trip in Colorado, Ben called Kiki to check in and told her he’d asked Mateo to take her out every now and then while he was gone.
It’s not as if I’m a shut-in, she told Mateo. I go to movies, I walk along the river, I listen to the songs of birds. If I lock myself up when I need to study human frailty—well, that’s what therapists do.
They sat at an outside table in front of an Old Town café run by an ancient husband and wife.
These people have my number when they’re ready to sell. He swirled the wine in his glass. You’re looking at the home of my first restaurant, Kiki.
He burns me up sometimes— she said, and then, Oh, Mateo. She put a hand on his. That’s wonderful news.
They said it wouldn’t be for a few months, which gives me time for some planning and to round up a partner. I want you and Ben in on this in some way, but I don’t want any money to pass between us.
Sure, sure, she said. Of course.
Mateo spent the rest of evening at the cafe drawing floor plans in the air, describing the furniture and fabric styles he’d chosen, and the core dishes he’d already tested on his friends, including her, without their knowing. He rode a sort of wave when he talked, some energy not entirely his own carrying him forward. Kiki, whose affection he never doubted, only its intensity, listened and nodded, and her eyes lit up at all the right moments. Then no one was left at the tables anymore.
Take me to your house, she said. She looked at him.
So Kiki had made the first move after all those years of questions, and they drove to his house in silence, and all weekend making love or eating or reading, one head leaned into the other, they barely spoke. In bed they held each other like feathers, free of any wind, in the other’s hands. At the downstairs window, Kiki wrapped her arms around Mateo from behind and lay her cheek on his shoulder. They looked out on the street. No one ever looked back in.
All weekend, they never once turned on a light or left the house. By Sunday morning, Mateo brought in the newspaper and knew from it the exact weight of guilt he would carry with him forever, a sort of stone for the pocket, a sort of lump for the throat. Half-read books lay open everywhere on the main floor: on the dining room table, the hearth, the stairs.
I need to go home now, Kiki said later that morning.
They never talked about the weekend again.
The day after the fortuneteller, Kiki stopped by work and told him she was pregnant with her first child, his future godchild, and that she planned to name her son, and she knew it to be a son, Mateo Ignacio Ficus. His first name would honor her best friend, she said, as would the last, and her son’s middle name would honor the fire of love between the two men, some of it hers, that had brought the three adults together. In a strange way, Mateo had known some announcement like this was in the offing, and as he embraced her in front of the restaurant, the lunch crowd filling sidewalks all over town, orders being taken, orders being filled, he felt the growing boy—if only for that moment, without the slightest shame or lack of joy for the real parents—all his.
posted by Trestles @ 1:23 PM
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