Badass chef Livia has been instructed by Wanda to stay far, far away from Bad, Bad Chocolate Tarts until she’s back from saving her sister’s butt in New Orleans. But, as we all know, ladies, if one is smart enough, she can rationalize pretty much anything, and be convincing about it… even to herself. In Installment X of our serialized and salty little tartelette of a novella, some irrevocable forces are set in motion. We’re kind of into the dinner phase now, but no worries, if you missed drinks and hors d’oeuvres, you can go back to the very beginning by clicking right here.
NB, for what follows: That thing in the picture? It’s a phone. Really, it is.
~
Telephone
After her conversation with Wanda, Livia took the train back uptown. On her way from the subway stop to her building, she stopped at a deli. For chocolate and flour. She shouldn’t, she knew—Wanda had told her to suspend all chocolate tart tastings until after her return from New Orleans. But the flour jar was low, and she was almost out of chocolate. She was merely following Pearl’s example.
There were no messages on her answering machine. She dialed the other number; she had one new message.
The message was from a man named Rick. He was forty-two years old, he had dropped out of a Ph.D. program in philosophy, he now owned an antique store, and he was bored with meeting women in bars (that was what they all claimed–Livia was never sure she believed any of them, but this was not about integrity. This was about sex). Rick claimed to be six feet, three inches tall, slim with long blond hair, which he wore in a ponytail. He assured Livia, no, Ophelia, that he owned a motorcycle jacket. Livia, in her no-nonsense laying-out of the qualifications–both physical and intellectual–necessary for even a phone call, had named the possession of a leather motorcycle jacket as a sine qua non.
That stipulation virtually assured her the avoidance of frumpy men: very few frumpy men would dare to appear in public in a black leather motorcycle jacket. In fact, very few men, having heard the dispassionate tones of Livia’s voice warning them against exaggerating their physical appeal (“I will eventually see you “), would dare to claim a full head of hair if they were bald, or to tout their broad shoulders and flat stomach if they were pudgy. Livia had thus far been satisfied with the results of her severity.
As to Rick’s calling her Ophelia, it was a precaution. One didn’t want the chocolate tart tasters, by some clever machination (after all, she had specified intelligence as one of the necessary criteria), obtaining one’s phone number, or divining one’s place of work, once the chocolate tart had been tasted, once the prickly warm desire between one’s silk-stocking clad legs had been satisfied, and the consequences consummated. (“No, I have yours, I’ll give you a call…” Livia often wondered how long they waited).
Sometimes, she told the men her name was Marta.
~
Rick had said that she could phone as late as two. It was barely twelve. She reached for the telephone, then paused. Wanda had cautioned her against having anything to do with the chocolate tarts until her business in New Orleans was completed. But, Livia reasoned, she had successfully handled the matter of the ad and the chocolate tarts for two entire years. On the one occasion when danger had been terribly close, Livia had reacted quickly, superbly, almost professionally. Wanda didn’t give her enough credit. Livia knew that it was because she wasn’t really Latina. Despite her perfect Spanish and her address, Livia, with her pale skin and blue eyes, would never be anything but a gringa.
And it was time–she hadn’t offered chocolate tarts to anyone for more than a week. The previous Sunday had been Easter, and Livia had worked many more hours than was her wont during the week preceding the holy day. For the past forty-eight hours, stabs of desire had asserted themselves with annoying insistence at the most inopportune of moments. That very day, while she was engaged in preparing delicate potato latkes, to be served with light sour cream and Russian caviar, Livia had allowed her mind to wander into dangerous territory. The smell of burning batter alerted her to her to the fact that all of the oil in her skillet had burned away. Soon she would have had a fire on her hands.
Livia could take care of herself, thank you very much. She would call Rick. She was doing the only sensible thing: her mind would be much freer to concentrate on Danae’s situation if she took care of her baser needs first.
There were five long rings. A click, a few seconds of silence, or maybe it was only one. Perhaps Rick had been sleeping.
The voice, when it answered, was a careful voice, a precise voice, the tones measured. It was a fully American voice; Livia thought that perhaps she detected the hint of a Midwestern accent, maybe Wisconsin. Livia’s ear, after two years of planning chocolate tart tastings with unknown voices over the phone, had become sensitive to the slightest nuances of cadence and timbre. She had been known to end a conversation after the exchange of only a few phrases: sometimes a mere “hello” was enough to induce Livia to rapidly replace the receiver.
But she liked this voice. Rick’s voice. In addition to the hint of a Midwestern accent, there was a certain roughness. Beneath the roughness, something carefully controlled. Livia wanted to know what that something was.
“Is this Rick?”
An amused, contained, interrogative, open-ended “Yes…?” The voice waited for her to identify herself.
“My name is Li…Ophelia…” The contained something had almost made her forget. “You left a message in my voice mailbox.”
There was another pause, then the voice, contained; again, Livia suspected a hint of amusement. “Yes, I did.”
A short silence, with which her interlocutor appeared not to be in the least uncomfortable. For some inexplicable reason, the silence was terribly arousing to Livia. “I guess it’s late. Did I wake you up?”
There was a laugh. A low laugh. Livia liked the laugh.
“No, and if you had, you would be perfectly within your rights. I told you you could call as late as two. It’s only ten past twelve.”
~
Breeze
It was after one when Livia replaced the receiver into the cradle. The conversation had been, on the surface, pleasant and innocuous. Rick had talked about his childhood and adolescence. He had moved a lot–California, Michigan, Wisconsin (Livia had been right), which had turned him into something of a loner. He had finished coursework for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale, but had dropped out before orals.
“I’ve never understood why you have to look like you have a broom up your butt to be an academic.”
After leaving Yale, he had come to New York (a logical choice). A short laugh. He’d worked in bookstores, art galleries, a restaurant. He’d opened the antique store with his wife. They’d separated. He’d bought her half.
Livia could have listened to Rick’s voice for hours; it wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest what he talked about. And there were the pauses and the short silences. He listened, considered, before responding to Livia’s statements or queries. Even as she’d enjoyed the pauses, she felt that they had been designed to test her, perhaps even to make her uncomfortable. As though he were tempting her, encouraging her to foolishly rush to fill them. The discomfort his pauses might occasion seemed to give him a mildly perverse pleasure.
Livia approved of perversity, as long as it was not carried to extremes. Perversity, judiciously employed, excited her. She wanted, very badly, to know what lay behind the pauses.
Given the violent effect of Rick’s voice and its pauses on her body, Livia had considered postponing their meeting until after her return from New Orleans. Wanda’s warning rang in her ears as they deliberated on a suitable place to meet (“don’t fuck with this, Livia…”). But Livia assured herself that she would scrupulously follow the rules of the chocolate tart game, to the letter, that she, as in the previous case of successfully averted disaster, would flee with due haste at the first hint of similar souls.
Rick suggested a bar near his antique store (he lived, conveniently, in a studio behind the store). They agreed on nine o’clock. The entire process could even be over in an hour or two: a drink, the tart, the consequences of the tart. With any luck, she would be sleeping peacefully in the embrace of the walls of her bower, decked with Wanda’s illusionistic tour-de-force, by midnight.
~
Immediately after her conversation with Rick, Livia began to prepare the chocolate tarts, vaguely conscious that it was hot in the kitchen. She felt sweat gathering under her arms and along her hairline; the sweat started to trickle in warm, salty rivulets down her sides toward her waist. And it kept getting hotter, and hotter, and still hotter in the kitchen until her body felt as though it were on fire. Livia reasoned that it was getting on toward the middle of spring, that she had gotten home late and the windows hadn’t been open all day.
The air in the kitchen was sweet and close, redolent of something heavy and dense, probably chocolate, reasoned Livia. And she must have set the oven too high–that was it, it was too hot because of the oven and the window, and the heat made the smell of chocolate stronger than it normally would be. Overpowering, actually, Livia admitted to herself as she swallowed a mouthful of hot, chocolate-heavy air. But no, the oven dial read a moderate 350 degrees.
Livia made herself a strong vodka and tonic, with extra cubes of ice. And extra vodka. There was a fizzing feeling, a hissing sound, as the cold liquid made its first contact with her tongue; alarmed, Livia raised a finger to her mouth. Her hand jerked sharply as she shook it; it felt as though she had burned it on an iron. Was she feverish? No, that was silly. She felt fine. Her forehead was cool. Perhaps she was drunk.
At a convenient moment in the mixing process, Livia ran across the kitchen to open a window; almost immediately she felt better. A sharp breeze had come up. It entered the kitchen window happily, as though it had been waiting for her to open that window, so that it could playfully caress her neck, the bare skin of her shoulders, her stomach (Livia had felt so uncomfortably hot in her black jeans and her man’s shirt, that she had removed them. She now stood before the kitchen counter in bra and panties, diligently stirring the chocolate mixture.)
The breeze played with a strand of hair that had escaped the loose beignet-speared-with-chopsticks at the back of Livia’s head. She reached up, annoyed, to tuck the mischievous strand back into the beignet and, while she was at it, to wipe the sweat from the back of her neck. At that very moment, as she completed the tucking gesture with her left hand, Livia’s right hand was occupied in administering the six drops of Wanda’s liquid to the chocolate mixture.
Suddenly, the room was dark. Livia felt blindly for the light switch, cursing in furious Spanish. The wind had blown out the candles.
~
More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
~
