Badass chef Livia takes her troubles to work. Like a lot of us, she tries not to, but sometimes it’s hard to keep the compartments separate. In Installment XII of our serialized and savory novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), the irrevocable forces set in motion last week continue along their irrevocable course (“irrevocable,” as habitués of this petit quoin of guilty-but-oh-so-delicious reading pleasures will remember, is a favorite word of Danae’s).
But it’s all good, some very delicious accidents are produced in the process. If you need catching up, we’ve saved you samples of past feasts–we’re even keepin’ ’em warm in the oven! Click right here, and remember: leftovers are best enjoyed alone, in the dark, leaning against the kitchen cabinet, and eaten with your fingers.
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After the Breeze
After the visitation of the breeze, Livia was unable to sleep. She had, she reminded herself, hastened to relight the candles, first the yellow one, to temper passion. She had left the candles burning even after the tarts were wrapped in their midnight blue rice paper, while she made preparations for bed.
But Livia had not slept, not even, she was certain, a wink. She’d finally resigned herself to sitting vigil, in wait for the gray shadows of dawn, and spent the remaining hours of darkness theorizing. Even if the candles had gone out, it had only been for a moment. And she was absolutely certain that the six drops of Wanda’s liquid had reached the chocolate mixture. Quite likely even more than six–her right hand had shaken; the sudden darkness had startled her. The drops were the key to the tarts’ effectiveness, ergo extra drops would simply make them more successful. Even if Rick’s soul proved to be the proverbial Platonic lost half of hers, she was safe.
At six, when the gray shadows arrived, she rose. The fruit trees and birds on her walls looked eerily real in the tenuous light of dawn. Throwing on her jeans and a tee shirt, she hurried down the stairs to the coffee shop on the corner. The Dominican owner looked confused as he consulted the clock; he was not accustomed to seeing Livia at such an hour, dressed with such negligence–the jeans, he had come to suppose, were for much later in the day.
Livia ordered two cafés con leche; she would need them. After drinking them at her kitchen table, she decided, since she clearly was not going to sleep (unlike Ophelia, who–damn her–still, still slumbered), to usefully employ the morning hours that stretched lazily between her and her shift.
First, she would choose her apparel for her meeting with Rick. After some deliberation before the open door of the hall closet, Livia settled on the two-piece black suit she had worn on the occasion of her first successful endeavor with the chocolate tarts. The silk stockings, the corset, the sandals. She sometimes had recourse to that particular combination of clothing for sex when she was inexplicably apprehensive with respect to a meeting. The ensemble was talismanic, symbolic of invincibility, and a sure-fire shortcut to consequences once the ritual consumption of the chocolate tarts had been enacted.
Once the clothes were chosen, she decided to clean her apartment. Cleaning, Aunt Cornelia had always said, was a Godly way to occupy idle hands.
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The kitchen sink was thoroughly scrubbed. The chipped, white surface of the stove top shone with unaccustomed brilliance, and the wooden boards of the floor purred after their warm, soapy bath in Murphy’s Oil Soap. Livia turned to attack the shelf above the stove, where she kept the dishes for her passionate and tempering candles. It was dusty. There were heavy deposits of wax-drippings around the area where she kept the candle dishes. Livia was forced to scrape at them with a knife. Finally, after several minutes of scraping, the tempering yellow drippings gave way. They peeled off in one amorphous glob. She threw the drippings into the trash can.
The passionate red wax proved to be more difficult. Livia scraped and scraped, but the wax clung to the blue-stained wood of the shelf as though its very life were at stake. After more and useless scraping, she glanced at the clock. Twelve-thirty. Late again. Livia threw the knife into the sink. The wax would have to stay where it was.
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Improvisation
As she hurried toward the subway, Livia was vaguely aware of the unaccustomed heat. The sun was bright, brighter than was the norm for the showery, new-leafed month of April. There were, she noticed with distracted surprise, fully bloomed flowers in the window boxes of some of the buildings on the sunny side of the street. The flowers–petunias, snapdragons, even some geraniums–were not the violets, daffodils, or pale-tinted, tiny irises she associated with spring. These blooms were drenched in the saturated colors of July heat and lethargy.
She would have sworn (although, in her sleep-deprived state, the sensible Livia would never actually have sworn to anything) that the seductive blooms had not been in those window boxes the day before.
Maybe they were in for an early summer–Livia recalled suffocating heat in her apartment the night before while she’d prepared the chocolate tarts. And she remembered, puzzled anew, the burning sensation in her fingertip after she had lightly touched her tongue.
At work, Livia was distracted (lack of sleep, as she had had the opportunity to observe during the owl-eyed month she’d spent following the inauguration of the chocolate tarts, was detrimental to one’s concentration). The white-tiled surface of her station was inexplicably disorderly, implements scattered in disarray across it. The irritated Livia rearranged them and set to work.
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Following her return from New Orleans, Livia was informed that she had been given a raise and promoted to sous-chef.
“Za first voman to haf here zees position…”, the pot-bellied, red-nosed Hungarian owner added, rubbing his enormous belly portentously with his small, chapped hands.
The raise and promotion were given because of the heavenly delectability of everything Livia had chopped, diced, filleted, marinated, simmered, sauteed, seasoned or even touched during her shift on the day of the evening she met Rick.
That evening, at the very moment in which Livia extracted the midnight blue rice-paper package from her bag, one of the restaurant’s most wealthy and regular clients experienced a spasm in his mouth shockingly similar to those spasms which generally occur only in regions below the waist, between the thighs. The spasm, he avowed, had been brought on by his tongue’s first contact with the heavenly sauce that moistened the giant al dente pasta shells stuffed with garlic-sauteed spinach and farm-fresh ricotta on the delicate china plate in front of him.
The Hungarian owner was summoned from the white-tiled world behind the metal door. After some ten minutes of florid compliments, batted back and forth like a badminton bird (the client was Russian), the gentleman asked to be presented to the chef.
The portly owner informed the Russian gentleman, proudly, that the hand which had created the sauce that had produced so indescribable a sensation against his jaded tongue was a feminine one (“a beautiful voman”). The hand’s owner, unfortunately, was unavailable to receive his compliments; she went off at eight.
Iron-grey eyebrows shot upward into shocked, inverted v’s that opened the Russian gentleman’s bulging eyes even wider. His booming voice lowered to a purr and his fat hand crossed the Hungarian owner’s square, red palm; there was a crackling sound. A crisp, one-hundred dollar bill made its way into the cramped space of the Hungarian owner’s pocket. The crisp bill was for the angel who had created the heavenly sauce. On his next visit to the restaurant, the gentleman wished to be presented to its recipient.
~
Livia, when she learned of the success of her sauce, was shocked. The sauce had, in the short space of four days and nights, become legendary; it was to be incorporated into the restaurant’s standing menu. The sauce, however, had been a harried improvisation. The clams for the marinara sauce ai frutti di mare on her list of things to prepare had failed to appear with the morning seafood shipment from Biloxi, and Livia had been loathe to devolve the sauce into a simple tomato one. She had searched the storeroom for pasta shells and had found several boxes, forgotten and dusty, behind a large case of fava beans. She’d asked one of the delivery boys to get her two kilos of fresh basil and set about chopping garlic.
She should have been exhausted, lethargic. But the sweaty, nervous energy of the night before had not diminished, despite her failure to sleep, even one wink–instead, it had visited a fevered, inchoate, and brilliant inspiration upon her in a moment of extreme crisis: basil-cream sauce with the slightest touch of cayenne pepper.
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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.
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