Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [151]
Just then a phone rings somewhere, the ringtone, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Jake’s. And mine, although Jake probably doesn’t know that. Months ago, in a fit of longing, I changed my ringtone to match his and never bothered to change it back. Jake pulls away, panting. His eyes flit to the hallway where our coats hang on hooks. He looks at me, looks away again. I pull myself up, run a hand through my rumpled hair.
“Hold that thought,” he says, scurrying over to the hallway to fish his phone from his coat pocket. I reach for my wineglass and take a long, luxurious sip, but the wine lodges uncomfortably in my throat. I finally swallow, not because I want to, but because I need to remind myself exactly how bitter it tastes. The last time I tasted it was here, in this kitchen, almost a year ago. I grab the bottle and confirm what I already know. 1999 Tenuta dell’Ornellaia Masseto Toscano.
“Sorry, I missed it, and they didn’t leave a message,” he says, frowning. “Now, where were we?” he says, reaching for me again.
I drain the wine. “Nowhere,” I whisper. “That’s where we are, Jake. We are nowhere.” It isn’t until I say the words that I realize I actually mean them. It’s like putting on a pair of eyeglasses you thought you didn’t need. Suddenly, I’m calm, and like that anthropologist Dr. D-P had rattled on about, preternaturally tuned into the most insignificant details. Like the stain on Jake’s apron that looks like the state of Florida, the pack of Merits in the front pocket of his shirt I hadn’t noticed before, the wistful look in his tired eyes. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I can’t.” He grabs my wrist, presses my palm to his mouth, and kisses it. I pull my hand back and turn abruptly.
Partly, it’s the wine, but mostly it’s the way Jake’s body had tensed the instant the phone began to ring. I know, without Jake’s having to tell me, that he isn’t finished with Nicola—not nearly—and I can’t see myself dodging phone calls, meeting clandestinely, being another in a long line of women wooed by Jake and his bag of recycled tricks.
I pick up my sweater on the way out the door. Don’t turn around, I repeat until I’m safely out of the alley and onto Grove Street.
Regrets? A few, but the biggest one is that I didn’t get to finish the cassoulet.
Dolce
I’ve set the board: henceforth ’tis yours to eat.
—Dante, The Divine Comedy
chapter 31
The great gourmand, Auguste Escoffier, once said, “Good cooking is the essence of true happiness.” Did he mean that happiness is to be found in the act of cooking? Or in the appreciation of the result? If the former, it should follow that all good cooks are happy. But most of us aren’t, at least the ones I’ve known. Most of the cooks I know are looking for something. The lucky ones, people like Boulie and Silvano, seem to have found it, while the rest of us soldier on, searching for love, or adulation, or affirmation, gathering scraps wherever we can find them.
Maybe what Escoffier meant was that true happiness is to be found in one’s ability to satisfy a basic human need so spectacularly. Those of us content to take our happiness secondhand cook because what we want, what we crave, is to be needed. Nurturers extraordinaire, brokers of comfort, we hope to turn the tables on our own needs by filling the stomachs and souls of the world.
Jake had needed me. Maybe that was what I loved about him. We’d been companionable, compatible, in small ways; our dreams, professional at least, had been shared. Perhaps he even loved me, insofar as he was capable of loving, but I suspect what he really loved about me was my caring for him completely, loving him to the exclusion of everything else. Until Grappa; and until Chloe.
One thing I know for sure—Jake’s infidelity won’t end with Nicola and Zoe.
Some men are just built that way, I guess. It should give me some satisfaction, but it doesn’t. It no longer even makes me angry. When I examine just what’s worth salvaging from my life in New York, what I keep coming back to is Grappa, some