Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [159]
Inside the bag are a couple dozen hazelnut cookies and a small plastic bag filled with what looks like mouse droppings. I open the package and drop a couple onto my tongue. They taste a little like chocolate, deeply flavored, thick, and somewhat bitter. But the aftertaste is something entirely different, sweeter, fuller, and much more complex, something you couldn’t have predicted from their first gustatory impression. I pop one of Bruno’s cookies in my mouth. Ben just might be on to something.
Enid returns my column to me first thing the next morning, bloodied with red “tracked changes.” But before I can so much as hit “accept changes,” she is on the phone.
“Since when have you become an armchair philosopher?” Enid asks.
“I’m not allowed to be sentimental?”
“How about you stick to cooking?” Enid says, with a sigh.
“But I wrote three recipes.”
“Which look fine, but why tell them to look for the holes? What holes? I don’t get it. It’s too abstruse. Cooking is not supposed to be abstruse,” Enid says.
“Okay, I’ll fix it,” I tell her.
“No, I’ll just fix it,” she snaps. “It’ll be easier.”
“Okay. You fix it.”
“Listen,” Enid says quietly. “We need to meet. Next Monday, one o’clock. Bistro Rive Gauche. Do you know it?”
“Sure,” I tell her, even though I don’t. “Why? What’s up?”
Enid hesitates. “Nothing. Nothing’s up. Just be there, okay?”
I hang up the phone, trying to ignore the heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. There was something in Enid’s voice, something businesslike and distant, when she is usually friendlier in a brash, newspapery sort of way. I suspect I know what’s coming.
I’m about to be fired.
Which, for some reason, troubles me. I am about to quit anyway, so there really isn’t any reason why it should bother me.
Who am I kidding? I’m no writer. Enid has to rewrite practically everything I send her because I can barely string two sentences together. Most of the time, though, she’s been reasonably pleasant about it, quietly correcting my errors of spelling, punctuation, and parallel construction—whatever the hell that is—like some good-natured grammar fairy.
Maybe it’s the idea of failing at something, or letting someone down—particularly Enid, whom I like. Or maybe it’s the completely unlikely fact that I actually like writing my columns. Until I started doing it, I didn’t really feel like I had much to say. Now, the idea that people might open their paper on a Thursday morning, read one of my recipes, and head out to the grocery store, makes me happy. It’s not the same feeling I get from nailing the missing component in a particularly complex recipe, or constructing a beautiful and perfectly balanced plate, but still it feels good.
I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to write the column from New York, as Michael had suggested, but I realize it will be too hectic, with moving back and getting settled, not to mention the fact that I’ll have to hit the ground running at Grappa. I’ll just beat Enid to the punch and resign. I think of calling her back and doing it over the phone, but it seems like the kind of thing I should do in person.
I’m up to my elbows in cookie dough when the bank calls to tell me I have been approved for my loan to cover the initial AEL investment, which is a relief because the closing is scheduled for now just a week away. I call Jerry Fox, who agrees to have his colleague review the settlement sheet before I sign it. He assures me that I don’t need to attend the closing if the terms are approved and I return the signed and notarized papers in advance of the meeting next Thursday. We’ve just finished running down the last minute checklist of things to do and are about to hang up when Jerry says, “Oh, two boxes of documents showed up this morning from AEL addressed to you and somebody named—hang on”—I can hear Jerry rifling through his messages—“Ruth Bernstein. What’s up with that?”
Marcus’s secretary must have screwed up and sent the backup documentation to Jerry’s office instead of to Ruth. I explain this to Jerry and ask him to forward