Our Country Friends(42)
Senderovsky and Vinod appeared before him looking glum and dazed, respectively, like two conscripted privates in an Austro-Hungarian army about to be vanquished. He quickly set them to task, ferrying things between the kitchen and the covered porch, checking on the grill while he relieved himself, and, most important, keeping him company, making him less nervous and thus moderating his alcohol intake (or that was the idea).
“Nice look,” Karen said as she hobbled over, face still distended from recent sleep. Ed was wearing his mask low under his chin (in other words, pointlessly) and had a cigarette hermetically sealed into his mouth. For once he wished Karen wasn’t being sarcastic. “Look at you go,” she added as he gently raked the coals. She had never seen him be this industrious. He’s completely in love with her, she thought.
He had stuck the sardines in a bowl and coated them in olive oil. The rest of the guests were now starting to filter onto the screened porch from their respective houses, and Dee passed him wordlessly, dressed in a collegiate parka and wearing a sly toothy smile. He nodded to her like a professional. Showtime, he thought to himself, a half glass of Campari sloshing around his mouth. The vitello tonnato was on the porch. The lamb steaks had been defrosted. He threw the sardines on the grill and watched the little fish sizzle, his eyes tight in a deep meditative stare, his apron and City Hunter jacket coated by a new layer of fish and char. The key was flipping them without losing too much of the delicious skin, and this required a surgeon’s grace. When the sardines were plated atop a bed of arugula, the latter would wilt from the heat—a sign that everything was in order.
Just then, a ghostly Senderovsky appeared through the remains of the fog, coughing into his fist but holding a strategically necessary plate of quartered lemons, which Ed immediately squeezed onto the fish, the lemon juice stinging his habanero-scorched hands. “Bring these up immediately,” he commanded the landowner as he ran to his bathroom to wash the grime off and to anoint himself with a quick spritz of nonoffensive cologne.
By the time he got up to the porch, the guests gave him a standing ovation. He glanced quickly at Dee, straining to separate the sound of her hands from the others. “You haven’t even tasted anything yet,” he said to them.
“You’re blushing!” Senderovsky said.
“Just look at the presentation,” Dee said. “It’s like something from a cooking show.”
He stopped himself from bowing to her. “Eat, eat,” he said, reminding Karen of something her mother used to say to her over breakfast: “Eat, eat, why you so fat?” Vinod was thinking of the Florent dinners he had shared with Karen and Senderovsky, three broke, starving students dipping fries into a big white pool of aioli sauce, carving out flaky little disks of goat cheese from the great big cylinder of the stuff, snapping back mussel shells and pulling out the meat with their teeth, the one time they could gorge at will without adhering to Karen’s codes of cool.
A similar hunger had settled upon the diners. Conversation ceased as the adults tore into the food, their chewing loud and uncouth (Senderovsky was reminded of his mother invoking the Russian prohibition against making the chavk sound with an open mouth, Sashen’ka, ne chavkai!), plastic knives sawing at tonnato-soaked sheets of veal or carefully peeling sardine flesh from its spine. “Oh my God,” Dee cried, her eyes full of tears. “It’s so hot!”
“Too hot?” Ed was worried.
“No, perfectly hot. And these snow peas, they just go so well with the veal and the sauce.”
“Textures,” Senderovsky said, resuming his unasked-for role as Dee’s teacher. “The softness against the crunch.”
“This is flipping amazing,” Karen said. “When you put your mind to something, Ed.”
“Oh, these sardines,” Masha said, filleting a glossy section for Nat. “They couldn’t be more perfectly grilled. It’s like I can inhale their essence.” It was unusual for her to be so lyrical, Senderovsky thought. Was she the one to have extricated Vinod’s novel? She sometimes took walks down the front lawn between patient calls and Nat’s classes and speech-therapy appointments.
“I made them just for you,” Ed said to Masha, turning to Dee with a wink to signal that it wasn’t true, that everything was for her.
“You should write a cookbook,” Vinod said.
“The world needs another Mediterranean cookbook like I need another ulcer,” Ed said.
Only the Actor remained silent, and while normally they would try to suss out his opinion, the guests remained too enthralled by the food to notice its absence. He felt their lack of interest morbidly.
“Where did you learn to cook like this?” Dee asked.
“I lived in Italy for a while,” Ed said. “When I was younger.”
“Remember when you and that countess started a bilingual magazine about the rivers of the world?” Karen said. “What was it called?”
“Wasn’t it just called Rivers slash Fiumi?” Senderovsky said, his mouth making the chavk sound with impunity now, his quarantined mother too far away in Forest Hills to hear.
“Let’s not go there right now,” Ed said, and Karen raised her hands in surrender. Ed reached for a bottle of Riesling (the newspaper would soon declare it the most underrated grape of this particular summer) and poured himself a glass to the brim, realizing he should have first asked Dee if she needed a refill. To bring up Rivers/Fiumi right now, after his victory with the tonnato and the sardines? He would never forgive Karen for that. So he had wasted his youth on silly indolent things fueled by ancestral money. So what? Were the eight hundred readers of Rivers ruined forever by his attempt at twentysomething romanticism, inspired by a combination of his love of Huck Finn’s journey down the Mississippi and the only family trip on which his father had been too drunkenly passed out to humiliate him, a luxury steamer belching its way down the wide contours of the Nile? By contrast, Karen’s invention was actively destroying people’s lives, the Actor’s included.