One day, during a calmer lunch service, Bouley stood on the fish line cooking halibut and started talking to the cook nearest his elbow about the fish, who happened to be me.
“You guys need to cook the halibut more slowly, give the fibers a chance to unwind. Halibut’s a tight fish,” he murmured. “You want to slowly bring out its natural sugars.” Never did he press his spatula on top of the fish to suture it to the pan and improve its browning, as the regular fish cook did. No, he laid three flat fingers on its bulging middle to urge it to settle down—more like the way a mother rubs a sleepy kid’s back. He looked up to see who was listening and took in my girlish barrettes holding back my bangs, my intent expression, my smooth, glistening pane of bleached-white indoor skin, and gave me a rakish smile, because he could spot the latent female in anyone.
“What’s your name?”
“Amy,” I said, “not Ah-my.”
He laughed. “Where are you from?”
I hesitantly said, “Rural Minnesota,” knowing that the mere mention of my home state conjures up its own brand of wholesome hickness from which I couldn’t hide.
“What do your parents do?”
“My dad’s a car dealer. My mom’s a teacher.” I wondered, Why is he asking me this? “When we were younger, she stayed at home with us. She cooked a lot.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, tasting a sauce. “What did you go to college for?”
I never said I went to college. “English,” I said. “American literature.”
“And what is it you want to do?” he said, setting the fish on a tuft of parsnip puree.
When I grow up? He doesn’t assume I want to be a cook? “I want to cook, Chef!”
He wiped the edge of the plate with a damp cloth, looked me in the eye, and smiled crookedly. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. Oh god, I was in for it.
He grabbed a large metal prep spoon and said, “You know, back when I was starting to cook, we didn’t use small spoons for plating. We used these big catering spoons.” I marveled at the absurdity of this. We often plated with the tiniest spoons we could find; my uniform’s breast pocket concealed two espresso spoons I’d cribbed from the coffee station that very day. He dipped the wide spoon bill into his small pot of ocean herbal broth and ladled it deftly onto the plate, then picked up a miniature corona of sautéed squid legs by the tip and gently dropped it into place.
He threw his arm around my shoulders and then tightened it around my neck in a friendly choke hold, and squeezed my opposite shoulder with a masseur’s precision. I stiffened, not because it felt flirtatious, but because it felt possessive. “Amy, can you run downstairs and get me two toes of garlic. And a bunch of chevrille.” (He had his own culinary language: toes for cloves, chevrille for chervil.)
“Oui, Chef.” I sped off. Holy crap, this was not a job. Bouley wanted to know who the hell you were, if you had any taste, any culture, any education, a good family. Basically, he wanted to know what the fuck you were doing in his kitchen and if you were worth his time to teach you. Cooking wasn’t just a job; it was a life—what looked to all outsiders, including my own boyfriend, like a pretty terrible life. It was, as Aaron feared, a real affliction. And possibly, a dysfunctional relationship.
Initially, I mistakenly thought that my attraction to this job was due to my reunion with the browned butter and ground poppy seeds and spaetzle of my youth, but the truth was, it was something greater than the flavors of my childhood that drew me to the Danube. It was more about the way the two captains sprang into a fistfight with each other the second they bridged the marble threshold into the kitchen, bursting into fire behind closed doors. It was the way the throbbing, merengue-blaring downstairs prep kitchen brushed up against the silent, methodical upstairs service kitchen, matching each other in intensity. The way an imperfect crew functioned perfectly, channeling all their hopes and wishes and ambitions into the center of the plate, letting their liquid emotions fall off the sides, the food always beaming in the eye of the storm. It was the simultaneous agonies and thrills of the job. It was the unrelenting syncopation of the merengue and of the clacking plates. It was the threshold itself.
I knew I’d found my people. Crossing lines, jumping the boundaries between rural and urban, high-flung and low-down, garbage juice and black truffle juice, felt right to me. Fancy and shitty, that was to be my loop. Cooking, I’d found, contained the multitude I sought. It was the kind of work that spanned worlds, that could knit the two sides of a hungry, home-seeking, dramatic sort of person back together.
In no time at all, I had entered the belly of the ship. I was a convert, to all of it, and would cook on the line in fine-dining kitchens in Manhattan for the next seven years.
Give or take a gardening summer or two back home.
—
A few months later, on April 5 to be exact—I will never forget the day—I was setting up my station for lunch when I got a call on the kitchen phone.
Aaron was on the other end, and I could hardly make out what he was trying to tell me. Finally I understood that his brother Matt’s three-passenger plane had gone down. Matt hadn’t made it.
It took me a minute to make the jerky progression from imagining his brother as hurt to gone; the brain struggles with moves like that. I repeated what he said to the guys around me and the sous chefs began yelling at me to go, go, go!, and suddenly I was throwing the gray messenger bag over my shoulder and flagging down a cab to Brooklyn.
Back in our apartment in Fort Greene, tears were spraying from Aaron. I had never seen him cry. We huddled on the couch, our limbs curled into a knot, and through my hand on his back I felt him heave and deflate, his body trying to process the news like a spider struggling to take in something big. I pictured his sister, Sarah, my childhood friend, in her Peace Corps apartment in a small town in Latvia; her return would take days. I could see his parents in their gold-wallpapered kitchen in Park Rapids, our hometown. I knew Aaron was probably thinking of the last time we had seen Matt, kind of a long time ago, in the kitchen of the khaki-colored house in the suburbs he shared with his wife, Evon. He had made us a chicken hotdish, she an apple crisp for dessert. I closed my eyes and felt frozen, as if the minutes kept ticking but went off the rails, setting us on an alternate course. I repeated “I’m so sorry” until I felt the empty bottom in this phrase and there was nothing left to say. We sank into the couch, David the renter’s horrible dirty couch. My exhausted body released its tension hold and our breathing found its deep together pattern. I wanted to lose consciousness, to make this news go away.