“Are you falling asleep?”
“No!” I jumped. I knew, given how much I’d let the insanity of my working life warp my perspective, that I could say nothing in my defense. I reeled in the entire length of my failings, the long rope of my shitty girlfriendness, and gathered it all up against my belly. It was true, what Aaron’s eyes were saying: I don’t understand—because Matt was only thirty-one years old and this was surreal. I don’t understand—because I have not lost a brother. I don’t understand—because I am a terrible girlfriend who had not paid my boyfriend two minutes of attention since I started this job. It hit me bleakly that if it weren’t for Danube, we would be at that very moment packing up the car and driving to Minnesota.
Oddly, Aaron already had plans to drive back to Minnesota with his friend Rob the following day to set up his show at an art center in Minneapolis. The evening hours seeped away nearly silently as we got him ready to go.
The next day at work Mario was sympathetic. “I hear you need to go to a funeral?”
Yes. I explained that I needed at least five days off because it would take me a day to get there, then a day for the wake, a day for the funeral, a day to be with Aaron, and a day to come back. I might as well take the week, I said. I could tell he was puzzled and that he wouldn’t take off that much time to bury his own grandmother.
“There’s no direct flight to my town,” I told him. “It’s really small. Like a village.” I was breathless. “I’m going to take a plane to Minneapolis and then a much smaller plane” —my hands swerved in the air— “to a small town north of mine, and then drive an hour south.” By the time I finished my long-winded description he was waving me off and telling me to give my boyfriend his condolences. He gave me three days.
Two days later I was set to leave from JFK airport at 3:00 P.M. This also turned out to be the day that Hans Haas, everyone’s favorite Austrian mentor, came for a visit. It bears noting that when chefs “visit” each other they do not hang out and catch up in the traditional sense. Sometimes the visiting chef will sit down to a tasting menu in the dining room, but generally, if they’re close, the visiting chef simply suits up in his work duds and joins the kitchen. They commune by working.
So it was that when I came in that morning Hans Haas was down in the basement, breaking down salmon. One fish after another, swiftly, wordlessly. He was doing the mise en place for the slow-cooked salmon with Styrian wurzelgemüse (wurzelgemüse: overstuffed German for julienned vegetables), the menu dish that Mario and Bouley had copped from his Tantris menu in apparent tribute.
Chef Bouley had heard that I was leaving early, before dinner service, and had been looking for me. “Amy,” he said, grabbing me by the wrist and pulling me next door, where he was in the weeds with one of his own projects, the last-minute production of hundreds of glutinous rice cups for a large party of Thai dignitaries. (I had just finished making a batch of German potato salad to go underneath the sturgeon for an offsite catering gig for President Clinton; was it possible that both of these events, in addition to Hans Haas’s dinner, were on the same day? Yes, in New York, it was.) Bouley pushed me in front of three cast-iron pans with golf-ball-size round divots in them, the kind I’d seen used to make Danish aebleskivers, those little pancake spheres. I started out pouring lightly sweetened glutinous rice batter into the twenty-four holes, all of which promptly stuck—until I learned to work the cups by swabbing each one with clarified butter. As the rice batter cooked, I topped each one with a spoonful of sweet coconut pudding and then rode my offset spat around the brown cooked-lace edge to tugboat them out of the divots. Twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight rice cakes stacked up on a paper-lined half-sheet pan. Bouley dropped lightly hot-smoked cubes of sea trout on top and garnished each with a thatch of miniature basil sprouts. It was a thrilling canapé, one I wish I’d written down. Sixteen more, twenty-four after that. I didn’t look up for hours. Then a glance at the clock on the wall revealed that it was time for me to go, but I hesitated: I’d customized this job so much that it was hard to abandon it. But I was going to be late for my flight. So I handed my spatula to the guy standing nearest to me on the line and took off running, leaving behind a jagged opening that missed me for about thirty seconds before sucking firmly shut and going on just fine without me. I realized then that my bond to this kitchen might have felt strong but was in fact impermanent; I needed it more than it needed me.
The plane I took from Minneapolis to Bemidji turned out to be a prop plane. As it started its approach to land, like a piece of paper wavering to the ground, I quaked with mounting anxiety. This plane was way too small.
It seemed like all of Park Rapids attended the funeral, which passed by in a dirge of minor pipe-organ chords. I held tight to Aaron, but he was in another world. He and his family grieved the way you do when the universe steals away your firstborn child, your tall, ambitious, golden-haired thirty-one-year-old son, your admired older brother—down through their toes and into the glacial bedrock.
Members of Aaron’s family sat at a table and shuffled old pictures like decks of cards. I couldn’t leave, and yet my ticket tugged, insistent. How much do I regret not pushing Mario for four days or more? Deeply.
Aaron stayed back home with his family. When Matt died, along with him went the other half of Aaron’s childhood imagination, the commitment to fantasy and play that fueled so much of his work. He told me it would be for a few weeks, but I knew it might be longer.
I returned to Brooklyn, and to Danube, whose challenges no longer seemed so amusing. I floundered my first day back on the line, Mario shouting at me while I tried to stopper my weepiness and plate the schnitzel with some sense of precision. The many jocular details of my day, formerly organized in situ for retelling to Aaron, didn’t seem to matter. They weren’t so funny anymore.