In Brooklyn without Aaron, I realized how much our fields of vision differed and how much I had been relying on his to supplement mine. He was more panoramic, more long-sighted; he saw our New York stint as temporary, a time to build the skills we’d need when we eventually returned home to live out our days in the woods and ply our crafts. My view was more near-sighted: I saw a flood of shapes and colors, a world of vivid, moving plates. I saw my shoes, sturdy and flour-dusted against the tile floor. But outside of work my mind continued to churn with the sights of the kitchen and I didn’t see much but the clouds; I could hardly cross a street safely without him there to pull me back to the curb.
That level of spaciness works when you have someone by your side looking out for you, but now, alone, I am forced to pay more attention. New York, chameleon city, with streets that can look like gold when you’re up, looks darker now, as if it had recently flooded and the mud just receded. Stranger exchanges on the street that usually fade off into the din sound bright and ominous, dangerously emotional. After work, I stop at the Pakistani cab stand, and when I get home I sit in our grungy window well overlooking Fulton Street and methodically eat all of my chicken korma, all of my green-velvet palak paneer, and all of my spicy chickpeas.
The constant stream of trucks on Fulton Street honk at one another as rudely as the swans do back home on the creek in front of our house. One bleats, another answers. Like migratory birds inhabiting the same old familiar waterway, they’re all just verbalizing to make conversation, blaring to communicate their gripes, their wishes, and their warnings—but these here in the city with a greater sense of urgency and way more out of tune.
3
HOME COOKING
For a month or so after his brother died, Aaron was okay. Devastated, but functional. He walked around the city in his usual patterns until one day the buried panic, which he thought he’d stuffed down a hole, rose up again. Like an emotional autoimmune disorder, his central nervous system began to attack itself, leaving him terrified to leave our apartment alone, terrified to drive in Brooklyn, terrified to take the subway by himself. For every plan, he had to consult his anxious mind for permission. Given the isolation he was living in, he might as well have been back in our house in the middle of the woods. He said very little about this, to me or anyone, and using his natural gift for persuasion, he found friends to accompany him where he needed to go. The one he really needed was me. And I was still working about eighty hours a week. I had no idea the terror I left him with each morning when I went to work, but late at night as I turned my key in the lock of our apartment door, I sometimes heard him singing his own songs at stage volume, his mournful voice seeping out of the cracks of the door like smoke from a fire. The full measure of my guilt over this, for so loving my job at Danube while Aaron suffered at home, came later.
Six months in and working the lunchtime meat entremet, I arrived in the kitchen early every day, second only to Michael on the meat roast station. He was cheerful and seemed to be in control of all the sauces on his list, rare for that position. Each morning I copped a new breakfast treat for us from the rack in the next-door Bouley prep kitchen—Seba, the French-African baker, just smiled and looked away. Michael and I agreed that the light, coarse-sugar-topped savory brioche buns were better than the pastries, especially when they were warm and the butter seemed to perspire right through the dough; the few meager pebbles of sugar on top were sweetness enough.
Then one day Chef Bouley called me into his office. Wearing a slim-cut pair of wool pants, a stiff French-cuffed shirt, and a cabled sweater, he possessed all the calm of a bolt of lightning at rest. Without looking up from his work, he asked me if I’d like to work on his cookbook. I was to stop working the meat entremet and start to shadow every cook at Danube, write down each station’s recipes, and hand them over to Melissa Clark, the book’s coauthor.
Bouley was sitting with steel-rod posture in an office chair in the center of a tornado of clutter, an office so full of papers and white shipping boxes that it looked black and white, and I admired this surrounding shitstorm—just as I did the serious avalanche of unpaid parking tickets that fell from his glove compartment on our last catering job—because the disorder seemed to me a sign of his brilliance. I also have a disordered mind—although he didn’t know that. He thought that because I was a young, nerdy, clean-cut girl, I must surely also be disciplined and efficient, and that I would be the perfect person to help him whip his long-overdue cookbook into shape.
I was intrigued. Recipes! Cookbook! It was an opportunity so perfect I couldn’t have dreamed it up. But I was so loving my current groove that I said without thinking, “But what about working entremet? I want to be a line cook.”
He finally looked up at me over his red-framed reading glasses. “What? Why do you want to be a line cook? You can always do that.”
He dismissed me. He barely knew me, but he knew my type. Of course I’d do it.
Mario called a group huddle to announce my new position, which I suffered through, feeling both precocious and like a deserter. Then he grabbed Harrison, who was working fish roast, T2, and me and ceremoniously carried a tureen of the soup he’d been making all morning down to the plush private dining room near the wine cellar. With florid Austrian gravitas, Mario ladled it out for each of us.
“Goulash soup!” he informed us, and handed each of us a Christofle spoon. “This is the soup of the Tyrol, where I am from.” He tipped his wineglass, filled with sparkling water, into the air.
“To Ahmy’s success on the cookbook!” he said, and winked. By this point I knew to be suspicious of his Austrian formality routine, and this one was turned on full jets. Mario slipped out to grab a napkin, and Harrison, thinking about the stacks of preservice work he’d left behind on his station, quickly spooned the goulash soup into his mouth, then leaned over and hissed, “This is so fucking weird.” And it was. But I would soon know why: Mario was anticipating the cookbook process ahead and he wanted me on his side.
Quickly, I saw the issue: There were no recipes written down. Few fine-dining kitchens have a full set of typed-up recipes, but the Danube kitchen was positively negligent. It appeared to exist prelanguage. All I had to go on were the line cooks’ scribbled notes, which showed no quantities but included lots of arrows to show the passage of time: “brown butter —? shallot —? celery root —? sweat out all the way —? white wine, reduce —? fill up with half-milk/half-veg stock.” The cooks’ recipes were as reliable as a game of telephone; that is, slightly more corrupted each time someone new took over the station. We ran fully on taste memory, which, among this tribe, was pretty finely tuned. And I soon discovered that taste memory was, in fact, more precise than a printed recipe. The act of translating an oral tradition to a written one would be both a corruption of everyone’s artistry and a record of their collected genius all at once.