You had to give it to them: New York was not diluting their heritage. They walked around the city in a Chinese dome, eating Chinese food, frequenting Chinese stores, speaking very little English. They were there, in New York, but as prideful, conflicted defectors, like me. I talked up Minnesota as if it were the promised land, stubbornly wore an unhip hippie belt that reminded me of my former rural life, and insisted on calling soda “pop.” I wanted to keep training in New York, had no idea how I’d cook professionally back home in Two Inlets, but felt a powerful need to keep up my allegiances. Like my Chinese coworkers, I sailed around the kitchen with my home in my back pocket.
My nostalgia was like a slipcover for a precious-but-ugly family heirloom. No amount of gingered crab could erase the truth: The meat and potatoes that had once defined me no longer sufficed. My palate had been whetted for more complicated flavors, more diverse populations, more chili fire. As I kneaded lotus-paste dough, I weighed my two homelands, the old and the new, and began to wonder which one would eventually win out. Unlike my Chinese comrades, I didn’t see a clear path back.
—
I worked like I was on repeat, walking out of the apartment each day around 10 A.M. with my glass pint jar of maple-sweetened iced coffee, returning home each day by taxi at 1 A.M., fried and sweaty. When I cracked Aaron’s studio door I was often met with a cloud of cigar smoke and the sight of him and Rob sitting on rocking chairs in the gray mist, yakking about art and listening to a steady soundtrack of outlaw country. Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Gretchen Wilson. The rural narrative was part of our collective consciousness, our group persona. They were the country boys who had reluctantly come to the city to find work in the art world; I was Aaron’s exhausted third-shift waitress wife. My feet throbbing, I figured I was about as tired as a girl in a country song. I considered seventy-plus hours a week an inevitable schedule but continued to whine about my constant suffering and threw a tantrum over any Sunday plans Aaron suggested that didn’t include a nap. My day off consisted of cooking him a huge dinner so that he’d have leftovers while I was gone. My case was classic. I was a martyr.
I knew this, could hear myself saying the words “wish I could, have to work,” and rued them, but at the same time I kept a list of excuses running in my head. Here’s the funny thing about a cook’s martyrdom: It really does begin with a generous impulse. Even though I spent my nights hunched over tiny tasting-menu-size plates, at night I dreamed of making giant pots of soup and serving it to the masses. Because of this, the martyr feels justified in her crabbiness. She’s pulling these double shifts out of a deep desire to feed the people. But housed inside the shell of a cranky, overworked cook with a sore back and a perma-rash between her perpetually moist fingers, that originally decent nugget of generosity comes out as the most unrelenting and aggressive kind of altruism, in spools and spools of never-ending spaghetti. And no amount of logic can stem her ever-growing rock collection of hard knocks.
Aaron was getting plenty sick of the way my work flooded our life, but to his credit, he never suggested I quit. My insomnia was killing us both, though. When I couldn’t get to sleep on Sunday night, my only day off each week, he wanted to either take me out to a bar and feed me shots of Jameson until I passed out or clock me on the head. I was willing to do either if something would just knock me out. Something in our relationship, and in our life, had to break—and finally did. The day came that Aaron’s commitment to plan A proved him right.
I knew he had had an important studio visit that day, but I didn’t expect him to call me on the kitchen phone at the restaurant. Shorty answered and handed it over with disapproval: “For you.”
Aaron breathlessly told me what had happened. Zach Feuer, the art dealer, showed up at his studio with a friend, who happened to be Maurizio Cattelan, the famous artist. They were enthusiastic about the work and each bought a carving on the spot—and then called up two of Cattelan’s main collectors, who came over and bought up the rest of Aaron’s studio. Aaron would have a solo show at Zach’s gallery in Chelsea in the spring, and the collectors were going to show his biggest carving at their own museum during the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in December.
He finished his spiel and I tried to take it all in.
“Oh my god, oh my god! Do we go to that?” I said, meaning Art Basel.
“Yes, are you kidding?” he shouted. “Ask for time off!” And we hung up.
I keened all over the line, making Shorty think that something horrendous had happened.
“Aaron just sold out his studio. I need to go with him to Miami next month.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know, four days?”
He scoffed. No one requested that kind of time off. Ever.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” I said. No way was I going to miss being with Aaron when things were happening for him. It had been too hard a struggle.
The next day Aaron came into our bedroom as I was waking up and dropped two hundred dollars on the bed. Zach had paid him in cash.
“Why don’t you go buy yourself some jeans,” he said in his best Merle Haggard drawl.
“Little lady?” I finished his thought, sat bolt upright, and clutched the money. I realized then the insanity of my sense of economic security, which has never had any correlation to hard facts or numbers but rests solely, as it has since junior high, on whether or not I can afford to buy a cool new pair of jeans.
Aaron’s full-time art-making and regular sales transferred some of the family focus from my career to his, to my relief. What he did all day—carving wood, painting, strategizing—was stressful, a pendulum swing between the poles of doubt and the thrilling highs. It was a weird job, unrecognizable to those back home, but it seemed to fit Aaron’s personality.
Within a month we were floating in the ocean in Miami, the day after walking down the marble staircase with Zach at the Versace mansion, a gaudy Versailles-like backdrop that tilted the entire moment into campiness. It was the height of the art boom. The art market at this time defied economics as surely as it defied the down-to-earth Midwestern practicality into which we’d been born—and we were feeling its crazy buoyancy. As I kneeled in the waves, it occurred to me that no one in Park Rapids, not even my young self, could have envisioned this scene for us. As the salt water soaked my burn-slashed forearms, I could think of nothing to say but the most pedestrian of straightforward utterances. The weight of Aaron’s belief system that had brought us to this place, where we were both floating in an ocean, taking a well-deserved break from doing exactly the kind of work we both wanted to do, was so much larger than that, but words sometimes fail.
“Good job, Aaron.”
I no longer cared if we had a—quote/unquote—normal life. Security was overrated. I’d take this one.
—