It came as no surprise to me that in the spring of 2003 Aaron didn’t see his steady art-making as more reason to stay in New York, but more reason to leave. He called the Two Inlets Mill and started getting quotes for building a new studio in Minnesota. I knew I’d have a hard time stopping him. The seeds we’d planted in that place years before had grown their inevitable roots, and he wanted someday to be able to work from there.
When Aaron talked to others about our place back home out in the middle of nowhere, he framed it with sweeping arm gestures, as if it were a utopian kingdom, the absolute center of the universe. I’d heard his spiel a million times before. Imagine this, he’d say, spooling out his long arms. It’s a crossroads of four great American landscapes. We’re basically sitting on the source of the Mississippi, the watershed of the nation. Drive north and you hit the boreal forest; drive east, the hardwood forests; drive south and there’s the edge of the glacial deposit. Drive an hour west and you hit the beginning of the prairie that stretches all the way to the Rocky Mountains and that’s where the West begins. And where else do you have four such strong, distinct seasons? Every six weeks the wind changes and you have to get ready for something new. It keeps you going. It never lets you rest. We don’t have just four seasons; we have more like eight.
In truth, the cold arrived in October and stayed until May, so I think he was forgetting to mention that winter reigned during at least five of those mini-seasons; Old Man Winter was the king of them all.
The next morning as we bungee-strapped straw bags onto our bikes in preparation for our weekly brunch-and-farmer’s-market Sunday routine, Aaron paused in the premature, weightless Brooklyn spring. The air felt as temperate as blood, as the 110-degree water you need to bloom yeast—in a word, heavenly. Aaron shook out his bare arms in a motion that implied zero resistance, a total lack of gravity. Compared to Minnesota’s plunging shifts between dry-ice winters and humid, suffocating summers, this lovely New York spring was too long and pleasant for him by far. Every seasonal change, he got restless like this. I could see it in the way his jaw twitched in the warm morning air, the way his eyes followed the garbage swirling in the curb hollows. His outlook defied common sense, but it was perhaps common to exiles who pine for difficult pasts. Back home, weather was temperamental, addictive, and central to conversation. Nature vindictively doled out blasts of winter and then apologized with the sun; we northerners walked collectively on a pile of eggshells, attuned to its moods. Surviving the petulant weather gave us a shared resilience.
Most people thought that living in Brooklyn presented similar collective challenges to overcome—the hordes of people, the steamy subway air, the inconveniences of doing one’s laundry in laundromats and of walking a mile toting heavy grocery bags that dug channels into your palms—but Aaron overlooked all that.
Sensing that he was getting ready to complain about this present glorious sunshine, I preempted him. “It’s a perfect day.”
He quipped, flopping his arms, “It’s an almost nonexistent day. It’s like there’s no temperature at all.” Squinting into the bright, untroubled street, he leaned hard into his pedal and restated his devotion to our place in the woods with brief, auspicious finality.
“I need weather,” he said, sounding a lot like one of the Norwegian-American farmers from whom he was descended.
6
TWENTY-FIVE PIES
I made Aaron stay put and tough it out. But I agreed to tentatively consider the idea of the studio back home, which he read as my consent to keeping the dream of our homestead alive. After finishing out my time at 66, I started looking for another job. I wanted to get back to a fine-dining kitchen, something with the intensity and intimacy of Danube.
Cru, a posh downtown restaurant with a book-length, instantly legendary wine list, fit those requirements—not coincidentally because the kitchen was staffed almost entirely with former Bouley and Danube cooks. The chef, Shea Gallante, former chef de cuisine at Bouley, assembled a tight seven-person crew of highly skilled haute-cuisine geeks, many of us bespectacled, most of us in our early thirties. The Austrian sous chefs back at Danube would have dubbed us “old,” but I preferred to think of us as “veteran.” As we prepared to open the restaurant, doing everything from painting the downstairs prep kitchen to curing the new copper pots, we felt like a small reunion band—a feeling that grew stale as our prep lists lengthened, our hours swelled into the high-eighty-hour-a-week range, and Shea stubbornly decided not to hire anyone he didn’t already know and trust until we got reviewed by the New York Times.
Tall and driven, with a pomaded, gill-like hairline, Shea was like a star quarterback, pushing his team toward the avant-garde. And once again, as at Danube, all of the smaller size 36 and 38 jackets were quickly snapped up. By this point I was beyond cooking in gaping sleeves. When I asked Shea to order more small jackets, he said under his breath, “What are we, a kitchen of midgets?” No, Chef, I thought, just a bunch of nerds and one short woman.