screwed me is dead.
“So whatcha been up to?” he asks, just baiting me into asking him why he vanished off the face of my earth.
“Business,” I say. “I told you today, I’m doing a lot of commercial properties, restaurants, things like that.”
He doesn’t say anything, waiting, I suppose, for me to ask him what he’s been doing. Bobbie will give up buying shoes before I ask that.
“Is there anything else?” I ask, as in: is there a reason I’m sitting here holding on to the phone, unable to breathe, wishing that we were still friends? Still more than friends?
“You doing anything tonight?” he asks. I tell him I’ve got a date, but the cocky bastard sounds like he doesn’t believe me.
“Howard is taking me to some charity cook-off,” I say.
“Oh,” he says. “Howard. That doesn’t exactly count as a date.”
“He’s picking me up, paying for my dinner, taking me to a show, and bringing me home. What part of that isn’t a date?” I ask. Bobbie, putting her little crocheted shrug over my shoulders in an attempt to influence what I’m going to wear tonight, gives me a thumbs-up. She seems to think that the right sweater will always win the day.
He tells me, “the part that comes next.”
“What comes next is none of your business,” I tell him and hang up. I give Bobbie a look that says it’s none of hers, either, and head upstairs to get dressed without my fairy godmother to give me her glass slippers, though I think I still have the Manolos she loaned me a few weeks ago.
Howard is simply glowing this evening. It’s like he’s been lit from within, and he is devastatingly handsome in a beige linen jacket over a chocolate-brown T-shirt that hugs his torso like…Well, I’m not going there, so suffice it to say that Howard is over six feet tall, filled out without any fat, and he has the fastest smile I’ve ever seen. Nothing lights a face like a smile.
He has told me three times how his friend Nick, the chef at Madison on Park, has been practicing for this evening, how he has made all kinds of entrées and desserts and how Howard has had to try them all. He throws around words like Provençale and forestiere like I’m supposed to know what he means. He says Nick did a dish with roasted Maine lobster and kabocha squash gnocchi with sautéed black trumpets in sage oil. When I look stricken he assures me that the trumpets are mushrooms and not swans, and shakes his head at me.
“You’ve no appreciation for good food,” he complains as if I’m just being stubborn. He glances at our tickets and gestures with his chin to keep progressing down the aisle of the cavernous high school auditorium where they have set up several kitchens on the stage and placed big TV screens around the room so they can zoom in on the stovetops and prep areas.
What he means is that the other night when he took me out to review a new Italian restaurant for Newsday, the Dentice Mare Monte was absolutely wasted on me. As is anything with olives or artichokes or a host of other foods he thinks God invented just to pleasure man.
We get to our row and he grimaces because we are obviously farther back than row B ought to be. He hurries up ahead, sees that there are rows AA to FF before the single alphabet begins, and, with obvious disappointment, waves me into our row in front of him. Excusing ourselves, we clamber over people who refuse to stand up to let us get to our seats—and who then have the nerve to glare at us when we stumble over their purses and toes. I remind Howard as we navigate the various obstacles that the gâteau au chocolat wasn’t wasted on me.
He pulls a laugh from his inexhaustible supply as we take our seats, and he wonders aloud how it is that I can remember the French names only for desserts or things that involve chocolate.
“Chocolat,” I correct, saying it with what I hope is a convincing French accent.
He waves away my attempt at being seductive and tells me that I should have been there for the practice run. “Cockle Bruschetta,” he says, like cockles were likely to be the surprise ingredient they’d have the chefs use tonight. “Then a choucroute Royale Alsacienne, done not with sauerkraut but with a pickled mushroom…” He closes his eyes like he’s having sex and it is too perfect to describe.
At least, I think he’d close his eyes during sex. It’s not something I know firsthand.
“And just this morning I had to go on a scavenger hunt for tamarind paste,” he tells me as I settle into my seat and take in our surroundings. “Took me until nearly noon to find it in this little Indian spice place on Broadway down on the South Shore.”
“The Taj? The one next to The Steak-Out?” I ask. I remind him that was where I was at lunchtime, and it was where I discovered the murdered man I’ve already told him about.
He stops helping me off with Bobbie’s shrug and asks me if I’m sure. I tell him it’s not the sort of thing that one forgets. And then I could swear he shudders.
“You all right?” I ask and he gets all defensive, like I’ve impugned his manhood or something.
“I suppose you talked to the police,” he says. I tell him that yes, they interviewed my mother and me. But, because the chip on his shoulder is the size of Shea Stadium when it comes to Drew Scoones, I don’t mention just who “they” were.
“Well, luckily you didn’t see anything,” he says, slipping out of his jacket and carefully folding it behind him on the chair.
“Just a dead man,” I say a bit sarcastically, since he seems to think that watching someone cook a fancy French meal trumps discovering a dead body.
I could see his argument if we were at least going to taste the results. And if they were chocolate.
He suggests that we leave our stuff on our seats and go backstage to see his friend Nick. We exit our row in the opposite direction and, after convincing the powers that be that we are vital to the survival of Earth, we are permitted to go behind the scenes to look for Nick and Madison Watts, owners of Madison on Park. Howard has described Nick in detail, but has never even mentioned Madison before tonight, so I am taken aback when he allows himself to be greeted with kisses on both cheeks by an elegant thirtysomething-just-younger-than-me woman who seems as surprised to see me as I am to see her kissing the man I’ve come in with.
She’s dressed all in black, like, well, like a black swan. Or like Mrs. Danvers, from Rebecca with Joan Fontaine. And let me tell you, if I were crumbs, I’d know better than to stick to her outfit. You know how interviewers always ask stupid questions like, “If you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be?” Well, Madison Watts would be a rare orchid that you know would cost thousands of dollars and would die if you looked at it wrong. And it would be your fault, not the flower’s.
Or maybe a Venus flytrap.
Something intimidating.
Yes, if I had to find one word to describe Madison Watts, it would be intimidating.
“Madison,” Howard says, and my ordinarily warm, garrulous date has suddenly gone cold and distant. “I’d like you to meet Teddi Bayer.”
“Your…?” Madison says, as if daring him to introduce me as his girlfriend. She waits, not giving him an out.
“Nick around?”
