Last Night in Twisted River (37 page)

“Something from Italy,” the menu at Mao’s would then say.

The long-distance truckers who stopped off the interstate would invariably complain. “What’s this fucking ‘Something from
Italy’
about? I thought this was a Chinese place.”

“We’re a little of everything,” Xiao Dee would tell them—Little Brother was usually the weekend maître d’, while the cook and Ah Gou slaved away in the kitchen.

The rest of the staff at Mao’s was a fiercely intelligent and multicultural collection of Asian students from the university—many of them not from Asia but from Seattle and San Francisco, or Boston, or New York. Tzu-Min, Ah Gou’s relatively new girlfriend, was a Chinese law-school student who’d been an undergraduate at Iowa just a couple of years before; she’d decided to stay in Iowa City (and not go back to Taiwan) because of Mao’s and Ah Gou
and the
law school. On Thursday nights, when Xiao Dee was still suffering the jazzed-up aftereffects of the chocolate-espresso balls, Tzu-Min would sub as the maître d’.

They didn’t have a radio at Mao’s, Tony Angel was remembering as he surveyed the place settings at Avellino, which on that late-spring ’83 night was not quite open for business but soon would be. At Mao’s, Ah Gou had kept a TV in the kitchen—the cause of many cut fingers, and other knife or cleaver accidents, in the cook’s opinion. But Ah Gou had liked sports and news; sometimes the Iowa football or basketball games were televised, and that way the kitchen knew in advance whether to expect a celebratory or dejected crowd after the game.

In those years, the Iowa wrestling team rarely lost—least of all, at home—and those dual meets brought an especially fired-up and hungry crowd to Mao’s. Daniel had taken young Joe to most of the home matches, the cook suddenly remembered. Maybe it had been the success of the Iowa wrestling team that made Joe want to wrestle when he went off to Northfield Mount Hermon; quite possibly, Ketchum’s reputation as a barroom brawler had had nothing to do with it.

Tony Angel had a Garland eight-burner stove, with two ovens and a broiler, in his kitchen at Avellino; he had a steam table for his chicken stocks, too. At Mao’s, at their busiest, they could seat eighty or ninety people in an evening, but Avellino was smaller. Tony rarely fed more than thirty or forty people a night—fifty, tops.

Tonight the cook was working on a red-wine reduction for the braised beef short ribs, and he had both a light and a dark chicken stock on the steam table. In the “Something from Asia” category, he was serving Ah Gou’s beef
satay
with peanut sauce and assorted tempura—just some shrimp, haricots verts, and asparagus. There were the usual pasta dishes—the calamari with black olives and pine nuts, over penne, among them—and two popular pizzas, the pepperoni with marinara sauce and a wild-mushroom pizza with four cheeses. He had a roast chicken with rosemary, which was served on a bed of arugula and grilled fennel, and a grilled leg of spring lamb with garlic, and a wild-mushroom risotto, too.

Greg, the cook’s young sous chef, had been to cooking school on Ninety-second Street in Manhattan and was a fast learner. Tony was letting Greg do a sauce
grenobloise
, with brown butter and capers, for the chicken paillard—that was the little “Something from France” for the evening. And Tony’s two favorite waitresses were on hand, a single mother and her college-student daughter. Celeste, the mom, had worked for the cook since ’76, and the daughter, Loretta, was more mature than the usual Brattleboro high school kids he hired as waitresses, busboys, and dishwashers.

Loretta was older than most college students; she’d had a baby her senior year in high school. Loretta was unmarried and had cared for the child in her mom’s house until the little boy was old enough (four or five) to not drive Celeste crazy. Then Loretta had gotten into a nearby community college—not the easiest commute, but she’d arranged all her classes on a Tuesday–Thursday schedule. She was back home in Brattleboro, still living with her mom and young son, from every Thursday night till the following Tuesday morning.

Since the cook had been sleeping with Celeste—only for the last year, going on eighteen months—the arrangement had worked well for Tony Angel. He stayed in Celeste’s house, with Celeste and her first-grade grandson, only two nights a week—on one of which, every Wednesday, the restaurant was closed. The cook moved back into his apartment whenever Loretta came home to Brattleboro. It had been more awkward last summer, when Celeste moved into Tony’s small apartment above Avellino for upwards of three or four nights at a time. A redhead, with very fetching freckles on her chest, she was a big woman, though not nearly the size of either Injun Jane or Carmella. Celeste (at fifty) was as many years older than the cook’s son, Danny, as she was younger than the cook.

There was no hanky-panky between them in the kitchen at Avellino—at their mutual insistence—though everyone on the staff (Loretta, of course, included) knew that Tony Angel and Celeste were a couple. The lady friends the cook had met at The Book Cellar had since moved on, or they were married now. The old joke Tony cracked to the bookseller was no longer acted upon; it was an
innocent
joke when the cook asked the bookseller if she knew any women to introduce him to. (She either didn’t or she
wouldn’t
, not with Celeste in the picture. Brattleboro was a small town, and Celeste was a popular presence in it.)

It had been easier to meet women in Iowa, Tony Angel was remembering. Granted, he was older now, and Brattleboro was a
very
small town compared to Iowa City, where Danny had invited his dad to all the Writers’ Workshop parties; those women writers knew how to have a good time.

Danny had treated his workshop students to an evening at Mao’s on many occasions—not least the celebration of the Chinese New Year, every January or February, when Ah Gou had presented a ten-course prix-fixe menu for three nights in a row. Just before the Chinese New Year in ’73—it was the Year of the Ox, the cook remembered—Xiao Dee’s truck had broken down in Pennsylvania, and Tony Angel and Little Brother almost hadn’t made it back to Iowa City with the goods in time.

In ’74—the Year of the Tiger, Tony thought—Xiao Dee had convinced Spicy to ride along to Iowa City with them, all the way from Queens. Spicy was fortunately small, but it was still a tight squeeze in the truck’s cab, and somewhere in Indiana or Illinois, Spicy figured out that Xiao Dee had been seeing a woman in Bethpage—“that Nassau County cunt,” Spicy called her. The cook had listened to them argue the rest of the way.

Somehow, thinking of Iowa City and Mao’s had made Tony Angel consider that Avellino lacked
ambition
, but one of the things the cook loved about his Brattleboro restaurant was that it was relatively easy to run; real chefs, like Ah Gou Cheng and Tony Molinari and Paul Polcari, might find Avellino unambitious, but the cook (at fifty-nine) wasn’t trying to compete with them.

One sadness was that Tony Angel wouldn’t invite his old friends and mentors to come visit him in Vermont, and have a meal at Avellino. The cook felt that his Brattleboro restaurant was unworthy of these superior chefs, who’d taught him so much, though they probably would have been touched and flattered to have seen their obvious good influences on the menu at Avellino, and they surely would have supported the cook’s pride in having his very own restaurant, which—albeit only in Brattleboro—was a local success. Since Molinari and Polcari were retired, they could have come to Vermont at their convenience; it might have been harder for the Cheng brothers to find the time.

Ah Gou and Xiao Dee had moved back East, this on the good counsel of Tzu-Min, the young Chinese lawyer who’d married Big Brother—she’d given him some solid business advice, and had never gone back to Taiwan. Connecticut was closer to Lower Manhattan, where Little Brother needed to shop; it made no sense for the Chengs to kill themselves while striving for authenticity in Iowa. The first name of their new restaurant, Baozi, meant “Wrapped” in Chinese. (The cook remembered the golden pork spring rolls and braised pork
baozi
that Ah Gou made every Chinese New Year. The steamed dough balls were split, like a sandwich, and filled with a braised pork shoulder that had been shredded and mixed with Chinese five-spice powder.) But Tzu-Min was the businessperson in the Cheng family; she changed the name of the restaurant to Lemongrass, which was both more marketable and more comprehensible in Connecticut.

One day, Tony Angel thought, maybe Daniel and I can drive down to Connecticut and eat at Lemongrass; we could spend the night somewhere in the vicinity. The cook missed Ah Gou and Xiao Dee, and he wished them well.

“What’s the matter, Tony?” Celeste asked him. (The cook was crying, though he’d not been aware of it.)

“Nothing’s the matter, Celeste. In fact, I’m very happy,” Tony said. He smiled at her and bent over his red-wine reduction, savoring the smell. He’d blanched a sprig of fresh rosemary in boiling water, just to draw out the oil before putting the rosemary in the red wine.

“Yeah, well, you’re
crying,”
Celeste told him.

“Memories, I guess,” the cook said. Greg, the sous chef, was watching him, too. Loretta came into the kitchen from the dining room.

“Are we going to unlock the place tonight, or make the customers find a way to break in?” she asked the cook.

“Oh, is it time?” Tony Angel asked. He must have left his watch upstairs in the bedroom, where he’d not yet finished the galleys of
East of Bangor
.

“What’s he crying about?” Loretta asked her mother.

“I was just asking him,” Celeste said. “Memories, I guess.”

“Good
ones, huh?” Loretta asked the cook; she took a clean dish towel from the rack and patted his cheek. Even the dishwasher and the busboy, two Brattleboro high school kids, were watching Tony Angel with concern.

The cook and his sous chef were not rigid about sticking to their stations, though normally Greg did the grilling, roasting, and broiling, while Tony watched over the sauces.

“You want me to be the
saucier
tonight, boss?” Greg asked the cook.

“I’m fine,” Tony told them all, shaking his head. “Don’t you ever have memories?”

“Danny called—I forgot to tell you,” Loretta said to the cook. “He’s coming in tonight.”

“Yeah, Danny sounds like he had an exciting day—for a writer,” Celeste told Tony. “He got attacked by two dogs. Rooster killed one. He wanted a table at the usual time, but just for one. He said that Barrett wouldn’t appreciate the dog story. He said, ‘Tell Pop I’ll see him later.’”

The “Pop” had its origins in Iowa City—the cook liked it.

Barrett was originally from England; though she’d lived in the United States for years, her English accent struck Tony Angel as sounding more and more English every time he heard it. People in America were overly impressed by English accents, the cook thought. Perhaps English accents made many Americans feel uneducated.

Tony knew what his son had meant by Barrett not appreciating the dog story. Although Danny had been bitten by dogs when he was running, Barrett was one of those animal lovers who always took the dog’s side. (There were no “bad” dogs, only bad dog owners; the Vermont State Police should
never
shoot anyone’s dog; if Danny didn’t run with the squash-racquet handles, maybe the dogs wouldn’t
try
to bite him, and so forth.) But the cook knew that his son ran with the racquet handles
because
he’d been bitten when he ran without them—he’d needed stitches twice but the rabies shots only once.

Tony Angel was glad that his son wasn’t coming to dinner with Barrett. It bothered the cook that Daniel had
ever
slept with a woman almost as old as his own
father
! But Barrett’s Englishness and her belief that there were no bad dogs bothered Tony more. Well, wasn’t an unexamined love of dogs to be expected from a
horse
person? the cook asked himself.

Tony Angel used an old Stanley woodstove from Ireland for his pizzas; he knew how to keep the oven at six hundred degrees without making the rest of the kitchen too hot, but it had taken him two years to figure it out. He was refilling the woodbox in the Stanley when he heard Loretta unlocking the front door and inviting the first customers into the dining room.

“There was another phone call,” Greg told the cook.

Tony hoped that Daniel hadn’t changed his mind about coming to dinner, or that his son hadn’t decided to bring Barrett with him, but the other message was from Ketchum.

The old logger had gone on and on to Greg about the miraculous invention of the fax machine. God knows for how long fax machines had been invented, the cook thought, but this was not the first he’d heard about Ketchum wanting one. Danny had been to New York and seen some rudimentary fax machine in operation in the production department of his publishing house; in Daniel’s estimation, his father recalled, it had been a bulky machine that produced oily scraps of paper with hard-to-read writing, but this didn’t deter Ketchum. The formerly illiterate woodsman wanted Danny and his dad to have fax machines; then Ketchum would get one, and they could all be instantly in contact with one another.

Dear God, the cook was thinking, there would be no end of faxes; I’ll have to buy
reams
of paper. And there will be no more peaceful mornings, Tony Angel thought; he loved his morning coffee and his favorite view of the Connecticut. (Like the cook, Ketchum was an early riser.)

Tony Angel had never seen where Ketchum lived in Errol, but he’d envisioned something from the wanigan days—a trailer maybe, or several trailers. Formerly mobile homes, perhaps, but no longer mobile—or a Volkswagen bus with a woodstove inside it, and without any wheels. That Ketchum (at sixty-six) had only recently learned to read but now wanted a fax machine was unimaginable. Not that long ago, Ketchum hadn’t even owned
a phone!

THE COOK KNEW WHY
he had cried; his “memories” had nothing to do with it. As soon as he’d thought of taking a trip with his son to see the Chengs in their Connecticut restaurant, Tony Angel had known that Daniel would never do it. The writer was a workaholic; to the cook’s thinking, a kind of logorrhea had possessed his son. That Daniel was coming to dinner at Avellino alone was fine with Tony Angel, but that his son
was
alone (and probably would remain so) made the cook cry. If he worried about his grandson, Joe—for all the obvious dangers any eighteen-year-old needed to be lucky to escape—the cook was sorry that his son, Daniel, struck him as a terminally lonely, melancholic soul. He’s even lonelier and more melancholic than
I
am! Tony Angel was thinking.