Life, on the Line (45 page)

As I explained the situation to him, I could tell that he thought it didn't sound great.

Our tee time was coming up. Chris and Bruce came over toward us and we headed toward the first tee. Andy must have told Chris about the situation because Chris's mood grew sullen. I realized that Grant's appointment started half an hour ago, but there was no message. I excused myself to duck into the trees to make a quick call, then dialed Grant's number.

He answered on the second ring.

“Hey. Did they see you yet?”

“Yeah, I'm talking to the doctor now.”

“What did he say?”

“It's cancer.”

Silence.

“What kind? What else?”

“I don't know. He's right here. You talk to him.” He sounded truly shaken.

The doctor introduced himself and then relayed the news to me: “It's squamous cell carcinoma. It's a serious cancer. At this point I don't know any more than that. I'm referring him to a specialist, an ENT at Masonic who's also an oncologist. He'll be able to do the actual diagnosis.”

“Is this like skin cancer? Can you just remove the tumor in-office?”

“It's impossible for me to tell with certainty. But I have to say that this seems serious. When he showed me his tongue, I knew. It was obvious. He needs to go right away.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Can you put Grant back on?”

Grant came to the phone and mocked a cheery “Helloooooo.”

“Well, that sucks,” I said. “But we don't know much yet. I know a few people who have skin cancer and it's been no big deal—the kind of thing they cut out then monitor over time. Just make that appointment with the ENT and I'll be down there in two hours. Okay?”

“Yeah. I already made the appointment for Monday. Stay up there. I'm going to the restaurant—we have ninety-eight booked tonight with forty Tours.” He was referring to the large number of customers we had coming in that night for dinner and the intricate “Chef's Tour” menu that had been requested ahead of time.

“Grant. Don't worry about that.”

“What am I supposed to do, go home and die?”

“Good point. I'll see you at Alinea.”

“What for? Stay up there. I need some time to myself anyway. I need to think.”

I hung up the phone and looked over at the first tee to see Bruce, Chris, and Andy watching me. I headed over directly to Andy. “Well?” he said.

“It's cancer. Squamous cell carcinoma.” Tears began to well up in my eyes and I was trembling. I had a hard time keeping it together.

Andy grabbed both of my shoulders and looked me square in the eye when I lifted my head. “It's going to be fine,” he said. “Look at me. I'm here. He can beat this.”

I hit my tee shot down the center of the fairway. I walked alone the first few holes, thinking, “This cannot be happening.” Then I spent the rest of the match with Andy, asking him about his ordeal and his treatment. It sounded like pure hell.

But Andy was here playing golf.

 

I left the oral surgeon's office in a daze.

Cancer.

I had no profound thoughts; I just wandered toward my car and marveled that everything seemed so normal. Even my tongue wasn't hurting that day.

I drove to Alinea, parked behind the restaurant, and entered through the kitchen door. The place was already humming with chefs who had come in early to get ahead on their prep.

I walked over to my station, grabbed a cutting board, and started turning artichokes. I had plenty of time to lose myself in the prep. I was like a zombie.

I thought of Kaden and Keller. I thought about what I would tell my mom. I looked around at all of the employees and worried about them.

And then I turned more artichokes. Slowly, methodically, I pressed through the day.

Three o'clock staff meeting. Introduced the new dishes. Choked down a bit of food at 4:00 P.M. staff meal. 4:30 cleanup. 5:30 doors open.

Ninety-eight guests with forty Tours. One thousand eight hundred seventy dishes to go out.

I thought to myself that I did not want to leave Alinea that night.

I thought I might just stay there until the next morning.

 

My third nine-hole match concluded that day at nearly 7:00 P.M. I played remarkably well, considering that I didn't think about golf for a second. The caddie would hand me a club, I would look at the target and hit the ball. I genuinely didn't care. It was a state of golf I had been trying to achieve my whole life: complete dispassion.

I walked the course thinking about my dad and his life and death. I thought about my mom's struggle over the past few months and whether or not I had made the right decision in giving the go-ahead for her brain surgery. I thought about the cruel irony that the best young chef in the world had tongue cancer and what that meant. I fought back tears for all of those things that day.

I explained to Bruce that I was going to head back to Alinea and skip the dinner that night. “For sure, Nick. Go ahead.”

I arrived at the restaurant at 10:00 P.M. I had to remind myself before I walked in the kitchen door that no one there knew yet. I had to compose myself. I took a deep breath, opened the door, and looked in.

There was Grant at the pass plating a dozen dishes at once with five chefs gathered around him. The kitchen was cranking. He is still here, still alive, I reminded myself. I was calmed by the normality of it all.

I walked up to Grant. “Hey. How's it going?”

He turned his head, gave a smile and a raised eyebrow, and said, “Fantastic! What are you doing here? I thought you had a golf tournament to play.”

“Yeah, well. I thought I'd drive down and say hi.”

He looked good, but I must have looked like shit. “Are you hungry?” he asked.

I never ate Alinea food during service, and Grant never offered to cook for me. I found myself saying, “Actually, yes,” despite my better judgment.

Grant called out, “Curtis, do we have any of that duck breast left over?”

“Yes, Chef. My station, third shelf in the back.”

Grant walked over to the flattop, grabbed a pan, and made a perfectly cooked duck breast. He then heated up morels, stock, and some garnishes from other dishes while slicing up the breast. He put it all in an oversized, shallow bowl, and as if on cue, Curtis reached over and ad-libbed some freezedried peas, micro greens, sea salt, and my favorite, Thai long pepper. They did this in a few minutes right in the middle of a crushing service. The dish looked worthy of the best French restaurants in the world.

I was dumbfounded. “Why is it that I can't get that down the street at some French bistro? If we opened a place that did that we would kill 'em.”

“Eh. It's easy 'cause we do everything right,” Grant replied. “The stock. The mushrooms. No one does it like that. You know that. Boring though, right? Where's the challenge in that?” He smiled and handed me the plate.

I took it to the downstairs office, snapped a picture with my phone, locked the door, ate my duck, and tried to remain calm.

It was delicious. Just perfect.

And so terribly sad.

 

E-mail to the investors of Alinea:

The ENT snaked a camera down my throat. Nick looked up at the video screen above me and said something about my profound ability to deep throat. He was trying to relieve the tension, but this wasn't the tense part. As fast as it was in, it was out again, and the doctor told me that my voice box looked clear. He examined my tongue and my neck with his hands, then asked me to wait in his office across the hall. Nick and I went in there, found two seats next to each other, and looked at one another.

“Seems okay,” Nick said.

“Yeah. Good that my voice box was clean. What do you think they'll do?”

We could hear the nurses shuffling around outside, asking some other appointments if they could wait a bit longer. It was a tiny room, barely big enough for three or four people, and it had the generic feeling of a doctor's office that was seldom used—an office supply desk tucked in a corner, a couple of posters on the wall detailing a cutaway of the head and neck, uncomfortable seats. We sat there waiting. And waiting. We probably waited for about twenty minutes, although it felt like a very long twenty minutes. And the room was so small . . . too small for even just the two of us. The whole time we could hear them clearing through other patients and gathering up a couple of interns. Finally, the door opened and the doctor entered with two interns who barely looked old enough to drive. I noticed that they wouldn't look me in the eye.

I feigned a smile.

The doctor had to steady himself before he spoke. Not good, I thought. Then he spoke quietly. “You know already that you have cancer. I'm sorry to tell you that it's a late stage, and that it's probably metastasized into your lymph nodes—certainly, at least, on your left side. It covers most of your tongue—or most of the visible part of your tongue. It may have bisected the midline, which I can't tell without an . . .”

At that point his voice drifted out. I understood what he was saying and didn't need to hear more. My expression didn't change, but I began to sweat and feel cold. I rejoined the conversation when Nick asked a question about treatment. I heard something about replacing my tongue with a muscle from my arm, and asked quickly, “Will I be able to taste?”

“No. It will not be a tongue, it will be a muscle that with therapy will allow you some limited speech and perhaps the ability to swallow and eat.”

I was gone again. I steeled my chin by biting hard. And then Nick spoke: “Doctor, I don't think we're going to accomplish all of that today . . . perhaps it's best that we leave now.”

The doctor protested, “Sir, this is very serious and I think . . .” Nick interrupted and looked at me. “I understand how serious this is, Doctor, and we'll do what we need to do—on another day.” With this the doctor wrote some names on a piece of paper, gave me a prescription for serious painkillers, and we left his office.

It was a nice summer day, and we did exactly what needed to be done at that point: We headed across the street, at 11:30 A.M., to a Mexican dive bar and ordered a pitcher of strong margaritas.

 

We had to tell the staff at Alinea what was going on. A few people knew that Chef was not well—anyone could see that. But suddenly he was missing work at odd hours, and then he flew to New York with no notice. This was highly unusual, and everyone could tell that something was up. Some people might have thought that we were planning to open out there, because when I asked Joe to call an all-staff meeting for 3:00 P.M. in the upstairs dining room—“the 20's”—there was, at first, an air of excitement.

I pulled Joe aside. “Grant is sick.”

“Yeah. I figured that; he doesn't look well at all,” Joe said calmly, as usual. “Really sick?”

“Joe, I don't want to tell anyone else right now because I think it's important that it comes from Grant himself, but he's spending the day tomorrow at Sloan-Kettering. He has stage-four cancer in his tongue, and it's spread to his lymph system.”

Joe looked at me with only a slight giveaway of the horror of it all. “That bad?
That
bad?”

“Yes, it's that bad. It's terrible. He's completely screwed. They are talking about removing his tongue and part of his jaw, most of his neck. Then chemo, then radiation.”

Joe looked at me for a long moment but said nothing. “I'll get the staff together at three.”

“Thanks.”

At 2:30 I got my laptop and called Grant on iChat. We thought it would be good for the staff to see him, to know that he was still functioning, still walking and talking. “Hey. How's it going out there?” I asked.

“It's going. I'm at Heather's place.”

“Cool.You know what you're going to say to them?”

“Yeah, I'm all set, I think.”

“Okay . . . I'll ping you at about five to three.”

The front-of-house staff gathered up their side work—folding napkins and de-linting the chairs and banquettes—and sat down. The entire kitchen staff, all twenty-six chefs, came up the back stairs and before entering the dining room took off their clogs and lined them all up neatly in a row.