Life From Scratch Page 6

  “I’m sorry—I just thought you would be with him. I thought you were . . . I don’t know . . . a random man. I’m Rachel.”

  “And I am Gael Paez,” he tells me, as if I should have heard his name before. What I hear is Gayle Perez, and the only person I can think about is Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, Gayle.

  Except that he doesn’t look anything like a middle-aged woman. He is, by far, one of the most attractive men I have ever met face-to-face (except for Adam, but I shove that image immediately out of mind.) He is about six feet tall with broad shoulders. A quick, lopsided smile, a small scar above his left eyebrow that screams “fútbol accident,” and deep brown eyes that match his equally dark brown hair. The accent also helps. I step aside and give him space to enter the apartment.

  “I work with Ethan,” Gael tells me. “On the coffee book. I lent him some of my equipment.”

  “Cameras?” I ask, nervously playing with the dish towel hanging off the kitchen drawer.

  “Cameras, tripods, lens,” Gael ticks off on each finger. “I am a photographer.”

  “For books?” I ask.

  “For weddings.”

  Of course it would be for weddings.

  I pick up a corkscrew and open the bottle of wine. It is white and room temperature and Gael looks at me strangely as I stand there with the cork in hand. “I didn’t mean for us to drink it now,” he admits. “It’s a gift? It’s what you bring to a dinner party, no?”

  “It is; thank you. I just . . . I meant to open this bottle of red. I’ll just put this aside for a moment, and I’ll drink it later.”

  “By yourself?” Gael asks, and I see him glance at my left hand and my bad-ass middle-finger cuff ring.

  I imagine myself, hand around the neck of the wine bottle, drinking straight from the bottle and drooling in front of the television after everyone goes home. Yes, I want to answer truthfully, but instead I say, “We can have it with dessert.”

  Gael slides himself onto one of the high stools in the kitchen while I switch out his wine bottle for the bottle of red I left on the counter. I glance over at the clock; Ethan, Arianna, and the other mystery guest are now nineteen minutes late.

  “What do you do, Rachel?”

  I like the way my name sounds coming out of his mouth. Towards the end of my marriage, I was always annoyed when I heard Adam say my name, because he often threw it into the sentence as if it were a curse word. What do you expect me to do, Rachel? was a well-worn phrase that I heard every time we argued, precisely after I had complained about something. That always made me clam up for the next several hours. Adam spat my name, but Gael lets it rolls of his tongue as if he’s uneager to let it leave his mouth.

  The taste of the name Rachel.

  I pour him a glass of the red wine and pass it to him. “I’m sort of between things right now.” I’ve obviously practiced since my date with Rob Zuckerman. “I’m a graphic artist, but I’m taking a small sabbatical from work. Learning how to cook. Writing a bit.”

  “What sorts of things do you write?” He gives me a smile that says he would gladly drag this portion of the evening out indefinitely, making me volunteer every small scrap of information before he turns over whatever he has brewing behind those eyes.

  My God, those chocolate-brown eyes.

  And that lopsided smile.

  I am saved from embarrassing myself by staring for too long by the buzzer jolting me to my senses. I ring the person into the building and stand awkwardly beside the front door. “It’s probably Ethan. Or Arianna.”

  A few moments later, there’s a knock on the door, and I can hear a cacophony of voices on the other side. Arianna has arrived with Ethan and another man in tow. She rolls her eyes at me as if to say that it was painful enough to spend time in the elevator with the stranger much less now sit across from him at a dinner table. She disappears into my bedroom area to throw her coat on my bed and adjust her bra. I know her that well.

  “Hey, sweetie, this is Pete,” Ethan says. “And Gael is already here.”

  “Hi, Pete,” I say, offering out my hand. The man takes it limply, as if he has been told to apply the least amount of pressure possible lest he fracture some of my fingers. He is the polar opposite of Gael, and I do mean polar. His skin is beyond white, as if he has been gessoed. A piece of white meat chicken. His hair is this pale orange, as if it couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to have a color or not.

  And his skin is cold.

  Gael’s hand is warm and dry when he places it on my shoulder and asks if I want him to pour some wine for everyone. I flounder for a moment and then will my head to nod.

  Arianna emerges from the bedroom area—I have a studio, so screens around the bed have to suffice—examining a stain of unknown origins on her shirt. Perhaps Beckett’s spit-up or remnants of his old bottle. She leans against the counter, smiling wanly at me while avoiding eye contact with Pete.

  “What did you make?” she asks, accepting a glass of wine from Gael.

  “Well, Gael, I don’t know if Ethan told you,” I start, staring at Arianna for confidence, “but I’m just learning how to cook after thirty-four years of eating out and ordering in. So . . . I made some pasta. And a steak salad. And I cheated and bought the bread and dessert.”

  I had felt like a rock star before they arrived, but now, listing out the menu, I realize that it sounds like a meal prepared by a middle school student in her Home Ec class. Noodles? Salad? The only thing this meal needs to look more amateur is an apple brown betty made in an EZ Bake oven.

  I am acutely aware that Gael is standing next to me.

  “It sounds great. I’m starving,” my brother announces. “Let’s eat.”

  When we get to the table, we do the dance. Where I’m waiting to see where Gael sits, and I think he’s waiting to see where I sit. He stands with his body behind one chair and his hand resting on the one beside it while I linger by the counter as if I need to break its magnetic pull before I can venture over to a seat. I take the chair to Gael’s right and stand next to it for a moment to mark my territory, even though I need to go back into the kitchen to serve the meal.

  I take special care as I walk each dish over to the table—not because the bowls are heavy, but because I am terrified that I’m going to end up standing in a pool of pasta. I can’t even pinpoint why I’m nervous. Is it the fact that strangers are eating my cooking for the first time? The fact that Gael Paez has a small, alluring gap between his top teeth? That he smells incredible—like cinnamon and winter and darkness and sex.

  Sex.

  I set the final bowl on the table—the lobster-shaped one with the vinaigrette-splashed steak salad—and take my place. I’m suddenly not hungry at all until Pete says, “It’s always a bad sign when the chef isn’t eating.”

  Really, that’s all it takes before I decide that I hate Pete. Even my brother, who usually has a terrible case of oral diarrhea, gives Polar Pete a look. I wonder how they know each other or why Ethan ever thought he’d be a good addition to my first dinner party. I help myself to the end piece of the crusty bread.

  “A mucha hambre, no hay pan duro,” Gael says, mostly to Pete.

  “I’m don’t know what that means,” Pete replies, somehow sensing that the words are meant for him.

  “It means beggars can’t be choosers. It means when you’re hungry, there’s no stale bread. Rachel made this wonderful meal, and we should be grateful that Ethan invited us to eat this food and drink this wine and meet his sister.”

  I watch to see what Gael puts on his plate. Whether he’s leaning more towards the salad or the carbs. I hope he’s not the sort of person who eschews white flour. I try to discern whether he’s smiling while he chews. It sort of looks like a smile.

  “Are you from Spain?” Arianna asks.

  Arianna asks all of the questions to which she can sense that I want answers. That is what dozens of years of friendship buy you—mental telepathy. I find out that he was born and raised in Mad
rid, moved to New York four years ago to learn English and works as a wedding photographer for his brother-in-law, knows how to speak three languages, and likes my pasta.

  And he knows that I am divorced, I am single, I am in love with all things Spanish. That I visited Barcelona for two weeks with a school-sponsored group when I was seventeen. That I don’t love Central Park. That I do like zoos. That I write a blog and am on a graphic design sabbatical and am terrified of baking. See, more information than Datey.com could get out of me.

  We are having a fantastic time, and I can feel my body actually relaxing when Ethan yanks me out of my reverie by mentioning that the guests should rate my meal. “You know, like they do on Iron Chef. Give her points for plating and taste.”

  “Judging me on plating isn’t fair,” I say, motioning to my tiny apartment kitchen. “I don’t have room for cool dinnerware.”

  “But this dish is very interesting,” Gael says, motioning towards the lobster bowl.

  “It’s from Bar Harbor,” I tell him, even though he didn’t ask. “Anyway, cooking is just a hobby.”

  “Cooking is more than a hobby,” Arianna says generously. “It’s your blog. It’s you taking back you. Or becoming you. Or something like that.”

  I hope Gael’s English isn’t good enough to follow this conversation, because I’m suddenly embarrassed over the idea of needing to find myself.

  “I think plating is a creativity thing,” Pete corrects. “It has to do with how attractive the food is arranged on the plate or if it was just tossed into a bowl.”

  “Well, I thought the pasta was amazing,” Arianna interrupts. “It’s simple; but simple is good. And sometimes tomato sauces can be too garlicky and this one wasn’t.”

  “I dulled the garlic a bit with water before adding it to the oil,” I explain.

  “And the salad was delicious,” Gael adds. “The steak was perfect.”

  I beam at the mention of my little-steak-that-could.

  “The dressing was a little lemony,” my brother tells me.

  “It was supposed to be lemony,” Arianna points out.

  “Then it was too lemony,” my bother continues. “But the pasta was incredible.”

  “I liked the bread,” Pete says, almost grudgingly.

  “I didn’t bake the bread,” I tell him.

  “Next time, you will have to make Spanish food. Habas con jamon,” Gael teases, since I admitted earlier in the meal that I’ve never tried pork. I’m not kosher, but Hebrew school did a number on my conscience.

  I like that he refers to a next time.

  “I wish I could make the blog my fulltime job,” I sigh. “I don’t really want to return to the library.”

  “Sorry, no help here,” Pete says.

  You can say that again, Polar Pete.

  “Write a book,” Arianna says decisively, as if publishing a book is as easy as learning how to fry an egg.

  “Travel,” my brother tells me. “Become a travel writer.”

  “I can’t just become a travel writer,” I say with a hint of exasperation. “If writing a book isn’t very realistic than writing a travel book is less so. I don’t even think my passport is up to date.”

  “Why not, Rachel?” Gael says to me. “You can do anything, right?”

  “What do you think Rachel should do?” Arianna asks, because she knows I can’t.

  “I need to think about it. I will call her with my answer,” Gael says.

  While I’m making a small pot of coffee, he writes out his name and number of the back of the ingredient’s receipt. G-A-E-L, I notice. Not Gayle. Not a middle-aged lady’s name at all. I tear off the other half of the paper, hoping the toilet paper I bought isn’t listed on the back, and scrawl my own name and number. “Rachel,” he says again, repeating the numbers on the slip of paper before tucking it into his pocket.

  Is it terrible that I’m thinking, through bites of my cupcake, about how this will make a fantastic blog entry? How I can’t wait to write about him which is just an adult substitute for writing Mrs. Rachel Paez one hundred times on the inside of a math notebook? That I wonder if I have it in me to try cooking ham just to have an excuse to have him over again? Which is the most sex-worthy pork—serrano, jamon, or chorizo? I pluck one of the tiny chopped strawberries off the top and hope I look sexy eating it. Aren’t strawberries supposed to be an aphrodisiac?

  And at that moment, Pete’s voice breaks into my thoughts with “Who the hell eats Canadian bacon?”

  Which seems to end the party. Polar Pete knows how to cool off a conversation. Arianna collects her coat, my brother gives me a quick kiss on the cheek while he slips the leftovers out of my refrigerator, and Pete gives my hand a final limp shake. Gael grabs me in a spontaneous hug before he catches the waiting elevator with the rest of them. He thanks me for the dinner and conversation.

  I realize after everyone has left that I forgot to tell Arianna about the Bloscar email. Though it doesn’t really matter, because the phone rings once she gets home and relieves her babysitter. We spend an hour on the phone dissecting the dinner party, until Beckett howls for his midnight bottle.

  . . . And that is how I made the pancakes. I’m never going back to a mix again.

  Off the topic of pancakes, I’m trying to keep this as vague as possible in case he ever stumbles upon my blog, but I met the most delicious man in the world recently. Literally, I could have eaten him. He smelled like cinnamon and coffee and chocolate and sex, the man just reeked of sex. Not that he smelled like he had just dismounted, but he had that Marlboro Man without the cigarettes, soccer player who just scored a goal, sprouting stubble manliness about him that made me realize that if I were a different kind of woman, and I met him on the street, we would have ended up doing it in the alleyway.

  Not that I've had great sex in . . . oh . . . almost thirteen years. Fine, Adam and I had some early good years, but the last few caused a fine layer of dust to settle on my nether regions.

  So these are my questions, oh brilliant people of the Internets: (1) if you just had dinner with said man, how long would you wait for him to call you before you tried his cell? (2) Would you ever call his cell or would you take his lack of phone call as a sign and just polish off the entire stack of pancakes by yourself in a pity party? (3) How many dates do you need to have before it's kosher to have sex these days?

  Not that I'm thinking of taking a bite of that chocolate, cinnamon, soccer-playing concoction or anything . . .

  Chapter Four

  Preparing the Thyme

  I am actually humming. I am walking through the food store, collecting the rest of the ingredients for the angel food cake I’m finally going to tackle this afternoon. My first true excursion into the terrifying world of baking, and yet I’m humming. This is the hum of a woman who is in that zone where it is probable that the man she gave her number to will call her.

  Two days post-dinner-party. Which is a very different window than the five days post-dinner-party time period, which is not hum-worthy. That window contains obsessive Googling and ice cream eating. But I’m not in that window of time; I am still in a happy, full, self-satisfied place.

  It has been a long time since I’ve been in this place. Anyone married who laments their single years is only thinking of this chunk of the continuum. The excitement of knowing that someone is holding your telephone number (okay, perhaps he isn’t literally holding it, perhaps the paper is on his night table, or in his pocket, or . . . shit . . . at the bottom of a garbage can . . . ), that they could call any minute. I think that’s why people love to check email or go to their mailbox—just because the chance of human connection exists. But what married people forget is the anxiety that creeps into that space, the self-doubt, the frustration as the minutes tick over to that next chunk of the continuum—the five-day-post-telephone-number-exchange window.

  I grab some bags of frozen berries out of the freezer case and toss them into my basket, wondering if it would be too forward to c
all Gael and invite him over for cake even though this cake may be a complete disaster. I take out my cell phone and the scrap of paper I’ve been carrying around in my pocket in case an emergency occurs where caller ID does not record his phone number, and I am unable to call him back if I have bad reception at the grocery store. (I am also in that window when you plan for any possibility no matter how far-fetched.) I call Arianna instead, which is the safer choice.

  “Any word?” she asks.

  I can hear the sewing machine humming in the background. In addition to her freelance work for the designer, she is a sought-after seamstress, hemming the swingy pants legs of many a New York socialite. Beckett gives his greeting by screeching in the background.

  “Nothing yet. Can I come over tonight with an angel food cake?”

  “You’re baking? Good for you. Why don’t you come over after Beckett goes down, and we can eat it and get fat together. I’ll take you down with me if you’re going to ply me with sugar.”

  “It does have a lot of sugar. An inordinate amount of sugar for something that is supposed to be angelic,” I say, glancing at the shopping list. “If I stay home, I’ll just stare at my cell phone and the clock.”

  “Then come over here. Are you in the zone?”

  Arianna, of course, knows all about the zone. She is the one who labels every increment of time from the moment you hand over your phone number to a period of time two weeks later without a phone call.

  “I am in the zone, and I’m alternating between humming and feeling dizzy.”

  “That’s bad, sweetie,” Arianna tells me, and I know that it’s true.

  This is very very bad.

  A single, divorced woman, not completely over her ex yet, pining after a Spanish photographer.

  This is bad bad bad.

  He calls while I am reading the recipe for the third time, moving my lips as I go through each step. Preparation is the key to success, my high school gym teacher once told us, as if knowing the rules of field hockey would get us anywhere in life. But it’s not terrible advice over-all, especially in baking, where it’s sort of in the same genre of “Measure twice cut once.”