The Temporary Bride Page 3
“Jen,” she said tenderly, raising my hand and kissing it. “You have laborer’s hands. Just like your father and me.”
Chapter Two
The digital clock on the front of the oven shows almost midnight when I sit on the wide, short step that leads to the kitchen. It’s the usual place that I mop myself to, while I wait for the floors to dry. The scent of orange-oil soap, one capful per bucket, has come to signify the end of the day.
Flicking a worn, felt house slipper off one foot with the toe of the other, I lean back against the wall. I smell like onions and black pepper. It has worked its way into the weave of my clothes and the roots of my hair. Whether the class has Oaxacan moles in it, or a whole Vietnamese-style snapper, it’s guaranteed I’ll walk away reeking of alliums and spice.
I rummage through the left-behind bottles, pouring the last of some red wine into the only clean glass I can find. The large metal windows—remnants of my home’s previous life as a shoe factory, along with its concrete pillars and tall, bare ceilings—are opened wide and the cool spring air begins to mix with the smells of the hot kitchen. I untie the strings of the blue and brown apron printed with a fading pattern of dancing Victorian ladies and crumple it into a ball.
When I sense the floor is dry enough to move, I walk to the bathroom to add it, one final garment, to the washing machine. My lips are red and dry from not drinking enough water and my hair is pulled back into a ponytail, fixed with a black rubber band that has long lost its shape. My fingertips are stained yellow with turmeric and the polish on my toenails has worn away to misshapen dots. Three years in to this strange, wonderful new life and I look more like I did when I was a student. The same carelessness with my appearance. The same faded T-shirts and denim skirts, Birkenstocks and hooded jackets. My face is perhaps my one saving grace. Free of makeup, it has a kind of flushed, rosy glow I’ve always been proud of, one that leads most people to mistake me for younger than I am.
My home is over twelve hundred square feet, but for now I live out of just a small corner, in the bedroom into which I have pushed most of my belongings. My living room is strung with damp tablecloths and linen napkins hang over the kitchen stools to dry. A further load of aprons and dishcloths churns in the washing machine with a cupful of baking soda, added to remove the stains of red wine and smoked paprika. Often I fall asleep before the load has finished, still wearing my clothes and slippers, cradling a half-written shopping list, curled into a ball. My apartment is no longer my own, but shared with sixty people a week. They come here, in groups of twelve, and I teach them to cook.
There is no sign, no advertising, just a doorbell on the side of my orange brick building. When they come, my guests step into the old freight elevator that takes them up to the first floor. They are a potluck of people—strangers, often both to me and to each other—and most are young, in their twenties and thirties. Usually they like the idea of learning to cook in such an unlikely, industrial setting (“It’s so underground! It could be New York!”) but others are more wary. (“Do people live here?”) My smile is genuine when they arrive and I take their wine bottles, putting them in the fridge, in exchange for the cocktails I have made, having juiced pink grapefruits and pomegranates by hand, and crushed fistfuls of mint and ginger with honey in the final moments before the doorbell rings.
At first I was apprehensive about what the neighbors would think and tried to keep the fact that I had turned my apartment into a makeshift cooking school quiet. It drove me to theft, stealing magazines containing reviews of my classes from their mailboxes, but they seem to tolerate me, or at least, this being Britain, they lack the courage to tell me they disapprove of the strangers who come and go.
In any case, it feels almost wrong to call them classes.
Nightly we gather around my long, wooden table, perfect for rolling dough or hand-stretching filo pastry, using coconut scrapers and dim sum rolling pins. We taste “crazy honey” from Turkey and tongue-numbing Szechuan peppercorns from China. We crimp dumplings between our fingers and mix pickled tea leaves with roast peanuts and lime juice in tiny, lacquer Burmese bowls. Depending on the evening the table is laden with bamboo baskets and cleavers or metal rasps and paring knives; perhaps tiny Arab wooden presses for shaping the cookies we’ll make with ground almonds and dates. One day is Turkish or Modern British Cooking, the next may be a Malaysian or Cambodian class. My pantry is full to bursting with the tools I pull down for an evening and carefully stack away again: a copper ibrik for Turkish coffee along with a dozen tiny, enameled cups and saucers; Vietnamese mandolines for slicing green papaya and star fruit; a tortilla press for flattening balls of masa. I have not one but five mortars and pestles, made of granite, brass and volcanic rock.
Every morning, for three hours I shop for my classes, seeking the best and freshest ingredients I can find. The radish leaves we will crush with roasted pumpkin seeds, green chilies and tomatillos. The betel leaves we will wrap around minced chicken with toasted rice and Asian herbs. The fresh turmeric we will simmer in coconut milk, adding lobster, curry leaves and tamarind. Small cardboard boxes of tiny, folded quails. Round silver cans of walnut oil. Thick glass jars of crème fraîche. Fermenting and mixing. Straining and infusing. I spend hours trying to make each class perfect.
I seem to have become something of an “it girl,” which surprises me. PR firms and ad agencies book their Christmas parties here. Wine companies inquire about sherry tastings and champagne-pairing evenings. I write a column for a style magazine with recipes and photographs. It is strange for me to see my words printed alongside features on designer clothes or boutique hotels in Paris. I earn roughly half of what I used to and haven’t bought a new dress in over a year. I get my hair cut every four months instead of two, and the T-shirts and jeans I live in are starting to get holes in them. There is nothing breezy or effortless about what I do but I have never, for a second, looked back.
My first meal of the day often comes at 10 p.m. My assistant Katrina and I reach for my cheap Chinese plastic bowls, the ones with red, faded dragon motifs we often eat from when all the good plates are gone, and fill them with the remaining scraps of the evening’s food. Sometimes we are lucky and can feast on crab claws or the tail end of a fish; the morsels that are too messy, too full of bones for delicate English palates. More often than not, there is barely enough food for one so I pretend not to be hungry, nudging the leftovers toward Katrina and secretly making a bowl of steamed rice scattered with a few roasted peanuts after she has gone.
In the three years that we have been working together, we have seen a pattern develop. Our favorite classes are those made up of voracious people who love to eat: the Italians who push past us for the emptied pots on the stove and scrape the bottoms with hunks of bread; the skinny East End girls who loosen the belts on their black, clingy jeans as they slurp third helpings of coconut-milk soup and long-simmered curry; and the timid Japanese couples who make easy work of dark chocolate cakes that spill with warm, salted caramel. We read their appreciation not in words but in brusque table manners and devastation, the stacks of empty bowls and plates, napkins stained with oils and sauces, hundreds of dollars of ingredients chopped, cooked and consumed in just under three hours.
The worst classes, the ones we dread, can usually be predicted by a glance at the class list. On unlucky nights it reads like the honor roll of some leafy private school. The tidy, pronounceable English names of people who will travel from London’s tree-lined, Georgian-terraced postcodes to spend the evening with us which often fill us with a sense of despair.
These are names that struggle with chopsticks, lose patience with rolling pins and eat flatbreads with a knife and fork. Reared on a diet of boiled vegetables and lamb with mint sauce, with pasty faces and lips that screw up at the scent of fish sauce or the sour taste of tamarind, these names are often bundled with smugness on coming to see what “this cooking lark” is all about. Our ingredients—meat streaked with fat and cartilage, fish with t
he heads still on, bundles of herbs bound up with twine—and our spice-roasted, wok-seared, street-food recipes are usually lost on them. They prefer delicate filets and white wine sauces. When they go, taking their awkward silences with them but leaving behind their recipe binders, they are also the most generous. With these names the leftovers are always plentiful.
My classes are uncompromising and authentic, probably too much so. I know some people want a list of pastes and instant doughs, cheats from the supermarket, but I continue to be stubborn. Most of the time, the people who come seem to like what I do. Their appetite seems to be not just for the food we cook, but the stories I tell and the world I inhabit: the woman in Chinatown who sells me tiny swimmer crabs out of a laundry hamper; the Scottish scallop divers who wrap langoustines in copies of the Highland Times newspapers and send them to me on the sleeper train; the trips abroad I take to learn new recipes, staying away for weeks at a time.
The only glitch in this new life is that it can still break my heart a little; I care so much. When someone brushes past me and eyeballs the setting I’ve meticulously planned, or gives a cold, thin-lipped smile upon finding that there are no chef hats or thermometer-controlled water baths, I feel awkward in my plain apron and bare feet, but I am learning to be stoic. I am fighting for this way of life, which still feels new yet has subsumed everything—my home, my energy, my every waking hour. Day in day out—the scent of orange oil, dregs of red wine and the scent of onion and black pepper deep in my skin.
The washing machine is still going when the doorbell rings. It is unusual for him to come on a weekday; we usually see each other only on weekends and even that is rare. Sometimes we won’t speak for months. The prompts and invitations are always by text message, always out of the blue and rarely, if ever, refused.
I take his coat and hang it up beside mine, along with the woolen scarf he wears looped around his neck. He knows to leave his shoes at the top of the step, to pull the door until it clicks, to park his car in the side street the parking attendants will miss, in case it should remain there until the morning. It is a strange appetite I have for him. I’ve never liked the rough, coarse way he kisses me. His hair feels slightly greasy in my fingers and through the soft linen of this shirt I can feel the paunch of his stomach, filling into the hollow of my waist as he presses his body up against me. But I enjoy the scent of leather from his coat and the eagerness he feels for me. He isn’t afraid to make demands on me and it feels sophisticated to be asked for this way. What began as an affair has mellowed into a sweet, familiar medicine. He touches my neck as though it belongs to him and looks often into my eyes.
We first met at a spring tasting dinner, eating pasta with nettles, morels on toast, wild sea trout poached with spinach. Across the round table we found we liked the same wine, lived in the same neighborhood, ate at the same favorite gastropub with a typewritten menu and mismatched plates. He gave me a ride home and his telephone number, written on the back of a torn-out section of newspaper.
In the beginning we took each other for long, decadent meals, tearing artichokes with our hands, drinking wine and grappa, ending with quick pecks on the cheek. Within weeks we were sitting in his car for hours talking, about the Dogon villages in Mali, the Andalusian farmhouse he is renovating, the pleasure of picking peaches still warm from the sun. It was only later I learned he was famous. I came home and searched through my cookbooks, finding his picture on at least a dozen of the jackets. Typing his name brings up dozens of references to awards, trips to India, Vietnam and Mexico. I found an article describing his Australian wedding as “the foodie event of the year” and felt a lump in my throat, looking at a photograph of him taken a year before we met, smiling at a crowd of casually dressed, barefoot guests, stirring a blackened cast-iron pot over a wood fire. I used to think he was going to choose me, that we’d live bravely, filling any resulting gulfs with patience and kindness, that the magic potion of romance, understanding and adrenaline was too irresistible to refuse.
Four years later his real wife still lives in France; they are still having problems and I still take his calls. And instead, we lie in bed together planning the trips we’ll never take and at the height of our frantic sex, or sometimes afterward, as I lay in the crook of his rib cage, he tells me that he loves me.
Sometimes, rarely, I tell him that I love him too. For in those moments I do love him; I love him and I love the simple, familiar combination of us. It is the longevity of that love that has become unimportant. Sometimes it lasts a few days, long enough for a breakfast of kisses, bites of toast, and promises to see more of each other. More often, it fades as he rinses himself in my shower; as I gather up his clothes from where they’ve scattered on the floor.
They seem enough, those small, random and imperfect moments. Worth being plucked out of my self-centered life for a few moments at a time. Afterward, we separate, living in the same city, overlapping, but largely unaware of each other’s presence.
Chapter Three
I have never had to wear a hijab. The idea frightens me a little. The shapeless cloak, somber colors and layers of scarf wrapped around my head and neck; garments so obscuring they seem to create even a labored, particular walk. At best, I imagine I will look severe and unkind, at worst I fear I may disappear entirely.
I have managed to avoid it until now, even in Yemen. There I had stayed with six women, the Al-Khatib sisters, who wore head-to-toe black, including veils across their faces and dark gloves to cover their hands. Yet each morning as we took turns checking ourselves in the tall mirror that hung in the corridor, they insisted upon my elbow-length sleeves and bare, ponytailed hair. When I tried to cover my head or don a shawl before going outside, they closed in around me, brushing away my attempts, saying, “No, it is good this way.”
With their fierce swaggers, shrill voices and readiness to make a scene if something displeased them, they made for powerful guardians as we moved through the narrow, darkened alleys of eastern Sana’a, squashing ourselves onto the creaky public minibuses that took us to the market. I followed the indications of their long, black-covered fingers as they pointed me to a new seat every few stops, a near-constant adjusting and readjusting of places to ensure no woman suffered the indignity of sitting next to a man she wasn’t married or related to. As we picked out fish, rabbits or chickens, that squawked and fluttered as they were thrown onto the scales, they whispered warnings of the times they had been insulted by the stray glances and roaming hands of Sana’a’s bachelors, who spent much of the afternoon sitting on flattened cardboard boxes in the streets, chewing the handfuls of green hallucinogenic leaves they stuffed into their mouths and wedged in their cheeks.
In their small, white-tiled kitchen the sisters observed a strict pecking order: the youngest and most recently married peeled garlic and scraped carrots while the oldest—twenty-four with three children already—commandeered the groaning Chinese food processor. She fed it handfuls of green chilies, tomatoes and coriander to make the fiery z’houg we dipped boiled eggs into for a snack. Under the layers of black cloth that were shed and flung into a corner, the girls revealed the indoor versions of themselves: faded jeans, fitted leggings and baggy sweatshirts saying “Frankfurt” or “University of Los Angeles.” Their skin was smooth and almond-colored, and their thick hair fell in loose curls around their faces. Their veil-muffled voices became loud and crisp. It felt strangely intimate to see them this way, the shapes and textures of their hair, the red lipstick on their mouths, the fact that some of them preferred pink T-shirts to blue, things few men would ever see.
From morning until midday the Al-Khatib kitchen was a busy hub of reaching arms, tasting spoons and fingers flicking water or oil across eager surfaces. One sister’s sizzling pan awaited another’s pat of clarified butter and heaping spoonful of hawaij spices. A third sister stretched dough across a conical straw pillow while a fourth brushed the surface with beaten egg and scattered sesame seeds. Jars of cardamom were tipped, colanders
of rice were washed, and chicken was hacked into neat pieces on a slab of wood balanced on small plastic stools. Unlike their kitchen duties, the care of their ten young children was interchangeable and every mistimed leap over the cushions piled in the living room, demand for a glass of warm milk with rosewater or scorched knee from an overeager approach to the blazing tanoor could send any of the sisters running.
I imagine they had expected me to be older and probably lazier but I worked hard for my intrusion into their lives, far beyond the thousand dollars in crisp banknotes that I had paid into the hand of the eldest of the Al-Khatib sons. In exchange for hard currency I had been promised two weeks of being permitted to trail them everywhere they went, and to be placed firmly at the center of all their cooking and feeding activities. The youngest, who by virtue of being the last born had been spared an early marriage, was enrolled at university and was thrilled to be able to speak English with a native.
Even though they were bound to me by a contractual duty, I sought my right of passage by peeling potatoes and scouring the large battered pots they cooked in, tipping their plastic margarine tubs full of peelings into the sewers that ran fast in the alleyways below. They smiled proudly as I scribbled frantically in my notebook, asking for precision—how much caraway? How many teacups of flour?—determined to translate faithfully the things I had learned and reproduce them on my return home. It wasn’t always easy; it was forbidden to photograph even their hands while they tossed dough back and forth until paper thin or checked a fermented batter by pouring it in loose ribbons from a metal ladle. The privacy of their indoor and unwrapped selves was to be guarded and kept hidden at all times.