LITMIR.BIZ

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and he has to be prepared. I mean, he’s got to have a million recipes in his head that need only the ingredients that are supplied, along with the spices and stuff he’s allowed to bring with him.”

      I wonder for a moment about whether Howard would be more interested in me if I were a great cook, and whether Howard’s interest would make Drew jealous. And then my reality check kicks in. Drew doesn’t get jealous because Drew doesn’t really care. Remember this, I tell myself.

      I watch the TV screens as the chefs lay out their wares, line up their knives, peelers, microplanes.

      “What’s that?” I ask Howard, pointing at a stainless-steel gadget on one of the TV screens. He pulls his eyes away from Nick’s setup for a second. “A culinary torch,” he says dismissively before pointing out that Nick’s is newer and bigger and that he usually uses a salamander for caramelizing sugar.

      I know better than to ask what a salamander is.

      The emcee is apparently someone from the Food Network. I have been able to cram raising kids, running a business, trying to date and coping with my parents into one life, but it’s meant there’s no time for the Food Network. Howard seems to find this impossible to believe.

      “You’ve never heard of him?” he asks. “He’s on after Rachel Ray.” I look at him blankly. He asks if I am pulling his leg.

      “I know Emeril,” I offer gamely. “‘Kick it up a notch,’ right?”

      Howard pats my leg affectionately and looks at me with something akin to pity while Mr. Food Network calls everyone to order and announces the rules.

      “And now,” he says—and Howard takes my hand and squeezes it like they’re announcing the nominees for Best Actor in a Documentary Starring Food—“the ingredients.”

      Howard raises a fist and shouts, “Yes!” at the mention of duck. I smile at him as if I care, while I imagine how best to redecorate Madison on Park, and how to present my ideas in a way that will convince Nick and Madison to take me up on my offer. Like one of Rio’s NASCAR races, Mr. Food Network tells the chefs to start their ovens. All around me people sit forward in their seats.

      Around me, but not me. I’m thinking about traditional colors that go with oak, and how forest green has been so overdone. I want Madison on Park to take people by surprise. Not dead-guy-in-the-bathroom surprise, but something that will distinguish it from every other nice restaurant they’ve ever been in. I try to picture deep red with the oak. I like it, but I feel it still needs something to make it pop, to give it pizzaz. Touches of a pale chartreuse? A bold lavender? A deep purple?

      A sharp whack jerks me from my reverie, and Howard tells me that the chef at the second station couldn’t cut the rind off an orange, never mind the head off a duck. I watch Nick’s monitor and see Madison put her hands on her hips and stamp her foot like Nick is purposely not getting on with it. There’s something Lady Macbethian about her as she directs Nick’s cleaver to some exact spot on the poor duck’s neck.

      Howard says something about a perfectly cooked foie gras with poached pear and a port wine reduction sauce, but I’m trying to imagine the chartreuse and finding it unappetizing.

      Maybe because now I’m associating it with dead duck.

      Meanwhile, no one seems the least bit concerned that knives are being tossed about the stage with dangerous abandon. No one except me and a fire marshal stationed just off to the right of the stage. Sure—he and I are well acquainted with disasters. I arrive in time to report them and he gets to clean up after them.

      An oven door is slammed, followed by an outraged shout about a soufflé and another about a rising cake.

      A time warning is issued and the chefs go into double time. The monitors look like someone’s hit the fast-forward button on TiVo.

      And I decide to go with the deep purple. Maybe it’s all the surrounding drama.

      At each station, one chef is tending the stove and the other is at the chopping block. Almost every monitor shows vegetables being julienned with knives the size of light sabers.

      A sudden gasp. Mine. Blood seeps onto the cutting board on Monitor Number Three—Nick and Madison’s station. Howard rises from his seat as Nick rushes to Madison’s side, wrapping her hand in a dishcloth and raising it up.

      Someone in the crowd announces that he is a doctor. A half dozen others jump to their feet and announce that they, too, are doctors, throwing specialities around the room like baseball statistics.

      “I’m a plastic surgeon.”

      “I’m a surgeon.”

      “I’m a urologist.”

      A urologist?

      Two or three doctors head for the stage, one even leaping up without bothering to use the stairs. And then Madison starts to scream, like she’s just realized what happened, and someone, I’m not sure who, knocks over one of those crème brûlée scorcher things. And suddenly there are flames leaping from the stage and people in the audience are screaming and Howard’s looking at me like it’s all my fault and he shouldn’t have brought me.

      People clamber over seats despite the fact that all the flames are confined to the stage and that the fire marshal is ordering everyone to stay calm. Someone keeps shouting about the nightclub in Rhode Island, and several lawyer-types are yelling something that sounds like, “Sue, sue!”

      Twenty minutes later, after we have been drenched by the automatic sprinklers, a police car has taken Madison, her severed fingertip and Nick to a hospital, and I have managed to pick the little padlock on Nick’s travel case with a bobby pin, Howard and I are gathering up his knives and tools.

      “Wish you hadn’t touched that,” a familiar voice drawls and there, in the flesh, twice in one day, is Drew Scoones.

      I drop the knife. “My mother’s right,” I say. “You are a stalker.”

      Drew tells me to feel free to put the knife away, now that my prints are all over it. I assure him that, despite the fact that I was here, there wasn’t any crime.

      “The woman just cut herself,” I say. “Heat of the moment,” I add, pointing toward the ceiling from whence, hair plastered to my forehead, I have been reduced to looking like a drowned rat.

      He looks at the debris-strewn floor and hands me what I think is a citrus reamer. “So what is it with you and disasters?” he asks.

      CHAPTER 3

      Design Tip of the Day

      “When we think of fooling the eye we tend to think only of trompe l’oeil, but there are many more ways of tricking the viewer than simply painting scenes on walls. There are faux finishes. There are fiber-board tables hidden under the fanciest of cloths. And of course, there are metallic paints and gold leaf, reminding us that ‘all that glitters is not gold.’”

      —TipsFromTeddi.com

      Until now the best thing about going out with Howard has been the food. I mean, only the finest restaurants, and all at Newsday’s expense, as long as I let him order for me and sample what’s on my plate. I mean, how great is that? I thought it couldn’t get any better.

      Only it has. Now the best thing about going out with Howard is that I get to tell Drew Scoones, when he calls this afternoon, that I am busy dressing for dinner at Madison on Park and can’t really talk.

      And no, I can’t possibly see him.

      Perhaps he’d like a raincheck? I say cooly.

      He says it’s not raining. “Gonna see old Nine Fingers? She gonna be there?”

      I tell him that I don’t know, that again I’m sorry, but like I said, I’m busy.

      “Oh, don’t worry about me,” he says. “I’m sure I can find something to do. It’s not like I’ll be sitting in

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