A Dish With Bite
by Ron Davidson
part 1
The automatic gate slid open and Jack drove his G-wagon onto the broad half-circle driveway. The neatly-trimmed boxwood hedge seemed to warp back and then return to position as it rolled by, as if the behemoth automobile displaced not only several cubic meters of air but also reality itself in passing. The SUV stopped, the door opened, and the tall, muscular form of Jack Banesworth stepped out. He moved with an equal mix of heaviness and grace, as former athletes who have managed to sustain their physiques into middle age often do.
Jack worked hard to maintain his football-playing form after two decades of climbing the ladder to the vice-presidency of his dad’s advertising agency. Only a modest layer of fat inhumed his still-firm musculature, and he privately thought the fat was enhancing, not detracting, to his appearance.
The extra weight had grown evenly around his body, not bunching in the middle, giving him an alpha-male, taurine quality that, he admitted to himself, had worked many times to his advantage in both work and play. Like his Mercedes-Benz, he was well-engineered, intelligent, dignified, and at the same time an object of brute force.
As the rear hatch of the vehicle swung open, Jack punched a text to his wife, Daisy: “Home.” He pictured her in her office loft, where she would be ensconced at this hour of the afternoon in her knockoff Eames chair, with her bare feet on her desk, flipping the pages of a screenplay every ten seconds with metronomic regularity.
The pattern would vary only occasionally as she scribbled a note on a legal pad or threw a script into the trash can and picked up another. The can was a large, round skull head with red eyes that lit up as its automatic jaws opened to receive trash. Herb Ranglefield, one of the executive producers on Honeymoon Horror Night, had given it to her as a joke, but it was just quirky enough to suit her taste, and she’d installed it in her office.
Jack hoisted six grocery bags out of the car and held them by the loops. He’d just spent two hours shopping ethnic markets, buying Spanish ham, Manchego cheese, choko chutes, Chrouk Metae and a lengthy list of other ingredients he’d need to prepare tonight’s “So-Yo So-Sta” (Southern European-Southeast Asian) fusion dinner.
Years ago, he’d thought cooking authentic ethnic foods was impressive. But under the influence of the menus of the dinner party circuit in Rancho El Dorado, he’d gradually raised the bar from cooking “ethnic” to a variety of ethnic fusion dinners, with ever-increasing degrees of exoticism and authenticity. He wasn’t a talented chef. But he subscribed to a several elite food websites and followed their recipe directions to the letter, without varying a thing.
Not that this made the job of cooking easy. He worked hard finding the correct ingredients and getting specialized utensils, then following the intricate steps the recipes demanded. He was iron-willed. And soon he had risen to the status of king chef in the dinner-party circuit. All of this was a source of deep pride in him, another measure of his strength.
He had, according to tonight’s recipe, more than two hours’ work ahead of him in the kitchen but, as he walked to the door, he swung the bags energetically in his arms, like a boxer carrying gear to a gym. He imagined tonight’s success. He would offer a self-deprecating baritone chuckle when guests showered him with compliments, as he knew they would.
Just lately, Irene Langstrom had been cooing the most over his cooking. At the last party, when her husband Art had gone outside to smoke a cigar, and Daisy had been deep in conversation with Linda Bergen in the den, she had run her fingers gently up and down his porterhouse arm as she marveled at his “Midas touch” with a paring knife.
There had been a little click in his head. There was no hesitation, nothing to mull over. He merely reflected that he’d often wondered what she saw in Art, a slightly stooped tax consultant with a forced flamboyance of style, an affected, cigar-chomping manner copied from war and detective movies. And that her sudden interest in him rang out as the answer. She saw damned little. Of what was left of Art anyway.
Maybe Art used to come off as charming. But no longer. Not with his hair going gray and his stoop worsening and his testosterone levels pointing at a bear market. And Irene, now in her middle forties and no doubt beginning to hear the tick of the clock, to really hear it for the first time, when it sounds like Big Ben in your head, was looking for some fun while she could. It made perfect sense to him.
“I found it!” Daisy. His wife. She wasn’t in her office loft. She was standing in front of him, beside the staircase, looking decidedly frumpy in her housecoat and fuzzy pink slippers, her hair a raven’s nest of disheveled curls, her granny glasses reflecting the slice of sky he’d brought in with him through the open door. A Number 2 pencil jutted above her left ear.
“Found what?” he asked.
“Another winner,” she said impatiently. “A needle in the haystack. Maybe the next Honeymoon Horror Night. Maybe.”
“Ah.”
“It needs another body. A woman we can watch naked and then get killed.”
“Of course it does.”
“And it has an absolutely disgusting incest subplot that has to go.”
“Can you turn it into a tasteful incest subplot?”
“But the rest is fantastically commercial.”
“Congratulations.”
“You’ll see,” she said. “If Gate goes for it and it grosses what I think it could, you’ll see.” She had turned and was already climbing the stairs. “I’ll set the table. For seven o’clock, right?” she asked without looking back.
The memory of Irene Langstrom delicately running her finger up and down his arm went through Jack’s mind. “Yep,” he said.
Jack spent the next two hours preparing his So-Yo So-Sta feast, following the instructions with utmost care. He paused now and then when things were simmering to sip a glass of wine and check in on the Dodgers game.
The kitchen was filling with a complicated odor of rival, yet supposedly complementary cuisines. Jack could not honestly decide if he liked the smell or not. But the websites hadn’t let him down before and, after a few minutes of growing used to the odor, he congratulated himself on what was certain to be another triumph.
When the marinated anchovies were arranged in a circle on the serving platter and chilling in the fridge, he wiped the countertops, dumped the pots and pans in the sink, took off his apron, and finished his glass of wine. Daisy had come downstairs and begun to set the dining room table. Jack would just have time to freshen up and change before guests started to arrive. Because it was overflowing, though, he took a moment to carry the little plastic bucket he’d filled with discarded vegetable bits out the compost bin.
He glanced around the yard as he trudged to the bin, which sat beside the high white vinyl fence that separated his yard from the fifth-hole fairway of the country club golf course. It was a nice-looking yard, with a pool and a lawn flanked by hedges and shrubs.
The foliage sheltered nooks that had played host to numerous key moments in the course of Jack’s career as a serial philanderer. They’d sheltered first kisses (Laura Miler, Andrea Anapoli); whispered plans to rendezvous elsewhere (Judi Wilcox, Alice Owen, The Summer Intern Whose Name He Kept Forgetting); brief, furtive embraces and gropings (many); and even break-ups, but only, here in his yard, if the partner was equally ready to call it quits and could be counted on not to get emotional or make a scene (Lisa Holt, Susan Vargas, Amanda Haynes, Penny Wriggles, The Summer Intern).
It was their size, Jack knew, that made these garden niches so ideal. They were fully sheltered from view, but because they were so small, his brief, female-accompanied saunterings into and out of them at various parties had never raised more than a curious eyebrow and a joking accusation. Neither of which did any damage to his reputation as a man, he felt. Besides — and most important of all — it was right here in this garden of earthly delights that Daisy had trysted with the pool boy for three months at the start of their marriage.
When Jack reached the compost bin, his knuckles were white from squeezing the handle of the plastic bucket. He opened and closed his hand a few times, then looked once more across the yard. The oleander, pink flowers blooming, made a charming little alcove. The oleander, then.
It would be simple a matter of taking advantage of the genial chaos of the later stages of the party, when the sixteen guests were scattered in small clusters and snatches of laughter were getting more raucous and the necks of empty wine bottles were poking out of the trash can. He would stroll with Irene around the ficus hedge by the barbecue grill, past the palo verde — a bit thin on foliage but, in the dark, he thought they could go unnoticed — and thence across a narrow gap to the oleander.
He unscrewed the lid of the compost bin as he imagined the evening ahead. But an upward gust of hot, putrid-smelling air interrupted his thoughts.
“Whoa.” He stared into the bin. He knew that composting matter heated up; he dimly recalled the figure as 150 or 160 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe a bit higher. But whoa! He passed his free hand over the opening. Could one of Art’s cigar butts have wound up in the bin, igniting a smoldering fire? The last dinner he’d hosted was a month ago.
He saw nothing smoldering. Inside was just a shadowy pile of “greens” and “browns”. Well, not “just,” he mentally corrected. The bin was filled with specialty ingredients imported from all over the world. And none of it was cloned GMO food. He was looking at a combination of fibers, seeds, enzymes, leaves, funguses — you name it — that was probably unique in the history of the world. Maybe, as the mix broke down, it experienced a supercharged chemical reaction. He could light the house with the energy it was giving off.
Jack felt satisfaction in thinking that the bin’s contents mirrored a trait he prized in himself. It was as if his strength had spread to the world outside of him. The intense reaction would burn out impurities and make a superior compost. His mind habitually jumped to the idea that the world would get an instant upgrade if he were the norm, not the exception.
This triggered the associated thought that it was getting high time to have children. Daisy wanted to wait for a “pause opportunity” in her career, but with her being 31 and him 41, how much longer could they afford to wait? He would bring it up delicately after the party.
At the conclusion of these thoughts, he found himself lingering at the bin. The smell was so foul it was troubling his reverie. It wasn’t the usual sour, vinegary stench of compost, but something nastier. He stuck his nose in the opening and sniffed. Maybe not so superior, he had to admit. If the usual stink of a compost pile could take a crap, it would smell like this. Some exotic vegetable must be dying a hard death indeed. Or maybe a rodent had burrowed into the bin from below and died inside. He imagined the furry corpse swelling in the heat and bursting open, drizzling maggoty guts into the compost. The thought of such befoulment dismayed him a little. But he had no time to clean any messes in the bin now.
He screwed the lid back on the bin and started for the house, blowing the corrupted air out of his lungs and inhaling the apricot scent of oleander. The guests would be arriving soon. He would just have time to brush his teeth, shave, add a dash of cologne, and put on his best dinner jacket. Better the jasmine hedge, he thought, as his eyes caught the gold shimmer of Daisy’s kimono-inspired party dress through the kitchen window.
The oleander was a little too close to the compost bin.
* * *
Art and Irene were the last to arrive, almost 45 minutes late, and Jack had begun to suspect that Irene had had second thoughts. But when she let herself onto the patio via the side gate, the ornate iron frame almost bumping into him as he chatted with Herb Mackey, with Art shuffling two steps behind, he knew at once the game was on. She had done her hair, which tumbled silkily over her bare shoulders, and gave off the fragrance of roses. She beamed amid a murmur of appreciation and spun theatrically to show off her décolletage. She gave him a longer-than-usual hello kiss, close to the mouth.
He understood her tactic at once, as he had used it several times himself. He called it the purloined letter, named after the Edgar Allen Poe story. Put what you want to conceal out in the open, and nobody will see it. She was being so brazenly seductive with him, nobody would suspect a thing.
“Hey there, gorgeous!” he said, and gave a hearty baritone chuckle. He knew the game.
As she moved on with her hellos — giving most of the men only a brief hand squeeze, he noticed — he glanced half-consciously across the garden to the jasmine stand. He felt the thrill of anticipation and risk run through him. Then, just for a second, his eye slid warily towards the compost bin, and a chill invaded his stomach. Had it... tilted? For a wild instant he imagined that the gaseous corpse of the rodent had exploded in the thing, dislodging it from its anchors. But he discarded the possibility as absurd. More likely another rodent was burrowing around the base, causing it to tilt. Then he narrowed his eyes. Were those... heat waves rising from it?
“We’re going to spend two nights around the Sacramento game,” Herb was saying.
Jack turned back to his friend, who failed to register his perplexity. “Uh, two?”
“We’ll go to a show, and we have reservations at Localis. Maximize the pleasure, right?”
“Yeah.” Just then, behind Herb, Irene’s bare shoulders came into view as she stepped forward to take a glass of champagne offered by Daisy. Jack’s eyes followed the contours of her shoulders up to the graceful curve of her neck, and the compost bin vanished from his thoughts. “Absolutely.”
Had Jack not gotten distracted and looked again across the yard at the bin, he might have noticed a squirrel scampering past it suddenly jump a foot into the air, screech in terror, and dart up the nearby palo verde. Had he looked even more carefully, he might have seen a steaming porridge ooze from the base of the compost bin in the direction of the palo verde. The porridge was whitish, but thick with untold bits of variegated leafy matter, tiny mushrooms and, at the front end, red and yellow sprouts that stretched and retracted like slug antennae. The squirrel would screech once more, but only for an instant.
* * *
An hour and a half later, the guests had eaten the So-Yo So-Sta feast, showered Jack with compliments so gratifying that for a short time he forgot about the planned tryst amid the jasmine, and imbibed enough alcohol to lend affairs a bright postprandial glow. The guests had broken into small clusters around the lighted patio, except for Pete Wilcox and Dave Mackey, who were watching a poker match in the man cave Jack had made of the spare bedroom, and Art, who stood off by the pool puffing a cigar and speaking on the phone. Daisy’s husky laughter rang out now and again from the den, where she and Lisa Bergen had gone to smoke a joint.
Jack, moving about the party in host mode, had had to extricate himself from two conversations with Irene because she was drinking too much and getting a little sloppy with her stratagem. She giggled too fondly at his jokes, stroked his arm too often and turned too conspicuously profile when she sipped wine, showing off her pursed, cherry lips. When a faked fake starts looking too fake, Jack thought, it comes across as real. He had immediately retreated to the kitchen, thinking to remember this new dictum.
But now the party had hit full swing, and it was time to make his move. He strolled past the bar where Irene stood in conversation with Alice Finch and Joan Connors. He paused briefly in her line of sight, pulled his phone from his pocket, and then walked off towards the jasmine at the dark, far end of the yard with the phone at his ear. When he reached the jasmine, he slipped behind it and pocketed the phone.
Copyright © 2023 by Ron Davidson
