16
Bain Marie: A container of hot water into which a pan is placed for slow cooking.
2008
New Haven, Connecticut.
Of all the places in the world Queenie B could land, this is last on the list.
It has been a decade and a half since she left this city to film the pilot for the PBS show that would jettison her from obscurity to superstardom.
She’d left it behind. All of it. Friends, jobs—she had two at the time—acquaintances whose names she can’t recall. They had to all be gone, at this point. On to better jobs. Better cities. Better.
Except Marco.
Of course, Marco.
He said he’d never leave, and he hasn’t.
She pulls up to the curb outside the dilapidated building she’s come to see.
It might have been lovely, once upon a time.
Quaint.
A good number of the original cedar shakes are still there. Big windows—currently glassless and boarded up—on the first floor. Those on the second—just as glassless and less carefully boarded—show signs of having had hurricane shutters, that meaning there are still a few mostly intact, creaking on their hinges. The shutter dogs remaining are not doing their jobs, but at least they’re still there, and probably original. Regina is surprised they survived scavengers, though who in this neighborhood would even know what they are, let alone their worth?
From what she’s learned from the realtor, the edifice was a fresh fish market from the time it was built in 1894 until the 1960s, when it became a pharmacy, and finally, in 1982, a head shop.
The upper floor has been used as a residence, a storeroom, and a hookah bar—being ten years too late or fifteen years too early for trends—in that order.
Abandoned sometime in the nineties, the place has been just another building in the once-bustling Rock Landing left to die a slow and withering death.
The perfect place for Queenie B to die, once and for all.
She walks around the perimeter of the building, keys laced through her fingers as she’s read a woman alone in a sketchy area should do, imagining the garden she could plant in the yard apparently being used as a toilet by the local indigent.
There is only one window cracked but not boarded, and she peeks inside.
Empty, but for more detritus.
The place will take at least a year, maybe two, to restore and get running. Queenie B doesn’t have two years left. Regina Benuzzi, however and hopefully, does.
Getting back to her car—a white 2001 Durango she paid cash for not two hours ago—Queenie stands aside for an elderly woman wearing a fast-food crown.
She is pushing a shopping cart full of empties and nods imperiously as she passes by.
This is who she’s doing this for, not herself.
She wants to make a difference, a positive impact, in overlooked, apparently disposable lives. The impoverished. The addicts. The runaways. The mentally ill. The elderly with no one to care for them.
Queenie needs redemption.
So maybe it’s a little for herself.
A lot for herself.
But doing good is doing good.
She rose to fame and fortune by sheer will; she’ll use that same will now.
One day at a time.
Alone. It’s how she’s lived the last several years. So far, so good. Tomorrow, she will go to the realty office and start the necessary paperwork. Tonight, though, she is heading to Wooster Street.
Not exactly Wooster, but a side street nearby.
To the last friend Queenie B and Regina Benuzzi have on earth.
New Haven has changed since last she drove these streets, but she manages to get where she needs to go.
It’s dark and it’s cold and it rained earlier, leaving shiny puddles in all the potholes and dips.
November in Connecticut is beautiful.
November in New Haven, not so much; but like any other city, it has its charms.
The names on the bars and restaurants and shops have changed, but the basic feel of the place remains.
The wealthy areas are still wealthy.
The poor, still poor.
Wooster Street is still Wooster Street.
And there is Marco’s, exactly as it was all those years ago, from striped awning to the curl of letters on the window.
Marco hadn’t believed her when she said she’d be back.
After a time, Queenie took his word for it.
She leaves the Durango parked down the block and walks the rest of the way.
No heels clicking on the sidewalk, just the squeak of wet sneakers.
Queenie doesn’t wear makeup, especially not the signature red lipstick.
The long ponytail pulled through the back of her ball cap—Huskies, picked up in the airport—is the last bit of her famous persona to remain. She’s even gained just enough weight to take her goddess curves to matronly plump. Not on purpose; it’s just the way it went.
Queenie goes around to the service entrance, even though, late as it is, no patrons remain inside.
Marco will be at the bar, having a drink with whatever staff lingers to drink for free and smoke inside rather than in the alley.
The kitchen is clean.
Empty.
Garlic, onions, and olive oil still mist the air or are so permeated into every crack and crevice it’s part of the decor.
Sacred aromas. Queenie breathes them deep into her lungs. Hopeful. Listening. Voices on the other side of the swinging door tell her all is as she suspects. Marco’s deep rumble tumbles around in her belly. He was never a drunk, but always a drinker. Every night. After hours. They’d gotten drunk together on more occasions than Queenie can calculate, back when it wasn’t a problem for her. She wants to see him, and yet doesn’t. Not at all. It’s too much to hope she can slip into his office and get her property without him seeing her. Pushing through the door, letting it flap-flap-flap behind her, she hopes she’s been vanished long enough not to be recognized by anyone but her old pal.
His eyes are the first to fall on her.
They open wide.
His lips pull back over his teeth.
Sneer? Smile? Feral. Queenie puts a finger to her lips, slips back through the door still flapping before the bartender and hostess can turn.
“I’m heading out,”
she hears him say.
“Early night, Chef?”
A male voice.
The bartender.
“This old man’s got to get his shut-eye.”
The hostess laughs, low and throaty.
“You’re far from old.”
“I feel it, these days.”
He sighs, and it doesn’t sound put-on.
“Once in a while, someone shows up and reminds you of your ill-spent youth, and you can’t help remembering just how many years are behind you.”
“I haven’t had enough to drink to dissect that one.”
Still low and throaty, but muffled now.
The clink of ice cubes.
Queenie envies her so hard, she salivates.
She waits, arms crossed over her chest, for Marco to push through the door.
Not long, because there he is.
Far from old.
They both are. But he’s a little on the plush side too; he’d been so skinny, back in their day. All sinew, sweat, and passion.
“Regina.”
He says her name on an exhaled breath.
Regina, not Queenie, even if it had been his idea to use the pseudonym.
A good sign.
“I thought you were dead.”
“A lot of people do.”
He opens his arms, and Queenie steps into them.
No hesitation.
It is, currently, the only place she wants to be.
“How’d it all get so fucked-up, Marco?”
“It wasn’t always.”
“It feels that way.”
She pulls away.
“You know why I’m here, right?”
He smiles.
“I guess not for me.”
“I think your wife might have something to say, if that were the case.”
“How’d you know I’m married? We haven’t spoken since the old days.”
“I keep tabs.”
She punched his arm.
“It’s good to see you.”
“Good to see you too.
You look good.”
“I look like shit.”
But she smiles this time.
“You want a drink?”
he asks.
Queenie puts up a hand and he doesn’t press. “Hungry?”
“I wouldn’t say no to a plate of your Bolognese.”
“You got it.”
Marco fills a small pot, salts the water, sets it on to boil.
“Penne? Spaghet’?”
“Got any rigatoni?”
He chuckles, pulling a container of sauce from the fridge.
“Still your favorite, huh?”
“Always.”
Sauce heats, pasta cooks, Marco plates without finesse, just like when they were twentysomethings trying to impress each other with their inexperienced, culinary prowess.
Grating cheese over top, he asks. “Enough?”
“A little more.”
Queenie digs in, suddenly hungrier than she should be.
Rich.
Homey.
Garlicky. It needs salt. She would finely chop anchovies and dollop them on top. Marco wouldn’t. Doesn’t. There is little of fine dining to the plate of food she devours. Old-school Italian. Just like Marco himself.
“You want a soda? Water?”
“Soda, thanks.
Diet whatever you have.”
Marco pushes through that swinging door; he’s gone longer than he should be.
Thoughts of him calling his wife—You’ll never guess who just showed up in the restaurant!—some newspaper or television station, or worse, Oz, are fleeting.
Most would.
He won’t. Not Marco.
He returns with a glass of soda, and a book.
Not a book.
He slides both to her across the prep table.
For a moment, all Queenie can do is stare. Then she swallows. Her hand is on the cover. Fingers trace the remaining gold flecks of the embossed words: Holy Bible.
Queenie opens to the frontispiece.
The edge of the paper disintegrates, powdering her fingertips.
Names in faded ink, almost illegible for as long as she can remember.
She flips the fragile, onion-paper pages, the ink getting more legible with each careful turn.
And there they are.
Names of people she has no faces for, a family she knows is hers only because she’s listed there with them, alongside her birth date, baptism, and bout with the chicken pox at the age of two.
A mother, father, two brothers, and a sister all lost in a house fire she survived because as the story goes—she doesn’t remember, even if the scent of woodsmoke never fails to chill her—baby Regina fell asleep under her sister’s bed, playing hide-and-seek, tucked into a nest of blankets and stuffed animals.
The firefighters found her sister dead in her bed, Regina alive and asleep underneath it.
Fanning gently through the pages still scented by the fire, the bible falls open to the Ladies’ Home Journal recipe tucked inside, near the middle.
Cheesy tuna-noodle casserole.
Queenie can’t be sure her mother put it there, but it was from the 1960s, so she probably had.
It was the first thing Regina Benuzzi ever cooked. It was horrible, so she cooked it again, tweaking and amending until it was something slightly less than horrible. Considering the basic concept, there had never been much hope. Queenie tucks the recipe back in its place and closes the book.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Moments pass, drenched in silence.
Queenie finishes the rigatoni on her plate, gulps down the soda, which tickles her nose.
“So, what now?”
Marco asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you back?”
“Hell, no.
I just came for this.”
“Where have you been?”
Softly.
“Where will you go?”
Less so.
“No one has seen or heard from you since .
.
. since . . .”
“Rome.
That was on purpose, Marco.”
“I’ve been worried about you.”
Queenie snorts.
“Liar.
You haven’t even thought about me in years.”
“That’s not true.”
Maybe it isn’t.
Queenie can’t let it matter.
“I’ve been around,”
she says.
“Italy, Spain, Croatia.
I might try Russia next.
I have an accountant I trust to keep my assets straight and me invisible. But no one’s looking for me anymore. I’m like Orville Redenbacher or Chef Boyardee. All my brand needs is my face, and my old shows on Netflix.”
“What about Oz? And Julian?”
Of course, he asks.
“Remarried.
Remothered.
Assets and parental rights severed. They’re both better off, I assure you.”
“What about you?”
Softly, again.
So fucking softly.
“What about me?”
Queenie bristles.
Rising, she takes her dish, cutlery, and glass to the sink and leaves them there.
“I’m fine.
I have loads of money. I’m mostly clean four years now. It’s a balance I can maintain as long as Queenie B stays vanished.”
“But if you’ve been four years clean—”
“Mostly clean,”
she snaps.
“The times I wasn’t, it was because Queenie B came out to fuck with me.
I don’t fucking want her.
I don’t fucking need her!”
Deep breath in, fingers pressed to temples.
“Look.
I’m sorry.
This is hard, you know?”
“I know.”
“Thanks for keeping this for me.”
She swipes the bible from the prep table.
“And thanks for the rigatoni.
I got to go.”
“All right,”
Marco says.
Nothing more.
It’s what she’s always liked about him.
That he has been a little in love with her, a little in awe of her, even when she was no one. Even now. Queenie leans over the table to kiss his cheek. He smells just the same as he always did—garlic, onions, and cigarettes. It makes her heart stutter. To go back to the days they were two young chefs sharing an apartment, eventually a bed, before she rose and fell and rose and fell would be . . . pointless. It would all happen again. She is Queenie B more than she was ever Regina Benuzzi, even before Queenie B existed.
“Take care of yourself, Reg.”
“Don’t you know by now?”
She wiped her olive oil lip-print from his cheek.
“It’s what I do best.
Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”
“That goes without saying.”
Queenie takes her coat from the hook next to the door, slides the bible into the open mouth of her backpack.
“I guess that’s it.”
“I’ll walk you out.”
“No need.
I’m good.”
Another kiss on his cheek.
This time, she lingers.
Wife or not, he loves her still.
Queenie suspects he always will. She loves him too, in her selfish, always-prideful way. It would be easy to fall into the past, if only for a night. Familiar. Easy. Comforting. But down that path, there be dragons slain and slain again. Queenie is too tired to take up that sword.
She’s in the alley.
She is walking along the sidewalk.
She is in her Durango, turning over the engine.
Tonight, the hotel. Tomorrow, Regina Benuzzi is signing all the necessary paperwork to make the decrepit, rat-infested, trash-mound building in Rock Landing home. No one will ever find her there, not even Marco. He won’t even look.
It is 2008.
Barack Obama has won the White House.
The global economy continues its spiral down a giant toilet.
The governor of Illinois has been arrested on federal corruption charges, Fidel Castro has stepped down after fifty years in power, and an earthquake in China has left ninety thousand dead—of which Queenie B might have potentially been one, had she not left Chengdu when she did. That fact changed everything.
No more running, hiding, pretending.
She is Regina Benuzzi, dammit, and it’s time for Queenie B to go.
Finally and at last.
Regina is going home.
The last place anyone will think to look for her.
The last place on earth she ever wanted to be.
She navigates the quiet streets.
Unlike New York, New Haven sleeps.
Queenie thinks she remembers this apartment building, or that little house tucked incongruously between a shoe repair and a bookstore.
She lived in so many such places between the ages of three and eighteen, there’s no telling if she’s remembering or simply filling in blanks. This relative. That family friend. A foster home or two, in between suckering one of the former to take her in. Some were kind but uncaring. Others were uncaring and unkind. All a string of smiles and fists blurring into one another, just like the residences she never called home.
Pulling into the hotel lot, she reaches for her backpack.
A backpack.
Queenie B would never carry one.
Regina Benuzzi used to.
All the time.
The change was already happening, and she hadn’t even done it consciously. Maybe because she bought it in a thrift store, where Regina shopped because she had no choice. Where Queenie B would never step foot unless it was ironically. And she knows she’s made the right decision, coming to New Haven, where it all began. She can’t go back, but she has the money and the will to take a stab at a sort of do-over. It’s a privilege most will never have; the least she can do is some good for those who won’t.