5. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
Mavren
I t’s nearly half-past two in the morning and I’m standing here, in the sparkling clean kitchen of my incredibly successful restaurant, Pomme Verte .
We closed at midnight, then ran through all of our front of house and kitchen shutdown tasks. I waved Jimmy, the plongeur, off after he’d dried the last of the dishes and hauled the last of the trash bags to the big dumpster out back.
With Jimmy gone, I ducked into my office to make sure that everything was lined up for Delia, my younger sister and sous chef–who would be acting head chef during my upcoming absence.
Of course there was nothing for me to worry about. Delia is just as capable, if not more than myself, in the kitchen. I know I only have a couple more years out of her before she flies off to run her own incredible place–and my front of house manager, Reina, is the one who runs the floor even when I’m out back on the line.
Whether my worry is justified or not, I’ve been anxious about leaving my restaurant—my baby, for more than two days at a time since Pomme Verte opened its doors three years ago.
Resigned to my neurotic fate, I shuck off my dirty chef’s coat and ball it up into a stained white linen projectile before launching it into the bin of dirty coats and aprons. The opening staff will ferry it to the laundry tomorrow morning. I let down my locs from their place tied high on top of my head for the entirety of dinner service and shimmy into a light sweatshirt before I shut off the kitchen lights and grab my jacket and backpack from a metal hook beside my office and push through the swinging double doors into the dining room.
The greenhouse-like enclosure of the main dining area is bathed in pinky orange city night light filtering in through the many panes of glass that make up the ceiling and walls. A few greasy yellow emergency lights shine from behind the bar, reflecting off the dark green leaves of the nearly omnipresent hanging plants.
A shiver runs up my spine as I take in the gently swaying outsized wicker weave hanging light fixtures, and I silently remark to myself how in the wee hours like this the bar looks more likely to be attended by ghouls and phantoms.
Sleepily, my brain tries to puzzle out why I am still standing here in the eerie small hours of morning instead of being home at my apartment, packed up and ready to embark on this absolutely absurd quest to find my pack. My pack and my omega.
“Mav,” a voice speaks gently, a hand falling softly on my right shoulder.
“What the fuck!?” I scream, arms windmilling as I’m startled nearly out of my skin.
“Woah, easy man. It’s just me! The Bert-miester!” My trusty, himbo saucier and one of my oldest childhood friends, tries to calm me— his hands raised up to protect himself from my panicked flailing.
“Bert, what the fuck are you still doing here?” I hiss, doing a double take—unsure where he has materialized from.
“Oh, I just picked up some dabs from Jimmy before he headed out. My torch at home is busted so I was using the creme brulee torch.” he explains with a giggle. Now that I look at him, Bert has that classic glazed expression of any successful pothead.
“Well you almost gave me a fuckin’ heart attack, Bert,” I snort, jangling my keys at him meaningfully. “And I wanna get outta here, so—shall we?” I gesture him toward the door.
“Dude, don’t take this the wrong way,” Bert hustles to the door, punching in the security lockdown code on the number pad beside it. I keep my eye on him, one skeptical brow raised as we prepare to both exit from the primed doors and lock them behind us before the system finishes arming.
“ But ,” I supply him, encouraging him onward.
“But… I can’t wait until after you’ve gotten laid again, dude.” Bert shakes his head.
“You’ll be at least 30% less insufferable, I guarantee it,” he adds definitively as we dart through the glass doors and lock them tightly behind us.
“Bert,” I begin on a sigh.
“Yeah, Mav?” He perks up hopefully as I turn to face him, his big blonde bushy brows pushing up toward his buzzed hairline.
“Can you try to remember that I’m also your boss now before you say absolutely asinine shit like that to me?” I scoff and laugh.
“Sure thing, boss!” He nods enthusiastically.
“Maybe you’ll be less of a tight-ass after you get your knob slobbed, sir. ” Bert adds officiously. The two of us pause in a moment of stony silence, before dissolving into laughter.
“Guess that’s what I get for putting a son-of-a-bitch like you on payroll,” I tease, punching Bert playfully in the shoulder as we take off down the sidewalk, both of our apartments only a handful of blocks away in the twinkling city night light.
I manage a measly three hours of sleep between my late arrival home, packing, and wakeup-shower-shaving before the sprinter van sent by the production crew pulls up in front of my apartment building.
I sit in silence for the nearly hour ride with traffic between my apartment, not far from my restaurant in Koreatown to the nondescript building in Studio City. I will be spending the next two weeks blind-dating in specialized ‘bubbles’ while countless cameras watch the entire ridiculous scenario unfold.
It still seems somewhat unbelievable that I'm even here. The whole thing started one night at my younger sister’s condo. Delia, along with her pack members, fed me entirely too much alcohol one late night as Build-A-Pack-Blind played in the background.
One of the alphas on a blind date with an omega he would never consider approaching in the “real world,” poured out his heart to the woman he couldn’t see on the other side of a backlit partition. Later in the same episode–he explained how much the experience of the show had opened him up to new ways of exploring intimacy with potential pack members.
In our drunken stupor, my sister had pointed at the television and taunted me. “That’s what you need, Mav. To be forced into actually getting to know people before you decide they don’t live up to your impossibly high standards from a single glance.”
Through the haze of intoxication, I hadn’t felt the sting of her blistering read. Instead, I only heard the ring of its truth—and comedy in the degree of severity to which I get in my own way.
“No shit, I need to be shipped away to date in a goddamn blind box so I can’t be so judgy. Too bad I’d end up still single by the time they get to the reveal” I’d laughed at my own expense.
In a fit of giggles and drunken jostling, Delia and I filled out a cast member interest form on her computer and filmed what must have been the sloppiest of audition video clips before sending the whole mess to Build-A-Pack-Blind’s casting inbox—insisting on the brilliance of our liquor soaked brains before passing out on the couch for the night.
I had completely forgotten about our mischievous sibling escapades until I received an email a few weeks later informing me I had been selected to be on the upcoming season of the show.
My initial intent had been to decline the opportunity, since it had been more of a joke on a whim than anything else. When I told Delia about being selected though, she insisted that I had to take the chance. She wasn’t afraid to drive home the fact that she had been bitten into her pack nearly three years prior and that I had been distinctly off the dating scene for almost as long.
When I had attempted to use my inability to leave the restaurant for 40 days, Delia had simply leveled her eyes at me and said, “are you telling me that you still don’t think I can handle running the place, Mav?”
Of course, both of us knew that was untrue. I didn’t have a leg to stand on. So, I signed the NDA and the cast member contract and made plans to leave Pomme Verte in the capable hands of my badass younger sister while I attempted to find love.
“Mavren Renard?” a young woman with a grating voice and a lucite clipboard stacked high with highlighter laden worksheets calls my name, bringing me out of my own head.
“That’s me.” I offer her a friendly smile, gathering my luggage from the sidewalk as the driver unloads my things from the back of the van.
“Hi, my name is Kimmy. I’ll be escorting you to your apartment for the first portion of the experiment. If you’ll just follow me?” She extends her hand for a quick shake before moving me along, through a long nondescript hallway to my new home-away-from-home.
“Alright Mavren, you’ll have about an hour or so to unpack and get settled before the A-Unit shows up at your room to grab some introduction footage of you in the ‘confessional lounge’,” Kimmy chirps helpfully—her eyes never leaving her complicated clipboard cipher.
“Confessional lounge?” I parrot, rubbing a hand nervously over my freshly shaven jaw. I don’t know why I did it—everyone says that I’m too baby faced without my typical shadowy stubble, and no one is going to see me anyway—but I felt compelled to do so before I left the house this morning.
“There’s a suite that we’ll be shooting most of your solo material on. Right now you’re in your own bubble apartment, but later—if you end up moving in with other men and you need to talk shit about one another on camera; you get pulled to film that kind of stuff in a more private space.” Kimmy smiles sweetly, despite how far from normal the scenarios are that she’s currently explaining.
“Uh huh,” I urge her on, my eyebrows still raised.
“After they grab that intro footage in the confessional, the D-Unit crew will catch up with you and Tim, my counterpart, and he’ll bring you and D-unit to a ‘bubble’ for your first date.” Kimmy stops dead in front of a door with a nameplate reading Mavren Renard, fixed to it, and hands me a magnetic swipe card.
“There’s a gym and an indoor swimming pool and jacuzzi that you’ll have access to, you just need to dial ‘5’ on your in room phone to check with a production assistant and make sure that you’re good to go and you won’t run into another of your fellow residents before you can see or smell one another.” She winks at me, one of the only times she’s looked up from her clipboard to directly acknowledge me this entire time.
“Uh, thanks Kimmy.” I take the keycard from her, slightly overwhelmed by the bombardment of information.
“Good luck Mr. Renard, I’ll see you in a few weeks—either to get you on a plane to tropical paradise with your new pack…or to coordinate specifics for the reunion appearances.” She flashes me a professional, hollow smile and takes off as soon as I’ve confirmed my room key works.
And so it begins.
As promised, I am shuffled by Timmy and the camera crew through my introduction then herded down another maze-like series of hallways from the confessional lounge to the ‘dating bubbles’ for my very first blind rendezvous with a mystery woman—unseen and unscented.
Despite the fact that there’s no way she can see me, I’ve changed out of my traveling clothes from this morning; a simple gray sweatsuit and sneakers, in favor of a more date-worthy pair of burgundy cords and a rust orange t-shirt that allows my tattoo sleeves to remain on full display; my locs hanging loosely just over my shoulders.
Even though it’s so far removed from any kind of ‘normal’ date I’ve been on in the past, I’m still nervous as I wait in silence on my side of the partition. I bounce my knee to let loose a bit of the pent up energy, then stop myself when I notice the gentle chattering noise my water glass makes against the low table when I do.
I’m actually about to get up and start pacing when I hear a voice from the other side of the partition.
“Hello?” her tone, warm and rich, shocks me into response.
“Yes, hello?” I call back, making sure she knows someone is here.
“Hey, howareya ? I’m Ursula!” Her plush alto carries her thick accent, the ‘how are you’ slurred together as if it’s a single word with casual ease. New York? Boston? Jersey? I’m not familiar enough to know for sure. It’s at once unexpected and endearing.
“I’m doing alright, Ursula. Nice to meet you, I’m Mavren.” I find myself smiling as I lean back into the sofa, almost forgetting for a moment that the automated gimbals in every corner of the room are trained on our every word and gesture.
“Gosh, that’s a gorgeous name!” she gushes.
“Thank you, Ursula is so pretty and so unique,” I return the compliment.
“Yeah, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you—a fellow lovely and unique name owner—how shitty the kids at school were about my name.”
I’m not sure if it's the relatable truth in her words or her immediate slip into the use of profanity that steals a laugh from me, but my lips buzz in an unexpected snicker at her declaration.
“Oh man, you must have gotten so many awful Little Mermaid jokes as a kid,” I wince, realizing almost immediately where the childhood cruelties must have aimed with the name Ursula.
“Whaddayamean ‘must have gotten’—some brainiac thinks they’re the first person to sing ‘poor unfortunate souls’ at me once a fuckin’ week, my guy,” she volleys back, her own brassy laughter covering more of my snickering.
“Damn, that’s rough. Most of the time I just had people thinking that me or my parents had managed to misspell ‘Marvin’.” I smirk, looking at the pinky-purple light dancing behind the frosted glass ‘portal’ between us.
For the first time since we’ve started talking, there’s a beat of silence. I momentarily panic. Usually, at a time like this, I would rely heavily on body language and facial expressions to decide on how to proceed in conversation. Without any idea of how Ursula is actually reacting to me, I’m suddenly rudderless—unsure of where to go next.
Luckily for me, Ursula has decided to take the reins.
“So, Mavren-not-Marvin, what kind of stuff do you like to do for fun?”
Oh, maybe not so lucky after all.
I don’t think that I’ve been doing a very good job of balancing my work and my life for… a while now. My brain scrambles to find something to say besides the truth. That I don’t really have much recreation time, and the best times I’ve been having since I’ve opened my restaurant have largely just been hanging out with my sister and her packmates on their living room couch every 2-5 months.
I must be taking longer than I realized to respond, because Ursula clears her throat gently, as if to make sure I’m still there on the other side of the wall.
“As lame as it’s going to sound, I haven’t had a whole-lot of free time lately.” The ‘lately’ is a little white lie, but I don’t want her to think I’m a totally boring work-a-holic, right off the bat—so I allow myself this bit of untruth.
“Ok, but when you do have free time, what kind of stuff do you like to do?” she presses cautiously.
Again, I feel a surge of nervous embarrassment at how difficult it is for me to find an answer to this question. I’ve been so focused on my career, on my professional future —that everything else in my life has taken a backseat. Despite Delia’s constant warnings that I have begun to lose myself and parts of my identity to the cult of productivity and success, I had insisted that things weren’t that bad.
In just the beginning of this conversation with Ursula, I can see just how dire the situation has truly gotten, and the outlook is distinctly not good.
“I like checking out different markets. Seasonal and specialty spots are my absolute favorites,” I manage to get out before another awkward silence takes hold.
“Do you have a favorite local spot?” Ursula inquires, her interest seemingly genuine.
“I mean, I think the Studio City farmer’s market is pretty solid.” I shrug, her easy conversational tone already lulling me back into a comfortable rhythm.
“Yeah, it’s not as much of a zoo as the Hollywood farmer’s market, but it ain’t no Atwater Marche, that’s for sure,” she scoffs playfully.
“Ah, you’ve been to Montreal a few times, hmm?” I kick up my feet and stretch out across the couch, focusing on the tone of her voice along with her accent. Now I’m starting to think it could be Boston, but I could still be off.
“Back when I used to live on the east coast, it was cheaper to drive North than it was to hop on a plane to Paris,” she laughs. “Not like I’m saying that Montreal and Paris are substitutes for one another—I could get flayed for making that kind of suggestion,” Ursula jokes.
“Nah, I get it. It’s got that European flavor,” I assure her.
“Now that I’m on the left-coast, it’s fucking expensive to go to either.” She lets go a bitter laugh.
“When did you relocate out here?” I float the question casually, though I’m more than a little self conscious that I’ve gone this long without asking Ursula about herself.
“A few years ago,” she answers quickly at first—then trails off for a conspicuous amount of time before adding, “I came out here for one job, and ended up in a different industry entirely. Kinda got trapped by marginal success.” Though the laugh that follows is meant to sound as brassy and assured as earlier, I can sense the unease lurking just beneath.
Since the question is practically just dangling there, I make the obvious inquiry:
“So, what do you do for work?”
A chain of nervous laughter follows before she gives the breathy non-answer:
“Do you promise not to immediately judge me?”
“Are you a stripper or something?” The words are out of my mouth before I can actually use my brain. She’s lulled me into such a sense of ease and security that it just came out of my mouth before my thoughts could catch up.
Ursula doesn’t immediately answer, but instead erupts into a peal of genuine sounding laughter.
“Er, I mean– ‘exotic dancer’ or uh– ‘adult entertainer’!” I flail wildly, trying desperately to fix my ham-fisted fumble.
“I mean—I wish all adult performers and sex workers ‘A Very Happy Money’, but no. I don’t work in the field.” Ursula struggles to contain her laughter as I bury my face in my hands—happy to hide behind the curtain of my locs as I nearly double over in shame.
“I’m a makeup artist first and foremost, but I do some hair and wig stuff too because I need to pay my bills like everyone else.”
I peek out of my hands at the wall as if I can see her through it. Over the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears, I can hear the auto-focus whirr as the lenses on the nearby cameras adjust to re-focus on my face as I re-emerge from behind my curtain of hair and hands.
“Why would I judge that?” I ask, genuinely incredulous.
“I mean, it’s not like it’s rocket science. I think people tend to make some assumptions about the aspirations and intelligence of people–especially women, who do what I do.” She laughs nervously before turning the question back on me, “What do you do Mavren? So that I might feel more or less superior by comparison.”
For some reason, when she says this, I almost feel embarrassed about the success I’ve been enjoying the past few years. I don’t want her to think that I’m some kind of out of touch rich asshole or a square.
What the hell is wrong with me? Why should I feel embarrassed about any of that? Plus, I just met her. We’ve barely talked for ten minutes and she’s only the first of X women I’m going to be going on dates with today.
Still, I opt for the least glamorous framing when I give my answer—even if I can’t explain exactly why I’m trying so hard this quickly.
“I’m a chef,” I answer flatly. It’s not even remotely a lie, but it’s not even close to the whole truth, either.
“Oho!” she crows happily, and I can hear her clapping giddily like a child. “Do you work in the private sector? Or are you on a line somewhere?”
This one I can’t really slither out of without an outright lie. I don’t want to give away too much of my identity, but I don’t want to mislead her either.
“I’m an executive chef,” I dangle, intentionally leaving out the rest of that thought, at my own restaurant .
Ursula lets out a long, low whistle.
“Woah! That’s…pretty impressive Mavren.”
I can’t help but feel a unreasonably pleased at her compliment.
“You’ll have to tell me about your menu sometime. I know it’s probably super cringey to say this to an executive chef, but I’m really into food and cooking. I absolutely hate the term foodie though. So, don’t worry I won’t call myself one,” she laughs, the warm brassy sound filling the air, prompting me to add my own soft chuckle.
I’m about to start reciting our current seasonal menu from memory, when Tim suddenly pops his head into the doorway of my bubble without knocking.
“Ok kids, we have a lot of first dates for you both to make today. Wrap it up. You can fill out the timesheets to see each other tomorrow.”
I blink, completely incredulous. I had thought that these sessions were organic, that they ran as long or short as we wanted. Apparently, the magic of video editing has merely created this illusion, and I am forced to say goodbye to Ursula before my mandatory hasty retreat.
“Well, you heard the man,” I laugh weakly.
“Yeah, Kimmy’s giving me the death glare too—so I guess I’ll sign up to see you tomorrow?
“Yeah, I’ll be looking forward to it.” I grin foolishly at the section of wall I’ve been ogling, my mind grasping at straws to divine some kind of mental image of Ursula, allowing Timmy to collect me and herd me toward my next date.