14
It was not lost on Stevie, as she tightened David’s coat around her and made her way across Fourteenth Street, that she was
pursuing Helen’s ex-boyfriend at a time when ex-boyfriends seemed to be a big part of her personal conversations.
Ex. Such a rough combination of letters. Over. Crossed out. Exit. Extinct. Extinguish. Exsanguinate. Execute. Explode.
Fun. Fun fun fun.
She consulted her phone for directions and turned down Seventh Avenue and entered what she soon recognized as the gayborhood,
with inclusive Pride flags in most of the windows, or with the Pride colors painted right on the building. Every business
seemed to be a velvet-chaired bar, a stark restaurant with no prices on the menu, a twee bakery, a pet boutique with designer
leashes, or a shop that only sold something specific, like a single kind of hat. There was Stonewall, the bar that was the
site of the famous riots that helped launch the gay rights movement in the United States. Stevie took a picture of it and
texted it to Janelle.
YES!!!!! came the reply. I AM GOING TO SEE YOU SO SOON.
The Saucy Goose was on Christopher Street, which was right by Stonewall. It was tucked under a tree and shaded by a red-and-white
awning. Awards from various journals and associations were discreetly framed and hanging just inside the window, facing out,
as was an article about the new Saucy Goose that Chef Robert Ang had just opened in Busan. The menu was written in French
and Korean as well as English.
The restaurant wasn’t open yet, so Stevie rapped several times on the glass door until a man in a white shirt and apron came
and opened it.
“We don’t open until six,” the person said.
“I’m looking for Robert?”
“Chef Robert? Yes. What’s this about?”
I’m here to tell him about his dead ex-girlfriend seemed a bit harsh, so she went with, “I have some information for him. It’s personal.”
Somehow that was worse. The man looked Stevie up and down, scanning for whatever strange and terrible vibe she was trying
to bring into his restaurant.
“About a friend of his,” Stevie said. “Something’s happened to her. She passed away.”
“Oh . . .” News of a dead friend seemed to come as a relief to the man. “Come in. Why don’t you have a seat over here?”
He indicated a table in the window, pale light coming in through the creamy white café curtain.
As he went to the kitchen, Stevie looked out to the street while old French bistro music purred in the background.
New York was cold, but inside the Saucy Goose, with its red walls covered in black-and-white pictures, all was cozy and warm.
It was the kind of place that she saw in movies or read about in books, where lovers would meet over large glasses of gem-colored wine.
A man appeared from the back, wearing jeans and a formfitting T-shirt with two pens clipped and tucked into the inside of
the left sleeve. He looked like he may have been in his fifties. His hair was graying, but there was still a full head of
it, and it was perfectly styled. This was Helen’s ex? He was too young, too stylish. This had to be a mistake.
“Can I help you?” he asked, examining Stevie through thickly framed glasses in a bright blue. “I was told you have some news
about a friend?”
“This is about Helen,” Stevie said.
“Helen,” he repeated, and for a moment, Stevie was sure she had the wrong goose and the wrong Robert. Then he sighed.
“Helen. Do you want some coffee? I do.”
“What happened?” Robert had made two cappuccinos and served them in gray handleless bowls.
“I don’t know for sure, but it looked like her heart, maybe. She was sick.”
“That’s not shocking,” he said. “She smoked more than anyone I knew, and that’s saying a lot. When did this happen?”
“Christmas Eve. Probably. We found her the day after Christmas.”
“Found her? Was she . . . alone? Did she have a partner?”
“No partner,” Stevie said. “Well, she had Murph. Her bird.”
“Her bird.” He shook his head fondly. “God, she loved birds. When we would go to Central Park we’d walk through the Ramble
to bird-watch. She could name every bird. Every time. I never saw her stumped. Birds and baking. How did you know her? Are
you a culinary student?”
“No,” Stevie said. “No, I can barely make toast. I’m a . . . friend. I met her where she lived.”
Again, a weird way of saying it, but it was hard to explain that they’d met, Helen had read her tarot cards, then she’d died
immediately after. Like she’d awakened the ancient curse.
“It’s just . . . there’s not a lot of information. About her past, her family. Everyone . . .” So much papering and riffing
on this story. “. . . is trying to put it together, to contact people. Could you tell me a bit about her? It would really
be helpful.”
“Of course,” Robert said, nodding. “You know, I was thinking about her just the other day. I was watching that British baking
show and thinking that she would be a hilarious judge. A really profane one. I’ve tried looking her up over the years, but
there was nothing about her online. That didn’t surprise me, though. She was the most private person I’ve ever met. Both private
and prying. She wanted to know everything there was to know about me, but never liked to talk about herself. Except about
the day-to-day. She would talk about baking. About the kitchen. About her staff.”
“What about her family?”
“She never talked about her past or family. Ever. She came from money, I know that. She knew the kinds of things that only people who were raised with money do. She would make little remarks about someone wearing Gucci loafers with no socks in the summer. Or how her aunt wore a Pucci turban in the rain. I grew up in Ohio. My dad worked in a shoe factory. I never saw a lobster tail until I was eighteen and in culinary school. But I could tell that she’d grown up eating fine food.
Old-school dining. You can tell from the way a person eats, how easy they are with the forks.
How they can accept a plate of oysters without leaning back in the chair to take in the sight of the ice, the shells.
There was an ease to her with all of that, and that comes from being raised with it.
Just from some other things she said, I know she was East Coast. Maybe Philadelphia.
She said she left home and became a hippie and that was that. ”
“Where did she go when she left home?”
“Here, I think. She said she made granola and whole wheat bread in hippie places until she went to culinary school sometime in the late seventies, so that would make sense. Nothing with Helen was easy to know. She was one of the hardest workers I had ever seen, and she could bake. Ran a good kitchen. We met working at a hotel. She was the head pastry chef and I was in one of the other kitchens. She was a bit of a legend. But there was something that she wasn’t saying.
I could feel it. I thought something bad had happened to her in her past and it was pretty clear she didn’t want to talk about it, but whatever it was, it was serious.
She was always looking around, like someone might be following her.
When we lived together, she would have nightmares, terrible ones, where she’d swing out her arms and scream in her sleep. ”
It was so hard to reconcile that Helen—the restaurant legend, the romantic partner—with the wheezing, pale woman who looked
like a strong wind would bruise her.
“Then she would get up and read tarot cards until morning,” he went on. “She was constantly trying to read my cards.”
“She read mine too,” Stevie said.
“She put a lot of stock in it, told me I should pay more attention to the signs. And she worked a lot of side jobs. She liked
getting paid in cash. Restaurant work, especially back then, could be a heavy cash business. She liked to have cash on hand,
more than I was ever comfortable having. I would ask her why and she would say something like, ‘You never know when you’re
going to need it.’ Or she would say it was for our wedding, which we were planning. We were going to get married in Central
Park. Then one day she comes home from work and says, it’s over. Out of nowhere. Something happened that day. I begged her
to tell me. Whatever it was that she was scared of, she had seen it. . . .”
It’s not working out, David had said.
“Did she explain?” Stevie asked.
“No. She never gave a reason. Moved out that week. And a few weeks after that, she left the job and went to work somewhere
else.”
“When did this happen?”
“1997. May. It took me years to get over it. I’ve been married for over twenty years now. It’s well in the past. But I always wondered. . . I’m really sorry to hear that she’s gone. Could you send me a message when the funeral arrangements are made?”
As Stevie walked out of the Saucy Goose, trembling from the multiple strong coffees she’d had over the course of the afternoon,
her thoughts were clear. Maybe it was the information—maybe it was the caffeine. Didn’t matter. She knew what had to happen.
Helen had been afraid of something—so afraid she had left her fiancé, her apartment, and her job.
When Frank Wills saw something was wrong, he went exploring. And that was exactly what Stevie was going to do.