5. Vivienne
CHAPTER FIVE
Vivienne
The bar is tucked down a side street that our classmate Dominic had insisted was très authentique, which meant the wine was cheap and the stools were mismatched and the lighting was so amber and low you could barely read the chalkboard menu on the wall.
Not that anyone was reading it anyway. We’d eaten enough that day to last a week.
Just a few hours ago, we were all standing at our stations in Le Cordon Bleu’s grand exam kitchen while three judges in pristine whites moved silently between us, tasting and writing and giving nothing away, like gods deciding our fates.
As if they didn’t know they were holding our entire futures in their mouths.
I received a distinction. So did Callum.
We were the only two in our class who did.
But I also took the Chef’s Award, voted on by the instructors, which was a separate thing entirely, and which Callum has spent the last two hours insisting is deeply corrupt and politically motivated and that his sauce alone should have ended the conversation before it started.
“I’m just saying,” he says, “the Chef’s Award should have been based purely on technical execution, and my beurre blanc was technically flawless.”
“Your beurre blanc broke twice.”
“It broke stylistically.”
“That is not a thing.”
“It’s absolutely a thing. I obviously invented it this afternoon.” He winks. “The point is, whatever political machinations led to you winning that award —”
“The instructors voted.”
“— the instructors, who are people, with biases —”
“Cal.”
“— simply could not handle the emotional complexity of what I was putting on the plate.”
I laugh hard, swatting him away.
That’s the thing about Callum Reid. It’s so easy around him. The laugh that usually needs coaxing and has to work its way past whatever professional composure I’m maintaining comes out so easily. Like he’s found some locked door I didn’t even know was there and he’s the only one who has the key.
It’s honestly a little annoying. I’ve spent years trying to stay sharp around him. I’ve tried to stay competitive and keep the edges I need to keep. But he wrangled his way in anyway.
The rest of our class is spread across the bar in various states of celebration and collapse.
Eileen has cried twice — happy tears both times — and is currently attempting to teach Marco a card trick, her cheeks still flushed, their heads bent together over the sticky bartop.
Marco has been buying rounds since seven o’clock and has shown no signs of stopping.
Dominic has connected his phone to the bar’s speaker and put on a song with too much bass for the size of the room, and every time the door swings open, a gust of autumn air comes in with it, smelling faintly of the Seine.
I feel light in a way I haven’t in months. In maybe the entire four years we’ve been here. My body feels like I’ve been bracing against a strong wind and it has finally stopped.
I can’t seem to keep my eyes off Callum tonight. But then again, I’ve never been able to keep my eyes off him.
He is wearing a navy suit that belongs to his brother.
It’s slightly too big on him. The shoulders are a bit wide and the sleeves a touch long.
The tie is his brother’s too, and I know for a fact he had to watch a YouTube video to figure out how to tie it because he told me earlier, laughing loudly about it.
It’s loosened now, pulled away from his collar, giving me a clear view of the tattoos on his chest. He shed the jacket at some point.
It’s draped over the back of his stool, and he’s rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, revealing the tattoos on his forearms.
He put on a backward hat at some point, the same worn gray one he’s had since orientation. He said he was hoping that would make him look less like a man who just graduated from Le Cordon Bleu and more like a normal person at a bar on a Friday night.
It does not. The suit is too formal and the hat is too casual. The combination makes him look completely absurd and also really, really good.
He also looks genuinely and completely happy.
He’s loose-shouldered and easy in a way I’ve only seen in him on the good days when a technique clicks or a dish comes together.
I’ve been cataloguing that version of him for years without entirely meaning to.
Callum when he nails something difficult.
Callum when he makes the whole class laugh during a brutal demonstration just by being himself.
Just by existing at that specific frequency he exists at. Callum when he talks about his home.
I’m in this black dress I found at that thrift store in the Marais last month. It has thin straps that cross at my back, and it cost twenty euros. It was a bargain! I’ve been saving it for tonight, and when I put it on earlier I felt really pretty.
Callum’s eyes drop briefly to the dress now and his pupils expand. Just for a second. But it’s enough that I notice, and then immediately wish I hadn’t, because now I don’t know where to put my hands.
I feel suddenly self-conscious, tugging slightly at the hem even though it hits exactly where it should, just above my knees. Then he raises his glass and gives me that easy Callum smile, and I tell myself I imagined the whole thing.
We end up at the far corner of the bar without discussing it, stools angled toward each other, a little away from the noise of the group. That’s been happening more lately. The two of us finding each other through a room without planning, pulled together by a gravity I keep declining to examine.
“Fine,” I finally say, raising my glass toward him. “To your emotionally complex beurre blanc.”
He clinks his against mine, the glasses making a dull sound. They are definitely not crystal. Nothing like the delicate coupe glasses we’d been handling with two hands and a prayer. After months of learning exactly what a perfect glass sounds like, the dull clink is a relief.
“And to your Chef’s Award, which, fine, was probably deserved.”
I press my lips together, hiding a smile. “Was that a compliment?”
“A grudging one.” He points at me. “Don’t make it weird.”
I hold his gaze a beat too long before I look away.
Across the room, Marco triumphantly turns over the wrong card while Eileen groans. The bar is warm with too many bodies. Through the small window above the door I can see a narrow slice of the Paris sky, dark and smudged orange from the streetlights.
Four years. I keep turning that over. Four years in this city, in that kitchen with that brutal pressure of becoming a professional chef hanging over me. And now it’s over and we’re in a random bar and I still can’t quite locate my feet on the floor.
“Can I ask you something?”
Callum has been watching the room too, chin tipped up, that easy half-smile still on his face. He looks over at me. “Of course. Anything.”
“Are you actually happy to be leaving?”
His eyes get a dreamy gaze to them and all of a sudden he is not the performance version of him.
Not Callum-for-a-room, but the quieter thing underneath it that I’ve only started to see in the last few months.
I catch glimpses of the softer Callum in the late nights and the early mornings and the moments between service.
He turns his glass slowly on the bar top.
“Yeah,” he says. “I really am.”
“You don’t have any —” I search for the word. “Ambivalence? At all?”
“About going home?”
“About all of it. You could go anywhere. You just received a distinction from Le Cordon Bleu.” I watch him out of the corner of my eye.
“You could get a position in the city tomorrow. New York. Copenhagen! Dominic’s going to Copenhagen.
He’s already got a stage lined up. Eileen’s going to Tokyo.
” I turn my glass in my hands. “And you’re going back to a town of two hundred thousand people on the Northern California coast.”
He doesn’t look defensive. He doesn’t even look like the question surprises him. He just looks at me with that uncomplicated expression that catches me off guard because there’s no artifice in it. It’s like the answer is so settled in him it’s almost funny that I’m asking.
“My dad’s there,” he says, “and my brothers. I’ve been gone for four years, and I have missed them every single day.
I can’t wait to get back to them.” His thumb moves absently over a groove in the bar top, back and forth, back and forth.
I watch his hands intently. “And there’s this restaurant I want to open.
Nothing huge or pretentious. Just right on the water with good food where you can actually taste what season it is and know that everything on the plate came from somewhere you could point to on a map.
” He stops and looks almost sheepish for a second. “I know that probably sounds small.”
“It doesn’t sound small at all,” I say.
“You don’t have to lie to me.”
“Callum.” I set my glass down and turn on my stool to face him more fully. My knees fall in between his and neither one of us moves. “I’m not lying. It doesn’t sound small at all. It sounds incredible.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Around us, the bar keeps going. Marco’s voice rising above the music. Dominic laughing loudly at something Eileen said. Someone near the door switching the music. But it all goes slightly distant and muffled, the way it does sometimes when it’s just us.
“What about you?” he asks. “What does Vivi Lane do now?”
The answer rises in me the way it always does. I’ve been saying it the same way for years. To my parents and professors and strangers who ask. I even say it to myself at two in the morning when I’m exhausted and the program is grinding me down and I need to remember what all of it is for.