Chapter 16
Tuesday was not only the final cooking class—which Duncan might or might not show up for—and my interview with the L . A . Times reporter, but it was Sara’s twenty-sixth birthday. Sara said she wanted a makeover for finally being as old as we were and for hitting the twenty-pound mark on the Skinny Bitch plan, and yeah, because she was kind of bummed about Duncan. Ty and I were all over it.
We were also throwing her a party at our apartment after the cooking class. I needed a night of doing nothing but sitting on my ass and talking to people I liked. For the past couple of days, I’d been busting it on baking and coming up with menus for the restaurants. I had close to thirty original recipes that I’d worked on over the past three or four years, thanks to my father for telling me to keep my recipes handwritten on white paper, my scrawls and additions and deletions for me to clearly see as I changed them. I’d spent the past couple of days shuffling the pages around, coming up with entrees and sides, adding new ingredients, deleting others. On Sunday night, after I taught a woman with a serious Texas drawl how to juice all her favorites, I’d come home and made a lasagna and then one of my favorite pastas: organic brown rice fettuccini with porcini mushrooms in a wine sauce. The fettuccini was perfection, but the lasagna was missing something. Monday, I’d worked on the lasagna all day, but it was still meh. I’d gone over the recipe with my dad on the phone, and he suggested adding a layer of avocado or pesto. Didn’t I say the man was brilliant?
Tonight, when everyone was gone, I’d get back to work on it. And tomorrow morning I’d work on my blackened pad thai for Asia Asia.
But right now, I had a birthday party to make happen. Ty and I had spent two hours in boutiques looking for the perfect outfit as a gift to Sara from me, while Ty’s sister Val, a famed hairstylist who specialized in curly hair, went at Sara with her scissors, Ty’s present. Apparently you were supposed to individually snip each curl in the center of the S to stop frizz. When we’d left, Sara had been in a swivel chair in front of Ty’s huge hall mirror for an hour, and only one side of her hair had been “carved.”
When we got back to Ty’s with a dress I knew Sara would love—short, shimmery, and blousy and tight at the same time—and a cool, long necklace, Sara was smiling and shaking her hair around. It was still long, but fell in perfect, shiny, shampoo-commercial ringlets.
I made her close her eyes while I got her into the dress and her strappy four-inch sandals and clasped the necklace. We sat her back in the chair by the mirror, but swiveled her around so her transformation would be a surprise. I did her makeup, vamping her up a bit.
Swivel time.
“I. Look. Amazing!” she screamed, staring at herself, then going into Ty’s bedroom to look in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. “Where’d this dress come from?”
“I got it for you. For your birthday. And for kicking ass on the diet.”
“I love it!” she screamed again. “Are those my legs?” she asked, sticking out her gams in the hot four-inch-high platforms. “Where’d my fat calves go?”
“You look gorgeous, Sara,” Ty said, giving her a hug.
“Suck it, Duncan,” she said, making kissy faces at herself in the mirror.
Everyone brought a birthday present to that night’s final class. Including Duncan, who’d surprised me—and Sara—by actually showing.
“Wow,” he said, eyeing Sara up and down. “You look great.”
“I know,” Sara said, beaming. “Clem and her friend Ty glammed me up for my birthday.”
“Well, they did an amazing job,” he said. “I barely recog-nize you.
“Meaning I looked like shit before?” she asked.
“Meaning you look great. That’s it. Jesus. Here,” he said, handing her the wrapped rectangle with a red bow on it.
His gift was a biography of Hillary Clinton and a Barnes my sister told me not to, but since the reporter asked, I told her exactly what I thought had happened without naming names. I grabbed my packet of recipes from the mail sorter holder on the counter and showed her the pages for my ravioli. Not a drop of butter. She even had the camera guy take some video of me flipping through the paper-clipped stack as though I was choosing what to have the class make. Then she interviewed me on how I chose the recipes for the vegan menus for the restaurants that were hiring me as a menu consultant.
The ravioli was done, so we plated it, dressed the salad, and sat down to eat.
“This is fantastic,” Stephanie Stemmel said, digging her fork into another ravioli. “Incredible. And I’m no vegan.”
Her camera guy took some photos and video of the reporter having an orgasm over her little plate, which I truly appreciated.
“Hey, Duncan,” Sara said. “I sure hope your ex-girlfriend doesn’t read the L.A. Times. She’ll see the pics of us and know you sent us into Ocean 88 to spy out why she dumped you.”
He looked kind of nervous for a second, but then shrugged. “Whatever. It’s not like I have a chance with her anyway.”
Sara rolled her eyes.
As the reporter and the camera guy were leaving, Duncan grabbed his messenger bag, wished Sara a happy birthday, and booked out of our apartment, the onion slice still stuck to his back.
I saw Sara’s face fall. No matter what she said about not caring or being over him, she wasn’t. “Forget him,” I told her. “He geeks out over eggplant. He wears bad shirts. And he’s a clichéd jerk who has sex with women and then decides he’s not interested. A jerk who smells like onions, too.”
“This,” she said, sweeping her hand up and down her body, “was supposed to be my in to whatever guy I wanted. It just sucks that it doesn’t matter what I look like. It means the problem is me .”
“Sara, it’s not you. Duncan’s just not your guy. That’s all it means.”
“He’s too much of a priss for you anyway,” Eva said, pulling out a compact and glossing up her lips. “Wait till you meet my husband—now that is a man. A man’s man.”
Sara burst out laughing and got a glare from Eva.
“I can’t wait ,” Sara whispered to me.
The doorbell rang. Maybe it was the man’s man.
But it was Duncan.
“Um, Sara, can I talk to you for a sec?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrow at me and walked over to the door. I pretended to be busy cleaning up the counter.
“Wow, Sara, you really do look amazing,” he said, his gaze traveling up and down her body. “And I just wanted to say that after the party, if you want to stop by …”
“I doubt the party will wind down till after one,” she said. “Maybe even two.”
“That’s fine. I’ve got plans tonight, but I should be home by one. Come by.”
Ew. This had booty call stamped all over it.
She was smiling at him. Shit. “Duncan, do you know what a Skinny Bitch is?” she asked.
“A vegan, I guess. Why?”
“Actually,” Sara said, “being a Skinny Bitch is about cutting the crap out of your life. So buh-bye.” She closed the door in his face, then turned to a very proud me. “Let’s get this party started!”
The buzzer buzzed a half hour later, and Sara perked up even more. Party time. Zach was away on business in San Francisco—something about meetings; he would have come otherwise. The first to arrive was Alexander with a bowl of salsa and a tray of mini veggie empanadas he’d made. Then Ty and Seamus showed up. Sara’s friend Trish from work and her best friends from high school. An obnoxious couple that Sara had met last week in hot yoga who kept interrupting everyone to tell their own boring stories. Sara’s sister who lived in Malibu brought her boyfriend. The cute new guy on the floor above us in 3C stopped by with a bottle of wine and flirted with Sara, which made her very happy, but he left after a half hour. Jolie and Rufus came by with a coffee-table book called Actors Through the Decades with black-and-white shots of stars from the silent screen to a steamy one of Ryan Gosling. “This is so regifted,” Sara whispered. She got a ton of presents, everything from gift certificates to bracelets and a tiny red iPod from her sister.
Sara and I were hoping Eva’s husband would show up so we could get a glimpse of the man’s man—what a husband of Eva’s would look like, we had no possible clue—but he never did.
Finally, at close to two-thirty in the morning, the apartment cleared out and Sara had crashed. I was totally awake, though, and still had all this energy, so I figured I’d try an avocado paste as a layer for the lasagna. I made some black tea and went to get my packet of recipes from the mail sorter on the kitchen counter. But it wasn’t there. Just a cable bill and two casting-call notices.
Maybe Sara had moved it so it wouldn’t get splattered with the salsa that Alexander had brought. I looked all over the kitchen. Not there. The living room, under the magazines on the coffee table. Under the huge Actors coffee-table book. Under couch cushions. Under the couch. Found an old remote control and three bucks, but no recipes.
I looked in my room. Under my pillow. Had I totally forgotten putting the recipes away somewhere? Yeah, I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, but I wasn’t blitzed or anything.
I tore the place apart and finally, by the front door, I noticed the big green-and-white-striped paper clip that I’d used to keep the pages together.
As though someone had taken the too-thick packet and the paper clip had popped off as they were leaving.
Okay, did someone take my recipes? What the fuck for?
I opened the door into the dimly lit hallway. Just to the left of the stairwell was a piece of paper lying faceup. I went over to get it. My scratched-over recipe for Hungarian Mushroom Soup.
Okay. This made zero sense. Someone stole my recipes. Seriously?
As I stood there in the middle of the hallway trying to figure out what could have happened, a drunken couple started coming up the stairs, so I went back inside my apartment.
All that work—gone. And I had my first demonstration for Stark 22 in three days.