Frost's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Frost had cooked alone for eleven days, and on the twelfth he admitted he could no longer taste his own food. The paella pan sat on its cast-iron stand in the corner of his kitchen, empty, waiting for a dish he had not yet made. He had built the stand himself, welded the pig-leg supports, and set it aside for the night he would serve the critic. The critic had written reviews for twenty years and had never cried at a meal. Frost intended to change that. He had cycled through a consommé, a tart, and four other drafts, and each one had died on his own tongue without telling him why. The problem was simple and it was ruining him. Alone, he could not tell brilliance from delusion. He needed a mouth that was not his. He had already set the small table by the window for the night the critic would come, a twisting wooden piece carved like a helix that he had bought years ago on the promise he would earn the right to use it. It stayed empty. He needed someone honest before that chair was ever filled. He took off his apron and walked out. Fogged City was wet that evening. He went to the diner three blocks from his kitchen, the one he had eaten at since he was a line cook with holes in his shoes. The tray came the way it always did: two chili dogs, fries, a root beer. He ate without tasting. He was there for the woman two stools down, a retired cook who had told him, years ago, that his consommé was thin. She had also, once, made him cry over a bowl of pork stew she cooked from a pig she had raised herself, a big pink husker she named and killed and served without ceremony. She did not flatter. That was why he wanted her. He asked her to come to his kitchen the next night and taste whatever he put in front of her. He told her he was chasing the critic. He told her he could not trust himself anymore. She chewed a fry and looked at him for a long moment. Then she said she would come, but only if he promised to cook something he was afraid of. Not clever. Afraid. He agreed before he understood what he had agreed to. Walking home past the blue neon of the jazz club on the corner, he understood. The dish he was afraid of was the one shaped like his grandmother's soup, the one he had sworn he would never touch. He had told himself for years that soup belonged to her and her dying husband and the silence between them. Now he had promised a stranger he would cook toward it without stealing it. He did not know yet how. But tomorrow night, for the first time, someone else's mouth would tell him whether he was close.