Ed had promised himself he wouldn’t drink, that the evening would pass with him as a battleship launching bons mots across the bow of the USS Dee. But tumblers of Negronis kept finding their way into his hand, and his tongue kept seeking out the cubed cool of the ice tinkling within. How did Senderovsky not drink himself into a stupor the half of the year he spent up here? Ed vaguely remembered slumping over his friend’s shoulder on the way to his bungalow last night after saying some unkind things, but he could never be ashamed in front of Senderovsky, who, he now realized, was more of a brother than the real article back in Seoul.
He prepped over the next hour, the vintage sixties Campari growing low in its bottle. He had blanched the sugar snap peas, one of the secret ingredients to his tonnato, and was now carefully charring them on the grill. The anchovies and tuna had been pureed and introduced into the mayonnaise, capers, lime juice, and, another secret ingredient, three quartered habanero chilis, then blended into a silky smoothness and strafed with kosher salt. The cold veal was then covered with cilantro leaves and pumpkin seeds, a dash of the pimento and citrus confit, and finally the creamy avalanche of the tonnato itself. By the time he was finished, his fingers burned with habanero heat, and he wondered if the dish wouldn’t offend the more timid palates. Cilantro was always a controversial ingredient, and he wished he had surveyed Dee’s feelings on it.
Senderovsky and Vinod appeared before him looking glum and dazed, respectively, like two conscripted privates in an Austro-Hungarian army about to be vanquished. He quickly set them to task, ferrying things between the kitchen and the covered porch, checking on the grill while he relieved himself, and, most important, keeping him company, making him less nervous and thus moderating his alcohol intake （or that was the idea）。
“Nice look,” Karen said as she hobbled over, face still distended from recent sleep. Ed was wearing his mask low under his chin （in other words, pointlessly） and had a cigarette hermetically sealed into his mouth. For once he wished Karen wasn’t being sarcastic. “Look at you go,” she added as he gently raked the coals. She had never seen him be this industrious. He’s completely in love with her, she thought.
He had stuck the sardines in a bowl and coated them in olive oil. The rest of the guests were now starting to filter onto the screened porch from their respective houses, and Dee passed him wordlessly, dressed in a collegiate parka and wearing a sly toothy smile. He nodded to her like a professional. Showtime, he thought to himself, a half glass of Campari sloshing around his mouth. The vitello tonnato was on the porch. The lamb steaks had been defrosted. He threw the sardines on the grill and watched the little fish sizzle, his eyes tight in a deep meditative stare, his apron and City Hunter jacket coated by a new layer of fish and char. The key was flipping them without losing too much of the delicious skin, and this required a surgeon’s grace. When the sardines were plated atop a bed of arugula, the latter would wilt from the heat—a sign that everything was in order.
Just then, a ghostly Senderovsky appeared through the remains of the fog, coughing into his fist but holding a strategically necessary plate of quartered lemons, which Ed immediately squeezed onto the fish, the lemon juice stinging his habanero-scorched hands. “Bring these up immediately,” he commanded the landowner as he ran to his bathroom to wash the grime off and to anoint himself with a quick spritz of nonoffensive cologne.
By the time he got up to the porch, the guests gave him a standing ovation. He glanced quickly at Dee, straining to separate the sound of her hands from the others. “You haven’t even tasted anything yet,” he said to them.
“You’re blushing!” Senderovsky said.
“Just look at the presentation,” Dee said. “It’s like something from a cooking show.”
He stopped himself from bowing to her. “Eat, eat,” he said, reminding Karen of something her mother used to say to her over breakfast: “Eat, eat, why you so fat?” Vinod was thinking of the Florent dinners he had shared with Karen and Senderovsky, three broke, starving students dipping fries into a big white pool of aioli sauce, carving out flaky little disks of goat cheese from the great big cylinder of the stuff, snapping back mussel shells and pulling out the meat with their teeth, the one time they could gorge at will without adhering to Karen’s codes of cool.
A similar hunger had settled upon the diners. Conversation ceased as the adults tore into the food, their chewing loud and uncouth （Senderovsky was reminded of his mother invoking the Russian prohibition against making the chavk sound with an open mouth, Sashen’ka, ne chavkai!）， plastic knives sawing at tonnato-soaked sheets of veal or carefully peeling sardine flesh from its spine. “Oh my God,” Dee cried, her eyes full of tears. “It’s so hot!”