Dinner with Chef
While I drank, my brain continued to fizz with a cacophony of thoughts: I’m oppressed by my own internalized sexism, I’m self-objectifying again, I’m a slut, It's OK to be a slut!...
Peach Fantasy came to my Airbnb in the middle of the afternoon. We knew that the country would be going into lockdown the following day. The stores were packed with people buying pajamas, blankets, and Bluetooth speakers.
“It will be so boring,” Peach said. “I am already so psychologically bored.”
I asked him to see me again.
He said, “Grrrr, I really shouldn’t.”
But he came with his bike helmet, in everyday clothes. Meeting for sex in the afternoon felt cliche, outdated. We were awkward in the daylight. He sat in the chair next to my desk and I sat across from him on my bed.
“Could I have a glass of water?” he asked. I hadn’t offered him anything. I served it to him in a wine glass.
We had never had a conversation beyond the logistics of the mise en place. Now we talked about our goals. He told me that he wanted to run workshops to teach people how to cook fish. While he talked, he picked up one of my moleskin notebooks and fidgeted with the elastic band. I had left my books and notebooks out intentionally. I wanted him to see the accouterments of my writing life. I wanted him to see me as a person with agency, interests, and expertise. In the restaurant, Peach had been a confident expert while I was skittish and clueless. Now he seemed timid. “Sorry I don’t talk more. I’ve always been shy,” he said.
I took the moleskin out of his hands and asked him to sit next to me on the bed. “Close the curtains maybe,” he said. It was hard to make eye contact. I missed the anonymity of the dark, vast storage room. I looked away from him, wondering if I had wrongly coerced him into coming to see me. He touched my cheek and asked, “Are you sure you want this?”
“Yes, I want this,” I told him. “Do you?”
“Yes, I want you,” he said. I smiled involuntarily; we relaxed.
Later, when he got up to use the bathroom, I checked my phone and saw a DM from Chef on Instagram. I had sent him a message thanking him for the opportunity to intern at the restaurant. He replied:
“You’re very welcome ; ) Do you have dinner plans this evening? I will cook for you at the restaurant if you’d like.”
I showed the message to Peach.
“It’s weird,” he said.
“He doesn’t usually invite the interns for dinner?”
“Ah, no. Ask him who else is going.”
“It seems clear no one else is coming.”
“Just ask. Make him uncomfortable.”
“But if no one else is going, should I go?”
“You should go. Go for the story.”
I reminded Peach of the time Chef quoted Oscar Wilde at the staff meeting, “Everything in life is about sex. Except for sex. Sex is about power.”
“I don’t remember this,” he replied. “How do you remember all these things? You take notes?”
He started putting his clothes on and gathering his things. I didn’t want him to leave me.
“I guess we can’t really see each other again,” I said.
“I can’t say that no, we will never see each other again,” he replied.
“Sounds promising.”
He kissed my forehead paternalistically and I squeezed his hand. Both times we slept together, I wanted him to hold me afterward but he didn’t. When he was gone, it seemed like the worst thing in the world to be alone in the Airbnb, on the brink of a second, indefinite lockdown. I read Chef’s message several times while pacing around my bed and I knew that I would go if for no reason other than I could not be alone all night.
*
I looked at Chef’s Instagram pictures. He had done a glam photoshoot by the ocean, wearing his turtleneck and peacoat, windswept curls in his face. He was handsome. He looked older than 40, but he definitely had a hot, brawny fisherman vibe. What if I had met him outside of the restaurant? Wouldn’t I be interested in going out with him?
Before starting my internship, the restaurant’s administrator asked me to fill out legal paperwork, which included space for a paragraph explaining why I had sought out Chef as a professional mentor. “I admire Chef’s emphasis on creative collaboration and the resourcefulness of using only woodfire…” These forms, signed by Chef, enabled me to have health insurance in Belgium.
He was my boss. One night during service, Chef asked me to distribute silver spoons to the guests for the caviar course. When I was done, he urgently pulled me aside. “Do not put your fingers on the end that will go in the guests’ mouths” he said sternly. “Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I called friends at home and asked them if I should say yes to dinner. I could hear myself. I was speaking so quickly, manically.
“Does it sound like a ‘Me Too’ kind of thing?” I asked.
“Not necessarily. Like you don’t technically work for him anymore. And regardless, you do have agency,” one friend said. “You can leave whenever you feel like it. You can say no.”
“I don’t feel like I can say no.”
“Do you want to say no?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, he is objectively hot. I find him hot. Maybe it would be fun and exciting, I dunno.”
“So go!”
I was flattered by Chef’s invitation. I wondered if his attention implied I was really hot. The flipside of feeling hot is feeling insecure, but at that moment I got a manic high off imagining I was very sexy (to men). I thought I must be like, sky-high-level hot. Like, I-should-profit-off-my-hotness hot. Like, I-probably-make-men-instantly-hard-whenever-I-walk-into-a-room hot. So why shouldn’t I participate in some sexual power-play? Why wouldn’t I want a hot, powerful man? I bet his dick was big and that’s why he was successful. I made myself physically ill with these dehumanizing thoughts. And then I told Chef yes, I was free for dinner. He “liked” my message. “Great ; )” he said. “Come at 8.”
I changed out of the underwear I had worn with Peach. Sometimes I confuse dread and excitement. Maybe I was nauseous because I was so excited? What was that quote my Soul Cycle instructor overused? “Do something that scares you every day!”
I drank a high-alcohol beer. I wanted more than anything to feel drunk enough to relax. While I drank, my brain continued to fizz with a cacophony of thoughts: I’m oppressed by my own internalized sexism, I’m self-objectifying again, I’m a slut, I’m everyone’s whore, I like it like that, I like sex, I’m sick of being used for sex, I’m too naive, I’m too seasoned, I am drowning, this is an adventure.
“Go for the story,” Peach Fantasy had said. Sweet, shy, adulterous Peach. This wasn’t a story, it was my life. But as I walked to the restaurant, I comforted myself with the thought that whatever happened, I would eventually mine for meaning.
*
I showed up to dinner tipsy and got progressively drunk as the night went on. We started with champagne.
I remember approaching the restaurant, seeing the lights on from across the canal. It was raining; it rained every day in Belgium. When I entered, Chef was placing the turbot in a castiron full of melted butter. He had a white towel slung over his shoulder. It required so much effort to remember that I was at the restaurant on a date and not for work.
He said, “So you are my victim tonight.”
“Oh my god. what?”
“You’re the victim of my cooking.”
He filled two champagne flutes and held his glass out to cheers. The formality embarrassed me. I felt like a child dressed as a woman playing “date.” It was probably good champagne but I didn’t take the time to taste it, I downed it. My hands trembled as I held the glass.
I asked him why he chose to invite me for dinner and he said, “I don’t know. I’m impulsive.”
“And,” he added, “I’ve been cooking for my eight-year-old daughter all week. I wanted to cook for an adult. So you see, you are my victim.”
“Did you want to cook for just any adult?” I asked.
The crux of Chef’s humor is an obviously feigned, flirty sense of innocence. He shrugged exaggeratedly.
“Do you always make dinner for the stagiers?” I asked him.
“I thought we had a nice conversation the other night,” he said.
I knocked over my champagne flute and he cleaned the broken glass. “OK. We switch to wine now,” he said. He told me it was a very expensive wine with skin contact, bio something, from a region in France near the border with somewhere. I nodded.
“Interesting,” I said.
We ate turbot in butter sauce, roasted celeriac, a salad with a lot of shallots, pasta with shaved white truffles. I pushed the shallots to the side of my plate. “Saving your breath?” Chef asked. He poured us more wine. He didn’t touch me. There was a distance between us and the ambiguity continued to make me anxious.
While we ate, we talked about relationships. “I thought you were married,” I told him.
“No. I get bored easily,” he said.
“Do you usually date younger women?”
“What do you consider younger?”
“I’m 32,” I said.
“I assumed you were about 27.”
“Because I was inexperienced?”
“Because you have a teenage sort of shyness and discomfort with yourself,” he said.
“It’s not a bad thing,” he continued, “you’re open to the world.”
He told me that his last relationship was with a 25-year-old woman. “It was full of fire,” he said. “Very passionate. Explosive fights. Have you ever had something like that?”
“When I was 19 maybe,” I said.
“Maybe young women match my maturity level,” he said.
“That is very self-aware,” I replied. He took my hand and stroked my fingers.
“Is it OK?” he asked me. I nodded. I suppose this was consent.
I did not want to disappoint him or pass up an opportunity so I leaned in to kiss him. I didn’t want to be perceived as someone with a “teenage-like discomfort with myself.” I wanted to be able to accept the attention of a handsome, accomplished older man. And yet, despite his accomplishments, he seemed so ridiculously immature; so unaware of himself.
I went to sit in his lap without invitation. He lifted my shirt, removed my bra, and put his mouth on my nipple. I remember him saying, “I want to kiss every part of your body.” The idea of him wanting me like that turned me on though the physical motions we moved through did not. I perceived his hands on my body from his perspective. He felt my ass and I wondered if it measured up to what he had anticipated. Had he watched me kneeling on the floor to clean the back of the cabinet where they kept the jars of lobster miso?
“I’ll call a cab to my place,” he said. “Or you can take it home. As you wish.”
I didn’t know what I wished. When we kissed, I pulled away and looked at his face. I felt dizzy, disoriented. We were both drunk and parched and wrinkled. I thought of Peach Fantasy and our afternoon together.
“Do you want this?” Peach had asked. My answer was unequivocal: “Yes, I want this.” I kissed Chef and I thought of Peach and I remembered how I had repeated, “I want you,” several times on my white bed. I wanted him. But that is the bare minimum I reminded myself.
When the taxi arrived, I still had not made up my mind but my pants were unzipped.
“I think actually I’ll go home,” I told Chef.
“As you wish,” he replied.
I didn’t have any cash so he lent me some. He gave the driver my address. Then I kissed him goodbye and he said, “Good luck with your future.” From the taxi window, I saw him unlocking his bike to ride home alone. I felt concerned for him; I wondered if I had hurt him. In the end, we would both have to process the night alone.
*
The next day, I woke up in my Airbnb at 2:30 PM with a headache, so thirsty, lungs full of smoke. I whispered “no shame, no shame, no shame” out loud to calm myself.
I showered and fled Ghent. I took the train to Brussels, put my messages on silent, sat by the window with my mask pulled down so I could eat a packaged chocolate-covered waffle. I tried to return myself to a place of comfort and safety. When I arrived at my friend’s apartment, I went to her bathroom and tried to cry but nothing came out. So I came back out and we made fish cakes with smoked trout.
Later that night, in my friend’s guestroom under an Irish wool blanket, Chef texted me: “Do you remember assaulting me last night? ; )”
“What is the joke here?” I asked him.
“ ; )”
“Can we not joke about assault?”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m in Brussels, avoiding your lawsuit.”
“?” he replied.
“Nothing. It’s just a joke,” I said. He didn’t reply. I worried I had been too short with him, so I typed a follow-up: “I think the power dynamic between us makes it hard for me to do this,” I said. “Maybe if I had never been your intern, I would feel less vulnerable.”
“You call it power dynamic, I call it impulsive.”
I wanted to say, “that makes no fucking sense.” But I could not escape the impulse to ingratiate.
“It was a fun night : )” I said instead. “Thanks for the cooking and for the champagne.”
“Next time I’d like to kiss your whole body,” he replied.
“Haha.”