Why Is Murder On The Menu, Anyway?

“Well, luckily you didn’t see anything,” he says, slipping out of his jacket and carefully folding it behind him on the chair.

“Just a dead man,” I say a bit sarcastically, since he seems to think that watching someone cook a fancy French meal trumps discovering a dead body.

I could see his argument if we were at least going to taste the results. And if they were chocolate.

He suggests that we leave our stuff on our seats and go backstage to see his friend Nick. We exit our row in the opposite direction and, after convincing the powers that be that we are vital to the survival of Earth, we are permitted to go behind the scenes to look for Nick and Madison Watts, owners of Madison on Park. Howard has described Nick in detail, but has never even mentioned Madison before tonight, so I am taken aback when he allows himself to be greeted with kisses on both cheeks by an elegant thirtysomething-just-younger-than-me woman who seems as surprised to see me as I am to see her kissing the man I’ve come in with.

She’s dressed all in black, like, well, like a black swan. Or like Mrs. Danvers, from Rebecca with Joan Fontaine. And let me tell you, if I were crumbs, I’d know better than to stick to her outfit. You know how interviewers always ask stupid questions like, “If you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be?” Well, Madison Watts would be a rare orchid that you know would cost thousands of dollars and would die if you looked at it wrong. And it would be your fault, not the flower’s.

Or maybe a Venus flytrap.

Something intimidating.

Yes, if I had to find one word to describe Madison Watts, it would be intimidating.

“Madison,” Howard says, and my ordinarily warm, garrulous date has suddenly gone cold and distant. “I’d like you to meet Teddi Bayer.”

“Your…?” Madison says, as if daring him to introduce me as his girlfriend. She waits, not giving him an out.

“Nick around?” he asks instead.

Madison eyes me critically while I try not to stare at her perfect complexion and huge gray eyes. I struggle to remember if I put on lipstick before Howard picked me up and figure it’s probably gone by now, anyway. I am wearing one of Bobbie’s crocheted tops with the matching shrug from last year and a pair of Ann Taylor pants which, I admit, are a good five years old. I feel mismatched, underdressed, out of style and fat. Where are this woman’s Hadassah arms? If Nick is such a great cook, why doesn’t her figure show that she ever, ever eats?

I’d credit Madison with an uncanny ability to reduce me to shame and self-loathing, but heck, nearly anyone can do it. It’s not like I don’t try. I’m sure I look good when I look in the mirror at home, or at the very least, good enough. And then I get where I’m going, see someone wearing the right thing, someone whose hair looks like she just stepped out of the salon, someone whose makeup isn’t smudged under her eyes, whose shoes apparently don’t cripple her feet, and all I want to do is crawl back into bed.

With the slightest hint of an accent, Madison, who looks like she’s primped all afternoon when I know she had to be preparing for the show, asks, “I know you, don’t I?” Those exquisite gray eyes of hers narrow slightly, as if she’s seeing through my disguise as a socially-acceptable, upwardly-mobile person who could pay for her own ticket and dinner if she had to. Which, luckily, I don’t.

I tell her that I don’t think we’ve ever met at the same time that Howard tells her that I am a decorator. “She’s doing a lot of commercial work,” he says. “Redecorating restaurants…” He pauses like he’s suddenly put two and two together and gotten Reese’s peanut butter cups. “You two should talk.”

My heart thumps wildly in my chest. Doing Madison on Park would be quite the notch in my glue gun. I can almost see the wheels turning in Madison’s head, too, and I smile at her like it’s an open invitation for her to watch the same process in mine—as long as we come to the same conclusion.

“You look so familiar to me,” she says, taking a step or two back and eyeing me from head to toe. “Have you been to the restaurant?”

I tell her I’ve been dying to come, but I’ve been so very busy. And poor, I think, but I don’t tell her as much.

“She’s doing The Steak-Out,” Howard tells her and we all exchange one of those oh, right, looks.

“You weren’t there today? When it happened, were you?” Madison asks, putting her hand on my arm as if ready to console me if I was.

And I admit that, unfortunately, I was.

“So sad about Joe,” she says as someone official-looking approaches her and she has to excuse herself to see to something about the show. “We’ll talk later,” she says to me, and maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I get the sense she is going to let me do the restaurant.

“‘So sad about Joe,’” Howard mimics as he looks around, I suppose for Nick. “She hated him just as much as the rest of us.”

I’m about to ask him how he came to know someone from the Health Department when he brightens and points toward the back of the stage. “Look! There’s Nick!”

Nick, who even with a chef’s hat on his head only comes up to Howard’s chin, pumps my hand until my arm goes numb. He is a cherub of a man, a little too chubby, a little too short, a little too bald to be considered good-looking, or even cute. But his eyes sparkle when he sees us and his pudgy hands clasp mine in a warm welcome.

“You’re here! I’m so glad! Now go away!” he says cheerily. “I must set up le mise en place.” I have no idea what that is, but I don’t dare ask Howard because he’s probably already told me three times and because if he tells me again I still won’t care. “They’re going to tell them the ingredients fifteen minutes before they’re supposed to start cooking,” Howard tells me.

“Yeah,” I say. I am getting testy because all we’ve talked about is food, on every monitor is food, and I’m getting hungrier by the minute. I still can’t believe we get to watch and not sample. “Like cockles.”

Howard, not offended that I clearly think cockles—which I have only heard of in the nursery rhyme—haven’t a chocolate bar’s chance in a gynecologist’s office of being the “designated food,” tells me, “It could be anything, and he has to be prepared. I mean, he’s got to have a million recipes in his head that need only the ingredients that are supplied, along with the spices and stuff he’s allowed to bring with him.”

I wonder for a moment about whether Howard would be more interested in me if I were a great cook, and whether Howard’s interest would make Drew jealous. And then my reality check kicks in. Drew doesn’t get jealous because Drew doesn’t really care. Remember this, I tell myself.

I watch the TV screens as the chefs lay out their wares, line up their knives, peelers, microplanes.

“What’s that?” I ask Howard, pointing at a stainless-steel gadget on one of the TV screens. He pulls his eyes away from Nick’s setup for a second. “A culinary torch,” he says dismissively before pointing out that Nick’s is newer and bigger and that he usually uses a salamander for caramelizing sugar.

I know better than to ask what a salamander is.

The emcee is apparently someone from the Food Network. I have been able to cram raising kids, running a business, trying to date and coping with my parents into one life, but it’s meant there’s no time for the Food Network. Howard seems to find this impossible to believe.

“You’ve never heard of him?” he asks. “He’s on after Rachel Ray.” I look at him blankly. He asks if I am pulling his leg.

“I know Emeril,” I offer gamely. “‘Kick it up a notch,’ right?”

Howard pats my leg affectionately and looks at me with something akin to pity while Mr. Food Network calls everyone to order and announces the rules.

“And now,” he says—and Howard takes my hand and squeezes it like they’re announcing the nominees for Best Actor in a Documentary Starring Food—“the ingredients.”

Howard raises a fist and shouts, “Yes!” at the mention of duck. I smile at him as if I care, while I imagine how best to redecorate Madison on Park, and how to present my ideas in a way that will convince Nick and Madison to take me up on my offer. Like one of Rio’s NASCAR races, Mr. Food Network tells the chefs to start their ovens. All around me people sit forward in their seats.

Around me, but not me. I’m thinking about traditional colors that go with oak, and how forest green has been so overdone. I want Madison on Park to take people by surprise. Not dead-guy-in-the-bathroom surprise, but something that will distinguish it from every other nice restaurant they’ve ever been in. I try to picture deep red with the oak. I like it, but I feel it still needs something to make it pop, to give it pizzaz. Touches of a pale chartreuse? A bold lavender? A deep purple?

A sharp whack jerks me from my reverie, and Howard tells me that the chef at the second station couldn’t cut the rind off an orange, never mind the head off a duck. I watch Nick’s monitor and see Madison put her hands on her hips and stamp her foot like Nick is purposely not getting on with it. There’s something Lady Macbethian about her as she directs Nick’s cleaver to some exact spot on the poor duck’s neck.

Howard says something about a perfectly cooked foie gras with poached pear and a port wine reduction sauce, but I’m trying to imagine the chartreuse and finding it unappetizing.

Maybe because now I’m associating it with dead duck.

Meanwhile, no one seems the least bit concerned that knives are being tossed about the stage with dangerous abandon. No one except me and a fire marshal stationed just off to the right of the stage. Sure—he and I are well acquainted with disasters. I arrive in time to report them and he gets to clean up after them.

An oven door is slammed, followed by an outraged shout about a soufflé and another about a rising cake.

A time warning is issued and the chefs go into double time. The monitors look like someone’s hit the fast-forward button on TiVo.

And I decide to go with the deep purple. Maybe it’s all the surrounding drama.

At each station, one chef is tending the stove and the other is at the chopping block. Almost every monitor shows vegetables being julienned with knives the size of light sabers.

A sudden gasp. Mine. Blood seeps onto the cutting board on Monitor Number Three—Nick and Madison’s station. Howard rises from his seat as Nick rushes to Madison’s side, wrapping her hand in a dishcloth and raising it up.

Someone in the crowd announces that he is a doctor. A half dozen others jump to their feet and announce that they, too, are doctors, throwing specialities around the room like baseball statistics.

“I’m a plastic surgeon.”