The Pastry Queen of Los Angeles

We are out by the pool when Sarah starts in. I’m dangling my toes over the edge, watching my skin change color as it dips in and out of the water. There are bridal magazines spread out over the patio, stacked on the mosaic table, piled high on the platform on which Sarah’s lounge chair rests. We’ve been flipping through magazines for days. Now with every detail firmly and inexorably in place, Sarah is determined to reassure herself that she has arranged the perfect wedding. All of a sudden amidst the pre-wedding chatter, she switches topics.
“I wish you would stop telling people you and Todd were lovers. It embarrasses him.” Sarah sits up in her lounge chair and pulls down her Fendi sunglasses so she can fix me with her ocean blue glare. “He complained to Daddy.”
All bow down to Daddy, the producer, famous for his unerring nose for high box office. I tell myself I’m not afraid of Sarah’s father, but still I cringe. Suddenly I’m eighteen again, ten years ago when I first used to come to Sarah’s house for visits. All those famous people out by the pool, normal as anything.
“I assume Todd is working with your father on something new?” The almighty Daddy never takes anybody’s side without a reason.
“Daddy’s courting Todd for that “Moonlighting” movie he’s trying to do.”
“Moonlighting? Isn’t Todd a bit pretty and dim to be the Bruce Willis character?”
“Be nice. I’m auditioning for the Cybil Shepard part.”
I forget sometimes that Sarah actually tries to take her acting seriously. She’s says she’s sick of always being the pretty girl, which I find a little silly. That’s like getting tired of being rich. But I always humor Sarah. After all, we’ve been friends since that first day of college when I showed up at the dorm meeting with a case of beer. Back then I was skinny, and Sarah and I were the undisputed queens of the campus. But all that changed when I gained a little weight.
A little weight is a bit of an understatement, actually I doubled in size. I’m fat. It’s okay, I can say it. I don’t even mind most of the time. I sort of revel in it. I stand out here in Los Angeles, in the land of the incredible shrinking woman. Even at this moment when Sarah is bronzed and smooth in her size five black bikini and I’m sweating in my silk caftan, I wouldn’t trade places. I have everything I want, a fabulous job , a condo with a view, and a popular sitcom actress for a best friend. Life has not been unkind to me. So my first lover is a famous movie star who refuses to acknowledge I exist. So what?
“What do you think of this dress?” Sarah says, holding up a magazine, held open.
I let her change the subject for a little while, “It’s nice but not as pretty as yours.”
She smiles. “I know. Can you believe I’m getting married?”
I don’t say anything. We’ve been having this same conversation every day for the last six months, ever since Edward proposed. I don’t want to talk about Vera Wang dresses and the aesthetic value of tuberoses. It’s bad enough I have designed the wedding cake and am supervising the caterer. My brain is already full of logistics involving tins of sevruga caviar and the optimum temperature for marzipan. But Sarah is my best friend and even if I’m not the maid of honor–there were aesthetic concerns–her wedding is my wedding in a multitude of ways.
I stare down at my pink-polished toes and wonder if maybe the fact that he complained to Sarah’s father means that the past matters as much to him as to me. Suddenly I realize why Sarah has brought this up today. “Sarah, is Todd coming to the wedding?”
“Well, I sort of wanted to talk to you about that,” Sarah says. “If we could all get along that would be really great.”
“I’m going to go get a glass of water.” I get up and walk across the patio and into the house. In the kitchen, Consuela is slicing fruit. She nods at me and I smile. Consuela and I go back a long way; I taught her how to cook. Not that it’s a skill she needs in this house. Sarah’s been on a raw foods diet for the past year. She says it makes her happy and she feels the best she ever has. If that were really the case, however, I would be allowed to bring food here. Instead, I always have to have a huge breakfast before I make the drive out to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Sarah claims the smell of cooked food makes her queasy. I think what it really makes her is hungry.
I grab a bottle of Evian from the refrigerator and open it. The house is lovely-cool. I could stay in here all afternoon but Sarah insists on soaking up the cancer rays outdoors. Todd at the wedding, a whole day where he can’t avoid me.
I go back outside, shielding my eyes against the merciless Southern California sun. I sit on the chair opposite Sarah. “Are you really going to invite him?” I say.
“Angie, you know as well as I do the invitations went out months ago and his name wasn’t on the list. He is dating Ella Vandale, though and I told her she could bring a guest. Daddy would really like it if he could be here. For the publicity.”
“Publicity–this wedding’s supposed to be ultra-private.” I think of the ten-page non-disclosure contract I made all of the catering staff sign. And I can’t believe he is dating Ella Vandale, that vacuous, underfed, over-publicized nymphet.
“Oh please, nothing I do is ever private,” Sarah says.
“Sarah, it’s your wedding, you should invite whoever you like.”
“Will you be good?” she says.
“Good is a relative term,” I say.
“Don’t be cute. No drama, Angie, I mean it.”
“Sarah, if you’re so damn concerned with this why don’t you just uninvite me. That seems to be the perfect solution.” I lurch up and stalk off as quickly as a woman of my size can. I wedge myself into my car and throw it into reverse. With blurring eyes, I negotiate the curving driveway and head for home.
Driving back from Sarah’s house on the 110 Freeway, I give in to tears of pain and frustration. It’s so silly and banal. I shouldn’t be telling anyone who will listen that Todd and I dated in college. Sarah is right, I should get over it. But when I think about doing that something rises hot and angry in my throat and I want to slam my fist through the windshield. I just want him to admit it. Or at least not deny it.
He was my first love but it was I who sacrificed him. I got him the audition for the soap opera by arranging it with Sarah’s dad. I told Todd to leave college. I told him it was best we just be friends. It was he who kept coming back to campus on the weekends because seeing me “soothed his heart.” Liar.
Now, our relationship takes place across crowded rooms where we never meet. After all, as one of the elite foodies in Los Angeles, I eat out most of the time. Believe it or not, I don’t have a huge appetite and it doesn’t take plates of food to satisfy me. That’s one of the great things about being huge. Being skinny takes much more effort to maintain. Fat just sort of takes care of itself. But my job is to eat food and to talk about it so it makes sense to combine sustenance with business at every opportunity. At one or another restaurant opening or private party I will see him, usually escorting some foreign-born supermodel. Whatever I may feel about his personal character he still is the most beautiful man I have ever seen.
The first time I saw him after he left college, three years after I had left when I already had my first cookbook deal, I went sailing over to him all open-armed and beaming. He recoiled from me as if I were some deranged stalker, someone he had never met. Later when it was clear who I was, he still kept his distance, as if my fat were a taint that might infect him. But I keep hoping one day, at some public event, he’ll drape his arm around me and the cameras will flash and we will smile.
The cell phone rings and it’s Sarah. “Still pissed?”
I don’t reply, I let the sound of the cars and the stereo fill in for sound.
“He doesn’t have to be there,” she says.
“I won’t cause a scene,” I say. “I promise. I’m finishing up the cake tonight and then I’ll be back in the morning to supervise the setup.”
“I’m so glad you’re not mad at me,” she says. “I couldn’t do this without you.”
“Get a good night’s sleep and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Perhaps it’s only natural that Sarah and I are snapping at each other. Nerves. This wedding is nearly as important to me as it is to her. I’ve thought for weeks about the menu, about the perfect marriage of flavors, colors, textures. Some girls, all their lives, they plan the ideal wedding dress. I was like that too, when I was fifteen or so. A silk brocade with a pearl-beaded bodice and an organza overskirt that could be removed after the wedding, revealing a tighter shorter skirt beneath. Now if I wore white, I’d look like the StayPuff marshmallow man rolling down the aisle. What remains for me is the perfect wedding meal.
All the way home, down the Harbor Freeway, I’m thinking about that wedding meal. The obvious thing is to start with caviar. Caviar on baby red potatoes, caviar on blinis, caviar and creme fraiche on ice. Caviar and champagne. I’ll concede that every wedding should have champagne, but why the caviar? Personally I think it is ostentatious, but it’s what Sarah wants, so the order from Dean & Deluca will arrive the morning of the ceremony. Try keeping ten pounds of sevruga on ice outdoors in Southern California in September. Most people don’t even like caviar, that is the silly part. They wouldn’t know sevruga from beluga from that black lumpfish shit you can buy in the grocery store for five bucks. It’s all just salt water and membrane to most.
See, that’s the thing about Los Angeles. Absolutely everything is an act. This is not a newsflash. Most of us arrived out here from small backwater towns, scared, ambitious and hungry. The caviar, like most other stuff around here is an illusion, a symbol that we have made it. We eat caviar as a sign of worth.
I actually like caviar. I was raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the moldering remains of what was once a great whaling town. The upshot of that is I grew up eating all manners of fish. Eating fish is like skiing, if you don’t take to it young, you’ve got little chance of liking it when you are older. I’ve seen it countless times out here, those perfectly beautiful or handsome young starlets from the middle of the country squinting uncertainly over sushi.
Back in college, Todd and I never ate together. My diet plan then consisted of carrots and ranch dressing during the week, pizza, beer and chocolate fudge on the weekends. My love affair with food started after he left. A love with a chance start like all good loves are. One day,wandering through town, I walked into the gourmet foods store. The samples at the counter were a revelation. Good food had just never occurred to me. Later, I apprenticed myself to the owner of the shop as a caterer’s assistant. And I didn’t mind losing the frat boys or the cute little outfits I used to wear, I was on the trail of something greater. Food, the one true need. I learned and I grew.
Now, this wedding, the culmination of all. I’m married to the caviar, that much is certain, but the rest of the meal is all mine. In my study at home, I have pictures from Gourmet and Bon Appetit posted on the wall. Months of research for this one day, the unforgettable meal. It has to be unique. And portable. Sarah wants a buffet so that the guests aren’t tied to tables. Everyone has to mingle. I hate the idea of the buffet. It makes me think of chefs carving large hunks of meat, and everyone standing in line. So instead I have reduced everything. The whole menu is in little bites that can be easily handed out. It is twice as much labor, and a menu that would normally be a page or so is instead four pages long. But it’s brilliant.

I wear white to work on the cake. I learned that in a catering class. When you are working with pure white fondant you have to wear white—any stray colored lint or fuss could become embedded in the fondant and become impossible to get out. Fondant isn’t like frosting, you can’t just fix a part. It has to be draped over the cake in a solid sheet. The fondant is thick and smooth. I take a tube filled with royal icing and dab on little pale-pink dots over the top. Then come the flowers. It has taken me months to make the flowers. Each perfect petal individually sculpted, all sugar paste and marzipan, all completely edible. Sarah left the design of the cake up to me. Luckily, a restauranteur friend of mine lent me her bakery and her staff so I did not have to bake it myself. But the decoration is purely my vision of the ideal wedding cake.
On Sarah’s wedding day I am up before the sun. I drive out to her house as the day dawns. When I arrive, the catering trucks are already lining the driveway. My heart begins to pound.
Upstairs, Sarah is breathing so quickly I fear she might pass out. Apparently Ativan is included in her raw foods diet plan, she pops two with a glass of mineral water and then settles into a chair to have her makeup done. Her bridesmaids are scattered through the house being generally useless, while I run from crisis to crisis. I go back upstairs an hour later and Sarah is pharmaceutically mellow as the hairdresser applies her extensions.
By noon I am exhausted. Every vase has been filled and arranged. All the food has been laid out on platters and sits in refrigeration, waiting backstage, for the great and shining moment. I allow myself a chance to rest in a lounge chair. I close my eyes and let the sun lull me into a sense of calm. In two hours, the wedding will begin. In two hours, I will get to see Todd. On the arm of that stupid Ella Vandale.
It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving when Todd told me he loved me. We had both gone away for the weekend. Me, to Arizona to visit my uncle, Todd home to Vegas with his best friend, Johnny B. I arrived back at the dorm before anyone else, and unpacked in blessed quiet. Later that night, Todd knocked on my door. He was rumpled and spacy, munching his way through a box of crackers.
“Long trip,” I said, as I let him in. “Endless. Johnny B and I just got back.”
He reeked of pot, his beautiful pale eyes were red-rimmed. Why does bloodshot look so much more painful in blue eyes?
“You shouldn’t smoke that shit,” I said. I was one to talk. This was back in the days when I had a three pack a day cigarette habit, and that little psuedo-recreational cocaine problem.
Todd sprawled on my roommate’s carefully made up bed, getting cracker crumbs all over her Laura Ashley quilt. “You should have seen the desert. The stars were so shiny and bright all the way home. Johnny B drove. I just smoked and stared out the window. And all I could think about was how my love for you is like the desert, all vast and unending.”
“You’ve really got to stop smoking that shit,” I said, not bothering to turn toward him. Instead I busied myself, sorting laundry I had already sorted.
“I’m serious. I love you. I will always love you.”
I open my eyes and reorient myself to the fact that ten years have passed since then. I move through the house, reassuring myself that every detail is precisely as it should be. When I am satisfied, I find myself an unused guest bathroom and change into my wedding finery. I avert my eyes from the sight of my own shape as I wrestle my way into my dress. At home my mirrors are small. Even then, seeing my own bloated face in the mirror is enough to give me pause. Luckily, today I do not have the luxury of deep contemplation or self-loathing. Besides, Sarah is the star of the show, all I am really striving for here is a presentable and unobtrusive appearance. Close enough.
When I go back outside, the guests have started to arrive. I know just about everyone here. All the old friends, all the new friends, all the not-really friends at all. I run interference for Sarah’s dad, keeping him safe from the more obnoxious flesh-pressers. My size has its advantages—people can’t see around me. Out in public, sometimes I block Sarah from the eyes of fans, a technique we laughingly refer to as the barrier method.
The string quartet begins to play and everyone moves out to the garden for the wedding ceremony. Just before Sarah walks down the aisle, Todd arrives. There are no seats available so he is forced to stand in the back with his arm around over-tanned, underfed Ella Vandale. I flash Todd and Ella a brilliant smile and a wave. Ella begins to wave back but stops when Todd gives her a fierce look.
Sarah walks down the aisle. The crowd sighs in predictable pleasure. Sarah waggles her eyebrows at me quickly, before her face resumes photographic perfection.
Vows, a kiss, applause. Sarah’s shoulders are slack with relief. Despite all the years of sets and photo shoots and the spotlight, she still gets nervous. Not so that most people would notice, but I can see it. She clings to Edward like a lifeline as they make the rounds.
The catering staff begins to circulate the food. Each tray, a different set of treasures. Truffle-infused risotto in hollowed out lemons, wonton wrappers stuffed with crabmeat and tied with scallion bows, round crackers spread with tapenade, miniature sandwiches with buffalo mozzarella and plum tomatoes. A riot of ethnicities, flavors, and colors meant to dazzle rather than provide sustenance.
All through the party, people are raving about the food. Even the models are surreptitiously licking the tops of the blackberry-infused miniature creme bruleés. The bathrooms are all redolent with the smell of oranges. To me, this is the scent of success. The orange comes from the natural air freshener that Consuela has put in all the bathrooms. The more air freshener used, the more I know the ultra-thin are trying to cover up the fact that they have just vomited. I should be offended, all the time and effort, all the delicious food, all winding up in the toilet. But this is Hollywood, and so I am elated. All the prescription appetite suppressants and illegal amphetamines couldn’t keep them from digging into the tamarind-dressed tuna tartare or the caper and balsamic vinegar-marinated baby vegetables.
I settle myself into a rattan chair in an alcove, and listen to the party all around me. I want to hear what the guests are saying about the food. This position is golden. I can catch little snippets of conversation. I can be part of everything, and yet completely invisible. He’s talking to Sarah. She says, “Angie, still loves you.”
Even today she is dealing with this. I feel a twinge of guilt. It is, after all, her wedding day.
“I can handle her, you should go be with your guests,” Todd says. “And your husband.”
“Ah, husband, what a word!” Sarah says.
“You were the most beautiful bride I have ever seen,” he says. “Now go, enjoy your day.” I hear a rustling sound as Sarah departs. I stand up, and block Todd’s exit in the opposite direction.
“Angelica,” he says evenly. He is not surprised to see me. I’ve been haunting him so ruthlessly for so many months, I have lost my impact.
“Damn it, Ange, “ he says, “don’t pull this shit. Sarah said you would be good.”
I reach up to smooth his lapel and he flinches away from my chubby hand. I stand there looking into his amazing aquamarine eyes, and he holds my gaze for what must be a good twenty seconds. And then I say the most banal thing possible, the silliest fat girl rejoinder ever.
“At least I can get thin, you’ll always be a jerk.”
His face turns red, and his hand twitches. I think maybe he is going to hit me, but instead he shrugs his shoulders, and laughs slightly. He moves past me, and walks back into the crowd.
I stand there for a minute, but I realize that if one person says one word to me I just might break, so instead I head outside. Past the smokers, past the lazy-eyed Mexican valets leaning on limos, past the pool where someone’s children are swimming naked. I get all the way out to the edge of the property, the place where the stone wall prevents me from sliding down into the horse pasture below. The wall is high enough up on the hill so I can still see the ocean. It’s clear today. On the edges of the horizon, Catalina sits pretty as a picture. On hazy days, Catalina disappears beneath the smog. When we were younger, I used to look for the island each time I came to Sarah’s house. I always took it as a good omen if I could see the island, a blurred smudge against the sky.
From the house, I can hear a swell of music and applause. It is time to cut the cake. I can imagine Sarah and Edward, posing in front of my beautiful cake. They intertwine their hands around the Tiffany silver cake knife and cut through layers of fondant, ganache, spongecake and dacquoise. My flawless, perfect cake. I should be there to tell the waitstaff how to serve it. It has to be cut a certain way, I’ve mapped out a diagram on a piece of paper in my purse. They are going to cut it all wrong, and not everyone will get a sugar paste flower.
But the air is so still here, and it smells like grass and dirt. The horses are trotting in the pasture down below. No one will miss me. No one will care how the cake is cut. These caterers all have experience with weddings, they will know what to do. Somewhere in there, Todd is watching. Perhaps with Ella, perhaps alone. All the guests are raising their champagne glasses. Sarah and Edward feed each other little bits of cake. I don’t need to be there. It’s not my wedding.
They are cutting the cake all wrong. No one will know to put out the tiny chocolate cups filled with Grand Marnier, chilling in the refrigerator. I stand up, and for a minute, the world spins. I’m light-headed. I haven’t eaten a thing all day. All this time, I’ve been monitoring the habits of others. All this time, with food everywhere, I have forgotten to eat. I let my hunger carry me back up the hill to Sarah’s house.