The man in question was young, hot, and brandishing a knife.
Pandy hated him immediately. Unable to tear her eyes away, she’d picked up the magazine for a closer look.
His hair appeared to be some kind of statement in itself. It was his best feature—long, dark curls that you wanted to run your hands through, rippling from a center part. Pandy surmised that he’d carefully chosen this particular hairstyle to frame the sharp cut of his jaw while deflecting attention away from his nose. It started off fine but then went to the left, as if it had been smashed with a baseball bat and the doctor had tried to smoosh it back into place. (Pandy would later discover t
hat this was indeed true.) His curved lips formed what was probably an unintentional sneer; his ink-dark eyes shone with the knowledge that he was someone special—and he hadn’t landed the cover of New York magazine at the ripe old age of thirty-two by accident.
Pandy was broke, but she bought the magazine anyway, mostly out of envy.
This was back when she was penniless and struggling, before SondraBeth Schnowzer and Doug Stone, before Monica, even. In those days, there was nothing that raised her ire more than a contemporary who was actually “making it”—in comparison to her own diminished circumstances.
Asshat, Pandy thought as she turned the pages to the story.
Jonny Beluga was no doubt extremely lucky and completely undeserving of his success. At the very least, he must be hopelessly shallow.
“A culinary wunderkind,” proclaimed the magazine, with its usual irritating and demoralizing hubris. Pandy went on to read that Jonny had grown up on Second Avenue; his mother had been only seventeen when he was born and had raised him as a single parent. The man who had supposedly been Jonny’s father had died of a drug overdose before Jonny was born. In his youth, Jonny had been part of a gang, which Pandy decided must be yet another self-serving aggrandizement—who could believe there were gangs on Second Avenue?
According to the article, after being in and out of trouble, including a short stint at “juvie,” as Jonny laughingly referred to it in the piece, he had lied about his age, claiming to be sixteen when he was only fourteen, and taken a job as a busboy at an upscale pickup joint called Peartrees. By eighteen, the magazine claimed, Jonny was practically running the place.
And then he’d taken all the money he’d made in tips and gone to culinary school in France.
This was followed by the usual: He returned to his beloved city determined to create an exciting new version of French food for the New York lifestyle—Whatever the hell that means, Pandy thought with a snicker. While working as a head chef for various establishments, he raised money to open his own restaurant. Apparently it had been one of New York’s “best-kept secrets”—perhaps too well kept. It had failed, along with his second attempt. Jonny, seized by the spirit of the great American entrepreneur, declared his failures mere learning experiences that had allowed him to open his dream “eatery,” Pétanque. Pandy recognized the name—it was a game played by old men in the South of France. She rolled her eyes. Beluga, she decided, wasn’t quite as clever as he thought.
She tossed the magazine in disgust, and forgot all about Jonny.
In the next few years, Pandy would hear his name bandied about, and while he was often in the gossip columns, she skimmed over his mentions. He didn’t come back into focus until Pandy’s friend Meghan had an affair with him. She met him—where else?—at the bar at Pétanque. They started talking and the next thing she knew, she was going home with him to the same white brick apartment building he’d grown up in on Second Avenue. Then he asked her to go away with him to Atlantic City.
There was a great deal of excitement around this event. With the success of his restaurant and some new cooking show that Pandy had never watched, nor cared to, Jonny had become quite the man-about-town, a regular on everyone’s list of the city’s most eligible bachelors. Meghan was nevertheless determined to hook him, despite Suzette’s warning that Jonny took every woman to Atlantic City. Pandy suggested that this seduction strategy would also make Jonny the perfect serial killer. He lured women to his hotel suite, stabbed them with his enormous butcher knife, cut up the bodies, and then cooked them in a stew.
Meghan had been furious at the suggestion.
But looking back on it, Pandy wondered if it was purely coincidence that before she’d even met him, she’d associated Jonny with death and destruction.
* * *
When Meghan returned from her weekend, Pandy and Suzette heard all about it: the endless sex, including sex standing up, which Suzette declared she’d heard was his trademark move. They were also informed of the usual excuses as to why Jonny Balaga couldn’t get serious: No woman, he’d claimed to Meghan, could tolerate his schedule, and he wouldn’t want to put any woman to the test. His restaurants didn’t close until midnight, and then there was still work to be done, meaning he often didn’t get home until four in the morning.
Pandy had roared with laughter when she heard that one. “Come on, Meghan, you know better than that. He’s out partying.”
True to form, after two weeks of this whirlwind romance, Jonny stopped responding to Meghan’s texts. When Meghan went to Pétanque to confront him, he acted like he hardly knew her.
This made Pandy hate him even more.
* * *
And then Pandy began running into him. Every time she went to Pétanque, which seemed to be everyone’s favorite place for first dates, whatever man she was with at the time always made a big show of “knowing” Jonny when he came out of the kitchen in his chef’s cap and tightly wrapped bloodstained apron. The man would be effusive in his praise, while Pandy tried to say as little as possible, doing her best to ignore him.
This wasn’t easy.
Jonny had presence. Pandy herself had to admit that he possessed that indefinable “it” factor. He was one of that rare type of man to whom women couldn’t help but be attracted in spite of themselves. Like Bill Clinton and Bobby Kennedy Jr., they oozed sex appeal like musk aftershave. You might not like them, you might even despise their politics and their double-dealing attitudes toward women and cheating, and yet when you were near them, you couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to be one of those cheatees yourself.
This, coupled with Jonny’s unapologetic arrogance, was enough reason to stay away. Why, Pandy wondered, must the Beluga come rolling out after every meal, stopping to greet every patron so they could congratulate him and tell him how wonderful he was? This sort of patronizing strutting was the sort of thing only men could get away with, and it just made Pandy resent Jonny more. He was like an actor standing around the exit of the theater after a play, begging for compliments from the departing crowd.
And then, as often happens in New York, Pandy’s orbit changed. Five years would pass before she would encounter Jonny Balaga again. Five years in which she herself changed: from struggling writer to the creator of Monica and the toast of the town.
* * *
Returning to New York from that disastrous trip to the island with SondraBeth Schnowzer and Doug Stone, Pandy had vowed never again to allow herself to be drawn into such moral debauchery. Despite having seen just about everything, she was proud to fall back on her prudish side, which, she believed, allowed her to run to the edge of the cliff and watch everyone else jump off while she remained on terra firma. She chastised herself for having momentarily gone against her better values, and for thinking she could escape from life’s vicissitudes by scooting behind the curtain of movie-star glamour. She vowed to get back to real life; like Odysseus, she would stuff her ears to resist the siren’s call to land on that treacherous rock called showbiz, where, as her literary friends had warned her, no self-respecting novelist belonged.