Cardamom and Blood - 11/11/11

Written for the 2011 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)
1,730 words written on 11/11/11

“The smoky scent of cardamom permeated the darkness as I crossed the threshold and was transported into Victorian India,” Marian said aloud, letting the words work their way across her lips as she had done when tasting chole, or spicy chickpeas, for the first time at Tea in Dubai, the latest ethnic restaurant to open in Milwaukee. Portia the Cat rested contentedly on top of the printer as was her custom while Marian wrote her reviews. She winked her acquiescence and then turned her attention to a leaf fluttering by the window.

“Glad you approve, Porsh,” said Marian. “I’d hate to lose your queenly favor due to poor verbiage.”

Portia the Cat, who was in fact a short-haired American tabby, operated under the assumption that she was descended from Persian royalty, with perhaps a drop of Egyptian heritage for good measure. Marian wasn’t about to be the one to correct her. After all, why shouldn’t an American tabby be treated like a god as the pharaohs had done millennia before?

Marian considered her next sentence, glancing at the picture frame on her desk for inspiration. In the frame, she kept a clipping of her favorite review by Marq Germaine, the leading food critic in Milwaukee, who could make or break a restaurant’s reputation with a single slant of the pen. Marian aspired to follow in Marq’s footsteps, and had left her day job as an auditor at Middle Mutual, a major insurance agency, so that she may try her hand at writing full time.

Four and a half months into her endeavor, she had 126 followers on her blog, MiSS Milwaukee, and she had managed to review seven of the nine most recent restaurants featured in Marq’s weekly column. Even better, she’d posted hers online before his had gone to print. Their opinions had differed for three of the locations, which Marian took as a good sign. As much as she adored Marq, she wanted to be recognized on her own merit, and to be seen as a discerning critic who was nobody’s copy cat.

As of yet, she was still writing anonymously; the only clue to her identity being the capital letters in her blog’s title. MiSS stood for her full name, Marian Sophia Sinclair. She also had a signature green dino that she put at the end of each of her reviews, a throw back to the old Sinclair gas stations she remembered from when she used to take summer road trips with her father, a semi driver. Her favorite trips has been to Georgia, though she always worried they’d have to make use of the steep dirt roads carved into the sides of the GreatSmokey Mountainsfor runaway semi trailers. Her father was a competent mechanic in addition to being an alert driver, though, so she needn’t have worried.

Supposedly, there were still three Sinclair stations left in Wisconsin, and Marian had added “road trip to Dickeyville” to her bucket list when she found out that’s where one of them was. All she remembered about Dickeyville was the old grotto made from bazillions of stones that she and her family had visited on summer camping trips. Somewhere, she was positive she still had that old pencil she’d bought as a souvenir at the grotto when she was thirteen. The whole top half was filled with tiny colorful pebbles, and she was pretty sure she’d never sharpened the pencil. The eraser had probably hardened a decade ago.

Marian chewed thoughtfully on the eraser of the pencil she now held in her hand. She’d never outgrown this habit, which she’d picked up in grade school, just as she’d never outgrown the habit of hand-writing a rough draft of her reviews before typing up the final and posting it on her blog. She preferred wooden pencils to the mechanical ones. There was just something so organic about writing with a wooden pencil on a yellow legal pad, scratching out mistakes, or erasing them altogether and blowing the eraser dust off the paper.

As Marian jotted down her next thought, the Katy Perry song on the radio was replaced by the DJ reading the latest headlines. She raised her eyes from the legal pad as she heard one about Peking Duck, the Chinese restaurant she’d reviewed last Thursday.

“Three more people were hospitalized with food poisoning overnight after eating at Peking Duck. The restaurant has temporarily closed until it can identify the source of the illness. It had only been open for three weeks.”

Marian thought back to the meal she’d had when she ate there. She hadn’t been very generous in her description of the food. In fact, she’d written that the Four Happiness Pork Balls had caused disappointment when they crumbled before she even touched her fork to them, and that the flavor of the plum sauce that was drizzled over the meal was plum rotten. Her final sentence asserted that the limp service warranted a name change from Peking Duck to Lame Duck.

“I feel sorry for those sick people, Portia, but I have to admit I won’t mind if that place stays closed forever,” Marian said. Her sentiments about Tea in Dubai were quite the opposite. She had been surprised at how thoroughly she had enjoyed her dining experience last night, which she’d shared with her friend and former co-worker, another auditor named Rex. It was probably the best meal that she’d reviewed yet.

Rex’ parents had imaginatively bestowed on him the more complex birth name Rutherford Xavier, but they had thankfully shortened it to Rex when he was a young child, and he only used his full name for legal purposes. Rex and Marian had met at Middle Mutual four years earlier, and quickly formed a bond as they were hired within a week of each other. Rex liked to point out to Marian that he had seven days seniority, to which she would reply that it was seven more days of his soul being sucked dry by endless numbers and paperwork. Rex disagreed, though. Unlike Marian, he got an adrenaline rush each time he located a discrepancy or resolved a documentation error.

Rex claimed that auditing was just like being a detective, except he wasn’t risking his life in the process. Marian always joked that he would wind up bleeding to death from endless paper cuts and then they’d see whose life was at risk. When she’d told Rex that she was leaving Middle Mutual, he’d pretended not to care, shrugging his shoulders and saying, “You’re too imaginative for this job, anyway.”

But he betrayed himself when he made her promise to bring him along on at least half of her “culinary conquests”, which was how he referred to her dining sessions. He’d argued that if she was going to write anonymously, especially as a critic, she needed to look like an ordinary patron of the restaurant, and that eating solo was too conspicuous.

“Milwaukee isn’t that big a city,” he said. “People frequent the same places, especially when they’re new locations, and pretty soon somebody will ask why this attractive girl keeps eating out by herself.” It wasn’t lost on Marian that Rex had called her attractive.

So, Rex had accompanied Marian on about 20 occasions over the last four and half months. This was more than the agreed upon “half” of her dining sessions, but she liked his company. Plus, he offered to pay for her, which eased her overall spending, even if she could write it off as a business expense.

She had carefully saved for over a year before quitting Middle Mutual, knowing that she would need to have something to live off of until her writing took off, not to mention a fund to pay for all the dining out she’d have to do. She got the occasional freelance piece, which provided some minor income, but the money she got from that didn’t go far. So, it was nice to have the company – and financial support – of Rex, who claimed he didn’t have many other outlets for fun, anyway.

Marian knew this wasn’t true. She knew that Rex liked to dabble in photography and had a habit of taking long walks to capture the city’s many moods. She had only seen a few of his pictures, but from what she could tell, he had a gift for the craft. Rex also liked to collect and catalog coins, which Marian thought was a fitting hobby for an auditor. He said that he loved to wonder about all the places the coin had been and what it had seen before getting stuck in a book. Marian thought maybe Rex had a little too much imagination for his job, too.

When they were at Tea in Dubai, he had been describing a particularly old and foreign coin that he’d found at an antique dealer in the Walker's Point neighborhood. Marian couldn’t remember the details of his story, though, because she’d suddenly noticed Marq Germaine dining two tables away. This was only the second time she’d seen him in person, if you didn’t count the annual Dine Out Milwaukee festival, a huge showcase of local restaurants that lasted three days and ruined any weight loss plan. Marq had emceed the festival for the last four years, and Marian had no doubt he’d do it again this year.

She had interrupted Rex’ story about the coin to gawk at Marq and speculate on his dinner choice. It looked as though he’d selected some sort of stuffed tomato entreé with a mango-based side dish. Marian couldn’t help but notice the difference in presentation between Marq’s dinner and her own. Whereas hers was brought out on one large plate, without pomp or circumstance, Marq’s meal was carefully arranged to highlight the various ingredients and the mango had been artfully carved into some sort of exotic bird.

“Well, he is established as the final word in local dining,” Rex pointed out. But he was kind enough to reassure her that Marq was receiving a biased experience and that Marian’s review would relate to the everyday consumer. And none of this detracted from the excellent taste of the food coupled by very attentive service. In the end, both Marq Germaine and Marian Sophia Sinclair rated Tea in Dubai favorably, solidifying the restaurant’s reputation as a new Milwaukee destination.