Imagine a dinner party in a English country manor with an American cook named Bubba making a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, waiters from Cal Tech, British royalty, a cat named Pudgy, and a thief. Honestly, what could go wrong?
Pudgygate
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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Dedication:
This is for Dean and the dudes, especially Thorn B. and the other turkey mongers.
Pudgygate
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
1995:
The wind off the Pacific Ocean is cold, even in Malibu. A group of fifteen young men huddle close to the celebratory bonfire they have built on a secluded stretch of beach. A short distance away, the cars wait like obedient children. Inside one, a cellular phone rings for the fifth time in an hour.
The sand is still warm from the day's sun. A tapped keg topples like a drunken soldier, but few of the men are drinking any more. They have been talking since noon, catching up on the years since they graduated from Cal Tech and went on their separate ways.
The conversation has deteriorated from highly placed and sometimes top secret research, grant applications, and the possibility of full professorships (as opposed to careers in government science labs) to the kinds of conversations they used to have in the dorm lounges late at night.
Desmond brought up his most embarrassing moment — something to do with toilet paper and the girl's locker room when he was in Middle School — and Benjamin followed with his, Scott with his, and Michael with his.
But the conversation has stopped, for Reuben has taken the stage. Reuben, who took a mysterious trip to London in his senior year, and has refused to talk about it ever since. Reuben is a kind of hero to them all because he crammed two semesters into one that last year, and still managed to graduate with honors.
"Toilet paper on your shoes?" he says as he settles in the center of the circle, legs crossed. He looks like the before picture in a body-building ad, but his skin has cleared in the intervening years, giving him a handsomeness he never possessed before. His hair is longer too, just touching the tips of his tiny ears. "Getting caught peeing on your coach's Volvo? Throwing up all over the Homecoming Queen at the dance? Come on, men, that's kid stuff."
"Kid stuff?" says Scott. His tone is a bit defensive. His Homecoming Queen story did get a lot of laughs.
"Yeah," Reuben says. "Kid stuff. My most embarrassing moment happened at a state dinner when I was in England." And then, because the group does not gasp or do anything else to show that it is impressed, he adds, "In front of Princess Di."
"Princess Di?" asks Benjamin. "The Princess Di?"
"Man," says a voice in the blackness. "She's hot. Old, but hot."
"You didn't get sick on her, did you?" asks Scott.
"Not quite," says Reuben, "but it might have been better if I did."
***
When Lester asked me if I wanted to meet Princess Di (Reuben says, settling into the story-telling cadence he is known for within the group), I never thought it through. I knew Lester had connections — his father was an MP (that's Member of Parliament for you non-anglophiles) — and Lester himself had spent summers with the Royal Family. So I spent my last thousand bucks and skipped the first semester of my final year at Cal Tech to winter in London.
I had brought a tux and my best hair cream. I even thought of getting my nose pierced, but then a friend told me that Di was not an Xer and might find the entire idea a bit gross. (I was a bit relieved; I am prone to sinus infections.)
That same friend sniffed at me for even imagining that anything would come of my meeting with Di. After all, she was a princess and I was a scrawny physics student who knew his way around quarks and computer languages — not the elegant dining rooms of Europe. But I had watched Pretty Woman enough to learn about place settings—
("Pretty Woman?" Scott says. "You watched Pretty Woman more than once?"
("Leave him alone," says Benjamin. "It was a date movie. You did see it on dates, didn't you?")
—and I figured what I didn't know, Lester would teach me.
And teach me he did. Place settings, Waterford crystal, the order of all seven courses. Seems Di had cut back on her social engagements. Lester's family was one of the few receiving her, and while I stayed at the house, I learned not to answer the phone which rang incessantly, particularly in the middle of the night.
This was before the press learned that one of Di's quirks was her penchant for phone harassment. Before the world learned that Di slept with her riding instructor and Charles never loved her. But it was after the bulimia stories, Squidgygate, and the public separation.
Di was lonely.
I hoped to take advantage of that.
Until Lester told me the real reason he had asked me to spend September with his family. They had to host a minor state dinner with the head of state of a small country in the middle of Europe. The Head of State, like the rest of us mortals, was fascinated with Shy Di, and refused to meet with John Major unless he could also meet with Diana. A ticklish thing at best, since at that point, Di was on the farthest outs she could be with the Royals. They refused to socialize with her, and so Lester's father offered, in June, to host the dinner privately.
No one could have known how difficult private had become.
You see, Di was a darling of the international press, and the center of tabloid attention at home. If she wasn't so frail, she probably would have killed a reporter or two by now. The family learned, in July, that hiring a catering staff was out of the question. Half the reporters on Fleet Street now moonlighted for the bigger name restaurants in hopes of a story. So the family had to rely on people they trusted, and when they came up one waiter short, Lester thought of me.
And all those posters of Di in my dorm room.
He figured I was an easy mark. He was right.
(Except for the screaming match the morning I found out. I slammed out of the house, stopped on that quiet English street, with its lovely row of trees, and realized that it was my pride or a chance to gaze on Di in person. I, of course, turned around.)
So, on the night in question, when I should have been wearing my silver tux with my grandfather's diamond cufflinks, I was, instead, wearing a borrowed black tux stained with gravy. The tastefully tight cummerbund covered the gravy stain, but not the feeling of shoddiness it imparted in me. And I still couldn't learn when to serve from the left, and when to serve from the right.
Lester, in exasperation, finally gave up, told me to watch the other waiters — most of whom were as pimply, scrawny and underfed as myself — then retired to his own room to dress for dinner.
Lester would get to eat with the family.
The traitor.
***
The chef was really the gardener, a middle-aged Idahonian named (I kid you not) Bubba. Bubba was big, Bubba was strong, and Bubba could protect a princess. But Bubba had only one seven course meal in his rather limited repertoire — a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. The Americans among the wait staff recognized it and tittered when they realized they were serving a colonial meal to the imperialists. But Bubba took offense at that.
"Them pilgrim guys," he said more than once, "was Brits when they landed on that Rock."
We all agreed, but took a vow of silence anyway. To us, a turkey dinner could never be elegant, not even when it was served on the family's highly polished serving set. And all of us worried, in one way or another, what that infatuated Head of State would think when faced with drumsticks, yams and pumpkin pie.
"Not our problem," said Cletus, the blond All-American hunk who had gone to MIT with Lester during his one summer in Boston. If Di noticed anyone on the wait staff, it would be Cletus.
"Nope. We just gotta make sure we serve this stuff in the best possible way," said Finigan, the tall skinny redhead who had met Lester during that infamous year at the University of Chicago.
"I hope you guys know what goes left and what goes right," I said. I was so nervous my face had broken out in four different places.
"Pay it no never mind," said Bobby Ray, the short, square Louisiana boy who had introduced Lester to Bourbon Street during his brief (and no longer recorded on his transcript) stay at Tulane. "If one of us messes up, all of us mess up. It might be an ice breaker."
"Lester's mother said we weren't to speak to the guests," said Percival, the pasty twenty-five-year old who had yet to reach his adult growth. He had been the class goat, and Lester's bunkmate at Eton during the period Lester called "the hell years."
"Lester's mother," said Georgia, the only girl in the group, with a decided sneer. Georgia was a gum-chewing Angelino of Puerto Rican descent whose black hair was so short, and body was so thin she looked better dressed as a man than all of us except Cletus. "Lester's mother's spine is so straight that she can't bend over to save her life."
Did I say that Georgia predates Lester's Cal Tech period by a wild twenty-four hours that ended in a fight outside the Viper Room? And this time, Lester was not the one caught fighting.
"First course," Bubba said.
We all turned and froze in horror. Dozens of deviled eggs stared up from the shiny silver serving trays like glow-in-the-dark eyeballs.
"These are the appetizers?" Percival asked, his voice small.
"You gotta problem with that?" Bubba crossed his thick arms — his wrists alone were the size of Percival's skull — and frowned.
"Absolutely not," Percival said with more pluck than I had given him credit for. He picked up the first tray, balanced it on his shoulder like a good waiter, and backed out of the swinging door.
As he backed out of the door, Lester's neutered tom, Pudge, sauntered in. Pudge was square as a linebacker, white with a touch of red, and had blue eyes from a roaming Siamese in his family's past. He was also the most focused cat on the planet.
None of us thought much about him, though, since he had never focused on any of us.
Until the salad course.
***