The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,59

attic while his mother and father were talking one evening and painted his hands so he could carry the smell with him, thinking it would bring him the elation he saw in his mother. His father was a bit taken aback by his blue-handed boy; his mother, after explaining about the need to be careful with special paint, had set him up with his own easel in her studio, where for years he had worked beside her—caught up in the swirls, the shapes, the oranges and greens and yellows and reds, the way the brush moved the paint across the thick white sheets of newsprint—until he realized that other people never saw on the paper what had been in his mind.

“It doesn’t matter, darling,” his mother would tell him. “That’s not the point of art.”

But for Ian, who worshiped at the altar of clarity as only a boy careering toward adolescence can, it was exactly, precisely, the point.

WHEN HE WAS TEN, Ian had discovered computers. There were no computers in his house back then; his mother was more amused than interested by the concept and his father used the one in his office at work. But a friend from school had one, and Ian was smitten from the moment his hands touched the keyboard. Here was a partner of unceasing consistency, whose rules were inviolate, if only you understood them. And Ian did.

He badgered his parents for months, until the next Christmas there was a present just the right size under the tree. Ian sat by the box from the time he spotted it at four o’clock on Christmas morning until the time his family finally opened their presents and he could take his prize from its Styrofoam packaging and bring it alive. From then on, the computer, or one of its various successors, held court in his room. Over the years, more computers entered the home, but they were mere functionaries in the life of his family—mail carriers, research assistants. Ian regarded his computer as the best of friends, one that would unselfishly step aside for a new model with a better memory, a quicker wit. In a house filled with the ambiguities of color, Ian’s first computers offered a reassuring world of black and white.

IAN HAD BEEN DETERMINED not to walk into Lillian’s cooking class unprepared, so he had spent the month of August in his apartment kitchen. As a software engineer, he reasoned that cooking, like any other process, could be approached as a series of steps to be mastered, fundamental skills that could be applied even, or perhaps especially, when one was confronted by the chaos of complicated recipes, sinks overflowing with pots and pans, shelves of red and silver-green spices, hiding in small, round glass jars like memory land mines.

He started with rice—pure, white, elemental, an expression of mathematical simplicity: 1 part rice + 2 parts water = 3 parts cooked rice. Nothing extra, nothing lost. Cooking it required only a heavy pot and discipline, both of which he had.

It was a disaster. First he had too much discipline, and the rice on the bottom of the pot scorched, sending a sad, brown smell throughout the apartment; then he had too little, and the rice was soggy, refusing to be roused no matter how much he fluffed and encouraged. He added salt and butter, which at least gave the mush a vague resemblance to popcorn in terms of flavor, but it still was not rice. Not the way he wanted it.

It was abundantly clear that he was going to need help.

IAN’S APARTMENT was above a Chinese restaurant that he frequented more often than he would have cared to have his mother know. The dining room was small, its walls painted a color that Ian guessed had once been red, the menus faded almost to the point of illegibility.

The first time Ian had ventured downstairs to the restaurant was two years earlier, after a long, hot summer day spent moving into his new apartment. He had been tired and hungry, and after being seated by an ancient waitress whose formidable expression made him look surreptitiously at his watch to make sure he wasn’t past closing time, he had opted for the safe choice and ordered sweet and sour pork and rice. When the plate arrived, he looked down at a fragrant mix of chicken, ginger, and the brilliant green of barely cooked broccoli tips.

“This is not what I ordered,” he told the waitress, as politely as