Food Whore by Tom Jessica

Author:Tom, Jessica [Tom, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-10-01T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

THE NEXT MORNING AT BARNES & NOBLE, ELLIOTT AND I SAT across from each other in the café section. He’d brought ten botany journals and one textbook, which stood between us like a wall. The bottom of my stomach rumbled with the taste of that sesame-yogurt mousse, of Pascal against me in Bakushan. I shook the memories out of my head.

“What are you doing?” I asked warmly, trying to be sweet and open to his affection.

“Studying evaporation rates in tropical versus tundra climates,” he said, his head already buried in his books.

“Oh, cool,” I said. I looked down at my books and tapped the table. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

He glared at me for a quick second before he returned to his work. “I can’t now. Moishe wants this report before I come in. Sorry, Tia, I’ll explain it to you later.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, playfully tapping his foot. He pulled it away.

I took a deep breath. Elliott wasn’t even noticing my efforts, so I went to find the newspaper without him.

There in a wire bin next to the entrance, I spotted them. I peeled away to the Food section and saw a beautiful picture of Tellicherry’s jewel-like dining room, centered around the best table, where Michael Saltz and I had sat and Pascal had paid a visit.

I read it slowly and carefully, ingesting each word before I moved on to the next.

Some parts of my review were left out or skewed. For one, I had raved about the lavender-peach macarons, but Michael Saltz had decided they didn’t make the cut. I had also written favorably about Tellicherry’s varied menu, but Michael Saltz’s review tweaked my words so that the menu selections came off as flighty and indecisive instead of agile and joyous. It made the thrilling will-he-or-won’t-he danger of the dishes something to be frightened of.

But those were subtle matters of punctuation and syntax, slight connotation shifts. More important, there were two major things that caught my attention.

First, just like the Madison Park Tavern review, Michael Saltz had used my exact words in the vast majority of his column. As he had said on the phone, he was perfectly able to write his own review, even if he was using my thoughts. So why had he bothered to use my wording? I loved some of my turns of phrase, but I couldn’t imagine why he had used them, especially given that this was Michael Saltz—his ego and name were so precious to him.

And then there was the big type across the bottom of the review: THREE STARS, as Michael Saltz had said it would be. He’d had it in his head from the beginning, and that’s why he’d made it so. My words, his judgment call.

But even with the star rating changed and those other minor tweaks, I still felt I owned that piece of writing. My words were in the New York Times, and that was an intoxicating, sky-high rush, the type that makes you want to scream from the rooftops and tell everyone you know.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.