Stars in His Eyes by Martí Gironell

Author:Martí Gironell [Gironell, Martí]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542040624
Published: 2019-06-30T22:00:00+00:00

Soon enough, the two men were celebrating the restaurant’s fourth anniversary. The duo functioned like a well-oiled machine as long as the chef held on to his place as the conscience of Jean, who was getting harder and harder to handle.

“Luckily, I don’t ever pay you any mind,” Jean told Emilio. “And see, here we are celebrating it.”

Jean never left the restaurant—or at least it seemed that way to Emilio, who was always eager to rush home at the end of the night. For him, the restaurant was an investment, a place to work and hone his craft, but he got no thrill out of seeing or being seen. When the day was done, he treasured his relaxation at home. Jean, on the other hand, liked to linger, to break down how the evening’s service had gone, to plan ahead for events to come, to dream for the future.

Often Emilio had the unpleasant feeling that Jean wasn’t so much lingering at a place he loved as avoiding being somewhere else: his home. Emilio missed Jean’s wife, Donna, even if Jean didn’t seem to.

But the chef didn’t voice his worries to Jean. Instead he focused on those small battles that he had at least a chance of winning. Like Jean’s gruff manner with his employees, the very opposite of the kindness he offered his customers. While Jean treated his guests with kid gloves, he managed his staff with an iron fist, and that often caused problems. He felt he could demand the maximum from them because he gave his all and he offered the best clientele and the biggest tips in all of Hollywood.

“It’s a matter of principle,” he said. And that was that. His friends, from Emilio to big stars like James Dean, had reproached his obsessiveness and his demanding nature—but as the restaurant grew, he started to cultivate those qualities intentionally. He perfected the Humphrey Bogart stare, which froze the blood of anyone who tried to contradict him.

La Scala was the world for Jean Leon, and he gave it all the time and energy it required, at the expense of everything else. Everything else being, principally, Donna and their two children.

He had become one of the beautiful people, and that was what mattered most to him. At seven every morning, he was already headed to the restaurant. He would have his coffee at one of the booths while he waited for the first deliveries. In theory, he left the closing duties to a manager or headwaiter, but in practice, some VIP always kept him long after the doors were locked. He would come home past midnight, liquor on his breath, bragging of how he’d shared a cognac with this or that celebrity, and he never noticed Donna’s bitterness, nor how it faded gradually into resignation.

With time, his family became a thing to be referred to, but not to be taken care of, and he worried more about thumb smudges on the silver and how the servers carried the plates than whether the strain of his absence was pushing his wife over the edge.

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