No Worst, There Is None. Eve McBride
her older sister Abbey under the Norfolk pine decorated with tinsel and glass balls. As she got older, the words made her recoil because she found them duplicitous. Christian salvation was a misogynist myth and had nothing to do with the actual teachings of Jesus.
What she understood least about her parents was their lack of questioning. How could they trust so implicitly something as tenuous as Divine, immortal goodness when everything about the human condition indicated that it did not exist?
Still, she loved the lush time of year: that it was the end of school and the beginning of summer holidays and she and her sister had free days ahead. Her mother, Dora maintained all the traditions of an old-fashioned English Christmas with Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” and gift exchange, then roast goose and plum pudding after the Christmas-morning service. What was best of all was the afternoon trip to the beach to play in the surf and make sand sculptures. Sometimes, on Boxing Day, if her father could find the time, they’d go off camping.
Meredith is in a reverie, thinking about it. All those joyous Australian Christmases. Now she has to reproduce that spirit in July. She is grateful for the stifling heat.
This is a substantial pictorial Christmas spread. RARITY caters to an elite readership accustomed to luxury and excess.
They are unfortunately almost a month late getting started. The longtime lover of Lew Chan, the art director, has died of AIDS and Lew has taken the time to recover. Though Lew had nursed Kirk through obscene suffering for long months before his death, he has been distraught to the point of helplessness.
This is the third friend Meredith and Thompson have lost to AIDS. These days, most social gatherings have the pall of the mysterious new disease. Some people are seeing it as a scourge for a lifestyle. The Warnes see it as something terrifying, ruthless and haphazard.
When Kirk died, Meredith had thought, What a punishing way to die, although she did not believe for a moment in the hideous “God’s Punishment” theory of AIDS. But she must have some aggravating, insidious Christian tendrils within her because when she was in the middle of her affair with Allan, she had thought, “Will I ever be punished for this?”
This shoot, which is meant to be about joy and festivity, will be sombre, and Lew, who is persnickety and anxious to begin with, will be feeling pressured because of the delay and the overhang of his grotesque loss. The Warnes are prepared for a rough time.
The menu is one of the most elaborate Meredith has worked on:
Appetizers: mini feuilletés with stilton and pear, smoked salmon cornucopias with lemon cream and capers, buckwheat blinis with crème fraîche and caviar and wild mushroom duxelles in pâte à choux.
Soup: oyster cream soup.
Palate cleanser: champagne sorbet.
Entrée: roast goose with chestnut-and-sage-sausage stuffing, red currant/port reduction, glazed carrots and parsnips, caramelized Brussels sprouts with roasted garlic, butternut squash gratin with pecan dust, mashed potatoes with nutmeg and cream.
Salad: watercress and arugula with lemon shallot dressing.
Dessert: ginger plum pudding, saffron crème brûlée.
It will take at least the week to prepare, style, and shoot the food. Meredith and Thompson will both work closely with Lew and Cindy, the prop stylist who will spend the morning in the studio staging the scene, an elegant dining room in a townhouse.
Mornings for Meredith will mean buying and cooking the food. In the afternoon, for the actual shooting, she will arrange all of it on the designated props and decorate it. Monday, they will do appetizers, which are the most finicky; Tuesday, the soup and sorbet and salad (an easy day); Wednesday, the vegetables and possibly one goose for composite photographs; Thursday, probably another goose and the stuffing for stand-alone shots; Friday, the desserts, although Meredith has already made the plum pudding at home.
The kitchen and studio for Artful Sustenance take up half a floor in a refurbished, four-storey warehouse. It is in a new commercial centre down on the harbour where a number of old factories have been transformed for the business community and Meredith and Thompson get good rent because the complex is out of the downtown area. The kitchen, with vast windows overlooking the lake, has two commercial-size ovens and a large double-doored refrigerator as well as both stainless-steel and butcher-block tables on which to work. It is well-equipped with all the accoutrements of food styling: spices and herbs and vinegars and oils, quality pots and pans, and a set of the best super-sharp German knives. Tweezers are crucial. But so are eyedroppers; spritz bottles; blue sticky tack; straws, X-acto knives; several sizes of scissors; pins; Krazy Glue; cotton swabs; cotton pads; three kinds of tape, Scotch, masking and duct; acrylic glaze; and any other accessories — emergency or otherwise — she imagines might be required. Sometimes the least likely device will save a shot.
Arriving in the kitchen late in the morning, she starts in on the four appetizers. It is intricate work. Because she loves to cook, this is the most creative part for her — beginning from scratch and coming up with beautiful results. It is both sculpture and painting. It is her task to make the food look “good enough to eat,” but actually be edible. There is a difference. One is artifice, the other naturalism. The two must form a complement.
She works quickly, instinctively, and deliberately. While she does, she thinks of Lizbett’s going to sleepover camp in a couple of weeks and how much she is going to miss her. Without her, the house goes silent and feels empty. Lizbett animates it and the family. She is part clown, part performer, part storyteller. She and Meredith have had a special bond, an unusually intimate companionship since Lizbett could talk. There is a synchronicity.
As for Darcy, sweet, moody, inward, tender-hearted Darcy, she is Meredith’s beloved. She makes her heart ache because she always feels as if her daughter harbours sad thoughts and is simply unreachable. Darcy is perpetually curious, but she is also anxious, preoccupied, a little hand-wringer. Her dark eyes are pensive and her brow always knit in a little furrow. And she seems vulnerable. Lizbett is forthright, resilient. She challenges everything that confronts her. Meredith cannot imagine anything untoward ever coming to Lizbett.
It is mid-afternoon and Meredith is behind. She puts all the food on a trolley and wheels it onto the set where the crew is waiting. Lew yells at her to hurry. He is blasting “Synchronicity” by The Police, which she asks him to turn down. Her ears are ringing from the Bruce Springsteen and Phil Collins of the morning.
A dark, highly polished Georgian buffet is decorated with ornate silver candelabra at either end, each surrounded by gilt wreaths. Four strategically placed silver platters rest on the shiny surface in between.
Now comes the part Meredith dislikes: the tedious, meticulous placing of the food, every centimetre of space crucial. Lew hovers relentlessly, tyrannically, wanting this piece closer, this piece overlapping, this piece removed, this piece added, these pieces in a different pattern.
Thompson is pacing. He is irritable and restless, anxious to get going with his camera. Thompson calls Lew the queen of control. “The queen of queens,” Lew says.
Working with Lew, orchestrating the food so exhaustingly to get a flawless frame always makes Meredith feel she has sold out; that she should be putting this kind of perfectionist dedication into her own paintings. Once she did that full-time: opulent, intimate, super-realistic still lifes that sold well. When they were first married, she and Thompson were bent on living a true and natural artistic life: he to his photography, she to her painting. And they managed for a time, each of them having a couple of successful exhibitions. But want got the better of ideals. They wanted a house; they wanted to travel; they wanted to be able to give their children a comfortable life, not the edgy, uncertain life of artists.
Meredith heard about an opening in the creative department of a large advertising firm and Thompson began to find successful commercial work and they were off to a measure of affluence they both desired. A year after the birth of Darcy, they took a fairly easy risk — because they were both known — and started