Madeline cradled the book. “Yes, Lulu. She was passionate, that one. Her eyes had fire in them, green with little bursts of yellow that flamed when she spoke about baking. She was a pastry chef. Her lemon soufflé melted on your tongue. Don’t get me started on her chocolate tarts. She gave so much to her food that I worried she wasn’t saving enough of herself for her own needs.”
So Madeline had written her a story to teach her to covet parts of herself unapologetically.
“Self-centered is not selfish. It does not necessitate that we ignore the needs of others. If we cannot take care of ourselves, if we cannot demand what we need, what do we have to offer others?”
Lulu had built her life around pleasing others. Madeline taught her to please herself. After reading the story, Lulu met Alphonse at an event for a global lifestyle company. They were celebrating a milestone that confounded Lulu, something about outreach on platforms, something intangible compared to caster sugar and Tahitian vanilla beans. The cake was to be impossibly tall, one hundred tiers for each of the one hundred goals the company had met, until the top tier was no larger than a thimble. Each time Lulu tried to build a sample cake, it would topple before she reached the top. She tried the traditional method of refrigerating the cake between tiers until it would not fit in the fridge. As always, she smoothed the buttercream icing onto each layer until it was as a level as a floorboard. She then experimented with thicker layers of icing to serve as glue. That worked better, but it compromised the taste, something she could not abide. She played with toothpicks, a plastic rod, a wooden dowel. Nothing would keep the cake upright and straight. It frustrated her in a way she’d never been frustrated before.
Lulu had been waiting to read Madeline’s story until she was finished with the job. She could not afford the distraction of love while her mind needed to be entirely committed to besting this cake. At last, when she’d run out of ideas for constructing the cake, she looked to the story for a diversion. It was about a man who collected hours like they were coins, piling them away so he did not have to share them with anyone else, and as she read it, she grew enraged. What was this story of a greedy man who hoarded time, unwilling to spend it on others? How exactly was it supposed to bring her love? When she returned to her cake, she was unprecedentedly annoyed. Annoyed at Madeline for writing her such an ugly story. Annoyed at her clients for expecting her to defy physics. Annoyed at herself for accepting this job, for toiling away at something that would never work. Anger overshadowed the task before her, yet somehow, as soon as she stopped trying to solve the impossible mathematics of the cake, she assembled each of the one hundred tiers, so high she needed to stand on a chair to reach the top. It was perfect because she had stopped caring whether she could do it or not.
At the party, everyone marveled as she gingerly carried the cake toward a table at the center of the room. Everyone except one man, who was so engaged in a story he was telling that he did not notice the entrance of the cake. Gesturing wildly, he waved his drink in the air. The cake was so tall that Lulu could not see around it. She simply trusted that the path was clear ahead, that if anyone saw an impossibly tall cake coming their way, surely they would make room. Still oblivious, Alphonse began rowing his arms. As he stroked the air behind him, he caught the tail of her chef’s coat, setting her off balance. The cake was rigidly tall. It had no give as she wobbled. When she managed to right her feet, the cake further tilted to a ninety-degree angle, landing squarely on Alphonse’s head.
“I was so shocked,” Lulu said when Madeline and Alice visited her at her industrial kitchen in Buellton, “that all I could do was laugh.”
The room had fallen quiet, Lulu’s wild laugh crowding the silence.
“I couldn’t help it. The whole thing was just so absurd, and it reminded me of the first line of the story you wrote for me, about how outlandish truths can only be accepted in fiction. I think about that a lot, how weird life is, how much weirder than the stories we create.”
This was not how Alice had read Madeline’s first line. She liked that Lulu had informed it with her own meaning, that it had resonated with her at a moment that might otherwise have been devastating. After all the time she’d spent creating that cake, how quickly its perfection was upended.
Lulu’s laugh persisted as the man turned toward her, his face slathered in white buttercream. He wiped it away, exposing brown eyes that sparkled. When they caught hers, he let out a laugh that matched hers, pitch for pitch, timbre for timbre. Lulu could feel everyone watching her, but they all ceased to exist. It was just Lulu in her chef’s coat and Alphonse covered in her cake.
Alphonse was a tennis coach and was attending the party as the guest of one of his clients. The client who had invited him was a divorcee who never took another lesson with him again.
Alphonse taught Lulu how to play tennis. Lulu taught Alphonse how to frost a cake. Both vocations had so much technique to them. They marveled at each other’s precision, at the care they devoted to their crafts, the attention they lavished on each other.
“It was like that for a while,” Lulu said. Alice and Madeline were trailing her as she floated between stations, checking the progress of her bakers’ creations, telling one assistant to add more vanilla to the icing, another that his cake was perfection manifest.
Over the last decade, Lulu’s Cakes had grown from a one-woman enterprise to the largest purveyor of specialty cakes in the Santa Ynez Valley. “I have my husband to thank for that,” Lulu said as she ushered Alice and Madeline into her office behind the kitchen. It was sparsely decorated but chaotically populated with folders, calendars, orders, and drawings of cakes. “I’m getting ahead of myself. A story must be told in the proper order. Isn’t that right?” She winked at Madeline.
“As I was saying, it was like that for a while,” Lulu continued. She and Alphonse taught each other their crafts. They taught each other to love. They were the envy of all their friends, especially those who had been in relationships for so long they had lost the passion of the beginning.
“But beginnings lie and love needs more than passion,” Lulu said, stacking papers on her desk so they weren’t quite so haphazard. “I should have realized you were telling me that in my story.”
Their passion obscured the truth of Alphonse and his jealousy. Lulu shared all of herself with Alphonse, but it was not enough. He was resentful of the hours she spent away from him, bitter about the events she had to attend for work. He would quiz her after she went out with friends on who was there, whom she spoke to, the nature of their conversations, until it was easier for Lulu to stop going out without him at all.
At first Lulu found it flattering. At first she interpreted his overbearing manner as a sign of true love. “That isn’t love. It took him showing up to one of my meetings for me to see how toxic we’d become.”
The irony was that it began as it had ended, with a perfect cake splattered across the floor. Lulu’s clients had paid her for a sample cake before their wedding. They weren’t satisfied with merely a tasting, they needed to see a replica of the cake they’d be served on their special day. Everything had to be perfect. As Lulu was carrying the cake toward a table seating the bride and groom, their parents and siblings, she spotted Alphonse through the window, watching her from across the street.
“At that point our relationship was particularly tumultuous. We both knew it. And he was so afraid of losing me that he acted out.”
When their eyes met across the street, Lulu subtly shook her head no, then plastered a smile on her face as she continued with the cake. Alphonse had the footwork of a tennis player. He was fast and precise, through the door and standing between her and her clients before Lulu reached the table.
“He always talked with his hands. It was one of the many things about him that I mistook for passion when really it was posturing. Trying to make himself take up as much space as possible.”
Lulu couldn’t follow what he was so angry about. His ranting was incoherent. As he swung wildly, of course he caught the bottom of the cake and sent it flying, until it landed on the head of the mother of the bride. When she wiped the cake from her eyes, they were not sparkling like Alphonse’s had been.
“I offered to make their cake free of charge, but there’s no turning back from smashing cake in the mother of the bride’s face. It’s the only time I’ve been fired.”
“I’m so sorry my story led you to so much jealousy and turmoil,” Madeline said, almost like she was not sorry at all. Alice glanced over at the old woman, whose face appeared contrite. You could be two things at once, regretful and gloating. For Lulu, Madeline was genuinely sorry. For Alice, she was pleased to prove yet again that she was right. Her stories caused more harm than good. She would win their wager. Alice would be forced to stop.
“Don’t be,” Lulu said, leaning forward, arms outstretched across the desk as though she was reaching for Madeline. “It was unpleasant at the time. Alphonse isn’t a bad man though. We just didn’t know how to manage the passion and jealousy between us. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll never be friends, but I did bake the cake for his wedding. By then I was already with Daniel.”
A few days after the cake affair, as she and Daniel had taken to calling it, Lulu got a call from a number she didn’t recognize. This was not so unusual. New clients often called her. She picked up, expecting it to be a request for a job. Instead it was the brother of the bride, the son of the woman who’d suffered a face full of sticky icing.
“Immediately I was on the defensive,” Lulu said, leaning back in her desk chair. “I’d already returned their deposit—unprompted, I might add. I’d emailed to apologize. I wasn’t sure what more he wanted from me. Turned out he didn’t want anything at all.”
“Are you okay?” he asked.
