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  “Do people do that?” he wondered. He kept following her with his eyes, studying the graceful and deliberate motion of her body.

  At the entrance to the restaurant, the tall man became engulfed in the light from the window beside the cash register. He was a handsome, rugged type, sporting short, curly, graying hair. He bore a dark complexion and wore black sunglasses. His clothing, too, was entirely black: shoes, trousers, turtleneck, leather jacket, gloves—all impeccable. Now it was this man who was caught in Jude’s egg-trained gaze. Jude caught himself, suddenly aware, and then suddenly embarrassed.

  “I’m a stupid fuck,” he thought. “Watching the world as though it were entertainment—entertainment, diversion.” He looked down again at the shattered egg, now congealing, and sighed.

  “Maybe it is!” he ejaculated, this time rather loudly. He lifted his gaze and looked again at this man in black. “Yah, sure,” he laughed to himself, in answer to a question he hadn’t even formulated. “Funny, very funny you asshole,” he thought. “Very, fucking funny.”

  Jude half-rose in his chair as though to leave, or perhaps to measure his height relative to hers, or his, but then sat back down again. His bleach-and-wear, faded denim jacket caught the side of the table, giving his fork cause for a backflip up and full twist. With the pride of a routine well executed, it flipped over once more and crashed down onto the floor, brushing his ankle on the way down, most probably egging up his pants. Befuddled, Jude didn’t know whether to follow his stare or to look down to acknowledge his gaff. Before there was time for any existential resolution, however, Tina, the maîtred’, emerged from the kitchen, hearkened as by the sound of a dinner bell. She looked at Jessica, at the man at the door, then over towards Jude, and then back to Jessica.

  “Saved!” thought Jude. He reached down and picked up the fork, so as to avoid the embarrassment of having Tina clean up after him. The idea of being regarded as a menacing lunatic by two employees of this restaurant was too much, even by his own rather loose standards.

  “Jess, thanks, I was just out back,” called Tina to Jessica as she walked towards Jude’s table.

  “Jess,” thought Jude. “Not Jessica. Jess. They must be close friends, or . . .” He felt aroused at the thought that these two women might be more than coworkers.

  As she approached Jude’s table, Tina dropped her gaze downwards, towards her long fingers, which she now extended as though to examine the color of her nail polish. There was no point in giving this young man the impression that he, or the mess of eggs that lay before him, were of special interest. Then as she neared Jude’s table, Tina looked back towards Jessica who, drawn by the figure awaiting her at the door, had begun to exit the restaurant. She suddenly turned back and looked anxiously towards Jude, as though she had suddenly remembered something she had meant to do.

  “Good luck!” she called out. Her voice pierced the restaurant, boring an aural hole through a space that contained only a faint hum and muffled jangling from the kitchen. This abrupt exclamation was the product of a purely professional instinct. The guest, Jude, was as far from her mind as her morning toast; but professional obligation, including the constant quest for acknowledgment from managerial staff, was part of every job that she had ever worked. She now worked in the food service industry, an extreme example of this tendency, and had done so off and on ever since her first dishwashing job, at the age of thirteen.

  “Good luck!” Jessica repeated. “With the egg, I mean. And the writing!” She hesitated for a moment, a sign of both her distraction and her insincerity. She then turned back towards the man in black, and then back again towards Jude.

  Jude felt a sense of rebirth. He wanted to shout something back, but before he could think of what to say, she called out once again.

  “Break an egg!” came her cry, in no particular direction.

  Jessica’s announcement, echoing outwards to this mysterious man in black, Tina, and Jude, was so undirected, that Jude didn’t know if she was actually speaking with him or re-enacting a joke that could have been said a thousand times per shift in a restaurant devoted to the art of cooking and serving eggs. Suddenly, now orbiting within the atmosphere and gravitational pull of the man in black, Jessica drifted and then moved energetically towards the exit of the dining room. The dark stranger was removing his gloves in anticipation of brushing his hand against hers as she approached him. Then, suddenly formal, he adroitly slid his fingers back into their allotted spaces and nodded in her direction. Jessica, as though acknowledging his sign, drew up alongside of his towering presence. The newly formed couple moved towards the exit, in close proximity to one another, but with an estranged physical distance. Jude realized he was staring again, and suddenly he wished that he’d given a witty retort to her good-luck wishes.

  “Break an egg! Bake a leg! Stroke a peg!” Jude was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Fuck! I don’t know. Tap a keg!” Each brilliant reply resonated in his brain as loudly as if he’d stood on the table and announced them all. Probably better that he didn’t say anything, he thought.

  Tina was now upon Jude, attending to his table by replacing the fork and arranging the place setting that he had sullied with the crushed eggshells and the remnants of the gooey yolk. Jude could not have known that her actions had nothing whatsoever to do with him. Her perfidiousness was aimed towards Jessica, for she had left her place in the kitchen and had interacted with this client, and she had done so without the delicacies appropriate to a dining room like this one.

  Tina’s finicky arranging and rearranging of the plate, the fork, and the napkin was a form of coded communication. In the restaurant, each dominion has its rulers, its keepers, its patrons, and its slaves, and nobody, except the owner and the maître d’, had the right to cross from one dominion into the other, not even Jessica. Jessica was the deity of Fabergé, the goddess of lushness and potency amidst a universe of unfertilized eggs, but this wasn’t her realm. This was Tina’s realm.

  When she was done, Tina simply smiled robotically in Jude’s direction and walked towards the maître d’s station. She occupied that post so that Fabergé Restaurant would be a place of heavenly eggsistence. Fabergé, while guarded by Tina, could never become the lost paradise of Milton, where the guards at the gate were sin and death, evil twins who would be unleashed from the dark premises once permeated. No, as long as Tina was there to guard the roost with her perfect demeanor, Fabergé’s eggs would have their namesake in human form. By virtue of her perfection, Tina was like that golden Fabergé hen egg Czar Alexander III had offered to his wife, Empress Maria Fedorovna, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of their betrothal. Fabergé had crafted his masterpiece from gold, which he wrapped in an enameled shell. Rather than crack, this egg could open on tiny golden hinges, revealing a golden yolk. Therein was hidden a perfect, golden hen that also opened, offering a minute diamond replica of the imperial crown, from which a small ruby pendant was suspended. A precious crown jewel, fit for a czar’s empress, a token of pure, unadulterated, royal love.

  Ah, but looks can be deceiving.

  Long before Fabergé Restaurant had been laid into the nest of New York City, Jessica was a young student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Tina one of the precious female models. A muse to Jessica’s designs, Tina offered herself up, first to Jessica’s penetrating gaze, and then to her gentle, probing touch. Tina, who now hovers quietly inside of John’s Fabergé Restaurant, was once clothed in Jessica’s fashionable creations, and then unclothed by Jessica’s desires. Amidst their heated embrace, did Jessica ever discover the many secrets harbored deep inside of Tina? Would this tall, dark stranger uncover Jessica’s hidden truths?

  I don’t know where Jessica went with that stranger in black. I don’t know where anyone goes when they leave Fabergé Restaurant. I do know that she is indeed Jessica, for those who know her, and Jess for those who know her well. And I know that the stranger is always dressed in black, and that in her presence, he always st
ares straight ahead, through space and through time. And then he approaches her, and, like today, he removes his gloves and gently slides the side of his hand upon hers, almost imperceptibly. His sole objective seems to be to breathe the air that she exhales, and to sense the golden warmth of her hair, golden locks that entangle everyone around her.

  As Jessica strayed from view, Jude stayed behind for a little while longer, adding and subtracting from the words he’d written about the intact egg and its shattered nemesis, and about the yolk, into whose large, yellow eye he stared from time to time, in between long reflections at his table. While he performed his linguistic fussing, Tina walked around him, preparing the dining room for guests, real guests. Unlike Jude, guests were people who actually spent money in Fabergé Restaurant, as opposed to buying one of the “intermezzo’s,” as John called them. The intermezzo that served as Jude’s main course was concocted as a frivolous little delight that properly affluent clients savor in between actual courses. Jude’s favorite intermezzo was the egg-shaped, vanilla-flavored scoops of coconut sorbet. This popular little trifle was acceptable in Fabergé Restaurant, because the coconut is an egg. But is it really an egg? Or is it a seed? Is it a fruit? Or is it a nut? In Fabergé Restaurant, the answer is clear, because one of John’s dessert recipes joyfully transforms coconut flesh into egg whites, which are then placed alongside the yolky flesh of ripe mangos. Fabergé Restaurant, where each egg is a fantasy, each fantasy a resurrection. I know, because I am the Fabergé Restaurant, and I myself am a resurrected fantasy.

  Chapter 2

  Jude lingered after Jessica’s departure, feeling aroused. He had never seen her before. She clearly worked in the kitchen, so why had she appeared in the dining room today? He turned his gaze back to Tina, whom he’d seen many times in that dining room, fussing over guests or arranging place settings. For him, Tina was an enigma, but he found her strangely enticing. He would celebrate her image on those occasions when his fantasies led him towards untouchable innocence. He never saw her in animated conversation or corporeal engagement, but instead she seemed to find pleasure in polishing, arranging, wiping, and measuring distances between table settings, as though there was an achievable perfection somewhere in the universe, and that she had to keep searching for ways to bring the dining room into alignment therewith. But she also seemed to alternately glow and then fade, to work and then disappear, as though there was something much more important to do elsewhere, in some undefined and probably undiscovered space in the multitude of galaxies with which she had celestial relations.

  Jude would often look up from his scribbles to examine Tina, the source of his ethereal obsession, as though each glance at her might reinvigorate his imagination. She occupied him, literally, and her image lay deep within his fantasy world. For him, she offered evidence of human perfectibility, which was reflected in her mannerisms, in the geometrical shape of her bobby-pin-supported hairdo, in the carefully pressed crease in her short, black skirt, in the consciously arranged folds of her puffy, white, short-sleeved blouse, in her perfectly egg-shaped breasts, in her neatly plucked eyebrows, in her polished, eggshell skin, and in her near-black, almost-Asian eyes.

  Jude was incapable of imagining what she had been like as a young girl, and where she might have come from before assuming domination of this pristine dining room. Was she the envy of her friends, or the darling? Perhaps she was the model of what they had hoped to be in some near-future world: a gentle, beautiful, but powerful force, able to put order into a universe of chaos. It would certainly be ironic if that turned out to be the case, because Tina now fusses over the grown-ups who still seek perfection, but in their failure to attain such a forbidding dream are forced to manifest their power by purchasing stocks and bonds, an apartment on 5th Avenue, and egg creations from Fabergé Restaurant. These grown-up girls love Fabergé Restaurant in part because Tina is there for them, as their dreams once were, to guide them to a special place of fantasy treats, a grown-up tea party with her friends, her dolls, and her eggs.

  Strangely, Jude’s bizarre fantasy wasn’t that far off from the truth. Tina was conceived one sultry summer night in Tokyo, when a handsome American soldier penetrated into the quiet and innocent universe of a young Japanese girl who had offered to escort him through the Asakusa temple grounds. She had paused to give homage and was overcome by the late-evening vision of Sensōji, the Buddhist temple dedicated to the Bodhisattva Kannon. In this state, she swooned and fell into the waiting arms of this handsome American. He, too, was overcome, not by a Buddhist deity, but by an overflowing desire for her. The negotiation of their respective desires and taboos was uneven, and she, terrified by her eventual acquiescence, had fled into the night, arriving many hours later in an apartment where her widowed mother greeted her with sobs of relief that turned to anger when she learned of her adventure.

  Thus, Tina, the child of this encounter, was to be raised by a young girl of seventeen years. Unbeknownst to her, the American father sought her out for years, and upon discovering her whereabouts, he arranged the wire transfer of an anonymous, guilt-drenched fortune, provided that the child be raised in America. And so when Tina was but a nine-year-old girl, her mother, unwilling to leave her homeland, sent Tina to the United States, where she was enrolled in a private boarding school for wealthy, young girls from blue-blooded New England families. Her first years in America were filled with the emptiness of abandonment, shame, and incomprehension. Boarding school became her only home, and tasks assigned to her in school her only friends.

  Had it not been for Jessica, the sweet-faced girl with the golden hair who one day sat down beside her in the echoing dining hall, Tina would have been friendless all through her adolescence. Instead, she was introduced to the beauty of colorful Connecticut autumns, to the warmth of snowy winters’ crackling fires, and to the magic sand that tickled her naked toes in the hidden coves that dotted and darted along the Long Island Sound. They drifted apart during high school, but when Tina appeared one day at the Fashion Institute as a model for students’ creations, Jessica was overjoyed, and soon their friendship was rekindled, and their recollections created a close friendship until giggles turned to breathless kisses, friendly touch to warm embrace. They were secretly bonded by this forsaken lust and the shared world from which it emerged, but it was as though it had all happened in another lifetime. Despite how intense their attachment once was, they now worked together as though it had never occurred, and would never again be rekindled.

  Jude of course knew nothing of this past, but felt his own attraction to her deep within his very being. He discretely leaned back in his seat and thought of her in his own warm embrace. Tina, Tina. He shifted in his seat. “What would she think if she knew about this?” he wondered to himself. “She’d love it!” He smiled. “Or would she?”

  He raised his gaze to the oval heavens of this terrestrial egg paradise. “Who are you, Tina, anyways?” He sought her out with his gaze and found her polishing silverware near the entranceway to Fabergé Restaurant. “Why are you here?” He stared towards her, intently, his gaze extended all the way across the dining room of Fabergé Restaurant. “She conceals to reveal,” thought Jude, whatever that meant. “Hmmm,” he mused, writing down the phrase. In this way she resembles the egg in its relation to the yolk.

  “No,” he retorted to his own musings, “she reveals to conceal!” He was feeling proud of himself, and he wrote down that phrase as well. He then leaned back to muse about the effects that Tina had upon him. She was decidedly beautiful and feminine, but also cold, almost metallic.

  “How can that be, Tina?” He thought about eggs and the creations that were made in Fabergé Restaurant. She reminded him of caviar, with its fragile, impenetrable skin that hides the glorious infusion of warmth within. But was she warm within? Or was she cold? She was also perfect, rigid, pure, glamorous, and veiled, like a precious jewel. “She is like a Fabergé egg!” he exclaimed to himself.

  This realization led him to qu
ite literally sit up in his seat. He thought about the jewels that adorned the Fabergé egg replicas that were placed throughout the restaurant, illuminated by precise and carefully directed lighting. Each egg sat upon golden satin, and each one had a luxurious box that sat open beside it, as though each box had expelled an egg into the world, and all the eggs were incubating in order to survive, and, one day, hatch. Jude looked back at Tina, who suddenly looked vulnerable as she stood before a nearby table, assessing, perhaps, its placement.

  “Maybe I’m wrong about you, Tina!” thought Jude. “Maybe you spend your evening in brutal, sadomasochistic practices, alternately dragging red-hot pokers across the huge backs of your overweight lovers? Maybe you love to have your soft hair pulled, your . . .” He smiled to himself.

  “No, probably not,” he retorted to himself. “You are a stupid fuck,” he concluded. “Stupid. And pathetic.” He reflected more deeply. “If her presence is akin to a precious jewel, what am I?” He looked down on the sparse pre-lunch-hour place setting that he’d sullied with his egg observations. “Am I a jigsaw?” He thought of what he had done to the eggs. “A bulldozer?”

  In full-on meditation mode, Jude straightened up in his chair, aware that the thoughts had led him to recline to the point where the backrest, designed to support the lower back, was almost up to his shoulders, and his legs were unduly spread open. He went back to the image of Tina, gallivanting with sadomasochistic lovers.

  “That makes no sense,” he thought, “because you, Tina, are perfect, and the world is not.” He rested his boyish chin in his hand, deep in thought. “So no,” he mused. “Tina, you probably just go home to tend to your bonsai trees, and then you retire to bed with a book about the history of oriental tapestries. After a few minutes, you drift off to sleep, magically, imperceptibly, leaving by morning time nary a dent in your mattress, because your body is neither heavy enough, nor warm enough, to leave a perceptible trace.”