What's Love Got to Do With It

What's Love Got to Do With It

“What am I bid. We have two-hundred and sixty thousand. Do I hear six-one?”

The bellicose voice of Harry Rains resonated in the arena. His local art work had been auctioned off, as well as the majority of the furnishings, sofas, chairs, café tables.  The appliances, ovens, pots, pans, some miscellaneous utensils, were all that was left. And then the building itself. But then Emile was in no hurry to see it go.

Harry Rains Jr. was attempting to wring the last dollar from anyone who would make Emile’s transition to private life, from that of a man who had devoted his life to his bakery, possible.

He’d begun his career before he’d even considered having a career. It was something he learned to do from his Grandmother, and as he grew, he found he was good at it. At least that is what everyone said. They loved the way he cajoled the yeast to a state of levity, the intricacies of the cheese and fruit fillings. Many people remarked they could not stop smiling while eating one of his Blintzes. He in turn, glowed in their kindness, and continued doing all he had ever really known how to do, bake. 

Some people were good at sports, some school, he was only good at one thing, baking. Once when he’d attempted to do something foolish, play catch with the neighbor, he caught the ball with his bare hand, injuring himself, and couldn’t help his Grandmother as promised with the church bake sale. He’d never really gotten over his embarrassment of having been so stupid. 

He'd considered his Grandmother an acceptable liability in the kitchen, but she lacked a certain creativity that he considered essential. He would never be content with being considered just another dough boy. The concept had been applied to him when he first started his bakery, but soon was retracted by those who lined up to buy his Blintzes. 

He and his bakery had been written about on many occasions in the local, as well as State newspapers, and he was once on the national news when a moose crashed through the front window of the bakery. Someone had claimed to have seen a moose. Emile was not convinced it was not another exchange of pranks between his rival, the Herskovits Bakery, and himself. But then the Herskovits Bakery had closed. Melvin had died. 

The article of course exaggerated the rational meaning behind the incident, entailing a short rendition of his Grandmothers telling of how she knew he would be famous one day. The moose only proved what she’d always known, “No one could resist on of Emile's Blintzes.”

Emile's Blintz was a donut like explosion of dough, boiled like a bagel, and then deep fried before filling them with fruit or cheese.  Emil had imagined the concoction one day while lying on the grass watching clouds billow and dreams emerge.

The trick of course was in knowing just how long to leave them in the deep-fryer. His Grandmother, nor he, for reasons of secrecy, ever revealed the most important secret. Blintzes, after being lifted from the boiling grease, were subjected to the flames of a devised burner which encased their flavors. The powder sugar, sprinkled like a first snow on their cooling surfaces, melted, leaving the sheen of a newly waxed car.

There were days when it took all his will power, to part with even one of his creations. He had learned from past experiences that to withhold something deemed a necessity by the local patrons would result in an ugliness he could never have imagined possible. 

The moose he believed was no accident; there hadn’t been a moose in the county, let alone the city, for the last hundred years. Moose Ville, was moose less, despite its namesake. 

As much as Emile Duncan loved baking, baking didn’t appear to love Emile. Being hit in the face with a baseball when young, when thinking back on it, was nothing compared to the list of injuries he endured over the previous couple of decades in the bakery. His face was a collection of pitted scars, burns from splattered grease and exploding kettles. His problems were the result of his never-ending lust to express a form of creativity he could not control. 

His left hand, now mostly useless, having slipped into boiling oil during one of his early Blintz experiments. His right eye, blind from the oven explosion that nearly burned down the bakery. The third degree burns he’d suffered over a large part of his upper body when a vat exploded, sending a cloud of steam onto his back and shoulders, resulting in a one month hiatus. 

Thinking back on his stays in the hospital, he reasoned he’d spent more time in the hospital, than he had on vacation. Hell, he’d not even considered going on vacation in so long he forgotten what the term meant.

Now he was on the verge of giving up. The only thing he felt he’d ever done well, the only thing he prided himself on having built into a success. The only thing he'd truly loved doing. He was a legend, well, his Blintz’s were, but he was the Frankenstein who created them. He couldn’t if asked, say how he came up with idea. He’d experimented with so many ideas over the years, they had all kind of rolled into a ball of dough, like one of his Blintzes, and exploded in his imagination. 

As he sat in the nearly empty arena, He asked himself how he came to feel he hated what he was doing, and why. It wasn’t that he hated baking, or even that baking hated him. It was that, sometimes when you love something too much, you can’t see what it’s doing to you. His Grandmother had warned him about that very thing.

His Grandfather had been a fisherman, and apparently a good one. But he'd drowned attempting to get a jump on Spring, she’d told him. The ice gave way, and with it, the need of catching that one trophy that he could hang on the wall to be admired, not for what it was, but for who needed it there.

As he looked around at the stoves, steam tables, ovens, and all his favorite dough machines, he realized he didn’t hate the bakery. He didn’t hate what he was doing, he just hated that he hadn’t created anything new in such a long time.  The Blintz no longer made him smile like it once had. 

He loved that bakery. He loved what he was good at, the only thing that had ever made him feel a sense of contentment. He couldn’t catch a fish to save his life. He danced like a deranged scare crow. And his laugh, they said frightened little children. But he could make Blintzes and he truly did love baking, especially during the holiday season. 

So why was he giving up on the only thing he ever loved? He didn’t know. Perhaps it was because the bakery no longer loved him. Perhaps it had been trying to tell him for all these years, that he wasn’t the one for her. Perhaps the bakery was like Eloise, she’d rather have Roger than him, and his Blintzes.

As Emile stood in the nearly dark arena looking at the shadows cast from the street lamp outside, when he thought he saw a light blink. But that couldn’t be, none of the appliances were plugged in. The power to the building had been turned off, and yet that light in the dark was calling to him.  Maybe an apology for having been so difficult over the years, when he knew all the bakery and its machines wanted was to be recognized for their contributions, to the one thing that had made Emile special. Why people loved him and the bakery, and why he enjoyed baking for them. 

He sat on the bench and watched the red-light blink to a rhythm he thought he recognized; but then he wasn’t much good around music.  So, he lay on the bench looking into the darkness above, feeling his heart beating in time to the pulsating light, the beat growing slower and more faint, until it disappeared altogether, joining the intermittent flashes from the Christmas lights that adorned the roofs edge.