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It's spring when news of Gusteau's death hits the newsstand nearest his home. Every year his allergies get so bad he can't step outside of the house without holding handkerchief over his nose and mouth. The sight of the news startles a brief fit of coughing out of him before he can recover enough to pay for a paper.
That's his only reaction. In point of fact there's nothing for him to feel, besides the minor irritation of responding to a question or two from the obituaries desk. The death doesn't affect him except to make room in his calendar for some other dire chore of a dinner. Theirs was a purely professional connection, and sadist though he is, he didn’t particularly want Auguste Gusteau to suffer at the very last. Knowing that he did will not draw one more tear to Ego's eye.
Officially, the cause of death is expiration by pulmonary embolism. An elegant little whisper of dignity accorded to the deceased, like a philanderer dying of "cardiac arrest" in the bed of his mistress. Every newspaper worth reading repeats the line with a straight face.
One or two particularly vindictive rivals don't even wait for the tabloids to announce what everyone already knows a "pulmonary embolism" really means. They pay homage by serving ghoulish scarlet desserts festooned with violets. If he sharpens his quill before he runs them through, it’s because he expects professionals to act like professionals.
Later, sucking on salted licorice and glaring at the pollen outside, he'll wonder that he didn't see it coming sooner.
Critics and chefs don't only encounter each other over the table linen. It is perfectly common to find a familiar stranger in the kitchen between waves of service, observing the mise, discussing the menu, gossiping or trying not to expose any unseemly ignorance of this or that technique. He does it with Gusteau just as often as he does it with any other chef unfortunate enough to attract his attention.
Gusteau in particular likes to run little experiments on him. One day, an unofficial taste of a new sweetbread concoction leaves Ego gagging over the kitchen sink, hacking ghastly-sweet saliva that reeked of dog rose purée. The smell alone is enough to have his allergies in an uproar.
A dear old friend of his had once espoused the theory that critics and chefs were like dishrags and napkins: We complement each other, spend time together, work together, but in our heart of hearts, we do not like one another. He would never breathe a word of argument to such an exquisitely heartless bon mot, whatever his personal feelings. Today, however, a slap in the face with the dishrag may have been kinder.
“It’s not that bad,” Gusteau grumbles. He doesn't even offer to hold back Ego's scarf.
Ego spits and spits again, shuddering at the briny anise sticking like cough syrup to his tonsils. “I did not think of you as a man prone to violence, Gusteau, but you never miss an opportunity to astonish me."
"It is not that bad!"
"Did you actually sample it at any point in the cooking? Or would that have spoiled the prank?”
“Of course I tried it!”
“Then your taste buds have gone rancid.”
Gusteau frowns and tastes the sweetbread before his very eyes. He chews and swallows thoughtfully. Feeling green, Ego turns to the sink once more and spits a final time, reaching for his glass of wine and rinsing his mouth without the least acknowledgement of the Sauternes’ exquisite bouquet.
He's eaten live octopus before. Nothing scares him in the kitchen. But there are some things that are simply too much. "You have exceeded yourself."
“It is fine,” Gusteau insists. “Sweet and salt are a classic mélange, and they are balanced well with the floral notes.”
Ego shakes his head. This isn’t a mélange. It’s two wholly separate tongue-serrating lashes of Dead Sea-brackish and cloying rot-sweet, each taking a razor to the salivary glands. And the floral notes! Gusteau must have ransacked a whole greenhouse, or a funeral home, for the amount of rose flavor in that purée.
“It’s inedible," he says over the rim of his wine glass. "Serve it and you will kill the feeble among your audience.”
“Let them die. I do not expect the faint-hearted to strive after greatness.”
Ordinarily he'd icily decline to notice the pointed look cut in his direction, but he is a guest in Gusteau's space. Ego pays him the honor of a brief sneer and leans his hip against the sink, drinking his wine more slowly.
Gusteau takes another bite and shrugs his shoulders. “Hehn. If anything, the rose isn’t strong enough. A few more experiments, I think, to perfect it."
Intransigent ass. "You'll live to regret these trends of yours. Trash to table doesn't suit you. At some point you will have to decide if you are an artist or a publicity hack."
"I might be both. May a man not contain multitudes? I do not consider myself bound by the limits of your good taste, mon cher."
"You might as well be conducted by my good taste, if yours is proving so faulty. But by all means please yourself. You shall practice on Solene at some point before the season is out. Perhaps if you cry she'll spare you."
Gusteau clears his throat. "And shall I not have the pleasure of being your pincushion?"
Ego points to the dish and flicks his fingers away. "Choose between us first."
Eyes twinkling, Gusteau takes the biggest bite yet.
There was time enough for Ego to read in his colleagues' reports how Gusteau died an inch every night for 12 weeks before his lungs gave up the ghost. Despite the best efforts of the brigade de cuisine, every mention of Gusteau's would leave a wake of chef's specialities all oversalted soups, oversweetened roasts, overspiced and overgreased potatoes: one insulting mediocrity after another, when Ego knew Gusteau knew better. Finally he felt compelled to see the wreckage for himself, and if necessary to slip a discreet word to his waitstaff querying whether they were incinerating the leftovers so stray dogs couldn't accidentally poison themselves digging it out of the dumpster.
Gusteau lost his star fair and square. Little as anyone wanted to recognize how many radiant culinary blossoms would stifle without a pair of sharp shears to clear out the weeds, not a single voice suggested that Ego's coup de grâce of a review came a second too soon.
(“It is sad to see the modern devaluation of the human tongue as an organ of analysis. Some people will put anything on it, but after this assault even the most stubborn glutton for punishment won’t demonstrate the poor taste of booking Gusteau’s twice.” Better luck next season, if you can bear to show your face.)
Then, a month later, they find Gusteau slumped over the patisserie table in his restaurant, chef’s whites smeared with blood and crushed petals of violet and honeysuckle. It is some solace to know the flowers were edible. Much better that the broken heart of a passionate professional should take Gusteau down, rather than anything more... viscerous. Ego prefers to think Gusteau died an artist, inasmuch as he ever was one; not a lover.
No one else seems to share his opinion. Gusteau’s romantic conquests were no secret, so what would a romantic failure do to his heart? Even from his lofty perch Ego catches word of some slight honey-blonde beauty who had been haunting the bar, or the pretty redhead who’d been on Gusteau’s arm some ten years ago. (Even, once, cross-my-heart, a whispered insistence that it was the lithe young man running the coat check, dark-haired with violet eyes.) The world sees scandal everywhere. He keeps his council, like a professional.
He files a final summation of Gusteau’s away in a box of drafts. There is no pleasure to be had in slaying the dead. Perhaps someday he will include it in a retrospective, but to publish a word now would be like wearing red to the funeral.
He will not attend the funeral. He could not present himself in any dignified manner, with allergy season thick in the air. Once again he is under the weather.
Instead he gets as drunk as a czar. He spends the dark watches of the night on his knees with his jacket and his purple scarf in a corner, vomiting it back up.
At last he must face the facts: Gusteau died a lover. He can only have died of a broken heart, because Anton's obstinate, proud, erstwhile opponent wouldn’t have dropped dead over a fallen star, much less to such a ridiculous disease. It doesn't even kill unless one lets it. The terminal strain went out with smallpox, for Christ's sake, and all it takes to live quite comfortably is an annual shot at the pharmacy, free of charge. Only some true impossibility, a traumatic grief or insurmountable impediment to happiness could left Gusteau preferring to bleed out in the garden blooming inside him.
The loss of his sense of taste might have driven Gusteau close to that despair, but Ego knows he had too much of a steel core to let that stop him. With flowers climbing up his throat he may never have tasted anything properly again, but he had an entire team of seasoned palettes to check himself against. Auguste had his flashes of genius. No man who played his Beethoven records to shreds could have missed the parallel.
Such a thing should have only presented a new challenge, a twist to spice up their game. An opportunity to prove that even without his tongue he knew cooking well enough to delight even Anton Ego's lead heart.
Ego knows he couldn't have resisted that. He knew Auguste, and how could he not, after they had been working in Paris all these years? After all the chance meetings in the market, at the sommelier, a cup of coffee here, a glass of wine there. Strictly professional, but how Auguste had chased him, determined to find something even Anton would enjoy. His relentless pursuit of perfection leading to all those arcane tests of Anton's palette: cafés in unfashionable districts with one croissant and two coffee cups, basil leaves fresh and dirt-dusted from the garden, slivers of pork fat that turned the inside of Anton's mouth slick and luscious. A square of hard, smooth chocolate placed precisely on his tongue, a dozen official dinners Anton did not enjoy but did not wish to end. A wicked smile over the edge of a newspaper turned to Anton’s column. At last, the infinitesimal nibble of Crêpes Suzette taken, tame as a housecat, from Auguste's own fork.
Anton's column could never have killed him. Auguste was hell-bent. He would have persevered and wrenched a new star right out of the sky, just to show he could do it. He would have seen the opportunity to take his place among the Olympians, legendary in the face of such odds.
Instead he dies for honeysuckle and tender violets. Auguste must have fallen for someone married, if Anton had to venture a guess—it would explain the demure violets. A modest beauty who could never melt in Auguste’s rapacious grasp; the idea was obscene enough to make him retch. How could Auguste lose his life to a love with so little fire? If there were any justice in this world, Gusteau would have been beset by thistles and prideful lilies, or monkshood, poison dripping from Auguste's mouth like it dripped from Ego’s words.
But Ego’s words — Ego’s opinion — didn’t kill him. It turns Anton's stomach to think of how little he has to do with it at all.
The sour sludge of gin and creme de violette and acid-curdled red wine rebuke him for his foolishness. This is all it amounts to, wanting that flavor in his mouth: wretchedness and reflexive gagging tears pricking at his eyes.
He hacks and spits again to get the last of it out. Exhaustion presses on his temples, signaling the last of the weakness he’ll have to endure tonight. In the morning he’ll consider the binge an embarrassing sentimental lapse, but while he's drunk he can see it clearly as the medication it is.
He reaches for the lever of the toilet and watches as the flame-brilliant, blood-stained petals floating on his vomit swirl and sink, gone forever. He had to drink. He could not have borne to taste the nasturtiums and pansies spilling from his lips otherwise.