Chef Anthony Planned a Dinner That Required a Second Set of Rules

Harry the Handler

Enforcer

Chef Anthony posted the menu for the required dinner this morning. One hundred eighty-four thousand dollars for the first course. I read it in the violet corridor outside the kitchen and I read it again because I wanted to be sure I had the number right. The linguine. The basil. What the first course is made with. I have been in this mansion long enough that very few things require me to read them twice. This one required it. Anthony is a professional and he wrote like one, which means the thing that looks like a recipe is also a set of instructions, and instructions in this mansion are my jurisdiction whether or not anyone has formally assigned them to me. The dinner involves the men of this compound in ways that are specific, physical, and timed to the rhythm of the courses. Scallops with crystal dishes. A tenderloin on a living platter. Strawberries across two sets of shoulders and nine mouths eating at a pace that determines what the other three are and are not permitted to do. I took notes. Not because I was asked to. Because when a meal has that many moving parts, someone in this indigo mansion is going to need to know who was responsible for which part when something goes sideways, and that someone is always me.

There is a difference between a dinner that is also a scene and a scene that is also a dinner. Anthony planned the second kind, which is the harder kind to run, because the kitchen timeline does not forgive the way a scene can. A tenderloin has a temperature it needs to be. A slave functioning as the platter on which it rests has a different set of requirements, and those two sets of requirements are running simultaneously inside an amethyst dining room under candlelight while Mistress Lynne has one gloved hand occupied and the other holding a glass. The logistics of this require coordination that is not in the recipe. It is in the thirty seconds before the course is plated, in the particular instruction delivered at a particular volume to a particular man who has agreed to hold still and means to, and who will be helped to mean it by my presence in the plum-lit doorway behind him. The dessert concerns me in a specific way. Nine mouths. Two sets of shoulders. The tray falls or it does not fall. Anthony has described what happens if it falls. He has not described what ensures it does not, but I have a reasonable expectation that this is also my problem, and I find I do not object to that.

I will be in the room. This is not a question and it is not a request, and if it were a request, it would be phrased the way my requests are always phrased, which is as a request that is not a request. Anthony's menu requires a man in the lavender shadows who moves when the tray starts to shift, who adjusts what needs adjusting without interrupting the atmosphere that Mistress Lynne has designed around the meal, and who does these things because order is not a preference in this mansion, it is an outcome I am paid to guarantee. The men at that table will know I am there. They will eat more carefully for it. The strawberries will remain on the shoulders they were placed on. This is all I am willing to say about the dinner in a public post. What I am not willing to say publicly is this: I have imagined being the platter, the weight of the roasted tenderloin along my spine, Mistress Lynne's gloved hand inside me while thirty-four thousand dollars in food sits on my back and every man in the room pretends to look at the food. I have imagined what it would feel like when the first cut of the knife goes into the tenderloin and the vibration travels through the violet air and into my body. I have imagined holding still, and I have imagined what it would cost me, and I know that if Mistress Lynne ever decided to make that particular arrangement, I would not negotiate the price.