Going to Beautiful

By Anthony Bidulka

International chef Jake Hardy has it all. Celebrity, thriving career, plenty of friends, a happy family and faithful dog. Until one day when a tragic accident tears it all apart. Struggling to recover, Hardy finds himself in a strange new world—a snow-swept prairie town that time forgot—a place where nothing makes sense. Cold is beautiful. Simple is complex. And doubts begin to surface about whether Jake’s tragedy was truly an accident after all. As the sun sets in the Land of Living Skies, Hardy and his glamourous, seventy-eight-year-old transgender neighbour find themselves ensnared in multiple murders separated by decades. In Bidulka’s “love letter to life on the prairies” he delivers a story of grief and loss that manages to burst with joy, tenderness and hope. Redolent of his earlier works, Going to Beautiful brings us unexpected, under-represented characters in settings that immediately feel familiar and beloved. Beautiful—a place where what you need may not be what you were looking for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stonehouse Originals
• Release date: May 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781988754369

Anthony Bidulka

In 1999 Anthony Bidulka left his career as a corporate auditor to pursue writing and never looked back. His books have been nominated for several awards and Bidulka was the first Canadian to win the Lambda Literary Award for Best Men’s Mystery. When he isn’t writing or busy volunteering on boards, Bidulka loves to travel the world, collect art, walk his dogs, obsess over decorating Christmas trees (it’s a thing) and throw a good party. His motto: life is short, so make it wide! Please visit his website at www.anthonybidulka.com for further information about Anthony and his books. Anthony lives just outside Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Book preview

Stonehouse2022-GoingtoBeautiful-FrontCover.jpg

GOING TO BEAUTIFUL

A novel by

ANTHONY BIDULKA

Stonehouse Publishing

www.stonehousepublishing.ca

Alberta, Canada

Copyright © 2022 by Anthony Bidulka

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used without prior written consent of the publisher.

Stonehouse Publishing Inc. is an independent publishing house, incorporated in 2014.

Cover design and layout by Anne Brown.

Printed in Canada

Stonehouse Publishing would like to thank and acknowledge the support of the Alberta Government funding for the arts, through the Alberta Media Fund.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Anthony Bidulka

Going to Beautiful

Novel

ISBN: 978-1-988754-35-2

For Herb, who has made my world more beautiful every day for the past thirty years.

Chapter 1

Life was good. Until it wasn’t.

We’d had a big party for my fifty-fifth birthday, which led into Christmas and a promising New Year. We had no reason to believe the future would bring anything but good things. A small group of no more than thirty friends, colleagues, acquaintances, a few frenemies, and one or two strangers who’d accompanied the aforementioned, huddled in the centre of our living room that New Year’s Eve. Veuve Clicquot was thrust confidently toward the heavens as we cheered our successes. No one in that golden circle could have predicted the life-shattering day that was on its way. Life was good.

Until it wasn’t.

I caught a cold late-March. Nothing serious, though to hear me tell it I’d been felled by a plague, the severity of which had heretofore been unknown to mankind.

I rarely get sick, so when it happens, my first instinct is to deny, followed by irrational anger directed at the malady and vows to defeat it. Sickness is a battle and, as in life, I always fight to win, showing nary a sign of weakness.

It doesn’t always work out that way.

By mid-morning the snorting, coughing, croaking signs of weakness and my refusal to recognize them as such were driving my senior kitchen staff around the bend. When I caught myself nodding off in the produce cooler, where I’d convinced myself I was assessing inventory but in reality had sought out to relieve my fever, I reluctantly raised the white flag and dragged myself (or was I pushed?) home. With no memory of ever missing a day of work because of illness, this was quite obviously a sign of dark times. Or maybe just the flu, I dunno.

Adequately overmedicated and vibrating with alternating chills and fever, I exchanged my stylish daywear (always fit a little tight) for Saturday sweatpants (in which I never sweat) and a hoodie (with a hood I never use). I retreated to the spare bedroom where I gratefully crawled under a mountain of comforters, blankets and decorative pillows and disappeared into a haze of mindless, recuperative slumber.

Waking up several hours later, I judged myself still alive. Barely. I heard a faint tap-tap-tap on the bedroom door before it inched open, letting in blazing shafts of cornea-torching hellfire (also known as dim lighting from the hallway). Despite my mentioning the hellfire thing in what was probably an unkind way, Eddie came in anyway. He gently lowered himself onto the edge of the bed and expressed concern. Lulu, our miniature French Bulldog, was markedly less empathetic. Having spent the entire day with Eddie at his atelier, she was vexed as to why I wasn’t greeting her return with the exuberance such a momentous event necessitated, especially after not seeing her all day. Assisted by Eddie onto the bed and grunting with the effort, she made short work of burrowing under the covers in search of an embargoed snausage. According to the vet, Lulu could stand to lose a few, but she knew I could always be counted on to have something special hidden in my pockets to ensure my standing as her favourite. I hated to disappoint her.

Eddie rubbed my arm. I saw his kind smile and closed my eyes. A while later I felt his hand on my forehead, testing my temperature. I must have passed the test because he leaned in, kissed me where his hand had been, and whispered: You’re going to be all right, my love. I don’t remember either Eddie or Lulu leaving the room.

My next memory is of being awakened by the doorbell. How dare Eddie allow someone to use the doorbell when I was on my deathbed? I cursed the ruckus and made a mental note to begin divorce proceedings as soon as I was better. In the throes of another teeth-chattering chill, I scrunched into a fetal position, buried my head beneath the covers, and fell back asleep.

A couple of hours later (could have been months—who could tell?) I awoke knowing I could no longer put off a visit to the bathroom. Cringing at the strain of muscles seized from little use, and the shock of fevered flesh exposed to cool air, I forced myself out of bed, wrapping a protective blanket around me like a chrysalis. With great effort I opened the door to the outside world. I established my bearings, committed the route to the guest bathroom to memory, narrowed my eyes to slits, and set out. A couple of minutes later I was planning my return pilgrimage when I realized that in my end-of-days stupor I’d unwisely left my arsenal of medications in the kitchen. Maybe I’d done it on purpose, leaving the impressive pile of decongestants (oral and nasal), antihistamines, analgesics, antipyretics, cough suppressants, and expectorants on the gleaming granite counter for Eddie to see when he got home. A heap of pills was sure to elicit sympathy and vigilance. They might even inspire him to stock the fridge with mint chocolate ice cream for when I needed life-saving sustenance.

I tightened the blanket around me for the lengthy journey to the kitchen; I wasn’t convinced I’d make it.

It was dark, inside and out, but that didn’t tell me much. In March, the sun rises at 7:30 a.m. and sets at 7:30 p.m. It could be morning or night. Our apartment was on the top floor of a four-storey building in a tony downtown Toronto neighbourhood, where top floor living always costs a mint, no matter if it’s the fourth floor or forty-fourth. The place was generously sized, which is swell until you’re sick and the voyage from bedroom to kitchen is tortuously long. If somehow I survive, I swore to myself, we are moving. We’d find a place with bedrooms adjacent to the kitchen, or better yet, with a bed right in the kitchen.

Halfway there, I fell against a floor-to-ceiling window, luxuriating in the coolness of the glass against my sizzling cheek. I considered stripping down and plastering my naked body against the pane, but just the thought set my teeth to chattering. If I was going to make it back to bed before daybreak, I had to keep moving.

In the kitchen, I found my stash of meds, swallowed some, downed two glasses of water and checked the freezer for mint chocolate. Disappointed, I set out on my return death march, propelled only by the promise of a warm bed. That was when I noticed it. A flickering light. It was coming from the other side of the sliding glass door that separates the living room from our expansive outdoor terrace, the feature that had clinched the deal when we first toured the place.

I glanced at the microwave. 10:15 p.m. Now I knew. It was night. I took a shaky step towards the light.

Wait a second, I thought, seized by fear, isn’t this what happens when you’re dying?

Was I dying? Did I feel compelled to step into the light? Had I taken too many drugs?

I checked for a pulse. Seemed strong enough.

It was too early for Eddie to have gone to bed, yet there was no sign of him or Lulu in the apartment. Could he be out there? On the balcony? At night? In March? The weather had been unseasonably warm that week. Sometimes when that happened, we’d bundle up in the matching hand-knit Aran sweaters we’d brought back from Ireland, prepare brandy-spiked hot chocolates, crank up the space heaters and make good use of that goddamned balcony which had led us into temptation, and a ridiculous mortgage. With fragrant steam wafting off our boozy drinks, our noses reddening, our breath dancing in the air, we’d cuddle up on the couch, giggle and laugh and pretend we were two burly fishermen who’d found love on the Irish moors, or some such nonsense.

They had to be out there. Satisfied with the explanation for the flickering light and convinced I wasn’t dying (just yet) I turned and headed for bed before the NyQuil kicked in. I was halfway down the hallway when that itty bit of rationality still lurking in my congested head told me to stop. Eddie would be worried about me. He was sweet that way. As a good husband, I should poke my head outside and announce my status as still breathing. I owed him that much. Even if he hadn’t bought me ice cream.

With the blanket wound tightly about me, I did the geisha-walk from hallway to balcony door. The first thing I noticed through the glass was Lulu frantically pawing at it. She wanted inside. That was unusual. She loved Eddie and was always content in his company. Was she out there alone? Had he somehow forgotten her out there and gone to bed after all? Weird. Lulu was not an outside dog, even when outside meant a recently remodelled fresh air living space (a term coined by our interior designer who detested the term balcony, which she thought sounded too basic).

I strained to see out but saw no sign of Eddie.

I slid open the door. Lulu rushed inside, shooting me a belittling look as she passed by on her way for parts unknown. From this vantage point, most of my view was blocked by a wall of preserved reindeer moss. I stepped onto the balcony, grimacing as my bare feet made contact with the cold floor. Aggressive night air searched for ways to infiltrate my blanket wrap. It was quiet. Too quiet. I’d recently curated a fresh air living space playlist that Eddie seemed to enjoy. We rarely spent time out there without it.

I stepped past the reindeer moss. The light I’d seen from the kitchen was coming from a statuesque liquid lava lamp which, according to the same designer, we could not live without. It used smoke and laser beams and probably some sort of artificial intelligence to create abstract lighting that could be adjusted for intensity and motion to suit whatever ambiance you were going for. Much to Eddie’s chagrin, I regularly made fun of the ridiculous thing in front of guests. Secretly I loved it. Judging by the undulating dark greens and moody blues washing over the balcony, Eddie had chosen something apt for fretting about my well-being. But where was he? Despite protective layers of quilting, I felt a chill. Not the fever-induced kind.

I moved forward and called out, Hello?

Hello.

There he was. Eddie was standing in heavy shadow, wearing something I’d never seen before, which is not unusual when your husband is a fashion designer. His wardrobe was as changeable as a chameleon.

For several seconds we stared at one another.

How are you? he finally asked.

Did the pile of drugs in the kitchen tell him nothing? Hadn’t he looked in on me earlier and found me comatose in the guest bedroom? Or had I hallucinated that?

You should go back to bed, he said.

Go back to bed? Was I disturbing his evening? It may have been the fever, but his apathetic suggestion ticked me off. Where was the caring? Where was the worry? Where was the goddamned mint chocolate ice cream?

Thankfully, before I said what was really on my mind, I remembered the sage advice of our neighbour and good friend, Baz: if you don’t have anything nice to say, mumble it under your breath and walk away. I did just that.

It was the last time I saw my husband.

Chapter 2

Reality shows catapulted our careers into the stratosphere. TV celebrities are not the zeitgeist mainstays in Canada that they are in many other parts of the world, and neither of us set out to be one. We both just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

When Eddie and I met we were a couple of don’t-know-any-better dreamers pursuing careers in two of the most challenging and competitive fields known to mankind: culinary arts and fashion. To be honest, I had a better shot at making a living as a cook than he did designing clothes. People gotta eat. And if you don’t care about what kind of restaurant you work in, there’s always a job. I did care, but if I had to choose between scrambling eggs at Denny’s or working 9 to 5 in an office job, Denny’s would win every time.

For Eddie, things weren’t as easy or clear-cut. Imagine being an eighteen-year-old from Nowhere, Canada come to the big city in the early 1980’s with stars in your eyes and sartorial dreams. You’d have to be either (a) brave and persistent or (b) naive and delusional. I’m not sure which is better. The market for Canadian designed clothing, especially in the export market where all the money is made, was developing at a glacial pace in the seventies and eighties. For every Alfred Sung, Simon Chang and Linda Lundström, hundreds of Eddie Kravetses tried to make it and never did. Dreams weren’t enough. Talent wasn’t enough. You had to be something the world hadn’t seen before. You had to be exceptional.

Eddie Kravets was exceptional. Accepted into Toronto’s Academy of Design, it wasn’t long before tongue-wags in the fashion community, a minuscule but influential group, began chattering about the bold new designer who’d come from nowhere, exploding with fresh ideas, designing outrageous, fashion-forward men’s wear.

Today’s fashion world has begun to embrace gender fluidity, but when Eddie was starting out, putting a man in a skirt or accessorizing with pearls and purses was considered extreme. It was a time when avant-garde fashion for men was an insignificant niche market. When I met him in 1990, Eddie was a struggling genius. It was clear that if he wanted to survive as a designer, he had to expand his designing portfolio to include women’s clothing.

By the time our son Connor was born in 1993, Eddie had created and abandoned several lines of womenswear. Nothing clicked. Creatively he was running on empty. Disillusioned with a fickle industry that promised much but delivered little, he made the decision to stay at home and raise our child.

When Connor started school, Eddie was thirty-three years old and ready to give fashion another try. Despite—or maybe because of—spending years putting all his energy into being the best full-time parent he could be, he felt fresh, inspired, hungry. It was the late nineties/early 2000’s and the Canadian fashion industry was bursting with young designer wannabes from Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal. Eddie was older than most of them, but he knew the business better than anyone. He’d made strong connections on his first go-round, he knew the power of marketing and networking and the importance of getting your collection seen by as many people as possible, no matter what it took. In 2007 it was the fervour of his small but fiercely loyal stable of clients who clamoured for Eddie Kravets evening wear that attracted the attention of producers for a new reality show. It was the Canadian version of a UK hit that gave up-and-coming designers an opportunity to make a name for themselves by defeating competitors in a series of increasingly bizarre design challenges. Eddie, the oldest contestant at forty-two, was declared the winner of Season One. In the first year after his appearance, riding the wave of post-show notoriety, Eddie’s taxable income grew tenfold. He never looked back.

***

At ten years old, instead of using the twenty bucks my parents left me to order pizza when they couldn’t quite make it home for dinner (which was often), I bought ingredients for increasingly complicated recipes. Mother and Father were intellectuals with intellectual-type careers who probably shouldn’t have had a child. To their credit, they only tried it once.

It was crystal clear to me what I wanted to be when I grew up. As unorthodox as cooking was as a career aspiration, I never shied away from the goal or permitted disappointments to derail me. Eventually it worked out. Focus and hard work paid off. When I met Eddie, I was having the time of my life. I’d spent the last five years travelling the world, training under renowned chefs and pursuing deliciously tumultuous affairs. Eventually I landed my first gig as head chef. It was at a tiny, unremarkable eatery on the Caribbean island of Providenciales, but I made the most of it. Mouths still water at the mention of my conch stir fry with special sauce. The sauce was only special because I declined to tell anyone what was in it. I went so far as to refuse to make it at the restaurant where anyone might see, instead throwing it together in my one-room-with-kitchenette apartment. As far as I knew, no one was actually actively attempting to discover the secret, but we made sure everyone who crossed the restaurant’s threshold heard the rumour, especially tourists. They ate up the story, then ordered the dish just to see what the fuss was about. It was our biggest seller week after week for my entire six-month stint.

I know it sounds cheesy, but having Eddie to come home to was the one thing that finally convinced me to have one. Until then, I was pretty happy bouncing from international city to tropical island to five-star resort collecting experience and passport stamps. Whenever I returned to Toronto for one reason or another, I was satisfied to stay with friends or in hotels until I’d done what I’d come to do, then move on to the next. I travelled lightly and eschewed owning anything I couldn’t part with easily. But Eddie made me want it all. Home. Couch. Dog. Child. He was it for me and I intended to do whatever was needed to make our relationship work.

Restructuring my life and career in order to stay in one place for a prolonged period of time was a challenge. Fortunately, I thrive on being challenged. If Toronto was the place I was going to plant my culinary flag, I set my sights on becoming king of the hill.

I’d been away from the Toronto dining scene for a long time. I didn’t know the players. I didn’t know the clientele. I had an ego, but I wasn’t cocky. I knew I’d have to pay my dues. I did my research and identified chefs I wanted to work with and restaurants I wanted to work in. By the early 2000’s, I’d been head chef at two of the city’s top restaurants, won a few notable awards, and earned a loyal fan base who followed me from restaurant to restaurant. It was time to strike out on my own.

I immediately committed two rookie mistakes.

First, when opening a new restaurant in a competitive marketplace, the chance of longevity when you are woefully undercapitalized (as I was) is about the same as for the residents of a seafood restaurant’s lobster tank.

Second, never name your first restaurant after yourself. The spectre of waking up one morning to headlines associating your name with Failure or Bankruptcy as you deal with rookie mistake number one, is emotionally and mentally draining.

Jake Hardy’s opened to decent fanfare and excellent reviews. Maintaining quality goods and services, however, was an overwhelming financial burden. Staffing costs to attract and hold on to the industry’s top professionals were staggering, never mind inventory, maintenance, and keeping the lights on. It wasn’t long before I needed a serious infusion of cash. This was definitely one of those rough patches that came perilously close to ruining me. But when it seems I have nothing, I pull out the one thing I never run out of: confidence. When things look their worst, I rely on one motto: fake it until you make it. So, of course, I wrote a cookbook.

Jake Hardy does Caribbean expounded on my culinary experiences from the Lucayan Archipelago to the Greater and Lesser Antilles islands, interspersed with lightly fictionalized personal escapades. The pages were jam-packed with original recipes, entertaining anecdotes, and amateur photographs of me working in the kitchen, playing in the ocean, relaxing at beach bars. I marketed the book as if everyone was shouting: Finally! The cookbook I’ve been waiting for!.

Jake Hardy does Caribbean was an immediate success. Its surprising meteoric rise up the bestseller lists led to TV and radio appearances, two sequels: Jake Hardy does French Countryside and Jake Hardy does Five Star, and eventually my own cable cooking show, Jake Hardy does TV Cooking.

My career resurrection took hard work and time away from Eddie and Connor, but the gamble paid off. The restaurant flourished. Money was no longer a problem. Leveraging the success of the TV show and cookbooks and itching to try something new, I threw myself into conceptualizing a new venture. I wanted in on the rarified Greater Toronto Area fine dining market. I wanted to create the kind of restaurant that would attract Michelin stars and Zagat Awards.

Eddie and I put our heads together and came up with the name Cuvée by Jake Hardy. Cuvée is a term that refers to the perfect blend of grapes needed to create the absolute best bottles of bubbly, and I knew it would take nothing less than the perfect blend of people, place, ambiance and culinary expertise to create the kind of restaurant I wanted.

During Cuvée’s ascension, I quietly closed Jake Hardy’s, never having seen the "Jake Hardy’s Fails" headline that once tortured my dreams. To appeal to a broader audience and capitalize on the success of Cuvée as our flagship, I opened a series of more affordable (slightly) satellite eateries throughout the country. Sticking with the theme, we called them Perlage, a term referring to the size and effervescence of champagne bubbles. Depending on fermentation and bottling, a champagne might have millions of tight, tiny bubbles, or many fewer, looser, loopy fizzles. Some bubbles give up the gas quickly while others release a seemingly endless stream of sparkles. People might not think they care about champagne bubbles, but I have found that once they start paying attention, favourites tend to emerge. With Perlage, not only did I convince a brand-new stratum of clientele to give my food a try, I gave existing Cuvée customers a different way to experience a Jake Hardy restaurant.

Blended together, our world was magic. Our careers flourished. Eddie’s recent collection was arguably his most successful. Cuvée was on the verge of achieving one of my wildest dreams: Relais & Châteaux status. We were at the top of our respective games and enjoying the weird brand of celebrity that comes with having been on TV. People knew our names. A team of PR people kept us relevant on social media. After thirty years we still had a rock-solid marriage. We loved each other and, probably more importantly, we liked each other. Best of all, we had Connor. We loved our son with such ferocity it sometimes took our breath away.

***

I woke up feeling a rush of elation, the kind you get when you’ve been sick for a while but realize that whatever it was you were so sure was going to kill you was leaving your body. A surge of energy, a clarity of mind assures you good health is on its way. The room was dull and