Over time, the world of jewelry gave way to the world of Steve’s Restaurant, which began to take up every second of Polly’s life. At the start she waited tables, until then the preserve of Steve; she became an efficient helper. She also instated the open days, an idea she took from artisan jewelry conventions. Other things that happened: an affluent set becoming regulars at the restaurant, attracted by the well-connected Polly; Steve deciding to cook the horizon; Steve announcing, to the surprise of all attending the Third Annual Open Day, Come on, everyone! I’m cooking the horizon! And him putting them all in a rental bus [rented by Polly] and pulling up in the parking lot at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, and walking them single-file along the path to the left of the traffic, until they were halfway across, where he stopped them and said, Look, the horizon! The sun was going down, and it smoldered on that horizontal axis, it burned. There you have it! he cried. The group looked on in silence, utterly rapt at the vision, and applause broke out among them when the sun disappeared, and they toasted with red wine. Passing drivers rubbernecked. The event was reported in the news. During the Q&A on the TV program Cooking Today, someone asked him to reveal his secret. His answer: My secret is that I don’t bother with the insides of things, I cook the skins and the skins only; the skins of all objects, animals, things, and ideas are apt to be cooked, and this is to do with light and nothing else: the skins are the places the light reaches. You might say that the way I cook is the logical next step in the spread of sunlight across the surface of the earth, my cooking is the point where sunlight causes mutations, becomes total across the surface of things. Doing up his astrakhan shawl, he left with his arm around Polly’s waist. That night, as they always did now when celebrating special moments in their relationship, they went to the yard where Polly had first caught sight of him jumping up and down on a car. They usually took a little food and would sit on a couple of wheels or a backseat strewn somewhere in the yard, open a couple of cans of Pepsi, and she would tell him about diamond-cutting and he would talk about the advantages of astrakhan fur over rabbit pelts. A tall, fairly fat man with hands like octopuses, a regular in the yard at that hour of the day, would sometimes come and sit with them; people called him Frankie, though not because his name was Frank, rather after Frankenstein. Wrapped in his tweed jacket, he told them how, in his earlier days, he had written a novel called Hopscotch, but it was Hopscotch B or, as he called it, the Theory of Open Balls, which was really good—and was also top-secret. They offered to share their food, their Pepsi. By the way, said Steve, I loved that stuff about cooking only the points where the sun reaches, and the thing about skin, loved it—it gave me the perfect out when those hacks started asking questions. Don’t mention it, said Frankie. I’m glad it was useful. I got that idea from a guy I met in Armenia—that’s near Russia, by the way—a pig farmer, he had an idea to use his 8-story pig farm to produce a carpet of pigskins that would stretch from his front door to the glaciers of Pakistan, said he’d be killing 2 birds with 1 stone that way: first, the layer of skins would maintain the temperature of the planet and, second, ward off attacks by the Turko-Muslims, since, seeing as they refused to go anywhere near pig meat, they wouldn’t dare set foot on lands covered in the skins of that animal … Pass me a sandwich, Polly. She held one out to him and said, And you, what were you doing around there? Frankie, taking a large bite, said, Oh, nothing, really, looking for some wall I might stick myself to, but then I got sidetracked. I wandered around those moors for a number of months, and then one day I heard Chet Baker playing his trumpet off in the distance—unmistakable, it was the same recording I owned when I lived in Paris, and as it mixed together with the grunting, complaining pigs, it created a terrifying kind of harmony. I stayed, lingered in the area for a while—until the Armenian government came and took the whole thing down, I’m thirsty, Polly, pass the Pepsi, would you?