“Brilliant idea, sweet,” Charles said to my mother, and he reminded us that his children all loved to fish and hunt. “Count me in.”
“Me too, Malabar,” said Lily. “What fun it will be.”
Ben placed his hands behind his head and tipped back in his chair. “Hold everything,” he said, his smile enormous. “Not so fast. We haven’t discussed royalties. Seems to me that the hunter-gatherer couple should get a greater cut than the cooking-eating couple.”
“Oh, Ben.” Lily laughed. “You stop that this minute.”
“Do we have a title?” asked Charles.
Ben and my mother were silent for a moment. They looked upward, as if a title might fall from the sky.
“How about something simple?” Malabar said. “We could call it Wild Game. It tells the reader what to expect but promises adventure too.”
“It’s perfect,” Lily said.
Ben touched his glass to my mother’s. “To our wild game, Malabar.”
Seven
Our home on Cape Cod became the hub of the wild-game universe. Wood ducks hung in the shed to dry-age; rabbits were butchered and sautéed; mussels, clams, and lobsters, separated by layers of seaweed, were slow-cooked over coals in giant pits down on the beach. Holes were dug, fires built, and hunks of meat were swabbed with olive oil, rosemary, and crushed garlic. The hypnotic hiss of fat dripping onto coals was the backdrop to almost every meal. Malabar, expert at extracting all things comestible from any creature, kept her enormous enameled Dutch oven, blackened at the base, in constant use on the back burner of the stove, braising tough cuts of meat, rendering shiny chunks of fat, simmering marrow-filled bones.
Whenever Ben burst through our door with diminutive Lily in tow, he would always bring something unexpected—green frogs from his pond or a squirrel that he’d hit in his rush to get to us—in addition to the agreed-upon fare that was to be the next night’s dinner. My mother would cook a light meal when they arrived, and we would discuss the following night’s feast, brainstorming about how best to prepare it. Often, I’d never tried the meat—bison or alligator or wigeon—but Ben would describe it and I was encouraged to toss out ideas. What if we slid butter and tarragon leaves under the skin? How about slow-roasting it until the meat falls off the bones? Something sweet in the sauce, like figs or currants?
Ben was the most experienced game eater among us, boasting that he’d tried everything he’d ever killed, from a two-ounce black rail to a six-ton elephant. He even ate notoriously bad-tasting animals, like the fishy sea ducks locally known as skunk-heads, insisting they were palatable if you removed the rank fat and then flash-fried them. He suggested my mother develop a recipe.
“Wild Game is not intended to be a survivalist manifesto, Ben. It will be a gourmet cookbook,” my mother said. She looked Lily’s way and shook her head, feigning annoyance.
“Malabar, you don’t even know the half of it,” Lily said, basking in her friend’s sympathy.
Looking back, I can’t imagine that Charles and Lily did not see what was going on before their eyes. Could they not smell and taste foreboding each time they sat down to one of my mother’s meals, Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! piped into the dining room and arching over their heads? Their spouses’ fingers touched at every passed plate. Their eyes lingered. Malabar’s laughter dared the room to imagine her thoughts.
Together, my mother and Ben shucked oysters, plucked feathers from mallards, ripped innards out of delicate woodland creatures. Their patter was filled with pornographic double-entendres about the game they roasted, the savory loins, luscious breasts, tender thighs. Their every gesture seemed garishly sensual; the way they slurped clams from their shells, gnawed on bones and sucked out the marrow, and dipped their pinkies into the leftover sauce on their plates. Never mind that when they moaned their delight, the sound caused my stomach to pinch and sent me upstairs for Tums, which I ingested by the handful.
Through it all, Charles and Lily went along for the ride, chewing and tasting, earnestly selecting one piece of elk, brook trout, or grouse over another for the sound reason of moistness or flavor. They took their jobs as testers seriously. Lily even jotted down her impressions in a small spiral notebook. Charles looked pleased when their tastes aligned. They had an unspoken alliance of sorts as the voices of reason, the grownups, when Ben and my mother’s mock arguments got out of hand or when their ideas became too outlandish.
“Malabar,” Ben said, eyes twinkling. “How does a woman attend Le Cordone Blue and not know a goddamn thing about butchering meat?”
Lily rushed to Malabar’s defense. “Oh, please, Ben. Don’t be a fool. Anyone can butcher meat. Butchers are a dime a dozen.”
“It’s ‘Le Cordon Bleu,’” my mother said, correcting Ben’s pronunciation. For months, she’d tried to teach him to enunciate the final s in vichyssoise so he sounded more sophisticated. She pointed the tip of a sharp filleting knife in Ben’s direction. “Your game would be as tough as shoe leather were it not for me.”
“Give it up now, Ben,” Charles warned his friend. “You will never, ever win with Malabar.” He gazed at my mother admiringly. “But there is no sweeter defeat. How about another glass of wine?”
The clues were everywhere, strewn like seaweed on the shore. Did Ben accidentally just call my mother “darling”? Did anyone hear my mother suggest they re-create that sauce they’d had at Lutèce?
And what of all their sudden disappearances?
“Ben, be a dear,” my mother would say, dredging a slab of shad roe through lightly seasoned flour, “fetch the charcoal. It’s in the far corner of the basement, near the garden tools.”
“Malabar.” Ben’s voice would creep up through the floorboards a few minutes later. “Can you give me a hand? I don’t see it.”
My mother would wipe her palms on her apron or a nearby dishtowel and give Lily an artful look of good-humored exasperation and camaraderie, a look that said, Men. Then she’d pop off to the basement to help Ben.
These moments terrified me more than almost any other. Time slowed down; my stomach burned and my pulse rang in my ears as if I were the one about to get caught. I knew my role at these times. I was there to distract and amuse; I’d talk too much, tell jokes, do a jig in the kitchen if that’s what it took conceal Ben and my mother’s absence. As if any amount of jazz hands and blathering could divert attention from the ticktock of the grandfather clock and how absurdly long it was taking two adults to locate a ten-pound bag of charcoal.
Footsteps would finally thump back up, five or six or seven minutes later. An eternity.
“Exactly where I told him it would be,” my mother would announce.
I’d vigilantly check her for mussed hair, smeared lipstick, disheveled clothing, but if I brushed a strand of hair back into place or straightened her collar, my mother was just as likely to slap my hand in annoyance as to be grateful. She did not sheepishly avoid eye contact or busy herself in the kitchen at these times. If anything, there was defiance in her eyes, a raised chin. She felt the right to what small piece of Ben she had, to what dim glow of the bright light of her future she could bask in now—and, goddamn it, no one was going to take that from her.
Could it be that Lily, then married to Ben for close to forty years, believed her husband to be a harmless flirt and didn’t let it bother her? I imagine it would have been inconceivable to Charles that Ben, his oldest friend and godfather to his son, could be in love with his wife, let alone be having an affair with her. I would later learn that before my mother and Charles married, Ben Souther had been one of several people who were suspicious of her intentions. He’d cautioned Charles, one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors at the time, not to rush into marriage with her.
So even as evidence stacked up and my mother and Ben’s chemistry charged the air, Charles and Lily didn’t waver in their support of this friendship or of the wild-game cookbook in the making. Perhaps somewhere deep down, they understood, as I did—f
or my mother was very clear on this point—that this affair was being conducted with everyone’s best interest at heart.
But Malabar was growing impatient. How was she to manage unfulfillment lurking on one side and Charles’s death calling from the other? Simple. She filled a shaker with ice, poured in the bourbon, and wrapped herself in a blanket of alcohol to dull the hurt and deaden the guilt as she rode around and around, endlessly circling the life she wanted, that gold ring just out of reach. When Malabar made a power pack, that dry Manhattan with a twist, she would pause for a moment, consider the shaker, then add another shot of booze.
For years when I made Manhattans, I did the same.
Eight
At age seventeen, three years into my life as Malabar’s confidante and accomplice, I became overwhelmed by the desire to get away. The gnawing guilt I felt but didn’t recognize as such continued to worsen, as did my stomach problems. At the time, I didn’t trace the roots of my wanderlust to my mother or anything beyond a typical teenage drive for independence. As my high-school graduation loomed in the spring of 1983, I impulsively decided to take a gap year before attending college. I’d worked hard at Milton Academy and deserved a break, I told myself. I’d earned a year off to follow my dreams. Who could fault me for wanting to travel?
With an acceptance letter from Columbia safely tucked in my desk drawer, I deferred for a year, wondering if my parents might object. Perhaps they’d suggest that I should spend the time doing something meaningful, like volunteering for Habitat for Humanity or teaching English abroad, something that might count as vaguely productive, educational, or altruistic. But I needn’t have worried. My family wasn’t particularly big on the idea of giving back or community service. I was taught to take full credit for my accomplishments and consider them the result of grit and hard work. Privilege was not a concept we discussed in relation to our good fortune.
So, while Malabar expressed concern over how she would possibly manage without me, she did not bat an eye over my ill-conceived plan to explore America starting on the island of Maui. Years ago, we’d spent several family vacations there with my grandfather and Julia. Julia had inherited his beautiful time-share condominium in Napili Kai, and she offered me the use of it starting in mid-June. After that, who knew? I planned to take things one day at a time.
“You just can’t miss a single one of our therapy sessions,” my mother said, a reference to our private joke that I was the best psychiatrist she’d ever had, not to mention the cheapest. “Promise you’ll call every week. We’re two halves of the same whole, Rennie. I can’t bear to be apart from you for long.”
With some sixth sense about my need to get away from Malabar, my father gave me an open-ended round-trip airline ticket to Hawaii as a graduation gift. Although he and I never spoke directly about my relationship with Malabar, he intuited that my mother lacked boundaries with me, as her mother had with her.
I said goodbye to my family and goodbye to 100 Essex, the home I’d lived in from the time I was eight. My mother and Charles had finally found a respectable buyer for the house and would move to an apartment they’d bought on Beacon Hill. Peter was attending Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. When I got back, nothing would be the same.
My plan was upended from the start. Unbeknownst to anyone, Julia had gone on another bender that spring and forgotten to reserve her unit in time for my arrival, so I landed on the island, seventeen years old, with a denim duffle bag and no place to stay. I decided that being adrift was an essential part of my adventure, so I spent the first few nights sleeping on the beach under the star-sprayed blackness, feeling powerfully independent for the first time in my life.
Soon enough, things fell into place. I found a studio apartment in Napili Village and work at a gimmicky jewelry store called the Pearl Factory in Kaanapali, a five-mile shot down Honoapiilani Highway. At the store, shoppers would choose a pre-seeded oyster from a large tank. I would hold up the selected mollusk theatrically as a small crowd gathered and ask if they were absolutely positive that this was the one they wanted. Then, as a hush fell over my audience, I would slip in the knife, pry open the shell, and, with great fanfare, pluck out its iridescent occupant with a pair of silver tongs and greet it with a hearty Aloha!
A handsome blond haole, as we non-natives were called, started visiting my shop. From Kansas originally, Adam was unlike any of the boys I knew from Boston. He rarely had a plan that stretched beyond the current day. He hung out along the white beaches of Kaanapali and cruised the paved walking path that meandered between the shops and hotels, selling dime bags of weed to tourists. But each evening when the conch shell was blown, a resonant blast announcing that the sun was about to set—one part local tradition, two parts vacationer-cocktail-gong—Adam would materialize in front of the Pearl Factory holding a piña colada–filled coconut. Then off we’d go, aimlessly strolling the beach and talking about our lives.
As our romance proceeded over weeks and months, our walks extended beyond the sandy edges of hotel shorelines to secluded spots tucked into the corrugated volcanic coastline. There, in the nooks and crannies of Maui, in its dark and secret caves, something feather-light unfurled inside me as new physical sensations obliterated all I’d ever known. I was falling in love for the first time. The promise of wonders to come.
Adam showed me Maui’s bountiful arcade of outdoor pleasures—hidden waterfalls, rock stacks left by menehune, blowholes blasting of water and vapor up through submerged lava tubes. He also introduced me to pot—pakalolo, as it was called on the island—something I’d tried a few times before but never really enjoyed. Adam promised me that the marijuana was different on Hawaii, mellow and relaxing. “It will calm down that stomach of yours,” he told me. He was right. It did soothe my stomach, but I still didn’t love the feeling of getting high. It made me self-conscious. I felt hungry and dimwitted and paranoid about my hunger and dimwittedness. My studio condo was littered with boxes of Cap’n Crunch, a dietary staple of Adam’s. We ate it dry, by the handful.
We took a hit to start the day, shared a joint as we explored the Jurassic jungles of Hana, got stoned before snorkeling over kaleidoscope coral reefs, where we glided and dived to the music of whale songs, aching and alien in the distance. This is what life would be like if I were a pothead, I thought without irony, as if that weren’t the life I was living. On Maui, I often felt as if I were watching a theatrical performance of my life from the last row of a distant balcony, observing this carefree and freewheeling girl played by me.
What would my mother think of this life? I wondered over and over again, and I tried not to care.
I knew Malabar was having a difficult time coping without me, and I felt guilty for not being more supportive. Still, I did not try to be in closer touch. One call per week was what I’d promised her, and one call was all I could give. However unsuitable Adam might have been, I was in love, a first for me, and through that surrender, I achieved genuine emotional distance from Malabar. Plus I was having fun. Whatever pent-up teenage energy had been thwarted in me because of my role in my mother’s affair was now rushing the gate. At last, I was the one experimenting with sex, drugs, and adventures. I was the one having the time of my life.
One morning over coffee on my deck, the first joint of the day already stubbed out in an ashtray, Adam bluntly asked me what I was escaping from.
“Escaping?” The question took me by surprise.
I couldn’t see the ocean from my condo, but I could hear it, and the rhythm of the waves lapping at the shore made it seem like the world itself was breathing.
“Everyone comes here to get away from something,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You first,” I said.
“Factory life.” I already knew this. Adam had grown up in Ozawkie, Kansas, and dropped out of high school at age sixteen to join his father and brother at a printing factory. The money had been good but the monotony and chemicals unbearable.
I thought about my own
life so far: prep school, Cape Cod, an Ivy League education on the horizon. The privilege of it all embarrassed me. What could I possibly be escaping? My brain, fuzzy with THC, came up with nothing. I didn’t know how to answer the question.
Adam refilled our coffee cups, lit a cigarette, waited.
A puffy cumulus cloud towed its shadow across the lawn below us, and as I followed the dark spot racing along the ground, the story of my mother and Ben spilled from my mouth. It was a relief to talk openly about my secret. Let me be clear: I did not actually believe that my mother’s affair was why I was living on Maui. Nevertheless, I was telling Adam Malabar’s story—our story, really—and I channeled a boundless tide of moments and emotions into an abridged narrative: the kiss, the exotic meals, the constitutionals. And the lies. So many lies. When I got to the end, when the words finally stopped forming, my hands had become a wedge clenched tightly between my thighs.
“Holy shit!” Adam said, letting out a long, low exhale.
Not the reaction I expected.
“Holy shit,” he repeated. “What kind of person would—”
Would what? I wondered. I wasn’t following.
“What kind of person would do that to her daughter? And with her husband’s best friend? Jesus Christ. Your mother sounds like a piece of work.”
I felt confused, suddenly thrust into a state of disequilibrium. Adam was getting this all wrong. He saw Malabar as perpetrator, not victim. I must have failed to relate the complexities of the situation, I decided. But how to explain the tragedies of my mother’s life when words were inaccessible? I was so stoned.
“You’ve misunderstood,” I said, the sensation of anger rising within me. “It’s not like that.”
I dived into the details and tried to explain that Charles and Lily were both ill, not at all the spouses that the others deserved. Ben and my mother were, in fact, doing the honorable thing by staying with their respective partners. “Not everyone would,” I assured him. “I don’t think Charles would survive for five minutes without my mother.” I let that sink in. “He’s completely dependent on her. And my mother loves him. Really, she does. She’s still really good to him. She takes care of all his needs.”
Wild Game Page 7