“What do you mean?” Adrienne had asked.
“Twenty minutes of discussion and you order a green salad?”
“It wasn’t twenty minutes,” she said. Then she started with the bread-balling thing.
Now she gazed at him, clear-eyed. “I think this is a bigger issue, Jack.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s a food issue.”
“Well, I daresay there’s some member of the animal kingdom that eats mouse turds, but for me it’s not a food issue. It’s a mouse turd issue. It bothers me that you turn your bread into mouse turds. Although…” He lifted the bread, which was heavy, brown, and studded with seeds and grains, and he made a play of weighing it in his hands. “I dunno, maybe that is the best use for it.” He rolled a little ball himself and grinned. “How was the shoot?” he asked, sidestepping, giving up.
Adrienne brushed her hands together, ousting invisible crumbs, and said, “The shoot was fine.”
“No kids? No dogs? No divas?”
“A very nice, very old, man. An astronomer. He won the Pulitzer.”
“Good. Good for him.”
“Jack, I think we need to confront this food issue.”
“There is no food issue.”
“Yes, Jack, there is. You have a food issue. You’re obsessed with food. It’s draining your creativity. You’re not writing and you’re obsessing about food. It’s like a…transference thing, you’re transferring your writing skill, your ability to concoct things with words, into concocting things with food. It concerns me, Jack.”
“It concerns you?”
“Yes.” She reached across and laid her fingers delicately on his. “I think it’s holding you back.”
Jack stared. But he knew that some of the blame for the conversation was his. He’d reopened the route to it.
He’d done a stupid thing. He’d let Adrienne read something he’d written. Handed the pages to her with a script in his head that he knew she could not possibly adhere to. It was some work he’d done that morning, work that in other times he’d have considered merely bulk, let sit awhile and then lifted from it perhaps one sentence, and discarded the rest. But in his recent, less sure, frame of mind, he’d been meddling, fiddling with his material and, in the bothering of it, losing his way. He knew that, knew the answer was to step aside from it, but he hadn’t been able to. He’d kept poking at it like worrying a tooth, and then he had involved Adrienne. Dumb.
She had looked at the work and read it quickly and then looked back at him, searching.
She’s a bright woman, he’d thought. He’d made Manhattans; he sipped his.
“What is it you’re looking for, Jack?” she’d asked.
“Looking for?” he replied—the repetition like a faint starter’s gun for an altercation.
She hadn’t heard it. “I’m not sure,” she said, judging the impact of each word before uttering it, “whether you’re looking for critique, or…” She paused again and sipped her own drink.
He didn’t help her out.
“Reassurance,” she finished softly. Her voice sounded unusually warm.
It was the warmth, ironically, that jerked him—a sudden, upward pull. If she’d responded harshly, he’d have let go, allowed himself to be swept away in a senseless flood of irritation.
“Reassurance, naturally.”
He stood up, crossed the room, and took the sheets of paper from her and kissed her. “I’m a sap for words of praise. Particularly from those I care about,” he said.
Adrienne, looking unconvinced, but rescued nevertheless, smiled. “This drink is very nice,” she said.
“Aah,” he’d said, smiling back, putting his own glass down and dropping to his knees in front of her, “Now you’ll see the effect that a few drops of flattery can have on a man of needy disposition.”
“You might consider fasting,” Adrienne said now, “as a way of getting back in touch with your real writing. As a purging process—clear all the clutter from your mind and body so that the new ideas can flow freely.”
Their meal arrived. The waiter put Adrienne’s salad in front of her as if it were a salver of gemstones. She smiled gently in response. Then, to Jack’s dismay, she resumed the conversation, “Yes, a fast,” she said, as if settling a major decision. “We could both do it.”
“Honey, I sure as hell am not about to give up the plain unadulterated joy of eating just in case the muse is a goddam anorexic.”
“I’m not an anorexic, Jack.”
Jack looked at her, struck by a string of instant understandings: First, that what she had said was true; Adrienne ate with no fervor, but she ate. Second, that she had forced a leap over the safety wall between third person and first, which in turn took them deeper into “couple” territory and the attendant depths of revelation. And then, something else. “No,” he said in the dawn of it. “But you want to be the muse, don’t you? Is that what it was with whatshisname? Terry?”
“Terrence,” Adrienne corrected. Her ex-husband, a singer and songwriter, moderately successful. She thought for a moment. “When we were married, yes, he said I inspired him. I don’t know if I’d use the term ‘muse,’ though.”
“I would,” Jack said. “And I think there are flesh-and-blood women who honestly believe that’s what they are. That they can inspire art. Is that what you believe, Adrienne? Do you think you can inspire me?”
“You’re shouting, Jack.”
“Claptrap has that effect on me. So does this trash.” He tipped his plate on an angle toward her. It was large white square; four tiny zucchini were arranged on a nest of what looked like yellow hay in the center of it. His voice rose again as he said, “I am suddenly filled with the desire to hunt out some place where they’ll knock the horns off something corpulent and serve it up to me with a sharp knife and a side of fried balls.”
When the waiter came to clear Jack’s untouched meal, Adrienne smiled apologetically and said, “He’s having a bad day.”
You’ll want very dark plums, Eve wrote:
Damsons are best, prick them well all over and then just leave them in the gin with the sugar until Christmas. It’s a bit late for sloes, the flavor takes longer to develop, and anyway the plums are easier to pierce. Sometimes I add a drop of almond essence.
The engagement party went very well. Thank you for asking. The hors d’oeuvres were stunning and they looked beautiful. I think with party food, looking beautiful is really as important as the taste. Party food is the hummingbird of foods, don’t you think?
I have just realized that plums were almost where we started. It seems a long time ago.
Eve
This is an afterthought, but no less thought about for that, I am sending you Grandmother’s Christmas Cake recipe. She was not my grandmother. She was the grandmother of a school friend of mine called Erica. Erica went to live in Australia, and we have lost touch, except for Christmas times when airmailed cards and this recipe briefly unite us again. I made my ginger biscuits (what you might call cookies) once for Erica’s grandmother and she gave me this recipe in return. It made me feel at the time as though I were a treasured granddaughter, and I have that same marvelous belonging feeling every time I make the cake, which I do, every Christmas. Perhaps you will, too. Don’t feel obliged. The recipe is by way of a present. I have been feeling rather better lately, for all sorts of reasons, than I have for a long time, and I think your letters are a part of that.
Eve
I have just noticed that the recipe calls for Golden Syrup. I may have to send you some, substitutes are either messy (combine caramelized sugar, vinegar, corn syrup) or inadequate (honey).
Thank you, friend. I am touched by your cake recipe gift. I will make it if you can send the syrup (which I am intrigued by).
You’re right about the plums seeming a long time ago. It seems a long time, too, since we mentioned Paris. I’m pretty keen at the moment to eat in that hedonistic way that Paris allows for best. You can eat anything y
ou want in New York, and in Italy your taste buds get their wings, but Paris is the place for self-indulgence and I’m after a slab of that right now. Cream, beef, brains, garlicky escargot, tarte tatin, profiteroles. Waddya say? Maybe we could go for New Year. You’ll have this wedding shindig out of the way by then and self-indulgence always tastes better in the cold.
Jack
Eve had written to Jack about the Christmas cake while sitting on the big hotel bed still feeling the gentle fizz of the party aftermath. She had wanted to talk to a friend. Tell a friend how the evening had gone, but she had realized that the years of isolation had cost her more than her family. Perhaps she could have written to Erica, rekindled the warmth that had once been between them, but leaning against the plumped pillows, she had admitted to herself that it wasn’t Erica she wanted to talk to, but Jack.
And so she had, divorcing the missive from the image she held in her head now of Jack and his beautiful willow, or mermaid. That’s what she looked like—Adrienne Charles—a mermaid. But that was of no interest to her, she told herself. Her relationship with Jack, her friendship, was a separate thing. A chaste, if warm, thing based on a mutual interest. There was no harm in that, no matter what Jack’s romantic attachments were.
She went to sleep with the image Jack had painted, of the two of them, in her head. The two of them in Paris. Eating. Talking about cooking. Why not, she thought. She had overcome so much—why not keep marching?
Jack had left New York the night before after a tense conversation with Adrienne. Well, tense on his side. On hers an infuriating calm had reigned. Jack had suggested that he should leave town early, but that he would call her in a day or two to see whether she would like to come out for the weekend. It had been, after all, the first argument they’d had.
“Yes, I think that’s the best plan,” she’d agreed, looking at him sympathetically. As if, he thought, he were recounting an embarrassing incident in which he had come off worst.
At home he wrote:
Eve,
Over these past months you’ve become my comfort stone. Like one of those beach pebbles you find in your pocket in wintertime—the simple act of rubbing your thumb and forefinger over it elicits sea breezes and inner peace. I need some of that. One of my books was called “The Salt Zone.” It was named for the barren lake bed on which it was set, but lately it seems like a metaphor for my life. The Salt Zone—real hard to grow anything in salt. The only thing that is flourishing around me is you. Your letters get more full of life by the day. I wish you joy.
Jack
Think about Paris. I will.
Dex,
I will be very happy to see you, friend. Don’t let that go to your head. Adrienne may be here. I have been seeing something of her. Then again, she may not.
J
You dog. She never mentions you.
She never mentions you either.
No sensitive woman would mention me to you, Coop. Too deflating if you get my drift.
Yeah, yeah. You ain’t Dexter Cameron “movie star” in my house, pal. See you Saturday.
Jack.
Jack left off from this exchange feeling content. A weekend with Dex. No order required. No sensitivity. No ticklish femininity to contend with. With Dex, even disagreements had an understandable, collaborative rhythm.
“Dex is coming out this weekend.”
“It would have been nice to see him,” Adrienne said. Jack could imagine her with her telephone held just away from her ear. He had not wanted her to come, since Dex was, but now that she had said she wouldn’t, he was disappointed.
Adrienne, reacting to his silence, said, as if answering something unasked, “We were never an item, you know. Dex and I.”
Jack laughed. “I know that.”
“Oh,” she said. “Good.”
It was a shard of unsureness, subtle, but further indication that the smooth to and fro of the early days of the romance were behind them. They were at that stage, he knew, when the relationship, in order to grow, would have to lose the luster of novelty. Have to rub away some of its gloss to get to the duller accords and compromises beneath. He wasn’t sure he was ready for the effort that took. But he wasn’t ready to lose her completely either. When he told her he’d call her soon, he meant it.
“You still ducking the neighbor?” Dex asked, holding up his beer, pointing to the label. “C-Z-E-C-H,” he said. “Don’t say I never do nothing for ya.”
“Noted,” Jack said. “Nope. She’s moved on. Got herself a German billionaire.”
“They’ll do that.”
“She swung him by here last week,” Jack said. “So I could see he was real.”
Dex chortled. “And was he?”
“Nobody would make themselves up like that.” It was good to be with Dex. He could exhale. “What say we head up to Dobb’s Creek for a coupla days?”
“Why not,” Dex said. Easy.
Dear Jack,
I read ‘The Salt Zone’ and I liked it very much. I am sorry to hear this new interpretation of its title. I have imagined you—although I say imagined, I have of course seen photographs of Jackson Cooper the writer—in any case I have thought of you as a fruitful person, a person who was rather lush with life. Although, thinking more clearly, I can see that you have drawn similar—false—conclusions about me. I am not rounded in any aspect, Jack. I am a spinster in many ways, despite my early marriage (which was brief) and my daughter. I have closed myself off from life and used the regularity of domesticity and cooking particularly—the adding measured milk to flour—as a way of maintaining control over myself and my surroundings. I have decided to try to embrace a little imprecision, though. I may break a few eggs in the process.
Eve
“So how’s life really?”
“Copacetic.”
They were in a woodsy little bar—paneled walls and smoker’s lighting—in a quiet town, halfway to Dobb’s Creek. The tables housed small clusters of paraphernalia—bottles of sauce, chunky salt and pepper shakers, and bowls of sugar propped up the menus.
“Look at that,” Jack said, lifting one. “A menu you can get your teeth into: burgers, grilled cheese, and hot fudge brownies.” Then he asked, “How are you?”
Dex took a toothpick out of its paper wrapper and teased his lower lip with it for a moment.
“Different.”
Jack looked up.
“It’s different this time around.” He put the toothpick down. “I dunno, I didn’t think it was going to be, but it is. More real somehow.”
He was referring, Jack knew, to the earlier period when he had been written up in The New York Times as one of the hottest young actors of his generation. The real lean period had followed that, in his late thirties.
“Or maybe I just matured.” He laughed. “Like you.”
One of the covenants of Dex’s and Jack’s friendship had always been that they didn’t talk about their work in any direct way. They had talked about other people’s work instead—dissecting books, or films, sitting for a long time, over coffee or wine or pasta, criticism moving from the club to the scalpel. Jack had always found those evenings comfortable and satisfying, as comfortable and satisfying as any of the evenings in his life. But now he realized things had not been so comfortable for Dex in those off years. Jack had always understood Dex’s lack of money and some of his frustrations, but his need to practice his craft, to act, and the burden of that need, Jack was suddenly aware, he had borne alone.
“Nah, you fought for it. Makes me look like a kid,” he said.
Dex grinned—a famous kind of grin, slow and captivating.
“Get up,” Jack said. “I’m gonna whoop your ass at the pool table before we eat, so’s you don’t turn insufferable.”
They ate steak and dessert and then, when two eager locals in short skirts and midriff-baring tops came in, Jack left Dex to them and walked back up the main street of the small town. They’d taken two rooms at a place called Robinson Inn, and it w
as the cheerful woman who’d checked them in who’d told them to eat at the little, dark bar. “Not a lot of choice hereabouts, but you don’t need it. Food there is as good as you’ll get. Make sure you have the peach pie.”
She was still awake when Jack let himself in and crossed the lobby, sitting in a side room, watching television with the door open.
He smiled at her. “You were right about the pie,” he said. “The crust…” He kissed his fingertips.
She smiled back. “Crisco,” she said.
“Zat right?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t tell anyone I told you, though.”
Jack tapped the side of his nose and went upstairs.
In his room he thought about calling Adrienne. Then he just thought about Adrienne generally. Dex had touched only lightly on the affair in the car on the way up, and Jack hadn’t gone into any detail because, apart from anything else, he hadn’t really got his own bearings. His feelings for Adrienne were different from those he’d had for other women; she did not rouse in him the paternal affection he’d had for Marnie, nor the painful, operatic love of youth that he’d had once for Paula. Nor was it pure lust that attracted him, although he found her constant aura of detachment alluring.
He poured himself a nightcap from the bottle he’d brought with him. I want her maybe, because I’m not sure if she wants me. He smiled at himself, admitting this. “Can’t help it,” he said out loud. “Just can’t help myself.”
He took off his shoes and lay on the bed with his legs outstretched and crossed. It felt good, being away, being detached. He didn’t want to talk to Adrienne right then, and in any case, she wasn’t the type of woman who kept you to a timetable. Perhaps that was another part of the attraction of her. She had never once balled him out for not calling. A first.
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