by Julie Powell
Our cat Maxine took the opportunity of my distraction to steal a seat on MtAoFC, which promptly tipped off the edge of the counter, tumbling rubenesque cat and book both to the floor. Max dashed off in irked humiliation; the spine of the book had ripped loose from the back cover. By the time I’d picked it up again and found the page for Sauce à la Moutarde, Eric was gone, taking his iBook with him, leaving behind a whiff of hurt fury. My moral high ground had evaporated into mist.
I didn’t want to do this anymore. The Salmon à la Moutarde matched with braised endive was a disaster—somehow the endive made the salmon taste fishier, and the salmon made the endive taste more bitter. Eric and I hadn’t had sex for a month, and we sure weren’t going to end the drought tonight. But I couldn’t stop. Living in a universe where the laws of thermodynamics have run amok can be pretty great for a while, but eventually it can leave you careening out of control.
Gwen had known Mitch as a business associate for most of a year, through phone conversation, but it wasn’t until after he met her in person when he came to town for a commercial shoot that The Thing started up. She was the one who buzzed him into the office that morning.
“The famous Gwen, I presume?” he said, smiling, as he strode up to her desk, sliding off a pair of gloves with the languor of an adept hit man.
“Um, yeah?”
“At last we meet. Mitch from the LA office.” He held out his hand.
Mitch wasn’t a terribly big man, nor in fact a terribly good-looking one, when you got down to it, though his dark hair was stylishly mussed and he was wearing an overcoat so expensive-looking and luxurious that Gwen found herself wanting to touch it. Quite a coat indeed for an Angeleno who only wore it the two times a year he was in New York during the winter. When Gwen said, “Oh! Hi! Nice to meet you!” it came out louder, and squeakier, than she had meant it to.
“Phil said you looked like a young Renée Zellweger.” Gwen, who maintains a long-standing abhorrence for Renée Zellweger that I’ve never quite understood, had heard this several times before from Phil the shoulder-biter; she just grimaced. Mitch continued, “He’s an asshole. You’re clearly a dead ringer for Maggie Gyllenhaal.”
“Oh, come on.” She was starting to blush.
“Listen, I don’t go around telling women they look like movie stars. I’m serious—I’ve worked with Maggie. You could be her twin.” He leaned over the reception desk to get a better look at her. “Maggie’s teeny-tiny, elfin twin.”
Gwen knew she was grinning like a fool, but she couldn’t figure out what to do about it.
“Oh well; can’t expect Phil to be an astute judge of women, I don’t guess.” His large dark eyes were laughing at her, and he seemed to take up a bigger space in the narrow office than could be justified by his small frame. “Is the man in, actually?”
He gave her a wave and a wink when he walked out of Phil’s office as the both of them headed out to the set, but that was pretty much the sum of their sparkling repartee. So although Gwen had felt a passing, annoyingly Bridget-y sort of a jones for him, she did not think much of it.
Until she got the first IM three days later.
> Well, my mini-Maggie, I didn’t have the opportunity to get you drunk and have my way with you. A mistake I do not mean to duplicate on my next New York trip.
Gwen never had a chance.
As far as I understand, phone sex has always been a marginal activity, indulged in by a relatively small and specific, and generally lonely and unhappy, demographic. But the birth of the Internet bestowed the joys of anonymous noncontact sex upon the general populace. You can now find, with the click of a mouse, dozens upon dozens of sites dedicated to the notion that the hip and young, of every sex and all persuasions, choose cybersex, not out of hunger, but as one of many modes of satisfaction available to them in an ever-larger world. Now, I’m no sociologist, so forgive me if I’m making a faux pas here, but I’d be willing to bet that among these cutting-edge consumers of gratification, phone sex still does not pop up too often on the menu of options. I think that there’s a very simple reason why, which is that the written word is sexy.
Probably Eric and I are together to this day because of the sexiness of prose. When we were living in different states, back in college, we had our share of fraught, whispered, two a.m. phone calls, sure. But it was the letters that really kept the fire going. The entire tortured process—finding the envelope in the mailbox, carrying it in my backpack all day unopened until I was alone in bed at night, huddling over the pages to parse the cramped handwriting and violent scratch-outs, scrawling my reply, sweating out my anxiety until the next letter arrived—kept me in a haze my entire freshman year. It’s an absolute miracle I didn’t fail my first semester.
So I can understand exactly what Gwen was going through as she and Mitch began their agonizing IM back-and-forth. If you’ve ever done anything like this—and I suspect that if you’re a single office worker under the age of, say, forty, you almost can’t have avoided it—you’ll know what makes it almost impossible to resist is the combination of craft and spontaneity, joined by the particularly lethal instant gratification that the twenty-first century does so very well. In response to your coworker’s impromptu admission of lust, you will construct a riposte of baroquely balanced daring and aloofness, deliberating over every pronoun and abbreviation. All thought of work duties will cease as you immerse yourself in this literary puzzle, but painstaking though you may be, you will feel remorse from the moment you click the Send button, for a joke too juvenile or pretentious, a word too coy or vulgar. And professional concerns will not return to the forefront, because you will also be imagining him, in his own office four thousand miles away, going through the same creative spasms you just had—unless he isn’t, unless (perish the thought) he doesn’t plan to answer at all. You will suffer the pangs of the damned until his icon pops up on your screen again:
> You know what happens to cheeky monkeys like you, Maggie? They get spanked.
And by the time he lets slip the small fact of his eight-year marriage, you are far too far gone to care.
Foies de Volailles en Aspic is marginally less agonizing than Oeufs en Gelée—or was for me anyway, mostly because one taste of the calves’ feet gelée was enough to convince me that packaged gelatin and canned broth were the way to go for aspic when your name is Julie, not Julia. (Actually, my name is Julia too, but no one has ever called me that—I just don’t possess the gravitas, I guess. A Julia is brave and Junoesque and slightly forbidding; a Julie is a seventies-era cheerleader in pigtails and hot pants. No one would ever start a joking cyber-flirtation with someone named Julia. Apparently no one much wanted to start one with me, either. But that had nothing to do with my name and a lot to do with pushing thirty and ten pounds of butter-weight.
The item being aspic-ed in Foies de Volailles en Aspic is chicken liver, first sautéed in butter with shallots, then simmered in cognac until the wine’s gotten syrupy, then chilled. When they’re cold, the livers are immersed in gelée—topped with a slice of truffle if you can afford that kind of thing and rent too; I can’t—and chilled until set. Eric and Gwen and I ate these for dinner one evening, with Concombres au Buerre, also known as baked cucumbers, on the side.
“Concombres? We don’t need no steenkin’ concombres!”
This is what Eric said when I handed him his plate. Gwen just stared in silent terror. She had called that evening after a terrible day at work, asking if she could come to dinner, and although I’d sort of been hoping to get dressed in some outrageous lingerie and seduce my husband that night, I agreed, because since the whole Mitch Thing started, she’d been prone to depressions—thunderous, palpable depressions that made me look like a total lightweight. The poor girl must have been wondering why she’d turned to the friends she knew would try to cheer her up with aspic and baked cucumbers.
Eric dove in first—he chose to go with the aspic. He took a bite and shrugged. “Ehn.” Thus emboldened, Gwen and I
attempted tastes as well.
The verdict on Foies Volailles en Aspic? Surprisingly undisgusting, but why eat chicken livers cold with jelly on top of them, when you could eat them hot without jelly?
Our Concombres au Buerrelay on our plates, limp and pale and parsley flecked, waiting. “Okay, Eric, you first,” I said.
He got a cucumber strip onto his fork and gingerly took a bite. His eyes widened, expression blank, sort of like a character on South Park before delivering a punch line—I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“What?” Gwen and I asked in unison.
“Huh.”
I took a bite, too. “Huh!”
“What?”
Gwen ate some of hers, and said, “Huh!”
Verdict: baked cucumbers? A fucking revelation. They don’t melt away, and they actually taste like cucumbers. Only better, because I don’t like cucumbers.
After dinner, I walked Gwen down to let her out while Eric was washing the dishes. “Thanks for the cucumbers. They were really good.”
“No problem. You going to be able to get home all right?” I asked as I held the front door open for her.
“Sure—there’s my bus now, actually.” She stepped out into the cold, waving at the bus coming around the corner. It stopped and she hurried for it. Just before she got on, though, she turned around and shouted, “He’s coming. Mitch. Tomorrow night.”
I dimly remembered the feeling expressed by the look she shot me as she climbed aboard—half shitless terror, half stupid glee. And I felt a pang of envy.
Upstairs, I shed my sweatpants and T-shirt and sneakers and vamped through the kitchen doorway in a bra and panties set that actually matched. “Hon? Why don’t you leave the dishes until tomorrow morning?”
“I guess I’m going to have to—we just ran out of hot water.” He wiped off his hands, turned to me, looked me up and down, and said, “I need to check my e-mail.” Then he went to the laptop, where he spent the next forty-five minutes surfing CNN.
What am I, chicken livers in aspic?
I’m a secretary at a government agency, and so I can talk with some authority about things that are a pain in the ass. Say, for instance, filling out purchase orders. But do you want to know what’s really a pain in the ass? Poulet en Gelée à l’Estragon.
First you truss and brown in butter a whole chicken, season it with salt and tarragon, and roast it in the oven. When it’s done let it cool to room temperature, then chill it. I did this on Saturday, after I’d scrubbed the toilets and cleaned the kitchen as best I could. Actually, I roasted two chickens this way, so we’d have something to eat for dinner.
The kitchen was beyond my poor powers to improve by much. Cat hair clung stickily to the stainless steel grid suspended over the window, on which my pans were hung. Greasy yellow stains wouldn’t come off the walls above the stove, no matter how I scrubbed. I distracted myself from the misery of my poor housekeeping with the misery of making gelée, which at least wasn’t my fault. This particular gelée was made with canned chicken broth, steeped with tarragon and flavored with port—some Australian stuff I’d gotten at the wineshop at Union Square, which tasted surprisingly good. Good enough to have two glasses, because Eric was at the office, “working,” though probably he just didn’t want to spend his Saturday in a filthy “loft” watching his wife work herself into a snit making gelée. I couldn’t blame him—I didn’t want to spend my Saturday doing that either.
But I guess there are even worse things to do with your Saturday, because he came home at seven in a surly mood. All he said about the dinner was that he didn’t like tarragon, and we wound up drinking too much, watching some German movie from Netflix, and falling asleep on the couch.
Then, to cap it all off, he woke up Sunday with one of his headaches. He lay in bed until late in the morning. “Honey,” I called to him at eleven or so, not trying very hard at all not to sound irritated, “you want coffee?”
“Gah, no. I’ll pick up some Gatorade on the way to the office.”
“You’re not going to the office! You can’t, you’re practically dead.”
“I have to. I’ll feel better once I get up.” Then he propelled himself out of bed in a single resigned lunge, retrieved the crumpled clothes he’d shucked on the way to the bed when we awoke at two a.m. with our contacts seared to our eyeballs and matching cricks in our necks, and went to the bathroom to throw up. After that was done he stared at the paper for a while, rubbing the stubble on his gray cheeks as if for comfort, and then abruptly stood up and lurched for the door. I’ve never understood that about Eric, how he can just head outside all of a sudden, with not a moment of preparation. I couldn’t do that if we were evacuating under threat of radiation poisoning.
“Um, bye?”
“Sorry, honey.” He came back to where I was sitting and pressed chapped lips quickly up against my cheek. “My breath stinks. I’ll see you around six, I hope.”
To put together Poulet en Gelée à l’Estragon, start by heating up the jelly and pouring a thin layer of it onto an oval serving dish. Except I didn’t have an oval serving dish, so I used a hip-to-be-square chunky white Calvin Klein platter that we got for a wedding present. (Did you know Calvin Klein had a line of chinaware? Well, he does.) This is then supposed to chill until set, which of course entailed emptying an entire shelf of my fridge, so that I had jars of jams and half-gone limes and forgotten sour creams and wilted bags of parsley and odd pats of butter with funny smells scattered over my none-too-clean countertop. For a person like Sally or my mother, this would have been enough to kick off a refrigerator-cleaning spree, but I am not such a person.
Once the first layer of gelée is jelled, carve the chicken you’ve roasted and chilled and arrange it on the platter. I am not much of a chicken carver. My pieces came out looking rather mauled, but I was in no mood to care. Stick the platter back in the fridge while you stir a cup of the warmed jelly in a bowl set over another bowl of ice, until it cools and begins to set. Spoon it over the chicken on the platter. Julia told me that the first layer would “not adhere very well,” and that was certainly the case.
Gwen called. “Hey.”
“Hey. How was your big weekend?”
“Can I come over?”
“Uh-oh. That bad? Don’t answer that—come on over. Eric won’t be home until six. I’m making aspic.”
“Oh great. The perfect ending to the perfect weekend.”
Repeat the whole pouring-half-set-jelly-on-top-of-the-chicken-pieces twice more. The next two layers stick better than the first. The chicken will begin to look polyurethaned, which I suppose is the point. Slide it back into the refrigerator to finish setting.
I was stuffing the crap I’d pulled from the refrigerator into a big black garbage bag when Gwen rang the doorbell. She must have sprung out of her door the second she hung up the phone. Not a good sign. I went downstairs to let her in.
“I brought vodka. Can we start drinking yet?”
“Oh, Gwen. What happened?”
We headed back up to the kitchen, and while I started blanching tarragon leaves—dumping them in boiling water, scooping them right out again, running cold water over them, laying them out onto paper towels to dry—Gwen parked herself on a stool and gave me the blow-by-blow, as it were.
It had all started out so well. Well, I mean once you set aside the sheer impossibility and bad judgment of it. They’d met on Thursday night in a suitably skeezy bar Mitch knew in the West Thirties. He had the situation in hand from the second she sat down beside him in the booth and he had a drink waiting for her—Scotch and soda. She’d told him she was more of a vodka tonic sort of girl, but he just said, “Not tonight you aren’t.” And thus the tone of the evening was set. The arrogant, dominating, sexually irresistible Mitch of the instant messages had been made flesh. One Scotch and soda later, she had her hand on his crotch, right there in the bar; two more after that and they were locked in a stall in the ladies’ room, grappling to get into ea
ch other’s clothes.
“Grappling in a ladies’ room stall sounds pretty good to me, or maybe that’s just five years of marriage getting to me.” I opened up the refrigerator to get the chicken back out, passing Gwen the ice tray while I was at it. (She’d decided that 3:30 was definitely not too early to start drinking.) “So what’s the problem?”
“Well, we went back to the apartment where he was staying, and—God, is that what we’re eating for dinner?” The third layer of jelly on the chicken was almost set, and I was painstakingly and frustratingly dipping each small tarragon leaf into yet another cup of semiset gelée before arranging them in little stupid-looking X’s on the chicken pieces. On the Oeufs en Gelée, tarragon X’s had looked vaguely forbidding; on Poulet en Gelée à l’Estragon, they just looked bedraggled and sad. “Afraid so.”
“No offense or anything. I’m sure it’s great. Can we heat it up first or something?”
One last cup of jelly got poured over the chicken, which kattywhompused the tarragon leaves. Screw it. I threw it back in the fridge, mixed myself a vodka tonic—what the hell—and settled down on the other kitchen stool. Gwen shook out a cigarette and lit it for me, then one for herself.
“It was this absurdly fantastic loft, you could put a roller-skating rink in there—belongs to a friend of Mitch’s, I don’t know who. Not that I got much of a chance to look at it. Julie, the sex was just—God. You know how when you’re with a guy who’s, you know, really big, he’s usually lousy in bed, it’s always just about worshipping his breathtaking member or whatever? Well, Mitch is, well—you know—but he isn’t like that at all. I swear to God, I came at least ten times, no joke.”
I have been with the same man since I was eighteen years old, and yet my single friends continue to talk to me about these things as if I have a clue. I don’t know if they think I was some kind of world-class teenage slut, or I can remember my past lives, or what. Thank God for Sex in the City; I just put on my best Cynthia Nixon commiserating-savvy-girlfriend face and nod.