by Julie Powell
The man rips my panties down and goes about his nasty, brutish, and short business. He mutters filthy, stupid nothings into my ear with hot breath. I squeeze my eyes shut, concentrate on D. With what different, breathtaking force he once would throw me against a wall, pull up my skirt. When all my need became too much for him, when he needed to just shut me up. How better everything was between us afterward.
It’s over in three minutes. In five I’m back out on the street, my guts aching and my BlackBerry in a trembling hand.
I don’t know what to do. Just had the worst sex in the world with a total stranger to try to get you out of my head. It didn’t work. I know you want nothing to do with me, but I need help. Please. XxxxoHH-j
That night, I’m back home with Eric, chopping pancetta for a pasta dinner. The knife doesn’t shake in my hand, I am capable of smiles and conversation that, if not closely observed, seem natural. But the tremor is not gone, it’s just gone underground, making my eyeballs jiggle in their sockets. When my BlackBerry trills on the kitchen table, my breath goes and I nearly knock the cutting board off the counter when I reach for the phone. But it’s only Gwen calling. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” Gwen’s voice is queer, with both a twist of tension and an unusual drip of concern. “I just wanted to call to see how you’re doing.”
“Um… I’m fine.” I didn’t tell Gwen about my experience this afternoon; didn’t tell anyone but D. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no particular reason. I just… just thought maybe I should check in. See if you’re holding up. We haven’t talked in a while.”
I glance up at Eric. He’s across the room on the couch watching Jim Lehrer, sipping from his wineglass. I take a gulp from my own and reply as casually as possible, “Oh thanks, I’m doing good. Eric and I are just putting together some dinner. You want to come over? Just spaghetti.”
“Ah. No, thanks. But soon, for sure. You’ll be on IM tomorrow?”
“Sure.” I’m pretty sure now what she knows and how she knows it. I just don’t know what that means.
“Okay. We’ll talk then. And—I love you, Julie.”
“Um, I love you too.”
“Have a good night. Be good to yourself.”
“Okay. ’Night.”
When I lower my phone to press the End Call button, I notice that my hand is quivering again. Of course, with the butchery, my hand is often tired these days. Eric looks up from the TV. “That Gwen? What did she want?”
“Just checking in. We’ll have her over to dinner in a few days, probably. You want some more wine?” I ask as I pour some for myself. I walk toward him and empty the last of the bottle into his waiting glass.
I HAVE gotten quite good at tying roasts, which pleases me immensely. Is there a single action that more quintessentially evokes butchering? It is both delicate and, sometimes, painful. The twine can bite into fingers, cut off circulation, but the swirling motions as I quickly make the knot and pull it tight are graceful and feminine.
As the holidays approach I’m getting more and more practice with tying, as people begin ordering fancy roasts for their celebratory dinners. Thanksgiving is supposed to be the single craziest time of the year, a line out the door, many of the customers cranky and worried, waiting to pick up their heritage turkeys or some pâté for their cocktail hours or bacon for their brussels sprouts. Every year, apparently, the Fleisher’s crew makes something of a celebration of the ordeal. Everyone dresses up as some goofy thing or another. Jessica hands out plastic glasses of beer. This year Hailey, the heartbreakingly young new hire they have at the counter, lovely and tiny and endlessly sweet—dubbed Schmailey by Josh—will be the one who rings up orders and calms the restless beasts lying in the hearts of anxious cooks on overdrive. I wish I could be there for that.
Instead, Eric and I wind up spending the holiday in Dijon, France, of all places, with his father and stepmother. Eric is running the Beaujolais marathon. He was never a runner before, but since our marriage has fallen into such spectacular shambles he has suddenly taken up the sport. He’s already run the New York City Marathon and is determined to get more under his belt. On the day of the race we meet him at the finish, at the top of a rather punishing hill in the center of the town of Beaujolais, along a medieval cobblestone street.
“How’d it go?” I ask, giving him a kiss on his sweaty cheek.
“Good! Sort of silly.” He plops down on a chair at the sidewalk café table his stepmother and I have staked out near the finish line. “The Beaujolais marathon is not the place to work on breaking any records. We were literally running down stairs into wine cellars.”
“You’re kidding!” Jo Ann’s tone is, as usual, effusive. Delicious delight with the magical oddity of the universe is her favorite emotion.
“I didn’t drink the wine, which I sort of regret.”
“They were passing out wine at a marathon?”
“Oh yes.”
Eric always looks remarkably not-at-death’s-door after these races, though for the rest of the day his brain function is not what it usually is. He seems to be built for endurance. I honestly think the running is helping him keep his sanity—whatever sanity either of us has managed to maintain.
“So, I got this, though.” He holds up the shiny silver cup hanging by a sash around his neck. “What is it, anyway?”
“I think it’s a tastevin. Like, a pretentious sommelier’s cup.”
“There are unpretentious sommelier’s cups?”
“Good point.”
We stay at a beautiful country inn, an ancient old house with light-filled rooms and a classically snooty Gallic proprietress. Eric and I love it. Yet I’m with him and his parents at every moment. I feel very alone and very crowded in at the same time. I think Eric feels the same way; catching a look at his face when he doesn’t know I’m watching, I see eyes somehow both dull and wet. It seems sometimes that we aren’t so angry with each other anymore, that we shouldn’t be, with D and Eric’s lover both out of the picture. But I wonder if he still longs for the woman he broke it off with. Whoever she was, I certainly know how the comforts of simple romance tempt.
When I find a café with Internet access, I send another in an endless wash of e-mails. It’s as involuntary an action as sneezing.
I keep thinking how much fun you and I would have here, lounging about all indolent and shit.… This is me pretending that one day soon you’re going to start talking to me, and we’ll get together and this whole thing will be this funny story we tell.… xohxohxoh
I try not to expect and indeed receive no response.
Thanksgiving dinner is a multicourse lunch at a Michelin-starred restaurant in a small village. I’m distracted. I don’t remember afterward what we ate. At least I’m spared the afternoon of football, the part of Thanksgiving I dread. The origins of my deep-seated phobia surrounding all spectator sports are obscure, but the result is that I can barely be in the same room with a TV blasting statistics and plays. It’s one of Eric’s and my few absolute incompatibilities. This year he scurries out to find Internet service every few hours to check on the scores, an arrangement I am content with.
In the evenings Eric and I wander the cold and damp streets of Dijon, a somber town, but with a sort of understated melancholy that feeds all too well into our mood. I’ve taken up smoking again after having (mostly) quit for some time. France seems the place for it.
“I have to say, it suits you. Very sexy.”
Though Eric essentially disapproves of my habit, he’s also something of an enabler. I think he likes the look of a woman smoking, just as he likes the look of a woman with a martini glass in her hand. It fits his noir sensibility. In any case, he might say I’m sexy, but I just smirk skeptically, and he follows up with a sad, affectionate smile. We’re acting out parts, and we know it.
“Oh, wow. Look at those.”
In a shop window two mannequins are draped with two men’s scarves, dramatically and abstractly floral, one p
attern orange and crimson and gray, another sky blue and sea green and gray.
“The blue would look gorgeous on you.” And the red would suit D to a tee. “Would you wear that?”
“It’s kind of out there. I like it, though. But, um, I’m not buying a three-hundred-dollar scarf.”
“That’s pretty crazy, it’s true.”
Later, I return alone. I finger the exquisitely soft weave of the two scarves longingly. Can I buy two three-hundred-dollar scarves? How insane is that? Finally I whisper “Screw it,” pick one, and carry it to the counter.
“The red is an excellent choice,” the handsome young man behind the counter says, in English, as he begins to wrap the scarf in tissue paper.
“Thanks,” I reply, not saying what I think, which is, Actually, it’s the worst of choices.
The Monday after we return from France, I pull my first actual, for-real stalking. I easily convince myself it’s only fair, after I’ve tried for so long to reach him in all the more usual, less invasive ways. I warn him ahead of time, via text, that I’ll be there, with a gift. I wait for an hour and a half outside the door of the building where he works. When he finally comes out, my face melts into a soppy smile that I can’t prevent at the sight of him. But he merely grimaces as if in pain and keeps walking, allowing by a single impatient jerk of his head that I may follow. We walk together in silence a moment, downtown. He’s wearing a leather jacket I’ve never seen before, as well as the familiar crimson knit cap I was thinking of when I bought the scarf.
“What do you want?” Still walking. Not looking at me. His anger is coming off him like the basal grumble of an idling semi truck; I feel its vibrations in my chest. I’ve never seen him truly angry before. It terrifies me, makes me stammer and blush.
“I just—I don’t know. I just—all of a sudden this silence. You seem to hate me, and I don’t understand why. I just thought, if maybe I could understand what happened, I’d be able to feel better.”
“Well, what do you think happened?”
This is how D argues. Teasing out answers, giving none of his own. I think of it as his Socratic method. It makes me feel like a schoolgirl with scabs on her knees, but I’ve never been able to alter the line of an argument with him so that it turns out any other way.
“I don’t know. It couldn’t be the horrible anonymous sex. The silence was the reason for the horrible anonymous sex.”
“You had horrible anonymous sex, and then you told me about it. Why would you do that?”
“I just—”
“Why would I want to be in a relationship like that?”
“I—” I am shocked into speechlessness. I could never have guessed at such a reaction, from D—unhurtable, impenetrable D. For a vertiginous moment I’m almost thrilled.
We come to a standstill at the south end of Union Square, across 14th Street from the Whole Foods, at the crosswalk. The holiday craft fair that takes over the square from Thanksgiving until Christmas is being erected; to get out of the way of pedestrians we back up against a wall of brightly painted plywood. “Look, I’m not really mad.” He’s talking so quietly I have to lean in to hear him. I want to touch the smooth leather of his lapel so badly, it’s like fighting gravity.
“Yes, you are.” I stand a moment, hideously unable to speak. Strings cinch tight around my throbbing heart.
“Did Gwen call you?”
I nod quickly, looking hopefully into his eyes, beautiful eyes even when angry, for forgiveness or concern. “Yes… she didn’t say anything about… she was just checking on me.”
“Good.” He won’t meet my eyes, stares at his feet. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I… I’m… thank you.”
“I just can’t—” I can’t catch all his words. I hear him say something about being “unable to reciprocate,” a phrase I immediately latch onto as possibly horrible, but also maybe hopeful. I can work with unable to reciprocate. I can make it easier for him to reciprocate, I can do without reciprocation! But I don’t dare say anything, and then he says, “I have to get some lunch and go back to work.”
I nod vigorously, obediently. “Yes. Go. Eat.”
“I want to hug you, but…” His words descend again into indecipherability under the roar of traffic.
“I’m sorry… what did you say?”
“I want to hug you, but I don’t think I should!” Snappish.
“Oh. Okay. All right.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Yes. Okay.” I try to press the bag with his scarf inside into his hand, but he just gives me one last, faintly incredulous glance, and turns to walk away.
I manage to keep from collapsing to the pavement in tears for approximately half a block. Wind up sobbing at the feet of the Gandhi statue near the corner of 15th and Union Square West. So classic. I ought to have my own New Yorker cartoon.
HAVING MISSED Thanksgiving at Fleisher’s, I must make up the time, for myself and for Josh. I’ll be working right up until Christmas Eve. My parents and brother are coming from Texas for the holiday so I can both spend time with them and log in the necessary hours at the shop. They’ve rented a cottage just up the road from my small apartment. We’re going to make pork crown roast for Christmas Day dinner; I’m going to cut and tie it myself.
But it’s not quite time for that. For now, I’m just tying a bottom round for Aaron. I bring the cone-shaped spool of butcher’s string to the table. I place the oblong muscle, which I’ve released from its Cryovac bag with a slash of my knife, on the table so that the short end of the rectangular cut of meat is facing me. I unwind a couple of feet of twine and slide it under the round, then loop up over the meat from the back to the front. Holding the twine taut along the top of the round with my right hand, with my left thumb and forefinger I loop the other end, the one snaking out from under the meat, over and under it. I perform the same twirling movement with thumb and forefinger a second time, over the upper length of string, down through the loop I’ve just made between my first knot and the incipient second. Then with my left hand pinching the two-loop knot, I gently, evenly, pull the string through it, until it tightens. I don’t pull too quickly or the knot will catch before it’s cinched tight around the meat. Once the string has done its job of gathering the meat in a bit, not too much, I make one final twirl of thumb and forefinger, an overhand knot, and tighten, to reinforce. Then I cut through the string, freeing it from the spool, leaving at the forward end a neat knot, two white, slightly unraveling bits of string sticking out like a young girl’s pigtails.
All this is the work of about ten seconds. Which is not terribly fast. I’m more precise—or perhaps, to be honest, more hesitant—than I am speedy.
The next loop of string goes around the length of the meat as well but perpendicular to the first, so that the string never slides under the round. Getting the angle on the loop in this direction was at first a little tricky, but I’ve gotten pretty used to it. I still have to tilt my head to the side to get my bearings. Again, I don’t pull the string too tight; if there’s too much pressure now, the twine could snap by the time I finish.
Next I lift the round off the table, turn it ninety degrees, and set it back down. I’m going to be tying circles of string up and down the whole length of the roast, about an inch and a half apart. In the end, the little bulges of meat between the loops of taut string will make the roast look segmented, like a little flesh caterpillar. An image that we will not be sharing with the customers. I start in the middle, scooting the twine up along the underside of the meat to the center. Loop, loop, cinch, loop, cinch, cut. From there I move out. One circle to the left of center, one to the right. If I had started from one end and worked to the other, it would be like squeezing a toothpaste tube from the bottom, correct form for toothpaste but not for beef. I want a regular cylinder when I’m done, which will cook evenly, not a squashed roast, tiny at one end, bulging to bursting at the other.
When I finish the roast I furtivel
y eye the clock. Two minutes. I cannot yet tie a roast in twice the time Josh and Aaron can break down a side of pork. (Josh recently edged out Aaron’s score of fifty-eight seconds by two seconds. Stopwatches are now involved, and precompetition stretches.)
Josh walks by, always walking by on his way to someplace else. “Julie, that’s perfect. You are my god.”
“Uh-huh.” That would seem high praise, except that Josh uses that particular phrase about five times a day. Still, it is rather lovely. I fancy that I tie the prettiest roasts in the shop, though I would never say so. I carry it back to the kitchen along with several marrow bones—that is, sections from the middle of the shank bone, cut on the band saw into two-inch rounds. I rub the roast generously with the salt and pepper and brown it over high heat on the stovetop before arranging it on top of the bones and sticking it into the oven.
Then I wash my hands and loiter for a moment over a cup of coffee. Juan’s trying out a new chicken and lamb sausage, “Moroccan-style.” He’s fried up some of his latest batch before stuffing it into the casings. On a kelly green plate sits a small pile of cooked ground meat, a slowly cooling pool of grease. I nibble.
“Mmm. Juan, what’s in this? Good!”
Juan shrugs. “Dried apricots, garlic, cilantro, turmeric, ginger… I don’t know. It’s missing something, I think.”
“Yeah?”
Juan shrugs again and rubs his chin. He is beginning to grow a goatee for the Great Facial Hair Face-off that Aaron has got scheduled for the spring. We both take another taste of the sausage and stare together at the plate intently. Then he nods. “Just a little more cinnamon, I think.”
“Jules?” Aaron gestures me over to the table. He’s holding a rack of lamb’s ribs loosely in one hand. “You set the timer?”
“Yeah. One hour, twenty minutes, right?”