Cleaving

by Julie Powell

  The result is the best meat you can buy. But there’s a lot less of it.

  So one night I am cooking up one of the steaks Josh has given me over my strong objections. He very nearly had to use force, which I would not put past him at all.

  Cooking these steaks is a somewhat nerve-wracking business because they are so expensive, and while they are still delectable if a little overdone, it seems a heartbreaking shame to miss out on the melting, chewy, meaty perfection of an ideally medium-rare aged strip steak. I follow Josh’s directions to the letter.

  JOSH’S PERFECT STEAK

  1 100% grass-fed, 21-day-aged, 1½-inch-thick bone-in New York strip steak

  1 tablespoon canola or safflower oil (optional) for seasoning the pan

  Coarse sea salt or kosher salt to taste

  Coarsely ground pepper to taste

  1 teaspoon softened butter (Josh insists on butter from grass-fed cows)

  2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil

  Preheat the oven to 350°F.

  Remove the steak from the refrigerator and let it stand uncovered for 20 to 30 minutes before cooking. Pat the steak dry to remove any excess moisture.

  Place a heavy, ovenproof sauté pan, preferably stainless steel or cast iron, over very high heat. If the pan is not well seasoned, put 1 tablespoon canola or safflower oil in the pan.

  (Use ovenproof pans only!!! “No plastic-handled pans!” Jessica always warns her customers, yet always there is some moron, irate or contrite, with stories of ruined cookware, burning plastic drooping, that horrid toxic smell …)

  Generously season the steak with salt and pepper right before you put it in the pan. Sear one side of the steak until a nice brown crust starts to form, about 2 minutes. Do not move the steak or press down on it in any way. Then flip the steak gently, using tongs (never pierce the steak with a fork!), and sear the other side.

  Remove the pan from the stovetop, top the steak with the butter and olive oil, and place the pan in the oven. Check the temperature of the steak after five minutes with a meat thermometer. For a rare steak, remove it from the oven at 115 to 120°F. Grass-fed meat, because it is so lean, will cook much more quickly than conventionally raised beef. (Not to get your nerves any more wracked or anything.) Place the steak on a cutting board or platter and let it rest for five minutes. The internal temperature of the steak will continue to rise. After five minutes, slice the steak into strips and arrange on a warmed platter. A New York strip can actually serve two people, but I will often eat this all by myself.

  I have not even bothered with a salad. This steak will be all I need.

  So I’ve cooked the steak, and as I’m standing there waiting with my glass of wine, just sort of staring at the meat as it rests, crusted brown and aromatic on a plate beside the stove, I’m dreamily imagining how it will soon melt richly in my mouth, make my head fall back with pleasure, and as I’m imagining this, something pops into my mind. A thought I immediately recognize as tortured, yet it remains somehow irresistible, a scab to be picked.

  What the hell else am I doing up here, idling, alone, if not dry-aging myself? And if that’s the case, what’s going to wind up rotting and being cut away? Is it our marriage that must succumb? Or maybe it’s all the rest that is expendable, that is the peeled-off age. The affairs, the hurt, D, all thrown away to find the tenderness of a new, sweeter marriage.

  Or maybe even I myself, my whole being, must be sloughed off something or someone else. I am the part that has to be discarded to make for something great, in which I’ll have no role.

  I’m leaking tears now as I stand, tongs in hand, watching a pool of pink juice that’s formed under the meat on the plate. Maybe when I’ve sat in my juices long enough, everything will come clear, I won’t want the rot, whatever it is, will see it as useless, no longer necessary. Is anything outside of butchery, outside of metaphor, ever that clean?

  The steak is beautiful. I take two home to New York the next day, to share with Eric. I don’t share my thoughts with him. He wouldn’t understand, or rather he would understand far too well. And for now it’s enough, just the pleasure of giving him that flavor, maybe explaining a bit about the aging process, about the sacrifice. Of moisture, that is, of flesh and fat.

  Two days later I am walking up Union Square from my yoga class along the east side of the park. And I see D.

  It’s not a surprise, exactly. The only surprise is that it took so long. I’m at Union Square at least three or four times a week, it’s the center of my life in the city. This happens to New Yorkers a lot, I think—periods of life defined by, mapped out on, some string of blocks, some neighborhood. Though Eric and I lived in Brooklyn when we were first married, much of our lives during those years played out on a few blocks of the East Village, between First and Avenue C, between 7th Street and 10th. An earlier period had me daily frequenting the West Village, Bleecker between Sixth Avenue and Seventh, Carmine and Bedford. For the last few years now, it’s been Union Square. I explain, when Gwen or another friend asks why this is, that it’s where my therapist is, my yoga studio, Whole Foods and the greenmarket and Republic, where the bartender knows me and pours my Riesling before I get up on my barstool. And all these things are true. But it all started with D. D works around here. Our affair began here, was carried out here—meetings at the Barnes & Noble, make-out sessions at the entrance to the subway or sitting on the grass of the square. Ended here. And the truth is I’ve been lingering here ever since, waiting to see him again. The only real point of interest—and if it’s not just my superstitious mind, this may make a sort of cosmic sense—is that it happens now, when for once, exhausted and maybe a bit blissed out by an hour and a half of inexpertly rendered warrior poses, I’m not thinking of him at all.

  I had wondered if I’d even recognize him if I saw him walking down the street, but I spot him in an instant, from a block away, with a throng of people between us, just the top of his head with that crimson hat and a brief glimpse of his gait. He’s coming right toward me. I’ve not seen him in months, I suddenly can’t breathe at all, my ears are full of droning.

  I stare desperately at the screen of my BlackBerry until he passes. I don’t try to catch his eye, and he either doesn’t see me or has pretended not to.

  He’s living in the world, the same world I’m living in, only I’m in this endless eddy and he’s floated on. He’s free. I’m sloughed off. I want to throw up.

  My brother wrote another refrigerator magnet poem, when he was probably nineteen or twenty:

  When the flood comes

  I will swim to a symphony

  go by boat to some picture show

  and maybe I will forget about you

  Nineteen years old. How did he know, way back then? How is it I know only now?

  11

  Hanging Up the Knife

  “AS LONG AS this candle burns, that’s how long we’ll be missing you here at Fleisher’s.… So, approximately twenty-four to twenty-six hours.”

  “Ba-da-BUMP!”

  We are standing in a circle in the middle of the shop half an hour past closing, drinking champagne out of chipped ceramic mugs. The table has been wiped and salted, our aprons are in the dirty laundry bin, my leather hat sits atop my packed bag. It’s my last day at the shop; I’d agreed to apprentice for six months, and I’ve done it. The sublet is up on my apartment; my husband is expecting me home, for good.

  The candle is one of Aaron’s latest endeavors, a golden pillar about six inches high. It’s made from beef tallow I helped him render. He hands it to me with a flourish. His mustache is by now a dark Snidely Whiplash thing that actually curls up at the ends. Colin now sports great long muttonchop sideburns. Josh of course still has his porntastic facial hair. (One of his favorite T-shirts reads: GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE. PEOPLE WITH MUSTACHES KILL PEOPLE.) The Great Facial Hair Face-off approaches. People are beginning to make bets, and Aaron is pondering prizes.

  I’ve received other gifts today as well. From J
esse, who has decided not to participate in any mustache growing, I get a carved marble egg, veined pink and black, and a small stand to set it on. “Maybe it will help your writing, I thought. Like a sort of object for meditation or something.”

  Josh hands me a CD in a case labeled A GOODBYE MIX FOR JULIE— JUAN. “He was in the store the other day. I told him you were following him, back out into the bad old world. He dropped this by.”

  “How is he? I miss him.”

  “You and me both, sister. But he’s doing good. The new charcuterie job pays more than I ever could. He’d have been crazy to pass it up. Onward and upward, y’know?”

  “I suppose so.” Last night I had a dream that I was about halfway up a sheer cliff, endlessly high. Up ahead of me was, it seemed, everyone I’d ever known—the guys at the shop, my family, Gwen, Eric, D—and they were pulling ahead, climbing fast, leaving me behind. I tried to call out but found I had no voice, that my words slurred and died in my mouth, that I could not be heard. I awoke with a terrified lurch, unable to scream. I have this dream all the time.

  In addition to the candle, Aaron has also presented me with a small, ornate gilt frame in which he has placed a picture of a cow, and over it the same motto that he says hangs on the wall of the office at the slaughterhouse where he has been training for the last couple of months: “If we are not suppose to eat animals, why are they made of meat?”

  “It took me forever to get that right, just like it is in John’s office. Spell check kept switching ‘suppose’ to ‘supposed.’ But I had to have it exactly.”

  “How very you. Well, it’s fantastic. Thank you. Will go right on my desk.”

  My desk at home, I mean, which has become a cluttered altar to at least one of my obsessions. A vintage Spanish poster is pinned up over it—an advertisement with an image of Don Quixote riding a hog, a fat ham skewered on his lance. The surface is stacked with butchery manuals and cookbooks and stacks of papers held down by a black stone, carefully shaped, round, concave on both sides. It’s called a “chunkee stone.”

  “C’mon. There have got to be like a thousand of those in that cabinet.”

  Eric remained firm. “Nine hundred and seventy-seven, actually. You know how I know that?”

  “No one is going to miss one itty-bitty ancient artifact. It would be really romantic…”

  “Julie. I can’t.”

  “You can’t, or you won’t?”

  “I can’t because I won’t.”

  “One early Native American field hockey puck. It doesn’t seem so much to ask.”

  It was his first job in the city, at the Museum of Natural History; he catalogued their North American archaeology collection. Lots of beads, lots of chunkee stones, which are in fact exactly what I say—ancient field hockey pucks. I coveted them, loved the way they felt, heavy and cool in the hand.

  Eric wound up hiring a stoneworker to make one for me. Which was a beautiful, touching gesture. Part of me still wishes he’d just stolen one.

  I LOVE all the gifts I’ve been given today, but the best one came hours ago.

  All morning I’d been “helping” Aaron make a porchetta he was giving some friends for their wedding reception. A whole pig, boned out, seasoned, and stuffed with an insane mélange of indulgence—garlic, onions, truffles, and several brined pork loins wrapped in bacon—then rolled up around a huge spit worked through the hog’s open mouth and down the length of the creature. I’d done nothing much more than help slice garlic and watch, agog, as he took all of the bones but for the skull out of the animal, keeping it all in one piece, until it was a gigantic, limp shawl of pork flesh. I did help roll the loins in bacon, and line them up end to end inside the carcass, and strew the entire thing with garlic and truffle slices; did help pull the pig around the spit and truss it tightly, a loop of heavy-duty wire in the place of the usual twine, every six inches, yanked until we had produced a long hog-cylinder, six feet of it, the head on one end the only variation to what was otherwise a completely uniform, skin-on, yellowish pink tube of meat. It looked so much like a penis that there was no joke to be made among even these embracers of the obvious. All you could really do was raise your eyebrows at it, and say, in high-pitched Josh style, “Oh-kaaaay…”

  Aaron had headed back to try to clear out a space in the cooler for the giant thing, a neat trick given that the cooler was overflowing with meat as it was. It took him a while to reemerge, and when he did it was just to poke his head around the steel door and call to me, “Hey, Jules, come back here for a sec. Need some help.”

  So I headed back to the cooler, where I found Aaron, Josh, and Jessica all crowded in among the shelves of bagged subprimals, great heaps of bottom rounds and chuck eyes. They were all three atwinkle with anticipation. “Close your eyes.” I did. Waited. “Okay, now you can open them.”

  When I did, Josh was holding out a black canvas cutlery case, with a shoulder strap, the kind every culinary student possesses, as ubiquitous as chef’s checks and clogs.

  “Ah, thanks, guys.”

  “Open it.”

  I tore open the Velcro fasteners and unfolded the thing, laying it out on the table. There were three knives inside. A five-inch boning knife, a foot-long scimitar, and a hugely heavy cleaver. “Oh!” I breathed. “These are great!”

  Josh was practically bouncing up and down. “Read the inscription.”

  Each of the knives had words engraved on the blade, in delicate letters. Julie Powell, Loufoque.

  “It’s louchébem. You know, what Aaron was talking about, French-butcher pig latin? It means ‘crazy lady.’ ”

  I burst into tears.

  “Oh no. You are not going to start bawling on me like a little bitch.” Josh turned on his heel and marched out of the cooler.

  Jessica hooted. “He is such a pussy.”

  “Jules!” Aaron pulled me in for a hug. “You’re a butcher now! The apprenticeship is over.”

  “Thank you, guys, so, so much. Really.”

  “And look!” Aaron took out the cleaver and pointed at the brand name carved into the other side of the blade.

  “Awesome. Just what I always wanted, my own big Dick.”

  “Ba-da-BUMP.”

  “I’m here all week.”

  “Yeah, I wish.”

  I teared up again, just a tad. “Yeah, me too.”

  “All right, all right,” said Jessica. “Enough already. Back to work, guys. It’s not even three o’clock yet.”

  NOW IT’S close to eight p.m., and we’re well on our way to finishing off the champagne. I eye the rapidly emptying bottle, knowing I’ll not be able to avoid the inevitable much longer, the good-bye speech, the drive home, the moment when I acknowledge that I don’t have a place at this table anymore. I’m afraid I’m going to cry again. In fact I know I will; I’m just hoping I can wait until I’m alone in the car to do it.

  “Julie, it’s been really great having you here.” It’s getting to be toast time. Jessica holds up her mug. “Just having another woman around, for one thing. My God, the testosterone overload around here sometimes, Jesus.” She gives me a tight hug. “Seriously. We’re going to miss you.”

  “Nah, she’ll be back. She can’t stay away.” Josh pours me a refill. The champagne is cheap and pink and I wish I could stay here all night drinking it. Wish I didn’t have to go home.

  “So, Jules, what did you learn today?”

  “Um… that Josh is a big wimp who freaks out at a few tears?”

  “That, and?”

  “That, and… oh, well, there was the porchetta. But I didn’t really learn how to do it. I just watched you.”

  “I promise, next time you need to bone out a whole pig and tie it to a spit, you’ll be able to figure it out.”

  “I suppose so. Man, I’ve seen some pretty phallic things around here, but that took the cake, I have to say.”

  “Sometimes a six-foot-long tube of pig is just a six-foot-long tube of pig.”

  “Uh-huh. And the
n sometimes not.”

  Hailey, sweet little strawberry-blond Hailey, sips with responsible conservatism at the wine she is too young to drink legally. “So you’re going to be coming back, right?”

  “If you guys’ll have me, yes. I don’t have a place to stay anymore, but I’ll come visit.”

  Josh flipped his hands at me dismissively. “There’s always our couch to sleep on, until you buy your own place.”

  “Buy my own place?”

  “Real estate shopping, you and me. Next time you’re up. And you know what else, crazy butcher lady?” Josh points at the time sheets in their slots hung on the wall just behind the counter. “From now on, you’re on the clock.”

  “Oh please.”

  “Fuck you, ‘Oh please.’ I’m not having any unpaid slackers on my table. I’m going to put you to serious work. None of this an-hour-to-break-down-a-shoulder crap.”

  “All right, all right…” Finally I raise my glass, reluctantly. “You guys, thank you so much for letting me stick around here. I’ve… this has been just the greatest… I…” I’m not going to start bawling, I’m not. “I don’t want to leave.”

  Josh pulls his lips down and his eyebrows up into a sad clown face that he manages to make at once mocking and sincere, almost a little teary himself. “Awww… now if you cry again, I’m going to bitch-slap you with Aaron’s porchetta.”

  It’s completely dark outside now. I have my duffel bag and my big grocery sack of meat, my candle and my marble egg and my little picture frame and my inscribed knives. It’s getting late. Eric is waiting. I’ve got to go home. My throat constricts.