Cleaving

by Julie Powell

  I don’t get a block away from the apartment before the first man stops me.

  “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

  He is a bit older than I, well dressed, tweedy in that good, Giles-y sort of way. I find myself giving him a wide smile. “Thank you!” I walk on.

  It keeps happening, all day. On the subway, in bookstores, in restaurants, on the street. I get whistles, open stares, extravagant compliments. From men young and old, wealthy and destitute, of every color. Man, what a figure…. You have a beautiful face.…I get hit on by a couple of guys at the bar at Republic, which I come by so I can say hello to Marcel, my favorite bartender. The guy collecting money for the homeless in a watercooler jug doesn’t even give me the “One penny! One penny!” spiel. He just says, “You have amazing legs.” A sultry dark-haired young man working at one of the greenmarket booths shoots me a bedroom smile from across a bin of apples. I’ve never gotten attention like this in my life. I could get used to it.

  But the best part, the part that makes me feel like something strange is happening, is how I respond. I do not blush and sweat and turn away, and neither do I feel a pang of craving for more, more. To each man I nod with a small smile as I pass by without stopping, as if graciously receiving my due. I am beautiful, yes, it’s true, thank you for your kindness. It feels utterly foreign, but as natural as sunshine.

  That night, once I’m home and the spell has faded, I’m still all a-burble with the aftereffects, becoming giddy, as I’d not been when it was happening. “I swear to God, there was something otherworldly going on.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re gorgeous.”

  “I’m really not. I’m telling you, it was weird. I wonder what it was?”

  “Maybe that you’re gorgeous?” Eric is making a stew, peering down into a big pot, at the bottom of which chunks of beef I bought at the greenmarket this afternoon sizzle merrily in bacon fat. It is a meal for a November night, a meal for home, and I’m ravenous.

  “No, that’s not it. I lost some weight, that could be part of it. But can’t account for it all. The lipstick, maybe? No…”

  “You’re not listening to me.… Ouch!” He jerks his hand back as fat splashes up. “You think these are brown enough?”

  “Looks good.” I’m sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, rather unable to let it all go. “Oh, well, duh! It’s the skirt, of course.”

  Eric shrugs. He’s fishing the stew meat out in batches as he sears them well on all sides. “It’s a cute skirt.”

  “It’s a magical skirt. My Ukrainian Magical Mystical Skirt, bestowing the power of instant irresistible sex appeal.”

  Now that all the beef is browned, Eric’s scraping a hillock of chopped vegetables and herbs from a cutting board into the pot. There is a lively hiss as he begins to stir. “Great.”

  “I think so. That smells good.”

  “We may be eating just a wee bit late.”

  “Fine by me.” My stomach is growling.

  Once Eric has gotten his stew composed and in the oven, we retire to the couch with our bottle of wine (well, our second if you count what was left of the bottle he opened to add to the stew, which we’ve already finished off) to wait for it to come back out again.

  I’d thought that after a month of relative teetotaling, and after coming home to find this new sense of comfort, this lack of dread, I’d not drink so much, and we have, after all, limited ourselves to one and a half bottles tonight, half our usual amount. But I’ve not counted on my reduced tolerance and the fact that I have had nothing but the two glasses of wine and the vegetable dumplings Marcel served me during my glamour spell at Republic. The next morning I’ll not remember much of the DVDs we watched. As I recall, we started with an episode of Joss Whedon’s sci-fi Western, but now The Third Man is in the machine—and I barely remember the stew, though at least we did manage to get it out of the oven without burning it to a crisp. It goes on to make a bizarre but delicious breakfast for us both. This is Eric’s recipe:

  ERIC’S BEEF STEW

  3 pounds beef chuck stew meat, in 2-inch chunks

  ½ cup flour, in a shallow bowl or baking pan

  3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus some more

  1 onion, sliced into thin half-moons

  5 cloves garlic, minced

  3 carrots, peeled and cut into ½-inch rounds

  3 stalks celery, finely sliced

  1½ tablespoons fresh thyme

  2 cups red wine

  1¼ cups beef stock

  1 tablespoon tomato paste

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Preheat the oven to 300°F. Dry the stew meat with paper towels and toss them lightly with the flour until evenly dusted. On the stovetop, in a heavy soup pot, brown the meat in batches over high heat in the olive oil.

  Once the meat has all been browned, remove it to a plate and set aside. Turn the heat down to medium, add another small glug of oil, and throw in the vegetables and thyme and cook, stirring often, until softened, about 10 minutes.

  Return the beef to the pot, then add the wine, beef stock, and tomato paste. Stir in salt and pepper. Don’t go light on either, but especially not the pepper, which ought to be freshly ground, really.

  Cover the pot and slide it into the oven. Cook until the meat is meltingly tender, about 3 hours, or when you wake up on the couch, with the wife you still love like your own flesh snoring beside you, with her feet in your lap and a wineglass threatening to spill from her fingers. Rub her feet and remove the glass before rousing her enough to slip out from under her to fetch the stew. Two people can get three meals apiece out of this. Eat some, blearily, right away, then let cool thoroughly on the stovetop; all night long is fine. It will taste much better in the morning.

  THANKSGIVING COMES EARLY this year, just three days after I arrive back home, so we decide on a quiet day, no family, just the two of us and Gwen at our apartment (her boyfriend is out of town), a turkey and dressing and a couple of vegetables. We’ve finally, finally seen about as much of Buffy as we can collectively stand. It’s time to move on, so our postmeal TV watching consists of four or five episodes of our brand-new obsession, Veronica Mars. We continue to drink and nibble and fall asleep on the couch, eventually. It’s pleasant, easy, and just a tad morose.

  How we approach Thanksgiving, it turns out, is how Eric and I seem to be approaching all aspects of fitting back into our life together. We don’t have fights in the middle of the night anymore, I don’t wake up in the morning to the heat of Eric’s radiating anger. And neither do I feel that same trapped, claustrophobic feeling that used to overwhelm me in the evenings. This doesn’t mean all is well, though. More like all is quiet and waiting to see.

  “I think we should go to couples’ therapy, Julie. Maybe start up after the holidays.”

  We’ve talked about this before, of course. For the first time the suggestion doesn’t fill me with stark terror. But I’m still uncertain. “Okay. I don’t know if that can fix things.”

  “You mean you don’t know if you want to fix things.”

  “No! I love you, I want you in… I just don’t know if I want to be—”

  “Married.”

  I flinch a bit, pressing my lips into a thin pale line, and say nothing.

  Since we didn’t see family for Thanksgiving, we arrange a trip for Christmas with my folks, as last year, only this time we all come together in Santa Fe. There is, as usual, much eating and jigsaw puzzling. I buy Eric something carefully unromantic, a Bose dock for his iPod.

  He gives me a knife.

  Actually, it’s a necklace, a delicate silver pendant on a chain, a charm of a knife, and the hilt is studded with tiny diamonds, the tip actually sharp enough to hurt just a bit when I press it into the flesh below my breastbone.

  “Oh my God.”

  “I know it’s not the right kind of knife. I wanted a cleaver or a—”

  “It’s perfect.” I’m tearing up, and my parents and my br
other think I’m being a little silly, sentimental over a thoughtful gift. But Eric and I know it’s something else. I don’t read aloud the small card he’s tucked inside the box.

  For my butcher wife. To do with as you will.

  I AWAKE early on the morning of New Year’s Eve, roused by a dream. I’m in a dark corner of a library or bookstore, and a man, someone faceless and irresistibly strong, is forcing himself upon me, holding me down, roughly fondling me. I try to scream out, there are people so close who could help, but my voice dies in my mouth. It is the most helpless feeling in the world, and familiar, and somehow my fault. But still I try to cry out, and try, and desperately try, and.… “Stop!!”

  Eric jerks up in bed in terror. “What? What? Are you okay?”

  I am, already, in the wake of the nightmare, smiling. “Yeah, actually. Sorry.”

  “You had a bad dream?”

  “Yeah. But it’s okay. I could scream.”

  “No shit.”

  I feel like I just woke from a dream of fine wine and warm summer evenings.

  Eric tumbles back to his pillow. It’s nearly dawn, the light outside our apartment window tender and growing. He and I are having a dinner party, eight people coming for our usual New Year’s Cajun feast. There’s cleaning and shopping and cooking to be done, and what with recovering from Christmas and traveling I’ve not gotten around to much of it.

  Before getting out of bed I unplug my BlackBerry and scroll through e-mails, as is my habit, leaning up against Eric’s bare back. In the past month or so, since returning from my trip, I’ve gotten used to the touch of Eric’s skin again, am no longer afraid of him or his expectations. It helps that he has ceased to demand. Maybe he feels me slowly coming back to him, or pulling away, or whatever it is that’s happening to me. Perhaps I seem to be doing both at once. But we are, for the first time in a long while, relatively content.

  My in-box contains a message from iTunes. I think it’s just a receipt for one of our latest purchases, a TV show or an album, but no. This is something else.

  “You’ve received an iTunes gift.”

  I click to open. And have to will myself not to stiffen as I read what’s inside.

  Julie

  I shouldn’t be writing you, but I’ve listened to this song 230 times in the last week and it reminds me of you for some reason.

  Happy new year.

  Damian

  So, yes. This program has been brought to you by the letter D, but of course he has a name. It’s a name that has often struck through me like lightning. But for the last year and more, in my phone, in my distraught e-mails, in my journals and letters, in my heart, he’s been reduced to D. A reduction that has perversely seemed to make his power over me even more entire—symbolic, abstract. Godlike, in point of fact, the similarity underlined not least by his extreme absence, nor by the fact that the past few months have seen me beginning at last to add my ex-lover to the list of things I no longer believe in.

  So to see his name there, unaccompanied but entire, at the bottom of an e-mail, is to be suddenly shocked into remembering: this is a man. Not some kind of sinister force, irresistible and fatal. I once looked up the meaning of his name. It is from the Greek, and it means “to tame.” I took this much to heart. But this is just a guy. A guy who’s weak too sometimes, a guy who’s just said he shouldn’t be doing something, but is going ahead and doing it anyway.

  It’s a little dizzying. I can’t tell if I’m ecstatic or terrified or pissed to the eyeballs.

  Yes, I can. I’m all those things.

  The song is “Willin’ ” by Little Feat.

  First of all: What the fuck?! Second: What. The. Fuck? “Willin’ ”? I know the song “Willin.’ ” It’s a song about hopped-up truckers. What in the hell is that supposed to mean?

  Also? What the fuck?!!!!

  I get up and, while Eric is still in bed, download the song and listen to it several times with my earphones on, laughing sometimes, rolling my eyes, tearing up once or twice, letting my heartbeat slowly back off its hysterical beat.

  It’s a great song, one I know well. But it’s a song about a fucking trucker. A trucker who sees his Alice in every headlight. A trucker who’s been from Tucson to Tucumcari. A trucker who’s willing. Willing to be moving. What does it mean?

  So, yes, I microanalyze. The strange thing is, though, that by the time Eric arises and we begin discussing our plans for the day—a shopping trip for me, a bit of work and a run for him—I’m actually something close to calm. I wait several hours to respond to this strange missive. (That in itself a once unheard-of accomplishment.) Shortly before I leave to go into the city, I shoot out a quick e-mail:

  Damian

  I’m assuming that the song you’ve sent me was just a New Year’s–related moment of weakness/douchebaggery. If not, though, and you want to talk, I will be at Union Square, at the greenmarket, at one o’clock.

  Julie

  I don’t expect him to show. I don’t really dare to hope for it, am not even absolutely sure that I want it. I remember well the breakdown that seeing him once before inspired. And I have too much to do today for histrionics.

  In summer, the greenmarket is an explosion of color and noise and crowds, a city of foodies descending like plagues upon bright piles of broad beans and bins of corn and glorious, knottily shaped tomatoes. In the winter, however, it’s a tiny, quiet, gray affair. I don’t have to wait in line at the bakery booth for a couple of baguettes, nor at the tent where a Korean woman I am on a smiling-basis with sells homemade kimchee and microgreens.

  I spot him as I’m bagging up some salad. I’ve been trying not to look around for him, but when I glance up briefly from the Igloo cooler full of mesclun, he’s right there, maybe twenty feet away, loitering at the corner of 17th and Union Square West. Standing there in his same old coat, same old hat, earbuds in his ears, head ducked in that same old way. I know he’s determined that I see him before he sees me, that I be the one to approach.

  My heart is pounding hard in my ears, I know I’m blushing, but I finish paying for my purchase, make myself go slowly, continue to breathe, count out exact change, and wish the woman behind the plastic folding table a happy new year. Make myself walk steadily, though I’m tempted to either rush at him or run in the other direction. I can feel the tiny smirk on my face, the smirk we both always used together. I come to a stop in front of him, perhaps a foot and a half away. He glances up at me, his head still tucked down. Those eyes.

  You can say many things about what happened between Damian and me. But the look that passes between us now is a look full of history and ambivalence and knowingness and regret and, even, humor, even—could it be?—a muted sort of happiness. That exchange, whatever it all means, and it means too many things for me to immediately understand, is not to be faked. Why would we?

  He slips his earbuds from his ears, slips his iPhone out of his coat pocket (of course he has an iPhone: if there is one thing I could bet my life on with confidence it would be that Damian would buy an iPhone instantly), wraps the white cord methodically around the shiny gadget, slides it back into his coat. With his head still bowed, he looks up at me again, that complicated look, somehow naked and questioning and sardonic and guarded all at once, and I know I look just the same. “Have you had lunch?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  I ARRIVE back at our apartment at around four thirty, hurried—late for starting dinner preparations—and loaded down, flushed. I greet Eric, who’s sitting at his desk hunched over his laptop, with a kiss on the forehead before beginning to unload groceries. “If we’re going to get this gumbo done before Paul and Amanda get here I’m going to have to get chopping.”

  “I’ll help.”

  I pull out the celery, bell pepper, onion, my boning knife (I use it for everything, probably shouldn’t but it fits so well in my hand, is a sort of comfort to me somehow), and I take a cutting board from behind the sink. I’m singing
under my breath.

  Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made, driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  Eric’s come up to the kitchen sink to grab another board and a knife. As I roll the onion over to him, I look up and realize instantly that he knows—or thinks he does—just what has happened.

  Well. Good.

  “That song. I know he gave it to you. I didn’t even have to go looking. It was right there in our iTunes file.”

  I set down my knife, rest my knuckles on the counter. Make myself look him in the eye. He’s doing the same. For the second time in one day, one of those complex, gorgeous exchanges. “That’s right.”

  I’m shocked to notice that I don’t tear up, or cringe, though there’s anger in my husband’s look, and hurt. All I do is take a deep breath, blow it out through pursed lips.

  “I had lunch with him today. Needed to.”

  It occurs to me that I am happy. That sounds horrible, but I am, about many things. I’m happy about the unexpected civility and calm of the lunch today, at the same Indian restaurant where Damian seduced me so long ago. It was not an easy conversation. He had quite a grocery list of my hurtful and unacceptable behaviors of the last year and more, of all the ways I had raged and pled and bargained and, frankly, lied, all those ways you speak to a God you don’t really believe can hear you but still hope will surprise you. What I’d not realized, because I’d not credited him with the humanity to feel hurt or weakness or sympathy, was the toll these constant demands took on him, or how desperately he had to push against that suck of my need, how legitimately afraid he was, how legitimately angry that I kept trying to pull him to me. But even as I cringed as he pointed out each tyrannical, manipulative text and e-mail and late-night call, I also felt a strange equilibrium returning. I’d misused a power I didn’t even know I had.

  And with that realization, I find I’m also happy about both the still-present physical pull of him and my remarkable ability to resist it, about the hug and kiss on the cheek he gave me when we parted and the unbelievable truth that I didn’t fall apart when he left.