Cleaving

by Julie Powell

  I’m happy that I’m now about to open my mouth and speak with perfect honesty to my husband, from whom I’ve so often tried to hide.

  But perhaps I’m most happy because I’ve suddenly realized just this. I can see these men, these dear, flawed men, my partners and lovers and friends. And they can see me. And none of us are going to die because of it.

  I’ve steeled myself for Eric’s response, for rage or guilt or tears. But he surprises me. He nods. “Okay.” He doesn’t look away, and he asks no probing questions. But I’m going to offer up something more. No gut-wrenching confessions of guilt. I don’t feel any, for one thing—my God, I really don’t. It’s like getting a therapeutic massage for the first time and standing up afterward and realizing that I’ve spent my entire life with a knot in my back, or a tense neck. And now, just being human, just walking around the earth, feels entirely different. Except that analogy isn’t quite right. Because let us be clear here. Damian is not the person who made me whole and well, just by swooping down from Jupiter and entering my life again like some glorious extraterrestrial masseur. No. All his return did was make me realize I’m somehow managing to heal myself. So, no guilt. Only what he, Eric, my husband, deserves.

  “It was good to see him. We talked a lot. He’s unhappy about how we left things, and obviously I have been too.”

  “I really don’t need to know.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t say it was going to be easy. “I can’t cut him out of me. Don’t want to. I don’t mean that he’ll… or that I’ll… I just need to accept it. He’s in there. Buried in. Part of my… my experience, I guess. Like a tattoo. A scar.”

  Eric nods again. “I know.”

  “And you know you are too. Buried in, I mean.”

  “I know.” His lower lip curls as it always has, for the sixteen years I have known him, when he is about to weep. His eyes are a sparkling blue when he cries. A hard thing to see, something I’ve always shied from seeing, but I don’t look away now. “I love you, Julie. So, so much.”

  And I have tears in my eyes too. “I know.” And I am happy. I am, in fact, overjoyed, filled with love—not love like a drug or a sickness or a hideous hidden thing or a painfully faraway one. Love like air. Like a dream of sand between my toes.

  “I will probably see him again. I know I will. We have a lot to talk about. I won’t be sleeping with him.”

  “You don’t have to promise—”

  “It’s not for you. I’m not going to do it because I don’t even know if he wants it, or if I do, and because it would be messy and—”

  The embrace Eric encircles me in then is full and deep and both familiar and strange. I lean my head against his shoulder. I can feel his tears when they fall on my cheek, but he isn’t racked with sobs, he isn’t pulling me so tightly to him that it’s like he wants me to slip back inside his skin. “You know what? I’m so fucking tired of being scared,” he says.

  “I don’t want to scare you, I just need to—”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He takes me lightly by the shoulders and pulls away to look at me. Our faces are wet, but we don’t attempt to dry each other. “Life is messy. I’m tired of being scared of that. We’ll deal with it. Things are going to happen, or not happen, and life is going to change, one way or the other, and I’m tired of being terrified, angry that I can’t keep everything the same, the way it was. You know? I don’t want everything to be the way it was. So this is what we’re going to do. We’re just going to see. It’s uncertain, and it’s probably going to hurt, and we just don’t know, and you know what? I’m fine with that. I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  “And everything? It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be great. We’re just going to see.”

  “Yes.”

  We kiss, for the first time in months really. And then we make gumbo. Eric chops, I devein shrimp, he looks over my shoulder with glee, as he always does, when I make the roux the Paul Prudhomme way, with fantastic heat and smoke and finesse. We know how to move around in the kitchen together. After all, we’ve been doing it our entire lives.

  Epilogue

  February 13, 2008

  SO. MY JACK THE RIPPER theory. What I think is that when this poor, sick fucker looked at the frenzied destruction he’d wrought, when he saw what he’d done to these women, who he’d probably hated or feared simply because they possessed a uterus, maybe the tiny flicker of humanity remaining in him burned him. Maybe he opened them up, took out their insides, did his patient exploring, not as an extension of his savagery, but as a sort of ritual cleansing against it. Maybe he tried to soothe his horror of himself by bringing order to the chaos he’d created—cataloguing the parts, studying the way pieces came together. He could take the torn, bloody evidence of his sickness and worthlessness and transform her, transform it, into something recognizable, sane. Neat slices of meat ready for the butcher’s window. Whoever this guy was, butcher by trade or not, he was too far gone to save himself. But what he did with his knife to these women’s bodies was his attempt to anyway. His butchery was his last bid for salvation. I get that.

  Then again, maybe I’m exactly wrong. Maybe he wasn’t a butcher at all, and if he had been, women would have remained whole, he would have stayed in his shop contentedly feeding people, making something from something else, and his salvation would have been himself.

  Once I’ve finished my coffee, I set the cup in the sink, wash my hands—thoroughly, up under my nails and under the leather of my Maasai bracelet. Then I slip a large translucent vacuum bag from a stack on a Metro shelf against the wall and return to the table.

  A liver is unlike any other organ—not muscular and obvious like a heart, with its ventricles and aorta clues to its function; not like digestive organs, those tracts and sacs a passageway, concerned with the practicalities of nutrition and excretion. A liver is a mystery. It’s a filter. The liver records experience, the indulgences and wrong turns; it contains within it a constantly updated state-of-the-union address. But it keeps what it knows a secret. Encoded. It cleans up after itself, too, will after a time purge files, dispensing with the unnecessary information, what’s been relegated to the past, keeping what’s needed. There are even some hopeful, possibly deluded souls who believe a cirrhotic liver can heal itself, with time, and with gentleness.

  I shake the bag open with my right hand while lifting the liver into it with my left, my whole forearm supporting its sagging weight. As its surface sticks to the inside of the bag, I hoist it up in both hands, giving it a few jerks to weight it down to the bottom, well clear of the lip. Tote it over to the big Cryovac machine pushed up against the wall, lay it inside, line up the mouth of the bag flat against the raised metal sealing edge, and close the lid. Through the window at the top of the machine, I watch the bag swell slowly up, then shrink quickly, tightly, around the organ with a sound like the timbers of a ship in a heavy storm. The door of the machine hisses open, with horror-movie slowness. I take out the bagged liver, weigh it, slap the sticker that comes sliding out of the slot at the bottom of the scale, printed with the weight and today’s date—“11.2 lbs, 2/13/08”—onto the cool surface of the bag, label it with the Sharpie stuck in my right rear pocket—“Beef Liver”—and haul it over to the walk-in freezer. Pulling up on the latch and edging the door open with my shoulder, I lean just far enough into the frigid darkness to place the package in a bin on the metal floor atop a pile of burgundy bags just like it, but frozen as hard as rock and rimed with frost.

  I’ve just finished wiping down the table with a rag soaked in a bleach-water solution when Josh strides up and heaves a side of pork onto it. “Hey, your tattoo all healed?”

  “Yeah. See?” I lift the hair off the back of my neck as Josh peers to see the small word inscribed there in black ink. Loufoque.

  “Very nice!” He slaps the hog’s haunch as I let my hair fall. “So, genius, you forget everything you ever knew about meat?”

  “Oh, I imagine.”
<
br />   “Prove it.”

  I peer down at the pig for a moment, contemplating my first move. Today is only my second return to Fleisher’s after a hiatus of many months. It’s a Wednesday morning, the gentle midweek buzz of readying the shop to open instantly familiar when I walk in the door. Aaron is peeking down into a big pot of soup on the stove. Jessica and Hailey are talking over receipts near the cheese counter. Jessica has recently found out she’s pregnant—which has been occasion for much amused contemplation of a toddler running around the shop with a cleaver dangling from his hand—and is grooming Hailey to handle things while she’s out of the shop. Jesse is filling up the case.

  The first time I returned was on a Saturday, and it was a bit of a disaster. Often, on the weekends, the shop is invaded by the Weekend Warriors, old friends or colleagues of Josh and Jessica, all of them guys, up from the city, who want to practice cutting meat because they think it’s manly. On these days the wash of testosterone becomes a flood that threatens to float the table away. The conversation, which on an average Wednesday ebbs and flows, pours out in an unceasing torrent on these Saturdays. No talk of politics anymore, or movies. None of the usual self-aware riffs on the homoerotics of butchery and male competition. Now the chest-thumping becomes very nearly literal. Stories about guns and hunting begin to predominate, as cycling yarns fade into the background, unless they include viscera.

  Aaron has one that does. He tells his tales with his whole body, standing in a biker’s squat, holding imaginary handlebars, his eyes wide, then tightly shut, chin pulled back, as he reenacts the moment of stopping to see lovely deer crossing the road. One second later he witnesses their explosive death by high-speed collision, the grisly blowback dousing him from head to toe.

  (Okay, I laughed.)

  My femaleness becomes an issue on these days as it never has been during the week. It’s not as if they’re flirting with me, exactly. It’s more like the mere presence of estrogen agitates them. In no way are any of these men interested in me sexually, but their animal brains take over, I guess, and somehow, quiet and small though I make myself, I become the axis of some strange male ritual, rams clashing horns, apes clapping their chests with their great leathery palms. People are suddenly calling me “sweetheart”—a familiarity an amateur butcher has not earned. Someone drops ice down my back. Thank God I have no pigtails and there are no inkpots around. Only Colin rises above their antics. He reminds me of Robert in a dog run with a bunch of little yappy dogs—Colin is a creature of a whole different magnitude, indifferent or amused. He and I exchange conspiratorially jaded glances.

  It’s an odd feeling. Of course I’ve witnessed this behavior before. So has any woman who’s ever been a thirteen-year-old in a schoolyard at recess. And any woman can tell you it can be exhilarating. In the past few years, I’ve quite often loved being in the center of such a swarm, recognizing that I’m just a conduit through which macho, emphatically heterosexual men can goad one another, but wanting to be just that. It somehow made me feel worthwhile.

  But not here. Fleisher’s long ago became a haven for me from my womanliness, or at least from my frustrated need to feel womanly, seductive—and used. Used by men—by any man—to deliver whatever it is he really needs. I don’t want that anymore. Here in the shop I want to be worth something because I know how to handle a knife and crack a dirty joke. Worth something because of who I am. So I like Wednesdays.

  I flex my hands and eye the clock before I begin.

  “Your hand bothering you?”

  “Oh, not so so much. It aches a little. I’m getting back into the groove, you know.”

  “Momma, you’re a butcher now. That ache is gonna be with you the rest of your life. What, by the way, is that fucking thing on your hand?”

  “This? Oh. It’s a Maasai bracelet. I ate the goat this skin came from. Look, you can still see a few hairs on it. If I wear it until it falls off, I get good luck.”

  Josh nods approvingly. “That’s disgusting.”

  I snap off the kidney and its attendant fat, then attack the tenderloin, eyeing the clock. I’m not remotely ready, certainly not after the sabbatical I’ve been on, to challenge the Great Side-Breaking Record, currently held by Aaron at forty-four seconds. (A can of Colt 45 sitting on a high shelf, draped with a digital stopwatch, commemorates the great event. Aaron has taped over the “5.” It now reads, “Colt 44,” and a handmade label beneath it reads, “Refreshing piggy goodness brought to you by Aaron.”) But I have aspirations. I pull out the tenderloin quickly, throw it to the table. Count down five ribs from the shoulder, wedge my knife tip between the tightly wound vertebrae, then, once through, pull my blade down to the table, as smoothly as I can, removing the shoulder.

  “Oh, you still got it.” Josh peers over my shoulder.

  I shrug.

  “So what’s going on with that husband of yours?”

  “You trying to distract me?” After raking my knife down the length of ribs, I set it into the scabbard strapped around my waist and pick up the butcher saw to break through the ribs and separate the belly from the loin.

  “I just can’t believe sweet Eric would do something like that.”

  After withholding all this drama for so long, in the last month or so I’ve told Josh quite a bit about what’s going on. Not in that desperate, self-pitying barrage I used to be so good at, but just as one friend to another. Things are different now. There are no names I can’t say without falling apart.

  “What, you mean him seeing the girlfriend again? Oh, she’s a nice girl. And she loves him. Gotta like that about her. They left things strange, I guess, trying to work stuff out.”

  “Good God, Momma. You need to take away his Wii until he snaps out of it.”

  “Heh.” I’m through the ribs, and so I put down the saw and take up my knife again and finish the cut with it, curving up past the bottom of the rib cage and down to take off the belly. Throw that to the table.

  “Meantime, if he’s getting laid—”

  “I don’t know if he’s getting laid.”

  “Well, you oughta be able to get some ass too. Stay with us for a few days. I’ll hook you up. And we can do some house hunting.”

  “Thanks, but I’m okay for now. Though I will take you up on the real estate shopping.” For the last month or so I’ve been having a look around up here. The idea of having a place in these curled mountains, a place of my own, makes any prospect of my future, paired or solitary, seem less frightening. I yank the remaining side around, leg hanging off the edge of the table.

  “And what about this other asshole?”

  I shake my head. “He’s gone off again.” After a month or so of conversations, conversations that seemed terribly healing and measured and Adult, D—Damian, I mean—has flown the coop, without explanation. “It’s what he does. He’s here and he’s gone, he can’t do anything else. And finally I’ve learned that, and I’m over it.” I lean on the loin with one elbow and grab the animal’s foot with the other, in readiness to break the joint.

  “Bullshit.”

  I grunt as I push down hard on the leg. The joint wiggles and squeaks but doesn’t break open. “Well, I’m not over him. Over it. He is who he is—”

  “An asshole.”

  I shrug again, push down again, unsuccessfully, on the leg. “He’s just the man he is, capable of just what he’s capable of. And he’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. So am I, so is Eric. And we shall see.”

  “Fuck. You are like a Zen master.”

  On the third try, a decisive crack. With a single deep slice to wood, the leg is off the loin, in my strongly gripping hand. Sinovial fluid drips to the floor.

  “Nah,” I say with a grin. I slap the leg back onto the table.

  Aaron calls from the kitchen. “What was the time on that, Jules?” Josh rolls his eyes.

  “Oh, about a minute and a half.” Actually, no. Actually, one minute, twenty-five seconds. Exactly.

  “Halfway there. You’re
on your way, Jules.”

  I take a deep breath, smell the smells of meat as I run my fingers around that impossibly smooth white cup joint, that old, private pleasure of mine. “Yeah. Maybe so.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are so many people who’ve taught, supported, helped, and plain old put up with me during the writing of this book, I’m inevitably going to blank on some names here, so apologies in advance.

  Thanks to the entire Fleisher’s crew—Josh and Jessica Applestone, Aaron Lenz, Jesse, Colin, Hailey, Juan, and everybody else—who let me poke around the shop for six months, getting in the way, and gave me much undeserved free meat. Thanks to my guides and helpmeets on my travels—Santiago, Armando, Diego, Oksana, Kesuma, Leyan, Elly, and the park rangers of Ngorongoro Park in Tanzania, who managed to keep a clueless traveler alive and mostly well. Thanks to my family—Kay and John and Jordan Foster, Mary Jo and Jo Ann Powell, Carol Sander, Ethan and Elizabeth Powell—most of whom have declined to read this book, but in the most cheerful, loving way possible. Thanks to Emily Alexander-Wilmeth, Emily Farris, Eric Steel, and Amy Robinson, who plowed through drafts, gave great notes, and didn’t hate me, as a general rule. Thanks to my “bleaders,” you know who you are. Thanks to Robert, who’s just the best dog in the world, and to Maxine, Lumi, and Cooper, who are the best cats, in no particular order. Thanks to my editor, Judy Clain, and her assistant, Nathan Rostron, who edit adroitly and remind me from time to time that there is such a thing as too much information. Thanks to Michelle Aielli, my “publicist” at Little, Brown; I use quotation marks not to denigrate her astounding PR powers, but rather to indicate my discomfort in attaching such an oft-mocked word to a friend who does such a remarkable job of keeping me sane. Thanks to therapist Anna and bartender Marcel, who also pull double shifts on sanity maintenance.