American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Thank you, but no,” Ian said. “I must leave.”

  “—a drink?”

  “Thank you. No.”

  She helped him into his coat, handed him his smart green woolen scarf, his smart Astrakhan hat, and a fur-lined glove that had fallen out of one of his pockets. Repentant, shamed, or at the very least shamefaced, she followed him to the door: stood shivering at the top of the ill-smelling stairs, her braid loosened and askew down her back. “I’m so sorry,” she said; “so damned embarrassed,” she said, smiling suddenly and adding, “Will you come back another time, Ian, and allow me to be more hospitable?”

  As if impulsively, she took up both his hands in hers and kissed them; looked up at him with such raw gratitude, such childlike undissembled hunger, Ian had to back off. “Thank you,” she said softly, “—Ian.”

  But he was thinking, No.

  IT SURPRISED HIM that, outside, the sun still shone, the day still continued; he’d been exhausted by his hours in Sigrid Hunt’s flat. But the snowy glare was still strong enough to bring tears to his eyes.

  A light snowfall had defined the trees and bushes around the garage more clearly, reminding him, yet more poignantly, of a Japanese watercolor or woodcut. Beauty in squalor, he thought. And how fitting, here.

  It would go no further, of course. He would not allow it to go further. He had not once been unfaithful to his wife, in twenty-six years of marriage. Nor had he considered being unfaithful, except in rare vengeful fantasy. He wondered, not whether he should tell Glynnis about the visit, and the check—for of course he would tell her; it was inconceivable that he not tell her—but when he should do so; and in what manner. With Glynnis, sensitive as she was and startlingly quick, at times, to take offense, manner was crucial. A very odd thing happened to me today. A very strange thing happened to me today. A very . . .

  Ian McCullough drove back to Hazelton-on-Hudson in a trance that was both erotic and rueful: guessing that what he’d done might be a mistake but quite satisfied with himself that, against the grain of his natural caution, he had done it. He thought of himself, that February afternoon—to be specific, the afternoon of February 20, 1987—with satisfaction and, even, a measure of pride, as a man crawling over a carved rock face whose lineaments he cannot see but which he has faith will be revealed to him in time. In time.

  THE EVERGREENS’ SNOWY BOUGHS

  Two days later there was a heavy snowfall, and the temperature dropped overnight to –15 degrees F. and by 10 A.M. had risen to only 4 degrees. The air had a sharp Arctic taste that seemed to suit the day, which was Sunday; the earth’s axis might have shifted, the sky was so blue, the sun so blazoning. Ian stood in the doorway staring, his breath turning thinly to steam. The freezing air eddied around him and Glynnis called from another room, “Ian? Is the front door open? Are you going out?”

  He was. He was going out, dressed in a bulky down jacket frayed and grimy at the cuffs, a woolen ski cap on his head, his oldest pair of winter gloves. And boots: heavy snow boots the women of the household, Glynnis and Bianca, called his paratrooper’s boots, their laces crusted with dried mud and left untied.

  It was Ian’s intention to shake the heavy clumps of snow from those branches of their many evergreen trees that were within reach. Yesterday, and during the night, about twelve inches of snow had fallen; some of the trees, particularly those on the windward side of the house, were bent nearly double. In bed that morning Ian had had a vision of them snapping under their terrible burden.

  Glynnis came up close behind him, saying, shivering, “Why are you standing with the door open, Ian? Either go in or go out.” She laid a hand on his sleeve. “Not that I’m urging you to go out in this cold.”

  “I don’t mind the cold,” Ian said, but since this wasn’t altogether true, and Glynnis knew it, he smiled and added, “—certain kinds of cold.”

  He stepped outside into the knife-sharp air and Glynnis stood in the doorway in a long cardigan sweater, arms folded tightly beneath her breasts, a certain gaiety in her face and voice—she was by nature a happy person, and mornings were good times for her. “It’s the sunshine, the pure air, like the Arctic,” she said, drawing a deep breath. She spoke slowly, as if reading Ian’s mind. “So beautiful. So bracing.” Midway across the snow-heaped courtyard (where, in milder weather, a profusion of roses bloomed, and English ivy snaked across the flagstones), Ian heard Glynnis call out, “Maybe I’ll come out and join you; won’t you need help?”

  But Ian seemed not to have heard; he didn’t pause or look back. Glynnis must have thought better of her impulsive offer and closed the door: carefully. The walls in which the heavy carved door was set were made entirely of glass and there was a danger, as the McCulloughs had been warned by the previous owner of the house, that, if the door should ever be slammed really hard, the plate glass might crack, or even shatter. Had that ever happened? the McCulloughs asked, concerned, and the man paused, as if thinking better of his warning, and said, smiling, evasive, Yes, I think it did happen, once—in the time of another owner.

  CELEBRATION

  1.

  My house. My family. My life.

  Midafternoon of the day of her husband’s fiftieth birthday, Glynnis McCullough stands in the kitchen of their house at 338 Pearce Drive, Hazelton-on-Hudson, New York, her pulse pleasantly fast, her fingers chilled with anticipation: like an actress in the wings, awaiting her cue. It is April 7, 1987, a day merely checked on the McCulloughs’ heavily annotated calendar, but a day of much plotting, calculation, expectation. That evening, there is to be a surprise birthday party in Ian’s honor, to which only their closest dearest friends have been invited. Ian of course knows nothing about the celebration, suspects nothing; he is the most trusting of men, Glynnis says of him, amused yet respectful: he never asks questions about the household; he leaves that sort of thing to me.

  The kitchen is warm with April sunshine, and warm with the odors of cooking, baking, activity. It is Glynnis’s favorite room in the house though she does not think of it as merely a “room”: rather as a place of retreat, sanctuary, unfailing consolation and pleasure. Many of the fixtures are new, or relatively new: the large, finely calibrated stove and microwave oven; the green refrigerator; the butcher-block table with its raw, clean, blond wood; the long horizontal glass window above the sink and counters, over which a dozen hanging plants have been set in ceramic pots. Crammed into shelves in the butcher-block table is a library of much-consulted cookbooks; overhead, hanging from hooks and positioned on the walls, are gleaming copper pans and molds, an assortment of wooden spoons, knives with shining blades, and whisks, and scoops, and carving boards, and bunches of garlic, dried herbs—mysterious dessicated things whose names and precise functions Glynnis McCullough can call up in an instant, should any visitor to her kitchen inquire. (And this is a Hazelton kitchen much visited.) Prominent atop the butcher-block table is a handsome new food processor; hidden away in cupboards are specialty utensils of various kinds—colanders, casserole dishes, gratin dishes, soufflé dishes, cast-iron skillets, a cast-aluminum crepe pan, woks and scone pans and egg poachers. In a corner of the kitchen is a round wooden table, several chairs, a Moroccan rug, a small portable television. Though the family eats breakfast at this table, the table is really Glynnis’s; she answers mail here, does quick handwritten drafts of her writing—food articles and columns, cookbooks.

  Glynnis’s current project is a book tentatively titled American Appetites: Regional American Cooking from Alaska to Hawaii, at which she has been working, with varying degrees of inspiration and frustration, for the past year. Though Glynnis’s first two books were praised by reviewers and have sold well, she prefers to think of herself as an amateur: an amateur writer, an amateur cook, an amateur “food person.” (There is room for only one true professional in the McCullough family, Glynnis has told friends.) The first cookbook had seemed to Glynnis scarcely written at all, merely assembled, at the urging of Hazelton friends; the second was her publ
isher’s idea; the third, though Glynnis’s own idea, seems to her now overly ambitious, rather more professional in its background, research, notes than she would like. But with the passage of months the book has acquired its own idiosyncratic tone and its own erratic momentum. American Appetites: the title came to her, seemingly, in a dream, or in one of her kitchen reveries. In any case it is the first of Glynnis McCullough’s cookbooks to be more than a mere assemblage of recipes; it is—thus the frustration, and the fear!—the first of her books to be really written.

  Since the meal she plans to serve this evening is fairly demanding and involves an uncommon degree of time coordination, Glynnis has begun it hours, even days, beforehand—the seviche, for instance, to serve fifteen, has been marinating since yesterday morning in the refrigerator; the sourdough bread is even now in the oven, with twelve minutes yet to go; the preliminaries of the ballotine of chicken à la Régence are well under way—the several chickens properly boned, and the stock for the sauce simmering, and the farce à quenelles à la panade prepared, and the fine-chopped truffles, and the tongue (this delicacy gives Glynnis a curious sort of frisson, its mere touch—it took Ian years to acquire a taste for it). And the salad greens, in a large wooden bowl, are in the refrigerator, covered; and the tart, mustardy French dressing to accompany them has been mixed. Late last night, while Ian was in Philadelphia giving a lecture, Glynnis had made one of the desserts, with results that were encouraging: a sour-cream chocolate cake with thick rippled fudge frosting upon which, in crystalline vanilla frosting, she wrote HAPPY 50TH IAN! in childlike block letters. There is a delivery imminent from the wine and liquor store, and from the florist; and as soon as Marvis finishes with her housework, the two women will fit an extra leaf into the dining room table, to open it out for fifteen and to begin the task, which Glynnis always loves, of setting her table. We’ll be a bit crowded at dinner, Glynnis apologized, when she called to invite her friends, but I hope you won’t mind. Of course, Marvis is going to help every inch of the way.

  (Knowing, of course, that no one in their circle would mind in the slightest; being crowded sociably together, for one of Glynnis McCullough’s superb meals, has never troubled anyone in the past.)

  Though Glynnis is an experienced cook and, most of the time, a quite confident hostess, tonight’s party for her husband worries her: not so much the party itself, and the food—which will be tricky, but surely manageable—as the fact of its being a surprise, that most dubious of pleasures. “Do you think Ian might find it too much of a surprise?” she had asked their friend Denis Grinnell. “Coming into the house unprepared, preoccupied with his thoughts as he invariably is, and then finding all of you waiting?” “I think Ian will love it,” Denis said. And then: “I would love it.” (There is an old and not entirely resolved emotional issue between Glynnis McCullough and Denis Grinnell, to which, in the tacit understanding that has evolved between them, Denis may freely, yet never reproachfully, allude; while Glynnis is empowered to remain silent. Though Denis’s allusions may sometimes annoy her, or make her feel guilty, they more often please her, with the knowledge that, though she and her husband’s closest friend will never again make love, she is loved by him still; he remains faithful to her as any husband.) But Denis is not the point; Denis is no reliable measure, for he and Ian are quite distinct personalities, Glynnis thinks, and what the one might love, the other might not.

  To another friend, a woman friend, Glynnis said, laughing, “Isn’t it odd, I really don’t know whether Ian will be happy with the party or furious with me afterward; whether a ‘surprise’ of this kind might be too extreme for him, or whether it’s what he’d most like, in secret, for his fiftieth birthday. What do you think?”

  The woman, Meika Cassity, like Glynnis the wife of a man prominent in his profession (in Vaughn Cassity’s case, architecture), said, as if the question did not warrant much thought, “We must always do what we want to do and hope that it’s what they will like, or, in any case, what they will accept as liking. Otherwise, you know, Glynnis,” Meika said, dropping her voice in a sly pleased slide, “life in Hazelton would be quite dull.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Glynnis said; and though ordinarily she would have liked very much to pursue the theme Meika had introduced—like Meika Cassity, Glynnis McCullough has a taste for adventure, and news of others’ adventures—she persisted in her own theme; of limited interest to others, perhaps, it was of crucial interest to her. “Do you think it’s odd, though—and please speak frankly, Meika—that after living with Ian for so many years, I really, at times, don’t seem to know him at all and can’t predict how he’ll react to things? For instance—”

  “Oh, they live in their own heads,” Meika said, “our ‘brilliant’ husbands. They’re happiest there, so we must learn to be happy here.”

  “‘Here’—?”

  “Here.”

  Glynnis smiled; her friend’s answer pleased her. They were speaking over the telephone, and Glynnis was in her snug corner of the kitchen, seated at the table, back to the wall, midmorning cigarette in hand; a mug of coffee, black and strong, before her. Spread across the table were notes and cards upon which recipes had been typed, and a miscellany of magazine and newspaper articles, columns, and clippings on the subject of food; a yet-unread section of that morning’s New York Times; the April issue of Gourmet, in which Glynnis herself had an article. The dark-tiled kitchen floor shone; in the window opposite, several of the hanging plants, the Swedish geraniums, were in bloom; how quiet, how lovely, the house, my house, Glynnis thought, with Ian and Bianca gone. “Oh, yes,” she told Meika. “Here.”

  And afterward thought, Why don’t Meika and I feel more comfortable with each other? We are like sisters, really.

  GLYNNIS WONDERED THEN, and wonders now, thinking ahead to the party, and to Ian’s arrival, and the guests, and the food, and the small quick deft tasks she alone will have to do, to orchestrate the evening as she wishes, whether it is a terrible sort of vanity and selfishness, her contentment with such domestic matters: her happiness in them, and in making others, by way of them, happy. Food is such a simple thing, Glynnis’s mother once said, perplexed—why is it so difficult? Yet Glynnis has never found it difficult; no more than she finds love, or at any rate lovemaking, difficult. “It helps not to think,” she said. “Just do.”

  The evening’s agenda is: Ian will remain at the Institute until his usual hour, around six o’clock, when he will drive to the Poughkeepsie airport to pick up Bianca (coming home from Connecticut for her father’s birthday, presumably a small quiet affair involving only the three of them); he will arrive home, unsuspecting, between seven and seven-thirty, well in time for their usual dinner at eight. In the meantime, arriving between six-thirty and six-forty-five, their friends will gather in the guest room at the rear of the house, having parked their cars along Pearce Drive in a way calculated not to arouse Ian’s suspicion. Bianca will lead her father into the house by a side door (the McCulloughs’ long low modern multiroomed house has a half dozen entrances), a strategically safe distance from either the kitchen or the dining room. And Glynnis, her apricot chiffon dress more or less hidden by one of her oversized aprons, will go to greet them and behave as she normally would—assuming of course that Bianca is behaving as she normally would—and trusting to intuition and improvisation, Glynnis will lead Ian back into the guest room, where their friends await him. . . . But beyond that crucial moment she doesn’t want to think; her heart beats too quickly.

  The oven timer has begun to chime; Glynnis takes out the sourdough bread in three baking pans, sets them on the butcher-block table. But the heady delicious smell does not quite placate her. She thinks, What if it is a mistake? And our friends are embarrassed for us?

  It is true, she’d given several surprise parties for Bianca when Bianca was a small child, and those parties, however meticulously planned and overseen, had not been unqualified successes: Glynnis recalls the house filled with laughing, screaming,
galloping children; disappointment at the outcome of games and the inevitably “unfair” distribution of prizes; even outbursts of childish temper and tears; her own sudden fatigue, before the last of the children was taken away. Though she has long ago forgotten the woman’s name (this was in Cambridge, while Ian still taught at Harvard), she will always remember another young mother saying to her, with a look of wonder and pity, “As the Irish say, Glynnis, ‘Better you than me.’” But the good memories far outweigh the bad: a little boy pulling at Glynnis’s sleeve to whisper, “You’re pretty, Missus”; the gaiety, the high spirits, the laughter, the sheer silly fun of the children’s games, and their excitement in playing them; the delight the children took in bringing Bianca presents, prettily wrapped by others, and watching her open them. And of course there was Bianca’s excitement, Bianca’s childish gratitude. In a pink party dress, eyes wide with pleasure, plump cheeks flushed, Glynnis’s little girl clambering on her lap and throwing her arms around her: “Mommy I love love love you!”

  Years ago.

  The sourdough bread is perfect, Glynnis thinks. Crusty in precisely the way she’d wanted. It is Ian’s favorite bread, of the numerous breads Glynnis bakes: a bread he himself tried to bake, in fact, a few years ago, under an odd short-lived inspiration, derived from a friend’s enthusiasm about his own bread-baking experiences. (The man is Malcolm Oliver, a journalist and an adjunct fellow of the Institute, an old friend of the McCulloughs’ and, like Ian, rather caught up in a world of abstraction: of words.) But Ian’s kitchen adventures, amusing to relate to friends as anecdotes, were not entirely amusing at the time; and Glynnis did not much enjoy overseeing her husband so closely, forced of necessity—for of course she was forced—to correct him when he did things wrong, or was about to do things wrong. In Ian McCullough’s world of dauntingly complex demographic studies, computer programs, Journal of International Politics business, and labyrinthine professional intrigues, his judgment and his authority are unquestioned; elsewhere, one might say (as Meika said) here, he seems so frequently at sea, well-intentioned but oddly clumsy, as if uncoordinated: as if there were some neurological lapse, or block, between word and act. In the kitchen, optimistic as he was, hands covered in flour and dough as he’d seemed rather to like them, he listened to instructions but did not hear; or, hearing, did not understand; or, understanding, did not want to understand. “You can’t bear to take orders from another adult,” Glynnis said, teasing, yet exasperated; and Ian countered, lightly and cleverly, as Ian McCullough invariably did, “Who then would I take orders from, Glynnis, if not ‘another adult’?”