American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Everything appears to be going well; apart from Bianca’s behavior, her rudeness both in public and in private, everything is going, Glynnis thinks, wonderfully well.

  At his first taste of the ballotine of chicken, Leonard Oppenheim laid down his fork and said, “Glynnis, you’ve outdone even yourself, this time.” And raised his glass to her.

  And Glynnis tasted it too, and thought, Yes, it’s good, thank God it’s good; my effort has paid off.

  She has not, she thinks, seen Ian so happy in any social gathering in quite a while.

  Nor has she, she thinks, seen her friends so . . . attractively and attentively happy, so harmonious together; no matter if, even with Bianca’s place removed, they are a bit crowded around the table.

  Denis is talking about an incident that happened to him the other day, in New York City. A near mugging, as he describes it. Glynnis listens to him, as always, with immense interest, watches him admiringly, feels a surge of affection for the man, her husband’s closest friend, her closest friend’s husband, that is still deeply erotic: yet perhaps more companionable, as if she and Denis had in fact been married, instead of deciding that they must not push things beyond a certain point . . . must not destroy the delicate fabric of their domestic lives. Denis, an economist, like Ian a senior fellow at the Hazelton Institute, is a year or two older than Ian: a thick-shouldered, thick-necked man of moderate height, with a head that might have been painted, in its shrewd peasant solidity, by Brueghel. A bulldog face, Glynnis thinks, but a handsome one. In the candlelight, Denis’s somewhat coarse skin is softened and the sharp quizzical frown lines between his eyes have vanished.

  Glynnis has seated Denis on her left and, at these close quarters, is led to consider the brief eight months of her affair with him: the “physical” affair, that intense, rather unnervingly intense, parenthesis within the long romance of their friendship. (Has it been fifteen years since the McCulloughs came to Hazelton? It seems impossible.) The affair had begun innocently enough when, in Ian’s absence, Denis drove Glynnis home from a party. A kiss, then kisses, and she’d invited him in for a drink; and, next morning, as she’d known he would do, Denis called. You know I love you, Glynnis. I haven’t slept all night. Please let me see you. You must let me see you. In all, Glynnis supposes they made love, in the fullest sense of the word, less than a dozen times, charged with adolescent fervor and an adulterous sense of guilt. She remembers, dreamily, one vertiginous summer day when, at the zenith of the affair, she made love with Denis in his air-conditioned office at the Institute, on his couch, and reappeared no more than fifteen minutes later, in Ian’s company, to have lunch with him and Denis and one or two of their Institute colleagues, on the outdoor terrace of the dining room. And later that afternoon she’d dropped by the Grinnells’ house to see Roberta, at that time, as now, Glynnis’s closest woman friend. How high she’d been, those days, on her own bravado, her own daring, her astonishment at such behavior. Am I really doing these things? Is it I, Glynnis, who is capable of such duplicity?

  She had known, then, that absolute trust in another human being is an error. We believe, not what is true, but what we wish to perceive as true.

  But the affair ended, as precipitously and emotionally as it had begun. And Glynnis was the one to break it off, thus retaining, in both her imagination and Denis’s, a certain measure of advantage.

  The discussion of crime, violence, police, et cetera, still continues; Glynnis hears herself say, quite feelingly, in response to a question, “Yes, I still have nightmares about it. I don’t know if what they did was really harassment or, as they insisted, a mistake”—“Of course it was harassment,” Malcolm says—“but it made me realize how vulnerable we are, how helpless, in a house like this—in any of our houses, I suppose—people like us who don’t own weapons, and don’t want to own weapons. I suppose you could say,” Glynnis continues, pleased at her own eloquence at this table of articulate and assertive people, who frequently interrupt one another in their eagerness to speak, “that, in an equation in which others are assailants, people like us are inevitably victims.”

  This provokes Vincent Hawley and Meika Cassity, who do not, they declare, want to be victims; what does Glynnis mean, people like us? But Roberta agrees with Glynnis; and so does, perhaps too somberly, white-haired Elizabeth Kuhn, who says that there must inevitably be situations, in human society—“in decent civilized society”—in which one simply cannot fight back, even to save one’s life; one cannot match evil with evil. And Amos, her husband, rather pointedly disagrees with her; and Denis supports Amos’s position; and Meika Cassity interjects a remark or two, closing her pretty beringed hands into fists and raising them aloft: “I intend to resist to the death.” And they laugh, but the subject, even then, is not, to Glynnis’s annoyance, dropped; for Elizabeth, dogged in her Quaker idealism, has more to say; and Sonia Hawley, it turns out, was once, as a child, molested—“And not by a relative, either: by an older boy at school”—and Leonard Oppenheim, and Paul Owen, whose luggage was stolen on a recent trip to India, have a great deal to say; and Ian can be passionate on the subject. And so it goes.

  At what she calculates to be the proper moment, Glynnis lays down her napkin and goes out into the kitchen, returns with Marvis at her elbow, the two women bearing warm heavy plates. “Will you all have a little more?” Glynnis asks.

  It’s odd, how, at her age, mature as she is and surely gifted with a healthy sense of humor, she asks that question with such apprehension; as if her very worth—or is it her very life?—were being proffered.

  5.

  In addition to the chocolate cake there is a crepe dessert prepared by Glynnis at the table; a light, delicious, orange- and raspberry-flavored crepe, new to most of the company, made with Chartreuse. How lovely, Glynnis thinks, as the crepes flame up: that low bluish-purple flame, a child’s sort of magic, and the aroma of alcohol and sugar; how lovely, how sad, things coming to an end. Both desserts are great successes, and Glynnis is pleased that everyone wants a bit of both. Flushed with pleasure and wine and feeling at last that she can relax, she has come through, she accepts her friends’ compliments with thanks. Praise, particularly at such close quarters, embarrasses her; though its absence, as she well knows, would certainly wound her.

  Deflecting attention from herself and onto Ian, she says, “Thank him. He has been the inspiration for everything.”

  Ian, absorbed in conversation at his end of the table, does not quite hear what Glynnis has said but smiles down the length of the table at her, the lenses of his glasses winking in the candlelight. On the plate before him are the remains of his dessert, partly eaten.

  AT GLYNNIS’S END of the table, over coffee and liqueur, they are talking of food: of whether, in civilized societies, among the affluent classes at least, food can be said to exist in esse; or does it, as Amos Kuhn suggests, always stand for something that is not food. “Who among us, after all, eats merely to live?” Amos asks. “Who eats food of the kind you prepared for us tonight, Glynnis, merely to—eat?”

  Glynnis says, “It’s just food. After all.”

  “No. It is material, and you make of it art.”

  Amos Kuhn, the anthropologist, the Institute’s most distinguished elder, is an uncommonly tall, snowy-haired, well-spoken gentleman in his sixties with a fair, handsome, lapidary face: a protégé of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead whose reputation, if not popular fame, now equals theirs. He did his earliest fieldwork in Borneo and can tell remarkable tales—many of which, of course, Glynnis and her friends have heard before—that turn upon the mysterious nature of mankind’s obsession with food. It is, Amos says, both the most fundamental and the most abstract of issues: “You can study the subject for a lifetime; you can amass a staggering quantity of data and come away with contradictory theories.

  “The very concept of ‘taboo,’ for instance—why some foods are taboo in certain cultures and not in others; why, within a single culture, some foods are taboo and
others not; and why ‘taboo’ itself can shift from season to season. In any number of aboriginal cultures, for instance, a too-close proximity to death—that is, to dead bodies—violates taboo; and when one is in violation of taboo he can’t eat certain foods, nor can he feed himself; he must eat from the ground, without using his hands, or be fed by hand by another. Even more perversely”—Amos pauses, as if suddenly aware of his voice, which has steadily risen; and Glynnis sees how, sensitive as the man is, and mildly impaired in his hearing, he quickly gauges that, yes, others at the table are now listening, the entire table in fact is now listening, he is therefore empowered to continue—“in cultures in which food is always scarce, and consequently a source of anxiety, food is ceremonially wasted—offered up to gods, totem animals, even dead enemies. Before head-hunting was suppressed in, for instance, Borneo, Melanesia, West Africa, and elsewhere, head-hunting tribes used to insert delicacies in the mouths of their victims’ shrunken heads, accompanied by the most exaggerated, absurd, yet, it seems, altogether sincere endearments! I’ve witnessed the ceremonies; they’re really quite astonishing, not so much in their grisliness—you soon get accustomed to the idea of the shrunken head, as a sort of artifact—as in their sincerity. And, of course, in obedience to divine will, or the cycle of the moon, primitive peoples, as we like to call them, are in the habit of gorging themselves to the point of serious illness or starving themselves literally to death. Feasting, fasting—it’s apt that the words sound so much alike. Food is codified,” Amos says, concluding, with a smile, “but who among us has cracked the code?”

  So they talk of feasting and of fasting, of bulimia and of anorexia; and Malcolm, who is in fact one of the leanest of the company, strokes his stomach above his belt and says, “Food is love, no more and no less”; and Denis says, “But is love food? That’s the crucial question.” And Ian, just rising from the table, says, with smiling husbandly courtliness, “If it is nourishing, it is.”

  Ian excuses himself from the company and disappears into the rear of the house, to use his bathroom perhaps; in his absence they talk of Institute politics, and Vincent Hawley, a senior sociologist involved in the National Health Service project, asks Glynnis pointedly if Ian “has yet been approached” by the search committee for the new director; and Glynnis says, annoyed, “You’ll have to ask him” but immediately adds, “But please don’t: it’s all, as you know, confidential.”

  “Oh, as to that: ‘confidentiality,’” Vincent says, smiling. “What place has it ever had, among friends?”

  But the subject is quickly suppressed, for such talk is premature, and they revert to their previous subject, food: talking variously of ritual cannibalism and of Catholic communion; of several passionately recalled meals in three-star French restaurants—the Hawleys, leaving soon for a year in Provence, are instructed by Leonard Oppenheim about precisely where to go, and when, and what they must order; of fad diets and real diets; and food obsessions, childhood and adult. June Oliver confesses to an appetite for cheap rock candy, the kind sold in dime stores, “all stuck together in a sort of obscenity, like Laocoön”; and Roberta Grinnell confesses to an appetite—“it would be insatiable, if I gave in to it”—for peanut butter spread thick on Saltine crackers. And Paul Owen, that most fastidious of men, the editor of a prominent art and antiques journal, has a weakness for popcorn: cheap, greasy, salty, even rather stale, with a faint taste of the cardboard box in which it comes, “and a smell overall of the disinfectant used in movie theaters in the 1950s.” And Leonard Oppenheim, the connoisseur among them of good wine, confesses to a “corrupt” fascination for junk cookies of all varieties: chocolate chip, Oreos, peanut butter, marshmallow sprinkled with pink-dyed coconut—“When I was depressed, in my twenties, I used to buy a big bag of them at a Seven-Eleven Store and eat myself into oblivion.” Malcolm Oliver, a resident, in the mid-1960s, of the Zen center at Tassajara in California and a food purist of sorts even now, admits that he too likes junk candy, and cookies, and potato chips, and pizza, and onion rings—“The greasier the better.” Elizabeth Kuhn confesses to a craving for oatmeal so thick she can barely manage a spoon in it, with lots of cream and sugar: a remnant of her upbringing, otherwise rather bleak, by a Scots grandmother. Amos Kuhn, eating, still, his second helping of cake, says, “Chocolate. But it must be very good chocolate, like this.” Denis, and the Hawleys, and Vaughn Cassity, as well as Glynnis, admit to being obsessed with ice cream; Denis jokingly wonders if, in his case, it has to do with infantile trauma at the breast, and subsequent traumas, at subsequent breasts? By this time Glynnis is aware of Ian’s absence as palpable and deliberate; she wonders if he is ill—he must be ill—yet laughs at her friends, who vie with one another in naming their favorite ice creams, their favorite flavors: Baskin-Robbins, Häagen-Dazs, Abbotts, Breyers, Old Philadelphia, Frusen Glädjé . . . marshmallow mint, peach-strawberry ripple, lemon-cherry whirl, chocolate fudge, chocolate chip, chocolate walnut, chocolate rum, and classic vanilla, of course—“the purest, the most ethereal of tastes,” in Leonard Oppenheim’s solemn words. Though she is distracted by Ian’s absence—he is either ill, in his bathroom, or being unaccountably rude—Glynnis springs to her feet, hurries out into the kitchen, and returns, gaily, with an armful of quart containers of ice cream, seven dramatically different flavors: tosses down spoons, tells her friends to taste, to sample, to pass the containers around—“We needn’t bother with bowls.”

  “What of Ian?” someone asks.

  “Ian will have to fend for himself,” Glynnis says.

  So, like children, they pass the containers around: protesting, some of them, that they cannot eat another mouthful of anything, yet spooning up the ice cream nonetheless; like children. A cigarette burns in Glynnis’s fingers, though she cannot recall having lit it; and she has finished her second tiny glass of crème de menthe; and her eyes water, after a spasm of laughter; and she licks banana-ripple ice cream from a spoon held by Vaughn Cassity and wonders where Ian is, and where Bianca is. And why, now, when the party has crested, and all that might have gone wrong with the meal has not gone wrong, and their friends are so clearly enjoying themselves, warmed, mellowed, agreeably intoxicated with food and drink, why, she wonders, should she feel, in secret, so melancholy, as after love, after the expenditure of love in passion; so leaden, behind her party vivacity; so susceptible to tears? she thinks, too, even as she laughs in a fit of helplessness at a funny remark of his, that Denis and she have had relatively little to say to each other tonight; he has been more keenly attuned, in fact, to Meika, and Meika to him: Meika Cassity, with her stylish streaked ash-blond hair, her so very French so very feminine laughter, looking, aged forty-three or -four, a decade younger, and ravenous for men. . . .

  “IAN? IS SOMETHING wrong?”

  Glynnis has opened the door to Ian’s study, without knocking, and there he sits, in the dark, at his desk, the telephone before him, his head in his hands. When the light from the hall falls onto him he looks up, blinking and guilty. Seeing him without his glasses always arouses, in Glynnis, conflicting emotions of tenderness and impatience. She guesses, at such times, that he can barely make out the expression on her face.

  “Who are you calling?” Glynnis asks, frightened. “Is something wrong?”

  Ian gets quickly to his feet, puts on his glasses, says, apologetically, “Nothing is wrong, Glynnis, I’m sorry to have . . .” and there is a long pause, as, it seems, he cannot think of what he means to say. Glynnis is puzzled; she is hurt and angry, asking why on earth he has to make a telephone call now, doesn’t he know their friends are about to leave, isn’t he aware of having been away from the table for a very long time, of having been rude, when everyone has been so wonderful to him, when the evening has gone so well?

  “I’m sorry,” Ian says. “I hadn’t realized I was away very long. I seem to have lost track of . . .”

  “Ian, how could you!”

  His hair is disheveled, his necktie loosened; there is an unpleasa
nt dampish odor about him, commingled with a sweet wine smell. A guilty man, Glynnis thinks. An adulterer.

  She says, calmly, “Something is wrong, isn’t it? Who did you call?”

  “I tried to call Stanley Brisbane . . . but no one answered. I’ve been trying to get through to him most of the day.”

  “Who is Stanley Brisbane?”

  “My co-chairman for the Budapest conference in October . . . he and I are organizing the world population symposium . . . we have to get speakers, panels. There is a minor crisis, a budget problem; I’ve been trying to reach him in Chicago for two days, actually, with no—”

  Glynnis cries, “Ian, please do not speak of that now.”

  When they return to the dining room, it is to discover, to Glynnis’s chagrin, that several of their guests are on their feet, ready to leave; and Ian apologizes, not without a certain measure of charm, explaining about the telephone call, his futile attempts to reach Stanley Brisbane, the political scientist, of Chicago, the problems he has been having with Brisbane overall, in organizing their part of the conference, and so on and so forth, glossing over the awkward moment and making everything all right, or nearly. Denis, in whom drink arouses belligerence and a curious stubborn loyalty to friends, says, “You should know better than to get involved with Stanley: the man is spoiled rotten.” Denis proceeds then to tell one of his convoluted and, in this instance, not entirely coherent tales, and the Hawleys and the Kuhns, though prepared to leave, linger; and everyone laughs at the posturings and pretensions of Stanley Brisbane, of Chicago, of whom, until now, Glynnis has never heard. But she laughs, with the others. And pours herself another tiny glass of crème de menthe. So lethal, and so delicious.