Stevie Mackenzie’s brother broke up the family. He emailed her a few days after Thanksgiving to announce it. He would no longer be coming home for Christmas. John Armstrong—the family called him Army—had decided to spend the holidays in San Francisco with friends. His friends didn’t try to shove him in a box and tape it shut. His friends understood his situation.

A year went by, and Army stayed away again. Stevie and her parents fought to keep him. Eva, the older sister, was strangely neutral. Fewer pieces in the pie? Maybe. Perhaps she had a problem with intimacy. Whatever the reason, Eva was willing to let him go.  She and Army had much in common: strong chins, advanced degrees, jobs in technology. They even attended the same gadget conventions in Las Vegas. At one of these, they lunched.

*

My father said, “The decisive moment is overrated. I can’t tell you how many students of mine have wasted God-knows-how-much film trying to capture it.” Fifty or so wannabes stood outside the auditorium pretending to be cool, listening to him as if his talent would wear off on them. I leaned against the wall feeling forgotten.

He spoke to the crowd, but it was my sister Victoria who grabbed people’s attention, sneaky looks. The blond hair, red lipstick, white skin, four-inch heels: she was runway model-pretty. Her black widow dresses made her head float. Stylists across the city drooled over her sculptured hair.

She was next to me on the wall, listening, with a plastic glass of wine in her hand. I whispered to Victoria, “You know he’s full of shit.”

“This is his game, Tom,” she said under her breath.

“He’s selling the brand,” I said.

“I’m not buying,” she said.

The year she turned eighteen, Devi became a cashier in the Food Halls at Parkson Grand, Malaysia’s first fine department store, in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur. Before that she’d lived with her family in their village in the north. She’d barely finished secondary school when Parkson Grand advertised around the country for a “Malaysian Rainbow.” They wanted to hire people who were Malay, Chinese, or Indian, like Devi was.

It wasn’t college (no one in her family had attended college), but it was a way to earn actual ringgit and a way to explore. She sent in an application; six weeks later, she climbed on a bus. Her mother wept outside the sputtering vehicle, shook her fist when it took off. That night Devi curled on top of the last bunk in a room already occupied by five other cashiers in a falling-down apartment building on the edge of the jet-black Parkson Grand parking lot.

I.

Mateo got me drunk and told me about his mother’s parties. I stared at my reflection in the half-empty glass and lost myself in the white organza and tulle, the light strings and floating lanterns. Teo masked his familiar scent with cigarettes and cologne, but I could still smell the sweat lacquering his forearms, Argentina moist on his dark skin. He bought another round of tequila, and we drank to Cash and the mountain, my throat raw and roaring, the drowned pink worm dancing against my lips like a second tongue.

The small room filled up with eyes watching this príncipe and his boyish gringa. I leaned on the bar and laughed like my father, Mateo spinning words into worlds and building horizons with his long hands.

Andy had spent three years at art school. His angle – because in the arts one always has to have an angle – was that he painted things at microscopic level. Encouraged by his tutors, he referred to this as “Interiorization of External Space.” Andy liked cauliflowers a lot, he was always painting cauliflowers, because he couldn’t think of anything else to paint; initially, a friend had recommended them to him, because of their “interesting structure.” Sometimes he’d leave them lying around for a couple of weeks until they went brown. He was always mindful about giving his paintings industrial-sounding names: “Rotten Cauliflower, Batch I,” “Rotten Cauliflower, Batch XXII,” etc. One of his best compositions was called “Rotten Cauliflower, XIX,” he painted it one morning when he was badly hung over and suffering from nicotine withdrawal and therefore full of spontaneity.

 

Because she is seven days gone and he is so obviously heart-busted, I know it is not a good idea to talk to Tommy right now about Rosa or anything else. About how pointless this is. If it was a good time, then yes, I’d have things to say; we’ve been driving around for a long time. I’d say, “Tommy, I want to go home,” or “Dressing like a cowboy doesn’t make you one.” I’d say, “She is with Danny Lee now. She is probably gone for good, man.”

Phil is sitting in his office staring at his computer when his cellphone rings. It is his wife, Helen. He picks it up, punches a button. The call goes straight to voicemail.

“Tell it to your mother,” says Phil.

Then it’s the phone on his desk, melodic and eager. Phil watches the blue digits scroll across the caller ID display. It’s Helen. Phil turns back to work on his spreadsheet. He knows an email will appear on his screen within minutes, an apology from Helen. Her contrition will be touching, the way a green fly is touching.

Before Phil married Helen, his older brother pulled him aside at a family cookout and said, “Marriage is really hard. You have to work at it. It’s a lot of work.”

Firstly, the Earth itself spins on an axis. In fact, everything in the universe spins, unless you’re at the very center of the sun. In that way, the wheel itself is a microcosm of us all. And that’s just one aspect. Making the wheel so small, and with handles, illustrates man’s attempt to manipulate the world, while the randomness of his success proves our existential nature, how we really have so little control. Further, doesn’t everything, no matter how far away it goes or how fast it travels, always come back to us? It could be trouble. It could be a bad penny. If we’re lucky? Love. Moving right along, ff you’ll recall, man’s first invention—before fire, by some accounts—is the wheel, what we associate as the birth of engineering, man’s conquest over nature, our attempt to control the universe. Speaking of which, “Spinning your wheels” is also one of our more popular adages, one that evokes the image of gears moving throughout the head (in place of the brain), thought itself the bi-product of a semi-complex machine, moving parts rolling about each other, perpetuating motion, i.e., ideas. Time, which we are all slaves to, is controlled by clocks, run by the same inner workings of gears. Sometimes I take things further and project myself into the clockmaker’s role, one theory of the creator of the universe. In this version, God merely sets the game into motion and watches as the players fulfill their own destiny, using the tools they’ve been given, following a distinct set of rules. Sure, once in a while, I step in to move things along, but for the most part, the wheel dictates all. The wheel decides who lives and who dies, gives us choices, indiscriminately takes them away. The wheel simultaneously guides us along, encourages us, and destroys us, but never gives us the answers, hoping that we keep asking, keep searching, confidant that one day, on our own, we’ll fill in the blanks.

The two of them sit on the curb across the street from the Fun Church listening to the Christian rock jamming out the stained-glass windows. It’s that day: the perfect one between spring and summer that everyone in Chicago waits for. No humidity. No clouds. The grass has reached its greenest. The rehearsal of music that they’d both normally hate sounds pleasant. And the potential for that afternoon in the sun is overwhelming infinite. So they sit on the curb with their backs to Wicker Park scattered with other single people sunbathing and playing chess and softball and Frisbee. But they are not happy.

“We should do some magic maybe,” she suggests, resting her head on his shoulder. “Like go to one of those Mexican witch-crafty shops on Milwaukee Ave and get some candles and herbs and maybe some other stuff to cast a spell.”

“You want to go in La Botanica? Ew, it looks so creepy…” he says, resting his head on hers. “All those dusty saints and stinky smells. Wait. What kind of spell?”

“You know: to make guys fall in love with us. Smart guys.”

“Hot smart guys.”

“Cool hot smart guys.”

“Do you know how to cast a spell?” he asks, completely doubtful of the idea, but fully willing to have an adventure.

“Well, no. But who says we can’t write our own magic?”

“We’ll each make up an incantation.”

“They’ll be top secret.”

“For our eyes only.”

“We won’t ever tell anyone.”

“I need magic underwear so when I go to Boystown I can–” And that’s where he stops, because he doesn’t ever go to the gay neighborhood and he doesn’t know what magic underwear would grant him.

“Yes! I need a sexy magic bra!” She likes saying it out loud. “Let’s go shopping!”

“To the Botanica?”

“No, we’ll go to Myopic Bookstore and see if they have a section on magic…”

He hops up and dusts his palms off, then reaches down for her hand, glancing quickly at the smattering of single men in the dog park not speaking to each other. They continue concocting the plan as they walk away, laughing. She threads her arm through the crook of his elbow as they set off. By sunset, they’ve bought expensive underwear and a tattered used book full of imaginary animals and poems pondering love. They set their purchases under their chairs on the patio outside their favorite restaurant and drink margaritas, their matching Moleskin journals and pens at the ready, as they inspire each other to spells that might get them loved the way they want to be loved. Both will head home tipsy and alone and to bed early. There will be no incantations. The book will end up on a shelf in her house and the underwear will continue to be underwear.

 

Their summer fills with galleries and museums and concerts and performances and vodka and tonic. He gets tan riding his bike on the Lakeshore path. Her blond hair lightens and glistens, especially after a vacation spent on the beach. As autumn arrives, they are still both single. There have been no dates. Neither one realizes that both of them are clueless about dating and even worse about giving the other advice. Both have switched to bourbon. Both sit on bar stools. She leans against his thigh, staring out the window at the hipster boys with their tattoos covered in tight sweaters and thrifted scarves. She sighs. He pats her hand and tries to catch the straight bartender’s eye, not knowing what he’d do if he caught it.

“I’ve figured it out,” he says, looking away from the man’s muscled arms.

“Figured out what?”

“I’m too fat to date,” he says. “That’s the problem.”

“Me too,” she says watching one of her recent one-night-stands catch the North Avenue bus. She doesn’t realize that couple of the guys she’s slept with think they’re dating her. He doesn’t realize that he’s dating his best friend.

“Yeah, but it’s different for me, because I’m gay.” He gives her a look.

“Oh, like you’re judged for your appearance and I’m not?” She gives him a look.

“Well, sure, we’re both judged too harshly…,” he says and they grow silent.

Both of them are the skinniest they’ll be in their lives.

 

That winter, they both finally get dates. His is of the blind kind. Hers is a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend. His Date is tall and slender which only makes him feel fatter. They meet in The Loop at new bar that will be shut down by the city in few months for a rat infestation. They sit by a window that has a clear downtown view of neon and elevated train tracks. The Date is a window dresser. He orders them both cocktails that come in what looks like a flower vases. That is why The Date wants to meet there, that and the half-off nacho platters. Midway through their drinks and nachos, the electricity goes out all around them, for blocks. They laugh. The bartender lights candles. The darkness makes the moment special enough for them to kiss. They’ll sleep together that night, but they won’t call each other. “A power outage isn’t enough to make a second date,” he tells her the next morning.

“Totally.” She supports him, but doesn’t really understand what that means.

“Besides, he didn’t have a single book in his house,” he adds.

That she understands.

Her Date has a tattooed sleeve of Where The Wild Things Are, smokes Dunhill cigarettes from a gold pack, and DJ/bartends at Subterranean. They ride the bus so far north that she thinks they’ve left the city. He takes her to Moody’s for burgers and the room is so dark she thinks they could have sex on the table and no one would notice. She wants to have sex with him. Her Date has read Italo Calvino and watched every kung fu movie she has. But they don’t have sex that night. They say good night with a hug and she’s confused. “I need you to meet the guy,” she tells him the next morning. “He’s so confusing.”

“We’ll go tonight. I’ll be your wingman,” he tells her but he’s a very bad wingman.

And when he sees Her Date spinning records in the dark, he tells her, “Honestly, I think he’s too ugly for you. He kinda looks like one of those troll dolls with all the crazy hair.” Honestly, he thinks no one would be good enough for her. She never sees Her Date again.

 

It’s summer again and the weather is finally perfect again, but only for a few days, and they are still not happy. In fact, she is beginning to think it’s the way she smells; that she is giving off some pheromones or something that warn men she’s undateable. She has changed all of her lotions and perfumes. She’s doubled their applications. And no matter what she does, the men just stare at her blankly, in the bars and on the street and in her graduate classes. So finally she stops wearing them all together. She’s so embarrassed by this, she won’t even tell him. And she tells him everything.

He has begun to believe in God. Though he won’t even admit it, he thinks that Mr/Ms Devine Power has made a decision on his behalf, a proclamation about his lot in life. S/He of the capital S/H has decided to give him everything he’s ever wanted—a good job, a nice home, a great family, fantastic friends, an awesome best friend, even the coolest city ever to live in—but he of lowercase h will forever be unloved. How the hell do I speak something so depressing?

They’re at the Andersonville Midsommarfest standing in the crowd watching the band, Bumpus, rock out while they drink rum out of whole pineapples. He taps his foot. She bobs her head. They smile at each other knowingly. They’ve seen the band play so many times and so much has happened while watching Bumpus. He puts his arm around her and laughs. Without asking he takes the maraschino cherry off the toothpick-umbrella on her drink. She hates cherries. They freak her out a little. She doesn’t thank him, because he’s done this so many times.

Over the music, she suddenly shouts, “I’ve figured it out!”

“What?!”

“Why we’re always single!”

“Awesome!”

“It’s us!”

“Us?!”

For a long time, he’s thought that he’s wiser than she is, because he confuses youth for ignorance. He’s only beginning to figure out that she’s wise in ways he’d never thought about.

“Yeah! I think we look like we’re dating each other!”

“Really!?”

“Yeah! And I think we need to not do that!”

The band begins playing ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ and both of them cheer. “Bookmark!” They both yell, their understanding that a topic needs to be revisited later. Then they dance, and later, as they walk along Clark Street looking at all the venders’ jewelry and postcards and candles, she continues from the bookmark. “What I think is that we need code names.”

“Okay!” He flips through a rack of witty t-shirts and stops at one that says:
 I’m not gay, but my boyfriend is.

“Seriously.”

“Okay, seriously.”

“See, if we had code names then we could use them when we’re around someone we like.”

“Huh. But what would the code name tell us?”

“Like ‘don’t touch me’ sort of.”

“Or they’re our alter-egos. We’re like spies!”

“We’re undercover. We’re playing siblings.”

“Yes, you’re my sister. What’s your name?”

“And then when I call you by your codename, you call me ‘Sis’ real loud.”

“Or if I use yours, you talk really loud about how you talked to Mom on the phone today and she asked about me.”

“Exactly, so like say I meet this great guy,” she points to a tall slender guy in a t-shirt that says “I MAKE THINGS” who’s in line to buy a brat and who has been eyeing her since Bumpus stopped playing, “and I say–wait– What are our code names?”

They walk awhile, tossing out ideas. The guy with the brat fades into the crowd. Finally, as they reach the end of the festival and begin to feel their skin burning a bit, they agree upon their code names. They are satisfied–not happy, but satisfied–as they head back to their neighborhood not holding hands. They have a plan. Something to keep them moving. Even though the plan won’t work, it’ll keep them going until suddenly life jumps in and surprises them in ways they couldn’t possibly plan.

At some point this stopped being about food.

“Tell me, what can people expect from Artisan?” The digital tape recorder rests between New York culinarian, Chef Tairy Livingston, and myself on black sheepskin acting as tablecloth. According to the editor-and-chief of Neo Gourmet Magazine, it’s now standard practice to do interviews with the emotionally unstable and eccentric of the culinary world. “Rock star hash slingers,” they’re called—guys that attend an anger management meeting before outsourcing their pent-up aggression on a filet of veal.

“The more psychotic the guy is, the better,” he told me. “That’s what sells magazines nowadays, Straub.”

As in: Gordon R. Straub, critic of cuisine and respected journalist.

“They should expect the unexpected,” Chef Livingston muses, circling a glass of Californian dry white in-hand, Darvocet particles slowly phantom fade. He takes a healthy draft of his concoction from the breast-shaped crystal before revealing, “The menu shall be based upon my mood-swings and medicinal side-effects,” he says. “So even I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The standard answer of a sociopath. Although this is my first official interview with Chef Livingston, I’m already familiar with him and some of his previous work.

Half-Rack Baby Lamb & Peppercorn Cranberry Chutney: A beautifully tragic dish. The lamb was read “Oliver Twist” by a Canadian Laureate and marinated in Susan Boyle’s tears as she sang, “I Dreamed a Dream.” The lamb then invites you to dine on the carcass as stated in its Last Will & Testament, delivered in a wax-sealed envelope by a half-Catholic altar boy.

A once-in-a-lifetime dish. Literally. It has yet to appear on his menu again.

One reviewer said, “Never have I grieved over a meal before. Livingston serves a main course that was both moving and cathartic, like an Eastwood film.”

Absolute horseshit, if you ask me.

Back when the culinary arts were an institution of class and prestige, dishes were judged on the complexity and balance of flavors, presentations of eloquence and captivating design. It was about food and formula. It was about flavor. Not fad.

“Our slaughterhouse plays Hindu prayers of redemption and sacrifice so the cows retain idol status when they reach the other side,” Livingston explains, taking another drink of Darvocet wine. “Artisan is the only restaurant to serve enlightened beef.”

Shock literature and Hollywood publicity stunts have officially leaked over into the next medium. For years, people have paid money hand-over-fist for the latest sordid affair or juicy gossip. Apparently, that feeling has generalized to the edible.

“The free range pheasant I’m serving tonight,” Chef Livingston leans in, whispering covertly over the tape recorder. “Cheating on his wife.”

After enough of these interviews, you learn a little something called anti-reaction; it’s the ability to keep a straight face, no matter what you’re confronted with. Like playing poker, every chef is an opponent waiting to have their bluff called.

“Do not smile,” my editor said. “Do not grin, snicker or roll your eyes because these people are all nutter butters and will lunge at you with a knife if you offend them.”

Which means I won’t get paid.

Getting prison-shanked by a paring knife isn’t fun, either.

“You talk. The tape recorder listens,” and the chief of food lit pressed two palms flatly together, gazing agnostically forward instead of above. “Please, be tactful with this guy, Straub. I need you on this one.”

The same way those legendary NFL coaches and players get to become color commentators—investigative reporters retire to cushier assignments, too. You get an opinion column or review summer popcorn flicks. Write fluff and puff. After reporting murder and crime for so many years, being a restaurant tourist seemed like a dream job. Boy, was I wrong.

“Just do what comes naturally,” Mr. Editor said.

Meaning: turn the rants of this lunatic into something readable. It’s a journalistic skill few have—being able to walk out of a bloody crime scene with a nice clean article for the public. I’ve done more than my fair share of murder-suicides and serial killers, but only recently did the psychos begin migrating to the kitchens. Same tools. Different victims.

“You will enjoy this appetizer, Mr. Straub,” Chef Livingston brags, as a small dish is set before me by one of the staff.

Scallop Suicide ($187): Take your breath and life away with this forlorn creature of the sea. The scallop is diagnosed with colon cancer by an accredited doctor, sautéed in low-fat Mediterranean garlic butter, and served with a razorblade and Zoloft garnish. It’s simply to die for!

“And that’s our freshest razorblade,” Chef Livingston mentions as he pours another glass of wine. He sees me looking left, looking right, and it’s nothing but itchy black wool on either side of the plate. “What’s the problem, Mr. Straub?” he asks.

“Seems I don’t have any silverware,” and the chef frowns disappointed, cracking yet another capsule over the French beverage.

“The razorblade, Mr. Straub,” he glares. “It’s our freshest one.”

Custom Cutlery: All Artisan dishes are accompanied by specialty flatware hand-selected by Chef Tairy Livingston. Savor our Fondue with a Mont Blanc pen or eat beef & pepper kabobs off a power drill. The possibilities are endless!

“This thing is going to give me Tetanus,” I say, fingering the rounded safe edge of the blade, noticing deep maroon stains mingling with rust that takes me back a few years.

Victims that were chained to decaying radiators or surrounded by aged nails in a dark room—if they started having jaw spasms or difficulty swallowing that meant their chances of survival went down to about 13%. The police would save these people only to have them break out in fever sweats a few days later from bacterial infection.

“I really don’t want to have to report any health issues in my review,” and Chef Livingston begrudgingly passes me a stainless steel fork from the inner pocket of his jacket, openly grinning as I take a harmless bite of scallop. He and I both know the appetizer is only the beginning.

“Doesn’t matter to me if he’s a certified nut job,” my editor told me. “Do whatever it takes to get the goods on this guy so we can print it.”

Just like with skydiving or surfing in shark-infested waters, the rich and eccentric flock to all things dangerous, including people like Chef Tairy Livingston and his new Manhattan restaurant.

Tetrodotoxin, which is found in Blowfish, is 1,200 times more potent than cyanide. Death Cap mushrooms contain over seven toxins that can instantly cause death after only one bite. Chef Livingston is progressive enough to serve them both in a pasta, draped in a light cream sauce.

“So, are you trying to kill your patrons?” I ask flatly, looking over tonight’s sample menu and taking another bite of scallop.

“You are hilarious, Mr. Straub,” he laughs carelessly, wine leaking from the corner of his mouth. “Look,” he reaches over to the tap the white menu card, finger lingering over the letters MP. “It’s clearly marked.”

“How does ‘market price’ indicate anything?”

“No, dummy,” Chef Livingston sighs. “Maybe poisonous.”

It’s a fairly obvious angle to play.

When the lead singer of INXS died from autoerotic asphyxiation and that highlight reel of substances in his blood, the phone lines of the Stamford Plaza Ritz-Carlton nearly crashed from all the people trying to book the room post-mortem.

Same thing happened with the Janis Joplin overdose and Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Cause of death varied, but it all turned into profits.

“Speaking of poison, can I interest you in a Rhubarb Mojito, Mr. Straub?”

This plant consists of toxic leaves containing corrosive acids. Potency increases when mixed with soda or water.

“No thanks,” I say, requesting a bottled water when the next dish is served.

Fig Salad with Pepper Cress and Poe Chicken ($211): Leafy sophistication served with literary poultry. The chicken is raised on the burial site of Edgar Allan Poe, occasionally writing tribute blogs and poetry. On October 7th, the chicken rides business class on Southwest Airlines accompanied by an octogenarian whom escorts it to Artisan where it surrenders to its melancholy and Chef Tairy Livingston, gently rapping, rapping at his chamber door.

“What you do is squeeze on the handle here,” Chef Livingston instructs, a drug-induced smile broadening across his face. He handles a two-foot black rod with the head of a preserved raven at the end. “See? And then his little beak opens up and grabs your salad for you.”

And although this pales in comparison to the dangers a dirty razor blade poses, I decline, opting to continue this venture with the fork.

“You might also note that this particular dish was prepared in a writers’ workshop at NYU,” Tairy says. “Notice how the nostalgic flavors of the poultry mix with the youthful prose of the greens and figs?”

Chef Livingston—if he’s not trying to drug you or stab you, he’s serving mediocre dishes with farcical back-stories, and he’s going to make a mint doing it, regardless of my opinion. Celebrities will go nuts for the salmon that backpacks through Europe or the French apple tart that was deemed OT level 7 by the Church of Scientology.

“See how this dish contrasts classic and contemporary?” Chef Livingston poses, taking another large slug of wine. The bottom of the glass is now thick with sandy white pharmaceuticals, sweeping with the currents of chardonnay.

“Honestly,” my brow furrows, digesting another bite of this average course, “the whole thing seems rather pretentious.”

“That’s because you’re a critic Mr. Straub,” Chef Livingston smirks, undaunted. “Critics, unfortunately, can’t experience dishes beyond their presentation and flavor.”

He’s serving history.

Edible experience.

“I should hardly expect you to comprehend the level of genius behind pork dumplings that protested the war in Iraq,” he shrugs. “So perhaps you need something a little more…obvious,” and the chef takes a moment to consider me and my utter lack of acknowledgement to him. The unmatched brilliance of Chef Tairy Livingston—he’s going to make me see it whether I like it or not, a flicker of mischief passing through his eyes now that I’ve called his bluff.

He raises the stakes.

“A slice of Winter Cake for Mr. Straub!” he yells over his shoulder, and a waiter in the middle-distance rushes out of view to retrieve it, footsteps fading quickly as he approaches the kitchens. Tairy seizes the menu card from my side of the table, pushing it snugly into his jacket pocket and out of my view. Whatever he’s about to serve, he doesn’t want me to know what it’s made of.

“Ah, winter,” he sighs blissfully. “The season of snow and ice…when Mother Nature becomes a cruel bitch.”

“Are you about to poison me?” I ask flatly.

“Worse,” he snickers, but lacking any hint of a threat. Chef Livingston leans back in the steal and charcoal vinyl of the chair, completely at ease. “I’m going to serve you our finest dish,” he says.

A waiter emerges from a hallway, balancing a triangle of white on his fingertips. Bright white, and if I’m not mistaken—sparkling.

“No history or preparation method, Mr. Straub. It’s obvious these things are lost on a simple man,” Chef Livingston says.

No ingredients.

Or grand pretense.

“I want you to judge it the way you normally would,” he advises as the dish is placed before me: double-layered white cake, white icing, served on a chilled platter.

Chef Livingston winks at me and says, “Flavor and presentation, Mr. Straub—bon appétit,” and he takes another gulp of wine, admiring his work. Icing turrets spiral under fine, powdery dust, but he still hasn’t answered my question.

“Is it poisonous?” I ask again. “Because if it is—“

“—No!” he cuts in. “It’s not poisonous. Relax. Eat.”

I pick up the fork a little more comfortable with this tape-recorded straight answer. The tines ease through the icing and body, breaking the tip of the triangle away as Chef Livingston watches me, waiting for a reaction. Most cake can be judged without even eating it.

The cheap variety will be dry and crumbly with sandy-textured frosting, like the kind you pick up the grocery store. The perfect dessert, I’m told, will be sweet, but not overpowering. It’ll be moist without being muddy. My mouth accepts the first bite.

“That dessert costs over $11,000, Mr. Straub,” Chef Livingston says, just as it passes my lips. He says this as if he was waiting on that.

You break it, you buy it, so to speak.

I give him my best anti-reaction.

“Chew slowly…you’ll start to feel it,” he notifies me, once again, breaking a tablet of something or other into his drink. A pleasant vanilla cool starts to spread through my mouth, my gums and cheeks.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he smirks. “That I’m overcharging in order to appear chic and keep the restaurant exclusive.”

Because only A-listers and multi-million dollar professional athletes would be able to afford something like this. Only the Hollywood eccentric would risk death and pay out the nose for it.

I manage a quaint nod of agreement.

The cake is simply too good, too exotic to disrupt with speaking as the complexity reaches past the back of my tongue. Down my throat where the cool begins to spread through my chest. Another bite is taken. A bigger one.

Chef Livingston continues, saying, “And you’re absolutely right. I don’t want the general public to have any part of this because they haven’t earned it…but these celebrities,” he begins to laugh, giving his own knee a little smack. “They’ll do just about anything to look special, won’t they?”

And at first I thought it was mint. The cool sweet chill was indicative of it, but it’s transcended that, turning into a slight numbness. A slow building rush of euphoria seeping into my gums, swimming through my jaw. This dish alone just might be the redemption of Chef Tairy Livingston, but then I remember something my editor said.

“Do not get too chummy with this guy,” he warned me. “Be professional, but be on guard.”

And I shove another bite of Winter Cake in my mouth, savoring that sweet, thrilling numb. Spreading. Spreading through my skull and neck. And my gums, they begin to burn vanilla menthol warm.

“You don’t remember me, do you, Gordon?”

My gums, burning absently, and I could swear there’s a granule of something floating around in my mouth, pressing a thick cloth napkin to my lips.

“I suppose I’m not surprised,” Tairy shrugs, glowering at me now. Staring with a twitching smile. “You’ve ruined so many people in print, I guess the faces started to blur together, didn’t they?”

Milky blood on the napkin, and I’m tonguing my gum and cheek lining, digging through the numbness for an irregularity. The numb strengthens in pleasant warm, reverberating down my shoulders, my spine. I finally excavate something hard into the fabric, dumping it onto the plate in order to get a better look at it.

My editor told me, “Chef Livingston has never agreed to a sit-down…so we either got lucky or there’s something special about you.”

And I’m looking down at the plate, staring at the shard but oddly calm about it, asking, “Glass?”

He pulls out the menu card, reciting it verbatim.

Winter Cake ($11,777): A one-of-kind dessert, capturing the despair of this cruel season. The batter is cut with real diamond dust procured from Abraham Abramowicz of Abramowicz Diamonds. Pure Columbian cocaine, refined black tar heroin, flunitrazepam, and vanilla with a touch of crème de menthe to compose the icing. And if you’re hearing this Mr. Straub, then you already know it’s too late.

The diamonds sand down your gums and tongue, allowing the drugs to pour in practically unnoticed. Euphoria sets in. Overdose is possible if enough is ingested.

“Then those diamonds will start to go to work on your esophagus and stomach lining,” Chef Tairy tells me, but I’m already familiar with some of his previous work: dishes he used to make before they had elaborate histories and expensive ingredients, the fame and his legions of celebrity clients.

Before he was the eccentric ruler of Artisan, he was known by another name. Another face and different locale. This was the man that I launched a full on character assault upon with my articles.

Headlines that said: The Charles Manson of the Culinary World and Chills & Grills: an Exposé of Psychotic Cooks.

But a new lease on life is only an identity change away. Some plastic surgery. Restaurants aren’t exactly the type of places to give a full-on background check, either.

“Seven years in the joint for a little rat poison in some pancakes hardly seemed fair, Gordon,” he reasons, but my head is swimming so thick with euphoric joy and terror, my face can’t decide on an expression. And it’s numb.

“You really ruined my fun with your little crusade,” he scoffs, giving me a playful slap on the arm. “But I guess it gave me time to study, and when I heard you were wanting to review this place—I just had to see you…if only to show you how much I’ve learned.”

Same M.O. Different materials. Maybe I should’ve seen this one coming.

He’s been extremely careful though, never serving the same dish twice.

“Hey Gordon,” he taps my hand, taps it hard enough so a ghost of feeling registers. “Gord-o, would it be too pretentious if I say you’re getting your just desserts?” and he snickers manically, dunking the tape recorder in his wine glass.

He tilts it by the stem like it’s a microphone, asking me, “Do you care to comment on your current predicament?”

Despite myself, I’ve faded. Folded.

Already, I’ve begun to forget how good revenge can taste.

The black mountain goat.

The black mountain goat with white-trimmed ears.

The black mountain goat with white-trimmed ears rose vertically.

 

An absurdly efficient elevator, its hooves move smoothly, precisely. The lift in Adam’s steel-and-glass London office building. The American will be impressed. The slim American. The slim American with the come-hither-stare. The American that has caused Adam’s wife to massage her elbow in one slow stroke. The jocular American father. The all-American dad. The jocular American dad in the kiddie pool, playing with his two small children. The confident American dad, pretending with his two small children that the empty lifeguard chair beside the kiddie pool transforms into the Eiffel Tower. The playful American. The imaginative American. The American laughing hysterically—with his children—as the youngest, just under two, repeatedly chants “Champ de Mars” while splashing across the flat of foot-high water she sees as the dusty Parisian mall.

Yes, this American. He will be impressed.

 

Not only because Adam, at the end of his second week, finally accepts the American’s silent challenge to leave the comfortable Lemnos Village Resort—convincing his elbow-rubbing wife Angela to watch their two young children at the too-warm kiddie-pool—but also because these black mountain goats, their eyes dark and deep, suggest to Adam a secret language of scribbles, asemic dancing men, cut within the hardscrabble of ancient walls. Yes, the American would be impressed. Adam watches the goats pass willy-nilly through the lower remains of the Venetian Castle towering about the rocky streets of the capital. The capital of Lemnos. He takes a picture with his cell phone. No bars.

The ascending path consists of billions of blistered rocks warmed by a punishing sun. Adam’s feet burn. Of course for the American, heat of all kinds proves merely hypothetical. Even with his two small children, the American seems wildly impervious to the effects of the throbbing orb permeating the island like butter pressed through the cheesecloth of the sky, then smeared, in purified form, like jelly over a suffocating tick. His brood is always mucking about the hotel pool, the smallest one chanting “Champ de Mars” over and over as if her three short days in Paris, before coming to Lemnos, makes her a miniature Baron Hausmann. The American, smiling at her, sweats less than a cactus.

The American’s stamina remains absurdly bullish. Perhaps affected by the pagan legends of the island, he seems also possessed of abnormal protean abilities. He can be in many places at once, as he never tires of proclaiming. Eternally at the resort pool during the heat of the post-lunch buffet afternoon, but also traveling: at Kotsina, gazing up at the statue of the martyr Maroula, his two children curled under his arms while the seaspray pumps their family with its foamy blessings; he takes deep swishes of muddy coffee in the village of Portianou, gazing carefully at Winston Churchill’s WWI residence; he thinks nothing of waiting over an hour under the blistering heat for one of the island’s small number of cabs to return to the resort; he descends hundreds of feet, alone along the steep stone staircase at Kavirio, the green-blue water rolling into the cave in which he sits, a bronze-age idol, watching the sunrays pass like spears into the portal between worlds.

The American lifts a forkful of Greek spaghetti at the Thanos beach restaurant, and tells again of the sand like silk nothingness between the toes of his children who move, crablike, over its wondrous threads. He wanders the main tourist street in Myrina, the capital, and presses his naked toes into the grooved stones amid this mercantile artery glazed with trinkets of the Aegean world—smooth opals, paintings of cats and small churches in stark blue and white, jars of thick nutty tahini, vacuum-packed olives cured in rusty salt, bracelets of tiny eyeballs to ward off evil charms, and terrapins, thick-flippered and bright, bringing love and wealth and contentment.

And then he is above it all: among the deer and wild goats of the Venetian Castle.

Inside the ruins.

Under the punishing sun.

 

The first several-hundred feet are nothing for the casual climber, for Adam who lives atop a world of glass-and-steel, for the businessman who works hard to provide a life for his two children and wife Angela. He succeeds and they are happy. They take a vacation to Greece. They fly directly to Lemnos. Unspoiled, says the travel agent. Unhurried, says a co-worker. Adam drops his children at school when he can. He picks them up when he must. Adam does everything asked of him. And more. He takes out the trash. He empties the cat litter. He is happy. They are happy.

And now, he takes a sort of bet, an unspoken wager, from this American always laughing some sort of secret laugh with his two children. The wager argues that Adam cannot leave the resort on his own and make his way, hand-over-fist if need be, the top of the castle at the top of the bluff at the top of all Myrina and beyond which so goes the entire island of Lemnos, the land of the god Hephaestus, tossed to earth millennia ago in furious afterflash by his angry father Zeus.

The crumbling path zigzags for a quarter of a mile and Adam delights in the pebbles that tickle his feet. At first. And then they are ball bearings beneath his shoes, which then become thin leather sheaths tanning in the endless sun. A collapsing archway just ahead signals, as the American suggests, the end of the so-called modern area. A green garbage can with a smiley-face sticker hums with thick flies and Adam sees lollipop wrappers, a soda can, Greek candy bar slivers at the bottom of this almost-empty drum. Far from the Athenian Acropolis. No guards. No entrance fee of so many Euros. No wrinkled women laying out cloth mats strewn with St. George candles. No well-appointed-yet-dirty museum.

Once Adam passes under the arch, he follows the path as it reveals an exposed corridor partially shaded by stringy ivy, following the suggestion of a wall rising almost ten feet high immediately to his right. The loose stones in the wall shake lightly, shingles in the wind, when Adam props his arm against any point of the edifice. His legs tense atop another set of loose stones, tiny agates spinning noisily down the steep incline.

A second archway emerges along a steep path sloping west, 300 feet or so beyond Adam. This terminates in a plateau above which, to its left, begins a further series of steep ascents toward a towering Greek flag that waves dully on a distant summit. Small, and far from glorious, with white stripes dancing in the wind. Adam imagines a brief moment each afternoon, late in perpetual heat, when the sun and the flag press together in perfect syzygy with his body as if it were a third heavenly object subject to its own laws of revolution and rotation. To Adam’s right, alternately, the plateau passes through a set of partially excavated anteroom. The lower end of the fortress, the American relates, where most people stop or give up or maybe wonder about what’s inside—inside what?—the caves.

The American take long sip of his plastic-cup beer and details his smallest daughter’s scurry up a slope thick with dusty plant scrub, as they move into the first dark opening. The air is choked and brittle. The American follows his daughter into the cave, and the first thing, he says, with legs entangled in kiddie-pool noodles, must be the smell. Rotting meat. The putrefying character of old coffee. And then, the flies. Yes honey, the Champs de Mars. The Champ de Mars at night. The American carries his youngest daughter back down to his wife, waiting by the rental car hundreds of feet below. Unaffected by the loose stones, the heat, the stoic gaze of the mountain goats, the American scurries back to the same spot where Adam now stands. Smelling the same heat that Adam now smells.

This is the exact view, the exact smell, the American explains, which serves as an entry point into things that are real. Things that are real, that’s what the American says. Not like the things in the Lemnos Village Resort. The American learns what is real and so many other things from the Greek. The Greek, says the American, knows many secrets about Lemnos. The Greek, Theophiles, zips to Plati beach on his tiny motorbike to hold the hand of the American’s children and order cabs for them and take them wandering through the beige valleys of Lemnos. The Greek, says the American, knows a secret café in Moudros where young boys drink wine in the middle of the day and pull slow donkeys down a crumbling alley. This Greek, who has traveled to London and whose grandmother was mayor of Myrina many years ago, knows many things about the Venetian Castle set high above his hometown.

 

From this starting point, this special place, Adam feels the transition between the unbroken sun and the penumbra of the cave’s entrance. He stands between the zones—the skin of his left leg, framed by a dusty sandal, marked by peeling points, tiny bite marks where the Aegean sun has nipped at his legs; these small mountains of baked skin curve sunward like whittled strips of balsa wood. Adam counts three still-unexploded blisters, their heads white like the inside of a juicy Saturn peach, threatening to explode with volcanic pus. Adam can imagine the lemon-peel feeling of the enflamed red skin beneath the blisters, waiting to harden in this unforgiving climate.

His right leg, enrobed in the shadow of the cave, is not so much cooler—but soothed by comparison. She’ll rub lotion on these spots. Adam’s wife Angela and her eyes: dull marshmallows dunked in soft brown pools of melted chocolate. Like the eyes of the American’s wife. The women stare at each other while they sunbathe, beneath oversized sunglasses, under the brim of soft summer hats. When Adam stands up from the kiddie pool, he finds, in the tiny aperture between hat and glasses, that the American’s wife is no different that his. Given different circumstances, different geopolitical realities, different accidents of birth and upbringing and education and station, they might as well be each other. Adam pictures the American’s wife in her swimsuit, rubbing sunscreen on the American’s back so as to prevent the blisters on Adam’s left leg. Adam feels the American’s wife’s tongue probing her husband’s lips. Tiny droplets of water set like tiny islands across her neckline.

Up the path. Another mountain goat. Black, like charcoal drizzled with a thin skein of dull gray ash, dusted by the distant-fingers of ancient Venetian guards wasting hours in the castle, flexing their bare-chests and feeling, sternums at the sun, the seared flesh smell of breasts pressed to the solar grill. The goat’s white beard scatters like burned hairs turned upward as the ends of a sooted paintbrush. Its hooves are blasted obsidian rocks, volcanic stones transported here from the far end of Lemnos, from a quarry on the other side of the island, and so carried in the body of this animal to this spot high above the city of Myrina.

Of course, the Greek Theophiles says to Adam, everything is lazy here except the goats, and except for us on the nights we go to the Kinky Club just outside of Myrina. We ride our motorbikes and we pay small cover charge and we do things that our mothers never do because they are older and no longer go out and these are also things you tourists never do in America or Britain because—here the American pulls back his eyes wide in the blare of the afternoon sun so that he looks more what Adam imagines Theophiles might look like—these things we do are beyond what the tourists on Plati beach could never even dream. The American says these things, casually, splashing, his daughter who is shouting, Daddy, Champ De Mars, and the American then smiles closely at Adam’s wife in her lounge chair.

The goat bleats three times. Adam remembers the American describing the way the goats will bleat, this goat maybe, when Adam will reach the second entry point, the second way to understand the things that are real. Adam wipes the sweat from his brow with an exposed arm, splattering droplets onto the lower ridge of his nose. He bunches his t-shirt, pulls it awkwardly over his face to his forehead as a damp sponge wipes a puddle. Yes, this goat. This goat with the eyes like grey cuts in a stone vagina. This goat whose bleats cover Adam in a enveloping pulse—visible in the air as ripples in a pond thick with skimming spiders paralyzed by the sun—and so on beyond Adam, over the roofs of Myrina’s houses and shops and groceries so many meters below. Adam calls down now, for his wife, picturing the American’s wife and the American’s two children waiting at the bottom for Adam to finish his climb before they take the rental car back to Plati beach, before they relax with a drink at the kiddie pool. They pass through a transparent Adam, and the goat, this goat—which the American describes as a doorway, an entrance—this goat rises alongside the rickety path, races to the distant Greek flag now in phase with the sun pasted high above the sparkling soup of Myrina’s boiling, aquamarine bay.

 

And so Adam climbs after the goat. After the American. After the American’s wife. After the American’s children with the youngest shouting Champ de Mars and maybe Adam’s wife and children can be set inside the jowls of this goat. The American’s goat that is now Adam’s goat. And then they may come out differently than they began. Isn’t the purpose of a holiday to change you for the better? To rest, yes of course to rest, the American would say, but also to transform the mundane world you came from, Adam, the world of glass-and-steel and commuting and loneliness and alienation into a series of impossible sandy islands rising like glorious vertebrae from the primordial back of the ocean. The London Eye, Adam, can grant you a sort of vision, but it is only the vision of steel, the prophecy of the great Ferris wheel, of everything you already know.

The path grows strangely stiff once Adam’s toes knock a cover of loose stones toward the plateau now below him. The great wheel of everything that ever was—for you and your wife and your job and your world. To pass through, Adam, to open a door, even for a week, well, is that what you’ll accomplish in the Lemnos Village resort when the check for the dinner buffet comes and you write your room number and sign your name and gaze up at the lights of the Castle before sleep?

The American describes his dinner with the Greek, Theophiles, in the seaside restaurant over the Turkish beach in Myrina. They shared a bowl of thick kalamata olives. Briny. Maroon. A plate of ripe tomatoes red like the sun in the evening against the distant monolith of Mt. Athos. The Aegean waves tickling the flat stones of the sea wall’s shadowy face. The lights from the Castle above the Turkish beach gleam like a chain of electrified paper clips draped over the rocks. No, the Greek says in answer to the American’s question. No, we don’t go at night because of the homeless, the drug pushers as you call them, and how do you say, yes, the Satanists.

Now, here, this goat moves with impossible lightness; it senses Adam, following, climbing if not precisely in the same direction—because the goat seems to fly twenty feet to Adam’s right, walking vertically up the cliff face—while the ground slopes suddenly, undulating in the rhythm of a sandy wave, and Adam learns the best way to move upward is to use his hands, with arched back and dust on his chin. Adam sees the American pushing off the crevices in the rock wall, the dusty powder of grainy dirt steadying into definite handholds as he climbs ever higher.

The American describes this moment to Adam, this particular moment which serves as another entry point, where you can stop being you and start being goat or rock or castle or hill, and if you move quick enough to the top of the Venetian castle, before that a Byzantine fortification taken over later by Ottoman Turks, where the goats play sentry over a pack of 200 dear that flail in underground cisterns and submerged rooms under shackles of scrubby moss, then, Adam, you’ll finally get where you know that I’ve been.

I’m here, Adam. The goat stops suddenly near the height of its ascent, just below the high wall of the remaining embankment containing the Greek flag thick with dark spots and tiny pinhole tears. And I’m down below, Adam, too, at the bottom of the world, under Myrina town at the two beaches that flank the castle bluff when there is nothing but the periscopic late-afternoon silence of intense heat so familiar to the inhabitants of Lemnos that they wilt into their cots and collapse behind closed shutters and grow comatose and catatonic in the stifling afternoon.

The trick is not to move when the goat stares you down, Adam, and it will, wondering in the final moments of your climb whether you are of goat or of man and what you’ll be once you reach the summit, finally, and where you’ll move your feet and your hands once you stand again vertically, a biped once more, high above the city, the island, the distant green water steaming in the wink of the setting sun.

Adam pulls himself over the last lip of the pathway before the buttress. Adam feels as the American feels. That certain places can be doorways, entry points to something else altogether. To things that are real. The ground is hot to the touch. Adam has no water. He is covered in sweat. He stands atop the embankment and moves over to the center of the clearing, deep inside the crumbling stone walls.

Adam, the goat says, the American says, splayed in a circle of stones, among a cask of discarded bones thick with maggots, it’s time for you to do what the American does, it’s time to dream yourself away.

1. Good Girl

Paz has been dead a month but he is still here.  Abby, his dog, snuffles in her sleep and moans, sounding much like Paz when he wore his oxygen mask in the last few weeks of his life. A psychic had told Paz that she saw him alive at seventy-four so he wasn’t convinced he was dying at fifty, even when the doctors suggested it was time for hospice.  Paz put little stock in medicine, holding the doctors responsible for misdiagnosing a case of rheumatic fever as a child.  He had told me this on the first date we ever had, but I was too giddy with lust and youth and was convinced his heart was strong enough for both of us.  He was a devout Buddhist, raised a Jew, and had read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, as many times as the twenty years I had known him. Still, he refused to consider the possibility of his own death, even when he was down to one hundred and twenty pounds on his six foot two inch frame, too weak to roll over or even get out of bed and piss on his own. We did without hospice.  I cared for Paz, wiped his ass, adjusted the oxygen tubing, administered the meds, made the holistic tea he requested and then let grow cold on his bedside table, read to him from his library book, The History of Baseball, because he was too weak to hold the plastic coated binding, and made him blended meals he could not eat before finally surrendering to the little cans of ensure.  I was afraid every time I left the room, afraid to close the door when I went to the bathroom for fear he would need me and I wouldn’t hear him call, his voice reduced by fluid and congestion that was filling the cavities of his heart and squeezing me out.

At the same time Paz could no longer get out of our bed, Abby stopped being able to go up the stairs.  I found her one morning slumped against the bottom step, her watery Labrador eyes beseechingly turned toward the top where her master lay dying.  I called the vet who told me to bring her in and I arranged for our next-door neighbor to sit downstairs with the baby monitor I had hooked up so I could hear Paz’s every move.  His low moans and wheezing breath replaced the radio where NPR had played on a constant rotation.  She was earnest, our neighbor, strident and evangelical, perhaps an odd combination for a nurse, or maybe the perfect one.  I lacked perspective.  We saw each other by chance at the hospital where Paz had gone for the final round of tests; she walked by in scrubs with a stethoscope draped casually across her breasts.  She had broken free of her group when our eyes met.  She seemed sincere and offered to help and as needy as I was, I shamelessly dragged her into our mess, probably because she didn’t flinch when I barked at her that Paz refused hospice.

I used to be strong from yoga, but now there are different muscles, from lifting Paz, rolling him in the sheet to move him from side to side, supporting his weight when he adamantly refused the indignity of the bedpan and demanded to be taken to the bathroom, up until a week before he died. So carrying Abby into the vet felt like I was carrying Paz. She even smelled like him, or the old him, slightly rank, a whiff of the out of doors always clinging to his skin.  There was a sense memory there, lurking in my addled brain, but I couldn’t find it.  Close to tears I pressed my face into the scruff of her neck.  Her fur was matted and gnarled and I felt a pang that I had failed her as well, considering I barely remembered to fill her food and water dish on a daily basis, so preoccupied was I with trying to keep a dying person alive.

The vet knew all about Paz and I could see it on her face when she told me that Abby’s fourteen year old kidneys were failing, that it wouldn’t be long before I would be totally alone.  She sent me home with more meds to ease the pain to aide in the journey, but not heal, the meds I am most familiar with, and I took Abby through the drive thru at McDonalds and bought her a Happy Meal.  I pulled into the lot of the park where Paz and I used to take Abby for runs and unwrapped the cheeseburger and put it on the seat between us.  Abby lifted her head and sniffed the wrapping as I slurped the soda and shoved the salty hot fries into my mouth, wondering when it was I last ate a meal.   Finally, she nudged the burger with her snout and opened her mouth and nibbled at the corners.  Watching her struggle I pulled back the bun and realized I should have asked for the burger plain.  The yellow cheese was slick with tomato and pickle.  I swiped a finger through the ketchup and hooked the pickle and popped it into my mouth and chewed.  Abby looked at me and back at the burger and then we finished our Happy Meal in silence.

When I came home and carried her upstairs into our room and put her on the bed next to Paz he raised a hand and slowly kneaded his pale blue fingers into her fur.  I had become used to the startling hue of his skin, but not his fingers. He long ago stopped wearing any rings because his fingers had shrunk, instead I wore them on a chain around my neck: his grandfather’s signet ring, a jade band and a large knob of silver set with a stone we found years ago on the beach.  I wore a similar one on my right hand, with half of his stone and the same setting and I wound a thin white piece of string around Paz’s finger where his ring had once been.

Once Abby was settled on the mattress she pressed the length of her body against his and they slept.  After that there was no other place she seemed pain free so I carried her down the stairs three times a day to watch her limp around the yard looking for a spot to let loose her bowels as I cried.  It was the only place I allowed myself to do so and I was amazed at how easily the tears came three times a day, like clockwork.  When she was done and I wiped my face I gave her meds on a spoon thick with peanut butter and carried her back upstairs to the bed I used to share with Paz. The last words he said to me on the day he died was: “such a good girl” as he patted Abby’s side.  I realize that was probably directed more toward Abby than me. But as a memory it is mine.

A week after Paz died I stopped answering the phone for two reasons.  One: telemarketers are surprisingly resilient where death is concerned, and two: my parents. My parents who have never quite forgiven Paz for being so charming I would fall in love with a man ten years my senior, never marry, and never have any children.  That I left school in my final year and was content to follow him from country to country those first few years of our relationship, was incomprehensible to them.  I had been the girl with big plans.  Up until I met Paz I had no idea how wrong those plans had been.  That I eventually received my degree and taught when we settled here in the home Paz’s parents’ had left to him didn’t seem to make things any better.  I had delayed my parents’ dream, not mine, which was why I had yet to tell them that when I realized that Paz’s heart would not beat forever, I tendered my resignation. The department head tried to talk me into a sabbatical, but I knew a temporary home when I saw one.

My parents wanted me to come out to Sag Harbor for the rest of the summer as if a tonic of creaky old wicker, salt breezes and a decent lobster roll could cure me of my grief.   My mother ventured that, at forty, I was still a young woman implying my youth somehow entitled me to a twenty-year do-over.  I refused, as I had refused them as Paz died.  We hadn’t talked specifically about what happened after his death, but I knew enough that Paz believed a person should exit this earth as quietly as they entered.  There was no one else to make the decisions: he was the only child of only child parents’, both deceased. I had no service, only cremation, with a vague intention to do something with the ashes other than leave them in the center of his mother’s Danish modern credenza in our front hall among a few wilting flower arrangements and cards I couldn’t bring myself to open.  There should be a meaningful place, but forced to choose among my memories, giving weight to some and not others, without Paz, is nearly impossible.

I started riding my bike at night because I couldn’t sleep.  Once Abby had her evening meds she was out, her body pressed against pillows covered in some old t-shirts of Paz’s, my pathetic attempt at recreating his body so she wouldn’t miss him.  In nocturnal exhaustion I turned to her in the dark looking for the comfort of a warm body; on two occasions her eyes were open, and she looked through me as if to say she knew the charade, but she was going along with it to humor me.

Paz had given me the fixed gear bike, as a present on my 21st birthday, because I didn’t have a driver’s license and he thought it was quaint.  The bike was from the fifties, a sparkly blue with the word: Hollywood scrawled in fancy script on the hub. While I did eventually get my license as convenience, I rarely drove when Paz and I were together.  The university, shopping, our home and Paz’s studio, were all within biking distance.  Paz enjoyed the curve of the road behind the steering wheel more than I, and I was content to have him there.  I still took my bike wherever I could, even the grocery store, preferring to buy only what fit into my wicker basket.

I was too timid at first, a mixture of paralysis and fear and loss, a horrible cocktail of loneliness, to venture further than around the block.  So I made the loop over and over again until I lost count and the houses and asphalt blurred.  I hadn’t even realized I was crying until I stopped and my face and shirt were soaked. It seemed that my body had decided to take the expulsion of grief into its own hands, having been denied its natural inclinations of sleep, sex and nourishment.

At dawn after that bike ride, I was hungry like I hadn’t been in months, and my mouth watered for the crepes Paz had made for breakfast after our first night together.  He had fed me. He tasted like sugar and his hair held the faint scent of the butter he had used to cook the crepes, and his skin warm where our bodies met.

I couldn’t recreate those crepes even if I had the ingredients, so I settled for what was left in the fridge: peanut butter on cold wheat bread drizzled with honey, making a slice for Abby too, without the honey and with the addition of her meds.

During the day I am tethered to the house by Abby, but at night I ride my bike, slowly moving away from the house like a reverse spiral, yet always arriving home just before dawn.

Right before Abby dies she lifts her head and looks around the room before dropping her head back down and nudging my shoulder with her snout.  She presses all four paws into my body with one last burst of energy before she goes, just as she had when she slept on the bed with us when I first moved in with Paz.  When she shoved us like that Paz and I knew our time languishing in bed was short-lived.

When I am fully awake and her body is still, I think all of this or none of this has happened.  I cannot be sure since I have no witness.  I get out of bed and wrap the sheet around Abby while I pee and brush my teeth and get dressed.  She is much heavier now as I carry her downstairs and out to the car.  I seatbelt her body into the back seat and realize that the last time I was in this car was after Paz died.

The vet is at the desk conferring with another patient and so I don’t have to say anything.  When she sees my face she knows.   She follows me out to the car and peers in the back window at the sheet that is Abby.  She puts her hand on my arm and whispers something I forget the moment I hear it.  The sound filling my head is that of the ocean after a storm.  There is a roar, a rushing, a crash, then nothing, a momentary lull, before it begins all over again.

 

2. The Winter We Stayed in Montauk

I woke one morning in a strange bed, limbs tangled up in sheets, in a borrowed apartment on Avenue A, three weeks into our stay in New York and told Paz I dreamed of the beach on a fall day, with the wind in my face and a thick sweater pulled around my shoulders.  “I could taste the salt in the air,” I said and was surprised to feel water collecting at the corners of my eyes.

We had been together a year and had only recently come back into the country. Paz had a fellowship in Italy for six weeks where we had lived in a crumbling villa with six other artists of varied disciplines.  I spent long afternoons alone at museums soaking in images I had only seen in art history books, and nights slightly drunk and sated from meals that stretched on for hours.  Later, naked, I was aware of the soft dimpled spread of my thighs and the half circle of belly that filled the hollow between my hipbones through the filter of an Italian moon, while Paz, stretched out beside me on the uneven mattress traced this new fuller body with his hands.  Back in the States I was always hungry, but never ate enough to be satisfied. The energy of the city made me burn through fuel as quickly as it was consumed, and soon my body reverted to its original form.

Montauk was a gift. Paz had friends with a beach shack that had a woodstove.  They offered it to us for the weekend and we stayed for four months.  We teased Abby into the surf that coiled at the shore with pieces of driftwood she retrieved from the foam, and danced in the snow at the beach on New Year’s Eve.  We made love under layers and layers of musty old Pendleton wool blankets, my flesh rubbed pink from the scratchy wool.   Skin tasted like salt no matter the washings with soap, and our hair was stiff from the air so close to the ocean.  We bathed together to conserve water from the rusty tank, huddling for warmth under the lukewarm spray, and Abby slept at our feet as sentry and added heat. I collected jars of stones from the shore, white with a tinge of pink, sanded to translucence from the size of a pearl to that of a perfectly shaped egg.  Paz sifted through them making Stonehenge-like piles, and held the stones up to the watery winter light separating them into shades of white.  We read a thick shelf of National Geographic magazines from 1956 and memorized most of O’Hara’s Oranges and Second Avenue, mildew spotted copies with sticky pages we found tucked away on top of the refrigerator.  Our only outside human contact was at the grocery store where we purchased whatever it seemed was left on the shelves from the summer people and the liquor store where we bought anything under ten dollars. It was an affront to our palates after drinking the most beautiful Italian wines, but we were not boorish about it.

When the below zero days of January kept us in bed out of necessity to stay warm, Paz asked me for stories of my childhood summers in Sag Harbor. Of sailing lessons, surfing, and first boys kissed, the smell of hot dogs and French fries and ketchup, mosquito bites and the condensation of milkshakes sweaty in your palm.  Sunburned shoulders, tiny bikinis, the ache as you lost the wave and you slipped below the churning waters, the distillation of bubbles and light as you broke the surface, striated vision from strands of hair across your face and the feeling of utter joy that you hadn’t drowned.

It was March before we saw a bundled up couple on Ditch Plains beach, their bodies bent like question marks against the wind. That night I knew as soon as I felt his lips move against the hollow at the base of my throat what Paz was about to say. “It is time to go, my love, time to go.”

When we left Paz painted for three months, sleeping in the studio when exhaustion sent spasms through his back and cramps threatened his fingers.  The paintings were larger than our beach shack, massive canvas where he tried to contain the power of the ocean.  Abby and I would go there and I would lie next to him while she sniffed the corners of the studio before standing by the painting, her head cocked to the side as if contemplating its breadth.  Curved against Paz’ spine I would bury my face in the fragile space between his shoulder blades. Unwashed for days, his skin and clothes smelled like the salty sea air, musty and rank and slightly sweet, like the winter we spent in Montauk.

 

3. Hunger

The crepes were paper-thin triangles, tinged a pale shade of blush, and dusted with powdered sugar.  Paz carried them toward the bed on a vermillion plate and my stomach growled at the sight of them.  I had been too weak to cover myself with the sheets we had kicked to the floor earlier in a rush to be next to each other on the bed, so I lay there, propped up against the headboard with many pillows, naked and waiting as he had banged around the tiny kitchen, refusing any assistance.  All worth it now as he set the plate down on my trembling stomach and brought a crepe to my lips.

The dance. Oh my god, the goddamn dance of longing, of waiting, of craving the feel of him. That want exceeded my inexperience in all matters physical and for once, didn’t seem to matter. That first touch was exquisite.  “What took you so long?”  I asked as Paz undid the buttons on my sweater and lowered his face to my breasts.  He laughed in response to my question, a soft explosion of his breath against my skin before I felt his mouth close around my nipple.  Dizzy, I said with a surety I hadn’t known I possessed, “This is going to be so good.”

And Paz had stopped what he was doing and looked up at me and grinned.  “You are a prophet, a goddamned prophet.”

Our lips and fingers were slick with butter and powdered sugar.  I touched the tip of my fingers to the spot on his chest where his heart beat.  Over the endless dinners, drinks and coffees as we had told each other the stories of our lives, and gave everything we had leading up to this moment, Paz had confessed about his weakened heart, the valves scarred from a virus, future surgeries and medicines, but all of it didn’t seem possible.  The color was high in his face, his arms and legs sinewy, his back a thread of finely sculpted muscle and beneath my fingers, a smooth unscarred surface. As Paz tossed the last crepe into the air and the dog caught the crepe in her mouth, the plate slid slowly onto the floor with a dull thud. The smell of burnt butter clung to his hair and his skin as we started the dance all over again and Paz, without words, said everything I ever wanted to hear.

Janice Bane cranked it up.  Neil Diamond.  The Solitary Man.  Anybody who had a problem with that could go fuck themselves.

“I’ve had it to here, being where love’s a small word.”  Janice gripped the steering wheel and belted out the lyrics. “Part time thing.” She hit the gas and passed the Range Rover. “Paper ring.”   L.A. traffic was getting to be unbearable.

“I know it’s been done having one girl who loves you.”  She swerved around a man puttering along on a powder blue Vespa Scooter.   “Right or wrong.”   HONKKKK.  What kind of man would chose to drive a Vespa?  “Weak or strong.”

She picked up some speed on the straightaway.

“You’re different, today,” Alice said.

There was no way for her to know that. Robert had just gotten home, hadn’t even spoken to her yet.

“I had an affair. That’s why.”

He loosened his tie, took off his shoes.

“Wow. Just today? That was short.”

“Well, it’s been going on for a while. But today was especially good.”

He stripped, hung up his suit, threw his socks in the hamper.

“Whatever it is, I like it,” Alice said. “You look good.”

In the shower, it occurred to Robert that he should tell her the truth.

But then, he had, hadn’t he?

Yes. He had.

When he got out of the shower, Alice was in the kitchen, talking.

“Right,” she said. “Oh no, it’s definitely for the better. I can tell.”

Robert threw on some pants and a t-shirt, looked around for something, and then headed into the kitchen.

“Is that my cell?” he asked.

Alice held up her finger. “So…three o’clock works? That would be perfect…. Excellent. Have a good time!”

She hung up.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I made you an appointment with your mistress. Saturday at three. Does that work for you?”

“I guess so. What will you do?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I thought I might learn to fly. They offer weekend classes at the municipal airport.”

And so she learned to fly and eventually became a flight instructor. In fact, she was my flight instructor, but that’s not where I met her. I met her on a friend’s deck in Tujunga where she told me all about her ex-husband’s affair and her avid obsession with managing it.

“It was exciting!” she told me, not so drunk that she was slurring her words, but she was definitely wide-eyed. “There I was, MASTER…of his affair!”

“How genius,” I said. It was a boring thing to say. I blame the fact that I’m boring.

Alice thought so, too, so we didn’t hook up that night.

Three years later, I decided to become a pilot, and she was my first flight instructor, and our first fling began in the cockpit. In fact, it never left the cockpit.

She liked all manner of positions, so long as they were her idea. She also liked mutual masturbation because it could be done without taking the seatbelts off.

“Isn’t it exciting to do it while we’re flying?” she’d say.

But we weren’t flying. We were still on the runway. We never made it off the ground.

One afternoon, after we almost took off, I was trying to figure out if there was a new mole on my hand or if it was something that would wash off, when Alice asked me, “So, have any big plans this weekend?”

I let it slip that my future self was coming to visit. Suddenly I was far too interesting to waste time in the cockpit with.

Of course, Alice only slept with me because she wanted to be in a threesome with me and my future self (well, okay—not necessarily me and my future self specifically—with anyone and their future self, really). She wanted the experience and she was also keen on being the first to do it—the first to be the meat in a person-and-their-future-self sandwich. So that’s what we told her, that we’d never had a threesome with anyone before.

Not long afterward, my future self moved in with me and then Alice moved in with us and my future self took a night job which left me and Alice alone most evenings. We played Scrabble. Eventually Alice decided we could have sex without the future self because she could still fantasize about him while we did it. Then, we got bored of having sex and went back to flight school. She, as an instructor, and me, as a janitor. I went into the custodial arts because my future self predicted only failure if I tried to become a pilot. Like it or not, I trusted my future self.

I wiped up the halls and the toilets and eventually my future self found us both boring and decided to go hang out with my childhood.

Alice moved out. I took up league bowling. I was put on a team with Bob, whom I bowled with for two years before I figured out he was Alice’s ex-husband.

He was interesting.

“Hey!” someone behind me screams.

“Jesus Walks, God show me the way…”

I am lost in the newspaper, headphones in place and walking along the platform at the Damen Blue line stop in Wicker Park.

“Jesus Walks with me, with me, with me…”

“Hey!” they scream again, followed by a playful shove to the back.

I remove my headphones. It’s her and she’s all smiles. I’m still conflicted about whether I think she’s attractive, with her buzz cut, crazy angular features and harsh cheekbones. She could almost pass for a dude, a boy really, but for her breasts which are swelling under an ancient Smoking Popes T-shirt, those hips, just climbing above her baggy jeans, and that ass, that golden ass.

“Where’s your head at, man?” she says smiling, but intense, hungry.

She adjusts her T-shirt. Was I staring at her chest? I need to watch that, but can it really be avoided? I don’t know. I don’t even really know her. I once knew her, sort of, before I was married, though you wouldn’t call it a friendship exactly.

We worked at the same agency and she had been hired to oversee this huge grant, AIDS stuff, before protease inhibitors and before anyone could manage the disease. People died then. That’s all. I don’t even remember what kind of program she was running, what anyone ran back then, hospice and support groups mostly. It was horrible. They called her the Angel of Death. It was meant to be funny, escapist, black humor. But she couldn’t deal.

She also couldn’t deal with her husband Matt, her chronically depressed husband who rarely got out of bed and was never going to finish his Ph.D. much less anything else. Once in awhile we got a cup of coffee at The 3rd Coast.

“I was diagnosed with adult ADHD,” she said one day.

“Yeah, what does that mean?” I asked because no one talked about things like adult ADHD then, no one even diagnosed such things.

“It explains my inability to concentrate at work,” she said, “that’s what.”

“That’s good, right,” I asked warily, “now they can help you get some control over it.”

“I guess,” she said, “if I actually knew what I was doing. Hey, did I tell you about Matt?”

“No, what?”

“He’s working on his dissertation again,” she said.

“Awesome.”

“Yeah,” she said looking out the window for a moment, “so I have to tell you about the fucked-up thing my mom said to me last night.”

So it went, every time we went out, I would try to be empathic and I would try not to picture her naked. Mostly though, I didn’t know what to do. One day I got another job.
We vowed to stay in touch, but I didn’t, couldn’t, something.

And here she was, though to be truthful, this wasn’t the first time I had seen her since then, this was the second. The first time had been at this party I was at with some friends of ours. She hadn’t even been there when I we arrived.

But he had.

We saw him across the room. I had worked with him years ago as well. He had been a case worker at a drop-in center for homeless men who were HIV positive.

“Hey,” I said to my wife pointing across the room, “I used to work with that guy back at the agency.”

“Yeah,” she said mockingly, “is this you pretending you have gay friends because you’re so progressive and cool?”

“Fuck you,” I said punching her in the shoulder.

“Save that for later,” she says, “go talk to your friend.”

“Hey,” I say as I get ready to walk away, “do you really think he’s gay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think he was when I knew him.”

“Right.”

I walk towards him, but he doesn’t see me at first and I suddenly feel very self-conscious as I think back to work all those years ago. We had been doing something at the center, lugging boxes of donated clothes up the stairs, the dusty, blazing hot, never air-conditioned stairs. He peeled off his shirt when we walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water. For a moment I lost myself in the rivulets of sweat tracing a path along the muscles on his ridiculously ripped back. He turned and caught me, the late afternoon sun briefly dancing in the air around his head.

“You going to make a move or what?” he said.

I pause, attracted, panicked, confused and not interested, right?

“Uhmmm…”

“Dude,” he said cracking-up, “I was just fucking with you. You don’t think I’m gay do you?”

“No,” I said, “I knew you were goofing.”

“Cool.”

I wave when he notices me weaving through the crowd and walking over to him.

“Yo,” he says smiling, but not so much, welcoming, but not terribly so.

“Hey,” I say walking up to him, “how are you doing?”

“Great, married, awesome chick, kid, the whole thing,” he says quickly, effusively.

“Cool,” I respond, “me too.”

We don’t have much to say after that and I’m not sure where to go with it or how I should get away. Maybe my wife could save me, maybe, but she’s off somewhere.

“Holy shit!” someone says next to me.

I look over. It’s her. The Angel of Death.

“Holy shit!” she says again. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re friends with the hosts,” I say, “our wives went to college together, you?”

“We belong to the same co-op.”

“Word.”

“Yeah,” she says, and then noting I am not by myself, “and who’s this?”

I look at him. He’s smiling, really smiling.

“You guys don’t know each other?” I ask.

“No,” both say, now staring at one another.

“That’s funny, because we all sort of worked at the agency at the same time, and yet you guys never met?”

“No,” they both say again still looking at each other.

It’s amazing how lost they seem in one another. How quickly I’ve become the third wheel. Am I jealous, and if so, of whom?

“So, are you still married to Matt,” I abruptly say to her trying to break the spell.

“Sort of,” she says.

“Sort of, what’s that?” he says.

“He’s sort of shut-in these days, it’s working for him, but I’m not sure if it’s a marriage, you know?”

“I know,” he says, “marriage can definitely feel like a prison some times.”

Didn’t he just say he was married to an awesome chick? What the fuck? At this point the conversation continues along the lines these conversations do.

Obama.

Facebook.

Do you know so and so?

The difference though is their reaction to one another, hanging on each other’s every word, laughing too hard, her touching her hair, and him constantly leaning in towards her, trying so hard to listen to everything, occasionally touching her shoulder or her arm, looking like he wants to eat her. It’s like I’m not even there, and I’m not, not really.

A little alarm goes off on the iPhone in her purse.

“Oh fuck,” she says, “gotta blow, I need to walk the dog. See you guys around.”

He watches her leave. He stares at her ass, her still stellar ass. And then she’s gone, though not before looking back one more time at him and smiling. He leans over to me conspiratorially.

“I want to fuck her in the ass,” he says grinning like a little kid.

I suppose I am supposed to play along, but I’m too stunned to say anything. I start to retreat and once he can tell I’m not going to respond to him, he becomes more formal, less relaxed, no longer smiling and now looking to get away. Which he does, and so do I, end of story, but not quite, because here she is, coming off of the train, so awesome and so unavoidable and so whatever else she is.

“Hey,” she says, “so what did your friend say about me?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“C’mon,” she says smiling, but anxious, searching, “there was something there, right? He seemed into me, didn’t he? He must have said something.”

“Eh….”

“What? You can tell me. Please.”

I look at her crazy cheekbones and short hair, her oddly attractive boyish looking features.

“He said he felt bad for you. That your marriage was so fucked-up. That he was wondering whether maybe you’re actually a lesbian, but don’t know it and that maybe that was the problem. It wasn’t nice. I’m sorry.”

Her shoulders sag and her face crumples as she tries not to cry. And then we just stand there and stare at each other for a moment.