Cleaving Read online

  An e-mail. Eric, of course. How’s it going? he writes. The meat I bring back home when I return from Fleisher’s, the butcher shop where I’ve trained and worked, helps, but after more than a year, my husband still doesn’t understand what it is I’m trying to do here, what I’m finding that’s so important. He gets lonely. So do I. Still, I elect not to answer; not now.

  Instead, I take a break. It’s four o’clock, and there’s a fresh pot of coffee, our third of the day. Since I started cutting at Fleisher’s I’ve become a coffee fiend. It’s not just that the caffeine keeps me spry during the long hours on my feet. It’s also that the heat warms fingers icy from slipping into the freezing crevices between muscles, and the moments spent loosely cupping the mug seem to soothe my hands and wrists, so often swollen from gripping the knife, working it into joints, then twisting to open them up.

  I pour myself a mug and clasp it between my palms, leaning up against the table opposite the stove in the kitchen. Something on the cooktop smells wonderful, heady with garlic. The soup of the day. I peer into the pot, then grab a ladle for a taste. Spice and rich pork. Posole. Warms me to the core, reaches where even the coffee doesn’t, in this place that must of necessity remain nippy all the time. Resting against the counter, thawing my hands, I stare, dreamy with weariness, at the lion’s share of liver still sitting on the table a few feet away, as smooth as a river stone, though of a more vivid color.

  Those familiar with grisly nineteenth-century British history might know that one popular theory among Jack the Ripper armchair criminologists posits that the killer was a practicing butcher. I have developed a small addendum to this hypothesis. I am by now fairly confident that should I want to surgically excise a streetwalker’s liver, I could manage it. I will even confess that I can sort of imagine the appeal. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not an advocate for slashing prostitutes’ throats and rummaging through their innards as a valid lifestyle choice. But in a weird way, I see the butchering part of what Jack did as separate from the killing, the frenzy, the rage. And I see it as maybe containing the tiny kernel of sanity still left to him. Maybe it was his forlorn way of trying to fit the pieces back together, or at least understand how they once fit. I look at that crosscut organ sitting on the table, its workings so mysterious but its dimensions so satisfying, dense and symmetrical and glassy-smooth, and I feel a sort of peace, a small piece of understanding.

  My hands are blue with chill, my lower back throbs, my left wrist aches, and in the cooler in back is a towering stack of pork sides waiting to be broken down before closing in three hours. I smile into my cup. I am far from home. Right where I want to be.

  PART I

  Apprentice

  … And how it whispered,

  “Oh, adhere to me, for we are bound by symmetry

  And whatever differences our lives have been

  We together make a limb.”

  —THE DECEMBRISTS, “Red Right Ankle”

  When are you going to get this, B? The life of a

  slayer is very simple. Want. Take. Have.

  —FAITH, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

  1

  Love and a Butcher Shop

  A year and a half earlier, July 2006.

  I GUESS I really have been in the city too long; I’ve acquired, among other traits of the native New Yorker, a blanket disdain for the entire state of New Jersey. I was irrationally hesitant to come here. But on this day NJ Route 202 is leading me through an unexpectedly lovely landscape of gentle hills and dilapidated barns. I’m getting no service on my BlackBerry, which sends a slight frisson of panic through my body, making my teeth buzz in my gums; this must be another one of those New Yorker things I’ve picked up. I keep lighting up the screen and scrutinizing it for bars, but it’s no-go.

  The air breezes in through my rolled-down windows, warm and smelling heavily of honeysuckle and freshly cut grass, rather than the diesel fumes and sour chemical smoke that clung to my nostrils during the run down the turnpike. It calms me. I breathe deeply.

  It’s been a frustrating few months.

  • • •

  I GUESS the truth is that butchers intimidate the hell out of me. I’ve long had a bit of a thing for them, akin to the way many women feel about firefighters. Burly Irishmen covered in soot are okay, I guess, if you’re into that. But I prefer this world’s lock-pickers to its battering rams. Anybody with enough resolve and muscle can bust down a door; that kind of force I comprehend completely. I myself possess it, psychologically if not physically—just call me Julie “Steamroller” Powell. But a man who can both heave a whole pig over his shoulder and deftly break down the creature into all its luscious parts, in a matter of moments? That’s a man whose talents I can really use.

  I’m attracted to a butcher’s intimate knowledge. Romantically, I imagine it’s innate, that his nicked hands were born knowing how to slice those whisper-thin cutlets. I’m attracted to his courtly, old-world brand of machismo. Butchers are known for their corny jokes and their sexism, but when the man behind the counter calls me “sweetheart” or “little lady,” I find myself flattered rather than offended. Most of all, I’m attracted to his authority. There’s an absolute sureness to a butcher, whether he is chining lamb chops with a band saw or telling his customer just how to prepare a crown roast. He is more certain of meat than I’ve ever been about anything. Rippling deltoids and brawny good looks are nice, of course, but to me a butcher’s sureness is the definition of masculinity. It strikes me as intoxicatingly exotic, like nothing I’ve ever experienced. (Well, not for years, anyway, not since I was a kid. I think of the teenager I was when I found Eric and took him to me, and it’s like remembering an entirely different person.)

  Maybe that’s why I seem unable to open my mouth around butchers.

  IF I’M dreading a conversation, I tend to practice it over and over in my head beforehand, perhaps not the most effective of preparation techniques. “I want to learn how to—”… “I was hoping you could teach me to—”… “I’m really so interested in what you do…” Ugh.

  This is far from the first butcher I’ve tried to ask for this favor. Weeks ago, I asked the guys at Ottomanelli’s—my first butcher shop when I moved to New York City, and still my favorite. It’s a tidy storefront on Bleecker Street with hams and ducks hanging in the meticulously polished windows and a tight awning overhead, red and white stripes as neat as the trimmed and tied meat and bones within. I used to be a regular there, and the guys behind the counter—brothers, I think, all of them in their sixties or seventies, white coats spanking clean despite days of blood and ooze—still always make a point of greeting me when I come in. It’s not quite a “Norm!” sort of welcome, but there’s warmth there.

  But when I managed to ask, stammering, if they had a place for an apprentice with zero experience, they demurred. Not particularly shocking, I suppose. Instead they suggested one of the culinary schools downtown. I briefly entertained this notion, but it turns out culinary programs don’t offer one-off classes on butchering, and I wasn’t about to shell out twenty thousand bucks for a yearlong program teaching restaurant management and pastry making, my personal vision of hell. I proceeded to ask around at the handful of other butcher shops in the city, or try to, anyway. Half the time I couldn’t even get the words out. When I did, the men behind the counter looked at me as if I might be a tad touched and shook their heads.

  I press my lips together as the beseeching words run through my mind. And then, inevitably perhaps, he pops into my head, the one whom the word beseech sometimes seems to me to have been invented for, the man who called, two years ago, to ask me to lunch, the man I’ve wound up spending much of the last two years pleading with—for attention, assurance, sex, and love. The exception proving the rule of my marriage, the one man who, when he was not much more than a boy, small and dark, not so very attractive, found he could make me open my dorm room door in bewilderment, late at night, with a single knock. The one who, nine years later, discover
ed he could still do essentially the same thing. In my phone’s contact list he is represented by a single towering initial, D.

  But no. I’ll not let him in, not now. I shake my head sharply, as if I could physically dislodge the errant thoughts. Find a butcher. Get him to teach you how he does what he does. Do it now. I don’t know why I want this so much, what I have to gain from learning to cut up animals. Yes, I have a thing for butchers, but it hasn’t ever before occurred to me to try to be one. What’s going on here?

  Maybe I just need distraction. D and I have been sleeping together for nearly two years now. I’m familiar with the landscape of addiction, and I recognize that I’ve built up a habit for him, no less real and physical than my habit for booze, which has itself grown stronger in the wake of all the various stresses of being an adulterer. And something is wrong lately, slightly off. Just thinking about that makes me crave a drink.

  Eric, of course, knows I’m fucking someone else, has known for almost the entire period of my affair with D. He even knows that, in distressing point of fact, I’m in love with this other man. I don’t have to tell him this. We basically share the same mind, after all. Once, I was proud of and comforted by this nearly paranormal connection. That my husband knew me so well, and I him, seemed proof of a love superior in all ways to all others. Then D happened. We fought about it when Eric first found out, of course, or rather I cried and Eric yelled and marched out of the house into the night for a few hours. But after that, there was only exhaustion, and quiet, and in all the months since we’ve barely spoken about it at all. Sometimes, even most of the time, everything seems fine this way. But then, this talent we share emerges and proves itself the stealthiest, most vicious weapon in our arsenals. We can delve into each other’s heart and deftly pull out the scraps of filthy hidden longing and unhappiness and shame. With a look or a word, we can deftly rub these into the other’s face as we’d push a dog’s nose into its mess on the living room rug.

  We’ll be sitting in front of the TV, say, into our second bottle of wine, watching some Netflix DVD. I always have my phone on silent when we’re together, so Eric doesn’t hear the trill or feel the buzz against the sofa cushions. But still I’m tense, glancing at the BlackBerry screen whenever Eric gets up to go to the bathroom or stir the soup. When he gets back to the couch and sits, I’ll press the soles of my feet up against his thigh in a gesture of affection intended to make me seem comfortable and happy. But eventually, unconsciously, the nervous energy builds, and I’m tapping my bare feet against his pants leg. “What’s the matter?” Eric will say, grabbing my feet to still them, not taking his eyes from the TV screen. “He not paying enough attention to you tonight?” I’ll freeze, stop breathing, and say nothing, waiting to see if there will be more, but there won’t be. There doesn’t need to be. We’ll stare at the television as if nothing at all has been said; when D does send me a message, if he does, I’ll be afraid to answer it.

  I can do the same to him. Some night my husband will go out. “Drinks with work buddies,” he will say. “Back by nine.” Nine o’clock and then ten will, inevitably, come and go. The first time this happened, a month or two after he discovered I was sleeping with D, I was surprised and worried. He came home that morning at two thirty and woke me up to confess, remorsefully, that he’d been on a date with another woman, that it wouldn’t happen again, though I told him—ah, the pleasure of being the sainted one for once—that he deserved to be able to see anyone he wanted. By now I’m used to it; I don’t expect him home, probably until dawn. I can instantly tell, from the tone of voice when he calls or the phrasing of his e-mail, that he’s going to be with the woman he’s been seeing off and on for nearly as long as I’ve been fucking D. I’m not even angry; I’m pleased. The text I send him at a little after eleven is always more than gracious: Sweetie, can you let me know if you’ll be home tonight? I totally understand if you won’t be. I just don’t want to worry.

  It might take him twenty minutes to write back, or an hour, or three. But he’ll always write the same thing. I’ll be home soon. I know I’m fucking up everything.

  No, I’ll write, all sweetness and light, you’re not fucking anything up. Have fun. Come home whenever you like. When I hear the lock in the door I’ll initially feign sleep while he undresses and cuddles up guiltily beside me in bed, but I’ll make sure I give his hand a reassuring squeeze so he knows. In the morning I’ll pretend not to see his wish that I’d scream or cry, show my hurt and thus my love. I’ll poach an egg for breakfast, smiling. Nothing will be said. This is how I punish him.

  When he leaves for work I’ll report everything that happens to Gwen, the friend I go to with all of this. “I really don’t mind. He cares for her, you know? He deserves some relief.”

  “Julie, honestly? I love you, but I don’t know why Eric stays. I really don’t.”

  Gwen says all the things a good girlfriend should, and every once in a while she offers to beat up my husband or my lover for me, depending on who is driving me more crazy, which is nice. But at the end of the day, she can’t quite fathom the situation I find myself in.

  “I know. When did we start being so nasty to each other? I mean, it’s not all the time, it’s really not. But—”

  “Do you really see this getting any better?”

  I don’t know the answer to her question. I do know that through all this, Eric still doesn’t leave. And as for me, as bad as it is, I can’t even comprehend the pain of leaving him. (As so often happens in my life, I find that a character from the much-mourned TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer puts it best: “It’s like I lost an arm. Or worse. A torso.”) I just need a place to hole up from time to time, from this constant silent seep of toxic hurt and anger, and also, lately, from D’s hot-and-cold ambivalence, which I feel like too-tight clothing. Bafflingly, when I think “sanctuary,” what comes to mind is the gleam of steel and tile, the moist red of a lamb roast, the pungent smell of aging beef, and the grip of a knife in my hand.

  But it turns out that this is a tricky thing I’m trying to do, and not just because I seem to be constitutionally terrified of men in white coats. There also just aren’t a lot of butchers out there anymore, not real ones, not in this country. That seems impossible, doesn’t it? I mean, there are a lot more of us Americans than there were, say, a hundred years ago, and a whole lot of us are eating meat. But butcher shops have been largely replaced by meat-processing plants, giant factories that swallow up animals and excrete vacuum-packed steaks. A crude analogy, I know. But the invisibility of the procedure is as complete as that of your own bodily processes. We know there are lots of heavy, sharp machines in there, since the workers inside are constantly getting hurt and killed. (Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and that’s probably why it employs more than its share of illegal immigrants.) We know that there are probably men in there with terrific knife skills, presumably fitted into the industrialized process, fleshly cogs in the vast machine, clad in chain-mail aprons and repeating the same cut on the same body part over and over until their hands cramp and backs throb.

  But I’m guessing about all this, because Big Beef doesn’t generally tend to roll out the red carpet and start throwing backstage passes around. In this age of nanotechnology and liability, you’ve got a better shot at taking a journey through the digestive tract of an industrially farmed steer than at witnessing exactly how that same animal moves from on the hoof to on your plate. And that’s not what I want anyway. I want to be taught by an artisan, not an assembly-line worker.

  So, after exhausting all the possibilities in the city, I’ve made a few calls and obtained another few names from farther afield, seasoned guys who still know how to go about the old-fashioned trade of ushering animal into meat. I’m following one of those leads now, straight into the far reaches of southern New Jersey.

  I’ve been riding the curves of the road a bit too fast, declining to apply the brakes, so that on the sharper turns I can feel the weight of the
car edging out along the grassy verge. But as I get closer to Bucktown, I slow up. At least, I think I’m close to Bucktown. I’ve been on the East Coast for fifteen years now, since graduating from high school back in Texas and moving up to Massachusetts for college, plenty of time to have accustomed myself to the fluid notions of townships up here. But I still find myself occasionally nostalgic for the decorous distances of my home state, not these villages and localities endlessly bunched and inextricable, but blank landscapes clarifying the separation between well-marked city limits, leaving me always assured that I can find out where I am, at least on a road map. I miss that sense of separation.

  Generally I like driving, especially by myself. I never really lost that teenage thrill, the fantasies of flight that accompany going fifteen miles over the speed limit, curling smoothly around more earthbound drivers, knowing that whatever exit I need to take is still miles ahead. But this part of driving I don’t like—the looking, the poking about, the squinting to catch sight of numbers on the sides of mailboxes. Trying to figure out the details of where the hell I’m headed. I guess maybe no one likes this part. I’m tempted to text Eric, always am when I’m lost. He is out there somewhere, eager to help, but I still have no phone service.

  Finally I find the place. It’s more retiring than I’d imagined, more countrified. I’ve been in the city long enough that I expected, even in this rural setting, a city sort of butcher shop. I’d been imagining a redbrick storefront in the small town center, shining glass panes, and the white tiles and stainless steel of a meat counter visible within. So I’d missed the rambling old clapboard building set some yards back from the road, with the weather-beaten sign propped up on the pitched roof of the front porch—an Italian family name in unprepossessing lettering. I pull into the little unpaved lot with a crunching roll of tires. For most of the drive from Queens I’ve been filled with that lovely sense of purpose that comes from having embarked upon a quest without yet having begun to grapple with any of the nitty-gritty; yet for the past half hour I’ve been overcome with the frustration and irritation of unfound addresses. And now, as I put the car into park and take the key out of the ignition, all of that goes away and I’m stuck with that old lurch of the heart. Now I have to walk in there and ask these guys for a favor. A job. That this time I’ve driven for two hours at the behest of the raving voice inside my head doesn’t make this any easier at all.