Cleaving Read online

  (Funny, about meat hooks. I’ve had the phrase meat hooks in my vocabulary for as long as I can remember, accompanied by the vision of a broad-chested, letter-jacketed thug pawing at a comely bobby-soxer. And I never gave the origin of the word any thought; I think I was picturing fleshy, too-big mitt-hands. Actually, using this meat hook, a sharp, small, thin tool that fits so coolly and easily in the palm, provokes a tiny, almost imperceptible shift of perspective. Meat hooks aren’t like “meat hooks” at all. They’re much more effective and terrifying. I find myself wondering idly if the first fifties coed to utter the phrase “Get your meat hooks off me!” was a butcher’s daughter.)

  As I pull down on the orange handle now, the bone gets looser. I help it along, scraping, sawing through the sinews marrying it to the rounded edge of the thigh bone. As more of the bone loosens, the rest of it comes away easily, until by the end I’m hardly using the knife, just yanking down and toward me with the hook.

  “We keep the bones?”

  “Keep the bones! Always keep bones!” Tom bellows. (In addition to working and instructing here at Fleisher’s, Tom teaches butchery at the Culinary Institute of America in nearby Hyde Park and has therefore developed his comically stentorian delivery.)

  “Shut the fuck up!” Josh bellows right back. (Not sure where Josh developed his stentorian delivery, but he sure as hell has.)

  “Josh, would you stop yelling?” This from Jessica, Josh’s tiny wife, ensconced in her office, working over invoices. “The store is fucking open!”

  I like this place.

  After the aitchbone is out (that’s going to keep bothering me, what the hell kind of word is aitch anyway?), it really is pretty simple. There are two connected bones remaining in the hunk of meat, each of them shaped like a Flintstones sort of thing, what Pebbles would have stuck through her hair (bigger, of course). I stab down through the meat at the top edge, where the evident shiny white end of one of these bones sticks out, and I slice down along its top, to the next joint, until I’ve exposed its entire length. Then I get in there, the fingers of my right hand sunk deep in the meat crevice I’ve just made, peering inside, while with my left hand, my cutting hand, I scrape down along both sides of the bone and down under. The meat is cold from its time in the cooler; every once in a while I take my hands out and shake them around, blow into my cupped palms.

  “Careful there,” says Tom. “Get numb, you could lose a finger without feeling it. And we have a hell of a time moving finger sausage.” (Tom thinks he’s pretty funny.)

  I gradually reveal the bones, peel them out, and all that’s left is a messy mound of pig flesh, probably fifteen pounds of it. This I just carelessly cut into large chunks with my scimitar—rolling my eyes a little, inwardly, when Tom hands me the hugely impressive knife, one of his own personal collection, and tells me what it’s called. Between the scimitars and the scabbards and the chain-mail gloves, it sometimes seems like the butchery industry was created by a bunch of testosterone-poisoned D&D nerds. More meat for sausage.

  “All done.”

  “Good. There’s the next one for you.”

  So I attack the second one. It’s gratifying how much more quickly it goes than the first did; I do love me a steep learning curve. Tom is finished up and heading out, off to teach his evening class, and so now I’m alone at the table, mostly, except when Aaron passes on his way from the front counter, which he’s working today, to the kitchen, where he’s monitoring roast beef in the oven, slowly bubbling beef stock on the stove. “How’s it coming, Jules?” he calls out with extravagant good cheer. “Can I call you Jules?”

  “I answer to pretty much anything.”

  He throws some arched eyebrows my way. “Anything, huh? I’ll have to think on that.”

  Aaron is a CIA grad—CIA culinary school, not exploding-cigars-and-covert-arms-deals CIA—and about my age, with close-cropped dark hair, startling blue eyes, and almost palpable enthusiasms. I barely know him, but I have known a few CIA grads in my time, and he has the vibe. Boyishly eager, impressed with himself. Sort of like a Harvard grad without all the money. I like him, but he’s a little intimidating. I try not to let him see it. I throw some eyebrow action right back at him. “Do that.” I don’t even know what we’re talking about, it’s just random innuendo, locker talk without a subject matter.

  I’m almost through with my round when Josh strides up from the back with a whole side of pork—eighty pounds of pig—slung casually over his shoulder. Without a word he rolls the thing onto the table. He takes his knife from the metal scabbard chained around his waist with a pink bicycle lock. “Yo, Uncle Sweet Tits!” he calls to Aaron, who’s in the kitchen stirring around some chicken bones roasting in the oven. “I’m gonna kick your ass now.” Jesse, the tall, thin, beaky kid who works the front of the shop—he’s quiet, a reader of Harper’s and Wired, who is teased mercilessly for drinking green tea—leans up against the case to watch. He evidently knows what’s coming. Josh points with his knife to the clock on the wall, like Babe Ruth pointing his bat at the center-field bleachers at Wrigley Field. And sets to work.

  Pulls off the kidney and kidney fat with a single yank. Gets in and quickly carves out the tenderloin nestled in under the spine, tosses it to the table. With thick but quick fingers, he counts five ribs down from the shoulder. Works his knife tip intricately between those two vertebrae, then, once they’re separated, slices the shoulder away from the loin with one sweeping pistol-grip cut, straight down to the table. Picks up the butcher saw, like a hacksaw writ large, and with three swipes cuts across the ribs a couple of inches out from the triangular column of meat that runs along the rib cage’s outer curve, against the backbone. Once he’s through the bone, he puts down the saw, picks up his knife, and runs it along the saw cut he’s just made, down to the table, curving up closer to the spine as he gets past the ribs, toward the hip joint, separating the belly from the loin. Then pulls the carcass to the edge of the table so that the rear leg is hanging off, leans hard with one thick forearm on the loin that rests on the table, while pushing suddenly, heavily, on the hoof with his other arm, really putting some serious pressure into it. A mighty crack! And the hip joint is opened up. One more raking slice through to wood and the round is off the loin, swinging floorward, held tight in Josh’s big muff of a hand.

  He slams the ham to the table with a meaty smack, staring at the clock. “Hey, pussy!” he yells. “One twenty-five!”

  (“We have customers, goddammit!” Jessica calls, not really expecting to be heeded.)

  Aaron sticks his head out from the kitchen. “Fuck you. Really?”

  “Booop!” Making an eloquent upward gesture, low down, middle finger extended. “Right up your rectum.”

  Aaron shakes his head, as a timer alarm goes off from somewhere over the stove. “Okay, man. I’m coming for you.” He jabs the greasy end of a meat thermometer in Josh’s direction. “I’m comin’. Don’t mess with Chocolate Thunder.” (Aaron and Josh, cochairs of the Nickname Committee, seem to disagree on Aaron’s moniker.)

  Jessica walks by on her way to the back of the shop in her padded orange vest and jeans, her frizzy hair twisted up on top of her head. She rolls her eyes in my direction as she passes, muttering “Jesus Christ,” with equal parts exasperation and affection.

  I really like this place.

  I go back into the remains of my pork round… and immediately send the tip of my knife skittering across the meaty flesh of my thumb. It doesn’t so much hurt as startle me; I yank my hand out of the meat with a little whispered “shit!”

  Josh turns to me with mild eyes. “You lose a finger, genius?”

  It’s a tiny thing. Blood, though, welling up through the smooth translucent smile of the sideways slice. “It’s nothing.”

  Jessica calling from the back, “Oh, yes, please let’s have the unpaid, uninsured apprentice cut off a digit on her first day.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Lemme see.” He roughly grabs
my hand, peers at it. “Dude, that’s nothing!”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “C’mon.” He leads me to the back of the kitchen, where there’s a shoebox full of first-aid supplies on a shelf over the big metal restaurant sink. “Rinse that out real good,” he says as he rummages through the box. When I’ve finished washing and drying my hand—blood is still running in more-than-expected amounts—he dabs me with a drop from a dark green vial. OREGANO OIL, it says.

  “What kind of hippie crap is that?” It is a testament to Josh’s ability to put people at ease that a good girl like me is flipping shit to the boss before the first day is out.

  “Beats Neosporin all to shit.” He wraps a Band-Aid around the cut. “You put a glove on that. Don’t want you bleeding all over my meat.”

  I SPEND the rest of the day helping out as I can, learning the ins and outs of boning pork shoulders, even breaking down my first side. (It, of course, takes me considerably more than one minute, twenty-five seconds.) I make sure to complain aloud about the glove I now have to wear: “Now I know why men hate condoms.” I say it not just because it’s true—I’m surprised at how that thin layer of latex between my skin and the meat makes me feel clumsier, less sure—but also, of course, because I want the guys to know I’m one of them, as obscene as they are. My cut keeps bleeding for a surprisingly long time, soaking through two Band-Aids and filling the fingers of two gloves before it finally stops. I’m obscurely proud of this.

  Later, as we’re cleaning up at the end of the day, I learn how to operate the great creaking Cryovac machine that vacuum-packs boned-out meat for the cooler until it’s ready to be trimmed for the case or taken back to Juan. As the shop’s sausage maker, he has his own little kingdom in the back dedicated to the work. I clean the cutting table with a metal scraper and wipe it with a towel soaked in a bleach solution before spreading on a thick layer of coarse sea salt, rubbing it into the cracks in the table. By seven thirty, my apron is in the dirty clothes bin, my leather hat is hanging from a hook in the bathroom, and I’m on my way out the door, a bag in hand full of meat Josh wouldn’t let me pay for.

  (“Oh, come on. You can’t give me this.” “Fuck you. You worked for ten and a half hours for no pay.” “But you’re doing me the favor here. You’re teaching me. I suck at this.” “If you don’t put that credit card away, I’m going to stick it up your butt.”)

  As I’m headed for the door, Aaron calls out to ask if I want to kick back with a beer before I leave.

  “Nah, I got to get back.”

  Aaron is cracking open a bottle of his own, some dark local brew. “To the city? Man.”

  I shrug. “It’ll be fine. Not so far.”

  “So, we gonna see you again, Jules?”

  “Oh, yeah. Count on it.”

  I’m physically exhausted when I climb into the car, my hands aching, my back throbbing, my skin sheened in pig fat, and my hair limp and hat-headed. When I fill up for gas, I buy a couple of Diet Pepsis, as I’m a bit worried about this solo drive. But my mind is almost too busy, and it turns out that the two-hour evening drive back to Queens, the traffic quick and smooth at this hour, is just the gateway I need to calm myself a little. I glide down the thruway, keeping the speedometer at just under eighty. My iPod is plugged in and playing Old 97’s, as I busily thumb-type away on the BlackBerry. (It is going to be really embarrassing if I wind up dying by careening off the road whilst texting, though I suppose I wouldn’t be the first.) I give Eric my ETA—he’s been checking in with me throughout the day, a few e-mails, a couple of texts, but I’ve been too busy to answer, plus I’ve found that reception is completely lousy in the shop—and babble to him about my fantastic first day. He writes back immediately; I picture him on the couch, watching the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, his phone close at hand, waiting for me. “That’s great, babe. Drive safe.”

  I babble, too, to D, the other one, this twitter being of a slightly different cant, self-consciously witty, flirtatious, downright dirty by turns. Once, not that long ago, he’d have answered all these in kind, hitting all the notes of our familiar cyber-foreplay routine. But he’s grown chary with his responses lately; on this evening, he’s totally silent.

  By the time I get back to the apartment at nine thirty, I’m still giddy—the Diet Pepsi, as it turns out, was unnecessary and possibly a bad idea; I now am both overcaffeinated and in desperate need to pee. I take the two flights up two steps at a time, jiggle the key in the lock, swing it open with a flourish.

  “Mommy’s home!” Eric calls. Robert the Dog, our 110-pound German shepherd–Rottweiler mix, meets me at the door in his usual quiet style, tail wagging at a metronomic pace that possibly only Eric and I can recognize as an expression of enthusiasm. He is nosing at my bag as Eric comes to greet me, folding me into his arms. “My God, you smell like meat.”

  “Is it really that strong?”

  He holds me at arm’s length, his nose wrinkled not in disgust so much as a slight sense of bafflement. “Um. Yeah.” Robert is licking my shoes.

  “Well, sorry. But I come bearing pork chops!”

  Eric cooks us up some chops while I visit the bathroom, then sit at one of the stools at the kitchen island and pop open a bottle of Portuguese red. Eric’s always in charge of pork chops. His favorite thing to do with them, usually, is a paprika cream sauce (Eric is an annoyingly thin man with a cream obsession that he foists off most inconsiderately on his gradually spreading wife). The recipe calls for loads of paprika, loads of fat (he never pours off the excess as some might do and, to be fair to him, it’s not like the deracinated pork we usually get produces much), vermouth, and half a cup or more of cream. For most pork chops it’s an excellent way to go, but here it would just be gilding the lily. “I’m telling you, you’re not going to believe this meat. Don’t do a thing to it.”

  So tonight Eric makes his pork chops a simple new way.

  ERIC’S FLEISHER’S PORK CHOPS

  ½ tablespoon vegetable oil

  2 1-inch-thick Berkshire pork chops

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Preheat the oven to 375°F. Set a heavy ovenproof skillet on the stovetop, over high heat. Heat the oil until almost smoking. (Don’t you love it when recipes say things like “almost smoking”? Reminds me of that Beckett story about a stage direction reading that a door should be “imperceptibly ajar.” Fuck you, Beckett. The oil can be smoking a little. Or not. Just make sure it’s good and hot.)

  Place the chops in the skillet and cook until deeply golden brown, just a couple of minutes per side.

  “Finish off” the chops in the hot oven, a matter of about 5 to 10 minutes, depending. You can tell they’re done by measuring the internal temperature with a meat thermometer—it should be, contrary to what the FDA would have you believe, about 120 to 125°F; the temperature will continue to rise as it rests—or, if you know your pork, pressing down with one finger to detect that moment when the flesh beneath the sear has begun to firm up but still has some give. Or you can do what Eric does, cheat—cut into it and peer at the juices, which should run almost clear, with just a hint of pink, and at the flesh, which also should retain a slight blush.

  Let rest for 5 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Serves two.

  While Eric cooks, I prattle on about Josh and Tom and Jessica and Aaron and Juan and Jesse and pigskin and look at my first cut! (I shove my bandaged thumb into his face.) And this is Berkshire pork, it’s a heritage breed, andandand… “I’m a little manic, aren’t I?”

  “A little.” He grins over at me, his eyes widening in that look of mock dismay he makes whenever his dismay is not entirely mock at all. I’ve not yet really been able to explain to Eric why I want to be doing this. Hell, I can’t really explain it to myself.

  Though we have a late start on the wine, we get through two bottles as usual. The pork chops are, as I promised Eric they would be, a revelation, moist and full of flavor, like a whole different animal from what you get in the grocery store,
which of course it is. “Jesus Christ,” he whispers. “Isn’t this the best thing in the fucking world?”

  I smile to hide a sudden pang of memory. “Pretty much.”

  I eat with other people in the world, of course. I cook for other people and take them to restaurants I hold dear. It’s one of the ways I share myself and communicate with the people I love, probably the primary way, other than books maybe. (My dad and I, for instance, adore each other uncomplicatedly, but we almost never address that fact directly. Instead what we do is read together. One of my favorite earlyish memories is of reading aloud to him in the morning from Doonesbury comic strips, which I didn’t entirely understand, to get him to laugh. And the last time I spoke to him on the phone, the first thing he said was “Have you read the latest Richard Price? I really think it’s just great.” This is how we tell each other we love each other.) And there is no one I share so satisfyingly with as Eric. We eat revelatory pork chops, we read revelatory novels, and when our eyes meet, our mutual understanding of these pleasures is utterly complete; we are one person who just happens to inhabit two bodies. I have this tenor of connection with no one else.

  So why do I find myself anxiously fingering my infuriatingly quiet BlackBerry, retiring to the bathroom to text D behind Eric’s back, to tell him I’m pining for him, that I love him? Why do I spend so much time feeling this alone?

  To Eric, I am beloved. The Julie I am with him is mercurial, both too much and too weak, someone to be coddled and feared, kept in line and depended upon. The Julie who D knows is someone just a little different. A coconspirator. A playmate. Mischievous, sexy, thrillingly amoral. Someone to whom you’d murmur, as you slid inside her, and felt that answering clench, “Isn’t this the best thing in the fucking world?” The me I feel I am with D is unfamiliar, exhilarating, someone I am constantly sidling up to, excited and frightened. But which one of me is real, the cherished, starstruck girl or the sultry, winking woman? I don’t know these days, have not since the first day D tossed me back onto his bed.