Cleaving Read online

  Luckily, the wine does the job I’ve employed it for; that and a hot shower fold my overexcitement and confused contradictions back into my exhaustion and I am able to sleep. I think the night ends well; we go to sleep together, spooning, not one of those nights when I pass out early while Eric is left to his own devices.

  But something happens while I’m sleeping, with uncharacteristic soundness. Something that I should by now expect, but that I snore right through—one of my husband’s typical bouts of four a.m. wakefulness, his dream-inspired suspicion, his tiptoeing search for my red BlackBerry Pearl…

  This affair of mine and D’s would not have been possible for me, say, three years earlier. Not because I was a better, more stable person then. And not because I was working seventy hours a week in a cubicle, though that certainly put a damper on things. No, one simple technological innovation is really completely to blame for the whole thing: the SMS text message.

  You’ll have of course already noticed by now that I am the sort of person who uses text as a verb, the sort who conducts a disproportionate percentage of her interpersonal communication with her thumbs. This is a relatively new development. Historically, phones have been a phobia of mine, exacerbated greatly by my various stints in secretarial jobs over the years, during the last of which I came to regard the things as unpredictable and potentially vicious wild creatures. I didn’t even own a cell until 2003. One of my most distinct memories of September 11 is walking the streets of midtown shaking my head in wonder at all the people wandering around staring perplexedly at the screens of their nonfunctioning phones. As soon as I did get one, though, I became enamored of this lovely new thing called “texting.”

  Many people will argue that e-mail and SMS and instant messaging and all the rest of it have destroyed our capacity as a race for gracious communication. I disagree. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we’ve entered a new golden epistolary age. Which is another of the reasons I hardly ever use my phone as a phone. Why stammer into a headset when I can carefully compose a witty, thoughtful missive? With written words I can persuade, tease, seduce. My words are what make me desirable. So it’s really no wonder that I barely ever use my phone for actually speaking to people.

  From almost the beginning, D and I did most of our flirting and plotting in cyberspace, either through e-mails or, later, the text messages that eventually flew fast and furious between us whenever we were apart. The same technologies that Eric and I used to discuss grocery lists and share random moments of charm we witnessed when we were away from each other—Just saw Parker Posey watching kids on a playground!… Oh, can you pick up paper towels?—transmitted between D and me dirty murmurs and teary yearnings and postcoital sighs, all read and tapped out on my BlackBerry’s tiny screen, during any shred of a moment I could get to myself. (Eric must have thought my bladder had shrunk to half its former size, I started visiting the bathroom so often.) We signed off our missives with goofy pseudonyms (Ingritte Frottage, Laine Cable); we invented elaborate scenes of comic distress and romantic inevitability; we negotiated risky assignations. We turned each other on with words. We competed with them. Played with them. Message after message blinking into my in-box like spaceships popping into existence from some warp-speed jump. The trill from my phone provoking a response Pavlov would have made much of—racing heart, flushed skin. All for words, D’s words and mine. They made what might have been simply tawdry, exotically illicit. They gave poetic weight to what by all rights ought to have been the stuff of soap opera. Words, to be pored over, analyzed late at night when I couldn’t sleep for wishing I could just leap out of my own bed and run to his.

  But of course that’s exactly the problem with words, isn’t it? There they are, kept, findable. Evidence. Who knows if my affair with D would have survived as long as it did, or even begun, without all those secret communiqués, but assuming that it had, it certainly would not have been discovered so quickly. Eric would have continued on, suspicious but unable to confront me, for who knows how long, allowing me to explain away the marks on my body and the glazed giddiness in my eyes, if it were not for that underwater river of words. As it was, it took almost nothing for him to divine the truth. The water table was so high, he barely had to dig to find it. He knew my e-mail password because it was the same as his own (the name of our eldest cat). He had access to my BlackBerry, from which I rarely wiped old messages, because I enjoyed rereading them. I was so blatantly careless that it began to verge on cruelty, and when his suspicion became unbearable to him, my behavior simply beyond innocent accountability, my cyber-breadcrumb trail of guilt was all too easy for him to follow. My scarlet phone spilled its secrets; my e-mail account opened easily beneath his typing fingers.

  By now I’ve become accustomed to, and accepting of, my husband’s snooping. I’ve learned to cover my tracks. But this time, I fall asleep before intercepting the missive that finally arrived, late in the night. I love you too, sweetheart. Good night. xoh~D.

  Coded, the h our little shorthand to make something naughtier out of the traditional xs and os, but not nearly coded enough. In truth, no code could suffice. D could be writing to me in binary, but the Portland area code he still uses nearly two years after he’s moved to New York (it shows up on every communiqué issuing from his phone) would be enough.

  The next morning, I don’t know anything is wrong (I mean anything immediate; everything is wrong, of course, everything has been wrong, quietly or explosively, for two years now) until after I’ve fed the three cats their morning portions of wet food. Eric has climbed into the shower; we’ve not yet said good morning to each other. I reach over for my phone sitting on the counter, compulsively checking it like I always do, though there is no unread-message light. I open up the screen and see that in fact there is one message unread—unread, at least, by me. It is familiar now, that taste of my heart in my mouth.

  The water stops running in the shower. I step into the bathroom, the door of which stands perceptibly ajar, and take a towel from one of the hooks behind the door to hand him as he slides the glass door open and steps out onto the wet floor.

  (The tub has an incorrigible leak, in addition to being constantly, chronically clogged. Our new apartment is beautiful, with high ceilings, exposed brick walls, a skylight in the kitchen. But something seems to be going on, water-related, something that my inwardly superstitious mind finds worrying. Moisture seeping through where it shouldn’t, lingering where it should drain away. I have to keep repeating to myself: it’s faulty plumbing, it’s a leaky roof. Yes, I’ve spent far too many days and nights sobbing in confusion and guilt and frustration, but tears, no matter how fiercely repressed, can’t fuck up the paint job.)

  The second I see him not meeting my eyes I know how it’s going to go down. And I know I should just walk back out the door, let him come to me with his complaint. I know I should be angry, that I should not make this easy for him. I know I should be angry, but I can’t make myself feel it. Instead, as usual, I offer myself up to his anger: “You okay?”

  He sighs, for a second stands, his dirty blond hair dripping, and stares at his feet. I’ve always loved Eric’s feet, first noticed them back when we were in high school, improbably shapely in their hippie sandals. Then he groans, grabs me roughly by the arms, gives me one tight shake. “Our marriage is falling apart and we’re not talking about it!”

  There is nothing I can say to that, not one thing. He’s right, of course.

  3

  Fajita Heartbreak

  “YOU KNOW IT’S over when he’d rather show you Team America than his penis.”

  D is imagining the story I will one day tell about the day we broke up. He’s holding me in his arms at the time. Smiling. I laugh when he says it. “That’s a good line. I’m totally stealing it.”

  It doesn’t feel like a breakup at all, not at first.

  SO I’VE told you a little bit about seams, those networks of filaments that both connect muscles and define the boundary betwee
n them. Now, the difficulty is that seams can be thick, or they can be thin. The seam of a tenderloin, for instance, is very thin indeed, and therefore hard to follow. It’s easy to lose your way, which is apt to make you nervous, seeing as how the tenderloin is the single most expensive cut of meat on the steer, thirty-nine bucks a pound at Fleisher’s. If you lose the seam in one direction you waste tenderloin, and there’s only something like eight pounds of it per animal. If you lose it in the other direction, especially right at the head of the muscle, what’s called the “chateaubriand,” you cut into the eye of the sirloin, another expensive cut and one that short-tempered chefs won’t buy mangled. Beginning butchers, needless to say, don’t get assigned to pull out many tenderloins.

  I have been allowed to do one so far, under Tom’s close supervision. It’s a long column of muscle, nestled up against the spine on the loin primal, tapering to a point up near the forward end of the cut, burying itself graspingly into the sirloin at the other end, at the hip. Using the very tip of my knife and my fingernails, bending close to peer at my progress, I flicked away, endeavoring to keep from tearing the meat, leaving precious shreds behind. It eventually rolled off the spine, but reluctantly. It clung to its cradle of bone. At its thick head, especially, right under the tailbone, it hung on tight. I had to be braver than I really was, get down under, skim along the silver surface of the sirloin, force it loose. I left a little behind. You always do, I guess, when you’re dealing with two things so resolutely fused. By the time I was done, I was stinking with nervous sweat and my knife hand was aching, like your hands ache after surviving a car accident—a near collision or breathtaking slide on black ice—and you realize you’ve been gripping the wheel like a lifeline.

  D IS a great mythologizer. I learned this about him years ago, during those few nights in my college dorm room, and I rediscovered it when he moved back to New York nine years later and easily coaxed me back to his bed. He loves (well, once loved, as it looks now like I’m going to have to get used to this goddamned past tense) to pull up the sheets and lie in bed, entangled and sweaty, spinning tales and theories about the romantic logic of our journey to this one particular inevitable afternoon. It was destiny, he said. I remember photographically the conversation of more than a year ago, when he laid out his theory.

  “Obviously fated from the start.”

  I was gazing fondly at the bruise his teeth had left on my upper arm. “How so?”

  “Well, among many other factors, how about the first time I ever saw you? When you came to the door of my parents’ house with Eric, while he was up visiting colleges.” Eric was a year behind me in school and did his grand senior-year college tour the fall of my freshman year of college, using the excuse to make his first visit to me. D lived in my college town, but went to another college very nearby. (This whole thing is so intricate and incestuous and endless, I get breathless and discouraged just trying to get all the details down. It’s like trying to explain the plotlines of a Buffy episode six seasons in.)

  “So my do-gooder parents regularly give over their spare bedroom to visiting prospective students, and generously volunteer their son to do any dirty work involved. So I’m the one assigned to sit around waiting for this Eric guy. All day, I’m waiting. Then he finally comes around, with this sexy girl.” Here he bit my shoulder until I squealed, and pressed his naked front up against my naked back.

  “Ooh, what’s that you’ve got there?”

  “Don’t interrupt, I’m talking.” Digging his fingers deeply into my hair, pulling me onto my back. “And this guy is saying, ‘Oh no, thanks, but I’ll actually be sleeping with my girlfriend.’ Uh-huh, so that’s how it’s going to be…”

  “I don’t remember this at all.”

  “You forgot this?” Atop me now, one arm hooking under my knee, drawing it up over his shoulder.

  “Mhm…”

  What I remembered was that I didn’t notice that lean, dark young man who’d one day be D until nearly four years later, when he was introduced to me at a party. Eric, to whom I’d been unfailingly faithful all this time, was away on his junior year abroad; I wrote him long rambling letters and mailed care packages. I didn’t think about the boy from the college down the road.

  Until one night, not too long before graduation, I was invited to another dorm party at this other school. There was quite a bit of drinking, expectedly, and then, unexpectedly, disastrously, deliciously, there was kissing, a closed door, Al Green on his hip retro turntable, and, inevitably, sex. We’ve always differed, D and I, on who seduced whom; he says me, I say him. But I guess the real question is not Who? but Why? If you asked me then, I would say it was just hormones, that I wasn’t even attracted to the guy, skinny, with hooded eyes, Mick Jagger lips, and a weak chin. I wouldn’t talk about the judder in my veins when I heard his knock, knowing it was him, couldn’t be anyone else at that hour. I wouldn’t tell you about the sounds he made me make, despite my shame and thin dormitory walls.

  I didn’t talk to him in the daytime, though we chattered on enough at night. My guilt was too great. I didn’t even say a proper good-bye when I graduated. But I have a snapshot from the day I moved out of my dorm. My father took it, and I to this day have no idea why. It’s an odd photo, blurry and focused on nothing in particular, just a forgettable image of me hauling out a load of stuff, seemingly oblivious to the boy mooning, some feet away, at the edge of the photograph. In fact my heart pounded at his presence. My horror made me awful.

  You’d have thought that was the end of it.

  TENDERLOINS ARE hard. Skirt steak, on the other hand, is cake. A flap of meat totally encased in its seam, which is thick and white, less like the usual half-dried rubber cement than like an envelope of flaky, ancient paper. The whole package is laid out flat along a solid wedge of white fat and rib bone. Pulling out skirt steaks is the job you assign to the cutters who don’t know what the hell they’re doing. It’s an obvious muscle, neither expensive nor delicate, and you don’t need any mad knife skills to remove it. You practically don’t need a knife at all. All you have to do is get a grip on one edge of the flap, push down on the fat with the heel of your other hand, and tear the thing right out—riiiip!—using your knife only at the very end, maybe, to cut loose a stubborn filament or two. Yes, skirt steak is a snap. I should know. This past week, I’ve torn dozens of them off dozens of beef flanks. There’s a rhythm to it. Like pulling lots of Band-Aids off lots of knees.

  THIS IS not the first time D and I have broken up.

  The first time we broke up—that is, if you don’t count me piling into my parents’ Suburban without so much as a fare-thee-well on the day I graduated college—was right after Eric snuck into my e-mail and found his first hard evidence about D, just a couple of months into our affair.

  This breakup happened at a bar—Eric’s and my local bar, actually, in Long Island City, Queens. D got on a train to come to me as soon as I texted him. (“He knows,” I wrote, having a great gift for melodrama.) I remember that I took Robert the Dog with me, more as an alibi, should Eric come home to find me gone, than as a nod to my pet’s well-being. I remember that I cried a lot, and that we kissed a lot, and that the bartender, who of course knows me, and Eric, and knows that D is not Eric, disapproved.

  I was the one who called it off. “I have to try to fix my marriage,” I said. D didn’t disagree. He wiped my tears from my face, which I thought was sweet. “I can’t hurt Eric like this,” I continued.

  D nodded and pulled me in for a tender hug. He wasn’t crying, but he looked like he might.

  “We have to stop seeing each other.”

  We lingered at the subway entrance for a long time. (Robert the Dog thought all this standing around was bullshit, but he put up with it resignedly.) D and I hugged, and kissed, and made out, and generally made fools of ourselves. And I was thinking about how all this had started. An afternoon fuck, and then another, just a friendly exchange of fluids. I was thinking that he should be easier to g
ive up, and wondering why it was so hard. And so I said I loved him, for the first time, which made his face do this odd wavering thing for a moment, like I was seeing him through a haze of diesel exhaust.

  “Well, maybe we can get together tomorrow,” I said. “Since we had it planned.”

  D didn’t disagree.

  “But that’s the last time.”

  Who did I think I was kidding?

  THERE ARE actually four skirt steaks in every cow, two on each flank, just below the brisket, which is cut from the sternum, and even as I’m writing this sentence I can sense thousands of eyes glazing over in a more-than-I-needed-to-know fog. The two pieces on each side are called the inner skirt and the outer skirt. One of them is thicker and wider and longer than the other, and one is supposed to taste better, but I can never remember which is which. (I fall into fogs, too.) Josh has explained it to me a few times, and I don’t want to ask again, even though I’m still not sure. But I do know that skirt steaks, along with hanger steaks, are diaphragm muscles, separating the chest cavity from the abdomen and making the whole in-and-out thing happen with the animal’s lungs.

  Anyway, the point is, there are lots of opportunities, even just on one animal (and there is never just one animal; Josh always brings back at least three whole steer from the slaughterhouse), to practice the grab-and-pull motion of skirt-steak removal. Get some good music cranking on the iPod. Eminem works well, something with a good high macho reading. Make a show of chatting nonchalantly as you go about your business, not even looking at what you’re doing, exchanging filthy Michael Jackson jokes. (“What does Michael Jackson like about twenty-eight-year-olds? That there’s twenty of ’em!”) Build up a whole pile of skirts. You’ll have to trim them later, make them palatable, and that is not the fun part. Avoid that part as long as possible.