Cleaving Page 6

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  D AND I broke up the second time about a year after the first split had failed to take. By this time, the entire tenor of the whole messy situation had changed. After Eric found out about D, we wrangled, tearily and angrily, for months and months, about what our next move would be. Many couples would just have called it quits, but instead we occasionally cried, drank, watched a lot of TV, and went to bed together nights, except when he stayed out, because this was when Eric began seeing the other woman, sometimes staying out all night without explanation, trailing home the next morning full of a remorse that was actually something else, a recrimination. Also around then, a bronchial infection landed some codeine cough syrup in my hands, which I found I liked very much indeed. It was the only thing other than the brief release of an afternoon with D that made me feel like maybe one day everything would work out—until Eric made me pour it down the sink.

  At last we’d decided on a trial separation. I rented a small studio at 86th and York Avenue, and for four months I led a small, quietly satisfying, if slightly lonesome existence up in that unfashionable corner of Manhattan. I enjoyed having a space of my own, however tiny. I enjoyed the times, rarer than I’d have liked, when D came up and spent the entire night with me, just as though we were a regular couple, and I enjoyed the dinner dates with Eric, the sensation of simply liking his company, of having missed him. But then, four months into my six-month lease, my landlady had me kicked out early, not because the neighbors complained about some untoward three a.m. noises—though they did—but because she’d had a change of plans and needed her place back. I had nowhere to go. I would never in a million years have suggested living with D, he’d have laughed me out of the state, and besides, the bottle of beer he’d offered me the second time I came over to his apartment was still sitting on his windowsill a year later. I could have found another apartment, I suppose. But that had seemed like a stark choice, a separation more complete than moving out in the first place had been. In the end, I wasn’t able to pull the trigger. I was moving back in with Eric, it seemed, because of the vagaries of New York real estate.

  The second breakup went much the same as the first, except with less expectation of success. I performed it at Eric’s explicit behest. He had broken up with his lover by this point, and, quite naturally, thought I should do the same. I knew it was the only fair thing to do, but the thought of giving up D made me feel as rebellious and petulant as an unjustly punished child. That morning, D and I sat together on the floor, leaning against my futon mattress, which was already tied with twine and ready to be loaded into the U-Haul van. I was still flushed from the Last Sex We Would Ever Have. Again I cried. “It’s not fair!”

  He stroked my hair.

  “It makes no sense, breaking up with someone I don’t want to break up with!”

  He rested his chin on my head, which I’d tucked against his breastbone, like I was six years old and had dropped my ice cream cone. He hushed me gently. He didn’t even come close to crying that time. I think he knew that his sex life was in no immediate danger of drying up.

  I held out about a week.

  SO, AS I’ve mentioned, the hard part, or rather the frustrating part, with skirt steak is the trimming. The thick filament that makes the muscle easy to remove is also so thick as to be inedible, or at least not very fun to eat. It must be removed, but it doesn’t want to go, and clings determinedly. Some of it you can peel off with your fingers in strips, which is satisfying, rather like peeling nail polish, if your fingernail was four inches wide and two feet long. But like nail polish, bits of it stick stubbornly. Peeling also gets dangerous because sometimes you pull up a lot of meat with it, and if this happens at a thin space in the muscle, the steak can tear right in two. This is where your knife comes in.

  Skirt steaks have a deeply striated grain, running up and down all along the narrow span of the muscle. It’s best to marinate skirts before cooking, and always to slice them against the grain, because that striation leads to toughness. Any risk of chewiness is completely worth it, though, because, for some reason, the difference in flavor between Big Beef meat and that of a grass-fed “happy steer” shows most extraordinarily in this cut. It’s a dark, concentrated, almost liverish taste that is not for everyone, but which I find wickedly enjoyable. This is how Jessica told me to cook the first skirt steak I brought home from Fleischer’s. It’s completely delicious, and so easy it’s almost embarrassing.

  JESSICA’S SUPER-EASY SKIRT STEAK SALAD

  ¾ cup balsamic vinegar

  ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

  Several sprigs rosemary

  3–4 cloves garlic, crushed

  1 skirt steak

  Arugula, spinach, or other salad green of your choice

  Pecorino, Asiago, Parmesan, or other hard, salty cheese of your choice

  Sea salt and freshly grated pepper to taste

  In a nonreactive baking pan, combine the vinegar, olive oil, rosemary—slightly crushing the leaves between your fingers—and garlic to make a marinade for the steak. Let the steak stand in the marinade at room temperature for 45 minutes or so, turning once or twice.

  (You may want to cut the skirt steak into a couple of pieces, if you don’t have a huge skillet or a pan big enough to accommodate the marinating steak. Skirt steaks are rather long and can be unmanageable.)

  When ready to cook, just heat a large skillet over very high heat until a drop of water flicked into it skitters madly across the surface. Lift the steak out of the marinade, shake off a bit but not all of the excess marinade clinging to it, and put it in the skillet. It will hiss and pop rather alarmingly. Cook only until brown on each side, flipping it over once—about 90 seconds per side. Remove and let rest for 5 to 10 minutes.

  To serve, pile a handful of arugula or other green onto each of two plates. Slice the steak thinly, at a diagonal across the grain, and lay several strips over each bed of greens. Shave cheese over the top. I like to use a wide cheese slicer for this, to make substantial curls, but that’s up to you. Season with salt and especially pepper, to taste. Serves two, with leftovers.

  Easiest thing in the world. Assuming you’ve gotten your butcher to do the cleaning part, which is not so embarrassingly easy.

  To clean a skirt steak, you must slice along the grain carefully, so as not to take off too much meat with it. It’s a time-consuming process, slicing gingerly at all the stringy bits, judging just how clean is clean enough.

  Sometimes, I’ll confess, if I’ve been cleaning up skirts for too long, I’ll take the easy way out. I’ll tell myself, perhaps a self-serving justification, that there’s no such thing as perfectly clean. And when Slave-Driver Aaron isn’t looking, I’ll roll up the steak with whichever is the prettier side facing out, hiding the last bits of chewy white shreds, and just tuck it into the case at the front of the shop, where it won’t be closely examined. I do this furtively, guiltily. Sometimes I just can’t take any more of the endless fretful picking.

  THIS LAST breakup isn’t like the others. It takes hours—in point of fact, from D’s perspective, it probably has taken months—yet in the end it’s quick and cruelly final.

  During the two-hour drive back to the city from Kingston one Saturday afternoon in early October, I decide that something has to be done. D and I haven’t been sleeping together for several months, not really. He keeps citing a busy schedule, and, to be fair, my being married and also driving upstate all the time for the butchering isn’t making things easy either. Since he’s returned from his most recent business trip more than a month ago, we’ve met in parks and bars, we’ve kissed and giggled, cooed sweet words and cuddled like bear cubs, but have managed sex exactly once, and that was because I lured him with a wildly expensive hotel room directly across the street from where he works. What’s next? Is he going to start asking for a monetary exchange? Enough is enough. So I text him, just tell him straight up, I’m coming over tomorrow. What’s your apartment number?

 
(He’s just been forced out of his old apartment and has made the peculiar choice to move to a new one right down the street, staying in the Murray Hill neighborhood I find so dreadfully dull. I guess it’s funny what you can get attached to. Anyway, I haven’t seen it yet, which is my trumped-up excuse for inviting myself over.)

  I’m in a good mood as I ride the elevator up to his apartment. Here I am, making a stand, going for what I want. No meek, whimpering adulteress, I! When he opens the door, I’m grinning, and I neatly ignore the distinct ambivalence of the smile he gives in return. I grab hold of his hand as he gives me the tour of his tiny, rather sad, new apartment. Once he’s closed the door to his sunny, small room, still scattered with packing boxes, we collapse onto his bed—it’s the same bed, but stuffed into this much smaller room, pushed up against a wall, it seems depleted, a double instead of a vast expanse of California king—and commence some serious making out. After two years, kissing him still leaves me breathless; it seems worth both the harrowing guilt over Eric and the nasty little holes of self-contempt that my neediness for D opens up in me over and over again.

  But something’s not right, even willfully clueless I must eventually admit. I keep going for the buttons of his shirt, his belt buckle, but he handily evades my gropings. He cops the occasional halfhearted feel but doesn’t even attempt to get a hand under my shirt. (Highly unusual, that. D is what I believe is referred to as a “breast man.”) After a while, the kissing trails off, and though I keep trying to make inroads, conversation takes hold. Increasingly frustrating conversation, about not all the deliciously dirty things we’d like to do to each other, but movies. Animated movies. D is simply shocked that I’ve never seen Team America. The laptop comes out.

  I go along for a bit, fuming. He laughs loudly. It’s the same laugh he bestows upon himself when he’s feeling clever, which, I think meanly, is more often than is warranted. I don’t think it’s all that funny. I last perhaps twenty minutes before slumping onto my side with an irritable sigh. He presses the space bar to pause.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, that’s clearly not true.” He’s smiling at me. D never gets mad, not really. Occasionally condescendingly exasperated. He’s always smiling, no matter how angry I get, and, in truth, I have often gotten too angry, demanded too much. I’ve wanted certainty, resolution—have needed it. He has been, all along, the wrong person to ask it from. We were both happier, I think, before I told him I loved him, when that was a hidden thing.

  I flop onto my back, unable to stop a small answering smile to his despite my annoyance. “What the hell is going on here? What’s the point of this anyway?”

  “What’s the point of what?”

  “This! What’s the point of a torrid love affair without any sex, goddammit?!”

  And so, still in each other’s arms, we talk.

  “Look, I’m a total fucking mess, I’m miserable at the thought of losing you—”

  “Losing me? You’re not going to lose me.”

  “But I’m terrified that if we sleep together at this point, you’ll be mad at me for not living up to what you’re expecting—that I won’t be funny or brilliant or even good in bed.”

  I laugh, cuddle into his side. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Or else it’ll be great and then you and Eric will get divorced and you’ll blame me for wrecking your marriage when you realize that I’m not as good a catch as he is and then we’ll both just get bitter and I’ll lose my teeth and end up being an embarrassment to you for the rest of our lives.”

  I punch his arm. “Now you’re just making up crap for the sake of it. And what is it with you and your obsession with your teeth?”

  This is where we should be having the Fight Sex. Where I say something sufficiently angry, petulant, ultimatum-y, that leaves nothing for him to do but flip me over and fuck the living daylights out of me. In the past year this has happened countless times; I almost look forward to our fights now. But not this time. This time he just talks and talks. And it takes me so long, so agonizingly long to realize what’s happening. He even speaks his immortal Team America line, and still, still, I don’t get it. But finally I realize: He’s not saying he can’t have sex with me now. Or next week. Or until I’m happier, less needy. He’s saying he can’t ever. Not ever again.

  I clamber from the bed in a panic, as if my abrupt epiphany is some kind of nasty crawling bug I can brush off. With my back pressed up against the window, as far from him as I can get, I stare at D. He’s flat on his back, still smiling. He makes a gesture that in the last two years has become all too familiar. Without lifting his head from the pillow, he reaches his arms out to me like a hungry baby, his hands flapping toward his chest, his eyebrows raised in mock distress, dark eyes wide, soft lips parted to emit an urgent whine. It’s an exasperating, endearing, indolent gesture of desire, and in the past has had the unfailing effect of drawing me back into his arms, comforted, laughing indulgently. But now at last I see what it really means. I want to hold onto you a while longer.

  But it will never mean what you want it to mean.

  Oh, Jesus.

  When I begin to sob, he doesn’t come to me, not at first. He knows I’ve finally figured it out, something I’ve been ignoring for a long time, something that he’s known. I cry and cry, and this isn’t like the crying all the times before, not lusty and somehow at root pleasurable. This is the coldest, loneliest feeling in the world.

  Now I will become part of another of D’s favorite postcoital mythologies. Not the romantic epic of how the stars aligned to bring us together, but the litany of D’s Lunatic Exes. The leggy blond model who didn’t know the difference between Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover. The withholding Spanish exchange student who wound up being very impressed with his private parts. The dull grad student he narrowly avoided marrying. And now the crazy, clinging, married chick.

  “I can’t do this. Can’t. Have to go.” I pick up my purse, and then he does try to hug me. But I can’t have it. I cringe in his arms. I’m not angry—oh, how wonderful anger would feel! I’m just… done. I’d so wanted certainty, and now that I have it, I can’t breathe for the weight of it.

  He takes me down to the street, helps me catch a cab. He wipes away my tears, even cries himself. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him cry, but it doesn’t make any difference. He kisses me once more as the cabbie waits, which makes my heart blossom and die.

  My brother, when he was eleven or so, had a baby iguana for a pet, whom he’d named Geraldo. One night we had been out, for dinner or something, and when we got back to the house he went to his room. The rest of us were still in the kitchen when he came running out, sobbing. “Geraldo is dead!”

  In fact the poor thing was gray and cold but still, barely, alive. My mother took it into her cupped hands, blew onto it, trying to keep it warm, help it breathe. The creature would turn briefly green again, would seem to get better, but it couldn’t last more than a few seconds without Mom’s warm breath on it. I remember that moment more vividly than almost any other moment in my childhood. Our entire family gathered, crying, trying to summon enough breath to keep this animal alive. That’s what my heart feels like. Like a goddamned lizard, upon whom entirely ineffective CPR is being performed.

  At first I think I’ve been the one to do the ripping. I’ve made a decision. Painful, but clean. And there is a little consolation in the action of it. It takes me a while of picking off the bloody bits that remain to realize that I’m not the tearer, but the thing that’s been torn away. And I pick and I pick and I pick at these connecting shreds that cling to me. They catch in my craw unexpectedly. A trip to the dentist can do it. (Always obsessed with his teeth, D, a winking Woody Allenish mannerism that irritated and amused me in equal measure.) A store window. (Zales. A kiss we once shared on the sidewalk in front of the store, impassioned enough to inspire the salesman inside to come out and encourage us to do a bit of impulse shopping.) A once-
admired sweater or lingerie set. (Snapping on my bra in the morning, I flash on his eyes as he stands behind me in a hotel bathroom, his hands on my hips, eyeing me in the mirror: “That just hits you in all the right places, doesn’t it?”) Team America, of course. So what I thought at first would be clean and final is endlessly prolonged. The city is his body now, all those corners and bars and restaurants and uninspired blocks that inspire such specific wants in me. He’s been part of my muscle and bone, one of the joints that I cling to, for two years—give or take a decade—and now he’s gone. And I text and write and make phone calls that go unanswered. I pick and I pick and I pick.

  There’s no such thing as perfectly clean. Not really.

  4

  Stuffing Sausage

  WHEN MY BROTHER and I were both in high school—this would be my senior year, his freshman—someone in the family obtained one of those Magnetic Poetry boxes. You know, those Lucite boxes with all the tiny refrigerator magnets with words printed on them, which you can put together in different ways. My brother, who never showed much inclination toward writing in any other context, turned out to be the Refrigerator Magnet Poetry King. Over the next several years, every time I came home from college, I would immediately read the refrigerator for new masterpieces. (To this day they remain, in the garage, where our old refrigerator was banished to when Mom bought her sexier stainless-steel model.) His lines could be witty and pithy and absurd (Who put the knife in bed, man? is one of my favorites), but perhaps his best one was this: