Cleaving Read online

  I start by breaking off the shank. With a mighty pull I grab hold of the narrow end of the round—what would be the handle of the drumstick if this were a chicken—and swing it around until it’s jutting out over the table edge. Checking first to make sure that no one is near the knife’s path, I cut through the thick rope of tendon where it emerges from the muscle and stretches, exposed, to meet the bony knob of the shank’s lower end, with one sawing slice away from me. The blade always springs up a bit once it’s through. Then I follow the seam of the shank muscle up to where I estimate the joint to be. To find it, I press down against the meat and fat with my thumb and grab the bone by the end to wiggle it back and forth. My fourth round of the day, and finally, this time, when I stab my blade tip in, I hit the crack of the joint on the first try. “Gotcha!” I mutter as I dig in, working through the sinews until I’m able to break open the joint. The shank comes away in my hand and a lazy drip of clear, silky synovial fluid falls from the end to the ground. I toss the shank to the far end of the table. The inside of the joint’s cup is bright white, wet with the lubricating fluid, and impossibly smooth. I can never resist running my fingers, ever so briefly, inside that bowl of cartilage.

  “So tell me again where this place is? I’ve ridden my bike around there.”

  Jesse is asking about the apartment I’ve just rented, about twenty minutes away from Kingston. Eric doesn’t like that I’ve done this, of course, but the drive up from the city and back at the end of each day I spend at the shop is exhausting and burns unseemly amounts of gasoline, and besides—who am I kidding?—I look forward to the nights of solitude, to the escape from our fights that aren’t fights, our silences full of reproaches. It’s a plain, pretty, often chilly set of rooms on the second story of a slightly shabby Victorian. When Eric and I were separated, I never told him that I was, much of the time, happy, just having that tiny apartment to myself, to be able to sleep until ten or stay up until four, to cook my own dinners for myself, to read in a room no one else resided in. Though this place is twice as large as my Yorkville sublet, and in an upstate so-called town—really just a post office, a volunteer fire department, and a curve in the road—it reminds me of that first room of my own, of the small pleasures of living alone.

  “It’s in Rifton.” Now, the name is a bit of a problem, just a tad too ironic, as if I need more reminders of all the gaping crevasses opening up in my life. “South of here, off 213. Close to New Paltz, past Rosendale.”

  “Okay.… Yeah, there’s great biking out that way. You have a bike?”

  “Nah.”

  It seems like everyone in the shop is a serious biker, even Josh, who I can’t imagine on a bicycle. (He even sells a biking shirt in the shop on which the cuts of meat are marked out, so that you can see where my brisket is, where my flatiron steak. I wear it sometimes while butchering, and Aaron says I look like a superhero, by which he means, though he doesn’t say, that the top is brightly colored, very tight, and has a zipper that, when pulled halfway down, as I wear it, exposes a certain amount of cleavage.) Tom and Jesse, particularly, are always relating their latest cycling adventures. I have been trying to avoid getting sucked into an outing. That sounds nasty but isn’t meant that way. I just feel so daunted.

  I’ve taken up a meat hook and I’m working at pulling out the aitchbone. “Aitchbone,” I’ve now figured out, by the way, is derived from the Middle English “nache,” meaning “buttock.” But it’s still a hip bone, so I stand by my initial theory. Anyway, same process as with the pork rounds, just bigger and thus harder. I get the hook up through the eye of the bone.

  “You could borrow one of mine sometime.”

  A small grunt as I begin to pull down on it with my right hand, scraping up under it with the knife in my left. “Thanks, that’s nice of you. But I don’t really ride.”

  “Everybody can ride.”

  “Yeah, well, not me. I’m ridiculous. Must be some repressed childhood thing.”

  “You were molested by a Schwinn?” Tom calls out.

  “Something like that.” I spend a moment contemplating something sufficiently locker-talky to distract from the cycling invitation I feel coming on. “Never take candy from a strange banana seat, kids.”

  “I did not just hear that.” Aaron groans as everyone erupts into preadolescent guffaws, except for Jesse, who doesn’t much go in for locker talk and is satisfied just listening in, smiling from time to time.

  I sometimes feel like I spend an inordinate amount of energy evading social engagements lately, and I don’t even know why—well, other than the fact that I really am pretty ridiculous on a bike. I like these people, a lot. Jesse, for instance, sweet and quiet, with a good laugh, enjoys talking politics with me, and is fond of recommending various holistic remedies, which he most of the time manages to do without sounding like a twit or a fanatic. He is sometimes a little, I don’t know, floaty—easily distracted, slow moving. Josh and Aaron, straight-ahead, maniacally ambitious guys both, can get impatient with him. Occasionally they’re inspired to lock him in the cooler with the lights out or to see how long they can string him along on a prank call. On one of his days off, Aaron once kept Jesse on the phone for close to ten minutes with a put-on voice, a false name, and a claim that a turkey he’d bought in the shop had had three wings. Jesse’s nickname is “1480,” a reference to Josh’s disbelief that anyone with such an SAT score could be so out-to-lunch. But he’s great with the customers, knows their names and somehow has time for a bit of conversation with each of them, even when it’s busy. And I like having him around the place. The cutting table is surrounded by a constant flow of testosterone. Normally I enjoy being one of the guys, all of us competing to out-trash-talk one another. But sometimes I’m really thankful for a calm, simply kind presence like Jesse’s. So why not take him up on a bicycle outing, after all? Or a drink after work? Why do I more often than not decline Josh and Jessica’s invitations to dinner, Aaron’s elaborate weekend agendas? (He’s in the process now of formulating a shop-wide mustache contest and has been cultivating a great handlebar monstrosity with the care of Mr. Miyagi trimming a bonsai tree. He tells of combing and waxing and shaping endlessly. “We have an extra bathroom at home just for the mustache,” he says, and I believe him.) It’s not just exhaustion, which I often plead, or my anxiety to get back to the city and my husband and animals. There’s something else at work here.

  After I get the bone off and slapped into the designated “bone” can that stands at one end of the table, lined with a heavy-duty garbage bag, I move on to the top round, a circle of flesh, about as big as a hubcap. It’s part of the steer’s buttock, basically, thick on one side, near to where it once clung to the aitch, thinning at the edges, as the muscle peters out toward the base of the shank. I start at this thin edge, pulling up at the muscle and flicking at the filaments underneath, until the meat rolls off. I trim away a bit of the hardened outer layer of fat and remove the cap, another, smaller circle of meat that sits atop the round like, well, a cap.

  I’ve pulled well ahead of Jesse, which is not surprising. He doesn’t get a lot of cutting practice, and I’ve been working here three or four days a week, ten hours a day, for three months now. Not all of that time is spent at the table, of course—there’s the Cryovac machine to be worked, wholesale orders to be compiled, coolers and freezers to reorganize, and of course a fair amount of sitting around shooting the shit—but I’ve clocked enough time to have picked up a good bit of speed. We’ve descended back into silence now, all of us working intently, no noise but the music on the iPod (we’ve switched to early Madonna), the slap of meat on wood or into plastic luggers, the clatter of bones into the can. I pull out the big leg bone, peel the cylindrical eye round off the side of the trapezoidal bottom round. Pull out the thick, veined wedge of fat in the center with its trove of glutinous glands, roll out the conical knuckle. All these (but for the fat wedge, which is thrown away) will be bagged pretty much as is. I have to trim the silver ski
n off one sloping side of the bottom round. Aaron may have me tie it to cook for the roast beef he will (closely) supervise me making. Aaron’s method for roasting beef for the front counter always varies slightly. At the moment, it goes just about like this:

  AARON’S ROAST BEEF

  7 pounds bottom round, trimmed of silver skin, fat cap left on

  Salt and pepper

  3 tablespoons vegetable oil

  1 onion, sliced into ½-inch rounds

  4 cloves garlic, lightly crushed

  6 two-inch marrow bones

  3 tablespoons butter, sliced into thin pats

  Preheat the oven to 300°F.

  Tie the round with butcher’s twine into a neat, even rectangle, or have your butcher do it for you. Season the roast generously with salt and pepper on all sides.

  In a large ovenproof roasting pan, heat the oil on the stove over high heat until it’s reached that Beckettian “almost smoking” point. Sear the roast on all sides, taking particular care that the fat side reaches a good, crusty brown. Take the roast from the pan and set aside on a plate, then turn off the heat under the pan. Add the onion and garlic, briefly browning them using the residual heat, before setting the marrow bones in among the vegetables, arranging them into a rack. Rest the roast on top of the bones, fat side up. Arrange the pats of butter on top. Set the roasting pan into the oven and cook for about an hour and a half, basting every fifteen minutes or so—you want as much of the rich juices that melt out of the bones to be absorbed into the meat as possible.

  The roast is done when a meat thermometer inserted into the center reads 130°F. Remove it from the oven and let it rest until it comes to room temperature, then slice thin for sandwich meat. Makes enough roast beef sandwiches to feed a small army.

  Oh, and: after you’ve finished, smear the marrow from the middle of the bones on some bread, sprinkle with a bit of salt, and you have an ambrosial snack.

  I’ll do that a little later on. For now I have to remove tough sinews from the end of the knuckle, and from the upper shank muscles, which will go into the grind. I work away. The lyrics in my nostalgic head aren’t the ones playing on the iPod, but those that often linger up there, from an Old 97’s rockabilly tune I once referred to, half-jokingly, as D’s theme song: I don’t want to get you all worked up. Except secretly I do. I’d be lyin’ if I said I didn’t have designs on you.

  I enjoy our bursts of talk at the table, which then sink back into an industrious quiet. The rhythm of it feels like real work with comfortable companions. But at the end of the day, as soon as I take off my leather sheepherder’s hat, wash my hands and knives, scrape and salt the table, this peace is already leaving. When I walk out the door, the need will come down on me again like an anvil.

  “Jules, come have a drink. Mother’s Milk. It’s local. We have half a keg back there we need to get through.”

  So I sit around with Jesse and Aaron and Josh and drink the beer, darker than I usually take it, and bitter. We talk about this and that, nothing important, mustaches and presidential hopefuls. Juan has a glass poured too, but he can’t sit yet. He has dishes to wash, a band saw and grinder to break down and clean. Miles to go before he sleeps. As I do, in my own little way.

  “So, Jules. Did you know that butchers in Paris have their own entire language?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, it’s slang. Like pig latin. It’s called louchébem. They, like, switch around syllables. It’s so they can talk smack about the customers.”

  Josh is straightening out his long red hair with his fingers and rebraiding it. “Do they have a word for ‘Bite me, douche bag’?”

  “I’ll look it up.”

  I ask, thinking ruefully of how, I know, my evening is going to go, “Do they have a word for ‘crazy lady’?”

  “Almost certainly. Hmm. I feel a nickname coming on…”

  I could ask out any one of these guys, whose company I enjoy so much, for another drink around the corner. But I don’t. I leave after the one beer. We lock up; I walk alone to my car.

  There’s no place that’s really safe, other than the shop, these days. I’m just climbing into the Outback when my phone rings. “I need to ask you a question. Are you seeing him still?”

  “What? No! No—I—I haven’t even talked to him. He’s not—” I can’t tell Eric the truth. Can’t tell him, He’s not speaking to me and it’s killing me. “Where is this coming from?”

  “You know what? Forget it. I wouldn’t believe you, whatever you said. I don’t want to know.”

  “I haven’t done anythi—I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Eric and I haven’t had sex in months. And though D is gone, hasn’t exchanged a word with me in weeks, despite or because of the desperate, pleading texts that our horrid at-last-real breakup didn’t succeed in deterring me from, still he’s there, of course, living in our apartment. Eric doesn’t touch me. And I can’t touch him either. The truth is that Eric’s love, his very dearness, is excruciating to me, a constant stabbing. If we were to sleep together now—sleep together as in sex, of course; we still sleep in the same bed every night I am home—he would see that too clearly. It would kill him. I know because it’s nearly killing me. It’s a horrible thing to admit even just to myself. It gnaws at my bones.

  But I crave, I do, and I can’t yet seem to shut it down; it’s like plunging around a dark basement, pawing the walls desperately for the light switch and finding nothing but clammy bricks and cobwebs. And it’s not just about D. Oh, maybe it is. It’s so hard to know. Because, yes, I dream of being welcomed back into his bed, of reconciliation, but that’s becoming too painful to dream upon. And when it hurts that much, it’s time for a little cure-the-headache-by-slamming-the-fingers-in-the-cutlery-drawer treatment.

  Lots of people like indulging in a bit of light submission. It’s not necessarily such a big deal. I was always interested, in an academic sort of way. It just always felt so… well, goofy, in practice. In Eric’s and my little experiments. I figured it was one of those desires that works out better in the mind’s eye. And then D came along.

  “Come home with me.”

  I remember the first time, when I knew it was certain. We were standing in front of a deli at the corner of 12th and University Place, on a November afternoon in 2004. We’d had our friendly lunch, which had grown into something else. But this was where we should have parted ways; I’d already been away from home too long.

  “I’ll come tomorrow. I will. But I can’t today. I have to walk the dog.” I tried weakly to pull out of his arms, but his hands remained firmly clasped behind the small of my back.

  “You’ll change your mind if you don’t come now. Come now.”

  I was flushed and breathless, ready. D may have protested that time was of the essence, that I was a grown woman who needed persuading, who was capable of changing her mind, but in truth he’d known, from the moment he kissed me there on that corner while we waited for the Walk sign, that he would get me back to his Murray Hill apartment for the first time that day, and with a minimum of fuss. He didn’t even bother to conceal the shine of certainty in his eyes.

  All my young life, when push had come to shove, I’d been the one to pick what or whom I wanted, and to make sure I got it. Steamroller Julie. It’s how I got my husband, how I got my new career. But now I was being the one wanted, taken, had. I was helpless against that assurance. Liked the helplessness.

  “Okay. But I have to get back soon. One hour. That’s all.”

  “Perfect. Come on.”

  He’s like that, seems to suffer no trace of uncertainty, nary a moral twinge. For the two months before Eric found out about the affair, D felt no compunction about anything. He readily attended dinner parties to which I readily invited him, readily exchanged footsies and covert glances, readily even spent the night on the couch so he could have a wee-hours make-out session and then breakfast with us the next morning, comfortably digging into his eggs Benedict
at a booth with his lover and her unknowing husband. (His lover! How I relished rolling the word around in my mind, writing it in a covert e-mail or text—though always with ironic quotation marks—even tasting it on my tongue, though I would never speak it above a whisper, and then only to myself.)

  “Come on. Come to me.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I was finally doing something I ought to have felt ashamed of, and for the first time in a long time, no obscure guilt squeezed my heart at all. I was giddy. Wanton. I had a lover.

  “At last you came.” D answered the door naked.

  “As soon as I could.”

  He slammed me up against the wall, screwed me in the foyer before he managed to get my clothes off. Carried me—me, a big girl, not light and lithe—past his roommates’ closed doors (I chose to believe they weren’t home)—to his bedroom. Threw me onto the bed, knelt to unzip my black high-heeled boots. Raised his eyebrows in an expression both ironic and genuinely, excitingly lustful. “Rowr…”

  “Oh, please. I’m wearing stupid argyle socks.” Eric’s socks, actually.

  “But look at that reveal,” he said, indicating the shoes’ red leather lining. “R-owwr.”

  Hours later, when I arose to dress and leave, he pulled me back to bed, yanked me by the ankle as I crawled his bedroom floor looking for my underwear, a lost boot, a broken necklace. He slapped my ass, bit me, hard, left bruises all over my body that I had to take care to hide, dark and mottled and as distinct in shape as the bites taken out of surfboards by sharks. He had figured me out.