Cleaving Read online

  Not that I made it difficult. Under D’s influence, I opened up like a grinning harlot flower. The first time he slapped me across the face, after all, I was bound in trusses I’d given him. But the thing was, it wasn’t so much the slap itself; it was the gleam in his eye as he delivered it, the utter confidence that he’d guessed right. The sting on my cheek made me gasp, but his sureness was what freed me.

  I am, empirically speaking, a successful person. But all the things that should have made me feel sure and independent hadn’t. It was D who gave that to me. It was when he smilingly roughed me up that I finally felt fierce, strong—emancipated.

  But now he’s gone, and it turns out my freedom was only probationary. The grinding guilt has returned. My guts twist with it.

  Eric calls again just as I’ve turned off 213, south of Rosendale, onto the twisting road to Rifton. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said before.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry if you think I’ve done something wrong.” I can’t keep a small trill of resentment out of my voice. And that’s not entirely a bad thing; resentment is nice for covering up the remorse.

  “No, you didn’t do anything, I know. I’m sorry. I guess I just get a little crazy with you up there all the time. Robert misses you.”

  For the last couple of months I’ve been staying up here in my rented apartment three or four nights a week. I’ve always had great faith in the healing power of geography. Absence makes the heart, and whatnot.

  “I wish you could be okay with this. I want to do this, the butchery, and I’m going to, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and it has nothing to do with you or us.” I’m getting emotional now, a bit self-righteous. Protesting a tad too much.

  “Honey, I want to be understanding here. But you’re right. I don’t get it. I’m trying.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. Can you just—”

  “Yes. I’m fine. I’ll be okay. I just miss you and…”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Look, I think I’m going to cut out here in a minute.” His voice is growing sparser and quiet on the line. “Good night. I love you, I really do.”

  “I know. I love you too.”

  When I’m alone in the chilly apartment at night, a bare kitchen, small living room, bedroom painted white and blue, I cook up my dinner, a steak or a sausage or a chop. I open my first bottle of wine. These are the last pieces of the simple, jigsaw-puzzle part of my day. It is nine p.m., I’m tired in that stoned sort of way that means I’ll not be asleep for some hours yet. My wrist throbs vaguely. Piling several pillows against the wall for a backrest, I make sure my wineglass is full, pull up my laptop, insert a DVD.

  “What’s a stevedore?”

  It doesn’t matter what that line means in context. Or rather, it matters very, very much to Eric and me, but you don’t need to know what makes the line so priceless, why I can repeat it, out of the blue and for no particular reason, and Eric is right there with me. What matters is that this unlikely TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, canceled years ago, forms a singular touchstone of our private marriage-language. Watching it feels like coming home to him. And tonight, after our tense, aborted conversation, it feels almost like an act of apology, of fidelity. I am entirely Eric’s Julie while watching Buffy, one of the few bits of pop culture that doesn’t instantly bring D—who is both a cineaste and a South Park fan—to the forefront of my mind. I watch three episodes.

  By then it’s after eleven. I shut down the computer, set it on my bedside table by the now half-empty second bottle of Syrah, switch off the table lamp, and settle down, pulling the sheets fitfully up over my shoulder. But I can tell immediately it’s going to be no use. The laptop comes out again; I sign into my instant message account. Thank God, Gwen is online.

  Julie: Hey. What’s up? You’re not still at work, are you?

  Gwen: No, thank Christ. Over at Matt’s.

  After years of bad luck, Gwen seems to have found a boyfriend who suits her. Being Gwen, of course, she’s still stormy and annoyed at times, but they go on trips together and visit each other’s families, and he buys her clothes and fixes her computer, and by all accounts they have all kinds of sex. I try very hard not to be bitter.

  Gwen: What’s up with you?

  Julie: I’m upstate. Feeling rather like shit.

  Gwen: Sick?

  Julie: No. Just the usual thing. D. I’d flushed him out for a few hours there, but once I try going to sleep…

  Gwen: Oh, Julie. When are you going to let the douche bag go?

  Julie: I just don’t understand. Why does he hate me so much?

  Gwen: I’ve already spelled this out. He. Is. A. Douche. Bag.… I want to punch him in the face.

  Julie: That would be great.

  Gwen: You know, I just saw Match Point, finally. The Scarlett Johansson character is like you and D combined. You’re the drunken hysterical part, and he’s the part that needs killing.

  Julie: Hi-LAR-ious. Of course I’d take him back in a minute, though.

  Gwen: Now I want to punch you in the face.

  Julie: Thanks.

  Gwen: Listen, honey. I’ve got to go—Matt and I are going to… well… I gotta go.

  Julie: Understood.

  Gwen: I love you. Take care.

  Julie: Thanks. Love you too.

  Dammit. That wasn’t enough. I pour myself another glass to dose myself that little bit closer to sleep, then trawl the Internet awhile, looking for a certain something. For the particular kind of photos and cheap videos that distract for a time—women bound and helpless and begging, men withholding, commanding, sure. There’s a certain brainless eroticism to this sort of thing, for me. At least my body responds, even if my mind soon feels jaded and in need of a scrubbing. I try to focus on outlandish scenarios, images of exotic, tawdry humiliation. But my brain just bats these bits and pieces lazily about like a bored cat, then wanders inexorably back to its more accustomed, but more dangerous, feeding grounds.

  A cold, sardonic face, that unbeautiful one with its cool eyes and wide Rolling Stones lips I’ve by now memorized. The pebbly cyst still to be felt in a left earlobe, a closed-up hole from teenage rock-god years. A way of taking off clothes, deliberate, so different from my own impatient stripping. A matter-of-fact yank at my thighs, pulling me toward those lips, a way of giving that feels like something’s being taken, like I’m being emptied out. A voice, low, amused, with a guttural purr to it that makes my breath catch.

  Before D broke it off, we occasionally indulged in phone sex, an easy way to make use of brief periods alone, when we’d worked ourselves up but couldn’t manage to schedule a tryst. We never talked dirty during these phone sessions. Instead we made a game out of hearing each other, trying to time ourselves to each other. This was a much more challenging game for me than for D, basically because I’m a shitty poker player. No matter how stealthy I tried to be, I’d always throw him a moan, an “oh fuck,” the ragged, stuttering little gasp he knew meant I was there at the edge. Whereas I had nothing to go on but the tiny catch in the breath, the quickening of that wet slapping sound that barely reached the receiver, the occasional shudder repressed behind a bitten lip. And in the end, we sometimes cheated. He would speak, for the first time since we murmured our hellos. Whispering, urgent but measured, almost angry, a demand more than a question. Tell me when. Now?

  “Yes, please, please now…” His name comes out as a sob, the memory of those sounds on the other end of a phone line making my muscles tighten and spasm. The tendons of my wrist and index finger ping painfully, and then I cry myself to sleep. But at least I get there, my hand squeezed between my thighs not for pleasure, just for comfort, as a small child might do.

  The next morning I get up again with puffy eyes and lips purple with wine, a few hiccups of sadness still left to jump out of my throat. But I shower and change into a pair of jeans and one of the black Fleisher’s T-shirts (YOU CAN’T BEAT OUR MEAT!) I wear to the shop every day, and by the time I go outside into the nippy
fall air and climb into my Outback I am feeling calmer. Usually, I’d be headed to the shop for a day of getting scraped up and telling dirty jokes and cutting beef. Today, though, I have an elsewhere to be. I’ve got an appointment with a pig.

  6

  Off the Hoof

  IT IS A brilliant late November day, the sky a heartbreaking blue over the nearby ridge of the Shawagunks. The morning sun glints off the bright tossing leaves of the trees that line the edge of this green field I have walked down a short muddy track to reach, following a ragtag crowd. Kids in their twenties mostly, CIA students. A wooden-gated corral stands in the field, within it five pigs, chasing one another around and snuffling happily in the muck. When people approach the corral, to coo or snap pictures, the pigs come up to the gate, ears pricked and heads high. A few yards away, an old Austrian man in coveralls is loading a small-gauge rifle.

  Aaron turned me on to this gig; every fall the CIA arranges to have its students witness and participate in a pig slaughter, done the old-fashioned way. The event is headed up by one of the senior instructors, a man named Hans, who, it is rumored by Aaron, once won the European Master Butcher Competition. (I wonder if there really is such a thing. I like to think the winner gets a belt.) He told me when and where to go; eight a.m., a side road on the way up to the Mohonk Mountain House, a gorgeous if slightly Shining-esque old historic resort. Aaron has to be at the shop and so, to his emphatic regret, can’t come along, but says, “You have to go. You have to see Hans at work. He’s an artist.”

  I wish he were here. I know no one, and I feel like an impostor, like any minute someone is going to call me out, ask me who the hell I am, anyway.

  This is my first slaughter. I’ve been avidly looking for opportunities for this since I started butchering, but it’s a tricky business, getting in to see an animal killed for meat. Forget trying to get inside Big Beef; even the slaughterhouses Josh works with, small firms that are meticulously hygienic and humane, won’t let me near, won’t even give out their addresses to people outside their client base. They have a pathological fear of PETA, a fear I find hilariously overblown, but I guess they must have reason, now that I think about it. In my first book I wrote about boiling a lobster and got more than one deranged and grammatically unsound letter; imagine what slaughterhouses must put up with.

  I spend a few moments leaning with one foot on the wooden fence, contemplating these animals who are about to be dead, whose flesh I may very literally wind up eating. (The farmer providing the animals for today’s spectacle is one of Josh’s suppliers.) I’ve always had a bit of a thing for pigs, actually. And not just the cute Chinese potbellied variety, though, God, I want one of those. I like hogs. I like that they’re both filthy and smart, like that they can be vicious but are also known to appreciate a good scratch behind the ears from time to time. A pig is kind of my power animal. Honestly, it’s a shame they taste so damned good, but of course that’s part of my connection to them.

  Other people are gathered around as well, on either side of me, presumably thinking the same sorts of thoughts. Being kids, and culinary students, and friends and/or rivals, their talk contains quite a bit of evasive bravado, inclining toward one-upmanship, outdoing one another in knowledge or nonchalance. But I don’t believe them. There is a tang in the air, a palpable anticipation, and not just of a lesson in a culinary art. We are about to witness, many of us for the first time, a violent death—a murder, if you define murder as the deliberate killing of an innocent being. And we are all nervous and excited and a little bit thrilled about it.

  At a call from someone or other, the crowd (there are probably about thirty of us) begins to gather around a livestock trailer a bit away from the corral, which has two more hogs inside, separated from each other by a metal grating running down the middle. The bed of the trailer is strewn with straw. Hans, a gun in one hand and a metal bowl of chow in the other, opens the gate at the back end of the trailer to get to the first animal, who doesn’t retreat at his approach. When he puts the bowl down on the floor, the hog trots right up to it and immediately digs in. Hans puts the rifle to its forehead.

  When the gun goes off, it sounds like a champagne cork popping. The theory, which I’m not entirely sure I buy, is that the hog’s skull is so thick that the small-caliber shot does no more than stun it; it’s the pick immediately afterward, thrust into its carotid artery, that kills it.

  Hans shoves in the pick and hauls the animal out onto the grass with one movement. The circle of curious onlookers, who have gathered close to catch sight of the shooting, hop back.

  So this is where the phrase bleeding like a stuck pig comes from. The creature’s legs work furiously as blood jets from its throat. The force of its jerking spins it around in circles like a spasmodic break-dancer. All in eerie silence. There’s no terrified squealing, what we’re watching is not conscious suffering, it’s just the innate need of any living being to hang on to life. Like watching a patient who, though brain-dead, nevertheless fights hungrily for breath when taken off the respirator. As it struggles, the hog smears itself in its own blood, which continues to flow out torrentially and sinks into the deep grass, absorbed by the ground like water.

  It takes maybe a minute for the animal to come to stillness, though it seems much longer. Hans loops a rope around the animal’s rear legs, cinches it tight. He points to two students in the crowd, gestures at the rope. “Take it over there.”

  Two boys grab hold of the rope and drag the dead hog over to a spot where an old porcelain bathtub has been sunk into the ground. (Men outnumber women in this group by probably three to one.)

  Two ropes are laid out across the tub on either end of it. When the students give the body a shove, it drops heavily, in the way of dead things, into the tub, on top of the ropes, so they’re now looped under it, one at the shoulder, the other near the rear legs. As the rest of us gather around, a couple more volunteers start scooping bucketfuls of boiling water from a vat about the size of a smallish hot tub sitting atop a big woodstove and pouring the water out into the bathtub until the hog is half-submerged. At Hans’s direction, four guys take hold of the ropes’ ends on either side of the tub and pull them back and forth, tug-of-war style, so that the body is turned over and over. By the time the water has stopped steaming, the pig’s coarse hair has started coming loose, floating, and the ropes have worn away two long, bald areas, the skin beneath poached white and soft. It takes four people to pull the body back out of the tub and onto a piece of worn plywood.

  When Hans asks for more volunteers, half a dozen people step eagerly forward, but I am not one of them. I tell myself it’s because I should let the tuition-paying students, those who are here legitimately, get the experience, but the truth is that somewhere deep inside I don’t want to be a party to this slaughter, that I feel somehow less culpable as an observer than as a participant. Nonsense, of course.

  Volunteers kneel on the ground all around the hog, with cup-shaped rubber scrapers in hand. As they rub off all the hair, great soggy clumps shedding into growing piles shifting about in the breeze, the body shudders, fat rippling under its skin like an overweight jogger, legs sawing back and forth as if it’s still alive and struggling to get away. But once all the hair is off, the work of five minutes, as the hog lies there, pale and bloated, it is already more meat than animal.

  The body is carried to a nearby shed with a little covered, concrete-floored patio. A chain threaded through a pulley attached to a wooden beam overhead is looped around the hog’s rear legs, and two broad-backed boys tug on the other end to lift it up off the ground until it’s hanging free.

  The next part is where slaughter meets butchery, where everything starts looking very familiar to me. After making a couple of hissing passes across the honing steel with his knife, an unshowy thing not much larger than what I use in the shop, Hans without flourish slices the hog open from stem to stern. Then he reaches inside, scoops out its pallid entrails, and pours them into a large bucket. The
liver is cut out, the heart that so recently worked efficiently enough to pump all the creature’s blood from its neck in a matter of seconds, the stomach, the lungs together with the windpipe, all the way up through the animal’s throat, ending in the blue tongue cut loose from the floor of the mouth with a swipe. He cuts the head smoothly off and sets it to one side. What remains, the emptied body, the edges of its sliced belly hanging open like a set of curtains, is more or less exactly what I see at Fleisher’s.

  The CIA does teach butchery, but not extensively. Most students get about seven classes in meat processing, only some of which include hands-on practice, so what is now, after three months, completely familiar to me holds great fascination for them. After the hog has been halved with a quick pass of a butcher’s saw, they take turns leaning in to get a look at the sides, pointing out the spareribs, contemplating where the Boston butt comes from. (The shoulder, I could have told them but don’t; it’s the same muscle as what’s called a “chuck roast” in beef.) I back away to let them get close. It’s over for me. The hog has gone from contentedly grunting farm animal to nothing I haven’t seen before, in under ten minutes.

  Hans is already loading up his rifle again.

  I make myself watch the “processing” of one more animal. When Hans enters the second hog’s pen, it won’t stand up, just lies resolutely, chin between hooves, looking up at him. It doesn’t seem panicked, but it looks so much like Robert the Dog when I come home to find he’s been in the garbage can that I can’t help thinking it must have figured out that something bad is afoot.

  Part of me thinks I should stay longer, stick it out—they have half a dozen more animals to go through—but instead I head back down the track toward my car, which is parked at the side of the road. I’ve seen my slaughter; two were enough for me.

  I head back to the shop, a half-hour drive through the beautiful morning, and get to the shop before it opens. As I walk through the door, Josh says, “Back from the killing fields. You scarred for life? It’s rough, right?”