Bread Alone (12 page)

Elizabeth is shorter than I am, but then, most women are. Old-fashioned combs hold the dark hair back, away from clear, gray eyes that telegraph detached friendliness. She wears a navy blue suit with Joan Crawford shoulder pads, and her scarf could pass for a man’s tie, navy blue with flecks of red. I amuse myself by imagining it’s the spattered blood of an adversary. She shakes my hand firmly, shows me a chair, and sits down at her desk, where a file folder with my name already on it sits on top of a stack.

“So you’ve been married to David Franklin for seven years.” She opens the folder, pulls out a sheet of paper, takes the cap off a Mont Blanc pen.
“How would you characterize
the
marriage?”

The question takes me by surprise. It sounds more like a shrink’s question than a divorce lawyer’s. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.”

“Would you say that it’s been a happy marriage or an unhappy one, overall?”

“Happy,” I blurt out. “I guess. Well, at least until the last year or so. I mean, unless he was unhappy before that and I didn’t know it. Which is possible …”

Give it a rest, Wyn.

“Okay.” She rubs the tip of her nose with the pen. “Suppose you tell me about it, starting from where you first realized all was not well.”

This is worse than making the list of assets. I try to condense everything, to leave in the important facts and leave out the extraneous details. The problem is, I’m no longer certain which are which.

When I get to the lock-out scene, she interrupts me. “Some of the questions I’m going to ask you may seem more personal than professional, Wynter, but these things are relevant to how we want to proceed with the case. This friend you were visiting in Seattle, is it a female friend?”

“Of course.”

“And she is simply a close friend. There’s no other kind of relationship between you.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I don’t mean to offend you. But you said your husband tried to imply that you had left him. He and his attorney could be planning to say that you left him for this friend—male or female. As your attorney, I can’t overemphasize the importance of being completely candid with me.”

“CM’s been my best friend since the third grade. That’s all we’ve ever been.”

She scribbles on the piece of paper. “How would you describe relations between yourself and your estranged husband since the day he changed the locks?”

“Practically nonexistent. I’ve only talked to him once or twice. Once I went over to the house and that’s when I saw him with Kelley. His girlfriend.”

She
purses her mouth. “So you haven’t had sexual relations with him since he locked you out?”

I can’t help laughing. “It’s been a bit longer than that.”

“How long?”

“God, I don’t know. Months.”

“Do you have any idea how long he’s been seeing this woman?”

My stomach knots. “No. But I have a feeling it’s been a while.”

She cocks her head to one side like a curious little bird. “Why is that?”

“It sounds silly, I guess, but it was the way he kissed her. Kind of casually. Not the way you kiss someone when things are brand new.”

“Good observation.” She nods. “Do you have any financial records in your possession?”

I look out the window at the parking lot full of Mercedes and Jaguars and BMWs. Several lines are ringing out in the reception area.

“No. I … all that was at the house.” I pull my skimpy list out of my purse and hand it across the desk. She looks at it silently. Her face doesn’t give away anything. “I know it’s not very complete.” I shrug, helpless. “I guess I haven’t been very smart.”

“Don’t beat yourself up over it. It’s a lot more common than you probably think. It makes things a bit more difficult, but certainly not impossible. We would simply have to rely on discovery to ferret out any concealed assets. If he’s uncooperative, it might entail using an information specialist and a forensic accountant.” At the look on my face, she volunteers, “Yes, it does mean more money up front. But you stand to gain substantially. Do you want to go ahead and prepare to file?”

“Not yet.” It’s out before I can think. My face burns. She must think I’m either an idiot or a masochist. “How long do I have?”

Elizabeth leans back in her chair, matching the fingertips of one hand to those of the other. “As long as he doesn’t file, you aren’t required to do anything. If he serves us with papers, we have thirty days to respond. My suggestion would be that we file first, put him on the—”

Tears pool in my eyes. “I’m not ready.”

She smiles. “Then my next suggestion would be that we file for some separate maintenance for you. And we get an investigator to start nosing around. Just in case. Generally speaking, if you turn over enough dirt, you’re bound to dig up a worm.”

I write her a check for twelve hundred dollars, which pretty much cleans out my personal account. I should feel relieved, but I don’t. What I feel like is the time CM and I went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras
and got caught in the mob watching the Rex Parade. At one point we lost sight of each other and I was trying to cross a side street to a doorway where I thought I’d seen her. But everyone else on the sidewalk was going the other way and I suddenly found I was going with them; my feet weren’t even touching the ground. All I could do was keep my elbows up and let myself be carried along.

Six

M
ornings are the worst. You have to drag yourself out of the comfortable black hole of sleep and face it all over again. Yes, it’s true. He’s with someone else. Probably at this very moment. Doing all those warm, sweet morning things.

The only remedy is to eliminate morning. So I sleep all day. My mother says it’s a symptom of clinical depression. She comes home after work, pulls me out of bed, shoves food at me. I sit at the table in my old pink chenille bathrobe, glassy-eyed, while she tells me about her job, where she goes to lunch, which coworkers she likes, the ones she loathes. Nothing registers. I belong over in Riverside at the Cryogenics Insti
tute—frozen
in liquid nitrogen till a cure can be discovered for divorce.

She hammers relentlessly at me about seeing a shrink, says I can get an antidepressant. I promise to think about it, and I do. I turn it over and over in my mind like a grooved stone. At night it sounds like a good idea, but in the morning, taking action seems overwhelming. The one thing I do with a certain amount of energy every day is strip the bed and wash the sheets. I’ve taken to sleeping in the nude, and I’m addicted to the smell of fresh sheets, their icy smoothness against my skin.

My mother says it’s pathological.

Maybe clean sheets are important to me because I’m awake all night, reading until my eyes ache, till they’re dry and scratchy when I
blink. I have to keep feeding my brain with words, keep it chewing and digesting. The danger comes when I stop. When I close my eyes, the words are replaced by images of David. The way he smiles. How he looks reading in his leather chair, fair hair spilling onto his forehead. The way he chews his food, thoughtfully, as if considering every fine shading of taste. His effortless, almost professional tennis serve. The comical way he lifts his eyebrows in time to music. His elbow resting on the open car window when he drives. The sound of his voice. The scent of his Polo cologne.

So I plow methodically through the two cartons of books that I brought from the house. I don’t read them from beginning to end, I skim a few chapters of one, then pick up another. It’s an odd assortment, as if he went through the bookshelves and threw in every third book.
The Mosquito Coast
and
The Great Gatsby
and the
Lord of the Rings
boxed set and
The Female Eunuch, Atlas Shrugged, Anna Karenina,
and the complete set of Sherlock Holmes. The copy of
Night Flight
that was my father’s. The Tassajara book and
James Beard on Bread,
Julia Child volume two, Carol Field’s
Italian Baker.

And the first edition of Elizabeth David’s
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
that CM gave me when I went to France. Talk about asking someone what time it is and they tell you how to make a clock. This book is 250 pages of the history of grains and mills and yeast and bread back to Mesopotamia, plus about 350 pages of recipes. At the back there’s a chapter of suggestions for further reading—as if there could be anything further.

One night, my hand brushes something rough textured, large and flat, wedged in the bottom of the second box. I pull out a three-ring binder covered in denim, corners frayed and bent. It’s the notebook I started the year before I went to France, a bread journal full of recipes and notes in blue ink, sources for ingredients and equipment in green, quotes on bread, both philosophical and practical, in black. The sections are separated by tab dividers. My God, how anal. I’m my mother’s daughter after all.

I close the binder and lay it on my night table, pick up the Elizabeth
David book and plunge into the chapter called “Our Bread Grain: Wheat, Rye, Barley, Oats and Pease.” This should cure my insomnia.

Two hours later I’m still reading, seduced by the elegant prose, bound by tendrils of wit and romance. This isn’t just the history of bread, it’s the story of the world, how the growing and milling of grain and the making of bread shaped all of civilization. By the time I’ve worked my way through thirty centuries of the wheat grain’s progress from Kurdistan through Egypt and up into Europe, I’m exhausted. And we haven’t even gotten around to milling the stuff yet.

I turn the book upside down on the quilt, reach for my eyedrops. Artificial tears, the doctor called them. Ironic, since I’ve been able to produce plenty of the real McCoy lately. I recoil at the sting, blink rapidly, then close my eyes for just a second, to let the fake tears lube my lids and fill the gullies in my eyeballs. The next thing I know, my mother’s standing there in her teal silk dress and white jacket. Sunlight’s flooding the room, and I seem to be waking out of a coma. I feel like Scrooge asking “Boy, what day is this?”

My mother frowns and tells me it’s October twentieth. And Elizabeth Gooden’s on the phone. Is it possible that the information specialist has unearthed something already? I picture some Danny DeVito—looking guy in a shiny blue suit and fedora sneaking around after David with a miniature camera. It makes me laugh out loud for the first time in weeks. One small corner turned, if you believe in such crystallizing moments.

I step into my flip-flops, pull on a T-shirt, pick up the phone.

“Good morning, Wynter. I hope I didn’t wake you.” She’s probably been up since five, run three miles, and had breakfast with a judge.

“No,” I lie, “I was just in the shower.”

“You’ll be getting the paperwork in a day or two, but I wanted to let you know that your husband’s been ordered to pay temporary support of $3,000 a month. He’ll be making the first deposit in your account on the thirty-first. Are you going to be okay in the—”

“Three …
? Three thousand dollars?”

“I asked for five, but Hochnauer convinced the judge that you had deserted the marriage—”

“Who?” My toes are gripping the edges of the flip-flops.

“Ivan Hochnauer, your husband’s attorney, a.k.a. Ivan the Terrible,” she adds cheerfully.

“Oh. Is there any good news?”

“Yes. We’ll go back and get an increase, but I need some time to prepare, and I wanted you to have some money in the meantime.”

“Well …” Strange how quickly you forget what confidence feels like.

“Wynter, are you doing anything? I mean, getting out, seeing friends, going to movies, exercising?”

“Well …”

“That’s what I thought. You need to be in motion. Even if you don’t feel like it, you’ll be better off over the long haul if you stay active.” “I will. I’m just—”

“But no dating, okay? And don’t get a job. At least not a serious one. If you start making any money, it may be harder to get an increase in your maintenance.”

“I don’t think there’s much danger of that.”

“Good. Now remember what I said: Stay active. I’ll be in touch.”

After my mother disappears in a cloud of Guerlain, I get dressed and drive to the health food store, returning with several different kinds of organic flour, seeds, honey, raisins, and yeast. I flip through my battered notebook to a recipe for basic whole wheat bread.

3 cups lukewarm water

1 tablespoon yeast

¼
cup honey or molasses

1 cup dry milk

6 to 7 cups whole wheat flour

1 tablespoon salt

¼
cup oil or butter

1 to
2
cups flour for kneading