Cleaving (24 page)

4 pounds short ribs

Salt and pepper to taste

2 teaspoons crumbled dried rosemary

3 tablespoons bacon fat

3 cloves garlic, lightly crushed

1 small onion, cut into half rings

1 cup dry red wine

1 cup beef stock

Preheat the oven to 325degF.

Pat dry the ribs and trim off excess fat. I'm not a big fan of trimming fat off meat, as a general rule, but I think in this
case it's permissible and possibly even advisable. Once you've done this to your satisfaction, season generously with salt,
pepper, and rosemary.

Warm the bacon fat over medium-high heat in an ovenproof stockpot until almost smoking. Quickly brown the ribs on all sides,
working in batches, setting them aside on a plate once done. After all the ribs are browned, pour off all but three tablespoons
of the fat in the pan and throw in the garlic and onion, stirring a couple of minutes until the garlic is fragrant and the
onion is beginning to turn golden. Add the wine and stock, which will hiss and almost instantly come to a boil. Return the
ribs, along with any juices that have collected on the plate, to the pot.

Cover and place in the hot oven. Cook until the meat falls very easily from the bone, at least two hours. Serve four to six
of your friends, with the pan juices and a big scoop of mashed potatoes.

And oxtails? Oxtails are even more of a secret than that. It's the name that camouflages them so well. Oxtail. That is just
five kinds of unpleasant. And it also happens to be exactly accurate. Oxtails come out of the box that each steer is delivered
with, containing all the extra bits Josh might want to use. There's the liver, and the heart, which is also delicious, and
not scary at all, once you've gotten yourself around all the metaphors and imagery. A heart is just a muscle, after all, which
is something I should remember more often. The tongue. The sweetbreads, occasionally, if we're lucky. (Sweetbreads--another
instance of necessary euphemism--are actually thymus glands and are a pain in the ass to remove, generally not worth it unless
you're working with a large number of slaughtered animals at a time.) And the tail. Which looks just like a tail. A little
more than a foot long, two or three inches in diameter at the base, tapering to a point, threaded through with the last bones
of the vertebrae, getting smaller all the time.

To prepare the oxtails for the case, ready to cook and eat, you cut between each vertebra, which is a fun thing to do because
it's so much easier than you'd think. At this point, each is joined to the next by cartilage that is simple to cut through
with a boning knife once you find the right spot. And although the bones are getting narrower and narrower in diameter, they're
all the same length, so once you've found the first point of breach, it's child's play to guess where the next will come.
It makes me feel powerful and smart and, yes, a little sexy to cut up oxtails. When I'm done, I am left with about ten cylinders
of meat and bone, all the same height, the thickest of them lush rosettes of meat with bright white centers, the smallest
ones no larger than a fingertip, almost entirely white, hardly any meat to them at all. Arranged on a plate for the case,
they seem to naturally fit together into a whorling, floral circle, the most beautiful thing on display. And yet no one buys
them. They are my secret. I take them home and cook them for myself. And for Eric, of course.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about D, about the desolation I feel without him. I wake up with him in my head, go to sleep
with him still there, drink and drink to try to make him go away. Even the butchery, that blessed distraction, that way I
can take a knife and do something new, break something apart to make something else beautiful, understand something, a body,
its parts, the logic of it--even that chases the memory of my old lover, the longing for him, to the far edges of my mind,
but not away. He's always there when I quit for the day, wash up, drive back to the city or to my small rental apartment.
Retreating into the dark with my iPod for company (all the songs reminding me of him) is like watching a fire dying in the
wilderness at night, the creeping thing getting closer, hovering at the edge of the light.

I've thought a lot about that. And yet, sometimes I think I've thought almost not at all about my marriage of ten years, about
the man I've known and loved since I was eighteen years old, a child, unformed. About the man who formed me, not like a sculptor,
not like a person of intention and power, but like a sapling taking root too closely to its sister, so that they grew and
slowly grew until, so many years later, you'd think they were one tree, their branches so entwined, their bark overlapping,
their trunks joined. Now that they are essentially one thing, to kill one would be to kill them both. I haven't let myself
think much about that. Eric would say--does say--that the reason for this is that I have no room in my besotted, childish mind
for him anymore. That D has overtaken me, seduced me, made me small, and that my love for him, my yearning, is all I feel
anymore. There's some truth to this version. But there's also a gigantic hole in it.

D does consume me, still. When one has eaten a beautiful dry-aged steak, one remembers it, longs for it. That longing doesn't
stop. At least, it hasn't yet, and doesn't feel like it's going anywhere.

But that's not the reason I've not been writing about Eric. The thing is this. Longing, love, lust, all those L words--that's
easy to write about. I can think about the way D fucked me, or the way his hair felt silky under my fingers, or that mole
on the inside of his index finger, or that tiny lump in his earlobe--and I'm there. I'm living it again. I'm remembering something
I had and don't have anymore, something I don't have to imagine doing without because I'm doing without it. I may cry afterward,
from the loss, but there's pleasure in it as well.

But to think about Eric, now, after these years of pain, is to contemplate something incomprehensible to me. Separation.

Of course I've thought about it. We both have. We've even done it. But because I've spoken the words, because I've lived without
him for a period of time, doesn't mean I understand it. Eric's right, I don't think about our marriage that much, not in the
way I think about being in bed with D. But it's for the same reason I don't ponder my veins, or the floor of my room. I don't
ponder because I don't even see the world without it. It's too big, or buried too deep, with edges that thin out to nothingness,
binding itself to everything else. It's embedded in my dark, precious flesh.

Gwen speaks, sympathetically, of a "clean break." She sees the pain we have been putting ourselves through, and she doesn't
get it. Why we inflict such torture. Why we still stand like boxers who can't throw the punches anymore but have the unconquerable
advantage of not being able to fall down. "A clean break." (
Divorce,
a word I won't permit, can't even take seriously.) As if we were just cracking open a joint. As if we could just apply enough
pressure, push hard enough, and come loose from each other with a satisfying pop and a slow, clean drip. She, our closest
friend, doesn't quite realize that we're one thing, Eric and I. Not the "one flesh" bullshit of the wedding ceremony. But
one bone. You can't snap a bone in two with a delicious pop. You have to hack, saw, destroy.

When I cut up the rib bones to take home for a slow-cooked Sunday supper, the band saw makes a buzzing roar and the pleasant
smell of scorched bone drifts to my nostrils. They will make a warming stew for a chilly night. I bag them up, along with
my oxtails, say my good-byes, and head home, two hours back to the city. On the way there, my thoughts are predictably filled
with D. Part of me imagines driving to his apartment, knocking, making him let me in. But I don't. I drive home, where my
universe awaits, to make oxtail soup.

All this, the short ribs and sex and Fleisher's and D, these are things that, heartbreaking though it might be to contemplate,
I can imagine doing without. I can't imagine that about Eric. Which means, in a strange way, that I can't really see him.

But I'm getting there, coming closer. Or maybe I can feel his absence getting closer. Another thing edging in with the shrinking
reach of the campfire's circle of light. That possibility. And that scares me. It seems horrible that in order to see my dear
husband I have to be able to picture my world without him. But maybe I shouldn't be so afraid. Dreaming it doesn't have to
make it so. I can think of a life without short ribs, but that doesn't mean I have to live it.

Maybe, just maybe, seeing us for what we are, both together and apart, will make our dark worlds a little less scary.

E
VERYTHING HAS SUNK
into gray, still, icy winter. Nothing seems to move--not me, not Eric, not this paralyzing need and sorrow. Even the butcher
shop has become routine, a pleasant enough routine, just as my marriage has become a pleasant routine, usually, marred only
by the occasional late-night crying session or insinuating comment.

Out of the blue, one day, while I'm stocking the freezer in the front of the shop--quart-sized containers of duck stock, packages
of dog food patties, locally made yogurt--I get that back-pocket buzz.

So are you fucking somebody? Just wondering
.

I go red, self-consciously turn my face to the open freezer door while I rack my brain to think of what I've done now. Other
than Jessica and, I suspect, Josh, none of the gang up here knows much of anything about any of this, and I don't want them
to now. I type with my back turned to the meat counter.

What?!! No! Why?

I just figured.... Whatever. Do what you have to do
.

I'm not DOING anything!

And I'm not. There was a time not so long ago when I was, when I tried to dull the ache with a handful of anonymous encounters,
rough and unpleasant. But it didn't work; I only wound up being both hurt and bored. Bored automatically by any other men
who wanted me, their panting, the resentful sense of obligation their want made me feel, their lack of imagination and intelligence--evident
in both their copious spelling errors and the eagerness with which they wanted to fuck me. Because they gave me their attention
for such a pittance, they weren't worthy to give it.

All of this is just the tiny tip of the lethal iceberg of all I can't bear to talk to Eric about, even though he knows it,
or some of it, anyway. The fear I feel at the prospect of simply speaking is akin to the terror of being physically beaten,
though my gentle-hearted husband would never in a million years do such a thing. I bear the sorrow of not being able to talk
to my best friend because it hurts less than imagining the stark fear of talking to him.

Sometimes, though, it surfaces, briefly, in the middle of sleepless nights of tossing. Four a.m. always the dark hour.

"I hate that you love that asshole!"

I told Jessica that we never fight, and that is mostly the truth. I hesitate to even call these late-night outbursts "fights,"
because that suggests a mutuality, or common field of battle. What it is instead is the shedding of the patchwork of defenses
Eric has built up to be able to live with me in peace every day. His eyes fly open; he is suddenly awake. He sighs loudly,
tosses, mutters. I am instantly as wide-awake as he, but I keep my eyes studiously closed, try mightily to keep my breath
even and slow, as if he'll not unleash his anger on me if I play possum convincingly enough. The more he tosses, the more
still I become. And sometimes it works. Sometimes, on lucky early mornings, he drifts back to sleep by around six thirty or
seven without having said anything more than a grunted "Oh, Julie" that I can pretend to have slept through. Other nights,
he grabs me suddenly, by the shoulders, shakes me. And he makes the one declaration he has spent the last hours working over
in his mind, the one terrible, heartbroken, angry, justified lament:

"Why don't you just tell me to
leave?
"

"I don't want... I don't know... I..." I try to speak, but there are only two words I can say that are both true and not so hurtful
as to be lethal to both of us. So I sob out all my guilt and love and hurt and sorrow, shuddering. "I'm sorry, so sorry, I'm
so sorry..."

And we cry ourselves back to sleep. Awaking at eight thirty, groggy and swollen-eyed, to the yowls of indignant cats--the whine
of a Siamese mix with a thyroid problem is
not
to be denied--and to the more affable but increasingly sneezy beseeches of a dog in deep need of a morning constitutional,
we gingerly approach discussion as we move through our morning routines achily, as if we've both spent the night being beaten
with bags full of oranges.

As he stands naked in the bathroom, waiting for the water in the shower to heat up: "We've just been doing this for so
long
."

As I pull open a tin of Wellness cat food: "You think I don't wish I could stop?"