Cleaving (25 page)

As he pauses at the door with his satchel over his shoulder, his hand on the knob: "Will you be home tonight?" (Dreading that
the answer will be "no," but also relishing, in some dark place, the sharp, clean stab that "no" would bring.)

"I have nowhere else to be."

"Me neither."

"Maybe couples therapy." I repress a cringe at the suggestion. I don't know why it is that the prospect of counseling feels
like a life imprisonment sentence.

"I love you."

"I love you."

The day is filled with e-mails and text messages that are tender and long and, because they are not imbued with the horrors
of face-to-face discussion, more direct. We have our most probing talks in cyberspace. And yet mostly they are talks about
needing to talk, and then sometime at around four o'clock I tell him I can't handle talking, not tonight, and so I'm going
to buy wine instead. And he is kind, he says, "Take care of yourself." The rug lifts easily up to accept the settled dust,
and we are okay for a while.

Though Eric, the one of us who yells and accuses, is not the only one with suspicions. I suspect that Eric is not being entirely
honest when he says he has nowhere to go. I know that there is the other woman out there, still thinking of him. She's written
him passionate, longing e-mails (I snoop too, I am no innocent, just moderately less technologically adept is all); she not
only let him into her bed, but continues to speak to him, even after all this time, perhaps with frustration but also with
affection and patience and sweetness. I am not angry with him for having her; I am not angry at the woman either, who after
all can be accused of nothing more than having better taste in men than I do. I'm not angry, though I'm sure Eric would rather
I was. I am simply envious.

In many ways, I think bitterly, he is far less alone than I am. Occasionally at least he can still "accidentally" make out
in a cab after a party. At least he is occasionally told he is wanted. I have no one to make out with in a cab. I long just
to be kissed.

But it's also not true that I have no place to go. I may not have the solace of sex. But I have Fleisher's. And I try to escape
there as often as I can. My bribe to justify the ever-increasing length of my stays is the meat. Eric has grown exceedingly
fond of the meat. But the fact is that Eric and I both use my trips upstate as one more way, besides the rivers of wine we
dose ourselves with, to hide from each other.

I go, I cut, I drink both together with my friends and, more often, alone. I read and watch movies on my laptop at night.
I don't troll for sex, I don't try to get off, I hardly even cry, anymore, and when I do it's quiet and slow. I eat lots of
meat. Every now and again, Josh even forces one of his aged steaks on me.

Incredible things, these steaks, once you've trimmed off the blackened detritus that is an inevitable result of dry aging--it
is in fact the key to what dry aging is. It's also why dry-aged meat is expensive.

A dry-aged strip steak isn't cherished for the same reason that, say, tenderloin is cherished. A tenderloin is pricey right
off the animal. Once you've learned the trick of taking it off, a tenderloin is just about the easiest money you can make
as a butcher. Perhaps a minute to remove it, you don't even have to clean it up, trim the fat or silver skin. Just throw it
in a Cryovac bag and send it off to some big-city restaurant where some chef will cook it up with a minimum of fuss and a
sauce he could make in his sleep, and charge top dollar for this tender, insipid meat his customers so clamor for, a muscle
that the animal literally never uses, so that it never sees the exertion and struggle that makes for both toughness and flavor.

But a dry-aged steak is expensive for what's done to it. And, more specifically, what's taken away from it. Between the moment
a rib section comes into the shop and when, after three weeks of aging, it is cut on the band saw and trimmed into steaks,
it loses fifty percent of its weight. Some of this goes to loss of moisture. The muscles have literally dried out. More is
lost to plain old unglamorous rot. The outside edges of the rib section get dark, even black, and slimy. If conditions are
right, and Josh is meticulous about the conditions in his cooler, the decay--and that is what it is--continues at an even, controlled
pace. There is no mold, no creepy crawlies. But there is the slow breaking down of flesh, some of the inevitabilities of what
happens to dead things in the very best of circumstances. While the flavor of the muscle's interior is intensifying into the
quintessence of beef, and growing impossibly, meltingly tender, the protective outside edges are merely drying, aging, "going
over." It's inedible, it's got to go.

The result is the best meat you can buy. But there's a lot less of it.

So one night I am cooking up one of the steaks Josh has given me over my strong objections. He very nearly had to use force,
which I would not put past him at all.

Cooking these steaks is a somewhat nerve-wracking business because they are so expensive, and while they are still delectable
if a little overdone, it seems a heartbreaking shame to miss out on the melting, chewy, meaty perfection of an ideally medium-rare
aged strip steak. I follow Josh's directions to the letter.

J
OSH'S
P
ERFECT
S
TEAK

1 100% grass-fed, 21-day-aged, 11/2-inch-thick bone-in New York strip steak

1 tablespoon canola or safflower oil (optional) for seasoning the pan

Coarse sea salt or kosher salt to taste

Coarsely ground pepper to taste

1 teaspoon softened butter (Josh insists on butter from grass-fed cows)

2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil

Preheat the oven to 350degF.

Remove the steak from the refrigerator and let it stand uncovered for 20 to 30 minutes before cooking. Pat the steak dry to
remove any excess moisture.

Place a heavy, ovenproof saute pan, preferably stainless steel or cast iron, over very high heat. If the pan is not well seasoned,
put 1 tablespoon canola or safflower oil in the pan.

(Use ovenproof pans
only!!!
"No plastic-handled pans!" Jessica always warns her customers, yet always there is some moron, irate or contrite, with stories
of ruined cookware, burning plastic drooping, that horrid toxic smell ...)

Generously season the steak with salt and pepper right before you put it in the pan. Sear one side of the steak until a nice
brown crust starts to form, about 2 minutes. Do not move the steak or press down on it in any way. Then flip the steak gently,
using tongs (never pierce the steak with a fork!), and sear the other side.

Remove the pan from the stovetop, top the steak with the butter and olive oil, and place the pan in the oven. Check the temperature
of the steak after five minutes with a meat thermometer. For a rare steak, remove it from the oven at 115 to 120degF. Grass-fed
meat, because it is so lean, will cook much more quickly than conventionally raised beef. (Not to get your nerves any more
wracked or anything.) Place the steak on a cutting board or platter and let it rest for five minutes. The internal temperature
of the steak will continue to rise. After five minutes, slice the steak into strips and arrange on a warmed platter. A New
York strip can actually serve two people, but I will often eat this all by myself.

I have not even bothered with a salad. This steak will be all I need.

So I've cooked the steak, and as I'm standing there waiting with my glass of wine, just sort of staring at the meat as it
rests, crusted brown and aromatic on a plate beside the stove, I'm dreamily imagining how it will soon melt richly in my mouth,
make my head fall back with pleasure, and as I'm imagining this, something pops into my mind. A thought I immediately recognize
as tortured, yet it remains somehow irresistible, a scab to be picked.

What the hell else am I doing up here, idling, alone, if not dry-aging myself? And if that's the case, what's going to wind
up rotting and being cut away? Is it our marriage that must succumb? Or maybe it's all the rest that is expendable, that is
the peeled-off age. The affairs, the hurt, D, all thrown away to find the tenderness of a new, sweeter marriage.

Or maybe even I myself, my whole being, must be sloughed off something or someone else. I am the part that has to be discarded
to make for something great, in which I'll have no role.

I'm leaking tears now as I stand, tongs in hand, watching a pool of pink juice that's formed under the meat on the plate.
Maybe when I've sat in my juices long enough, everything will come clear, I won't want the rot, whatever it is, will see it
as useless, no longer necessary. Is anything outside of butchery, outside of metaphor, ever that clean?

The steak is beautiful. I take two home to New York the next day, to share with Eric. I don't share my thoughts with him.
He wouldn't understand, or rather he would understand far too well. And for now it's enough, just the pleasure of giving him
that flavor, maybe explaining a bit about the aging process, about the sacrifice. Of moisture, that is, of flesh and fat.

Two days later I am walking up Union Square from my yoga class along the east side of the park. And I see D.

It's not a surprise, exactly. The only surprise is that it took so long. I'm at Union Square at least three or four times
a week, it's the center of my life in the city. This happens to New Yorkers a lot, I think--periods of life defined by, mapped
out on, some string of blocks, some neighborhood. Though Eric and I lived in Brooklyn when we were first married, much of
our lives during those years played out on a few blocks of the East Village, between First and Avenue C, between 7th Street
and 10th. An earlier period had me daily frequenting the West Village, Bleecker between Sixth Avenue and Seventh, Carmine
and Bedford. For the last few years now, it's been Union Square. I explain, when Gwen or another friend asks why this is,
that it's where my therapist is, my yoga studio, Whole Foods and the greenmarket and Republic, where the bartender knows me
and pours my Riesling before I get up on my barstool. And all these things are true. But it all started with D. D works around
here. Our affair began here, was carried out here--meetings at the Barnes & Noble, make-out sessions at the entrance to the
subway or sitting on the grass of the square. Ended here. And the truth is I've been lingering here ever since, waiting to
see him again. The only real point of interest--and if it's not just my superstitious mind, this may make a sort of cosmic
sense--is that it happens now, when for once, exhausted and maybe a bit blissed out by an hour and a half of inexpertly rendered
warrior poses, I'm not thinking of him at all.

I had wondered if I'd even recognize him if I saw him walking down the street, but I spot him in an instant, from a block
away, with a throng of people between us, just the top of his head with that crimson hat and a brief glimpse of his gait.
He's coming right toward me. I've not seen him in months, I suddenly can't breathe at all, my ears are full of droning.

I stare desperately at the screen of my BlackBerry until he passes. I don't try to catch his eye, and he either doesn't see
me or has pretended not to.

He's living in the world, the same world I'm living in, only I'm in this endless eddy and he's floated on. He's free. I'm
sloughed off. I want to throw up.

My brother wrote another refrigerator magnet poem, when he was probably nineteen or twenty:

When the flood comes

I will swim to a symphony

go by boat to some picture show

and maybe I will forget about you

Nineteen years old. How did he know, way back then? How is it I know only now?

"A
S LONG AS
this candle burns, that's how long we'll be missing you here at Fleisher's.... So, approximately twenty-four to twenty-six
hours."

"Ba-da-BUMP!"

We are standing in a circle in the middle of the shop half an hour past closing, drinking champagne out of chipped ceramic
mugs. The table has been wiped and salted, our aprons are in the dirty laundry bin, my leather hat sits atop my packed bag.
It's my last day at the shop; I'd agreed to apprentice for six months, and I've done it. The sublet is up on my apartment;
my husband is expecting me home, for good.

The candle is one of Aaron's latest endeavors, a golden pillar about six inches high. It's made from beef tallow I helped
him render. He hands it to me with a flourish. His mustache is by now a dark Snidely Whiplash thing that actually curls up
at the ends. Colin now sports great long muttonchop sideburns. Josh of course still has his porntastic facial hair. (One of
his favorite T-shirts reads:
GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE. PEOPLE WITH MUSTACHES KILL PEOPLE
.) The Great Facial Hair Face-off approaches. People are beginning to make bets, and Aaron is pondering prizes.

I've received other gifts today as well. From Jesse, who has decided not to participate in any mustache growing, I get a carved
marble egg, veined pink and black, and a small stand to set it on. "Maybe it will help your writing, I thought. Like a sort
of object for meditation or something."