Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (63 page)

“It’s just about how people listen to their
records,
” she cries, exasperated. She cannot even look at the other wife, for this is not just another bit of funny, forgivable masculine absurdity; it is deeper and more shaming than that. Meanwhile, her husband’s heart is broken: she has reduced him to a hobbyist, a hi-fi enthusiast, a
nerd.
Later, at home, the couple have a fight and the musical husband says, in the end, “You’re just tone-deaf. You don’t know how to listen. You hate music.”

ARE the musical husbands basically husbands, and only musical on the side? Or is it the other way around? It’s certainly true that the longer they are married the more musical they become. At the same time, they enjoy acting the part of husband. “She keeps me on a short leash,” one will say ruefully to another when he is considering some musical purchase. “Yeah. Me, too,” the other musical husband will say. “We made an agreement—one CD a week. But I think this leaves me a loophole for LPs. I’ll stick them behind the sofa cushions.” They never feel so happily husbandlike, in fact, as when they are buying music in secret.

And yet, although they pretend to enjoy their wives’ tolerant indifference, their deepest fear is that their wives
were
musical once, with their teenaged musical lovers. Although the wives tend to greet their husbands’ anxious, eager demands for musical attention with a few rote responses (“It’s lovely,” “How beautiful,” or just a long, perfunctory “Mmm”), sometimes in a department store or a coffee shop, especially around Christmas, a musical husband will notice a funny look crossing his wife’s face when certain songs come on. (Not good songs, usually: “So Far Away,” by Carole King, or even, God forgive her, “Stairway to Heaven.”)

“Why are you smiling that way?” he’ll ask.

“No reason.”

“It made you think of something.”

“Nothing.” But she
is
smiling, to herself. Often the music that makes her smile most (and it is not the smile she reserves for new friends or people he wants her to impress, but another, inward-looking smile) is alarmingly lengthy stuff—the first side of “What’s Going On,” or even “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Sometimes they make love with music playing, but when they do the rhythm of the lovemaking never seems to give way to the swell of ambient sound that he imagines his wife once knew. Even sex has been digitized.

After he has been away for a few days, the musical husband becomes a musical Othello, and searches his stacks of recorded music to find out what his wife has been listening to while he was away. Usually, it turns out that what she has been listening to is sad songs from the fifties, before they were born. He notices that often, even while he is playing records, she is singing to herself. Sometimes, between tracks, he will look up and listen to her sing. She sings in a high-pitched, child’s vibrato, and he can never quite make out the tune. “Crazy,” it sounds like, or “I Should Care.”

“What are you singing, my love?” he asks her, suddenly and (he thinks) tenderly. But she can hear the anxiety and suspicion and mistrust—all the incidental percussion—in his question. So she says only, and almost to herself, “Oh, just a song.”

1992

LOUIS MENAND

LISTENING TO BOURBON

R
EPORTS
of a drug said to relieve inhibition, promote conviviality, blunt the sex drive, and turn morbid misanthropes into jolly, can-do airheads did not come as a complete surprise to some of us, since we were already familiar with a substance that provides virtually the same medical benefits. How this product, which most people can acquire just by presenting a valid driver’s license, has managed to escape the attention of psychopharmacologists is a puzzle. Still, there is reason to be grateful to the philosophical branch of the psychopharmacological profession for identifying an issue that had, frankly, never seemed worth getting too ontologically bent out of shape about. And that is, of course, the question: Which is the real self? Is it the self on bourbon? Or is it the self unmodified by bourbon?

This is not a matter to be approached glibly. For the problem of identity is a sea on which many philosophers have lost their way. Consider a bundle of sticks from which one stick is removed, and then another, and then another. After the removal of which stick does the bundle of sticks cease to be “a bundle of sticks”? Or take the case of the knife whose blade has been replaced once and whose handle has been replaced three times. What grounds do we have for saying that it is still “the same knife”?

As with things, so with selves. The sexual stallion and future world-beater of nineteen, for whom three pizzas and an accompanied hour in the back seat of a car are just the beginning of a decent evening, and the sagging commuter of twenty-five years later, who staggers home hoping only to have the stamina to make it through the first half hour of “Charlie Rose,” are nominally “the same person.” But by virtue of what? Of having the same Social Security number? Identity is the artificial flower on the compost heap of time.

So that when we begin to talk, as recent best-selling speculation on the metaphysics of pill-popping teaches us to talk, about the bourbon drinker’s “real self,” we are immediately made aware of a certain fugitive quality in the object of our attention. Certainly the person who after taking bourbon saunters merrily across the room at a cocktail party and says, with a feeling indistinguishable from sincerity, “Great to see you” to someone he has never met is not “the same” as the person who an hour earlier waited for the next elevator so he wouldn’t have to ride down with the boss.

But then the person who has just finished a pint of coffee ice cream with cookie dough is, by every measure, not the person she was before she opened the freezer door. The person who has spent the night cleaning up after a six-year-old with a stomach virus is no longer the obliging and fair-minded chap he was when he bedded down the previous evening. The person who has paid seven dollars and fifty cents to sit through “Intersection,” starring Richard Gere and Sharon Stone, is not the person who thought this sounded like a really good movie. Mood transformations have many agents.

Probably the only thing to say about the “real self,” in short, is that it is, of all our selves, the one it seems the least pretentious to own up to. Is this the self that greets personal setbacks with a chipper fortitude, that chatters amiably with idiots at a party, that maintains a healthy nonchalance in the company of members of the opposite sex? Or is it the self that would rather drive aimlessly for hours than ask directions, that broods for weeks after failing to receive an invitation to a party he had no desire to attend, that worries obsessively that his new haircut is a complete turnoff? Most bourbon drinkers have no hesitation in identifying the first self as a complete fake and embarrassment and the second as the self that, given the way things are, it is most reasonable to be. That’s why they need the bourbon.

It’s true that bourbon drinkers can experience unpleasant side effects unknown to consumers of faddish pharmaceuticals. But bourbon has other advantages. A glass or two neat is as close as most people can get to feeling like a novelist or an Abstract Expressionist without actually having to write or paint anything—a state thought desirable even by novelists and painters, and one that cannot be manufactured by mood transformers that come in capsule form. Sexual performance may be reduced by bourbon, but ribaldry, which is, after all, a much safer indulgence, is nicely enhanced. And for steady users death, when it comes, though painful, is mercifully swift.

1994

ANTHONY LANE

LOOK BACK IN HUNGER

R
EADY?
Ready. O.K., here we go. “Fold the wings akimbo, tucking the wing ends under the shoulders as shown here.” Lovely. “Then, on the same side of the chicken where you came out from the second knee . . .” Umm. “Poke the needle through the upper arm of the wing.” Wings with arms, like a bat’s. Cool. “Catch the neck skin, if there . . .” Hang on.
If there?
If not there, where? Whose neck is this, anyway? “. . . and pin it to the backbone, and come out through the second wing.” And go for a walk in the snow, and don’t come back till next year.

This wing-stitching drill, as any cook will tell you, is from the celebrated “To Truss a Chicken” section of Julia Child’s “The Way to Cook.” It’s a pretty easy routine, really, as long as you take it slow, run through a batch of test poultry first, have a professional chef on hand to help you through the bad times, and feel no shame when you get arrested and charged with satanic drumstick abuse. Julia Child is a good woman, with no desire to faze or scald us; she genuinely wants us to bard that bird, to cook it, and to carve it. (“Fork-grab under the knee. . . . Soon you’ll see the ball joint where the leg-thigh meets the small of the back.”) Hell, she wouldn’t mind if we went ahead and
ate
the damn thing.

I don’t know what it is about cookbooks, but they really drain my giblets. I buy them, and use them, and study them with the micro-attentive care of a papyrologist, and still they make me feel that I am missing out. I follow instructions, and cook dinner for friends, and the friends are usually friends again by the next morning, but what they consume at my table bears no more than a fleeting, tragically half-assed resemblance to the dish that I read about in the recipe. Although I am not a good cook, I am not a dreadful one, either; I once had a go at
mouclade d’Aunis,
once made a brave fist of
cul de veau braisé Angevin,
and once came very close to buying a carp. Last summer, I did something difficult with monkfish tails; the dish took two days to prepare, a full nine minutes to eat, and three days to wash up after. But an hour in front of my cookbooks is enough to slash my ambitions to the bone—to convince me that in terms of culinary evolution I remain a scowling tree-dweller whose idea of haute cuisine is to grub for larvae under dead bark.

And we all know the name of the highly developed being standing tall at the other end of the scale. Super-skilled, free of fear, the last word in human efficiency, Martha Stewart is the woman who convinced a million Americans that they have the time, the means, the right, and—damn it—the
duty
to pipe a little squirt of soft cheese into the middle of a snow pea, and to continue piping until there are “fifty to sixty” stuffed peas raring to go. Never mind the taste; one glance at this woman’s quantities is enough to spirit you into a different and a cleaner world. “I discovered a fantastic thing when preparing 1,500 potatoes for the Folk Art Show,” Martha writes in her latest book. “The Martha Stewart Cookbook” is a magisterial compendium of nine previous books, and offers her fans another chance to sample Martha’s wacky punch lines (“Tie securely with a single chive”) and her naughtiest promises (“This hearty soup is simple to assemble”). So coolly thrown off, that last line, and you read right through it without picking up the outrageous implication. Since when did you “assemble” a soup? Even the ingredients are a fright. “Three pounds fish frames from flounder or fluke,” Martha says brightly, sounding like Henry Higgins. To the rest of humanity, soup is something that involves five pans, two dented strainers, scattered bones that would baffle a forensic pathologist, and the unpleasant sensation of hot stock rising from the pot, condensing on your forehead, and running down into the pot again as lightly flavored sweat.

Martha does not perspire. There is not a squeak of panic in the woman’s soul. She knows exactly where the two layers of cheesecloth can be found when the time comes to strain the stock. She assembles her fish chowder as if it were a model airplane. Moreover, she does so without appearing to spend any time in the kitchen. “One of the most important moments on which to expend extra effort is the beginning of a party, often an awkward time, when guests feel tentative and insecure,” she says. The
guests
are insecure? How about the frigging cook? Believe me, Martha, I’m not handing round the phyllo triangles with lobster filling during that awkward time; I’m out back, holding on to the sink, finishing off the Côtes du Rhône that was supposed to go into the stew. But Martha Stewart is an idealist who has cunningly disguised herself as a helping hand; readers look up to her as a conservative angel who keeps the dream house tidy, radiant, ready for pals, and filled with family. “If I had to choose one essential element for the success of an Easter brunch, it would be children,” she writes, as if preparing to grill the kids over a high flame.

Yet the conservative image won’t quite fit. The Stewart paean to the joys of Thanksgiving (“To not cook and entertain on this day would seem tantamount to treason”) is itself rather joyless in its zealotry; you keep hitting something sharp and steely in her writings—a demiglace intolerance of ordinary mortals. Her kitchen is bewitched, and she’s Samantha. You won’t see it on her TV shows, but I bet Martha Stewart can wiggle her nose and turn any chauvinist Darrin into crabmeat. If you’re planning to fork-grab her under the knee, forget it. Was it the spirit of the season or a quiet celebration of dominant female power that led to the baked-ham recipe at the start of “Martha Stewart’s Menus for Entertaining”? It looks succulent in the accompanying photograph, and I have long yearned to make it, but three factors have restrained me. First, it serves sixteen, and I don’t know that many people who would be happy to munch ham at one another. Second, you need “one bunch chervil with flowers.” (That’s plain silly, if not quite as ridiculous as a recipe that I came across at the peak of nouvelle cuisine, in the nineteen-eighties—a recipe that demanded
thirty-four
chervil leaves.) Third, the ham must be baked for five and a half hours in a pan lined with fresh-cut grass. As in meadow. “Locate an area in advance with tender, young, organically grown grass that has not yet been cut,” our guide advises. “It is best to cut it very early in the morning while the dew is still evident.” I’m sorry, Martha, but it just won’t do. I have inspected the grass in my back yard, and I am not prepared to serve Baked Ham with Cat Whiff and Chopped Worms.