Tongue (7 page)

“How’ve you been?” His greeting isn’t really addressed to me, but not really to Paulie either. He unslings the bag from his shoulders and puts it down on the floor near the pocket door like he’s going to leave very soon. Paulie approaches him slowly and licks his outstretched palm. With his other hand, he strokes Paulie’s neck.
Paulie’s neck is going to smell like you for a while
.

I rise from the sofa. I hadn’t wanted him to see me asleep. “Would you like to eat something?”

“No, I already ate.”

We’d usually get ready for lunch around two, leisurely, after our midmorning brunch.

“Already?”

“I’ll go take a walk with Paulie and be back.”

You haven’t been here for more than two minutes!
“Okay, then.” I walk toward the kitchen. Paulie glances at me but pads out the door when he hears his whistle. The sound of him whistling. It’s been a long time since I heard it. No matter how hard I practice, I can’t make the sound. I hear the door closing. What’s the best thing to eat at two in the afternoon? I pucker and try to whistle as I open the fridge door. I have potatoes in the fridge, along with zucchini and flour and pasta and an assortment of sauces and frozen fish—flounder, turbot, mackerel—and fresh anchovies and caviar that would be great in a salad. With these I can put together a decent—though not sumptuous—meal. I used to
feel I was being given a special privilege every time I opened the fridge.

In the novel
The Edible Woman
, Marian bakes a cake in the shape of a woman for the man who’d tried to make her change but nearly destroyed her. “You look delicious. Very appetizing. And that’s what will happen to you; that’s what you get for being food,” she says. She calls him to her place and displays the cake. When he panics and leaves, she takes a fork and digs in, starting with the feet. It could be that she was only looking to share something with him and feel satisfied. The novel ends with Marian announcing that it’s only a cake, as she spears her fork into her cake body, neatly slicing off the head.

Roman women would bake a vulvalike pastry and put it on the table when they were upset with their husbands. A fresco depicting a cake baked in the form of breasts—made from sweet, thick, yellow custard and finished with red cherries perched on top as nipples—adorns a small church in Sicily. When women cook, they’re not just doing it for sustenance. An expression of rage and unhappiness and desire and sadness and pleading and pain may lurk in their dishes. Of course, the best kind is food filled with love.

Just as it’s important to be happy when you’re in a kitchen, the most crucial thing to keep in mind when you cook is the people who are going to eat your food—their tastes, their desires, their likes and dislikes, what will satisfy them, what will move them, what will make them want it again. A cook should understand the people’s eating habits, too. People can’t change their eating habits easily. They take their habits with them even when they leave home for somewhere far away. When I first started cooking, Chef would often tell us to cook the way our mothers did when we were young. Having had no mother, I changed that word to Grandmother. When I was working at that restaurant in Napoli, the head chef told me that proper
Italian cooking had to give customers the feeling that their grandmother was in the kitchen, and I found myself smiling despite myself. It’s not so when I cook for customers or the students I teach, but when I cook for him, I want to make the kind of food that would pique his hunger for me.

Taking lettuce from the fridge, I pause to look out the window, lit brightly by the spring afternoon sun. I look around at everything I have here—a kitchen spacious enough to conduct a cooking class for ten people, an interior and a yard roomy enough for an English setter, and a thirty-one-year-old man, as tall as a palm tree, walking across the yard. They’re not things that would come easily to me at this age. I have it all. Even if things have been bad between us, these I can’t easily give up. The problem now isn’t whether we love each other, but whether we can return to what we used to be. I need to say to him, subtly, suggestively:
Even if we can’t return to what we used to be, it can’t be completely futile. We can learn something truly valuable as we pick up the broken pieces and float up to the surface. Let’s wait until then
. Being inside the house in the spring, with him there, makes me a more positive person, more outgoing and cheerful.

I think I’ll make a meatless sandwich of herbs, vegetables, and eggs. There’s nothing more fitting for a meal at two P.M. on a Sunday. If it’s true that he already had lunch, the filling should be light. I put the cold chicken and the can of smoked salmon back in the fridge. Then I spread a thin layer of butter on the baguette and drizzle it thoroughly with olive oil infused with chopped garlic and thyme. Without the garlic and thyme enlivening the olive oil, the sandwich is boring. I usually add a bit of mayonnaise, but this time I don’t, since he’s not a fan. Now all I need to do is stack the ingredients. I spread lettuce, spun dry, slices of boiled egg, tomato, cucumber, onion. Usually one baguette is more than enough for the two of us. I cut it into thirds with the bread knife, on a slant, and nestle them in a
gauze-covered basket. Even if it’s a simple sandwich, you have to choose quality bread, the ingredients have to sing together, and, whether it’s thyme or basil, there must be some kind of herb—this is my philosophy for sandwich making.

“Go ahead, try one.” I wait for him to take a bite of the sandwich. The person you can eat with is also the person you can have sex with, and the person you can have sex with is the person you can eat with. That’s why dates always start with a meal. You get to experience the impulsive expectation and curiosity toward the other person this way first, not in bed. There are many instances when the opposite is true, too. When you eat together, your relationship deepens or takes a step back—it’s either one or the other. Eating together, having sex—he and I are used to both, and we also know how to bring it up to the next level.

I eat by myself. I gulp down two pieces of the sandwich. I’m full. I’m satisfied, but not completely. Sharing something and feeling satisfaction from it—now I can’t seem to recall how much joy that used to give me.

“Why don’t you just take a bite?” Is the sandwich too boring to stimulate his appetite? He doesn’t even look at it.

“I told you I don’t want to. Why do you keep doing this?”

“Why do you think I keep doing this?”

“It’s over, okay, so please stop.”

“Over? What’s over? You’re not being rational right now. Any day now you’re going to come back and beg, saying you were wrong.”

“That’s just not going to happen. And I wish you’d stop going around talking about Se-yeon.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“I mean, you two liked each other back then. Why would you do something like that?”

“I’ve never said anything about her to anyone.”

“Okay. I guess it’s Mun-ju, then?”

“Stop it. All you do is worry about Se-yeon, right? Have you bothered to ask me how I’ve been doing since you got here?”

“If you keep doing that, you really make me out to be the bad guy.”

I can’t speak.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, but I can’t do anything, okay?”

“You can come back. I told you I understand.”

“It’s not you I want to live with anymore, it’s Se-yeon. How many times do I have to keep telling you this?”

“You told me you loved me with that mouth of yours. Don’t you remember? Did you forget all of that?”

“Yeah, I did back then. It’s all in the past, though.”

“Come back to me.”

He doesn’t say anything.

I lay a hand gently on his arm, near his left elbow. No matter how much you kick off the covers in bed you always have a corner of it covering your stomach—just like that, we’d always been linked together, by one leg, one arm, one hand. “I’ll wait.”

He pushes my hand away coldly. “It hurts me, too, to think about us ending up like this.”

“It’s not hurt—you probably feel guilty.”

He’s silent.

“Isn’t that right?”

“I think in the future I should just visit with Paulie in the yard.”

I’m shocked.

If I bake a cake, I think I’ll make it in the shape not of my body, but hers, Se-yeon’s. Giggling, watching you shiver in disgust, I would pierce the chocolate eyes with a fork and eat them. You would ask, very seriously, How did it taste? How’s that? And since you’ll be curious about its taste, we can eat the entire cake, from the ankles. How’s that?

He’s not standing in front of me anymore. I rush out to the front door. He turns around, pausing as he slides his feet into his shoes. “Look in the mirror,” he says to me, his voice softening with pity for me for the first time.

“You, you’re about to leave the person you love the most, okay? So think about it just one more time.”

“I’m really sick and tired of that kind of talk.”

I’m stunned into silence again.

The door closes.

If I turn around, I’d be able to see him one more time, walking across the yard, kindly but sadly hugging Paulie, whispering, See you soon. I’d loved the shadow he casts, as sturdy as that of a grove of trees in the sun. I’m so worked up that all I can do is crumple onto the shoes stacked in the foyer. I’m not sure what this heavy thing is, pressing down on my shoulders—hunger, powerlessness, Paulie.
Okay. Goodbye, just for now. Even if I have everything, you leaving like that—it’s like losing everything. Bye. Even when you’re with her, you will have to think about me from time to time. I’ll continue to piece together my sorrow here, like this
.

CHAPTER 12

IF THERE HAS TO BE a reason for it, I think Mun-ju and I became close not only because we’re the same age, but also because I understood her appetite. Mun-ju said she was the eldest of five sisters. Pausing after revealing this, she asked me, Could you turn the lights off?

It was late at night, after her coworkers had left and I’d even told her about the pheasant I’d encountered when I was twenty years old, a story I’d never told anyone. I turned out the light in the kitchen, came back to the table, and extinguished the light hanging over the table, dangling from the ceiling above Munju’s head. Amid the honks and the intermittent flashes of headlights racing by on the eight-lane road outside the restaurant in the deep of the night, we were floating in a space of zero gravity where we couldn’t feel or taste or smell.

My father wanted to raise us very strictly, Mun-ju continued. Maybe it was because he felt unsettled that he didn’t have a son. He had rules about when we slept, woke up, studied, and didn’t allow us to wear skirts or blouses. My sisters and I had to
grow up like little soldiers. But raising girls like that doesn’t turn them into boys, you know? Our relationship got worse after Mom died. My father set strict curfews and even forbade me from hanging out with friends. I think he was the worst with me because I’m the oldest. Once, after a group tutoring session, a boy walked me home, and my father caught us. For a whole month after that, he didn’t touch the food I made, like it was dirty. Food was the hardest thing for him to control. Once a week, he’d force me onto the scale and weigh me, saying a fat girl was of no use to anyone. You can’t understand how hard that was for me. I wasn’t stick skinny, but I wasn’t fat either. So I ended up stuffing myself when my father wasn’t looking. There was no other way to rebel. I used to keep a whole bag of brown sugar in my purse. When I was sad about something, I ran straight to the fridge. But the odd thing is that I gained weight every day, a lot of weight, but my father didn’t say anything about it. And I couldn’t stand that either, because it felt like he was ignoring me.

My father would appear in my dreams and say, I’m going to eat you up because that’s how much I love you. I got fatter and fatter. At one point I was so fat that I even dreamt that my girth blew the house to pieces. My life’s purpose boiled down to this—leave home as soon as possible, which I did when I was seventeen. I think bingeing and starving are really the same. They both have the same purpose—they give you a twisted sense of accomplishment, allowing you to say, I’m the best at bingeing or starving myself. But that really was all I had. I met you at a time in my life when I was thinking that. And your cooking taught me, for the first time, that food wasn’t just for stuffing your face, but was supposed to make you feel something. That first day, the roasted duck breast you made, topped with roots of baby spinach, really got me hungry, just by looking at it. That’s why I wanted to leave as soon as possible. But
then you came after me in the parking lot, asking why I didn’t eat it, how could I write an article about it if I’d never even tried it. You really cracked me up. You were so serious! That day, I thought there must be something special about your food. It’d been a long time since I’d eaten something that made me feel as if a weight had been lifted off me. I feel like I spent all of my twenties struggling with something stupid, with eating, with food. I’m really pissed about it, I really am.

I pushed napkins toward Mun-ju, who was crying.

A sated person is different from a hungry one. A hungry one can’t be persuaded to do anything, but a full person can be given boundaries and convinced. So after that, I continued to cook for Mun-ju whenever she popped into the restaurant. I just made the portions a little smaller and helped her to eat slowly, and continued to tell her what she shouldn’t eat, what she should avoid, what she must eat. Like most intelligent and creative people, she knew what she wanted and how to focus her whole being on what she wanted. She wasn’t avoiding food, she was using food to get over her fear of eating. It was unspoken, but that was what we both wanted for her.

A person’s appetite is as precious as salt was in the seventeenth century. Trying to go around the salt officials who confiscated and regulated it, women would hide chunks of it in their cleavage and corsets, between their thighs and buttocks. When the officials squeezed those parts of their bodies, the women would burst out crying in pain. The more you try to take it away, the more people try to hide it. What I could do for Mun-ju was not to hurry, but to wait and watch over her patiently as if I were waiting for the last course of the meal to arrive at the table—this was something anyone could do for a friend. If Mun-ju thought this was special, it was special for me, too. I cooked, she ate. I cooked a little, she gradually ate less.