Читать книгу Deer Hunting in Paris - Paula Young Lee - Страница 10
ОглавлениеHustle
In good cookeries, all raisins should be stoned.
—Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, 1796
On my way back from the Bon Marché to my studio apartment, I’d often make a detour through the Luxembourg Gardens, where children would play with the toy sailboats in the central fountain. Each child would get a short stick and a boat with a numbered sail. They’d poke their boat with the stick, and off it would float across the rippled surface of the large circular pool. Eventually, their boat would drift back to the edge, coming close enough so they could poke it again. This activity involved a lot of waiting and chasing, because it was impossible to predict when or where your boat would return to the edge. The children were always trying to poke the wrong boat, just because it had drifted close to them.
This is how I feel about romantic relationships. “We begin by coveting what we see every day,” Hannibal Lecter purred to FBI agent Clarice Starling, who’d been visiting him at a prison for the criminally insane. He was correct, but who takes romantic advice from a cannibal serial killer, even if he is a doctor with great teeth? Studies have shown that people tend to date inside a ten mile radius, because they’d rather pretend that proximity is destiny instead of fessing up to being lazy. What happens when the boys go after a girl who accidently drifted within poking range? They take a stab at her, and the girl floats away. The process repeats itself until the pokers get bored and leave.
No surprise, then, that Paris is a city of transients. A remarkable number of super-Parisians aren’t even French. From Napoléon Bonaparte, who was born in Corsica, to Carla Bruni, the Italian-born former First Lady of France, a great chunk of those folks sitting decoratively in cafés are ex-pats who, by definition, came from someplace else. As a result, nearly 80 percent of Paris is unmarried but not necessarily single. Romance thrives in Paris because the city encourages the fine art of pitching woo, not the vulgar business of weddings. Lust has been around since the beginning of time, but it is only since the nineteenth century that it’s been considered any basis to exchange vows, let alone remain legally bound until the hearse pulls up and starts honking for you. A Parisian’s reaction to the news of an engagement is often perplexed confusion. “They’re getting married? But why?” As far as people in this city are concerned, what kills a relationship isn’t the fact that your lover snores like an asthmatic pig, but the contractual obligation to be by the pig’s side ‘til Death do you part.
One way or the other, marriage is fatal, and Paris is no place for the fainthearted in love. In this city, the pursuit of love demands a certain degree of flexibility and perseverance. Here is an example: When American porn magazine Hustler offered its first French edition a few years back, curiosity compelled me to buy a copy. Magazine kiosks typically place fashion, gossip, and health magazines on the customer’s left, and hard news, international press, and hobby magazines on the right. The porn is always on the uppermost right shelves where pushy toddlers cannot grab it, and consequently it is too high for short and overly inquisitive women to reach. Wherefore the situation required that I ask for assistance.
“I would like to purchase a copy of Hustler (pronounced ‘Oos-lair’),” I said. “Could you please get it down for me?”
This is not a phrase often posed, by man or woman, in any language.
The kiosk vendor leered genially at me, and shook his head in refusal.
“How come?” I prodded.
“Because such things are not meant for young ladies.”
I tried a few more kiosks, and each time, the vendor refused. When I related this experience to French friends with a request for an explanation, they chortled the French version of the clichéd line, “You ain’t so young, lady.” This unhelpful response did nothing to increase my respect for the French sense of humor. As a result, I have yet to resolve why the magazine kiosk vendors refused to take my money, but there’s no use getting wound up about it. Proprietors reserve the right not to sell to patrons, for reasons they are not required to defend. A friend once visited me with her American boyfriend of the moment, a bossy fellow puffed up with wealth and convinced of his own importance. A few hours later, he returned from a solo shopping trip, huffing in outrage because a pricy boutique had refused to sell him a pair of loafers. He’d shouldered his way into the small store, bellowing orders. Wherefore he was simply ignored, as he had mispronounced the magic word. He thought it was pronounced, “Plat-ee-num Vee-sa.” They were expecting to hear, “Please.”
In the end, I convinced the humorless owner of a tabac to give me the small publicity poster plastered by the entrance to his establishment. Wordlessly, he peeled it down and handed it to me. Clutching my talisman, I marched back to my studio, unrolled it, and stuck it on my mini-refrigerator. Whenever I went for a snack, I had to look at a female mouth amusing itself with a stick candy striped in red, white, and blue, these being the colors of both the American and French flags. The poster wasn’t much, but I liked it because it had required so much effort to get. The entire city seems to be constructed on this sadistic reward principle, with métro strikes, aloof waiters, and bad dates deliberately thrown into your path in order to make you deeply grateful for any crumbs of success.
Now, I wasn’t hoping to buy French Hustler for the pictures. I wanted it for the articles. In order to improve my conversational French (which still isn’t very good), I hoped to learn as many four letter words as I could, and I figured that an American porn mag translated into French would be a splendid way to learn. In English, my cussing tends to old-fashioned expletives such as “gosh!” “gadzooks!” and “golly!” In the larger scheme of things, it was far more embarrassing to wander around Paris, looking and sounding like Mister Peabody, the talking dog in the Bullwinkle cartoons, than to ask total strangers to sell me porn I was too short to purchase.
“But,” you sputter, “porn isn’t romantic!” Love + Lust = Lost without U . . . and a thousand candy hearts start to melt, for romance thrives in the spaces where hope meets confusion. And it is here that things start to get lost in translation, because in French, the word “fiancée” refers to your one-night stand.
Yes, I know. I’m a horrible, horrible person for bursting your bubble. But if you’re reading this sentence, you should be older than twelve—and if you’re not, please show this page to your mother so I can yell at her.
If I wasn’t looking for love, then why was I was bootlegging signal at a café near the Centre Pompidou so I could search an internet dating site? I wasn’t looking for myself. I was trying to help an ex-pat British scientist with a cat named Tara and a heart too soft for her own good. I was tired of hearing Cordula complain that there were no men in Boston where she lived, so I decided to send her a short list of bachelors worth meeting for a drink. That’s when I stumbled across John’s awkward profile. There was no photo, and everything about his information was wrong: almost-divorced dad, soccer coach for his son’s team, corporate lawyer who lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a wealthy white Boston suburb favored by pedigreed dogs with weak bladders. My brain said no. A dismal fit for my bohemian friend. The back of my neck said yes. But yes for me, though everything he listed seemed a worse match for a girl who shops for groceries at flea markets.
I read his profile again, and the bizarre tingling sensation grew stronger.
Baffled, I sipped my coffee, and finally concluded an email to him wasn’t poaching because my friend had no idea he existed. For that matter, neither did I. ‘J-o-h-n’ was merely a cluster of pixels on a screen. I sent him a message; within seconds, he replied. He later told me he’d been a member of the dating site for fifteen minutes and had received emails from three other women. As soon as my message came, he unsubscribed.
I wrote him that I read everything except for Popular Mechanics and gun magazines.
He didn’t mention that Soldier of Fortune was in his bathroom.
I’m a political Independent with progressive leanings.
He’s a conservative Republican who thinks that liberals are dimwits.
I refuse to marry or have children.
He’s a family man.
Etc.
We were total opposites with nothing in common except the fact that we were both from Maine. I knew the towns where he grew up; he knew mine too. We disagreed about everything. Still, we kept corresponding, because lawyers aren’t afraid of arguments, and that weird tingle up my spine wouldn’t dissipate. My lizard brain knew something I didn’t. What it knew, I had no clue. I was certain he wasn’t a soul mate. I have met them before. The first words out of the man’s mouth are always “Where have you been?” as if I’d popped out for a pizza and brought back beer by mistake. It’s not me but the men who ask, plaintively, “Now what do we do?” Perplexed words slipping out of unaccustomed mouths, for these are the sorts of men who don’t read their horoscopes. Their eyes plead. Their bodies yearn. Wherefore I am unimpressed. So what? It’s not romantic destiny to meet your soul mate. First of all, everybody has banana bunches of them, and if you’ve never met any, it may be time to leave your living room. Second, I find it pointless to pin romantic hopes on a companion who understands you deeply, listens to everything you say, bonds with you on an emotional level, and adores you beyond reason. Such perfection can only be found in a Golden Retriever. Or, says Cordula the Soft-Hearted Scientist, a horse. Not good options for me. (See “Allergies.”) Third, I’ve never felt incomplete, as if I’d lost my other half in the dryer and needed to start taking long, romantic walks on the beach in hopes of finding it washed up and waiting for me. I’m fine by myself, thank you. Stop bothering me.
When I run into a soul mate, I shake his hand and I leave. It’s keys-to-locks and perfect connection, blah blah blah, but so what? There’s nothing new to learn from a relationship with your other half because it’s already all about you. It’s like expecting your left earlobe to teach your right earlobe a thing or two. Plus, if “soul mate” was a valid concept, I should have met one in the form of a hot babe slinging burgers, or a garbage man fresh from a dump. But no, it’s always ridiculously dashing men with swollen bank accounts and a recidivist ability to recite poetry. I turn up my nose and run. This is also why I think reincarnation is 99 percent bupkis, because Larry, Algernon, and Ming all used to be Cleopatra. Just once, I want to meet a man who says that in a former life he used to be the daughter of Marie Antoinette’s wigmaker. Then, maybe, I’d wait around to hear more. I’m still waiting—which is to say, I’m not.
I’ve been accused of being heartless, because only a bitch walks away from a man pinning his heart to her sleeve. I think, therefore I am unrepentant. To my critics, I say: please read more books, paying particular attention to the supporting characters. Remember the story of Odysseus and the enchantress Circe? He was on an odyssey, but for a year, Circe delayed his heroic journey by fulfilling his every need. She was deeply in love with the man of her dreams. He was having a fabulous island vacation with a real sex goddess! Inconveniently, she also turned all his men into swine. In one version of the story, she fed them to him every night. He dumped her, and resumed voyaging home to his wife.
Why is this a bad story? Oh, but it’s not. Because he’s the hero, Odysseus kept on running into gorgeous sirens who fell madly in love with him, and they unleashed all their feminine wiles trying to get him to stay home with them. They’re soul mates! They belong together! Why else would a gorgeous, rich man with excellent table manners land in their laps, out of the blue, bringing shiploads of fresh food? The women are loamy of thigh with fertile wombs bearing many fruits, and the little bastards are never resentful when their father heroically abandons them. This is called Great Literature. My love story is terrible because I’m the one doing the running, and I look like a startled koala in spectacles. That’s the part that confuses everyone. Given the men I’ve left behind, I should look like Lucy Liu trussed in thigh-high black leather boots. Instead, I’m Margaret Cho wearing thrift-shop sweatpants on a bad hair day. It simply does not compute. I’m too short to be fashionable, too fat to be chic, and too tarnished to be a trophy. Makeup artists cry when confronted by my face. My eyeballs eject contact lenses—it’s something about “tight lids.” I’m allergic to mascara, rouge, and hairspray. Common sense says I should be grateful that men want to marry me. Instead, I’m uncommonly aggravated. I mean what I say, and it isn’t a ruse: I don’t want to. The very fact that men ask for my hand in marriage—the hand being the wrong bit to try to persuade, by the way—means it would be a giant mistake. It’s a perfect Catch-22.
To my secret glee, John won’t fly to Paris for a weekend rendezvous with a perfect stranger, even if the perfect stranger is moi. “I have soccer practice on Sundays,” he growled. Plus, he knew that I was moving to Boston for reasons settled long before our conversation began, and he didn’t mind waiting for me to come to him. Was he seeing other women? I sincerely hoped so. To each other, we were big cumulus clouds drifting on wind. He did not inhabit my reality. I neither trusted nor distrusted him, for he was a character on an electronic page, more fiction than fact, writing himself into my consciousness but disappearing when I dreamed. A fickle proposition at best. It helped that he was painfully honest, answering every question I posed with a direct answer. He also drove a pickup truck, drank regular beer, and liked declarative sentences, all of which hinted that he was that elusive beast known as the Abominable Straight Man. I asked for a picture, and he sent me a photo of a blurry humanoid skulking in deep snow. He’s the Sasquatch? My hypothesis was confirmed! Now I was really interested, because I’m allergic to everything else with fur.
“Sasquatches don’t exist,” Rose snipped, waggling her elegant finger in my face as we sat at an ordinary bistro near the Louvre. “Why don’t you fall in love with a Frenchman and just stay here?” That’s what she did, except her Frenchman was Dutch. An American stock broker who’d spent a few years working in the City (London’s equivalent of Wall Street), Rose had had an exceedingly good year and decided to celebrate by divorcing her gay French husband. Gilles was one of her very best friends, and she’d agreed to marry him because he had ultra-conservative Catholic parents who strongly disapproved of 1) Hollywood movies, 2) margarine, and 3) gay men. He hoped they’d die deluded and happy, swept into their graves by old age and too much confit de canard. And they did! Is there a better time to end a fake marriage than after a real funeral? So she took the Eurostar train from London to Paris, and headed to town hall in order to file her divorce papers. As she stood in line, impatiently tapping her toes, she found herself being stared at by a gorgeous man in the next line. Pierre invited her to a party that same night. She agreed to go. They had sex in the coat closet. Once her divorce was final, Pierre proposed. They now have two absurdly beautiful children being raised as citizens of Paris.
This story makes Parisians jealous, because hardly any apartments in Paris have coat closets.
We sat down to green beans, giblet salad, and crème brulée, a classic lunch special available anywhere in the city. Years ago, I’d told myself I should do exactly as Rose suggested, since it was as obvious as the subliminal sequence of our meal. But I never did. Why not? There are lots of reasons, some of which even sound reasonable, but in the end, my not-so-good explanation is this: it’s because I look grotesque when I eat. I’m not one of those women that can look all sultry when they swallow asparagus. It’s beyond my powers to transform the licking of an ice cream cone into an erotic experience, as advised by The Sensuous Woman on tape. Published in 1969 and written by “J” (predictably, as “O” was already taken), it was a revolutionary sex manual at the time, teaching women how to please their men in bed. Today, it’s pure comedy gold. Fast-forward a half-century later, the ice cream cone is now a raisin, and the focus is on women pleasing themselves. “I’d like you to start by examining your raisin,” psychologist Lori Brotto advises her female clientele after passing around a bowl of Sunkist fruits. “Touch the raisin with a finger. Look into the valleys and peaks, the highlights and dark crevasses. Lift the raisin to your lips . . .” This sort of hilarity has become so mainstream that I read about Brotto’s work in The New York Times Magazine. Nowadays, no scarlet letters are required; the analysis of orgasms has become a clinical exercise in head-shrinkage. Conclusion: It’s not the woman’s fault if penises make her laugh because female sexuality is “complex.”
I dislike raisins. They’re chewy and dried up. They happen to give me the runs, which is sort of beside the point, but what woman wants to think of her lady parts as shriveled black fruits? And lifting the raisin to your lips . . . well, if you extend the metaphor here, which is pretty much necessary for this exercise to work, it’s teaching women how to become lesbians. Penises are funny/ Raisins are yummy/ Eat some today!
To which I say: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a vagina isn’t a raisin unless you’re in therapy.
Clearly, I am no fun. When it comes to love, I’m literal. To me, all romance is fiction, too remote from real life to be anything but silly. Sweet nothings curdle my ears. I’m not interested in how things seem. I want to know what they are. The only way I can figure stuff out is by taking it apart and going back in time, all the way back to the Middle Ages when “romance” meant a story about pointy hats and disembowelments. When I chew on liver and giblets, my lips tell tales of blood and guts without me saying a word. Alas, chic women who carry tiny dogs in Hermès handbags don’t want to know about the shit in the silver lining. This is why Rose and I are friends, because she’s not ladylike in the least. Rose got married because she’s American, but she lives in Paris because she’s a flirt. “I’m a little in love with all my friends,” she admits breathlessly. “Why shouldn’t I seduce them?” And she bats her eyes at me.
She believes, profoundly, in love. Wherefore her version of what she shares with Pierre is terrifyingly X-rated.
“Let’s go to the Louvre,” Rose suggested as she sopped up the remains of her lunch.
“Why?” I asked in surprise, because we’d both been there hundreds of times.
“I need toilet paper.”
Swathed in couture, she likes to go the W/C, apply a fresh coat of lipstick, smile dreamily at the face in the mirror and abscond with a giant roll of TP. Crabbily, I’ve told her that it’s people like her that force people like me to carry their own stash in their pockets. She just laughs, and swipes the toilet paper anyway.
To this day, I don’t know why she wanted it, but I suspect she was using the cardboard rings for an art project. The Louvre is very inspiring.
There is an old physics problem: If a train is traveling at 100 miles an hour and a fly is hovering above your soup, how fast is the fly flying? Why doesn’t the fly hit the front of the car when the train suddenly stops? From the teacher’s standpoint, the fly is doomed unless the student finds the formula to keep it hovering. In the real world, the fly does just fine, but I could never explain how. In physics land, the hypothetical fly falls dead, the hapless victim of my poor math skills. Grade: F. F for the Flattened Fly.
Just because I was moving to the Boston area didn’t mean that my body was going to stay there. Call it an occupational hazard. Should one happen to be in a profession that starts with the letter “A,”—say, for example, “assassin,” “arms dealer,” anyone in the Army, “astrologer,” “angel of Death,” “acrobat,” “anarchist,” and, ho hum, “academic,”—moving around is part of the job. I once got the equivalent of a bill from a commission of interstellar planetary overlords who decided I’d used up too many minutes in outer space, therefore I owed them a Smoot of blood and turnips. Who am I to argue with Kang and Kodos, especially since I grew up listening to the original Star Trek on cassette tapes my brother had made? Long ago, I’d dispensed with my baggage in order to live out of a suitcase. Like one of the twelve called to be an apostle (yet another job starting with “A,” I will note), I ditched my worldly possessions in order to follow an inner voice telling me to wander until the wandering was done. No emotional safety nets. No trampolines to fall back on. My entire wardrobe filled an overnight bag, and the only shoes I kept were the ones on my feet.
For years, I lived out of a suitcase and then the suitcase was stolen, leaving me with nothing but the clothes on my back and the murmurs in my head. I should have been happy, or at least content. Instead, I found myself breakfasting in a nook, with a rescue cat warming my feet, and bouquet of resentments garnishing my table. As I stared into that crystal ball holding cut flowers withering in slow motion, I saw my future clearly: it was a bowlful of tap water that smelled like rotten spinach.
How to explain misery when life is great and God is good?
It would start with a gut feeling of wrongness that descended into dark wells. Was it hormones? Hysterics? A hissy fit? I tried on every explanation and concluded: it wasn’t female trouble. Mine was the misery of the fly in the physics problem. A nameless, faceless entity had set me up for a head-on collision with modern life, and as long as I stayed obedient to the problem, indecisively hovering at 100 miles an hour, I would soon be drowning in a bowl of mass-produced chicken soup.
Mmmm, mmmm, not so good.
The trick to solving a problem is recognizing it in the first place. Flies have compound eyes made up of three thousand separate lenses. Their eyes are twice as large as their heads. Trouble is, their tiny fly brains can only process information from a few hundred lenses at a time. Their sight is blurred, because their brains are in their thorax, the part that moves their wings. Because of this, the fly pays no attention to the theatrics of history. It’s too busy staying aloft so it can spit up in your food.
To get the answer you want, ask a better question. If you spend your time whining, “how come?” at random adults in the manner of a cranky two-year-old, you’re likely to discover that all questions lead to a time-out and a cookie. If you search for answers in the wrong places, you will get the answers you deserve. It’s all about the assumptions that get built in, the most famous example of which is: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Do you see the trap? Many people don’t, which is why Franz Kafka wrote a little fable called “A Little Fable,” about the pathos of imminent doom. Real life isn’t Saw, you see. It’s not like there are clues.
“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.”
“But you’ve only got to run the other way,” said the cat, and ate it.
Now, here is what’s so frustrating about this fable. Kafka pointed the trap out, explained very clearly how to escape, and yet mouse after mouse will insist that no, the human’s wrong, he’s just an insurance adjuster whose biggest accomplishment in life was writing a bizarre story about a giant bug named Gregor. Clearly, Kafka was writing for cats, so why should mice care what he thinks?
Kafka wanted the mouse to live. The mouse just wanted to be a martyr.
Time and time again, I’d returned to Paris, mulling whether to turn left or stay gauche. I was trapped in a maze of my own making, lured in by the promise of stinky cheese and lamenting the path not taken. My fetal twin still wanted to be an artist, and it wasn’t letting go of that ambition. Intransigent, it was the still, small voice in my belly that was my version of an addiction, an unreasonable craving that wouldn’t relent no matter how many times I tried quitting.
There was no way out of the trap, at least not as far as I could see. The fly did not agree, because it had 2,998 more eyes than me. All I had to do was to follow its lead . . . for at the end of the day, when the train has stopped and all the chatty mammals have departed, comes the Hour of the Fly. Released from the physics problem it didn’t understand in the first place, it’s free to flirt with other flies, and they will make baby flies called maggots. They will take over the world, because they have quick reproductive cycles and no birth control on their side.
One of the most famous cafés in Paris is Les Deux Magots (and no, it’s not a typo, though it would be funnier if it was). The café became famous because literary lovers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre used to argue over his infidelities there. The word magot, which is the same in French and English, comes from Magog, as in the Book of Revelations:
When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore.
Though the prophecy is grim, kids love the story of Gog and Magog because it’s almost a palindrome, “Gog am Gog,” which is pretty much how a bored child in Sunday school would expect a Gog to identify himself. Theologians haven’t decided what the prophecy actually means, but in kid-brain it’s the hellfire n’ damnation version of the joke: “Pete and Repeat were on a boat. Pete fell off. Who was left? (Repeat!)” In Bible-ese, the joke comes out: God and Gog were on a boat. God kicks Gog out. Who’s left? (Magog)! Over time, magog came to refer generically to people from heathen lands, thus the “two Magots” in the café are a pair of lifelike sculptures representing Chinese men. They are mounted near the ceiling. For a hundred years, the two Magots have hovered over countless tourists slurping bowls of soup, and there they will stay until the day when the trains stop for good.
Then what? It depends.
Satan and his minions get thrown into a lake of fire. Everyone else, including the dead, gets to stand before God, who reads about them in a Book of Life. People who aren’t in the Book of Life get tossed into the lake of fire, where they get to die for a second time, sort of like what happens when sunlight hits vampires. The only way I’d get into that book is if I wrote it myself. Now there’s a thought! If I wrote my own Book of Life and pulled off a switcheroo, could God tell? It’s not like He’d already read it. For sure He didn’t write it—that would be the Fickle Finger of Fate doing the writing. All I’d have to do is figure out where God stashes his triple-F bedtime reading. I’d already been to the Library of Hell, which is, naturally, in Paris. Where’s the library of Heaven? (Wrong answer: the Vatican.)
The world is wide, the mouse had insisted, right up to the moment when the walls converged and it was too late to form a better opinion. In a perfect world, the mouse would have whipped out a saw and hacked her way out of the trap. Not possible for me, because my hacksaw had been confiscated. It was one of two items missing from my bag when I’d rummaged around for that song in the Jardin des Plantes. (“Surely, my dear Watson,” said Sherlock Holmes, “you noticed that a hacksaw was curiously not among the items she’d had with her?”) The other missing item was my Swiss army knife. I used to carry both everywhere, until the airport people started objecting to them, asking me: “Exactly what, young lady, did you intend to do with these things?” I’d give them a dirty look. “Well, gee, isn’t it obvious? How else am I going to fix my supper?” The uniformed men would scowl at me, and then swipe my cooking tools. No wonder my fetal twin was howling for blood. She was hungry, and needed to be fed.
So what should I do, now that I had come to another fork in the road?
It was time to pick it up, find a new knife, and hack my own trail through the woods.
It was a busy morning, so it was noon in September before I made it to the cavernous lobby of the Boston tower where John had asked me to fetch him. Hovering behind a dais, humorless security guards pointed me to the express elevator to the 15th–20th floors. The lawyers were all wearing the same dark suit, but only one was pacing the perimeter with his head down like the bears in the Paris zoo. That was John.
In greeting, he gave me a jar of jelly his mother had made from wild blackberries picked from the back of the house in Maine. I gave him a glass Christmas ornament shaped like an alligator. We were opposites right down to the kinds of gifts we’d exchanged. He’d given me a jar of sentiment. I’d given him box of symbolism. The ornament didn’t survive the final leg of its journey; the tail had snapped off en route. I was mortified. He just chucked the broken shards in the bin and whisked me to a French bistro around the corner.
There was so much chemistry between us that even total strangers commented (to me, in the Ladies’ Room, giving me “thumbs up!” under the stalls): “Are you guys on a date? He’s really cute!” Uh, thank you? This date was a beacon of hope for pudgy women everywhere. But I wasn’t besotted, infatuated, or convinced I’d met my destiny. He happened to be six feet tall with thick hair and broad shoulders. So what? I don’t eat with my eyes. I smell with my tongue. Why should I care what he looks like? All that matters is that his skin whiffs of honey. To another woman, he might stink like an elephant after a hard run. He was, after all, a Republican in a liberal town, exuding white male privilege from his well-scrubbed pores. Didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. Loved this great country, and liked to shoot guns.
“Err,” I started, casting around for a conversational-type response. Finally, I squeaked: “I don’t shave my armpits!”
“Good,” he replied, and polished off the last bite of his steak.
Man-like, he ate everything placed in front of him without comment or complaint. The only problem with his food was that there wasn’t enough of it. Hungrily, he eyed the other half of my lunch. “Would you like to finish it?” I asked politely, thinking that he really should. He waited two beats and polished off the rest of my meal.
Beep! Time’s up!
He’d warned me that he had a business meeting at one, and so lunch ended with a swift peck on the cheek and a bellowed, “Bye!” as he hurried down the street.
What?
John wasn’t the kind of man who’d say, “I’ll call you,” just to have something to say. I’m not the kind of woman who sits around waiting for a man to call, because I hate the phone. Even for me, though, the end to this meeting was abrupt and strange. The more I thought about it, the more perplexed I became. Jumping on the T, I took the Red Line to Harvard, where I sat and fumed at Widener Library, working myself into a furious lather until I finally reached the point where I folded my arms across my chest, crossed my legs, scrunched up my face, and told myself: “If he doesn’t call me in ten seconds, I will never speak to him again.” Then I started a silent countdown. “ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .”
My cell phone rang.
This is why I hate the phone. Having a phone gives callers the strange idea that you’ll answer it.
The horrible device kept ringing. Students were giving me dirty looks, so I grabbed my bag, dashed into the vestibule, flipped the phone open and hissed, “What?”
“Hello?” John said in a slightly perplexed tone. “You called. So I’m calling you back.”
“I didn’t call,” I said sulkily. “I’ve been in the library. You called me.”
There was a silence. “But I heard you . . .”
Let’s not start up with that, shall we? “How was the meeting?” I cut him off.
“Fine.” There was another silence. “Do you want to have dinner?”
“No,” I replied peevishly. “I’m not hungry. We just ate, remember?”
“I didn’t mean right away,” he sighed in exasperation. “Tomorrow. That’s Friday night. Okay? ”
“Okay.”
“Come meet me in my office, and we’ll go from there.”
“Fine,” I grumbled.
“Fine,” he grumbled back. “I gotta get back to work,” he said abruptly, and hung up the phone.
No wonder chit-chat over lunch was a disaster. To communicate, we had to bicker.
To my great relief, we never made it to dinner. We argued all the way to Wellesley, and I ended up staying all weekend. He took the opportunity to explain to me that when a woman puts off meeting a man for months, and then makes a date for lunch and shows up wearing pants, the man will assume that she’s not very interested in him. As a rebuttal, I pointed out that a) I’d been in France, 2) the pants were Parisian, and iii) I’d warned him from the outset that I was fussy, and it was unlikely that I’d be attracted to him. I didn’t want to give him ideas. My argument was just as convincing as you’d expect, given that I’d spent the past three days in his bed.
My sister was not amused. “What if he’s an axe murderer?” she objected, because she thinks all corporate lawyers are axe murderers.
“He’s not an axe murderer,” I said firmly.
“But how do you know?” she fretted.
I knew because of the third law of Newtonian mechanics. We were equal actions and opposite reactions, agreeing on nothing, alike only in our stubbornness. He was bullheaded and impatient. I loathe being rushed. We fought. Real sparks flew, the kind that singed my skin and vanished in a tiny puff. John could make me so angry that I refused to talk to him for days, imposing utter silence that was worse that ignoring him. It turned him into a thought bubble yet to be filled. He had to come find me if he wanted to have words.
And where was I? I’d gone to Arizona for a semester. Surprise! We fought about the fact that I was in Arizona. Then, bellowing loudly, he came to visit. We went on hikes through red rocks in the desert. I returned to New England. Pretty soon, I was back in Paris for the summer. Howling furiously, he came to visit me. We had a hilarious time chasing cows in Normandy. I returned to the U.S. Before long, I landed in London. We fought about the fact that I was in London. Then, complaining bitterly, he came to visit me. We laughed our heads off riding the double-decker buses to the Tower. This back-and-forth went on until I got so tired of him calling me all the time that I moved in with him in Wellesley. The only thing that changed was that I started doing more of his laundry.
Little things for me started appearing around the house as if clever mice were making them. A baking dish. A purple hairbrush. A pair of fuzzy slippers. A list bearing a strange similarity to the “pan, a comb, and maybe a cat” that Scientologist grooms promise their brides. In what unfathomable place in the male psyche are these things located? Thankfully, there was nothing sentimental about any of these items. They were even less personal than the nylon stockings my halmoni would send every Christmas, the thigh-high kind with tourniquet elastic tops sized for legs the size of chopsticks. By the time I’d become a decrepit spinster of twenty-two—“Too old! Why you not marry?”—she’d given up the stockings and switched to bath sheets, which is a Korean grandmother’s way of saying “Too fat! Regular bath towels too small!” John knew perfectly well that the fact that I was living with him did not make us a couple. There was him, there was me, and there was lizard brain. The reptile kept me coming back, because it really liked honey. But I will leave, as I always do, because the world is wide and it is my nature.
Then, one day, he surprised me with a gift. It was a plastic grocery bag coated in crumbs from the forest. I opened it. Inside was the heart of a deer he’d shot himself.
Perplexed, my mouth opened. Then it closed. I didn’t know what to do with it.
To place it in perspective: my sister’s cat Buster was a legendary urban hunter. His fame was such that he earned a place in Clea Simon’s book, The Feline Mystique (see index, “Cat, loud shorthair.”) He’d been a mewling larva, blind eyes tightly shut, and he grew into an enormous black-and-white tomcat that showered with her and left whisker stubble in the sink. At night, Buster (“Holstein”) the Cat slept next to her on his back, his head on a pillow, tucked in with his paws over the covers and held straight by his sides. They both snored loudly. Sleeping was their favorite activity. At daybreak, he’d shiver himself awake, lick back his hair, give a good stretch, and head out to work. By the end of the day, he’d drag home a mangled bird and meow loudly, demanding to be admired.
Messy though it may be, it melts your heart when they do this. Cats bring you presents when they love you, “love” being in cat-brain the desire to ensure the continuation of the human most willing to provide Pounce® treats. A bleeding hunk of protein was the most sincere form of affection that Buster could give her. “You have to respect that,” my sister sighed, stroking his contented, blood-spattered face. “It’s disgusting, but he doesn’t think that.” She looked at the half-eaten pigeon on the floor. Pretty soon, Buster would start to vomit. She sighed again. “It’s the thought that counts.”
Standing at the threshold in his muddy rubber boots, John held his heart in his hands and offered it to me. His whole body glowed with pride. So I thanked him with a kiss, took the gift, and made him strip down and hose off on the porch so he wouldn’t track mud through the house.
He was pretty happy about the naked part. I was pretty happy with the meat.
But a deer heart isn’t a present so much as it’s a loud chest-thumping demand, a request to know where, in this relationship, did he stand? He’d given me a gift that money cannot buy. A precious thing beyond price, and a deeply romantic gesture. For when I went away, leaving him alone for months at a time, he wasn’t out chasing other women, even though he was free to do so if he wished. I’d said that he could. And it was true. I just wasn’t sure what I would do if he did. He didn’t sit around waiting for me to return. Instead, he started going to Maine every weekend, tracking whitetail deer in the forgetful forests behind the house where his parents live. John’s heart was proof of those sustained years of effort without promise of the prize. Uncertainty didn’t stop him, though sometimes he felt discouraged, sitting solitary in the cold sunlight, listening to the muttering pines.
Is the heart seized by a coronary the same organ pierced by Cupid’s arrow? To horny males, all prey looks the same. To the hunter, nothing could be further from the truth. A hunter’s quarry is singular, different from all the others because it knows how to get the better of him. The origins of the word “quarry” can be found in the Latin, “cor,” which means heart. Wherefore cordial, that which warms the cockles of the heart. To succeed in his task, the hunter must combine good luck with careful timing and unwavering commitment, forging a unity of mind, soul, and body yearning to catch the heart that flees not out of fear but because it will not wait for you.
John could not heave his heart into his mouth, so he took the matter into his hands. He hoped I’d understand. And I did.
He loves me like fresh meat loves salt. So I cried.
Here is my recipe for deer heart (serves four-six):
1 fresh deer heart, soaked overnight in clean, very cold water, changed frequently
1 cup port
½ lb bacon, minced
1 yellow onion, minced
2–3 medium carrots, minced
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 bay leaf
1 cup red wine
Salt and pepper, to taste
Wash and clean the heart, removing all membranes, arteries and veins. Pat dry, and slice as thinly as possible. Place slices in a medium bowl, cover with port, add salt and pepper, and marinate overnight in the refrigerator. Using a large sauté pan, cook bacon at medium heat until fat renders but the bits are not crisp. Add onion, carrots, and garlic to the fat, cooking over medium heat until onion is translucent but not browned. Turn heat to high. Lift heart slices out of port marinade, and sauté quickly until just browned. Add bay leaf, port marinade, and enough red wine to cover. Bring to a boil, then lower heat to simmer. Allow liquids to reduce. Do not overcook. Remove pan from heat and allow to rest. Remove bay leaf; add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with creamy polenta, roasted red peppers, and asparagus.
