Life From Scratch (19 page)

And then I look down.

This is my first time with an uncircumsized penis. Which shouldn’t be a big deal, except that it is. It nods its way up to me, looking just this side of not-quite-right. I mean, it’s sort of like a veggie burger—which looks like a hamburger and yet, there is also something about it that screams out its difference from any burger you’ve eaten in the past. Mrs. Gestlemann, my third-grade Hebrew school teacher,
tsks
me from inside my brain. “Rachel, honestly. Didn’t I teach you about the
chuppah
? And the
ketubah
? And not to taste unkosher beef?”

But didn’t I once say that the point of this year was to get myself an entirely new life? I learned to cook for the first time in thirty-four years. I’m writing a successful blog and working on a book. I kill my own spiders. Isn’t having sex with an uncircumcised penis the last great frontier I need to conquer? I
can
be the sort of woman who has sex with non-Jewish, European, uncircumcised men. Like this, non-Jewish, European, uncircumcised man; an olive-skinned, cinnamon-smelling man with a soft accent, slowly rotating his fingers over my inner thighs. I moan in spite of myself.

And then the decision is made, the deal done, check it off the list, because he is in me, and we are moving together. He is darkness and corners and sound and something beneath the cinnamon . . . photo chemicals and wool and the memory of detergent. He is rough and slow and cautious and racing. I orgasm slightly before him; it doesn’t take much. It has been so long since I have had sex that someone probably could have accidentally brushed up against me at Zabar’s and gotten the same response. He is slightly out of breath as he pulls out, and we lie next to each other, the scent of the completed
paella
washing over us.

I never know what to do after sex. I mean, after sex with your husband, you talk about the people you bumped into during the day or a particular bill that came in the mail or something you saw on the television. Ordinary stuff. Everyday stuff. But sex for the first time in years with someone who is barely one step up from stranger? It feels like it requires special words; poetry read over the incongruent rock music that is still pouring out of the stereo or proclamations of a sort. Instead, after a few moments of silence, Gael grins and then gets up from the floor. He points at his condom. “I’m going to remove this thing, okay?”

Maybe I’m a bit disappointed, but I’m also relieved to slip back on my clothes, wash up at the sink, fiddle with the
paella
pan. To have the pressure removed to mark the occasion. I spoon the rice into two bowls and place it on the table.

“
Mi amor
, it smells wonderful. I’m starving.”

“Thank you,” I say shyly, watching him sit down at the table as if he has just conquered a country. I slide into a chair myself, suddenly uncertain about everything. He has seen me naked. He knows the paths on the inside, their counterparts on the outside. It feels like we should be very intimate, except that we don’t really know each other all that well. I awkwardly shovel some rice into my mouth to give me a reason not to talk and wonder what I just did.

Half of my brain is
on the unfinished
crèma catalana
in the refrigerator as he tells me a story about some restaurant in
Madrid
that has butterflies encased in glass as their front door, and the other half of my brain is replaying how our jeans looked with their legs entwined together.

What the hell did I just do?

“Would you like to help me with something? A few weeks from now?” Gael asks, spearing one of the peppers, as if we haven’t just had sex on my living room floor. As if that whole portion of the evening was just part of my imagination. “I have this wedding to shoot; to photograph. Would you like to come with me? Help with the cameras?”

“Don’t you have a helper?”

“She can’t make this party. I just thought it would be fun. It would be interesting. You would get, of course, a meal with the rest of the staff. The same one the guests eat.”

“How fancy,” I say dryly.

“And I would take you out afterwards. We’d be dressed up so we could go somewhere dressy.” He smiles his lopsided smile and motions to his plate. “This is quite good. Not my mother’s
paella
, but quite good.”

Seriously, could the boy go a half hour without mentioning his mother?

When he smiles his lopsided smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkle closed, until I can only see a small sliver of deep brown beneath the folds. I need a do-over. I would like to stop eating
paella
and have sex on my bed. Try to last beyond a few minutes.

“I’ll go to the wedding,” I say.

“You will?” he asks.

“You sound really surprised,” I respond. What I want to ask is if the pre-dinner sex marked me as a different sort of girl; the kind who didn’t accept date invitations that were really work favors. If rolling around on my carpet and getting to use the condom he stashed in his pocket before heading over here changed how he viewed me.

“I didn’t know how you would feel about it being a wedding,” Gael admits.

“It doesn’t bother me,” I lie, waving my hand in the air as if I’m swatting away all of the bad feelings I have when I see white gowns, morning suits, or cream-colored one-hundred-and-ten-pound cardstock invitations. “Seriously, my marriage is over and done with. I’ve moved on. Anyway, you’ll make it up to me by taking me to the Guggenheim.”

“Absolutely,” Gael agrees. I wait for him to suggest a date, but we both sit there without speaking for a moment, the rock band wailing about something in the background.

“Actually,
you
could do me a favor and come to my friend’s open house.”

I regret it right after I say it. Why the hell did I fill the silence with that?

“Sure! When is it?”

“It’s next weekend. What I meant to say is
if
I go. I don’t know if I’m going yet. I mean, she’s an old work friend, and she had this desk drawer that was too neat, and she never knew where her panties were at the end of the night,” I babble.

“This is sounding better and better. Neat home and no underwear,” Gael says.

“I don’t even know how many people will be there, or if I can bring a guest. Let me talk to her first and ask her if that’s okay.”

Suddenly, I am so tense that I am getting a headache. I should be the opposite of tense. I should be jelly. I just had my first orgasm by something other than my hand in the last few years. I should be buzzing and humming and whatever else your body does when it has finally been satiated sexually. But I am tense, with a headache that is creeping around my forehead like a tight sweatband. I am missing every third
 
word
 
that he is
 
saying:
I
 
didn’t . . . she was . . . to do . . . but
 
I . . . happy anyway
. I want to ask him to repeat it, but I can’t get the words out of my mouth.

“Do you feel okay?” I interrupt.

“Okay? Yes? Why?”

“I think I have food poisoning,” I gag and run to the bathroom. Except I don’t vomit. I lean against the sink and try to catch my breath and look in the mirror. I look like I am on the brink of tears. This is it: I am having a nervous breakdown. Surely this must be what movie stars mean when they sit with Barbara Walters and talk about their nervous breakdown. It must start with a panic attack over
paella
and end with crying in the bathroom.

“Are you okay?” Gael asks on the other side of the door. There is an edge in his voice as if he is checking for the answer. If I’m not okay, he’s going to bolt. But if I tell him I’m fine, he’ll stay for dessert.

No one wants to deal with someone having a nervous breakdown.

I promise I’m fine; that the feeling is passing. And then I silently mouth some tough love to my reflection in the mirror:
you idiot, there’s no crying after sex. Old Rachel is a crier. You are the new and improved Rachel, the one who has sex before the paella she made from scratch. Who has sex, more importantly, with hot Spaniards rather than boring lawyers. Pull. Yourself. Together
.

I splash some water on my face, take a deep breath and return to the kitchen table.

“Is everything okay?” Gael asks again.

“I’m fine; I don’t know what that was. I thought I was going to be sick, but I’m fine. Do you want to have dessert?

“Do you think that’s a good idea if you were just sick? You haven’t eaten your
paella
.” Gael asks dubiously.

I am coming off as crazier by the second.

“I wasn’t really sick,” I tell him. “Can we . . . can we just reboot? Start the night over? I’ll go place our plates in the sink and then turn around and we’ll pretend that the night is just starting. Can we do this without me coming across as completely unhinged?”

“Unhinged? I don’t know what that means.”

“I need to start over tonight.”

“Is this about the sex?” Gael asks, motioning to the space where we were rolling about a half hour ago.

“It’s everything; yes, I mean, no, it’s not just about the sex. But yes, can we start over? Can we start everything over about tonight? I made dessert and . . . ”

I turn on the broiler and pull one of the two
crèma catalana
dishes out of the refrigerator. I set it on the table in front of him as an explanation. “I just have to do one more thing—caramelize the sugar on top. You told me that it’s your favorite.”

For a moment, it looks like Gael Paez is going to cry. That he’ll have his own personal breakdown, and we’ll at least be on equal footing. The CD ends at that precise moment, and after a whirl and click, it is silent in the room. Without saying anything, I move our
paella
plates into the sink. I sprinkle sugar over the top of the custards and slide them under the broiler, opening the oven door every few seconds to make sure that it is caramelizing and not burning.

I remove the dishes from the oven and bring them back to the table along with two spoons. Gael cracks through the sugar crust and scoops up a small spoonful of custard. He turns the spoon upside down and nods at me. “Look at this—perfect. It’s your first time making it?”

“First time.”

“And you remembered that I said that?” Gael asks.

I nod my head, suddenly not trusting my voice.

“This was a really perfect night, Rachel. I’ve never had someone do that. Hear what I said and then make it like this.” He finishes the rest of the thought in Spanish, and I nod as if I understand what he’s saying.

He stands up and takes my hands and leads me from the table to my bed. I get my wish for the do-over as he undresses me, very gently, very carefully, as if I am a flower and my petals may blow away at any moment.

He finishes and sighs and sinks down onto me. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’m not done yet, not when he is so grateful for the
crèma catalana
, for the attention. I want to thank him for the do-over; good things come to those who ask.

I seem to be on a rice kick as of late. First it was the risotto. Then I made paella, which is essentially Spanish risotto. Finally, I made rice pudding last night. With raisins and a little cinnamon on top. Just like . . . well . . . was going to write just like my mother used to make, but my mother never made rice pudding. Just like my mother used to buy. Except that's the whole point—it wasn't.

I used to love to get rice pudding from this diner by our house. I know it's sort of a gross dessert to love, but they'd serve it in these glass sundae dishes with a long thin spoon and a graham cracker on the side. So my mother never made it, but she often bought it, and I expected Meyer's recipe to be similar to the one at the diner—a big wedge of creamy love.

Except that it wasn't. Maybe I made it wrong, but the texture was off, and the taste was different, and it wasn't what I expected at all. I'm not enough of a cook to know how to tweak a recipe to match something in my mind, but it was this strange sensation, not knowing if I liked the new rice pudding on its own merits. I mean, it was good, it was sweet, but it wasn't the rice pudding I thought would be on the spoon. My mind was expecting one thing, and my tongue was experiencing another.