Cleaving (12 page)

Not that I made it difficult. Under D's influence, I opened up like a grinning harlot flower. The first time he slapped me
across the face, after all, I was bound in trusses
I'd
given him. But the thing was, it wasn't so much the slap itself; it was the gleam in his eye as he delivered it, the utter
confidence that he'd guessed right. The sting on my cheek made me gasp, but his sureness was what freed me.

I am, empirically speaking, a successful person. But all the things that should have made me feel sure and independent hadn't.
It was D who gave that to me. It was when he smilingly roughed me up that I finally felt fierce, strong--emancipated.

But now he's gone, and it turns out my freedom was only probationary. The grinding guilt has returned. My guts twist with
it.

Eric calls again just as I've turned off 213, south of Rosendale, onto the twisting road to Rifton. "Look, I'm sorry about
what I said before."

"It's okay. I'm sorry if you think I've done something wrong." I can't keep a small trill of resentment out of my voice. And
that's not entirely a bad thing; resentment is nice for covering up the remorse.

"No, you didn't do anything, I know. I'm sorry. I guess I just get a little crazy with you up there all the time. Robert misses
you."

For the last couple of months I've been staying up here in my rented apartment three or four nights a week. I've always had
great faith in the healing power of geography. Absence makes the heart, and whatnot.

"I wish you could be okay with this. I want to do this, the butchery, and I'm going to, and there's nothing wrong with that,
and it has nothing to do with you or us." I'm getting emotional now, a bit self-righteous. Protesting a tad too much.

"Honey, I want to be understanding here. But you're right. I don't get it. I'm trying."

"Okay. I'm sorry. Can you just--"

"Yes. I'm fine. I'll be okay. I just miss you and..."

"I know. I'm sorry. Look, I think I'm going to cut out here in a minute." His voice is growing sparser and quiet on the line.
"Good night. I love you, I really do."

"I know. I love you too."

When I'm alone in the chilly apartment at night, a bare kitchen, small living room, bedroom painted white and blue, I cook
up my dinner, a steak or a sausage or a chop. I open my first bottle of wine. These are the last pieces of the simple, jigsaw-puzzle
part of my day. It is nine p.m., I'm tired in that stoned sort of way that means I'll not be asleep for some hours yet. My
wrist throbs vaguely. Piling several pillows against the wall for a backrest, I make sure my wineglass is full, pull up my
laptop, insert a DVD.

"What's a stevedore?"

It doesn't matter what that line means in context. Or rather, it matters very, very much to Eric and me, but you don't need
to know what makes the line so priceless, why I can repeat it, out of the blue and for no particular reason, and Eric is right
there with me. What matters is that this unlikely TV show,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
canceled years ago, forms a singular touchstone of our private marriage-language. Watching it feels like coming home to him.
And tonight, after our tense, aborted conversation, it feels almost like an act of apology, of fidelity. I am entirely Eric's
Julie while watching
Buffy,
one of the few bits of pop culture that doesn't instantly bring D--who is both a cineaste and a
South Park
fan--to the forefront of my mind. I watch three episodes.

By then it's after eleven. I shut down the computer, set it on my bedside table by the now half-empty second bottle of Syrah,
switch off the table lamp, and settle down, pulling the sheets fitfully up over my shoulder. But I can tell immediately it's
going to be no use. The laptop comes out again; I sign into my instant message account. Thank God, Gwen is online.

Julie: Hey. What's up? You're not still at work, are you?

Gwen: No, thank Christ. Over at Matt's.

After years of bad luck, Gwen seems to have found a boyfriend who suits her. Being Gwen, of course, she's still stormy and
annoyed at times, but they go on trips together and visit each other's families, and he buys her clothes and fixes her computer,
and by all accounts they have all kinds of sex. I try very hard not to be bitter.

Gwen: What's up with you?

Julie: I'm upstate. Feeling rather like shit.

Gwen: Sick?

Julie: No. Just the usual thing. D. I'd flushed him out for a few hours there, but once I try going to sleep...

Gwen: Oh, Julie. When are you going to let the douche bag go?

Julie: I just don't understand. Why does he hate me so much?

Gwen: I've already spelled this out. He. Is. A. Douche. Bag.... I want to punch him in the face.

Julie: That would be great.

Gwen: You know, I just saw Match Point, finally. The Scarlett Johansson character is like you and D combined. You're the drunken
hysterical part, and he's the part that needs killing.

Julie: Hi-LAR-ious. Of course I'd take him back in a minute, though.

Gwen: Now I want to punch you in the face.

Julie: Thanks.

Gwen: Listen, honey. I've got to go--Matt and I are going to... well... I gotta go.

Julie: Understood.

Gwen: I love you. Take care.

Julie: Thanks. Love you too.

Dammit. That wasn't enough. I pour myself another glass to dose myself that little bit closer to sleep, then trawl the Internet
awhile, looking for a certain something. For the particular kind of photos and cheap videos that distract for a time--women
bound and helpless and begging, men withholding, commanding, sure. There's a certain brainless eroticism to this sort of thing,
for me. At least my body responds, even if my mind soon feels jaded and in need of a scrubbing. I try to focus on outlandish
scenarios, images of exotic, tawdry humiliation. But my brain just bats these bits and pieces lazily about like a bored cat,
then wanders inexorably back to its more accustomed, but more dangerous, feeding grounds.

A cold, sardonic face, that unbeautiful one with its cool eyes and wide Rolling Stones lips I've by now memorized. The pebbly
cyst still to be felt in a left earlobe, a closed-up hole from teenage rock-god years. A way of taking off clothes, deliberate,
so different from my own impatient stripping. A matter-of-fact yank at my thighs, pulling me toward those lips, a way of giving
that feels like something's being taken, like I'm being emptied out. A voice, low, amused, with a guttural purr to it that
makes my breath catch.

Before D broke it off, we occasionally indulged in phone sex, an easy way to make use of brief periods alone, when we'd worked
ourselves up but couldn't manage to schedule a tryst. We never talked dirty during these phone sessions. Instead we made a
game out of hearing each other, trying to time ourselves to each other. This was a much more challenging game for me than
for D, basically because I'm a shitty poker player. No matter how stealthy I tried to be, I'd always throw him a moan, an
"oh fuck," the ragged, stuttering little gasp he knew meant I was there at the edge. Whereas I had nothing to go on but the
tiny catch in the breath, the quickening of that wet slapping sound that barely reached the receiver, the occasional shudder
repressed behind a bitten lip. And in the end, we sometimes cheated. He would speak, for the first time since we murmured
our hellos. Whispering, urgent but measured, almost angry, a demand more than a question.
Tell me when. Now?

"Yes, please, please now..." His name comes out as a sob, the memory of those sounds on the other end of a phone line making
my muscles tighten and spasm. The tendons of my wrist and index finger ping painfully, and then I cry myself to sleep. But
at least I get there, my hand squeezed between my thighs not for pleasure, just for comfort, as a small child might do.

The next morning I get up again with puffy eyes and lips purple with wine, a few hiccups of sadness still left to jump out
of my throat. But I shower and change into a pair of jeans and one of the black Fleisher's T-shirts (
YOU CAN'T BEAT OUR MEAT
!) I wear to the shop every day, and by the time I go outside into the nippy fall air and climb into my Outback I am feeling
calmer. Usually, I'd be headed to the shop for a day of getting scraped up and telling dirty jokes and cutting beef. Today,
though, I have an elsewhere to be. I've got an appointment with a pig.

I
T IS A
brilliant late November day, the sky a heartbreaking blue over the nearby ridge of the Shawagunks. The morning sun glints
off the bright tossing leaves of the trees that line the edge of this green field I have walked down a short muddy track to
reach, following a ragtag crowd. Kids in their twenties mostly, CIA students. A wooden-gated corral stands in the field, within
it five pigs, chasing one another around and snuffling happily in the muck. When people approach the corral, to coo or snap
pictures, the pigs come up to the gate, ears pricked and heads high. A few yards away, an old Austrian man in coveralls is
loading a small-gauge rifle.

Aaron turned me on to this gig; every fall the CIA arranges to have its students witness and participate in a pig slaughter,
done the old-fashioned way. The event is headed up by one of the senior instructors, a man named Hans, who, it is rumored
by Aaron, once won the European Master Butcher Competition. (I wonder if there really is such a thing. I like to think the
winner gets a belt.) He told me when and where to go; eight a.m., a side road on the way up to the Mohonk Mountain House,
a gorgeous if slightly
Shining
-esque old historic resort. Aaron has to be at the shop and so, to his emphatic regret, can't come along, but says, "You
have
to go. You have to see Hans at work. He's an artist."

I wish he were here. I know no one, and I feel like an impostor, like any minute someone is going to call me out, ask me who
the hell I am, anyway.

This is my first slaughter. I've been avidly looking for opportunities for this since I started butchering, but it's a tricky
business, getting in to see an animal killed for meat. Forget trying to get inside Big Beef; even the slaughterhouses Josh
works with, small firms that are meticulously hygienic and humane, won't let me near, won't even give out their addresses
to people outside their client base. They have a pathological fear of PETA, a fear I find hilariously overblown, but I guess
they must have reason, now that I think about it. In my first book I wrote about boiling a lobster and got more than one deranged
and grammatically unsound letter; imagine what slaughterhouses must put up with.

I spend a few moments leaning with one foot on the wooden fence, contemplating these animals who are about to be dead, whose
flesh I may very literally wind up eating. (The farmer providing the animals for today's spectacle is one of Josh's suppliers.)
I've always had a bit of a thing for pigs, actually. And not just the cute Chinese potbellied variety, though, God, I want
one of those. I like hogs. I like that they're both filthy and smart, like that they can be vicious but are also known to
appreciate a good scratch behind the ears from time to time. A pig is kind of my power animal. Honestly, it's a shame they
taste so damned good, but of course that's part of my connection to them.

Other people are gathered around as well, on either side of me, presumably thinking the same sorts of thoughts. Being kids,
and culinary students, and friends and/or rivals, their talk contains quite a bit of evasive bravado, inclining toward one-upmanship,
outdoing one another in knowledge or nonchalance. But I don't believe them. There is a tang in the air, a palpable anticipation,
and not just of a lesson in a culinary art. We are about to witness, many of us for the first time, a violent death--a murder,
if you define murder as the deliberate killing of an innocent being. And we are all nervous and excited and a little bit thrilled
about it.

At a call from someone or other, the crowd (there are probably about thirty of us) begins to gather around a livestock trailer
a bit away from the corral, which has two more hogs inside, separated from each other by a metal grating running down the
middle. The bed of the trailer is strewn with straw. Hans, a gun in one hand and a metal bowl of chow in the other, opens
the gate at the back end of the trailer to get to the first animal, who doesn't retreat at his approach. When he puts the
bowl down on the floor, the hog trots right up to it and immediately digs in. Hans puts the rifle to its forehead.

When the gun goes off, it sounds like a champagne cork popping. The theory, which I'm not entirely sure I buy, is that the
hog's skull is so thick that the small-caliber shot does no more than stun it; it's the pick immediately afterward, thrust
into its carotid artery, that kills it.