Cleaving (2 page)

I was starry-eyed and vaguely discontented and had too much time on my hands. It was exactly the wrong time for the phone
call I got that summer of 2004, a year after my cooking project ended, as I was putting the final touches on my very first
book. A call from someone I'd not heard from in years, a half-remembered murmur coming across the line, sparking uncomfortable
memories of a handful of long-ago late nights I'd nearly succeeded in forgetting. "Hey, it's me," he said. "I hear you've
been doing well for yourself. I've moved to New York. Let's get lunch sometime."

I realize that this could all look a little incriminating, a woman in a butcher shop in upstate New York, covered in blood
and completely unruffled by that fact, wielding knives casually, lovingly manipulating offal with gore-begrimed fingers. No,
I'm not a lover caught red-handed in the middle of a crime of passion, or a psychopath in the midst of a ritual dismemberment.
No humans were harmed in bringing you this scene, but still, I get why it would all make some folks, well, speculate. Speculate,
maybe especially, about the expression on my face, which betrays more than just the professional indifference I'm trying hard
to project. If you look closely enough, if you get past the (formerly) white apron and the blood and the big knives bristling
at my hip and up to my eyes, I'll confess you might see something a bit unnerving there. A secret glow. A little thrill. As
my friend Gwen would say, "Makes a girl wonder where she's hiding the bodies."

It's a difficult thing to explain, made more difficult still by a phenomenon I've noticed many times since starting work here:
it turns out that it's very hard for people to listen clearly to a woman holding a butcher knife. But, truly, the glint in
my eyes is not about violence or vengeance or cruelty. The joy I take is not--well, not
only
--in the power I now have to hack and cut and destroy. It's about something else, something calm and ordered.

Just as Tinker Bell led Wendy astray from time to time, my inner whisper has sent me right into all manner of scrapes and
heartbreaks. But I trust it, because I've also followed it to my apprenticeship. My haven. My butcher shop. I spend my days
now breaking down meat, with control, gentleness, serenity. I've craved certainty in these last troubled years, and here I
get my fix.

I wipe my hands on a towel I grab from the bin and bring the china plate with its glistening offal rosette up to the front
of the shop. As I do I feel an insistent beelike hum at my left butt cheek--the BlackBerry tucked into my jeans pocket. I get
phone service only at the front of the shop; the walk-in coolers at the rear block the signal. Though I do, if I'm honest
with myself, still feel a small adrenaline-stoked surge in my chest whenever I feel this buzz, I ignore it, and instead hold
out the plate to Hailey, who's ringing up a couple at the cash register. "For the case," I mouth at her.

She nods. A line is forming, the beginning of the afternoon rush. "Can you put it in for me? There should be room on the top
shelf."

"Um, where?"

"By the oxtails?"

I slide open the glass door of the case, bending to rearrange the crowded array of meat to accommodate this new addition.
It's full to bursting already, with dry-aged steaks and unctuous Berkshire pork chops, heaped bowls of ground lamb and rows
of spice-spiked house-made sausage. I thought it beautiful the first day I entered this shop, nearly a year and a half ago.
Now, as a contributor to it, I find it more beautiful still.

As I close the door and straighten up, I find myself eye to eye with one of
those
women. They come into the shop every now and again, these women, with their raised eyebrows and sourly flared nostrils, as
if they're walking into a refugee-camp latrine. Vegetarian or merely squeamish, forced by whatever circumstance into a clean-smelling
but unapologetic temple of meat, they exude supercilious disapproval, as if this place I have come to love is a barely endurable
abomination. It's all I can do to be civil, honestly.

"Hi. Whaddaya need?"

"Two skinless boneless chicken breasts, please."

These women
always
want skinless boneless chicken breasts. "We've only got bone-in. Sorry."

The woman sighs noisily at this affront. I try, not entirely successfully, to repress a roll of the eyes. Of course, I could
offer to bone them out for her. I now know perfectly well how to remove the breastbone and cartilage from that insipid slip
of white meat. But I am offended by the very notion of skinless boneless chicken breasts, and the boring sticklike women who
eat them. This is why I don't work the counter; my people skills leave something to be desired. "Well, that will do, I suppose,"
she mutters. I turn to one side to reach for a pair of latex gloves.

"Ex--, excuse me?"

I look up from the tray of breasts to see the customer's suddenly stricken face. She brushes a finger fitfully against her
own cheek. "You have a--"

I remember the red streak on my face and realize with a certain savage glee how I must look to her, bloody and wild-haired
under my wide-rimmed leather hat. I want to bare my teeth and hiss vampirically at her. Instead I pull off the gloves I've
just put on. "Actually, I'm going to let Jesse help you," I say cheerfully, nodding to a tall, bespectacled boy behind me
who's just pulled on his newsboy cap and is washing his hands in preparation to return to the counter after his lunch break.
Then I hold up my hands to her, turning them back to front so she gets a good look at the brown gunk under my nails, the stains
and unidentifiable bits of goo stuck to my skin, the blood-stained leather band around my wrist. "I'm a little messy right
now." I grin toothily, just to provoke a shudder, then turn on my heel.

As I throw the gloves into a garbage bin with a snap, the BlackBerry in my back pocket buzzes again. I pull it out, not worrying
about the grime I just tried to scare a customer off with. (My PDA, like my hat, my sneakers, and my iPod--currently resting
in a dock balanced atop the Cryovac bags, blaring Modest Mouse--gets coated with meat schmutz as a matter of course. Even the
setting of my engagement ring is clotted with bits of flesh and fat.)

An e-mail. Eric, of course.
How's it going?
he writes. The meat I bring back home when I return from Fleisher's, the butcher shop where I've trained and worked, helps,
but after more than a year, my husband still doesn't understand what it is I'm trying to do here, what I'm finding that's
so important. He gets lonely. So do I. Still, I elect not to answer; not now.

Instead, I take a break. It's four o'clock, and there's a fresh pot of coffee, our third of the day. Since I started cutting
at Fleisher's I've become a coffee fiend. It's not just that the caffeine keeps me spry during the long hours on my feet.
It's also that the heat warms fingers icy from slipping into the freezing crevices between muscles, and the moments spent
loosely cupping the mug seem to soothe my hands and wrists, so often swollen from gripping the knife, working it into joints,
then twisting to open them up.

I pour myself a mug and clasp it between my palms, leaning up against the table opposite the stove in the kitchen. Something
on the cooktop smells wonderful, heady with garlic. The soup of the day. I peer into the pot, then grab a ladle for a taste.
Spice and rich pork. Posole. Warms me to the core, reaches where even the coffee doesn't, in this place that must of necessity
remain nippy all the time. Resting against the counter, thawing my hands, I stare, dreamy with weariness, at the lion's share
of liver still sitting on the table a few feet away, as smooth as a river stone, though of a more vivid color.

Those familiar with grisly nineteenth-century British history might know that one popular theory among Jack the Ripper armchair
criminologists posits that the killer was a practicing butcher. I have developed a small addendum to this hypothesis. I am
by now fairly confident that should I want to surgically excise a streetwalker's liver, I could manage it. I will even confess
that I can sort of imagine the appeal. Don't get me wrong: I'm not an advocate for slashing prostitutes' throats and rummaging
through their innards as a valid lifestyle choice. But in a weird way, I see the butchering part of what Jack did as separate
from the killing, the frenzy, the rage. And I see it as maybe containing the tiny kernel of sanity still left to him. Maybe
it was his forlorn way of trying to fit the pieces back together, or at least understand how they once fit. I look at that
crosscut organ sitting on the table, its workings so mysterious but its dimensions so satisfying, dense and symmetrical and
glassy-smooth, and I feel a sort of peace, a small piece of understanding.

My hands are blue with chill, my lower back throbs, my left wrist aches, and in the cooler in back is a towering stack of
pork sides waiting to be broken down before closing in three hours. I smile into my cup. I am far from home. Right where I
want to be.

Apprentice

... And how it whispered,

"Oh, adhere to me, for we are bound by symmetry

And whatever differences our lives have been

We together make a limb."

--T
HE
D
ECEMBRISTS
, "Red Right Ankle"

When are you going to get this, B? The life of a
slayer is very simple. Want. Take. Have.

--F
AITH
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer

A year and a half earlier, July 2006.

I
GUESS
I really have been in the city too long; I've acquired, among other traits of the native New Yorker, a blanket disdain for
the entire state of New Jersey. I was irrationally hesitant to come here. But on this day NJ Route 202 is leading me through
an unexpectedly lovely landscape of gentle hills and dilapidated barns. I'm getting no service on my BlackBerry, which sends
a slight frisson of panic through my body, making my teeth buzz in my gums; this must be another one of those New Yorker things
I've picked up. I keep lighting up the screen and scrutinizing it for bars, but it's no-go.

The air breezes in through my rolled-down windows, warm and smelling heavily of honeysuckle and freshly cut grass, rather
than the diesel fumes and sour chemical smoke that clung to my nostrils during the run down the turnpike. It calms me. I breathe
deeply.

It's been a frustrating few months.

* * *

I
GUESS
the truth is that butchers intimidate the hell out of me. I've long had a bit of a thing for them, akin to the way many women
feel about firefighters. Burly Irishmen covered in soot are okay, I guess, if you're into that. But I prefer this world's
lock-pickers to its battering rams. Anybody with enough resolve and muscle can bust down a door; that kind of force I comprehend
completely. I myself possess it, psychologically if not physically--just call me Julie "Steamroller" Powell. But a man who
can both heave a whole pig over his shoulder
and
deftly break down the creature into all its luscious parts, in a matter of moments? That's a man whose talents I can really
use.

I'm attracted to a butcher's intimate knowledge. Romantically, I imagine it's innate, that his nicked hands were born knowing
how to slice those whisper-thin cutlets. I'm attracted to his courtly, old-world brand of machismo. Butchers are known for
their corny jokes and their sexism, but when the man behind the counter calls me "sweetheart" or "little lady," I find myself
flattered rather than offended. Most of all, I'm attracted to his authority. There's an absolute sureness to a butcher, whether
he is chining lamb chops with a band saw or telling his customer just how to prepare a crown roast. He is more certain of
meat than I've ever been about anything. Rippling deltoids and brawny good looks are nice, of course, but to me a butcher's
sureness is the definition of masculinity. It strikes me as intoxicatingly exotic, like nothing I've ever experienced. (Well,
not for years, anyway, not since I was a kid. I think of the teenager I was when I found Eric and took him to me, and it's
like remembering an entirely different person.)

Maybe that's why I seem unable to open my mouth around butchers.

I
F
I'
M
dreading a conversation, I tend to practice it over and over in my head beforehand, perhaps not the most effective of preparation
techniques. "I want to learn how to--"... "I was hoping you could teach me to--"... "I'm really
so
interested in what you do..." Ugh.

This is far from the first butcher I've tried to ask for this favor. Weeks ago, I asked the guys at Ottomanelli's--my first
butcher shop when I moved to New York City, and still my favorite. It's a tidy storefront on Bleecker Street with hams and
ducks hanging in the meticulously polished windows and a tight awning overhead, red and white stripes as neat as the trimmed
and tied meat and bones within. I used to be a regular there, and the guys behind the counter--brothers, I think, all of them
in their sixties or seventies, white coats spanking clean despite days of blood and ooze--still always make a point of greeting
me when I come in. It's not quite a "Norm!" sort of welcome, but there's warmth there.