Cleaving (7 page)

(The tub has an incorrigible leak, in addition to being constantly, chronically clogged. Our new apartment is beautiful, with
high ceilings, exposed brick walls, a skylight in the kitchen. But something seems to be going on, water-related, something
that my inwardly superstitious mind finds worrying. Moisture seeping through where it shouldn't, lingering where it should
drain away. I have to keep repeating to myself: it's faulty plumbing, it's a leaky roof. Yes, I've spent far too many days
and nights sobbing in confusion and guilt and frustration, but tears, no matter how fiercely repressed, can't fuck up the
paint job.)

The second I see him not meeting my eyes I know how it's going to go down. And I know I should just walk back out the door,
let him come to me with his complaint. I know I should be angry, that I should not make this easy for him. I know I should
be angry, but I can't make myself feel it. Instead, as usual, I offer myself up to
his
anger: "You okay?"

He sighs, for a second stands, his dirty blond hair dripping, and stares at his feet. I've always loved Eric's feet, first
noticed them back when we were in high school, improbably shapely in their hippie sandals. Then he groans, grabs me roughly
by the arms, gives me one tight shake. "Our marriage is falling apart and we're not talking about it!"

There is nothing I can say to that, not one thing. He's right, of course.

"Y
OU KNOW IT'S
over when he'd rather show you
Team America
than his penis."

D is imagining the story I will one day tell about the day we broke up. He's holding me in his arms at the time. Smiling.
I laugh when he says it. "That's a good line. I'm totally stealing it."

It doesn't feel like a breakup at all, not at first.

S
O I'VE
told you a little bit about seams, those networks of filaments that both connect muscles and define the boundary between
them. Now, the difficulty is that seams can be thick, or they can be thin. The seam of a tenderloin, for instance, is very
thin indeed, and therefore hard to follow. It's easy to lose your way, which is apt to make you nervous, seeing as how the
tenderloin is the single most expensive cut of meat on the steer, thirty-nine bucks a pound at Fleisher's. If you lose the
seam in one direction you waste tenderloin, and there's only something like eight pounds of it per animal. If you lose it
in the other direction, especially right at the head of the muscle, what's called the "chateaubriand," you cut into the eye
of the sirloin, another expensive cut and one that short-tempered chefs won't buy mangled. Beginning butchers, needless to
say, don't get assigned to pull out many tenderloins.

I have been allowed to do one so far, under Tom's close supervision. It's a long column of muscle, nestled up against the
spine on the loin primal, tapering to a point up near the forward end of the cut, burying itself graspingly into the sirloin
at the other end, at the hip. Using the very tip of my knife and my fingernails, bending close to peer at my progress, I flicked
away, endeavoring to keep from tearing the meat, leaving precious shreds behind. It eventually rolled off the spine, but reluctantly.
It clung to its cradle of bone. At its thick head, especially, right under the tailbone, it hung on tight. I had to be braver
than I really was, get down under, skim along the silver surface of the sirloin, force it loose. I left a little behind. You
always do, I guess, when you're dealing with two things so resolutely fused. By the time I was done, I was stinking with nervous
sweat and my knife hand was aching, like your hands ache after surviving a car accident--a near collision or breathtaking slide
on black ice--and you realize you've been gripping the wheel like a lifeline.

D
IS
a great mythologizer. I learned this about him years ago, during those few nights in my college dorm room, and I rediscovered
it when he moved back to New York nine years later and easily coaxed me back to his bed. He loves (well, once loved, as it
looks now like I'm going to have to get used to this goddamned past tense) to pull up the sheets and lie in bed, entangled
and sweaty, spinning tales and theories about the romantic logic of our journey to this one particular inevitable afternoon.
It was destiny, he said. I remember photographically the conversation of more than a year ago, when he laid out his theory.

"Obviously fated from the start."

I was gazing fondly at the bruise his teeth had left on my upper arm. "How so?"

"Well, among many other factors, how about the first time I ever saw you? When you came to the door of my parents' house with
Eric, while he was up visiting colleges." Eric was a year behind me in school and did his grand senior-year college tour the
fall of my freshman year of college, using the excuse to make his first visit to me. D lived in my college town, but went
to another college very nearby. (This whole thing is so intricate and incestuous and endless, I get breathless and discouraged
just trying to get all the details down. It's like trying to explain the plotlines of a
Buffy
episode six seasons in.)

"So my do-gooder parents regularly give over their spare bedroom to visiting prospective students, and generously volunteer
their son to do any dirty work involved. So I'm the one assigned to sit around waiting for this Eric guy. All day, I'm waiting.
Then he finally comes around, with this sexy girl." Here he bit my shoulder until I squealed, and pressed his naked front
up against my naked back.

"Ooh, what's that you've got there?"

"Don't interrupt, I'm talking." Digging his fingers deeply into my hair, pulling me onto my back. "And this guy is saying,
'Oh no, thanks, but I'll actually be sleeping with my
girlfriend
.' Uh-huh, so
that's
how it's going to be..."

"I don't remember this at all."

"You
forgot
this?" Atop me now, one arm hooking under my knee, drawing it up over his shoulder.

"Mhm..."

What I remembered was that I didn't notice that lean, dark young man who'd one day be D until nearly four years later, when
he was introduced to me at a party. Eric, to whom I'd been unfailingly faithful all this time, was away on his junior year
abroad; I wrote him long rambling letters and mailed care packages. I didn't think about the boy from the college down the
road.

Until one night, not too long before graduation, I was invited to another dorm party at this other school. There was quite
a bit of drinking, expectedly, and then, unexpectedly, disastrously, deliciously, there was kissing, a closed door, Al Green
on his hip retro turntable, and, inevitably, sex. We've always differed, D and I, on who seduced whom; he says me, I say him.
But I guess the real question is not Who? but Why? If you asked me then, I would say it was just hormones, that I wasn't even
attracted to the guy, skinny, with hooded eyes, Mick Jagger lips, and a weak chin. I wouldn't talk about the judder in my
veins when I heard his knock, knowing it was him, couldn't be anyone else at that hour. I wouldn't tell you about the sounds
he made me make, despite my shame and thin dormitory walls.

I didn't talk to him in the daytime, though we chattered on enough at night. My guilt was too great. I didn't even say a proper
good-bye when I graduated. But I have a snapshot from the day I moved out of my dorm. My father took it, and I to this day
have no idea why. It's an odd photo, blurry and focused on nothing in particular, just a forgettable image of me hauling out
a load of stuff, seemingly oblivious to the boy mooning, some feet away, at the edge of the photograph. In fact my heart pounded
at his presence. My horror made me awful.

You'd have thought that was the end of it.

T
ENDERLOINS ARE
hard. Skirt steak, on the other hand, is cake. A flap of meat totally encased in its seam, which is thick and white, less
like the usual half-dried rubber cement than like an envelope of flaky, ancient paper. The whole package is laid out flat
along a solid wedge of white fat and rib bone. Pulling out skirt steaks is the job you assign to the cutters who don't know
what the hell they're doing. It's an obvious muscle, neither expensive nor delicate, and you don't need any mad knife skills
to remove it. You practically don't need a knife at all. All you have to do is get a grip on one edge of the flap, push down
on the fat with the heel of your other hand, and tear the thing right out--riiiip!--using your knife only at the very end, maybe,
to cut loose a stubborn filament or two. Yes, skirt steak is a snap. I should know. This past week, I've torn dozens of them
off dozens of beef flanks. There's a rhythm to it. Like pulling lots of Band-Aids off lots of knees.

T
HIS IS
not the first time D and I have broken up.

The first time we broke up--that is, if you don't count me piling into my parents' Suburban without so much as a fare-thee-well
on the day I graduated college--was right after Eric snuck into my e-mail and found his first hard evidence about D, just a
couple of months into our affair.

This breakup happened at a bar--Eric's and my local bar, actually, in Long Island City, Queens. D got on a train to come to
me as soon as I texted him. ("He knows," I wrote, having a great gift for melodrama.) I remember that I took Robert the Dog
with me, more as an alibi, should Eric come home to find me gone, than as a nod to my pet's well-being. I remember that I
cried a lot, and that we kissed a lot, and that the bartender, who of course knows me, and Eric, and knows that D is not Eric,
disapproved.

I was the one who called it off. "I have to try to fix my marriage," I said. D didn't disagree. He wiped my tears from my
face, which I thought was sweet. "I can't hurt Eric like this," I continued.

D nodded and pulled me in for a tender hug. He wasn't crying, but he looked like he might.

"We have to stop seeing each other."

We lingered at the subway entrance for a long time. (Robert the Dog thought all this standing around was
bullshit,
but he put up with it resignedly.) D and I hugged, and kissed, and made out, and generally made fools of ourselves. And I
was thinking about how all this had started. An afternoon fuck, and then another, just a friendly exchange of fluids. I was
thinking that he should be easier to give up, and wondering why it was so hard. And so I said I loved him, for the first time,
which made his face do this odd wavering thing for a moment, like I was seeing him through a haze of diesel exhaust.

"Well, maybe we can get together tomorrow," I said. "Since we had it planned."

D didn't disagree.

"But that's the last time."

Who did I think I was kidding?

T
HERE ARE
actually four skirt steaks in every cow, two on each flank, just below the brisket, which is cut from the sternum, and even
as I'm writing this sentence I can sense thousands of eyes glazing over in a more-than-I-needed-to-know fog. The two pieces
on each side are called the inner skirt and the outer skirt. One of them is thicker and wider and longer than the other, and
one is supposed to taste better, but I can never remember which is which. (I fall into fogs, too.) Josh has explained it to
me a few times, and I don't want to ask again, even though I'm still not sure. But I do know that skirt steaks, along with
hanger steaks, are diaphragm muscles, separating the chest cavity from the abdomen and making the whole in-and-out thing happen
with the animal's lungs.

Anyway, the point is, there are lots of opportunities, even just on one animal (and there is
never
just one animal; Josh always brings back at least three whole steer from the slaughterhouse), to practice the grab-and-pull
motion of skirt-steak removal. Get some good music cranking on the iPod. Eminem works well, something with a good high macho
reading. Make a show of chatting nonchalantly as you go about your business, not even looking at what you're doing, exchanging
filthy Michael Jackson jokes. ("What does Michael Jackson like about twenty-eight-year-olds? That there's twenty of 'em!")
Build up a whole pile of skirts. You'll have to trim them later, make them palatable, and that is
not
the fun part. Avoid that part as long as possible.

* * *

D
AND
I broke up the second time about a year after the first split had failed to take. By this time, the entire tenor of the whole
messy situation had changed. After Eric found out about D, we wrangled, tearily and angrily, for months and months, about
what our next move would be. Many couples would just have called it quits, but instead we occasionally cried, drank, watched
a lot of TV, and went to bed together nights, except when he stayed out, because this was when Eric began seeing the other
woman, sometimes staying out all night without explanation, trailing home the next morning full of a remorse that was actually
something else, a recrimination. Also around then, a bronchial infection landed some codeine cough syrup in my hands, which
I found I liked very much indeed. It was the only thing other than the brief release of an afternoon with D that made me feel
like maybe one day everything would work out--until Eric made me pour it down the sink.