The Year of Pleasures (16 page)

When evening came, we went out for dinner, always sushi on Sunday nights, and always he made a toast to what he called our continuing honeymoon. He was such a sweet romantic. His notes on scraps of paper left on the kitchen table. His washing my back in the tub, kissing my forehead on completion, and then saying, “There’s more where that came from. Come and let me dry you.” Surprise necklaces under the pillow, the warm grasp of his hand over mine every time we went to the movies. So long married, and yet the touch of his fingers pushing my hair back from the side of my face could still arouse me. And always he brought me flowers, sometimes huge bouquets from the fancy shop on Boylston Street that had me reapportioning the stems into several vases, other times a single peony snapped from the corner bush in our own front yard but presented with such flair—a bow at the waist, a sweeping motion of his pianist’s hand, a kiss to my own. “My lady,” he would say, and I would say, “Oh, stop,” hoping he never would. And he never did. It occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons I kept thinking about opening my store was that I could give to other women what John had given to me.

I thought for a moment about looking at the rest of the pictures but decided against it. There was hope in the waiting. And even though I’d not yet found a picture of John, I’d found memories to enjoy. I wanted them to last.

I turned on the light again, then headed downstairs to the Chinese chest. Perhaps I would find something there. The living room was lit beautifully by a gibbous moon, and I slid the drawer open in that milky glow, thinking its natural magic would help me find something that would make sense to me, that would give me the only nearness to him I could now enjoy. I reached in and pulled out a slip:
Amber.
I thought hard, to no avail. The stone? The color? Was it the name of a painting, a song, a person, even a small town we’d been to? Nothing came to me. I pulled out another paper:
Yolks only.
Yolks only? What could this possibly mean? What—the fact that I preferred the yolk to the white? Did
yolks
have another meaning altogether? Was it the punch line of a joke? Or had he meant
folks
? But that word would not suggest anything, either. I tried one more:
Pepper mill.
Oh, John. Oh, Betta. Standing in her living room in her nightgown, digging through a drawer, looking for her husband.

I carried the last slip of paper upstairs and laid it on the pillow next to me. It made no more sense than any of the others I’d looked at tonight. But it was the ink from his black fountain pen on that slip of paper, and he had written it when the blood ran warm in his hand, when images registered and reversed on the back of his retina, when the elegant exchange of oxygen occurred in the alveoli of his lungs, when he was alive.

I turned out the light again. Satie’s wandering and melancholy notes filled the room, and I gave myself over fully to the music, just as I used to years ago. Absent anyone else’s company, I felt no silent commentary interfering with my enjoyment, worried not at all about the volume. There was that. I had always loved Satie as much for his charming eccentricities as for his music. The way he kept two pianos, one on top of the other, in his studio apartment. The way he collected umbrellas and bought twelve gray velvet suits at the same time. The whimsical instructions he included on his scores: “Light as an egg.” “Here comes the lantern.” And one that seems particularly apropos now: “Work it out yourself.”

When I was in eighth grade, I had an art teacher I particularly liked. She was a pretty, reckless blonde who wore huge hoop earrings and laughed loudly all the time, and she made all of us excited about art because of the obvious if erroneous assumption that if we loved art, we’d be like her. Once, when I was trying to sketch something, she came over to help me. She put her hand over mine, and together we began creating a lovely image. Then she said, “Okay, you finish it now.” But I couldn’t finish what we had begun—it didn’t work. Instead, I ended up drawing something altogether different. “Oh, my goodness,” she’d said when she saw the finished drawing. “You did something else! Wonderful!” But I was disappointed. I knew that if her hand had stayed on mine, out of our combined imaginations would have come something neither of us would have done alone. And that it would have been so much better than what I went on to fashion alone. But what was I to do? There was a full forty minutes left to the class. I had to fill the time.

I turned onto my side and sighed deeply, pulled the blankets up higher. This room stayed stubbornly cold, even when the rest of the house was warm. As I punched at my pillow to reshape it, my fingers brushed across my lips, making for a rich tingle. Such a gnawing hunger inside for the simple pleasure of touch, such an edgy despair that came from the lack of it. Tomorrow I would call the man who’d left a message. He might be someone I would like to get to know. I swallowed hard against a sudden montage of imagined humiliations, then decided I’d do no such thing.

In the kitchen the next morning, I looked out the window, blinked my eyes against the brightness, and moaned. It was snowing—large flakes that looked like shredded lace. But I was immune to the beauty: there were three or four inches on the ground already. I didn’t feel able to shovel it. I didn’t feel able to do much of anything. Once again, I’d had terrible, frightening dreams, and this time when I’d awakened, I’d heard a man’s voice, ominous and low, seeming to come directly from a corner of the room. I’d sat up, terrified, but when I’d turned the light on, nothing was there, of course. But I hadn’t been able to go back to sleep.

I pulled out Matthew’s number and dialed it. I would ask if I could hire him to shovel—if not to rent me his room to sleep in at night. The phone rang several times, and then there was Matthew’s voice mail, hopeful-sounding. No doubt he was waiting for his girlfriend to come to her senses. I started to leave a message but decided against it. Who knew when he would call back? I needed to get the sidewalk and porch steps cleared as soon as possible. I’d eat a quick breakfast and get over to the hardware store for the widest, lightest shovel I could find.

I took a long time at the store—it was soothing to be in a place full of things that could help you repair or rebuild or maintain. There was the smell of coffee in the air, coming from the back room; and two men in paint-splattered clothes talked and laughed at the checkout counter where they waited for keys to be made. I looked at the plastic bins of nails and screws and washers and hinges, the wide variety of lightbulbs, halogen to pink-tinted, then moved over to the housewares section to view the basic pots and pans, the blue-and-white-speckled coffee percolator, the gargantuan bottles of Windex and Formula 409. If a high-end fashion store was a singing siren, a hardware store was your practical Uncle Walter, wearing bib overalls and carrying a hammer, asking you in a hearty, sausage-and-egg voice to point him in the direction of what needed to be done. After I’d finished examining drill bits and wrenches, pliers and ball-peen hammers, and many other things I had no idea how to use, I selected a huge blue plastic shovel, light enough to carry home but heavy enough to get the job done, I hoped.

It took an hour for me to shovel—it was heavy snow and I had to do it twice, because by the time I finished the first time, another inch had fallen. I looked up at the sky—still dark and cloudy, the snow seeming to fall even faster. I supposed I needed to load up on some groceries, too. I rested the shovel against the front porch, then headed resolutely back to town. I needed to check the newspaper or listen to the radio—what were we in for, anyway?

Apparently something bad. Lines at the grocery store were long. People were stocking up on toilet paper, on milk and bread and eggs, on cans of soup and boxes of pasta. Several people had turkeys in their basket. “How bad is it supposed to
be
?” I asked the cashier, and she rolled her eyes. “Oh, not that bad. They can predict half an inch for the first snowfall and people will do this. It happens every year, I swear. Come January, they can predict three feet and nobody raises an eyebrow.”

I looked around at all the full carts, then at my little basket. “Maybe I should get more.”

“Do you have to drive far to get here?”

I laughed. “I can walk.”

The cashier laughed, too. She was a pleasant-looking woman, curly brown hair streaked with gray. An open smile. She wore many pins on her smock, mostly jokey ones but also a larger one with a picture of two young children, beneath which was written,
GO AHEAD: MAKE MY DAY. ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDCHILDREN.

“This is just the usual mass hysteria,” she said. “People scare people.” She looked at her watch. “Good. Quitting time.” She put her
CLOSED
sign at the end of my groceries, apologized to the irate customer who was forced to go to another checkout lane. Then, after she rang me up, she untied her apron and said, “Think I’ll go home and snuggle under a blanket with my hubby—watch a movie and eat popcorn for dinner.”

“Sounds great,” I said, and concentrated on the lemons resting at the top of my grocery bag. I didn’t want to look at her face and see how happy she was. I didn’t want to begrudge her her simple pleasure. When I walked home, I thought about the last snowstorm John and I had endured. It was a surprise nor’easter that ended up dumping more than twenty inches of snow on us. The minute I heard the forecast, I called John at work and told him to come home, but he didn’t leave his office until two hours later. By then, the roads were a mess—there’d been accidents on top of accidents. I waited for more than three hours for him to arrive, at first calling his cell phone every twenty minutes or so to make sure he was all right. Finally he told me to stop calling, that he’d see me when he saw me. This enraged me—the traffic reports were so bad, and I thought that somehow my checking in with him would ensure his safety. When he walked in the door, snow like a caul over his head and shoulders from his short walk from the car, I was weak in the knees with relief, but then I coolly ignored him until morning. I’d wanted to punish him for being short with me when my only sin was concern. I should have watched a movie with him. Under a blanket. Eating popcorn for dinner. I should have uncorked the most expensive bottle of champagne we had and flung my arms around him. I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life.

At home, I rubbed the cavity of the chicken with a paste made of garlic and kosher salt and stuffed it with punctured lemons. I put it into the oven along with quartered red potatoes tossed with olive oil and rosemary and plenty of salt and pepper. I shoveled yet again, and when I came back inside, delicious smells were filling the house. So tired my muscles burned, I carried
The New Book of Middle Eastern Food
into the living room. One of my favorite things to do was to read about cooking while smelling something cooking. I was grateful to have the pleasure so unambivalently back. I turned on a lamp against the gathering darkness, stretched out on the sofa, and started with the acknowledgments.

“I never knew anyone who actually
read
cookbooks,” John had once told me. I’d been engrossed in
Beat This!,
my all-time favorite cookbook, which, in truth, I had already read cover to cover. “Lots of people read cookbooks,” I’d answered testily—I’d been at a good part and didn’t want to be interrupted.
“Why?”
he’d asked. I’d looked over at his book, something about the North Pole, and said, “Why do you read that?” “For pleasure,” he’d said. “For escape. For edification. For thrills.” I’d held up my cookbook, raised my eyebrows. “Okay,” he’d said.

But it was more than that. It was something harder to articulate. How are poets able to unzip what they see around them, calling forth a truer essence from behind a common fact? Why, reading a verse about a pear, do you see past the fruit in so transcendent a way? There are circumstances under which food is not just food—Jane Hirshfield, in her poem “Pillow,” calls a provolone sandwich just that. But this is always true about food, as it is always true about a thousand aspects of daily life that we do not, cannot, fully appreciate—there is only so much room inside, and we are a busy species. It takes the poets to make for a divine displacement. The poets and death. Before, cookbooks were interesting to me, comforting. Now they served as testimony to my own kind of faith.

The introduction to this cookbook talked about how the author heard the voices of the people who gave her the recipes every time she made them. I understood that. I still heard my grandmother’s tremulous but authoritative voice every time I baked her pistachio cake. I saw her, too, sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, her still wonderfully thick white hair up in a glorious French twist, her light blue eyes direct and intelligent. In these visions, she wore a small-print housedress, safety-pinned at the top for a little extra modesty, though her legs were always spread wide apart. I saw her nylons knotted at the knee, her maroon corduroy slippers with the heels run-down disgracefully—but God forbid you try to replace them!