Cleaving (6 page)

"So, we gonna see you again, Jules?"

"Oh, yeah. Count on it."

I'm physically exhausted when I climb into the car, my hands aching, my back throbbing, my skin sheened in pig fat, and my
hair limp and hat-headed. When I fill up for gas, I buy a couple of Diet Pepsis, as I'm a bit worried about this solo drive.
But my mind is almost too busy, and it turns out that the two-hour evening drive back to Queens, the traffic quick and smooth
at this hour, is just the gateway I need to calm myself a little. I glide down the thruway, keeping the speedometer at just
under eighty. My iPod is plugged in and playing Old 97's, as I busily thumb-type away on the BlackBerry. (It is going to be
really embarrassing if I wind up dying by careening off the road whilst texting, though I suppose I wouldn't be the first.)
I give Eric my ETA--he's been checking in with me throughout the day, a few e-mails, a couple of texts, but I've been too busy
to answer, plus I've found that reception is completely lousy in the shop--and babble to him about my fantastic first day.
He writes back immediately; I picture him on the couch, watching the
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,
his phone close at hand, waiting for me. "That's great, babe. Drive safe."

I babble, too, to D, the other one, this twitter being of a slightly different cant, self-consciously witty, flirtatious,
downright dirty by turns. Once, not that long ago, he'd have answered all these in kind, hitting all the notes of our familiar
cyber-foreplay routine. But he's grown chary with his responses lately; on this evening, he's totally silent.

By the time I get back to the apartment at nine thirty, I'm still giddy--the Diet Pepsi, as it turns out, was unnecessary and
possibly a bad idea; I now am both overcaffeinated and in desperate need to pee. I take the two flights up two steps at a
time, jiggle the key in the lock, swing it open with a flourish.

"Mommy's home!" Eric calls. Robert the Dog, our 110-pound German shepherd-Rottweiler mix, meets me at the door in his usual
quiet style, tail wagging at a metronomic pace that possibly only Eric and I can recognize as an expression of enthusiasm.
He is nosing at my bag as Eric comes to greet me, folding me into his arms. "My
God,
you smell like meat."

"Is it really that strong?"

He holds me at arm's length, his nose wrinkled not in disgust so much as a slight sense of bafflement. "Um.
Yeah
." Robert is licking my shoes.

"Well, sorry. But I come bearing pork chops!"

Eric cooks us up some chops while I visit the bathroom, then sit at one of the stools at the kitchen island and pop open a
bottle of Portuguese red. Eric's always in charge of pork chops. His favorite thing to do with them, usually, is a paprika
cream sauce (Eric is an annoyingly thin man with a cream obsession that he foists off most inconsiderately on his gradually
spreading wife). The recipe calls for loads of paprika, loads of fat (he never pours off the excess as some might do and,
to be fair to him, it's not like the deracinated pork we usually get produces much), vermouth, and half a cup or more of cream.
For most pork chops it's an excellent way to go, but here it would just be gilding the lily. "I'm telling you, you're not
going to believe this meat. Don't do a thing to it."

So tonight Eric makes his pork chops a simple new way.

E
RIC'S
F
LEISHER'S
P
ORK
C
HOPS

1/2 tablespoon vegetable oil

2 1-inch-thick Berkshire pork chops

Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 375degF. Set a heavy ovenproof skillet on the stovetop, over high heat. Heat the oil until almost smoking.
(Don't you love it when recipes say things like "almost smoking"? Reminds me of that Beckett story about a stage direction
reading that a door should be "imperceptibly ajar." Fuck you, Beckett. The oil can be smoking a little. Or not. Just make
sure it's good and hot.)

Place the chops in the skillet and cook until deeply golden brown, just a couple of minutes per side.

"Finish off" the chops in the hot oven, a matter of about 5 to 10 minutes, depending. You can tell they're done by measuring
the internal temperature with a meat thermometer--it should be, contrary to what the FDA would have you believe, about 120
to 125degF; the temperature will continue to rise as it rests--or, if you know your pork, pressing down with one finger to detect
that moment when the flesh beneath the sear has begun to firm up but still has some give. Or you can do what Eric does, cheat--cut
into it and peer at the juices, which should run almost clear, with just a hint of pink, and at the flesh, which also should
retain a slight blush.

Let rest for 5 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Serves two.

While Eric cooks, I prattle on about Josh and Tom and Jessica and Aaron and Juan and Jesse and pigskin and look at my first
cut! (I shove my bandaged thumb into his face.) And this is Berkshire pork, it's a heritage breed, andandand... "I'm a little
manic, aren't I?"

"A little." He grins over at me, his eyes widening in that look of mock dismay he makes whenever his dismay is not entirely
mock at all. I've not yet really been able to explain to Eric why I want to be doing this. Hell, I can't really explain it
to myself.

Though we have a late start on the wine, we get through two bottles as usual. The pork chops are, as I promised Eric they
would be, a revelation, moist and full of flavor, like a whole different animal from what you get in the grocery store, which
of course it is. "Jesus
Christ,
" he whispers. "Isn't this the best thing in the fucking world?"

I smile to hide a sudden pang of memory. "Pretty much."

I eat with other people in the world, of course. I cook for other people and take them to restaurants I hold dear. It's one
of the ways I share myself and communicate with the people I love, probably the primary way, other than books maybe. (My dad
and I, for instance, adore each other uncomplicatedly, but we almost never address that fact directly. Instead what we do
is read together. One of my favorite earlyish memories is of reading aloud to him in the morning from Doonesbury comic strips,
which I didn't entirely understand, to get him to laugh. And the last time I spoke to him on the phone, the first thing he
said was "Have you read the latest Richard Price? I really think it's just great." This is how we tell each other we love
each other.) And there is no one I share so satisfyingly with as Eric. We eat revelatory pork chops, we read revelatory novels,
and when our eyes meet, our mutual understanding of these pleasures is utterly complete; we are one person who just happens
to inhabit two bodies. I have this tenor of connection with no one else.

So why do I find myself anxiously fingering my infuriatingly quiet BlackBerry, retiring to the bathroom to text D behind Eric's
back, to tell him I'm pining for him, that I love him? Why do I spend so much time feeling this alone?

To Eric, I am beloved. The Julie I am with him is mercurial, both too much and too weak, someone to be coddled and feared,
kept in line and depended upon. The Julie who D knows is someone just a little different. A coconspirator. A playmate. Mischievous,
sexy, thrillingly amoral. Someone to whom you'd murmur, as you slid inside her, and felt that answering clench, "Isn't this
the best thing in the fucking world?" The me I feel I am with D is unfamiliar, exhilarating, someone I am constantly sidling
up to, excited and frightened. But which one of me is real, the cherished, starstruck girl or the sultry, winking woman? I
don't know these days, have not since the first day D tossed me back onto his bed.

Luckily, the wine does the job I've employed it for; that and a hot shower fold my overexcitement and confused contradictions
back into my exhaustion and I am able to sleep. I think the night ends well; we go to sleep together, spooning, not one of
those nights when I pass out early while Eric is left to his own devices.

But something happens while I'm sleeping, with uncharacteristic soundness. Something that I should by now expect, but that
I snore right through--one of my husband's typical bouts of four a.m. wakefulness, his dream-inspired suspicion, his tiptoeing
search for my red BlackBerry Pearl...

This affair of mine and D's would not have been possible for me, say, three years earlier. Not because I was a better, more
stable person then. And not because I was working seventy hours a week in a cubicle, though that certainly put a damper on
things. No, one simple technological innovation is really completely to blame for the whole thing: the SMS text message.

You'll have of course already noticed by now that I am the sort of person who uses
text
as a verb, the sort who conducts a disproportionate percentage of her interpersonal communication with her thumbs. This is
a relatively new development. Historically, phones have been a phobia of mine, exacerbated greatly by my various stints in
secretarial jobs over the years, during the last of which I came to regard the things as unpredictable and potentially vicious
wild creatures. I didn't even own a cell until 2003. One of my most distinct memories of September 11 is walking the streets
of midtown shaking my head in wonder at all the people wandering around staring perplexedly at the screens of their nonfunctioning
phones. As soon as I did get one, though, I became enamored of this lovely new thing called "texting."

Many people will argue that e-mail and SMS and instant messaging and all the rest of it have destroyed our capacity as a race
for gracious communication. I disagree. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we've entered a new golden epistolary age.
Which is another of the reasons I hardly ever use my phone as a phone. Why stammer into a headset when I can carefully compose
a witty, thoughtful missive? With written words I can persuade, tease, seduce. My words are what make me desirable. So it's
really no wonder that I barely ever use my phone for actually speaking to people.

From almost the beginning, D and I did most of our flirting and plotting in cyberspace, either through e-mails or, later,
the text messages that eventually flew fast and furious between us whenever we were apart. The same technologies that Eric
and I used to discuss grocery lists and share random moments of charm we witnessed when we were away from each other--
Just saw Parker Posey watching kids on a playground!... Oh, can you pick up paper towels?
--transmitted between D and me dirty murmurs and teary yearnings and postcoital sighs, all read and tapped out on my BlackBerry's
tiny screen, during any shred of a moment I could get to myself. (Eric must have thought my bladder had shrunk to half its
former size, I started visiting the bathroom so often.) We signed off our missives with goofy pseudonyms (Ingritte Frottage,
Laine Cable); we invented elaborate scenes of comic distress and romantic inevitability; we negotiated risky assignations.
We turned each other on with words. We competed with them. Played with them. Message after message blinking into my in-box
like spaceships popping into existence from some warp-speed jump. The trill from my phone provoking a response Pavlov would
have made much of--racing heart, flushed skin. All for words, D's words and mine. They made what might have been simply tawdry,
exotically illicit. They gave poetic weight to what by all rights ought to have been the stuff of soap opera. Words, to be
pored over, analyzed late at night when I couldn't sleep for wishing I could just leap out of my own bed and run to his.

But of course that's exactly the problem with words, isn't it? There they are, kept, findable. Evidence. Who knows if my affair
with D would have survived as long as it did, or even begun, without all those secret communiques, but assuming that it had,
it certainly would not have been discovered so quickly. Eric would have continued on, suspicious but unable to confront me,
for who knows how long, allowing me to explain away the marks on my body and the glazed giddiness in my eyes, if it were not
for that underwater river of words. As it was, it took almost nothing for him to divine the truth. The water table was so
high, he barely had to dig to find it. He knew my e-mail password because it was the same as his own (the name of our eldest
cat). He had access to my BlackBerry, from which I rarely wiped old messages, because I enjoyed rereading them. I was so blatantly
careless that it began to verge on cruelty, and when his suspicion became unbearable to him, my behavior simply beyond innocent
accountability, my cyber-breadcrumb trail of guilt was all too easy for him to follow. My scarlet phone spilled its secrets;
my e-mail account opened easily beneath his typing fingers.

By now I've become accustomed to, and accepting of, my husband's snooping. I've learned to cover my tracks. But this time,
I fall asleep before intercepting the missive that finally arrived, late in the night.
I love you too, sweetheart. Good night. xoh~D
.

Coded, the
h
our little shorthand to make something naughtier out of the traditional
x
s and
o
s, but not nearly coded enough. In truth, no code could suffice. D could be writing to me in binary, but the Portland area
code he still uses nearly two years after he's moved to New York (it shows up on every communique issuing from his phone)
would be enough.

The next morning, I don't know anything is wrong (I mean anything immediate; everything is wrong, of course, everything has
been wrong, quietly or explosively, for two years now) until after I've fed the three cats their morning portions of wet food.
Eric has climbed into the shower; we've not yet said good morning to each other. I reach over for my phone sitting on the
counter, compulsively checking it like I always do, though there is no unread-message light. I open up the screen and see
that in fact there is one message unread--unread, at least, by me. It is familiar now, that taste of my heart in my mouth.

The water stops running in the shower. I step into the bathroom, the door of which stands perceptibly ajar, and take a towel
from one of the hooks behind the door to hand him as he slides the glass door open and steps out onto the wet floor.