Everything Happens Today (11 page)

“Next,” she called, and Wes shuffled forward.

“Do you have any sweetbreads?”

She narrowed her eyes and smiled conspiratorially at him, as if he had just given her a secret password.

“Veal or lamb?”

“I don't know. I never made them before. What's the best?”

“Veal is better, but lamb is good. How much do you need?”

“I don't know. For one?”

Her eyebrows lifted and her smile broadened. “I'll see what we have.” She disappeared into the walk-in at the back, leaving Wes feeling very grateful that he had not introduced himself. He studied the old black-and-white photos that hung on the wall, showing the store as it had been one, two and three generations earlier, and all the dead butchers who had once worked there. There was a time, it seemed, that they had all been Italians, some of them younger than Wes, the older ones with mustaches and shiny hair and quite dark skin, but all the butchers now were Mexican. Wes wondered what all the young Italian men who might have been butchers were doing instead, and if any of them were happier than they would have been if they had been butchers. As Wes watched the Mexicans trimming the fat off great lumps of meat with long curving knives, or carving chicken breasts into cutlets, he wondered if he could be happy as a butcher. On the one hand, he thought, it would be a great job for someone who was conscientious, a perfectionist who believed that life offers never-ending opportunities for self-improvement and thoughtful application, as Wes did. Clearly, you could work an entire lifetime as a butcher and never fully satisfy yourself that you were as artful as you might be, and that was a good thing. On the other hand, Wes believed that the time would come when, as an artist focused on honing his craft and grappling with philosophical and literary conundrums, his interest in food would gradually fall away, leaving nothing but the core need to satisfy hunger as he became increasingly ascetic and otherworldly; by his early twenties at the latest, when he had stopped growing and no longer needed lots of protein, he would certainly have given up meat-eating, especially given its karmic and ecological implications. Now it would be incredibly interesting to consider the moral and ethical implications of being a vegetarian Buddhist butcher, and probably an amazingly difficult and worthy exercise in principles of self-mastery, but Wes couldn't be certain that he had it in him. What if, after decades of devoting your life to form and mindfulness, it should just turn out to be really boring? In theory, Wes didn't believe in boredom because there was always something to do with an unoccupied mind, but still.

Teresa emerged from the walk-in with a sheet of butcher's paper in one hand, on which there sat something pink and shiny and mottled, enmeshed in a network of threadlike capillaries and pocked with globules of fat. It looked perhaps like a giant embryonic mouse. Teresa tilted her hand towards Wes so that he could assess the quality, and several waiting customers leaned in simultaneously to get a better look, one even emitting a low, awestruck gasp.

“That looks fine.”

“Two pounds is the smallest I have. Too much for one, okay?”

“No it's fine. I'll take it.”

An old lady in a tweed overcoat and a thick grey scarf around her neck nudged Wes in the elbow, tutting. “How are you going to cook that?” she asked in an old-fashioned Little Italy accent.

“You have to soak it and poach it and press it. Then you can fry it and serve it with mushrooms or raisins.”

“You're the cook?”

“It's easy. It's just complicated.” The old lady nodded approvingly and gave Wes's forearm a little squeeze. It was like something out of a movie, and Wes felt a little swell of pride in his heart. He looked up to see if Teresa had noticed that something special had passed among her customers, but she was wrapping the sweetbread with her head lowered. She would remember him now, and the next time he came he would be sure to introduce himself.

Wes continued along Jones, turned east on West Fourth, then immediately north on Sixth Avenue on his way to Citarella. Although the brown paper package containing the sweetbread was light and unobtrusive, it felt heavy and conspicuous, as if it concealed the tell-tale heart and was calling out to everyone on the street. Although he planned to be a vegetarian one day, Wes was still an avid meat-eater and did not generally suffer ethical qualms about it, so he was puzzled by this creeping sense that he was doing something wrong. Unless there was something he didn't know about sweetbreads, in theory they were no different from any other cut of meat, since the animal from which they came had had to die in order to supply it. Wes thought that maybe it had something to do with Teresa's question: “Veal or lamb?” He remembered now that when she'd asked, for an instant so fleeting that he was unaware of it until it had passed, there had popped into his head the image, almost like a drawing in a children's book, of a calf and a lamb with a backslash between them and a question mark to the right. There was something about calves that upset him, even when he thought about them ever so casually, because of the way they seemed to be born to suffer. Lambs, at least, gambol and play, but calves seemed to be sad, somehow, from the moment they're born because virtually all mammal babies are cute but calves seem to be stamped with the mark of death from the very beginning, like the condemned calf in “Dona Dona.” And he couldn't help but think, as he strode towards the Jefferson Market library and noted the time on the clock tower, of the very calf that had died to give Wes its one and only pancreas or thymus gland, and he saw in his mind's eye a kind of accelerated history of his sweetbread, which was really the brief and doleful biography of a living creature that had maybe never even had one sip of its mother's milk before it was carted off and kept in concrete pens and fed from stainless steel hoppers and shouted at and taunted and tolerated on this earth just long enough for some blank-eyed stranger with a knife and elbow-length plastic gloves to reach deep, deep into the recesses of its hot, frightened body for that glistening pink jewel of viscera. Of course Wes knew that the butchering process was not like that at all, that the sweetbreads would be among the last thing to be removed once the body had been dismantled, but in this montage it was the sweetbreads that had held all the other parts together, and once they had been harvested everything else—the various cuts of meat, the hide, the components of the head, the bones and the intestines—all flew apart, pieces of a puzzle or a planet exploding in outer space, and away to their appointed destinations in foam trays in supermarket coolers, tanneries or great vats of boiling water. And when you abstracted it that way, when you allowed yourself to think of the body as an assemblage or a vessel, rather than as a sodden sponge infused with sorrowful knowledge, it did help a little. You could imagine the calf's soul soaring free and exuberant from the wreckage, and that tiny interstice in which it had been entrapped in its living body as an aberration, a hiccup that the creature's spirit could look back upon later and laugh about. This was where Buddhism, even just a smattering of it, came in quite handy. Wes was quite pleased that he was on his way to becoming a Buddhist.

A year earlier, a girl had fallen or jumped in front of an oncoming train at the 77th Street station. Wes had not known her, but those who had said that she had struggled with depression for years. Even so, the school administration had taken the opportunity to organize mandatory parent-student drug-awareness events in which participants sat in safe circles and voiced their misapprehensions about each other. To encourage candor, parents were placed in separate circles from their own kids, and that was how Wes had found himself sitting besides Delia. She was a grade above him, but he'd seen her before, of course, in the hallways or on the street, and had long been attracted to her because she didn't look or act like anyone else at Dalton. Wes found her very beautiful, with her kinky red hair and pale skin, her strong nose and the womanly curve of her lips, but she was unusual enough to allow him to imagine that no one else had ever recognized her beauty as he had, and that if she were to look deep into his eyes she would be startled, then gratified and grateful, to see herself understood, appreciated and desired for the first time in her life. When you pictured some girls naked, it was all thrashing and grunting, but when you pictured Delia naked, with her round shoulders and broad hips, you thought of waking up in a feather bed in an icy cottage on the moors with one of those strong, smooth, fragrant thighs splayed across your midsection. And that was precisely the image Wes had entertained as they held hands in their circle, while even at some distance his father's voice rose above the general murmur to insist that drugs don't always pose a mortal danger to a healthy, socialized adolescent.

Wes had no reason to suspect that complaining bitterly about his father wasn't a perfectly suitable opening gambit when they broke for juice and cookies.

“What does your father do?”

“He's a failed novelist.”

“That's his profession?”

“He teaches creative writing at the New School.”

“What does it mean, ‘failed novelist?'”

“He's published one book in 20 years.”

“Then he's a published novelist, right?”

“The failure is in his heart. If you asked him, he'd say he was a failed novelist.”

“Did he give up?”

“God, no.”

“Then he hasn't failed. Think of Melville or Balzac.”

“They all did their best work in their youth. Trust me, he's a failure.”

“That's such a horrible thing to say about someone you love, and so lacking in compassion.”

“He also sleeps with his students. They do it in the house.”

“Then he must be a very unhappy man. You should pity him.”

And that was how Wes had discovered that Delia was a Buddhist, and that he loved her hopelessly. She was less than a year older than him, but she made him feel like a cranky little child, and then and there he had vowed to become worthy of her, to close the gap between them. For the remaining minutes of their break, he limited his self-expression to sage nodding of the head as she discoursed on meditation, mindfulness and the loving-kindness that she tried to practice toward her own parents. She was calm, poised; the gentle modulation of her voice acted upon Wes like a cool hand upon a fevered brow. She was everything he wanted to be and despaired of having, and with her knowing serenity and quiet self-confidence she continued to be just that through the entire year that Wes worked to catch up with her. She was always self-contained and unhurried, as if she didn't sweat and woke up with her breath smelling of rosehips, and despite her curvy, voluptuous body, she was always somehow untouchable. It was hard to picture Delia allowing some smooth-talking jock to put his tongue down her throat or grope her tits; she just didn't seem to be made for that kind of transaction. Even in his fantasies, Wes somehow managed to skip over most of the dirty bits because it was almost impossible to imagine Delia in a state of sexual arousal. Of course, she could be the kind of girl—
woman
—who was attracted to much older men, graduate students in philosophy or yoga instructors, but that only added a sense of urgency to Wes's project of self-improvement because it was always possible that he could get to her before she had figured out what kind of guy she was attracted to. He had decided that he would not even attempt to have sex with her until he was confident that he had become the kind of boy—
man
—that Delia could admire on an intellectual, an emotional, a spiritual plane—until such time as he could look in her eyes and see the same shock of recognition that she would see in his eyes when she looked at him, if only he could persuade her to look hard enough. If he were honest with himself, he would have to admit that it had been not so much a vow of chastity as insurance against humiliation, but it had kept him faithfully engaged in bettering himself, which must have its own rewards other than the promise of losing one's virginity to a woman one truly loved. And until his fateful encounter with Lucy the night before, Wes had sincerely believed that he had been closing the gap, despite the incontrovertible evidence that, with only seven months left to graduate, Delia had yet to lay a thigh across his midsection. And now, as he approached the gourmet market, thoughts of Delia's thigh, which remained an object of idealized, frustrated desire, and of Lucy's thigh, which smelled of grapefruit and vanilla, confused themselves in Wes's mind until in their combined carnal warmth they became a disembodied leg of lamb, rising joyously through the dimensionlessness of karmic space.

The automated glass door opened at Wes's approach, and he headed for the vegetables, losing his train of thought. Wes knew this market well because he stopped in several times a week on his way home from school to shop for supper. But as he stood before the vegetable display case with the list of ingredients open on the iPhone in his right hand and the plastic basket in his left, as he had done in virtually identical fashion countless times in the past, it occurred to him that he had been standing right on this very spot, give or take a few square inches, only eighteen hours earlier, give or take a few minutes, but that somehow, in that very brief interlude, he had become an entirely new person and the world had been entirely remade.

He remembered himself eighteen hours earlier, who he had been and what he had been thinking. After he'd read Lucy's tweet, he'd spent the rest of the day fretting about how he would defend himself against her aggressions, should they come, or speculating about the possibility that it was all just a mistake—or worse yet, a prank—and that she had absolutely no romantic interest in him whatsoever, and then he'd left school, skipping a meeting of the Lit Club, and come here to shop for dinner, and the argument had continued to rage in his head even as he had stood in this spot. Now, barely aware of the shoppers who were forced to push past him as he blocked the aisle, Wes shook his head and smiled indulgently on behalf of his previous self, whose exercise in self-delusion had been so transparent it had taken an almost miraculous act of will not to puncture the illusion. It was as if he had sequestered an entire sector of his analytical brain and given it over to alien control, the way you can allow tech support to take remote control of your laptop during a technical crisis, and suddenly some dude in Mumbai is moving the cursor across your monitor while your own keys go limp. That was how it had been all day yesterday—some avatar who didn't know anything about the real Wes controlling his thoughts—but it was only now that he could see it. It was so obvious, at least to the new person he was today, that the whole resistance-versus-misunderstanding scenario had been a total scam that he had perpetrated against himself. Of course he had not really wanted it to be a misunderstanding, and even more, of course, he had had no real intention of resisting her if she was interested in him. If he had, wouldn't he simply not have gone to her party? Instead, he had found himself in this market after school trying to decide what he would make for dinner on the basis of how he could impress her, later that night, by describing the exotic, sophisticated supper he had prepared for his family that evening. He had entered the store intending to buy ingredients for a meal of grilled pork chops and baked potatoes, but he'd taken one look at the bin of Idahos and realized how lame it would come across if he tried to make a boast out of such a pedestrian effort. Instead, he'd ended up spending a fortune on saffron, carnaroli rice and Nantucket bay scallops to make a risotto that no one but his father had really enjoyed, and that Nora had rejected altogether in favor of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and all so that he might possibly be able to use it to impress a girl who might possibly but probably wasn't interested in him. And he had done all this without once admitting to himself that this was what he was doing. In the end, at some point in the evening he had told Lucy about the risotto, and she had been duly impressed. Like a jerk, he had even promised to cook it for her one day. Still, it wasn't easy to admit to yourself that you were the kind of boy who thought that bragging about your exploits in the kitchen was a good way to seduce girls. Wes wished he'd made the pork chops instead.