11
Lingua con le Olive
“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism,” said Georges Bataille, or maybe he didn’t. I haven’t read the book this quote is supposed to appear in, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, but perhaps I will. I suspect I’d find it interesting, though I don’t know that Bataille’s book would pass the prison’s censors. They’d likely take one look at the title and pull it (while letting far worse tomes slip through the cracks.
We’re allowed twenty-five books of our own here in prison, and they circulate like rumors. Truth be told, most Bedford Hills inmates have terrible literary taste. They love Fifty Shades of Grey and Danielle Steele. Mein Kampf, if you can believe it. The complete works of Stephen King. The Diary of Anne Frank—she knows about living in close, unsparing quarters with people you don’t like; it’s an unsurprising favorite. Flannery O’Connor’s stories, tellingly, have a following. As do Sylvia Plath’s writings, because what con doesn’t feel drawn to a melodramatic portrayal of adolescence. If there’s a single thread that runs through the fabric of the penitentiary, it’s that of arrested development).
Here are a few things I’ve gleaned from being a penitentiary librarian: prisoners love self-help books. They glom on to religious narratives as drowning rats to the flotsam of a sinking ship. Cons do, in fact, judge a book by its cover; an unsympathetic author’s picture is enough to dissuade a convict from reading it. They are credulous with regard to titles. Most find great disappointment in Of Human Bondage; a very few will, however, enjoy it.
The incarcerated, by and large, read books that comfort them, which makes them not very different from the world outside. Inmates,
like conservatives who strictly watch Fox news or liberals who mainline MSNBC, are vested in their own convictions, by which I mean their opinions, not their sentences—everyone here is innocent, everyone but me. You never see as many innocent people as you do in prison. Everyone here is stuck in the limbo of their own appeal, buffeted in eternal circles with their arms wrapped around sheaves of legal paper. The bubble-wrap of self-delusion swaddles all convicts; they think they’re this close to being sprung free. Almost all are wrong. I myself find serenity in accepting my fate. The unapologetically guilty woman sleeps soundly at night.
“Is this fig?” Gil asked, eyeing the slice of torta limone on his plate.
“Of course not, darling,” I said. “It’s quince.”
Gil took a bite, smiled with satisfaction, chewed, swallowed, and immediately put another forkful of torta to his mouth. Two minutes later, his hands around his throat, his breathing ragged, Gil’s face turned red as arterial spray, then the sanguine hue seeped away, and bloomed a mauve, lavender almost. It was interesting to watch Gil’s skin grow a sweaty gloss and a pallid hue. It was like a sunset, but with motion. Gil looked at me with pleading eyes. I have mentioned Gil was allergic to figs, or perhaps I have not.
“Epi!” Gill gasped and reached out his hands in the universal gesture of supplication. “Epi!” He whispered.
I couldn’t let myself get drawn into the spectacle. Gil’s EpiPen had hit the water leagues ago. I had things to do.
His body must be found with water in his lungs, assuming that anyone found his body, which in an ideal world would not happen.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and make sure there is water in the lungs when a body is fished from the Atlantic. No water in his lungs meant no drowning, and no drowning in a waterlogged corpse meant foul play. I needed Gil to inhale at least one full breath before expiring in order for his death to look like a proper accident, and judging from Gil’s ever more livid skin, I had no time to waste.
I sprang at him. My hands hit Gil square in the chest, hard enough to knock him sideways onto the edge of the boat. “Oof,” he gurgled. His throat closing, Gil wasn’t capable of articulate speech or even inarticulate screams. Gil hit the side of the boat and rested,
body splayed diagonally across the gunwale, half on and half out of the boat, his legs stuck at an awkward mannequin angle. He scrabbled at the gunwale to right himself.
Gil was a solidly built man. Though not as tall as I am, Gil was thick and powerful, with big, meaty hands and dense thighs. His surprise, his anaphylactic shock, and his momentary weakness were on my side, but I knew that as Gil’s adrenaline kicked in, my advantage would vanish. I grabbed his legs in a fireman’s grip and heaved Gil’s body up, hefting him above the six-inch railing, and shoving him over the side of the boat. As he fell, one of Gil’s hands grabbed the railing. Hanging by one hand, his body trailed toward the water. His legs kicked the water, churning like an aimless egg- beater. His other arm thrashed toward the railing as he reached out his free hand.
I did some quick, brutal math. As the anaphylaxis closed Gil’s throat and cut off his air supply, he would pass out and slip into the water. But before that happened, he could pull himself up and over the side of the boat. Neither case was ideal. It simply wouldn’t do to let him drop inert into the sea, nor could I risk him getting back into the boat. I wasn’t convinced I’d be able to hoist his unconscious body over the side of the boat. I needed him to drop into the drink and take one last, big, conscious breath before he died—Gil’s great appeal had always been his cheerful compliance. Whence this new and displeasing recalcitrance, I wondered.
Gil’s hand tightened its grip on the gunwale. I spied the winch Gil used to tighten the sails a foot to my right. I grabbed it and started whacking his fingers as hard as I could. One by one, his fingers let go, but not all at once and not fast enough. I could hear his breaths coming ragged and short, desperate painful wheezes. I banged harder at his fingers. They held fast. His body struggled to lift his other arm. It flailed in space, awkwardly reaching for the boat’s railing.
Slowly, painfully, Gil was pulling his big, doggy body up the side of the boat. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a knife, a cruel, whisper-thin, scimitar-shaped blade made for gutting and boning. Gripping the handle inelegantly in my fist, I jammed the point deep into the first knuckle of Gil’s index finger and twisted it, messily
severing the finger. A little spray of blood jetted, a tiny scarlet fountain. The joint went flying onto the deck. I’d find it later. Gil’s hand released.
Gil slid beneath the water’s surface. A sound, high and alarmed, hung in the perfect June air. And then, it quieted. I watched Gil’s hands flop like clumsy baby otters. He bobbed up and down, a buoyant jack-in-the-box, a crimson stain wispy as watercolor spreading around him. I grabbed for the boat hook, a telescoping tool that Gil used to snag mooring lines. I extended it to its full length, thinking I could push down on Gil’s head, hurrying his drowning, but it didn’t reach, even as I leaned dangerously over the side of the boat. I stood upright and assessed the situation. Gil was now safely and proverbially, if metaphorically, dead in the water. I pulled the clever telescoping ladder up from the rear of the boat, leaving him stranded and alone, bobbing in the water, helpless.
I found the fingertip and threw it overboard, sluicing the boat with water as quickly as I could. A few drops of blood shone crimson on the blue indoor-outdoor fabric of the boat’s seat cushion. I’d been trying to avoid exactly this. Bloodstain spatter analysis is a killer’s worst nightmare.
Let us pause as Gil dies to sing an encomium for the freedom- loving days before Luminol, when homicidal maniacs could kill with bleach-happy impunity. Before the 1980s, when Luminol found its footing in policing, a murderer merely had to clean well to transform a bloody scene of homicide into the very picture of domestic calm.
Luminol changed that. Bleach blurs Luminol’s traces, and you can never really be certain that you’ve gotten every splat of blood, and even the miasmic haze of bleach can alert law enforcement to the fact that you’ve cleaned too aggressively and make them wonder about your motives. A little Lysol, a jug of Clorox, and getting away with murder was easy before the days of DNA and Luminol; these days, even Mr. Clean will bite you in the ass.
I stared at the tell-tale droplets of Gil’s bright red blood and reassured myself that the boat wouldn’t divulge my secrets—nautical paint is made with copper to help it withstand fading, and copper always reads a false positive under Luminol. Should the authorities find a spot of Gil’s blood on his boat’s seat cushion, I told myself,
homicide wouldn’t necessarily be the first thing to leap out at them.
It’s entirely within the realm of possibilities that an ordinary, everyday accident would cause the dime-sized blot of Gil’s blood. Gil fished, he hung sails, he spliced rope—he even carried a little knife on his hip. That splat was entirely plausible. Innocent, even. I couldn’t let my morbid flights of fancy run away with me, not at a crucial time like this.
As I watched Gil drown, I stripped to my bathing suit, readying myself for the third stage in this murder. Gil looked at me only once, his eyes pleading and hurt, like a puppy as you drive away from the pound, like the face of a veal calf hung from his hocks, like the face of a nice man you’ve killed simply because you can. It was only that one look, wounded and dying. And then it was gone. His body was inert, rocking gently as a buoy, but otherwise still, facedown in the great, wide ocean.
I lowered the ladder, popped a life jacket around my chest, and affixed it with a rope to the boat’s swimming platform. I threw a second life jacket at Gil and slipped the sheathed gutting knife into a small net bag that I tied to my wrist. I jumped into the water, swam the few yards to Gil, and started wrangling him into the life vest.
This was not as easy as I’d planned. His body didn’t want to float on its back, and facedown in the water, his body was hard to dress in the life vest, which I needed him to wear. Prior to the sail, I had schooled myself with YouTube lifesaving videos where lifeguards gracefully slipped a life vest on one unconscious person after another. They’d made it look effortless, like a phalanx of soldiers gracefully sliding slippers on to the feet of insensate Cinderellas. The videos lied. Real life was nothing like YouTube.
Gil’s body kept slithering from my grasp, twisting and dropping below the water’s surface. He was slippery and his finger was still oozing blood, which was spreading everywhere. I couldn’t get the vest to lie flat in the water, and I couldn’t slip it around Gil’s body without him spinning away like a renegade log. I had nothing to buttress myself against, so I couldn’t hoist him up above a vest, and as I was wearing a life vest, I couldn’t slip beneath the surface and grab him to hold him still. I tried wedging myself between his body and the boat to get better leverage, but the boat moved, making
everything more irritating. It was hard, much harder than I wanted it to be, far harder than either of the other murders. I could have cried.
Gil’s body was far more troublesome dead than it had ever been alive. His legs starfished out at every turn. His arms acted like spiteful toddlers, floundering with the purposelessness of feelings.
We turned and spun, and we tangled in the rope that tied me to the boat, which, though anchored, floated this way and that. It was very annoying, and just as I was about to give up and carve some indiscriminate pound of flesh from somewhere—anywhere—Gil’s body righted itself in the correct faceup position. Holding the body against my hip with the life vest trailing in the water, I swam to the ladder, climbed up two steps, sat down on a rung, and wedged my butt hard on the ladder’s step. Crouching over Gil, I slipped the life jacket over one arm and then the other, as if I was dressing a big, sleeping baby. I clipped the fasteners tight around his middle. The body was held tight, secure, buoyant. I was ready to cut out his tongue.
Only then did I realize exactly how poorly I’d planned this murder.
The one part of Gil I wanted was his tongue. (I very much wanted his thymus glands, too, but the body tucks those tender little sweetmeats like jewels behind the bony breastplate—and it would not do to crack Gil’s barrel chest with him bobbing in the Atlantic.) I wanted his tongue; I had planned to harvest his tongue. I had a charming recipe for lingua con le olive, a simple Campania stew of tongue, olives, and ripe, fruity tomatoes, and everything was ready to go, lacking for nothing but the tongue of the dead man in front of me.
Yet in all my planning, in all my scheming, in all my research, and in all my dreaming, I had failed to remember that when humans suffer anaphylactic shock, their tongues swell, sometimes three or four times in size. Gil’s tongue was so big that I couldn’t open his mouth and I couldn’t fit my fingers or my knife in it. Indeed, when I pried apart Gil’s lavender lips, his giant, bloated tongue lolled like a beached, bleached whale. I hoped that the swelling wouldn’t ruin the texture. That would be ironic.
The sun shone down on us like God’s own benediction. There was no other boat to be seen. The ocean, tucked as we were near the lip of the Bostwick Bay, lapped with gentle little waves, hardly
anything more than meditative in motion. It was a lovely day for a little homicide. I took a deep breath and reconsidered the situation.
If I couldn’t take Gil’s tongue from above, I’d harvest it from underneath. Sitting on a low rung on the boat ladder, I laid Gil’s body across my thighs, lashing him to me and to the ladder for stability.
With my left hand, I felt his throat from his Adam’s apple to the crease of his jaw, searching for the point where the soft, pliable muscles left off and the hard accordion pleats of the esophagus began. With my right hand, I tipped the knife, aimed at the sweet spot my left hand had found, and from left jawline to right, I sliced through the soft bits where the tongue rooted to the esophagus. The angle wasn’t easy. It would have been so much simpler if he were lying on a hard, flat surface. I felt perturbed as I hacked away. This butchering was not my best work; it lacked delicacy. As carefully as I could from that strange angle, I sliced repeatedly through Gil’s throat; each time, digging deeper, angling the knife up and back toward the soft palate, watching the blood ebb like warm cherry cobbler into the Atlantic.
I made several passes, working to sever all the connections. The water blossomed with bloody roses that flattened to nebulous clouds.
I put the knife between my knees and, with my right hand, I rooted around in the back of Gil’s throat, parting the skin, the thin layer of adipose tissue, bright yellow as marigold butter. I kept slicing carefully with the tip of the boning knife until I could feel the tongue wriggle free from its moorings, like a child’s milk tooth. When the tongue felt loose and mobile, I put the knife between my knees again and pulled the tongue from its roots through the hole I’d made under Gil’s chin. A few tendrils of connective tissue remained, like the stamens of a bloody flower. The knife slipped through them as through tissue paper. How inconsequential they were!
I was surprised at how large the tongue was. I was expecting it to be about four inches long, but it was much longer. Perhaps it was the swelling. Likewise, it weighed much more than the three ounces I’d anticipated. Lying inert in my hand, like a big, pink petal or a giant snail out of its shell, Gil’s tongue resembled exactly what it was: a piece of meat. Gil was gone; his tongue remained; and the sun
shone not unpleasantly on my shoulder blades. I remember thinking that I needed more sunscreen.
I slipped the tongue into my net bag, sheathed the knife, and tucked it in beside the tongue. Then I removed the life vest from Gil and shoved him off into the Atlantic. He was a good man, Gil.
I have, in my life, been a girl, a daughter, a student, a woman, a writer, a critic, a friend, a mistress, a lover, and a murderer. Now I’m merely a prisoner. This is the alpha and the omega of my identity.
Even being a psychopath takes a distant second seat to being a prisoner. I am a prisoner first, foremost, and always. I’m here for life, which is to say I’m here to die, slowly, incrementally, bits of me failing as the New York State Department of Corrections struggles to keep me alive. It’s a touch paradoxical, really, the fact that one of my few rights as a prisoner is the right to health care, given that I’m here for life. Unlike you, I will get the best health care that your tax money can provide. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, ’til death do us part: a life sentence is like being married, but without the handholding.
As a nun to her order, I am eternally joined to New York State.
The phrase “penitentiary system” comes from the religious term for a place to discipline or punish those guilty of religious offenses. The word naturally shares the Latin root “paenitentia,” or repentance. It’s a small mercy that some beneficent donor gave the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility a full Oxford English Dictionary—it’s the OED2, thus outdated, but with “penitentiary” it won’t lead me astray. You can’t have a correctional facility without the aim to correct, however poorly articulated.
You also can’t have a penitentiary system without regret, or so social reformers would have you believe. These modern days, that repentance need not be religious. We inmates are provided with secular methods of confession. It’s called “group,” and I have joined.
I mean, really, why not. It’s a weekly break from the tedium of library books, meals, and jogging in circles on the cracked red running track. With their eyes on the prize of a successful appeal, few inmates will directly announce their crimes, but there seem to be four murderers in the group, myself included, though one or two may
technically be guilty of manslaughter, or what I like to call “insufficiently ambitious homicide.” There are also three women convicted of drug felonies, one arsonist, and one computer hacker— she’s the most mysterious, often absent for long stretches in SHU, or solitary.
We sit in a circle. Our therapist, a middle-aged woman named Joyce, has an affinity for shawls and wearing her dyed red hair clipped into odd little animal-ear-sized bunches. Joyce makes something of a fetish of forgiveness. She urges us to forgive us our own trespasses and those who trespassed against us, as if we are tiny, grimy gods. We begin each session by going around in a circle and talking about what “came up” in the past week. Listening, I sometimes wish I had popcorn. These women live rich, complicated lives of betrayal, anguish, and worry. My own life, drab as custard, affords me little entertainment. I must rely on the crises of strangers.
After a brief recitation of the dramas du jour, Joyce picks up her thread of forgiveness and asks us to “talk to” some particular strain— family, friends, loved ones, ourselves, pets. She loves it when we confess some burden of guilt. This is very interesting for me. Group is quite informative, particularly those portions when Joyce asks us to respond to the feelings of others. I remember the day that Luciana, the arsonist, “shared” about her first foster home, a place she lived with three other foster children and a married couple, and how, coming home when truant from school, she discovered that her foster mother was having an affair with the UPS man. It was a funny story—little bed-burner Luciana sneaking in the back door of her foster home, hearing odd squeaking sounds emanating from the pantry, peeking around the corner, only to spy a pile of brown uniform pants puddled on the ground and a big brown ass pumping away at her foster mother bent over the pantry counter.
The group laughed with Luciana as she told the story, her eyes getting bigger in pantomimed recollection, her voice rising with each new discovery—rhythmic squeak-squeak-squeak, syncopated thwap-thwap-thwap, feral ah-ah-ah. Luciana’s face animated as the truant twelve-year-old she had left in the dim recesses of her haggard adulthood, she caught us in her story’s fist, holding us in the risible grip of pubescent narrative. She talked, we laughed; the foster
mother exclaimed, tween Luciana shrieked, the couple turned to face her united in flagrante delicto, the UPS man exited the foster mom with a non-erotic “pop!” The foster mother, in one graceful swoop, lowered her dress, scooped her gray unmentionables from the floor, and clocked Luciana a ringing blow across the ear.
The story continued with Luciana being beaten purple, getting sent to another foster home, and then two more after that. But Luciana’s story hit its crescendo when, as an eighteen-year-old, she returned to that first foster house, and entered its pantry carrying a pile of kindling, a butane torch, and some accelerant.
She burned that house black, she said. Throughout it all, Luciana didn’t stop laughing. Her laugh carried her from uncomfortable fucking discovery to arsonist’s flickering blaze, her eyes lit ever brighter the closer she got to striking that match. One by one, we quieted. One by one, we knew what was coming. We saw the train rocketing into the tunnel, and we saw that girl tied to the tracks. One at a time, we grew silent, captivated, and horrified. Luciana kept telling her story, oblivious. She laughed and her eyes snapped, her body tight with recollected ecstasy.
The house was a blazing pile of smoke and shadows, Luciana said. The firefighters wouldn’t come in time, she knew, and she laughed. She said she hid in the shrubbery across the street, and she watched. She counted the fleeing figures, silhouetted black against the burning building. Only three people escaped, she said.
“Three-hee-hee,” Luciana laughed.
Luciana ended her story, her laughter ringing hollow. She rocked back and forth in her plastic chair, wound up by the catharsis of confession. The room was silent, clasped in the chest-clenching grip of awkwardness and horror.
Joyce inhaled deeply. “Thank you for sharing,” she said and cast around the group for a reaction. Our eyes met. I saw the desperation in Joyce’s eyes. Oh shit, I thought.
“Dorothy, how does Luciana’s story make you feel?”
“Feel?” I said. “I guess I would say I feel sorry?”
“Yes?” Joyce looked relieved, bright, a rosy cardinal, with a worm in her beak.
“Yes. Sorry. I feel sorry. I feel bad that Luciana had to…” I searched for words that could fill the expected blank. “Experience that.”
Joyce looked so happy and so relieved. Her face twisted with the possibility that she could redeem the horrifying hour with an honorable lesson.
I sighed and said, “I hope Luciana can learn to forgive her foster mother because—” I paused. Joyce nodded, and the group looked at me, expectant. “Because then she can learn to forgive herself.”
“Yes!” said Joyce, and turned to Luciana, asking her if she’d heard what I said.
If there’s one thing that can help a psychopath learn to become a better, more complete person, it’s group therapy. It’s like a drug you take with everyone’s full, smiling approval.
Just because I’m a psychopath doesn’t mean I’m incapable of learning and growing, or whatever.
After I removed the life jacket, I shoved Gil toward the open mouth of the bay, where as the tide goes out, the bay’s currents sweep into the Atlantic. I cleaned the boat. I took my bathing suit off and carefully hung it on the ladder. I took a shower and dressed. Then I lifted the anchor and stowed it. Settling myself on the captain’s chair behind the steering wheel, my eyes lit on the compass, and I felt the wash of terror run down my spine. A nest of howling fantods uncoiled in my chest, cold as ice water. I’d made a mistake, I realized, a towering, inky black mistake.
My plan had been to motor the boat out and around the Sound, and only then to use the ship’s radio to call the authorities when safely away from the site of Gil’s demise. The issue was that Gil’s Hunter 45CC was, as are all modern sailboats, fully equipped with GPS. A body goes missing, and the Coast Guard will look at the ship’s GPS. They’d see how the Sea Bee Tee sat still for an hour or more, only then to venture out to sea. They’d see where I was when I called them, how long I’d been there, and how long the ship had stayed anchored at the lip of the Sound. They’d do the intricate nautical algebra in the service of finding Gil, and in doing it, they’d
see the boat’s movements. There was no way this trip wouldn’t look deeply suspicious, primarily because it was.
I had planned to power the boat into the Atlantic before using the ship’s radio because if the Coast Guard searched the wide-open sea they’d be unlikely to find Gil’s body. Radioing from the bay meant a search in the bay, which could very easily turn up the body. I didn’t mind if the body turned up in a few days—the intervening time and the inevitable sea creatures delectating at Gil’s tasty throat would easily explain the missing tongue—but it was imperative that the body not turn up too early. If the body surfaced too soon, it would be clear that a knife had been at work, and I couldn’t have that. I needed nature to be my cover, and as there were no dachshunds about, I was relying on crabs, fish, and other creatures of the briny deep.
Most of all, the Coast Guard would be able to tell that the Sea Bee Tee had gone out into the Atlantic not under sail but under motor. I had no idea how to sail the boat by myself; I couldn’t maneuver it out into the open water except by motor. There was no reason for Gil, an expert sailor, to motor into the Atlantic on a breezy summer day; sailing into the open sea was exactly the kind of thing he lived for. The Coast Guard would take one look at the GPS, see by the pattern of blips and blops that the boat was motoring, not sailing, and know that I was lying about something. This single mistake would most certainly bring an investigation, and an investigation would raise the likelihood of my being caught for murder.
My only choice was to drop the anchor again and come up with an excuse for choosing to spend the night in the bay. There was, of course, no reason for Gil and me to do so. We were only about two hours from the marina, a location that made perfect sense for a day sail and absolutely no sense at all for a sleepover. I turned the problem over in my head, but I found no solution other than spending the night on the boat, right where I was. There was nothing I could do that wouldn’t read as suspicious to the Coast Guard, so there was nothing to do but stay put and make the call in the morning. And after wrapping the tongue tight in plastic wrap and sticking it in the ship’s fridge, that’s what I did.
I was, as it turned out, profoundly lucky. I called the Coast Guard early the next morning, having concocted a story of our deciding on a whim to spend the night on the Sea Bee Tee, of rising to make coffee, and of finding myself alone on the boat. I sounded appropriately mystified and anxious. The Coast Guard, a lovely pair of men with skin sun-toasted the color of a marshmallow a second before it bursts into flames, arrived quickly, surveyed the scene, called in a search team to look for Gil, and ferried me home from the Sea Bee Tee. They let me gather my things before disembarking, which included my faintly blood-sodden bikini and Gil’s tongue hidden in ice in my bag, and under their care, I made it back to Shelter Island where a less tan policewoman took my statement before dropping me at the Greenport train station so I could take the LIRR back to Manhattan.
I dropped my bikini in the trash receptacle outside an Au Bon Pain in Penn Station, and I dropped the knife into a trash can on the corner of 7th Avenue and 32nd Street. Arriving home, I was pleased to see that the tongue suffered no damage in its travels.
Tongue, I believe, is an underappreciated bit of flesh. Delicately flavored, intensely tender, incredibly cheap, and absolutely singular, tongue has everything going for it but its discomfiting location.
People, fools that they are, seem to have a cognitive block against putting a tongue in their mouths. It makes no sense—a kiss is still a kiss, even after you’ve dined on tongue. Tongue is an amazing foodstuff: you can roast it, pickle it, sauté it, fry it, or boil it, and it will taste just dandy. The important thing you have to remember as you’re cooking tongue is that you have to skin it. I like to scald mine quickly in very, very hot water, then remove the tough outer layer.
After that, you can have your way with this fatty, luscious delicacy.
It’s very difficult, even as an amateur cook, to fuck up tongue.
Gil’s tongue was a lovely little morsel, surprisingly delectable for all its swelling. I skinned, sliced, then sautéed it with olive oil and garlic, adding chunks of plump Roma tomatoes, and finishing with green olives. I served it alongside a lovely arugula salad that I dressed simply with olive oil, lemon, and shaved Parmesan. Crostini rubbed with olive oil and layered with anchovy paste, and a cutting, fresh white from Liguria, Bisson Bianco Marea—hard to find, and
utterly worth the search—completed the meal. I dined outside on my little terrace, Manhattan like a magical film still, as it can be on a June night, and I thought about all the wonderful times I’d shared
with Gil.
He was a lovely man, Gil. So delicate.
About five days later, I received a follow-up call from the Suffolk Police Department. The Coast Guard had found Gil’s body. His body, they said, had gotten caught in a current, first swept out to sea, then returned to the coast on South Fork, several miles away from where he had perished. In that time, there had been some damage, they said, but they seemed to have found nothing abnormal. Preliminary findings from the autopsy pointed to a drowning, they said, though they couldn’t explain why. They expressed their condolences. I wept, mostly with relief.
In retrospect, as I sit on this orange plastic chair, just another inmate number in this prudently repentant group of my peers, I realize that killing Gil was wrong. Perhaps it’s spending time in group, with Joyce and the other inmates, but now I see that I made so many mistakes, beginning with murdering Gil at all. Killing Gil had nothing to do with Gil himself. He was a good man, poor Gil. He was collateral damage.
I lashed out at Gil because I felt humiliated when I was laid off by Eat & Drink. I couldn’t take down Eat & Drink, and I felt pained, impotent, raging with no target. I killed Gil because he was the weakest link.
The man ate out of my hand; murdering him was like killing a pet.
I acted like a bully with Gil, but then he always liked it when I took the upper hand. He always enjoyed letting me have my way with his flesh. La petite mort, the French call orgasm, so who can say what final pleasures I gifted Gil as he breathed his last at my behest.
Dying in that briny ocean, taste of verboten fig eternally on his lips, there are worse ways for Gil to go. You could almost say I did him a favor.
