14
Steak
“Hiya, Ms. Daniels? This is Detective Kiandra Wasserman calling from the Suffolk County Police Department.” From the speaker of my iPhone, Detective Wasserman’s voice sounded like she’d just smoked her last cigarette to a nubbin and couldn’t wait to light another. “We need to, uh, talk with you about a, erm, Mr. Casimir Bezrukov and hoped maybe you could make it over to Yaphank.
Please call us back at your, um, earliest convenience.” She left a number and the message ended.
It was early December in 2013, about six weeks since I’d last seen Casimir, first alive and then dead, and I’d left his body in a flamey conflagration. The brisk, crisp potential of October fall had turned to a sullen, pewter-skied winter. In the intervening weeks, I’d not thought of Casimir at all. In his memory’s place stood a paper cutout, a generalized form, a slight wisp that could slip into nothingness. I poked the circular arrow on the iPhone and listened to the message again. My right eye twitched.
I opened Safari and searched “Yaphank,” an unfortunate name for a town; it sounded like something preteens call masturbation.
Yaphank, I discovered, was in Suffolk County. It was not good that a Suffolk County police detective was calling me. If it had been a New York City cop, it would’ve been fine—my worry would be a missing persons report, a minor thing. That it was Suffolk County, the county that included Fire Island and all its quaint seasonal townships, sniffed of something more ominous. This did not please me. This did not please me at all.
I erased the message and decided that I hadn’t heard it. Then I met my friends Ron and Paul at a restaurant I was writing about, Cacciucco, a newly opened Japanese-Italian fusion spot. It was, sorry to say, uneven. It’s a food writer’s job to keep an open mind to a wide spectrum of foods, but some pose a bigger challenge than others. I’m unconvinced, for example, that miso has a place in risotto; I love uni, but don’t need it to garnish my burrata; and I’m not a fan of Madras curry in any food that doesn’t derive from Madras.
Color me the very arsenic-and-old-lace shade of old-fashioned, but I wasn’t feeling it. I had to return, of course, certainly on a better day, a day unscathed by the fried mozzarella tones of Detective Kiandra Wasserman and uncolored by the irony that I was dining with my Fire Island alibi, for Ron and Paul owned the Dunewood house where I recovered my equilibrium after I killed Casimir.
I mentally played back my visit to Fire Island that October, from the time I arrived at Dunewood to the moment I departed four days later. I sifted through the detritus of my Robbins Rest memories, wondered what I could have left behind at that scorched beach house that pointed Detective Wasserman to me. I imagined her sitting at her desk, some sad autopsied deli sandwich splayed open before her, its grinder guts spilling pimento loaf, waxy lipid-yellow cheese, wan shredded lettuce, and squirts of pus-white mayonnaise from a squeeze packet. I could see her, Detective Kiandra Wasserman, with her frosted hair and her pack of Parliaments and her palate dulled by her devotion to nicotine and Olive Garden. I could see her with her can of diet cola and her freezer stacked with lurid boxes of diet frozen entrees, cheating with Marie Callender’s chocolate satin pie, still icy at the center because her slippery sweet tooth couldn’t wait for a thaw. I could see her, and I didn’t like it.
What had led Wasserman and her mom jeans to my doorstep. I’d burned the beach house to the ground, and before I’d left, I’d cleaned my tracks. I’d carried everything with me—my containers of duck confit, my kitchen knife, my jar that had held the wine corks in denatured alcohol. I had cooked the entire meal wearing gloves, except for kneading the dough for the bread (it won’t do to compromise some things). The only times I hadn’t worn gloves was while eating and making love with Casimir. I had been the very
picture of the conscientious modern criminal—if not the consummate houseguest.
I tried to put it out of my mind. I tweeted something about Brussels sprouts resembling alien heads; I updated my blog with a brief rant against flaming drinks; I reviewed my notes for my Cacciucco write-up, tentatively titled “Neither Fish Nor Foul at Williamsburg’s Cacciucco.” I downloaded the edits for a “trend piece”
I’d written on artisanal pop tarts. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the edits, however. My editor at DISH was this darling little girl. When DISH hired me, I was turning fifty; my editor was twenty-four. She was born the same year as Photoshop, which tells you something.
My editor believes that exclamation points are stylish. She believes that “créatives” is a word. She finds first-person essays about tampons “edgy.” The skin on her face gleams, untrammeled as blancmange, which no one makes anymore, which I must admit is one tiny sign of improvement.
America has grown more food obsessed, more slavishly hungry for bits and bobs and scraps and flaps of all things gastronomical, luscious, and savory. And you would think that as we have collectively grown more knowledgeable about food; as our restaurants grow in number, complexity, skill level, and creativity; as we as a nation of eaters refuse to be dull, complacent sheep; you would think that food critics would be lauded, knighted, raised high as voices of all that’s true, worthy, and good to eat.
You’d be wrong. As I write this memoir in 2016, we don’t get thoughtful food writing, we get Yelp, we get “influencers,” we get personal essays that masquerade as recipes. America is more interested in eating and drinking well than it has ever been in its 240- year history, yet never have food critics done so much for so little money and been so soundly ignored by so many. Sure, there are the few reviewers who hold sway—and the Times has had altogether too many—but that great engine of democratization, the internet, has steamrolled the playing field. A swamp festers where once stood a mountain range. Everyone who’s ever watched Top Chef and considered herself adventurous when ordering sweetbreads now thinks she’s a food critic. After all, how hard can it be? I mean, it’s just, like, food, right?
In my twenty-five years as a food writer, I have written two books —both reached the New York Times bestseller list—I’ve been a staff writer at three magazines; and I’ve written for countless others. But by 2013, I was writing for a website. It doesn’t even print anything.
There is no there, there, at DISH. There is, however, a lot of video because if there’s one thing that the people who love food love it’s watching; the internet has made peeping Toms of us all. It almost goes without saying that, as the first food-specific web glossy, DISH led the pivot-to-video charge.
And, you know, it’s fine; it’s fine; it’s pretty and sleek and fine. The open-air DISH office teems with crema-faced young things who wear T-shirts and slump around in big boots and black leggings and hair the color of Pop Rocks. The money behind the site comes from a twenty-nine-year-old man who invented an app that helps you break up—with a lover, a job, a therapist, a television show, a hairstyle. It doesn’t matter from what you want to part, this colorful little phone application helps you do it. It’s called, appropriately enough, “BreakApp.” Maybe you’ve used it. I’ve never needed to. When I feel the need to break up with something, it’s simply dead to me.
Times have changed, and, like an octopus, I have tried to match my skin to everything new. I started writing my blog in 2003. I joined Twitter in 2008. I have an Instagram account—for the love of all things sacrosanct and holy, I take pictures of my food. I even Snap- chat. Any more adaption of youthful technology, and I might as well dye my hair the color of Jordan almonds. I have even appeared more than once as a guest judge on cooking shows. I pretended to laugh when I was supposed to laugh; I developed catchphrases, hurling, “Your taste is disgraced” at competitors. I have absolutely burst with not caring, but I didn’t show it.
Despite all my hard work, I must run to stay in place. Every decade, every year, and sometimes every month, I see my money, my life, and my work devalued. Literal devaluation is the most pressing, but figurative isn’t much easier. Ordinary people, home in bed with the flu, fall in love with Guy Fieri and his fast food doggerel and, taking a road trip to flavortown, decide that they, too, should be restaurant critics; they start a blog; they stop reading food criticism; and one by one, drip by drip, they have chipped away at everything
I’ve devoted myself to for the last quarter century. And it makes a kind of lunatic sense—if chefs are average, ordinary people who look like Rachael Ray and talk like Emeril Lagasse, then why, too, can’t the people who critique them be know-nothing vulgarians. All you need to be a food critic is a mouth and internet access, and almost every asshole has both.
The thing that roasts my black heart crispy is that these WordPress nudniks don’t have the ethics of a high roller who’s down on his luck and looking for an angle. They don’t care about being incognito; indeed, they don’t want to be—they want to be friends with the chef. They want free food; they want to meet the maestro; they want to whip out their iPhones and Instagram their meals as they’re being made. They want more than to rub elbows; they want to kiss asses. For all the things I’ve done, for all the questionable acts, for all the adultery, for all the various acts of perversity, for all the callous disregard I’ve had for men, I have never, ever fucked a chef. Nor would I. Either he would hope for a good review and I’d give it because he deserved it, or he would hope for a good review and I’d give him a bad one because he deserved that. In either case, I’d know that I’d fucked him, and I’d have to live with that knowledge.
That’s a line I can’t cross.
And thus I write for DISH. I have my copy edited by a recent Brown graduate who doesn’t know the difference between chiffonade and chinoiserie. She’s fine, really, she’s fine, but I miss the days when I had an unlimited budget, joyous excursions, and checks as fat and sleek as geese—free-flowing, hot-and-cold running money that I could use to track down the finest offal in Rome, the top tripe in Siena, the best brains in Piedmont. I miss the days when my work appeared in glorious four-color separation, on pages slick as oiled thighs and just as weighty. I miss the days when my work—my words —mattered, and I can’t shake the feeling that all the running I do to keep up, all the hobnobbing on the treadmill of the Internet, all the tweeting, blogging, Instagramming, and Tumblring, all the gut- wrenching time I put in to being relevant, isn’t just a feeble way to plug a forefinger into the dike, to stall my inevitable slow ebb into obscurity.
I am a whore, but I am a print whore, and I miss cracking spines to see myself splayed open in wet, glossy spreads of luscious, expansive prose. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for print media, and for me.
The Kiandra Wasserman situation weighed. I worked, I ate, I drank. I had sex with a charming young man I met in the elevator at the New York Public Library. I told him my name was Patience Fortitude; he believed me. Only intellectuals are more gullible than idiots. He had a fine sheaf of notes on Napoleonic Champagne glasses, and a sweet, thick, upstanding cock. It nearly took my mind off Detective BBQ Corn Nuts. Detective Low-fat Cheesecake. Detective Spicy Calabrian Wings. Detective Soup in a Bread Bowl.
Four days after Wasserman left her message on my iPhone, my doorbell rang. Only after I opened it and saw the badges flash did I realize that my doorman didn’t buzz.
“Hiya, Ms. Daniels,” the short woman in front of me said, flashing a badge as she grimaced. It might have been a smile. It looked uncomfortable. She was terrible at putting people at ease. “I’m Detective Kiandra Wasserman, and this is Detective Lou MacDonnell. We’re from the, uh, Suffolk Police Department, and we’d like to ask you a few questions. May we come in?” She again made that rictus movement with her mouth.
Wasserman’s hair was not frosted as I suspected. It was black shot with gray and ringed her head in snaking dreads that were barely constrained in a bright blue scrunchie. Her body was not round and soft, as I’d expected. Wasserman was small, but fit. This woman had not tasted a blooming onion in decades. Under her navy polyester sports coat, her acrylic-blend sweater, and her brown skin, Wasserman had muscles nearly as hard as her pistol, wherever that was. Her partner, however, was plush as a teddy bear. The hair on his head was thatchy, wiry, a little dandruffy, and thin, giving him the look of an aging chow-chow.
“Sure,” I said. I had no choice; clearly, I had no choice. What choice did I have. If I said no, they’d call me in and I’d have to— what’s the common parlance—lawyer up. That would be tantamount
to an admission of guilt, or so every cop show would have brainwashed me to believe.
Wasserman and MacDonnell entered and followed me down the
hall. I waved my hand at the couch.
“Espresso?” I asked. “Water?”
“Water would be great, thanks.” Wasserman was clearly the top brass of the pair. I returned to the living room, water glasses in hand, to see them seated in the two guest chairs. This put me on the couch, the apex to their triangle.
“Ms. Daniels,” Wasserman said, “we wanted to ask you a few questions about the weekend of October twelfth. Do you mind?”
“No. Of course not.” I felt my adrenaline spike. It was interesting.
“Where were you?”
“I was on Fire Island, staying at my friends Ron and Paul’s house in Dunewood. Why?”
Wasserman narrowed her eyes at me. “We’re investigating a matter involving, um, Mr. Casimir Bezrukov, as I believe I mentioned on the voice mail message. Did you get my message, Ms. Daniels?”
“Yes, I did. I was so nervous that I erased it by mistake. I’ve never gotten a phone call from the police before.”
“Why didn’t you call me back?”
Wasserman and her CrossFit thighs. I imagined her skin oiled and salted, apple in her mouth, pirouetting slowly on a spit. “I just got so flustered.”
Wasserman looked at MacDonnell and shared a smile. “You don’t seem like the kind of woman who gets nervous, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“And yet,” I said. I was imagining a swift slice through her throat with a nine-inch chef’s blade. I paused and summoned the scents of a basket of biscuits steaming floury heat, spread with freshly churned butter. I smiled.
“So. Okay. October thirteenth, you were staying in Robbins Rest
—”
“Dunewood.”
“Right, Dunewood. What were you doing on Fire Island?”
“I needed to get out of the city. I like the Island in fall. It’s so quiet, and the autumn air smells like salt and wood smoke.”
“Yeah, yeah. Nothing like the fall. Were you alone?”
“Yes. I wanted some time by myself to write.”
“You’re a writer.”
“Yes.” Arranged around me were two heavy quartz ashtrays, a bronze statue, one alabaster lamp, and a pair of hefty silver candlesticks. Any of these objects would make an elegant bludgeon.
My right palm itched.
Wasserman looked down at a tiny spiral notebook in her palm.
“So. Um, Casimir Bezrukov. Do you know him?”
My thumbs against her throat. Press ten seconds against the carotid artery, and she’d be passed out long enough for me to choke her some undiscovered shade of blue. A minute, and she’d be dead as her partner’s intellect. Deader. I’d never eaten a woman’s flesh.
“Yes, I do. We, oh, this is a little embarrassing. We met at a hotel bar and, forgive me… “ “We’re all adults here,” Wasserman said.
“Yes. Well, it’s personal.” I paused for effect, imagining how a
normal woman would act.
“Please go on.”
“We—we had sex in his hotel room a week or two before the weekend I was in Fire Island.” I paused. “Why do you ask?”
“We’re investigating his death. Did you see Mr. Bezrukov while you were on Fire Island?”
“What? Oh, no,” I said and tried to look stricken. “How horrible!” I pressed my hands to my face, pushing the heels of my hands at my eye sockets. I took a deep breath. Head in hands, I was playing for time. I hadn’t expected I’d need to. I’d prepared myself for this conversation. Since the voice mail message four days before, I knew it was coming. It was fascinating to find myself caught between foreknowledge and a total lack of emotional preparation.
After all, I’d lived much of my life in a curlicue line leading to this point—this conversation, this one, me and the law, and the game of playing innocent. I’d played innocent early and often. My sister’s cat that had gone missing. The grades mysteriously changed on my boarding school transcript. The Piemonte polizia following Giovanni’s impalement. The mysterious circumstances surrounding the kiddie porn found on my competitor’s computer. The Coast Guard
conversations about the moored meanderings of the Sea Bee Tee.
Marco. Marco’s wife. The polizia after Marco’s body was found, hung upside down, exsanguinated, guts strewn like Christmas garlands, symbols in his blood painted on the walls. I’d anticipated this conversation in a general kind of way, but the specifics of Wasserman sitting across from me on my own furniture I had failed to predict. How did I act, exactly. What do normal women do when they find out their casual sex compadre is dead.
I was accustomed to looking innocent in more than one country, in more than one language, and at more than one stage in my life.
But somehow the wealth of my experience, the breadth and the range and the depth of my feigned innocence, seemed to crumble like shortbread under the weighted gaze of Detective Wasserman.
Could it be that this steely-flanked, Medusa-haired, Long Island Jewess would best me. Could she, who clearly sustained herself on a diet of horse meat, egg whites, and kale in wet, dehydrated, pureed, and juiced forms, be my nemesis. Had I finally met my match. You’d think I would be thrilled. You’d be wrong.
“How very sad!” I said. “Poor Casimir!!” I didn’t want to lay it on too thick. Like swirling ganache on a cupcake, I had to tempt this paleo-CrossFit-fanatic policewoman into swallowing something she’d otherwise feel disinclined to digest. I paused, then asked, “How?
How did it happen?”
“He was in a house that burned to the ground.” Wasserman turned to her partner. “Lou, grab Ms. Daniels a glass of water, would ya?” MacDonnell lumbered off to the kitchen, and I heard some rustling and the sound of the tap; a large hand thrust a glass of water in front of me. I took it and drank, glad for the silence and the opportunity to hide myself behind the glass, if only for a moment.
“Um, Ms. Daniels.” Wasserman looked at me, her eyes falcon bright. “Do you have any idea what Mr. Bezrukov might have been doing on Fire Island?”
“No,” I said. “I thought he was in town for business. At least, that’s what he told me.”
“Yes, well, as far as we can tell, uhn, Mr. Bezrukov didn’t know many people in New York. We’re unable to locate anyone on Fire Island who might have known Mr. Bezrukov.” Wasserman looked at
me again and pressed her lips together. “We were hoping that you
might have some insight.”
“I’m so sorry, but I really don’t.”
“I see. Well, we thank you,” she said. “Do you have any plans to
leave the area? Any travel plans?”
I told her I didn’t.
“Good.” She dropped her card on the table. “We’d take it as a favor if you stayed in town.”
“You—you—can’t think I had anything to do with it, could you?” I tried to look stricken with innocent fear. I approximated the expression of a deer in headlights.
“No, no, no. Nothing like that. Just if anything crosses your mind, if you remember anything, please give me a call. Lou?”
At the door, she stopped, hand on the knob. “By the way, loved your Guide to Eating Gloriously.”
“It’s me,” I said into the intercom. The big red metal door buzzed. I waited in the hallway so narrow that two people couldn’t stand side by side and listened to the keening of the elevator. The elevator door shuddered open; I stepped inside and pressed “7.” The door shuddered closed. Tick. Tick. Tick. Creak. Creak. Creak. The door shuddered open, and I stepped out of the tiny elevator and into the studio of Emma Absinthe.
Emma was working on a series of paintings of famous women who famously got paid to have sex. “The Whorestep Chronicles,” she called them. Aspasia, Nell Gwyn, Madame du Barry, Mata Hari, Cora Pearl, Veronica Franco, Carol Leigh. Women who’d sold access to their bodies and risen to power, fame, or infamy. I was quite fond of the project. So many of these women knew how to carry a knife. Emma was at work painting herself as Calamity Jane; the canvas stood about a foot taller than Emma, and she was nose to about navel with Jane, intent on adding dimension to the fringe that dripped like tallow from the elbow of Jane’s buckskin jacket.
“Sorry, Dolls, I have to finish this section.” Emma looked and jutted her chin at the bags I carried in my arms. “Is that food?”
“Yes,” I said. “Steak.”
“Oh, thank the gods. I was hungry. It’s like you read my mind.
Again.” Emma had long ago left her veganism with her gas-mask purse and her anti-capitalist practices.
“Steak. Baby collard greens. Pancetta stesa. Eggs for béarnaise.
Parsnips, celeriac, and lemon. Castello dei Rampolla Sammarco 1996. Give me forty-five, and dinner is served.”
“I love you madly, you beautiful woman!”
I went to the kitchen and began clearing the espresso cups, Champagne flutes, and jam jars out of the sink, tidying the space.
I decanted the wine, and took to roasting the root vegetables with pearl onions, thyme, and lemon, browning the pancetta and sautéing the greens, melting the butter and slowly pouring it while whisking egg yolks, and, finally, searing the steak in duck fat and grilling it bloody. Setting the table and lighting the candles, I called Emma as the steak rested under its tinfoil hat. She sat as I slid a plate before her.
“Salute,” I said. Emma raised her glass to meet mine.
Emma scanned her plate. “No carbs! Thanks.” She forked a hefty piece of very rare meat into her mouth. “What’s up?”
I rolled my eyes. Wasserman the boogie monster floated like Marley’s ghost, her snaking dreadlocks glowing spectral in my head, her imagined muscles rippling under her acetate blazer. I could nearly hear the clanking of iron chains.
“Maybe I just want to see you, Emma. Ensure you’re eating at least one meal this week that was cooked by a caring hand.
Something that didn’t come to you care of Seamless or GrubHub or SweetEats, or whatever your dining app of the moment is.”
Emma rested her fork on her plate. “Let me tell you about this tedious argument I had with Sebastian Arpante.” She sliced off another unseemly chunk of steak and popped it into her mouth. Her
table manners were far from Italian.
I looked at her blankly.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “So. Sebastian actually told an Artforum writer that I was a ‘culturally appropriating virago with the derivative, vampiric talent of Berthe Morisot,’ but now that it’s printed for all the art world to see, he’s whinging and claiming it was off the record—”
I let Emma prattle on about the latest online argument she’d had with some of her many detractors. I poured wine, and poured more, and I listened. Emma held the unique position of being an artist beloved by legions of threadbare art students, pencil-sucking art critics, and collectors padded with wanton wads of cash. As much as she painted for the one-percenters, selling their own hypocrisy back to them at a steep markup, she also painted, sketched, and inked her way into a feminist-anarchist consciousness. She held a vibrant credibility among the art geeks, who are usually the first to denounce any artist who makes six figures a year—and Emma has been making seven consistently for more than a decade. But this very popularity made her a target for the cosseted academic elite, particularly since Emma didn’t have an art degree. She’d studied, but not at an art school; she’d gone to college, but she hadn’t graduated.
She was viciously talented and ridiculously hardworking, and people who truck with elite institutions didn’t—couldn’t—forgive her reckless attitude toward traditional models of artistic creation.
Emma was often eviscerated, sometimes publicly, usually privately, by people in power. Being a person who didn’t forgive slights easily, as well as one who truly never leaves the confines of her own world, Emma has an unfortunate tendency to wrap herself in the drama of her own disparagers. I listened to her unspool, and I poured out the bottle of Sammarco. Then I popped another, and I poured that. We drank it, talking in the shorthand of old friends. An hour or two later, we were curled like commas on her big unmade bed, holding jam jars of crushed ice, raspberries, Limoncello, and Champagne.
“This isn’t a social call, Dolls. I can tell from your face.” Emma put her jam jar down on the stool that served as her bedside table. “Tell me what’s up or I’ll be forced to tell you all about my new boy. He’s got a cock that’s—and I’m not being metaphoric—exactly like a large Asian eggplant.”
“I got a visit from a pair of detectives from the Suffolk Police Department,” I said. Emma stiffened, curling reflexively on herself.
“This guy, I met him in a hotel bar. We had sex a few weeks ago.
Anyway, he died in a house fire, I guess.”
“Oh God, Dolls. Are you okay?” Emma sat upright, weaved a bit, unsteady on her elbows.
“That’s a good question. I’m not sure.” I swallowed a mouthful of the Limoncello concoction. The world moved in an uncomfortable swirl, like a lava lamp. I was drunk.
“Sure, that’s a shock. Of course you’re going to feel weird and awful. Do you, you know, want a hug?”
“Jesus, Emma, no.” I stopped. My tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth. Emma looked at me with big blue eyes. She poked me
with her forefinger.
“Go on, Dolls.”
“Emma, I can’t. It’s nothing. He’s dead. It’s nothing. Really.”
I killed him, I wanted to tell her. I stabbed him through the heart with a vintage ice pick. I burned down the house with his body in it.
I’m not okay, I wanted to say, because that pony-assed police- woman, Detective Kiandra Wasserman, has found something that pushed her on her trail to get her man, and her man is me.
“Jesus. Dorothy.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, and inwardly I screamed, Emma. I killed him! We were lying around after fucking, and I found my hand wrapped around the hilt of the ice pick; I plunged it into his heart; I didn’t even love him. And this was, you see, the essential difference between Casimir’s murder and all the rest: I didn’t love him, and I didn’t eat him. Casimir wasn’t even snack food. He wasn’t a bag of airline almonds, a cup of Greek yogurt, a bit of street meat on a stick.
He was that treat you chewed and swallowed almost mindlessly, blank to notes of salt or sweet, of silk or coarse, of the caressing cold of ice cream or the blistering spit of pizza. Casimir was a passing thought. There had been Casimirs before; there would be Casimirs after. So why did I kill him.
Perhaps I had merely learned to enjoy the act of killing. The television shows and the movies all say that—you kill a person or two and you get a “taste for it,” as if murder were caviar or fugu, sophisticated gastronomical experiences whose enjoyment requires inculcation into a cult. Or as if killing were like potato chips; one leads to another in an endless orgy of mindless indulgence. Before
you know it, the whole bag is gone, and you’re sitting there with gritty fingers, grease on your lips, and bathed in blood.
In my experience, however, murder is roasting a pig. When you’ve never roasted a pig, it feels like a very big, very overwhelming undertaking. It seems like something so fraught with difficulties that the sheer number of things that could go horribly awry is intimidating.
The pig, from a distance, seems bigger than you. And as much as you’d like to roast that pig, to cook it until its skin is crispy as old parchment, its flesh as succulent as a Vermeer pear, you think the task is beyond you. Yet when you do it, you find out that it’s truly not all that hard—if you’ve roasted a turkey, you can roast a suckling pig —once you do it, you find yourself more than capable. You hardly feel bad for the pig. After all, it’s scrumptious.
I never gained a “taste” for murder. I might have gained an appreciation for human flesh, but I’ve always had a wide-ranging, experimental palate. I might have learned how to kill more efficiently and effectively. I might even have grown a thick layer of protection, not unlike the calluses you’ll find on a chef’s hand, where I had to butt up against the heated sanctity of human life. None of these experiences is as crass as developing a hankering for murder.
Still, even I had to admit that Casimir was an outlier. His unfortunate demise did not fit the pattern. So why did I do it.
I remember that moment when, straddling Casimir’s long éclair- like body, I had felt an overwhelming weight of banality settle on me like an eiderdown. I felt suffocated, resting there naked in the sex- scented air. There were so many things I could have done. I could have stood up and thrown him out of the house in a crazy operatic act of self-definition, run to the ocean and flung myself into its cold, raging arms, or merely walked to the kitchen and made espresso. I could have done any number of things to tear that banality a new one, but I didn’t. Instead I killed him.
Unlike the others—Giovanni, Andrew, Gil, Marco—Casimir was not essential to my identity. With Casimir, I felt pleasure and power, but I didn’t feel the sudden solidification of self that I got from the others. These four men I couldn’t live without, and now I don’t have to. I am all of them; they are some of me. Killing Casimir was rash and useless; his murder was akin to pulling the wings off a butterfly.
And I wanted, I absolutely itched, to tell Emma about this murder.
Lying next to Emma in her big rumpled bed, I wanted to disclose the whole of it. I wanted to confess, to tell her about the satisfying heft of the ice pick in my hand, the balletic arc of my arm, the cinematic spurt of blood. I wanted to paint Emma a visceral picture, something so thick and real that she could smell the air redolent with duck fat, pheromones, and arterial spray. I felt my hand cover my mouth, an involuntary act to stanch my story’s flow.
It wasn’t as if I felt guilt. I felt no guilt for stabbing Casimir, no guilt for gutting Giovanni with a Fiat, no guilt for slitting Marco’s throat, no guilt for asphyxiating Gil with a fig, no guilt for suffocating Andrew with carbon monoxide (and no guilt for shoving Liam off the side of the cliff, no guilt for Yves and that remarkably well-timed bee sting, and not even any guilt for letting anaphylactic shock do my dirty work not once but twice).
I searched the parts of my body where guilt was supposed to live and I found nothing, not a whisper, not a peep, not a flicker, not a flutter, not the faintest susurration of anything even remotely like remorse. From what I understood, only a few things compelled people to reveal secrets, and guilt was number one with a bullet. I certainly had no Theodor Reik compulsion to confess, no tics, no blushing, no stammering, no clues. Nothing but the naked and pulsating will to tell.
Emma was talking to me. She was waving her jam jar around in sloppy arcs, making a point, some point I’d missed. She had clearly been talking for a while. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I said you’re living a police drama.”
“It’s a bit derivative. Not my best work,” I said.
“Yes,” said Emma, “that was the source of my worry—your stunning lack of originality.” She looked at me. “Go home, Dolls, you’re drunk.” And then Emma flopped down on the bed, coiled around a pillow, and fell asleep, snoring gently. I pried the jam jar out of her hand, put it on the table next to her, and wobbled, unsteady, out the door and into the night.
