15
Gamberetto
The morning after my swirling, drunken night with Emma, I woke with a migraine and a burning, restive need to do something— anything—preferably violent. Flashes of the evening popped like firecrackers, while shards of conversation with Wasserman lacerated me. Nauseated, I lay on my bed in the dark, a crimson silk sleep- mask on my eyes, my skin hot and dry, then slick with sweat and pricked with gooseflesh. Every forty-five minutes, I ran to the bathroom and threw up; at first, a lurid, festive mauve; then a clear, acidic stream; then nothing. My stomach heaved, each abdominal convulsion resonated in my head, and the apparitional railroad spike drove deeper into the space behind my left eye. I wanted to pull my brain out through my eye sockets with a buttonhook.
What to do. What to do. The indomitable Detective Wasserman clearly had something on me, but what. I ran through the events of that October weekend over and over, like my memory was a manuscript I could revise. I had taken nothing but remembrances and left nothing but footprints, and those had been scrubbed by the wind and scoured by the house fire’s flame. I lay in bed and thought through the Fire Island events step by step, from the moment I asked Casimir to come with me, to my train ride, from food shopping to confit making, from meeting Casimir in the Fire Island twilight to our sharing of flesh, from the moment I stabbed him in the jugular to the time I returned to my Dunewood safe haven. Beginning with invitation and ending with conflagration, I scoured my memory and found it as clean as a proverbial bone.
Maybe there were video cameras at the ferry dock, but that wasn’t a problem; I had a legitimate reason for taking the ferry to Dunewood. My friends Ron and Paul truly did own a house, I truly had gotten their permission to visit it, and they truly had given me a key. Maybe Casimir had told someone he was meeting me—but I’d never given him my real cell phone number. I had one phone for business and friends—well, Emma, essentially, but a few other contacts, my family, for example, and publishers. I had a secret other phone for dalliances. When I wanted to quit the man of the moment, I threw away the phone and bought another. It was easy and clean, like flushing a condom. If a relationship lasted longer than the cell phone, I bought a new cell and gave the old man my new number. In this day of taking your phone number with you wherever you went— like a thumbprint, like a food allergy, like a talisman—it was a little odd. Yet no one had felt the need to remark upon it.
I had also been careful with my personal phone. I left it at the house in Dunewood when I met Casimir; I hadn’t carried it with me when I scouted houses in Robbins Rest. However, I’d made sure that it sat in my pocket to indicate that I’d been out and about on Fire Island, and far away from Robbins Rest. When I met Casimir, my cell phone had lain quiet and content as a mollusk, in the home of Ron and Paul, wholly unconnected to my whereabouts. It came to this: whatever it was that put Casimir and me together in the bloodhound head of Detective Wasserman, neither my phone number nor my cell phone was it.
Nor, for that matter, was my name. Spending almost two decades as a food critic gave me ample experience in concocting new identities on the fly. My colleagues often bewail the difficulty of remembering their various identities, and it’s true that there’s little worse than making a reservation at a restaurant, then, faced with the supercilious maître d’, finding that the name under which you’d booked the table has, like a terrine from its mold, slipped your mind.
This happened to me once, so I devised a system wherein it would never happen to me again. I picked a movie, and I ran through the major characters until I was done. Then I picked another and walked through that cast list. I was Jane Gittes, Evelyn Cross, Nora Cross, Holly Mulwray, and Ida Sessions. I was Filomena Marlowe, Eileen
Wade, Mary Augustine, and Jo Ann Eggenweiler. I was Cat Tramell, Nicole Curran, Beth Garner, Lisa Hoberman, and Roxanne Hardy.
Sometimes I’d catch that flickering look of semi-recognition, but only once did a maître d’ question me. I remember, I announced myself as Patricia Franchini at an aggressively chic Tribeca restaurant.
“Like the Jean Seberg character in A bout de souffle?” asked the host in impeccable French that my mother would have kissed with those Dior lips. The maître d’s eyebrows rose toward his improbably
high hairline.
“Yes,” I said.
“Really.”
“Truly.” He stared; I returned his gaze, steely. He sighed, swished up a stack of menus, and sat my party at an awful table right by the doors to the kitchen. The food, however, was tremendous, over the top, far better than either of my other visits. Clearly, the host had told the chef or the manager, and someone had puzzled out the ruse. I’d worn a wig and glasses, but it was a very close call. I learned my lesson, and I never again plundered a French film for my fictive selves.
Thus it was that Casimir knew me as Diane Selwyn. He thought I was a casting agent. He thought I lived on the Upper East Side. He thought I was unhappily married to a man named Hank. He thought, in short, that I was someone I was not. He went to his grave certain I was Diane. It was fine. It was fine. It was fine. Diane had plunged an ice pick into his throat, not I.
And that thought brought me up short and cold and sweating in the gloaming of my late-afternoon bedroom. I had only ever been Diane Selwyn to Casimir. When he called out my name in bed—and he had, often, for he was the sort who called your name—he’d lingered on the implosive, hard, interdental “D” and the nasal “aye,” drawing a straight line between my fictive name and his impending mortality, before he gasped the final “ann.” To Casimir, I was Diane, only Diane, and never Dorothy. So, then, precisely how did Detective Wasserman know me by my real name. How had she connected me to him, when I’d put so much in the way of anyone doing exactly this.
Someone, somewhere, or something had slipped, a breeze had blown, a curtain had brushed aside, the scale had fallen, a glove had
dropped. The jig was up. I was exposed, and there I was, standing naked before that sculpted, muscular lady cop. I had no idea how my clothes had been torn from my body.
This was so much worse than I had first thought.
Snatches of my conversation with Emma played like a bad movie flashback. I fumbled through my hazy memory as if I were pawing through a jumbled lingerie drawer. I had—I thought—I perhaps remembered—I maybe told her everything. Not everything everything, not Marco or Andrew or Gil, or Giovanni everything, but I had, perhaps, told her about Casimir. I recollected parts until a whole assembled before me. Red, raw, and fascinating as venison-heart tartare, my confession sat bloody before me. I felt a murmuration of fear. This was new. Fear clutched my chest with a clawed paw. I don’t recall ever feeling fear before this moment. I don’t recommend it.
I turned the previous night over in my head. Nothing about my maybe-confession to Emma made sense. Confession is always, to my thinking, like a hot mic, an act of illogic. I knew myself. I was not the kind of person who felt the need to unbosom herself. I kept things high and tight, like the testicles of a young greyhound. I saw myself as an emotional dragon, lizard autonomous, diamond-scaled, fire-bright, and handsomely alone in the world. All I needed was an aerie with a view, the land below me unspooling like an endless banquet. I soared and swept and dropped only to pluck sweetmeats as I hungered. I saw myself above, better than, superior to. I didn’t fling off my armor to show the rhythmic beat-beat-beating of my human heart. I had learned better. Years ago, I had learned.
I had said something. I had said nothing. I had said—I’d no idea what I said.
Maybe I hadn’t said anything to Emma about Casimir. Maybe I had only wanted to say something. I remembered the straining, leaping longing to tell her, and I remembered going through the story in my head as I lay with her on her big canopied bed. I remembered the jam jars of Prosecco cocktails, and I remembered feeling very drunk. I couldn’t, however, remember what specific ideas had crossed the mind’s threshold into speech. In my head, I twisted my conversation with Emma like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to line up what I
knew I’d said, what I feared I’d said, and what I was fairly certain I hadn’t said. I knew I’d said something about Wasserman’s visit, and I knew I’d told her about Casimir’s death. But the rest of it was a swirling verbal haze, a muddled memory where I couldn’t parse what I had said from what I only feared I’d said. What to do. What to do.
What to do.
The migraine held me in its gloomy embrace. I rocked in my bed.
I willed the railroad spike to remove itself from my head. I counted sheep. I counted breaths. I counted back from 100. I counted on myself. The pain in my head burned lethal umber and gold, shaped like a dagger and sharp as betrayal. I named it Detective Wasserman. I gave it flesh with my worrying, and I flayed it, inch by glorious inch.
Melicertus kerathurus, the Mediterranean or Imperial shrimp, is a different species from its lesser Atlantic cousin. Living in fairly shallow coastal waters, the Mediterranean shrimp lies buried and dormant in the sand during the day; at night, it emerges to feed, swim, and spawn, making it not unlike the festive estival inhabitants of Capri, those bright young beachgoers so driven to taking Molly while frolicking at foam parties. The Atlantic Litopenaeus setiferus, on the other hand, lives in deeper waters, and it’s active during the day. While all species of shrimp, or prawn—really, the difference is the same as between elevator and lift, boot and trunk, truck and lorry, or apartment and flat, which is to say it depends on whether your English conforms to the Queen’s or is American as apple pie— all shrimp are known as “bottom feeders,” the truth is somewhat less simple. Shrimp eat plankton, small plants, sea worms, smaller crustaceans, and, yes, decaying matter. Really, they’re opportunists.
As capitalists, we can hardly blame them.
In point of fact, shrimp are cannibals. This fact doesn’t differentiate them much in the aquatic world; about 90% of all aquatic species eat their own. You’re harder pressed to find the tenth that doesn’t. Octopi won’t just cannibalize others; they’ll also cannibalize themselves, eating an arm to save the rest of the body, and they’ll placidly eat the thousands of baby octopi that hatch every spring. Sand sharks are perhaps the most totemic of all ocean
cannibals. Gestating for around a year, a sand shark pup will eat its less developed siblings, and before being born, it’ll grow to about a meter in length; the sand shark emerges fully developed and ready to embrace its carnivore nature. They’re rather docile, sand sharks.
Perhaps they work out their issues before birth.
Like the humans who comprised the Donner party, almost all mammals will eat their own if driven to it, but only about fifteen hundred species naturally gravitate to cannibalism. They belong to three separate subgroups: sexual cannibals, intrauterine, and size- structured, a subset that houses both animals eating smaller or younger members of their own kind and mothers eating their own. Of these groups, we love the sexual cannibals the most—so easy to anthropomorphize. Who hasn’t lain in bed next to her lover and wished that, coitus concluded, she could turn her head a balletic one-eighty, unhinge her jaw, and snap off the head of the man lying insensate next to her. Beds, for all their vaunted symbolism of rest and peace, are sites of strife. Show me a human who hasn’t silently, stealthily, lain in bed and wished for the sudden horrible death of the person lying next to them, and I’ll show you a liar. We can only take so much intimacy before we close our eyes and pray to our gods for a cerebral hemorrhage.
Haters gonna hate, and predators are going to predate. Your purring housecat is but a short genetic leap from lions that will kill and eat the upstart youngsters in their pride. Sea horses make a happy meal out of newly hatched baby sea horses. Tell that to the cute little button-nosed girl with a charming frontal lisp and sea horses painted on her rainboots. Prairie dogs and lemurs are possibly the world’s most adorable cannibals. You could just eat them up, they are so cute. Perhaps the larger members of the group feel the same way.
Cannibalism aside, Mediterranean shrimp are not at all the same crustaceans as their pallid Atlantic cousins. They are at once sweeter, more savory, more profound, thicker in terroir. You go to your favorite seaside restaurant in Italy, and you order a plate of spaghetti con gamberetti, pomodori e basilica, fragrant with the pointy verdant scent of basil, the piquant acidity of the tomatoes, a pungent strain of garlic, and the sweet thrumming bass-line of
shrimp, a sea-swept sweetness that tastes like your mouth at the end of a long August day at the beach. You get the plate, and you find the shrimp intact, from their whiskered heads to their fringy feet.
It is a dish of utter beauty.
You delicately pull the fringes of feet off the shrimp, discarding them on the side of the plate. If you’re Italian, you do this with your knife and fork; likewise, you remove the outer shell with your silverware, not your hands. (Trust the people who gave us the Medicis to have the world’s most exquisite table manners; well-bred Italians wield their knives and forks with intimidating art.) Once you’ve taken your shrimp from its shell, you cut a bite-sized piece, and you twirl it delicately, tangling it thick and helpless in a net of spaghetti, and then you pop the twisted mass into your mouth. It’s a careful operation of sophisticated cutlery, and it is worth it. Next, you swallow your American reservations, lift the shrimp head to your lips, and suck deeply. The decapitated head delivers a shot of pure Mediterranean terroir, a gorgeous briny creaminess held singularly in the shrimp’s hepatopancreas, the shrimp version of a lobster’s tomalley, and it’s this—the shrimp’s rich, ruddy digestive organs— that make heads-on Mediterranean shrimp so extraordinary.
I thought of Wasserman, and I wanted to flee to Italy. I wanted to sit myself down in a Ligurian seaside café. Some anonymous restaurant with blue-and-white-checked tablecloths, where I could order a bottle of cold Cinque Terre wine and the most immodest plate of heads-on Mediterranean shrimp, wrap my lips around their bristly, hard heads, and suck until sated. I wanted to stroll in a land where the breeze blew across my face, the sun bore down in a vaguely threatening way, and cobblestones clicked under my heels. I wanted to hear Italian roll like the surf in my ears, and I wanted to smell hand-rolled cigarettes and the stink of men who use a bidet more often than the shower. I wanted to roll myself across coarse Italian hotel sheets and pay too much for espresso because I want to sit at an outside table, and I want to be served. I wanted to be in a place that closed its doors, all but those of its restaurants, between two and four. I wanted to be far, far away from Wasserman’s brassy tones and viper mind. I wanted to be free.
I couldn’t leave. If I booked a ticket to Italy, I felt certain that Detective Wasserman would know about it. I looked into buying a fake passport—not on my own computer, of course, I’m not an idiot —but while it seemed to be relatively easy to get a fake passport in Hungary, Poland, or Albania, it wasn’t at all simple here in the States. I could easily command the money, but then what would I do.
I might be a murderer and a psychopath, but, before being imprisoned, I didn’t hang out with criminals. This plan, appealing as it was, was out of the question.
I was stuck, confined, caught, if not in perpetuity—not yet—I could nonetheless feel the net pressing, the flesh constricting under its pressure. Invisible lines emanated from Detective Wasserman, unspooling through time to tie me in place, and I was not happy.
Wasserman sat in the center, secure in her tensile strength, a jacked and happy spider, and no matter how hard I looked, no matter the angle or the light, I couldn’t see the web.
And the web was tightening. Two days after my maybe- confession to Emma, Detective Wasserman called me for a formal visit to the Suffolk Police. I imagined the beige horror that would be a Long Island police station interrogation room. I couldn’t bear to think of what that woman had on me, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued and even impressed by her tenacity.
“Eat what you love,” they say, and I have. But that’s facile. It’s not merely that I loved Giovanni, Andrew, Gil, and Marco; it’s also that I lost them. And it’s not merely that I loved and lost them; it’s also that I hated them. As much as they were my lovers, they were my enemies, which is more or less all you can hope for from a person with whom you do not share DNA.
Food, if it’s at all fleshy, is difficult. Even vegetarians are complicated; after all, the mark of an absence is itself a presence, and vegetarians’ sanctimony is a lively chorus of apparitional cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and fish. Our lives, regardless of our choice to eat meat or not, and regardless of the meat we eat, are so filled with death and killing we might as well plant ourselves atop an abattoir and call it a day; our bodies are charnel houses, memento mori for the countless critters we’ve eaten, and the American industrial meat
complex enables our complicity with its cellophane-wrapped acts of oblivion. Bring us our sirloin, our lamb chops, our veal cutlets, and our chicken breasts snugly swaddled in plastic, thoroughly exsanguinated, wholly dismembered, and completely sanitized for our protection. We won’t hear the bleating of the sheep, the lowing of the cows, the hydraulic thwack of the bolt gun. We won’t smell the copper rivers of blood sluiced from below kill floors, the acrid tang of the chemical foam that suffocates “free-range” chickens, the florid stench of mountains of fish guts. We eat our meat, and we act as if all animals were always already dead.
I am an unrepentant, unabashed eater of meat. But because I love meat, I’m unwilling to be blind to the acts behind my perfectly cooked steak. Every mouthful is a choice; I like to be an informed consumer. To be otherwise is to be a zombie, mindlessly consuming —good, bad, or egregious. I prefer my meat to come from animals who have been humanely raised and humanely killed, but the truth is that even with my formidable resources, I couldn’t subsist solely on humane meats, animals with names, artisanally raised and killed at boutique slaughterhouses. And, really, what was my option. Live on a farm? I get allergic smelling hay. So I lived with the conflict, as humans have done for time immemorial. It doesn’t mean that I’m unaware. It doesn’t mean I’m going full Michael Pollan, apologizing for my desires, and sequestering my flesh-eating to certain days or times like a hapless, half-assed, rehabilitating alcoholic. It does mean, however, that I’m aware of the choices I’m making. I try to make good choices. I fail. I live to eat another day.
I am what I eat, and so are you. And so was Giovanni, the vegan; Andrew, the gourmet; Gil, the hedonist; and Marco, the nominally kosher. In death, I am closer to them than I ever was in life. I carry them around with me. It’s not as if I imagine I can hear them calling, but I do like to converse with their imagined voices. It amuses me to have them agree with me.
The interrogation room at the Suffolk County Police Department was exactly what I’d anticipated: rectangular cement blocks the size and shade of industrial vanilla ice cream, unforgiving overhead fluorescent lights, and a Formica table with two chairs of the sort
you’d find in a hospital cafeteria. I was shown in by Detective MacDonnell, aka Lou, the hangdog majordomo to Wasserman’s commandant, who waved me toward one of the chairs and left. I waited. I tried to look as if I was trying not to fidget. A person of interest who sits calm and composed, I’d garnered from watching Snapped, the show profiling female killers on the Oxygen network, shows signs of guilt. Only the worried fidget; the guilty don’t worry; ergo, I was playing at fidgeting.
Ten minutes of waiting and Wasserman swept in like Eisenhower into the Allied command room on D-day, MacDonnell tailing like her seborrheic lapdog. Wasserman bristled with authority and blood thirst. The harsh lights let me get a better look at her, my nemesis.
Wasserman was a paleo-CrossFit fanatic for certain—she was short but thick, like one of those tiny draft horses from Norway, all solid curves and no gratuitous elegance. In my heels, I was an easy foot taller than her; Wasserman stood essentially eye-to-nipple with me, but even this math wasn’t reassuring. I stood when she came in, mostly for the pleasure of looking down at her hair’s twisty brown roots.
“Thank you for coming, uh, Ms. Daniels.”
“Of course.”
“You remember Detective Lou MacDonnell.” Wasserman gestured toward her partner, who looked dazed, blinking slowly like a
sloth in a bright light.
“Of course.”
“So, Ms. Daniels, we called you in because we still have some questions about your relationship with, erm, Mr. Casimir Bezrukov.”
“Certainly. I’m happy to help.”
“Super.” Wasserman’s hard brown eyes had these intense lines around them, like sun spokes. Even in December, her brown skin looked wind-burned, and her eyes looked like she spent a lot of time squinting at the sea. “So, if you would, walk me through your
relationship with Mr. Bezrukov.”
“Bezrukov,” I said.
“Yes, that’s right. Casimir Bezrukov.”
“No, you’re saying BEHZ-roo-kov. It’s Bez-ROO-kov.”
“Well, how about that, Lou?” Wasserman smiled from the nose down, her eyes glittery and flat. “Walk me through your relationship with Mr. Bez-ROO-kov, if you would, uh, Ms. Daniels.”
“Do you mind if I consult my iPhone? I forget what day it is unless I look at my calendar.” Wasserman magisterially waved permission at my phone.
I flicked my phone, punched in my code, and loaded my calendar.
Naturally, I never use the calendar on my phone, at least not for erotic assignations. I had, however, entered all the dates I had with Casimir, from our fateful first meeting at the bar at the NoMad Hotel on September 23, 2013, to our last night of requited passion in that house on Fire Island on October thirteenth. I wonder how differently Casimir would have lived his life if he’d known he had only three brief weeks left to live it. Probably not much. We all lay claims to John Donne’s metaphysical, clock-ticking, carpe-diem action, but it’s habit’s reassuring arms we seek.
“We met on Sunday, September twenty-third, at the NoMad.”
“Do you remember what time?”
“Around nine, I think. I enjoy hotel bars.”
“And how long were you at the bar?”
“I was there in total for about two hours; I met Casimir after around forty-five minutes. We left together.”
“Did you go home?”
“You know I didn’t. I told you at our first meeting that I had sex with Casimir in his hotel room.”
“So you did.” Wasserman’s eyes met mine. I didn’t flinch. I wondered if I supposed to flinch. Snapped said nothing about
flinching. “Did you stay the night?”
“I left shortly after dawn.”
“Why?”
“I’m sorry, Detective, but is it really police business to know why I leave my lover’s bed when I do?”
“In this case, uh, Ms. Daniels, yes, I’m afraid it is.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“No, you’re not. You’re a person of interest.”
I narrowed my eyes at Wasserman, and I took a breath. “I left, Detectives, because it was Monday morning, and I had a story to
write. I don’t have unlimited free time.”
“When did you next see Mr. Bezrukov?” Wasserman placed
heavy emphasis on the second syllable.
“Three days later.”
“That would be September twenty-sixth.”
“Yes. I met him at Eleven Madison Park. We had drinks at the bar, and, if memory serves, we left at about 10:30, when we returned to Casimir’s hotel room and had excessively athletic sex. I believe there were ice cubes and candle wax involved. Would you like more details, or can I leave them to your imagination?”
“Did you see him again after that?”
“I did. I saw him on the evenings of September thirtieth, during the day on October second, and again on the evening of October
eighth.”
“And where did you see Mr. Bezrukov?”
“We met out at various eating and drinking establishments. Then we went to his hotel room, where we had sex. Each time I left in the early morning.”
“Was October eighth the last time you saw Mr. Bezrukov?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Where were you on the night of Saturday, October thirteenth?”
“At my friends’ house in Dunewood, Ron Newson and Paul Landrake. I stayed in and watched Netflix.”
“They can corroborate your story?”
“They weren’t there, no, but they gave me their house keys.”
“So you were alone.”
“That’s right.”
Steely gaze and a crackle of electricity. I was almost beginning to like this little pony.
“Tell me, Ms. Daniels.” Wasserman paused and leveled her glittery eyes. “Where do you buy your meat?”
“Ottomanelli’s. Why?” Wasserman looked at me and smiled the smile of a hyena sighting a particularly slow-moving wildebeest. My blood coursed icy, falling vertiginous in my gut.
“And you maintain that you did not see Mr. Bezrukov on Fire Island during the weekend of the thirteenth of October.”
“I do. I did not.” I stammered and took a deep breath. “The last time I saw Casimir was the early morning of October ninth; I left him naked and well fucked.” I let the word hang fricative in the air and met Wasserman’s hard gaze. “And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to end this meeting, infinitely charming as it has been. If you’ve anything further to ask me, please call my lawyer.”
And as I walked out the door, I tossed a card for Margaret Lately, my attorney, recently engaged, on the table.
