8
Rump Roast
The human body holds 66 pounds of comestible meat, on average, more than you might expect, given how much of humans is inedible.
More interesting to my thinking is how many different human parts are ingested by different peoples. Some argue in favor of the obvious cuts—the buttocks, the loins, the tender bits around the ribs, the savory marrow, steaks round as speed-skater’s thighs, the succulent brain. Others go somewhat more outré: the palm of the hand, the cheeks, the upper arm. To eat a human heart seems cliché, almost tautological in its weighted emotional shape. I could see the beauty in consuming the blood, perhaps in a nice sausage, but most argue that the blood is too problematic, too potentially contaminated; I suspect it’s merely too gross. Universally, people seem to avoid eating the eyeballs and the penis; the former is bitter and the latter, chewy.
Do a little research and you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of available information on the cooking and eating of people, so much, in fact, that one could begin to believe it’s entirely normal. Of course, in some cultures, it is. Ours is not one of them—no Western European culture openly embraces the eating of people (we will do it on the downlow, though; medicinal cannibalism lives into the twenty- first century). Even in the South Pacific, the cannibal capital of the world, not many cultures continue to practice traditions of cannibalism. It has been bludgeoned out of them, with religion, with laws, and with sticks. No, there aren’t many people on this wet blue planet that do condone the eating of humans, and those who do are hardly held up as a beacon of culinary inspiration.
Cannibalism, tellingly, isn’t illegal in many countries. It’s perfectly legal, for example, across most of the United States of America— Idaho’s felony law prohibiting cannibalism is an anomaly. Kill and eat a human, and the authorities will charge you with murder, of course; merely eat a human, and you may be hit with the charge of desecrating a corpse; in most states, it’s a misdemeanor. I’m not telling you this to imply you should eat a human; I’m telling you this merely to show you that you could eat a human. If your tastes run that way, that is.
I killed Giovanni in 2000, and I got away with it. The polizia called me several days after I had returned to New York, which was two days after I had hit Giovanni and one day after I’d turned his liver into a nice paté and spread it on good Tuscan toast. After the polizia had found his body, they wanted to talk to me; I was, after all, the person who had most recently seen him alive. Giovanni Traverso, an officer explained in a voice careful and measured as a metronome, had been hit by a car with great force; his body had flown and been impaled; he lay there for hours, until he was found by a local farmer, who had summoned the polizia. Judging from the state of Signor Traverso’s body, the police suspected that he had, in part, been eaten by cinghiale, which populated the woods.
I murmured, “Come terribile.” How awful. And then I shuddered a wee, stifled sob into the receiver.
“Per favore, signora,” said the poliziotto on the other end of the phone, a voice heavy and reassuring as a bowl of pappa al pomodoro. “We know it’s very difficult, but we need to know if you have any idea how Signor Traverso came to have his incidente, how he might have been hit by the car.”
I told him it was very difficult indeed. I asked for a moment to compose myself. I’d had several days to come up with a plausible story about why Giovanni was walking on that narrow Piemonte road in the dark, how it might have been conceivable a car would have cause to hit him, why I might have been entirely innocent in this whole regrettable situation. None of my stories were very good; all fit like couture garments—too extravagant, too improbable, too embroidered. I went with the truth, or a version of it.
“We had a fight. Giovanni was so angry with me,” I said, dropping my voice to a whisper. “He stopped the car in the middle of the road and he yelled at me. He said—he said—he said—he hated me. He called me names. Terrible, terrible names. He got out of the car and threw the keys at me.” Tears crept into my voice; I didn’t know I was capable of them, but I sometimes surprise myself. “I didn’t know what else to do—he scared me so. I turned the key in the ignition, I began driving, and I just kept driving. I drove back to the agriturismo, expecting he’d show up. But he didn’t.” I paused.
“Please, signora, continue,” the avuncular poliziotto said kindly.
“The next day I drove back to Giovanni’s apartment in Genoa.
When he didn’t appear, I assumed he was so angry that he was avoiding me. I decided to leave his car and go home. I changed my ticket and flew back to New York City early. I didn’t hear from him. I thought he was angry—not dead.” I let my tears flow. The poliziotto waited patiently. He told me to please calm down, maybe drink a little wine, to call a friend, to eat something. He told me he was sorry for my loss and he was sorry to be the bearer of such terrible news. He inquired if this number was the best to reach me, and I told him it was, asking him to call me if he heard anything about Giovanni. He thanked me and that was that. I never heard another thing about Giovanni Traverso. He was a luscious memory I held in my head. I could take his memory out of safekeeping and stroke it when I needed it. Giovanni was right where I needed him to be.
Why, you might wonder, am I telling you this. Is it not, you might ask, a legal confession. Could it not, you may ponder, get me in trouble.
To this I say, Trouble: I’m in it. Like prison, I’m never getting out of trouble. The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy— because here’s the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy, moral business, and feel like you are a better person.
One murder, then another, then another, then another. In my history, murder comes in easy links. Bodies fell, connected like
sausages, like syntax, like film stills. View each in focus, move them quickly, and you see a facsimile of motion. Look at them one at a time, and there’s the comfortable fiction of stasis. Neither movement nor stasis is more true—like a photo of mountains snapped from a car rocketing down a highway, both movement and stillness are equally true. Life erupts with contradictions, and we contain multitudes—in my case, quite literally, as I’ve eaten them.
In prison for the rest of my life, I sit surrounded by and surrounding these bodies, navel gazing at Giovanni, at Andrew, at Gil, at Marco. I write as if I am moving through a petrified forest, the sole living being for miles. But in truth, for all my torpidity, I know there is movement beyond me. I can’t see the wind wearing down the mountain one micron at a time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Outside the walls of Bedford Hills, people move and they change. They live and they eat, and they visit new restaurants and cut off ties with decades-old friends. They find strangers and have sex with them; they walk the streets and they find new lines in their face and they shop and they dance and they go to sleep in big, wide, clean beds. Outside the electrified perimeter of the prison, life goes on. I don’t want to be forgotten. Kill one man and you’re an oddity.
Kill a few and you’re a legend.
If getting away with Giovanni’s murder was a piece of cake, getting away with Andrew’s was the whole dessert tray. Really, no one should be this easy to kill, especially in such a complicated manner.
The bare facts are these: I laced Andrew’s drink with Xanax; kenneled his dachshunds in the run outside; dismantled the carbon monoxide detector; blew out the pilot lights in the stove, the oven, and the water heater; and let the carbon monoxide do its work. It was all surprisingly easy, even with Andrew’s labyrinthine home security system—all you needed to know for the home security code was Andrew’s IQ, 142, and his penis length, 7.5—men can be so predictable. Early the next morning, I returned to find Andrew a rosy shade of dead, opened the windows, aired out the house, sliced off two nice chunks of Andrew’s choir boy buttocks, released the hounds, and let time, canine hunger, and nature take their inevitable courses.
It pained me to leave so much of Andrew behind, but, really, there was nothing to be done about it. Just as I had neither the opportunity nor the vision to butcher Giovanni, I was still lacking both when it became poor Andrew’s time. I was so inexperienced, you see, still inching my way into the dark end of the pool. In fact, I am a little impressed with myself for killing Andrew at all. It’s quite one thing to let one’s foot slip on the accelerator; it’s quite another to hatch a murderous plan and see it through to its sanguine conclusion. Even walking up to Andrew’s door and ringing his doorbell, I hadn’t fully believed I would go through with it. Crafting a plan to kill your former lover with carbon monoxide, to slice the meat off his buttocks, and to use his happy, peanut-brained dachshunds as a cover-up is not even in the same congressional district as actually killing him, slicing him, and eating him. The plan is so much mental masturbation. Enacting it, though, that’s better than most sex.
Still, it hurt to leave so much of Andrew on the floor, where only his dogs and the police could appreciate him.
South Sea cultures refer to human meat as “long pig,” and many accounts of cannibalism claim that human flesh is reminiscent of pork. Armchair cannibal William Buehler Seabrook, however, maintained that human meat tasted not like pork but like veal.
Seabrook might have been full of shit. A reporter of the derring-do school of journalism specific to the Roaring Twenties, Seabrook claimed to have spent time with the Guere, a cannibalistic tribe in West Africa. His book, The Magic Island, glories in the joys of dining on human flesh, of which, he said, the company of the West African tribesmen availed him. Poppycock, it turns out. The Guere smelled a gastronomic bounder when Seabrook’s scent hit their collective nostrils, and they called foul. Long after publishing his book, Seabrook unveiled the lie, saying that, while he had eaten human meat, the African tribe hadn’t shared any of theirs. Rather, he had bought his portion from a morally ambiguous morgue worker at the Sorbonne. Seabrook took home a few choice pieces, cooked them for himself in a variety of uninspiring ways, and waxed poetic about the vealiness of it all.
Human meat, in my experience, has a texture that’s most like bear, which I have eaten a few times, both privately and at special wild game dinners at the Metropolitan Club. In the mouth, bear feels at once denser than beef and more ethereal; it’s the Amarone of meats, able to embody in equal parts the earthbound and the celestial. That said, it’s difficult to extricate the eating of bear from the knowledge that what you’re eating is bear. If you’re a modern person inured to peering through cellophane at anonymous meat, you can’t put an ursine morsel in your mouth without thinking, “Bear!”
Likewise human meat, and thus my conflating of the two.
At its most essential, human meat makes me think of magic. I can’t flatten the experience of eating human meat into pork, to veal, or to beef, something common sold at the Piggly Wiggly. In my experience, eating a human is like eating unicorn, or Pegasus, or griffin. It’s a flavor that best belongs in a bestiary, if bestiaries had butcher shops. To eat human is to dine on a chimerical hybrid, a marvelous, mythical meat that has the sensuality of lamb combined with the poignancy of wild game and the naïf quality of pork. To eat people is to get the taste of a Titan. It’s infinite immortalization. It
makes a god out of a woman.
But then, I am an excellent cook.
You may wonder why I bothered killing Andrew at all. By the time I sliced off his buttocks, tied the meat in petite rolls, and roasted them, he had been out of my life for more than a decade. Noir had folded in 1998, and I’d abandoned the ship long before it went down—I am neither captain nor rat. Fleeing to Gil’s Eat & Drink in 1997, I left Andrew to be surrounded by his flamboyance of flamingo-legged girls with lofty asses in tiny black skirts. I timed my exit perfectly. In 1997, diners were discovering the joys of the tasting menu and Thomas Keller’s French Laundry; they were flocking to Nobu, where they’d crane their necks and search for sightings of Robert DeNiro, because nothing accessorizes raw fish quite like the shattered gleam of celebrity—and I was delighted to document it all for Gil’s Eat & Drink. After all, by 1997, I had long ago stopped fucking Andrew, or perhaps he had stopped fucking me. Sometimes it’s hard to recall who didn’t do what to whom first.
I had moved on, in short. Then late one afternoon in March 2008, eight years after I’d tasted Giovanni, I started thinking of Andrew. I thought about our late-night dinners at Odeon, packing ourselves into the bathroom stall, where I would bend over and let Andrew lay a rail of cocaine on the curve of my ass, snort it loudly, lick my skin, and fuck me until someone knocked so loudly we couldn’t ignore it. I remembered how, before the Noir office had opened, Andrew had ordered an entire meal from the River Café, and we sat on Noir’s fresh carpet, inhaling the acrid odor of the rug as it off-gassed. We ate Ossetra caviar, chateaubriand, and foie gras with our fingers, swigging Dom from perfectly chilled bottles—at Noir, office furniture was secondary to an impeccably stocked wine fridge.
How strange it was that, more than a decade after I left Noir, I sat by myself in my apartment, thinking of Andrew. His sleek cotton button-down shirts and his suits, wool so fine my hand slid along his shoulders as if pulled by magnets. Andrew’s long, strong cyclist’s legs and his pointed tongue. The way he never let his early British childhood leave his voice or his word choice, and my annoyance when he asked me to ring him at his flat. The way Andrew moved, as if he were not dripping with but rather made of money. It’s a marvel that Noir failed, given Andrew’s unending reservoir of cold, hard international currency. I imagine he merely lost interest in it, or as one ego-driven magazine died after another, perhaps he feared it was no longer chic to be a publisher. Perhaps he couldn’t compete with Oprah. But who can.
I wondered how Andrew had changed. I wondered whether he still smelled of cedar and wood smoke. I thought of the time we had shared in bed and out of it. I thought of the plates we’d broken and the baker’s dozen of luxe shirts I’d cut into tiny fluttering strips after I caught him in flagrante delicto with my assistant.
Which was, I recalled, sitting in my living room, what caused our split, my leaving Andrew’s Noir for Gil’s Eat & Drink, and my calling in that one teensy little favor with that IRS secretary to the deputy commissioner regarding some of Andrew’s less savory tax havens.
Still, that was more than a decade ago. How long could Andrew hold a grudge, and, really, there was no way that he would know that the IRS investigation had any connection to me or to the time I saw
Andrew pull his hand, lacquered in vaginal juices, from between the legs of my assistant. Even if he did make that connection, what did he expect—it was my office, and she was my assistant.
I sat in springtime’s thin, lavender-yellow light and thought about Andrew. The more I thought about him, the more I wanted to see him. As any modern woman would, I Googled my ex-lover. Within a few keystrokes, I discovered that Andrew had sold the Tribeca loft in 1998, and he was currently living in a brownstone, which he owned, in Park Slope. I also learned that he had married my assistant—and divorced her. In the interim, she had birthed a pair of children, Ryan and Mackenzie, twins, born in 2001. It was all horribly predictable.
I decided it was best not to call Andrew, not immediately anyway.
Instead, I took the F train to visit his neighborhood. It was tree-lined, with quiet sidewalks broad enough for the double-wide luxury pram that Andrew and his former wife, my ex-assistant, had undoubtedly pushed together—until they didn’t. It was strange to think of Andrew living here in Brooklyn, so far from the action, from the bright lights and the big city and the rampant opportunity to seduce flocks of models.
I tried to justify the man as I remembered him with the street I saw before me. I tried to tuck Andrew neatly into the row of brown- stones and their wide staircases, to slide him into the lives lived here, lives of people bound by law and dumb genetic luck. Lives of people who reproduce wee, hopeful versions of themselves. Lives of people who proudly watch these replicants grow verbal, and then turn defiant and cynical, guarded and cold, or servile and cowed.
Lives of people who together bought things—great things like buildings and cars, small things like gemstones and socks, medium- sized things like couches and armoires—and after eating together and sitting in chairs together and sleeping together and rising together and doing all the banal breakfast things that culture tells people they should do with others, wake one morning to discover that none of it fits.
I tried to imagine Andrew living here on this street. I tried, and I failed. I couldn’t imagine him coming home, taking off his work-a- daddy jacket, hanging it in the closet, and putting his keys into the pottery bowl handmade by an unseen indigenous person, a bowl that
sat on a sideboard handcrafted from repurposed library shelving, a sideboard that sat atop an antique hand-knotted rug, a rug that was all the more collectable for its worn bits. I couldn’t imagine him checking his face in the antique looking-glass that hung in the foyer as he left for the day, his inability to sustain this prolix fiction growing more visible in the apprehensive lines around his mouth and the sparseness of his hair. I couldn’t imagine Andrew settling down. I couldn’t imagine him settling. I couldn’t imagine him here, and yet.
As if my imagining summoned Andrew into being, there he was, in the aging flesh, walking toward me. His hair was, indeed, thinner, and his face was, in fact, more lined. But it was unmistakably Andrew loping toward me, still fit and fine and wearing black like a proper Manhattan libertine. First, he was surprised to see me; then he looked happy. He hugged me. We chatted, the March wind slapping our cheeks. He invited me into his home, and I dropped my gloves into the pottery bowl atop the sideboard. The bowl was gray and charmingly lumpy; I was wrong about the sideboard—it was blond Scandinavian wood, mid-century and nearly incandescent with cost.
Thus I reentered Andrew’s life, almost as if I’d never left it. Before the sun rose the next day, I had cooked for him (a simple salad of greens and blood oranges, risotto with peas and porcini, sausages with braised fennel), we polished off a nice bottle of Anselme Selosse Champagne, and we had fucked, to mutual delight.
Talking to Andrew, I discovered that my assistant, while only marginally adept at her job, was spectacularly good at being the kind of woman who makes otherwise intelligent men lose their absolute shit. I always marvel at this sort of woman, the sort who accepts total, monogamous devotion like it’s her birthright. To my experience, there’s nothing that unites these women—they can be smart as pinstripes or dumb as fake fur, they can have the classic beauty of a perfectly ripe Honeycrisp apple or the compelling plainness of pie.
They tend to be skinny; perhaps their performance of appetite suggests comfort with deprivation. Maybe they dupe men into thinking that they, like air plants, don’t need nourishment to survive.
I suspect what makes these women irresistible is this: the women who impassion men are those who can maintain that tension
between being not in love and succumbing to it. In my experience, this delicate space is where men are most keen. On either side of this emotional divide, they may fall away, succumbing to boredom on one side and fear on the other. Women who sustain that emotional tension perform the emotional equivalent of edging an orgasm. My fondness for gratification has always been my downfall.
Plied with Champagne and fellatio, Andrew started talking. My assistant, it turned out, had possessed a preternatural vagina. His hunger for her in the early days could not—would not—be slaked.
Their affair had started on some long night of closing some long issue when she bent over to pick up a pen that Andrew had dropped and allowed him a view of her labial charms. My former assistant, it turned out, did not believe in undergarments, despite their verifiable existence. The early days, Andrew waxed, were wondrous. One lingering ecstatic moment of unimaginable pleasure. He plundered her body that she gave up in tidbits, sweetmeats, and morsels; she hand-fed Andrew’s libido with a breathtaking level of foreknowledge.
For every pleasure she gave him, she took an emotional step back, requiring him to lean farther out, to extend his hand as if wooing a shy forest creature, and to hope with his breath bated that this time, this time, she would feed, petal-pink lips coyly nibbling from his open palm.
Eventually, she did. They married, a fairy-tale wedding in the Hamptons with a Vera Wang gown and a Bora Bora to Pago Pago honeymoon. And then reality slowly came creeping in on hausfrau- slippered feet. My assistant, it turned out, was not a goddess; her vagina was just a vagina; the wild forest creature was just another housecat. You wake up with someone one too many mornings and you realize that any magic you’d seen was magic you’d made. The twins (one boy, one girl, I forget which is which) were great, really great, he said. He loved being a father, he really did. But the marriage fell apart. He had kept the brownstone in the divorce only through some fast financial footwork on the part of his lawyer and his accountant; his ex-wife now lived about ten blocks away, closer to Ryan and Mackenzie’s school. He saw the twins on Wednesdays and alternate weekends, and, anyway, he said, he had the dachshunds, Rags and Riches, for company.
His head lying on my left breast, Andrew sighed deeply. “It’s really nice to see you.” He snuggled his face into my bosom and sighed again. “It feels like the last decade was a dream.” He nosed
closer to my heart.
He needed to die.
Starvation is the most easily understood reason for cannibalism.
Pressed close to death, even a vegan will make a meal of man meat.
Our survival instinct is too strong to not eat the food put in front of us; this is what makes those rare individuals who hunger-strike so admirable. Faced with the very real threat of starvation, the sweating majority of us will reach for the meat, regardless of its emotional or moral cost. For this reason, while we may pleasure-shudder in the careful consideration of cannibalism, or while we may armchair quarterback the survivor’s guide to being stranded in the Andes, when faced with the reality, we will chew and swallow our loved ones. It’s better to live with guilt and remorse than it is to die—just look at how many of us cheat on our partners, our taxes, our diets, our dissertations. And that’s not even with our backs pressed cold against a dead glacier wall. It’s surprisingly easy to overcome moral qualms, if you give in to the appetite.
Whereas survival cannibalism gets a discomfited pass, the other major kind of cannibalism does not, yet it’s the reason for the majority of cannibalistic acts. This reason is symbolic. In the anthropological trade, it’s called cannibalistic essentialism: the idea that ingestion of human flesh imparts a crucial element. Sometimes it’s strength, sometimes it’s honor, sometimes it’s fecundity, sometimes it’s something inexpressible in English, but from New Zealand’s Maori to the Congo to the Amazon Basin, many cultures have practiced symbolic cannibalism. Anthropologists like to break essentialism down into two more discrete subsets, materialist and idealist, but, really, only pedants give a warm fuck. You eat a person because the flesh holds a secret meaning, and to eat it is the straightest line between the abstract and the embodiment.
Eat your dead companion, and you live on with the knowledge.
Eat your dead to honor or triumph over them, and you’re nourished with metaphor. But it’s all so much intellectual fapping. We as an
English-speaking people can’t not eat our dead—our language loves a cannibal. We don’t just win at sports, we kill the other team; we demolish them; we devour our opponents. To express our appreciation for a baby’s cuteness, we say we could eat her up.
When we have sex, we ravish our lovers, nibble their ears, lick their vulvas, or swallow their cocks. Gleeful, we banquet on flesh.
If ritual cannibalism is metaphor, then metaphoric cannibals abound. Look at your Eucharist. As Christians sip that wine and let that wafer dissolve on their tongues, these words roll around in their heads: “This is my body; this is my blood.” Cannibalism is so deeply ingrained in our culture that a good portion of us engage in the sacred act once a week. Turn up your nose at people like me, people who accept as actual what you all comfort yourselves with at a linguistic remove, but you’re no different. The blood is the life, and human history is littered with people who eat people, the pluckiest people in the world.
In sum, you and I are the same. You may not admit it aloud, but I know you will read this book and wonder how your lover would taste sautéed with shallots and mushrooms and deglazed with a little red wine. You read, and you wonder, and you know the answer would be delicious. Roll that word around in your mouth and feel the tang of its call.
The issue with killing Andrew was figuring out how not to leave a trace. I couldn’t count on vehicular manslaughter and incompetent rural policing to provide adequate cover. I couldn’t slip him poison, because I wanted to eat him. I couldn’t think of a way to lure him into a secluded area that wouldn’t create a digital trail leading straight to my computer or a physical trail leading to my door. I couldn’t shoot him because, first, it’s just so indelicate, and, second, guns are to cops as the Mister Softee jingle is to children. The biggest issue, as I saw it, was the fact that I had reappeared in Andrew’s life after a decade-plus absence. If I became at all visible to the police, any NYC cop worth his weight in crullers would immediately point his finger at me, the spurned woman who popped up like a whack-a- mole from Andrew’s past. From the moment the knowledge that Andrew Must Die glimmered in my brain, I also knew I didn’t want to
be caught. I needed to devise a plan that would cover up my tracks like footprints in fast-falling snow.
The first thing I did after I left Andrew’s apartment was to buy a prepaid cell phone. When he asked for my number, I gave Andrew the number of my old, defunct landline; later, I called him from the burner, as the cop shows call these phones, telling him I realized my mistake. I explained it away with the excitement, the confusion, the orgasmic joy of seeing him again. Burner in place, Andrew had a dedicated phone, one I used for him and him alone.
I got his schedule under the pretense of planning a trip somewhere special. It wasn’t difficult to persuade Andrew to give it to me in all its twin-addled, single-dad permutations. The rest of the information I gathered from his iPhone and his computer. Really, people’s passwords are too easy. Andrew’s iPhone passcode was his kids’ birth month and day (0714, Bastille Day, if you’re of a historical mind). I quickly confirmed he’d continued his tradition of using Bowie lyrics as his computer passwords. It took me three tries to discover that “thinwhiteduke” unlocked his computer, two to get into his Gmail with “gOldenyears,” and three to find that “GOld- whopwhop” granted me access to his bank account. I’d have gotten the last two on the first try but for the fact that “ohs” had been replaced with zeros. This is what happens when you’ve sung the same song in the shower for fifteen years. No wonder my assistant left him.
With this knowledge, I could easily access every scrap of information that Andrew wouldn’t want his psychopath ex-girlfriend to have. I knew his bank balance and his bill payments—and how much Andrew’s super-rich status had thinned to relative leanness.
Andrew’s economic decline seemed to be the effects of paying a simply breathtaking amount in monthly alimony, raising two children in the style to which they’d early grown accustomed, and some abominable financial decisions. Andrew’s bottom line, it turned out, was not very nimble. It was also fairly clear that as much as Andrew claimed to be a private equity manager, he mostly went to the office to watch Netflix and porn (he seemed to have a thing for cuckold videos, but then most straight men do), take long lunches, and occasionally dabble desultorily in the stock market. Clearly, Andrew
missed Noir, but who didn’t have a raging nostalgic hard-on for the years of Clinton excess, Damien Hirst, and chefs whose goal was to build the plate higher.
Andrew, for all his Thomas Pink shirts and Oliver Spencer suits, was holding on by a silken thread. Which was all the better for my planning, to be perfectly frank, and, really, when am I not. I picked a long weekend when the kids were with their mother out of the country—the Bahamas, I believe. It was perfect; all I had to do to execute my plan was time everything impeccably. To an amateur cook, timing is the biggest challenge. Your reward for your hard kitchen work is the blissful, sated faces of your dinner guests, but you’ll have failed if the Beef Wellington is a perfect medium rare and your roasted new potatoes are hard as marble. Timing is, as they say, everything; knowledge is power; and To Serve Man is a cookbook. My timing is as reliable as a Swiss train schedule.
I’m not only timely; I’m protean. As a food critic, I’m accustomed to being incognito. I’m tall, about six feet, and I’ve got flame-red hair, disadvantages for a food critic who needs to visit without detection. I have developed workarounds that rely on one principle: essentially solipsistic, people don’t want to remember you. Humans are far more interested in themselves than they are in anyone else. You have to make over yourself with the kind of body that makes strangers’ eyes glaze. In the service of being actively uninteresting, I own a whole closet of baggy, unremarkable clothes that hang on me like I’m a mannequin for Eileen Fisher or Eddie Bauer. Do I like these clothes?
No, I do not, but when I put on a pair of mom pants and a tan cardigan, eight out of ten eyes will slide off me as if I were a nonstick ceramic skillet, and the last two will linger for a moment before finding something better to look at. To food critics, this knowledge is deeply useful. I understand the power of dress to disguise me, and if necessary, I have wigs.
I arrived at Andrew’s midday on a Friday, dressed in a menswear topcoat and slacks, a fedora on my head, my hair tucked tight underneath. From a distance, I looked like a man. After slipping inside the brownstone, I kept myself hidden from the neighbors.
When the deliveryman arrived with the groceries, Andrew met him.
As I made dinner, I liberally dosed Andrew’s dishes with Xanax and
Ambien. By the time we showered together, he was so loose he couldn’t get hard, a predicament that I should have considered earlier. I’d have liked to have sex with Andrew one last time. He had an exquisite penis.
I hardly had a chance to guide Andrew to the downstairs bedroom before he fell asleep. With a kind of martial quickness, I cleaned up after myself, wiping surfaces of my fingerprints, making it look as if Andrew had cooked for one. I kenneled the dogs outside, blew out the pilot lights, deactivated the carbon monoxide detector, disarmed the alarm, and slipped quietly down the street by 9:00 P.M., not so late that anyone would have thought it unusual for a guest to leave Andrew’s, yet not so early that the Brooklyn street was crowded. I took myself to my favorite hotel bar for a drink, met a lovely Australian gentleman and taught him a few wonderful things to do with a finely knotted string of vintage pearls. After that, I went home and slept like the proverbial dead.
The next day, I let myself into Andrew’s brownstone with his keys.
I opened all the windows and sat in the backyard with the two dachshunds. They were overjoyed to see me, nuzzling their little Moroccan olive noses into my hands and pockets, flapping their velveteen ears everywhere. Mostly, they were hungry, but their hunger would have to wait. One thing about Rags and Riches: they were surprisingly quiet little chaps. Maybe it was that they were full- sized doxies, but while most of those ankle-biting dogs express themselves in a cacophony of sharp yipping, these two gave a couple barks and were silent. They nestled on my lap and stared at me with their tranquil brown eyes, and stroking their fur, I felt suffused with something like kindness. I gave them water, but I didn’t feed them. I needed them hungry.
After about forty minutes, I went back inside, lit the pilot lights, closed a few windows, and went to the bedroom. Andrew looked as if he were joyfully asleep on his stomach, exactly as I wanted him.
Here’s a fun fact about carbon monoxide: slaughterhouses pump it into meat to make it look redder, juicier, more sanguine. Corpses dead from carbon monoxide poisoning aren’t a livid shade of lavender; they appear rosy-cheeked as toddlers in the morning.
Incarnadine and inert, Andrew looked like such a dear, lying facedown and dead on that bed.
The night before, I had laid down a plastic tarp before Andrew staggered in and passed out. (I can’t imagine how anyone made murder in days before polymers—but then it was a more innocent time, a time before Luminol and DNA testing.) I took a large, sharp knife out of my purse, and with three plastic bags next to me, I readied to slice into Andrew’s well-muscled buttocks. They were round as twin Hostess CupCakes, perfect melon spheres, just a lovely pair of butt cheeks. I paused before slicing, remembering all the many times I’d held his ass in my hands to pull his hips faster and farther at my pelvis. Tracing my finger down the cleft between his buttocks, I recollected all the times I would take Andrew fresh from the shower, bend him over a pillow, and plant my mouth on his rectum with a wet, open-lipped kiss. Rich, well-bred men have the best hygiene. “Eat the rich,” they say, and in this they are not wrong.
I kissed Andrew at the base of his coccyx, then grasping the knife in one gloved hand and his right butt cheek in the other, I sliced a nice thick piece of meat. I did it again on the right side, dropping each piece into a plastic bag and sealing it. There wasn’t much blood, but then Andrew’s heart had long ago stopped pumping. I carefully pulled the plastic tarp out from under Andrew, rolled it up, and put it in the third bag. Wandering through the brownstone, I shut all the windows and triple-checked my tracks, ensuring that I left nothing behind.
Then, I let in the dogs, carrying them to Andrew’s bed. As I left the room, I saw one of them, Riches, I think, licking the blood from Andrew’s hip.
Good doggie, I thought and let the door click behind me.
