9
Banana Bread
I took Andrew’s rump roast home. I skinned it, trussed it, rubbed it with olive oil, red wine, thyme, lemon, garlic, and salt, and let it sit sit for a few hours. Then I seared it and popped it in the oven to roast until lovely and brown without and a bloody cherry red within. I made a delicious Bordeaux reduction sauce, and I served the roast with crisped tiny Yukon Gold potatoes, caramelized shallots, and sautéed asparagus. The meat was quite tasty, chewier than beef, certainly, but with an earthy thrum, a kind of truffled bass note, and the piquancy that comes only from the deepest flavor of nostalgia. I felt content.
While the rump roast was marinating, I took a walking tour of lower Manhattan with the leftover skin and the dedicated Andrew cell phone, which I’d bundled in a new dishrag, placed in a paper bag, and bludgeoned to bits with a hammer. I scattered the pieces of the phone all over the Lower East Side, and I dropped the orts of Andrew’s skin in dumpsters behind various restaurants in Little Italy and Chinatown. As a measure of extreme precaution, I also donated the menswear coat I’d worn to a Goodwill on 8th Avenue in Chelsea.
And that, with regard to Andrew Gotien’s untimely death (ultimately ruled inconclusive), was more or less that. A few days later, I read his obituary in the New York Times. As it turns out, Mackenzie is the boy and Ryan is the girl. Andrew’s life insurance was admirable, and the twins’ college is funded with a trust. What else do you need.
Thus I became a serial killer. People believe that you have to kill three or more victims over a span of time and space to qualify as a
serial killer, but people are wrong. In 2008 the FBI revised its serial killer criteria; where a person once had to have perpetrated a trio of murders to earn the status of serial killer, now one needs kill only two persons at two events separated by a period of time to qualify. I feel the FBI has set a low bar, but there it is. Locked in a cell, surrounded by women dressed in multifarious shades of gray and one shade of blanched orange, I am just a killer among killers—and among arsonists, thieves, drug dealers, hackers, and con artists, including one insufferable woman about my age convicted of insider trading.
How many I’ve killed doesn’t matter to anyone but my beloved behavioral science Ph.D. students, to you, and to my victims, I suppose.
Serial killing is, of course, discrete from being a mass murderer or a spree killer, this last term no longer used in law enforcement— sad, really; the word “spree” holds such whimsy. Distinct from serial killing’s necessity of gaps in time and event, a mass murder requires you to kill two or more people at the same time, in the same event.
Lizzie Borden (who was acquitted) was very likely a mass murderer. (While I believe we need more jump-rope rhymes inspired by female murderers, this one is factually incorrect. Lizzie did not give her father forty whacks, nor did she give her mother forty-one. She gave him around ten and her around twenty. Childhood: so hyperbolic.) I could never be a mass murderer. Mass murder is gauche. Mass murder is to serial killing as McDonald’s is to Peter Luger. Both establishments serve chopped beef, but one is indiscriminate to the point of ubiquity whereas the other is carnal dining at its bespoke finest. It’s not merely a question of quantity. A mass murderer is blind to attachment; a serial killer, however, holds a close relationship with his or her victims. Even the D.C. snipers, John Allen Muhammad and his henchman, Lee Boyd Malvo, shared a relationship with their victims. Perhaps their relationship was not precisely with their immediate dead or wounded—they killed from a distant remove—but they did terrify an entire city. In this way, the entire D.C. metro area was their casualty. Mass murderers make homicidal psychopaths look bad, in my opinion. At least we serial killers employ art in our abandon.
When I killed Giovanni in December 2000, I did so in a headlong, confused rush. No planning, all visceral action—my foot on the gas pedal, a big crunch, and a swift shift from buoyant life to gut-slick death. Neither he nor I had a microsecond to consider the ramifications of the car’s fender ramming him. It was the very epitome of rash action, the embodiment of wish fulfillment, a Freudian slip taken to its terminal extreme. Afterward, I felt a keen buzz, like the susurrations of a crush. But I also felt intensely anxious, taut and tight with the realization of what I had done. It wasn’t guilt, not really, not as I fumble to understand what “guilt” means. It was more the pervasive fear that I’d be found out—or possibly the fear that I wouldn’t. An inarticulate wonder that I’d come to inhabit the amorphous amoral space of having killed a man and being entirely okay with it.
The buzz faded first and fastest. In time, the anxiety faded. The memory bleached. And after a couple of years, I felt like I’d successfully navigated a potentially embarrassing unrequited love. I lived my life, Giovanni had left it, and all was fine, really. I didn’t miss him, but then I never liked him all that much. I loved him, I suppose, but it was the love of an itchy sweater that looks too good on you to throw it away. Every time you slip into that sweater, you know you’re going to get compliments and admiring glances, and every moment you’re alone, you’re going to scratch your flesh raw.
Killing Andrew in the spring of 2008 was different. His murder wasn’t merely premeditated—it was planned with the exquisite care of a banquet for a head of state, and I took pride in the knowledge that I’d done it right. So many things could’ve gone wrong. Nothing did. It pained me that I’d performed beautifully yet no one but me would fully appreciate the act’s crystalline perfection. I toyed with the idea of attending Andrew’s funeral services—they were open to everyone—but I didn’t. Why tempt the fates, or my desiring tongue.
Most of all, I didn’t want to see my former assistant, Andrew’s ex- wife, or, for that matter, his spawn. I didn’t feel bad about Andrew’s death, exactly, but if I did feel something, it was attached to how I’d left those two children fatherless. I am fond of my father. He has always smelled of bay rum aftershave and tobacco. It’s nice.
And unlike Giovanni, I liked Andrew. I enjoyed spending time with him. We had history; he had given me my first job in food writing, spotting in me a nascent skill set that I myself didn’t know I had. I respect men who teach me something new about myself. They fall so far and few between. The days after Andrew died, I surfed a billowing crest of satisfaction. A gilt cloud held me aloft; everything glittered with the serendipitous new. Even the dreary early April weather didn’t dismay me; I’d done something wonderful. From concept to execution, Andrew’s rump roast was an unparalleled success. Only the fact that I couldn’t share my joy marred its beauty.
Yet feelings of unease began to susurrate. Andrew could, after all, only die once. I wanted to spend time with him again and I wanted to kill him again; I wanted both, and I wanted them at once, and neither was possible. Were I able, I would gladly have brought Andrew back to life to kill and eat him, over and over. Multiple lives are wasted on cats.
I threw myself into my work, writing a piece on recession food for Eat & Drink, where I was now a contributing editor. After more than a decade, Gil had finally been pushed out of his role as publisher, forced out by a move of the board, so my interaction with him was now entirely libidinal. It’s strange, really, when I consider my years with Gil. We were never exactly a couple—I clearly held no misgivings about fucking my bosses—yet for all the intimate, oily time that Gil and I spent in each other’s company, we never considered ourselves a unit.
Gil, I remember him, that sweet-headed, lumbering lout. Such a contrast to Andrew’s chrome-and-black-lacquer urbanity, Gil was an appetizing potpie of a man, all overstuffed Americana and bountiful appetite. He’d moved to New York from some tiny town in Nebraska, made lascivious money off the stock market in the ’80s, and in the ’90s parlayed that cash into salacious money during the tech boom.
Gil had suddenly felt the need to start a magazine, and his magazine, Eat & Drink, contrary to all expectations, succeeded.
Indeed, it was so successful that eventually a large magazine conglomerate snapped it up. Gil remained as executive publisher as long as he could; he loved that magazine, the adorable lunk.
Eat & Drink had begun as a simple paean to simple pleasures, but rare is the gourmand who’s content to rest at modest fare—even Joy of Cooking progressed from meatloaf to paté. Likewise, Eat & Drink changed because Gil’s tastes changed. I helped change Gil’s tastes, and I began with spaghetti bottarga di tonno e ricci di mare, pasta with cured fish roe and sea urchin. Gil loved to lick pussy; he’d spend long hours with his nose deep in my cunt, his tongue lapping like a dehydrated cat, his mouth thick. His cunnilingus was a five- armed starfish of a love, stuck and sucking, beautiful in its stupid devotion. Spaghetti bottarga was the perfect dish to seduce him into finer food.
Gil looked the part of the absolute upright bourgeois man-child.
Blond and ruddy, Gil’s looks spoke volumes about his English roots.
You could easily imagine him striding out of a Hogarth etching. He had cornflower-blue eyes and tiny teeth like the nibs on an immature piece of corn. His hair brushed back from his head in a yellow-gold pelt; as he aged, faint lines of gray appeared like ghosts in a wheat field. Gil’s waist was as generous as his appetites and as warm as his humor. His wasn’t the kind of body I’d imagine myself enjoying when I was alone on a long winter’s night, but it was a nice body, and an appreciative one. Gil moaned when I kissed him, like a dog when you rubbed his belly.
For all his bourgeois luster, Gil was a well-hidden libertine. He had a roster of vanilla women, a couple he even married, with whom he enjoyed workaday missionary sex sanctioned by the New York Times and the Atlantic (there is no prudery quite like the purse-lipped prudery of liberal publications). But Gil was like a perverted superhero. Mild-mannered Clark Kent by day, he hung like a bat by night, but for all of his juggling of lives, Gil never felt pained by it. He embraced all his erotic aspects with all the emotional torture of a golden retriever, which is to say none at all.
Emma has long said that men’s erotic development stops at its first attachment. “It’s the fixation principle,” she says. Like a fly stuck in amber or a cherry blossom suspended in a raindrop cake, Emma says, men glom on to one specific image, construct, or fantasy, and they never sail past it. They may develop other interests, other obsessions, and new fantasies, and they may also embroider upon
their existing ones, but at the end of the night, men never relinquish that first fascination. My father, for example had a thing for Leslie Caron, whom my mother faintly resembled, for he never got over seeing An American in Paris at a very imprintable age. We would know he was sad when we heard the overture to Gigi coming from the speakers in the den. To my dad, an ideal woman was sprightly, clean limbed, and French; my mother embodied all of these qualities when he met her at the age of seventeen. She outgrew all but the Frenchness. Emma may be right about men.
I suspect that it was Gil’s stumbling across Story of O in his parents’ bedroom at thirteen that sent him on his merry spiral into kink. Between his summers spent on the family sloop and reading Pauline Réage at a formative age, Gil developed a deep-seated love of rope and a desire to make girls cry and come. Later the same year, Gil’s older brothers would sneak him into a drive-in porn theater somewhere on the Massachusetts coastline. Gil hid in the trunk, and when the screen lit up with that green wash, his brothers pulled the seat forward, letting loose unsuspecting Gil. He sprung like a young deer to find himself trapped in the skin flick Behind the Green Door.
Caged in that Impala, imprisoned by the fear of his brothers’ disdain and his brothers’ friends’ jeering, Gil sat through the entire movie, from skittering camera work to torrid kidnapping to theatrical orgy to heartfelt rescue at the end. Gil was not unlike Gloria, played by a creamy-skinned Marilyn Chambers: first terrified, then transfixed, finally ecstatic.
Gil moved fluidly from perversion to vanilla, accepting with good- hearted equanimity all the various pleasures of the flesh from missionary sex to anal. He was a rare good egg, my dear Gil. He was like Mister Rogers, if Mister Rogers hadn’t trained as a preacher and owned a full complement of ball gags and spreader bars, all covered in fine English leather.
Gil, a good man, wasn’t the only man. During the time span of our dalliance, I enjoyed many. Some were firefly fleeting in the warm belly of a July night—a tinkling cocktail party, twinkling lights, bare shoulders, sun-warmed flesh, the moist air salt-laden, wrapping you in an embrace even before you touched. Some were quicksilver flashes on trips, metallic clanking trysts thrusting like pistons and
groaning with stress. Some slipped like silver slivers in hotels, motels, inns, and pensioni, fleshy shivers in crisp sheets, kicking the martial corners asunder. Some, very few, occurred in my apartment, the unfamiliar masculine funk of forest floor, bleach, and spunk overstaying its welcome. The toilet seat left up, jarringly.
And there was one, just one, who held my heart in his large hands. He lasted for a bit, but no more of him just yet.
The hollow in my life left by Andrew’s death caused me, as complicated feelings sometimes do, to work harder. By the fall of 2008, I pushed myself deeper into my role at Eat & Drink, and I plowed through my edits for my second book, Voracious: The What, When, Where, How, and Who of American Food. In retrospect, there are better times than a major economic collapse to write a guide to topflight American restaurants. Voracious has a thick section on value meals—it’s hard to discount the beauty of Florent or Vesuvio Bakery, now both closed, both casualties of the recession that caused rents in desirable locations to skyrocket—but the meat of the book came from restaurants where diners paid an obscene amount to eat hedonistic food, with attendant repressed shame serving as seasoning.
American restaurants turn on a dime. For every hoary Fraunces Tavern or venerable Union Oyster House, there are countless restaurants that close their doors within a year. In any thousand New York City restaurants, for example, eight hundred are dead within five years. New Yorkers’ obsession with shiny objects might make those urban magpies flock to new, dazzling, star-studded restaurants, but there are only so many magpies in the city. Often, restaurant owners simply don’t care much about quality—the ego wants what the ego wants, as long as there’s enough money, coke, and young flesh in tight trousers or skirts—so restaurants will continue to operate on the sheer power of investor cash.
Restaurants, in short, open and close like eyes in the City That Never Sleeps. It’s not easy to run a successful restaurant, not in New York, not in San Francisco, not in Cleveland, Burlington, Portland, or Marfa.
I felt pressure to turn Voracious around quickly. There’s no good in buying a guide to restaurants whose doors are locked. I needed to write a book that cherry-picked the best, most stable restaurants and food “experiences,” and I needed to write it quickly. I culled from old Eat & Drink columns, but I broadened the scope beyond New York and LA to tempt the broad, tasteless belly of America to buy it. It was all a game, really, but just because it was a game didn’t mean I wasn’t going to play to win.
I took six weeks and crisscrossed America by plane, New York City to Seattle, Spokane to Missoula, Sacramento to Las Vegas, Tucson to Denver, Austin to Minneapolis, Chicago to New Orleans, and back up the East Coast. I felt like I was lacing America’s corset, tightening it with gourmet restaurants, specialty butchers, regional burgers, molecular gastronomists, and locavore demagogues. I tried, in the interest of being an ethical critic, to pick only restaurants I’d visited before—it’s unfair to judge a restaurant from a single visit.
Even Daniel Humm can have a bad night, though at this point he’s so cushioned by his plush team of handpicked staff that, were he to suffer a tough one, his long fall would land soft. I traveled and I ate and I visited and I chatted and I drank, and I hid my hair under a barrage of hats and my body under caftans of greige.
These travels consumed time, and the work nourished my loss.
As I moved from one aggressively eggshell hotel to another, the Andrew-hollow filled almost imperceptibly at first, but by the time I finished my great American tour and could tuck into the long days of slogging through notes, composing fresh entries, and reworking columns, I was living in comfortable quiet with Andrew’s absent presence. We were like an old married couple, Andrew and I, companionable in long silences and happy to be in each other’s company. Except, of course, that he was dead and I had eaten him.
I took a leave of absence from Eat & Drink to finish the book, about ten weeks in total. It’s hard, I find, to do the boots-on-the- ground work of being a restaurant writer while finishing a book.
Columns require me to visit a restaurant no fewer than three times, always with different people, always under a name that is not mine and dressed in a style that blurs the edges of my identity, trying a number of dishes that overlap like a Venn diagram in those three or
four visits, keeping notes straight, and then sitting down to write the cogent 300-, 600-, or 1,000-word review.
When people open their paper or their magazine (or, these days, load it into their browser window) to read the review of the latest marquee restaurant, they don’t see the work that underpins that sleek skin of words. People think it’s easy to be a restaurant critic; they think, Oh, how glamorous! How thrilling! How delightful it is to get paid to eat! And, you know, sometimes it is. Sometimes—rarely, but it does happen—you receive the golden Wonka ticket for a sublime experience. You get to roll creamy, piquant, savory, unctuous artistry around in your mouth and feel your tongue pulsate like the tender beating heart of a songbird. Sometimes—rarely—you stumble into sheer perfection. Sometimes, meals are transcendent.
And in those times, you feel unaccountably blessed, like a whore whose john is good-looking, clean, gifted, and possessed of a sensibility that weds generosity with egalitarianism.
Most of the time, however, you eat meticulously composed dishes that taste of ego and pretension, and, if you eat enough of them, you will gag. People, by and large, are idiots. What separates the food critic from the dilettante diner is not merely a superior palate. There are legions of excellent palates walking and talking on the streets of New York. It’s not even being an excellent writer; the world teems with people who can craft prose as liquid as silk and twice as strong. No, what makes a great food critic—and make no mistake, I am a great food critic, one of the greatest, and, I should add, a great food writer; Gael Greene, Ruth Reichl, Sam Sifton, R.
W. Apple, and the rest can collectively kiss my delectable ass—is twofold: the willingness to slog through the hard work of conscientiously tasting dishes, and the ability to take those somatic experiences and translate them into transparent prose. By their natural temperaments, these two skill sets do not hold hands. The physical realm longs to remain ineffable, while the linguistic wishes to be clear and utterable. But if you’re able to wed the fleshy and the linguistic, you have the makings of a great critic of food. We are a rare breed. Worship us.
In the ten weeks away from Eat & Drink, I finished a fairly polished draft of Voracious and turned it in to my publisher. I adore
the satisfaction of sending a manuscript off—joy kissed with a soupçon of anxiety. Your responsibilities are mostly finished, and while you still have a tiny hand in your offspring’s success, you invest in the hope that it does the work you intend it to do. Naturally, I thought Voracious a very good book.
The October day I met my Eat & Drink editor, Chloe James, to talk about returning from my sabbatical, the sky was that specific shade of translucent blue that’s reserved for optimism and irony. I arrived at the office punctually for our ten o’clock meeting. Chloe sat behind her desk, her nails clacking on her keys like cheap high heels. She looked up and gestured for me to sit in the chair opposite hers.
Chloe and I made small talk, that linguistic waltz that polite people do as a prelude to saying the things that actually matter. She congratulated me on finishing the manuscript. I thanked her for the time. She told me that she was glad the magazine could accommodate my request. She paused, her smile flickering into a grimace.
“Dorothy,” Chloe said. “As you know, 2008 has been tough for publishing.”
“Two thousand eight has been tough for everyone, Chloe.” I said.
I was not exaggerating. Brutal for most Americans, the 2008 recession had hit print media especially hard. In the first ten months of 2008, more than 45,000 writers and editors had lost their jobs through layoffs or closings, and during the course of my ten-week sabbatical, I’d heard about three acquaintances who had lost cushy roles at Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, and Elle. One of them had found work as an editor at a website that was, as far as I could tell, composed almost exclusively of pictures of cats saying ungrammatical things in capital letters. The other two were thinking about moving back to their family’s Midwest hometowns. The open- thighed wet welcome New York media had given writers just a decade earlier had snapped closed, for New York media was a grim, unyielding bitch in 2008.
Chloe swallowed and said, “We’re doing a little restructuring here at Eat & Drink.” Chloe’s left thumb compulsively pushed her wedding
ring against her finger joint, then ran along the edges of her nails. I noticed Chloe’s manicure lacked its usual luster.
I watched Chloe’s hands perform discomfort; I saw her body taut as a bowstring. I thought of the strange desolation of Eat & Drink’s offices, the empty desks and dusty cubicles dotting the open plan office. A thrill of fear trilled from my crotch to my heart.
“Dorothy, I’m terribly sorry, but Eat & Drink is changing its model.
We can’t keep you on the masthead.”
Chloe’s words summoned the vision of an old newspaper, its creamy whiteness closely packed with spidery black ink. Letters marching in serif font like sensitive insect feet, headlines dark and heavy as a Victorian funeral.
“Publishing’s changing, and, frankly, Eat & Drink simply can’t afford writers like you.” Chloe looked at me, a discordant, beseeching expression. Chloe paused, expecting me to say something. I kept my mouth shut, a narrow line, impassive as a window ledge. I waited for Chloe to jump.
“We’re terminating your contract,” Chloe said.
I stared. Chloe blinked.
“Dorothy,” Chloe sighed, resignation creeping into her voice, “your contribution to this magazine has been substantial, and we value your work.” Chloe’s thumb spasmodically worked her wedding ring. She opened her mouth, closed it. “I’m sorry, Dorothy, but we’ve decided to take the magazine in a new direction.”
Chloe’s eyebrows climbed toward her hairline, a quizzical look, my invitation to respond, to object, to wail, to lash out, to break down, as Chloe broke up my eleven-year relationship with Eat &
Drink.
I said nothing.
Chloe blinked, fumbled her papers. “The magazine business is changing. We have to change with it. Online short-form, more photography, video. It’s nothing personal.” She tossed a tiny, brittle smile.
I broke my silence. “Chloe, you’re firing me. I can’t think of anything more personal.”
Chloe looked at her desk, her hands fumbling across it, composure cracking. “Here is your severance package.” Chloe
pushed a crimson folder at me. “You’ll find it quite generous.”
I picked up the folder. I imagined hurling it at Chloe’s white, soft throat. I imagined the folder slicing her skin and thudding to a quivering stop, embedded like a dagger in her carotid artery. I wondered if her blood would match the scarlet of the paper.
Chloe looked at me, her shoulders slumped but her eyebrow cocked. “You’ll land on your feet, Dorothy. I’m sure of it.”
I paused, trying to think of something cutting to say. Finding nothing, I turned on my heel, and strode out the door. It was, until my arrest, the most humiliating moment of my life.
I had quit jobs, but I had never been fired. Like anyone who has ever freelanced, I’d had that experience when work relationships fade away with attrition, both parties silently agreeing that working together is simply not worth the hassle. I had pitched and I had been rejected, but any writer will say the same. I even failed to sell my first book proposal—an ill-conceived coffee-table book of the history of coffee. But I had never, not ever, been fired.
This sort of experience is difficult for ordinary people, but I found it unendurable. I went a little mad. I holed up in my apartment for a week, baking banana bread compulsively and drinking all the wine in my wine fridge. For eight days, I didn’t get out of lounge-wear. When I wasn’t baking, I flopped from horizontal surface to horizontal surface, carrying a bottle of wine, a loaf of banana bread, and a notebook with me. I scribbled plans and made notes, trying to find a way to grind Eat & Drink into sausage. It wasn’t enough to get Chloe fired, though that idea definitely appealed to me; I wanted to see that magazine burn. I thought of every tactic I could, turning advertisers away, IRS investigation, protracted litigation—something that would roast Eat & Drink so thoroughly it would be served in a body bag. But all the scribbling and all the charting came down to nothing but the empty ravings of a drunk, embittered woman, shaking her fist in the air and raging at nothing.
I look back at that impotent time and I think, This is how ordinary people must feel every day. You poor, pitiful fools.
In the end, it was Emma, the agoraphobe, who pushed me to move on. She read about my firing on some food-gossip site and called me.
“You’re better than this. Do the goddamn work, Dolls,” she said on the phone.
I told her I was obsolete, an anachronism. I was the rotary phone of the publishing world; I was a floppy disk, an IBM Selectric.
“Dolls.” Emma interrupted, “just put one word after another and do the work.”
It was a farce, I said, an airless, gutless, disembodied joke. The Internet was a rank, foul, fetid entity, and I was being swallowed by a weightless monster of binary code. My life was over.
“Fuck that pretentious, shitty magazine in its pee hole and do your goddamn work.”
I was nothing, I said. I should get a job in advertising.
“Be a fucking writer, Dorothy. Do that thing you know how to do,” she said and paused. “And, Dolls, bring me a loaf of that banana bread.”
My friend was right. I was better than Eat & Drink, better than Chloe James, better than the magazine industry that ate my insides and spat me out, as if my work were gristle.
I bathed and dressed and brought Emma her banana bread, and then I got back to work. I was hungry. I was bored. I needed something to make me feel real. And I knew exactly where I’d find it.
