Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (16 page)

•   •   •

ON HER LAST DAY OF WORK
, Abby went by her father's office to see if he wanted to go to lunch. Really, he should have asked her.

“Edward,” Brenda, her father's secretary, was always saying, “girls don't stay this age forever. You should take her out to lunch while you can.”

But that day, Abby decided she would take the initiative. She was going back to school in a week; she'd probably never see him during that time if she wasn't at the office.

She walked toward his office and looked in the partially opened door. Brenda was leaning over the desk, handing him a stack of papers. Her father was looking up at her, and the expression on his face was something Abby had seen only in the movies.

•   •   •

ABBY HAD RETURNED HOME
to an empty house, mind and body shaking. Lucy and Rory were off at a summer job or the beach, depending. On the kitchen counter, she found a note from her mother, saying she was off grocery shopping and would be back soon.

Couldn't her mother do anything more exciting? And Abby knew all the boring things that would be in the bags her mother brought home. Abby had discovered alfalfa sprouts that spring, and sandwiches with avocado and real cheddar cheese. Her mother, on the other hand, seemed to have awoken in the 1950s, like a culinary Sleeping Beauty, and decided that was where she was going to stay. Compared with the womanly elegance, the sophisticated palate of her father's secretary, Isabelle was about as exciting as a grilled Velveeta sandwich, a dish they'd had more than once for dinner.

Her mother probably didn't even know about Brenda, Abby thought as she went upstairs.

At the top, where she should have turned right to go down the hall to her bedroom, Abby turned left. She used to go that way when she was young and nightmares ripped her out of sleep. She had stopped when her father told her that big sisters made it through the night in their own beds. But now she went into her parents' bedroom, opening the closet, gazing at their clothes as if the arrangement would give her an understanding of what was happening. Her mother's shoes were lined up in a row leading directly to her father's, the dresses hanging neatly right next to the suits. It was almost possible to believe that the crackling sound of her parents' marriage that summer, the expression on her father's face that afternoon, was only the heat of August—except everybody knew that heat didn't do that in Los Angeles.

Abby walked over to the bed, touching the surface of the spread, the pillows plumped into mounds. She ran her fingers over the round brass clock on her mother's nightstand, and then opened the drawer below. Inside were earplugs, a pencil and an unmarked pad of paper, and in the back, a small, blue oval machine with a round attachment at one end, a white electrical cord at the other. Abby didn't immediately recognize it, and then, suddenly, she did. Her college roommate, Sandra, had one; she had shown Abby, joking about fish and bicycles and not needing men.

Abby shut the drawer of her mother's nightstand with a quick, definitive click and went down the hall to her own room.

•   •   •

ABBY AND BOB
had returned to college in the fall, almost embarrassed when they saw each other. The reality of Bob, of Abby, rattled loosely inside the fantasies they had created of one another over the summer, and it was disconcerting to be touched by hands instead of words. It was easier and more familiar when they were at a distance, even across a room, the space between them filled with the things they had said on paper, the air shivering with possibility. Which was how it still was that first day of the term, when the guy came into the chemistry lab, took one look at Abby, and chose her as his partner.

His hair was red and curly, not her type at all. He was a music major, just taking chemistry for fun, he said. Nothing like Bob, who was a choice Abby had made the first moment she saw him. And yet, when the red-haired guy reached for the beaker and his hand came near hers, she held still, hoping his hand would continue on its trajectory, brush her skin and tangle its way into her hair. Back in her dorm room that night, she found herself imagining a deserted lab, a metal table swept clean of all equipment, its hard surface cool against the length of her back as he rose above her.

She knew he wasn't the one she wanted, but her body wouldn't stop rustling, and a few mornings later, when she went to get dressed and realized she didn't have any clean underwear, she paused, hand raised over the laundry basket, midway to grabbing a pair from the day before. Then she pulled her hand back. She walked to the closet and selected a skirt, the fabric sliding over her bare skin like a suggestion.

It was amazing, she thought, as she walked across the campus, how the absence of something could be more startling than its presence had ever been. Each step seemed to have a bigger, more directed purpose, the rustling in her body concentrating, becoming almost, delectably, unbearable. She was suddenly aware of the pink-tipped flowers of the floss-silk trees that lined the walkway, the smell of bacon and eggs coming from the cafeteria, the air moving between her legs like the lightest of fingertips. Abby wondered if the guy in the chemistry lab would know, what he would do if he did.

“Hey.”

She heard Bob's voice behind her, felt his hand on her shoulder. “Missing breakfast this morning?”

She turned and his eyes caught hers, looked again.

“Walk you to class?” he asked.

She nodded, and they fell in line next to each other, his arm firm around her waist. She could see the straight lines of the classroom buildings at the end of the walkway in front of them. Her body softened against his, the long line of his leg moving against hers, and his hand slipped slowly lower, finally reaching what wasn't there. She heard an intake of breath, felt his pace catch and right itself, and then Bob's arm changed their course, back to her dormitory.

•   •   •

“YOU'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY
, Mom,” Rory said.

“What?” She couldn't even remember driving the last few blocks. Her eyes took in the black matte surface of the rental car dashboard, the glowing lights of speedometer, odometer.

“This isn't the way to the airport,” Rory said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Mom, you're going to the grocery store.”

Abby understood condescension to be a natural by-product of adolescence, arriving along with sweat and armpit hair. She observed it in her patients all the time, although when boys reached that age they generally moved on to male doctors, whose voices were lower and whose body parts, although never seen, were assumed to be similar. You couldn't take the defection personally.

“I don't think so.” Her doctor's voice, as her mother would say.

“Then what's that?” Rory pointed to the neon sign that read
FOOD MART
.

“Oh hell,” Abby said. Of course it was. How many times had she taken her mother to this very store in the past ten years? Isabelle drifting along, pushing the cart, Abby offering to run ahead and return with the items on her mother's list. Who wouldn't want their own personal shopper, anyway? But Isabelle would just say she wanted to choose her own tomatoes.

“Damn it.” Abby abruptly swerved into the left lane and entered the intersection at full speed, cranking the steering wheel into a U-turn.

“Mom!” Rory exclaimed. “Red light!”

And then, louder, panicked, “CAR!”

Abby heard the scream of brakes, looked to her right and saw headlights coming at her son, illuminating his profile, so much like her brother's. The hair that wouldn't quite lie flat, the cheekbones and chin that were becoming stronger as he grew into himself. Rory, her boy. The boy running across the soccer field, or sprawled on the couch with them, watching a movie. Without thinking, she flung her right arm across him and punched the accelerator through the rest of her turn, vaulting her car out of the intersection. In the rearview mirror, she saw a car fly behind her, just missing her rear bumper. An old blue Cadillac, fins rising up in the back. A blond woman in the driver's seat, flipping her off.

Abby pulled over to the curb, breathing hard.

“Mom, Jesus Christ,” Rory said.

“Are you okay?” She touched his arm, his hair. Nothing missing.

“Mom?” he asked. “Should I be driving?”

She stopped, her hand in the air.

She recognized that tone; it had come out of her mouth as recently as this afternoon. The readiness, the desire, to take over, a modulation set midway between frustration and condescension. As if Isabelle was a child, or worse, so far gone that childhood would be an improvement. It had seemed justified at the time, a minor venting of a larger aggravation. She hadn't even really thought about how it might appear to her mother.

Now she had a pretty good idea. When had her own child become her? Abby wondered.

The timing was ironic, in so many ways. Abby could still remember her own teenage certainty that she was smarter, more capable than her mother. She had never stopped believing it, if she was honest. And yet only today, as she had listened to her mother's conversation circle and repeat, observed the blankness in Isabelle's eyes when she had first seen her grandson, Abby understood for the first time the difference between adolescent hubris and actual responsibility and wanted nothing more than to give the latter back
.
In that moment, she had realized that perhaps all she'd ever wanted, all any child wanted, was to feel the exhilarating wind of independence rushing about her, flying without needing to land.

But there wasn't any choice, really. Gravity would always win, Abby knew that much. Isabelle would continue down the path she was on, and sooner or later Abby would follow her. Her own son would see himself as smarter than she, and then perhaps that would change, and change again. If they both were lucky, her son would never experience the difference between certainty and understanding when it came to his mother. But in the end, there was nothing she could do to alter any of it. They were all just barns, swooning toward the earth; the only thing that held them up was stories.

The smell of burning brakes still hung in the air. Abby looked over at her son, alive in the passenger seat next to her.

She took a deep breath and turned the key in the ignition.

“Where are you going, Mom?” Rory asked cautiously.

“Back,” she said. “I forgot something.”

Abby put the car in gear and headed to Isabelle's house.

T
om was furious, or perhaps merely frightened. He had realized over the past five years how similar the two emotions could appear, dressing up in each other's clothes like friends who had spent far too much time together. But the sight of Isabelle's handprint across Lillian's stomach—everything he suddenly realized it meant, and the fact that she hadn't told him—left his brain with such a cacophony of feelings that he had fled the kitchen. He had managed to avoid Lillian during Isabelle's parade through the neighborhood, always seeing a streamer that required refastening or a need for assistance on the other side of Isabelle's throne. When the afternoon was over and good-byes were drifting across the evening air, he ducked out to Isabelle's garden. Maybe there he would be able to line up his emotions in neat rows, weed out the ones that didn't belong.

Isabelle's chair rested at the edge of the vegetable patch. He wasn't sure if it was proper for him to sit in someone else's throne, but the chair didn't seem to mind, its deep expanse an undeniable invitation. He raised himself onto its seat and the arms enclosed him. He let out his breath for what felt like the first time in hours and shut his eyes.

Suddenly, he heard the screaming of car brakes, no more than a few blocks away. His body seized, waiting for the inevitable collision, the sound of metal scraping through the crackling surface of glass. But it didn't happen. He heard only the swerve, a shifting of speed and direction, realignment. The neighborhood quieted again.

That was how it was supposed to work, he thought—a momentary jostling with mortality that awoke you to life's possibilities, the fact that you had been wasting your days being frustrated about that extra-long red light on your way to work or the fact that the grocery store no longer stocked your favorite brand of cereal. You would look up, startled, and then go forward into the world, thankful for the reprieve.

Except, of course, when it didn't happen that way—when fate just kept coming and took out not you but someone so close to you that you wished its aim had been better. And once it happened, it was like you were snagged in that moment, always waiting, always ready to fall.

That was the thing he didn't know how to explain to anybody, even himself—the way that grief was a country as difficult to leave as it had been terrible to enter. Right now he should be rejoicing at the prospect of life in this new woman he loved. And yet all it took was one blast of adrenaline and he was flailing his way back down the rabbit hole of Charlie's death.

•   •   •

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SIGN
, a billboard, that nothing was ever going to make sense again—the surreal way the first days after Charlie's diagnosis had reminded him of arriving in Italy on their honeymoon. One moment he had been on an American plane, a practicing lawyer, newly married, listening to announcements in a language that entered his consciousness effortlessly, seamlessly. The next, he was in an airport where nothing—the signs, the conversations, the gestures—was comprehensible.

It was only a few years later that he sat next to his wife in a doctor's office, hearing a diagnosis that was no more intelligible.

Over time, he had learned to navigate the country of illness. The multisyllabic vocabulary that sounded like Greek and sometimes was. The customs—when to offer help, when to pull back, when a compliment would be considered anything other than pity, when a hand on an elbow would provide more support than pain. And the traditions—the glass of wine Charlie was never supposed to drink, a moment to remember who they had been when the only language they didn't know was Italian.

“Here's to the day,” she would say, raising her glass, while he tried not to remember the nights of their honeymoon, her breasts round and full as she walked toward him across their hotel room.

But it seemed no sooner had he become fluent in caretaking than he was exiled to the country of widowers, where he lived in a house stuffed with silence. He spent months unable to speak to others, no longer knowing how and uninterested in learning. People sent notes on stiff, white stationery, consoled him on his loss—and it was all he could do not to scream at them that he hadn't
lost
anything; he had never let her out of his sight; there was no losing here. There was only leaving.

His friends worried as time passed and he evinced no signs of moving forward, but when they reminded him that he was young and encouraged him to look outward and move on, the thought of conversing, of having to learn the vocabulary and nuances of another lover's (he couldn't think wife's) needs and life story, was exhausting. It was easier to speak a language he knew, even if he was talking to a dead woman.

It was almost a year after Charlie's death that a friend took him to Lillian's restaurant and Tom found an announcement for cooking classes on the table. He had signed up, surprising himself. Perhaps it had felt like a way to still be with Charlie, who had loved food so completely that he sometimes joked there was no room left for him—a claim Charlie had defiantly and abundantly refuted, her arms and legs wrapped around him, her long blond hair smelling of olive oil and oregano and simmering tomatoes, scents he should be jealous of but could only inhale, completely and utterly seduced.

But in the end, Lillian's cooking class had become a beginning of sorts. Somewhere around the third class he had felt his senses start to awaken, had found himself savoring the crunch of toast in the morning, the warm glide of butter across his tongue. He had looked around him at the other people in the class, wondering about their stories, their sadnesses and joys.

And then one evening, in class, he had stood next to Lillian at the counter and watched her long, slim fingers moving through flour, gripping the handle of a pan. From hands, it was a slow but simple progression to wrists, arms, collarbones, eyes. The way her lips would relax into a small, satisfied smile as the shreds of cheese in a fondue finally melded together. The way she would watch her students, the sense he got that she was giving them what they needed, even as she withheld something from herself. The latter intrigued him most, perhaps, and he began to observe her more closely, looking for the thing that she was missing, hoping it might have something to do with him.

The similarities between Charlie and Lillian were obvious—their mutual love of food, the way they changed others' lives through the simple act of feeding them. But where Charlie had been the warmth of sun on a beach, Lillian was more like fall, loss and bounty brought together. And so, that last night of the cooking class, after all the other students had cleaned up and headed out, he had resisted their invitations for a nightcap at the local bar and gone back to the restaurant, trying to ignore the sensation that he was still holding Charlie's hand as he opened the gate and walked back up the path to the restaurant kitchen door.

•   •   •

LILLIAN HAD KNOWN,
of course. He had told her about Charlie that first night, as they walked around the block, then around the neighborhood, then deep into the city and back, the sky gaining darkness and then light. That first walk she had simply listened, absorbing his story into her. At the end of the night, he had dropped her at her house and paused, uncertain how to say good-bye.

“Substitutions work best in cooking, Tom,” she said. Then she kissed him, quietly, and went into the house.

He had stayed away for a while—told himself he had work to do, which was true in many ways. But after a few weeks, he found himself back at the restaurant, sitting at a table by the window. When Lillian had come out into the dining room and seen him, she had walked over to greet him, her hands at her side, and he felt his fingers reaching out to touch hers.

•   •   •

THEY HAD SPENT
the past year together, their lives slowly blending into each other's. They had built trust—of each other, of luck—meal by meal, over a summer spent gathering oysters and clams on the beach, eating dinner in the garden during Lillian's breaks from the restaurant. She told him about her father leaving when she was young, about her mother's death. The way cooking had made life not just better but whole. He told her about growing up on the East Coast, of losing his father, then his wife. Their conversations had wandered into the branches of cherry trees, and finally spread out across bed pillows, words dissolving into touch.

He had forgotten how much a body could desire, how limitless passion could be. After watching a body he loved disintegrate into something he could barely recognize, the glory of the soft curve of Lillian's waist, the line of one long, lean leg escaping from her bathrobe as she sat at the kitchen table in the morning, was almost overwhelming, and he entered her world gratefully and deeply.

“Close your eyes,” she would say, and he would feel cashmere against his cheek. “Think jasmine rice.

“And this,” she would add, raw silk brushing his chest, “lavender.”

And as the fabrics grazed across his skin, he swore he could feel the lines blur between touch and scent, taste and sight and sound.

•   •   •

WHAT HE HADN'T COUNTED ON
, however, was how easily and often other lines would overlap—how he would sometimes hear Charlie's voice as Lillian sang in the shower, how he would see Lillian cooking in his kitchen and remember Charlie coming into the living room, spoon in hand, to get him to taste a new sauce.

Over the months, Lillian's things had slowly been shifting from her apartment to his house. At first only the obvious, the toothbrushes and underwear that made the next day feasible, but eventually, the bits of personality that brought a new color to a bookshelf, a new scent to the couch cushions. Still, he was ridiculously relieved when he found out Lillian preferred the opposite side of the bed to Charlie. It was like driving in England; even if at some point your mind managed to blur the differences in smells and colors and the lilt of an accent—the fact that the cars were driving in the opposite lane could always be counted on to jolt you back to a full recognition of what country you were in.

There was one night, however. Lillian had come home late from the restaurant; Tom was already deeply asleep.

“Slide over,” she whispered. “I cricked my neck; I need your side tonight.”

Her words came toward him, filtering through dreams of legal briefs and closing arguments. He surfaced only enough to move his body to the right, and then instinctively roll over to cradle her back, his knees sliding into the crook of hers, her head nestled under his chin. Her hair smelled of olive oil and oregano and he inhaled deeply as he slept.

His dreams were golden, incandescent. Stunned by yearning, he reached for her, still half dreaming. She turned toward him, liquid, and it was like entering a river, her body rising and falling against him like a current, her arms and legs wrapped around him. Afterward, he heard her breathing slow and return to sleep; as the first light came through the windows overhead, he lazily opened his eyes and saw her long black hair lying across his chest. Not blond. Not Charlie.

Shaking with guilt, he had gotten out of bed and taken a shower, then gone to work even though it was only five-thirty in the morning. Lillian called him later, her voice still languid, and he told her he was sorry for leaving so early; he had an important case. That evening, when she got home from the restaurant, he massaged her neck for almost an hour, unspoken apologies running through his fingers into her muscles, loosening them. When he was done, she turned, smiling.

“What did I do to deserve you?” she asked.

That night, she slept on her own side of the bed. The day after that, he was assigned a huge case and he dove, thankfully, greedily, into work, where everything had a precedent and all crimes, intentional or not, had a limit on their sentences.

•   •   •

ISABELLE'S BACK DOOR OPENED
and Lillian appeared, wearing his sweater, which hung to her knees, loose as a novice's habit. She looked at him.

“Hey,” she said. Her hand touched her stomach.

“When did . . . ?” he asked.

“You know . . .”

And then he realized he did.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I should have . . .”

“No.” It was awful that she was apologizing.

“So?”

He looked at her. He realized he'd used all the words already—how long; what did the doctor say. I love you.

“Right,” she said, and walked back into the house.

•   •   •

AND THEN THERE WAS NOTHING
—just the silence in his house once more, which felt hopelessly, endlessly familiar.

•   •   •

HE WOULD HAVE SLEPT
at work, if he could have—although with the hours most associates kept, it wouldn't have made a real difference in how much time he spent there. He was finding sleep overrated in any case, just an unguarded moment for his mind to wander, like a child who can't swim returning again and again to the edge of a pool. So he stayed late, anything to avoid his bed, where he could only lie on his back in the middle, trying to ignore the memories on both sides of him.