American Appetites (6 page)

“Oh, they live in their own heads,” Meika said, “our ‘brilliant' husbands. They're happiest there, so we must learn to be happy here.”

“‘Here'—?”

“
Here
.”

Glynnis smiled; her friend's answer pleased her. They were speaking over the telephone, and Glynnis was in her snug corner of the kitchen, seated at the table, back to the wall, midmorning cigarette in hand; a mug of coffee, black and strong, before her. Spread across the table were notes and cards upon which recipes had been typed, and a miscellany of magazine and newspaper articles, columns, and clippings on the subject of food; a yet-unread section of that morning's
New York Times;
the April issue of
Gourmet
, in which Glynnis herself had an article. The dark-tiled kitchen floor shone; in the window opposite, several of the hanging plants, the Swedish geraniums, were in bloom; how quiet, how lovely, the house, my house, Glynnis thought, with Ian and Bianca gone. “Oh, yes,” she told Meika. “
Here
.”

And afterward thought, Why don't Meika and I feel more comfortable with each other? We are like sisters, really.

GLYNNIS WONDERED THEN
, and wonders now, thinking ahead to the party, and to Ian's arrival, and the guests, and the food, and the small quick deft tasks she alone will have to do, to orchestrate the evening as she wishes, whether it is a terrible sort of vanity and selfishness, her contentment with such domestic matters: her happiness in them, and in making others, by way of them, happy. Food is such a simple thing, Glynnis's mother once said, perplexed—why is it so difficult? Yet Glynnis has never found it difficult; no more than she finds love, or at any rate lovemaking, difficult. “It helps not to think,” she said. “Just
do
.”

The evening's agenda is: Ian will remain at the Institute until his usual hour, around six o'clock, when he will drive to the Poughkeepsie airport to pick up Bianca (coming home from Connecticut for her father's birthday, presumably a small quiet affair involving only the three of them); he will arrive home, unsuspecting, between seven and seven-thirty, well in time for their usual dinner at eight. In the meantime, arriving between six-thirty and six-forty-five, their friends will gather in the guest room at the rear of the house, having parked their cars along Pearce Drive in a way calculated not to arouse Ian's suspicion. Bianca will lead her father into the house by a side door (the McCulloughs' long low modern multiroomed house has a half dozen entrances), a strategically safe distance from either the kitchen or the dining room. And Glynnis, her apricot chiffon dress more or less hidden by one of her oversized aprons, will go to greet them and behave as she normally would—assuming of course that Bianca is behaving as
she
normally would—and trusting to intuition and improvisation, Glynnis will lead Ian back into the guest room, where their friends await him. . . . But beyond that crucial moment she doesn't want to think; her heart beats too quickly.

The oven timer has begun to chime; Glynnis takes out the sourdough bread in three baking pans, sets them on the butcher-block table. But the heady delicious smell does not quite placate her. She thinks, What if it
is
a mistake? And our friends are embarrassed for us?

It is true, she'd given several surprise parties for Bianca when Bianca was a small child, and those parties, however meticulously planned and overseen, had not been unqualified successes: Glynnis recalls the house filled with laughing, screaming, galloping children; disappointment at the outcome of games and the inevitably “unfair” distribution of prizes; even outbursts of childish temper and tears; her own sudden fatigue, before the last of the children was taken away. Though she has long ago forgotten the woman's name (this was in Cambridge, while Ian still taught at Harvard), she will always remember another young mother saying to her, with a look of wonder and pity, “As the Irish say, Glynnis, ‘Better you than me.'” But the good memories far outweigh the bad: a little boy pulling at Glynnis's sleeve to whisper, “You're pretty, Missus”; the gaiety, the high spirits, the laughter, the sheer silly fun of the children's games, and their excitement in playing them; the delight the children took in bringing Bianca presents, prettily wrapped by others, and watching her open them. And of course there was Bianca's excitement, Bianca's childish gratitude. In a pink party dress, eyes wide with pleasure, plump cheeks flushed, Glynnis's little girl clambering on her lap and throwing her arms around her: “Mommy I love love
love
you!”

Years ago.

The sourdough bread is perfect, Glynnis thinks. Crusty in precisely the way she'd wanted. It is Ian's favorite bread, of the numerous breads Glynnis bakes: a bread he himself tried to bake, in fact, a few years ago, under an odd short-lived inspiration, derived from a friend's enthusiasm about his own bread-baking experiences. (The man is Malcolm Oliver, a journalist and an adjunct fellow of the Institute, an old friend of the McCulloughs' and, like Ian, rather caught up in a world of abstraction: of words.) But Ian's kitchen adventures, amusing to relate to friends as anecdotes, were not entirely amusing at the time; and Glynnis did not much enjoy overseeing her husband so closely, forced of necessity—for of course she
was
forced—to correct him when he did things wrong, or was about to do things wrong. In Ian McCullough's world of dauntingly complex demographic studies, computer programs,
Journal of International Politics
business, and labyrinthine professional intrigues, his judgment and his authority are unquestioned; elsewhere, one might say (as Meika said)
here
, he seems so frequently at sea, well-intentioned but oddly clumsy, as if uncoordinated: as if there were some neurological lapse, or block, between word and act. In the kitchen, optimistic as he was, hands covered in flour and dough as he'd seemed rather to like them, he listened to instructions but did not hear; or, hearing, did not understand; or, understanding, did not want to understand. “You can't bear to take orders from another adult,” Glynnis said, teasing, yet exasperated; and Ian countered, lightly and cleverly, as Ian McCullough invariably did, “Who then would I take orders from, Glynnis, if not ‘another adult'?”

His questions so often strike her as riddles: Zen koans of a kind; though, in Ian's case, the questioner does not know the answer, and asks, it sometimes seems, in order to know. Yet there are no answers to such questions; that Glynnis knows.

She loves him; even in, sometimes, disliking him, raging at him, she loves him; for he seems to inhabit her, like an indwelling spirit that is both
other
and
herself
: a twin. If, over the stretch of their long marriage, Glynnis has been, now and then, unfaithful to Ian, she has rarely been unfaithful to him in the more spacious sense of the word; she has never loved another man as she loves him. Indeed, planning this birthday celebration and preparing, with such anticipation, the food, Glynnis feels her heart swell with love of him, and gratitude for him, that he is the source of so much happiness: a bounty of feeling that spills over onto their friends as well, for without friendship, without a circle of close friends, there can be no true celebration.

It is four-thirty. The delivery from the wine and liquor store arrives, and from the florist; Marvis finishes with her vacuuming, and she and Glynnis tug at the dining room table and pry the halves apart, after some effort (Ian evidently locked the table, without telling Glynnis, when they'd put it together last), and fit the extra leaf into place, and begin setting the table. Midway, Glynnis breaks off, to return to the kitchen, to the chicken and the
farce à quenelles à la panade:
working, as the afternoon wanes, in a bliss of concentration. For fifteen people Glynnis must in fact prepare three ballotines; going through the motions, dreamy yet deft, of sewing, rolling in waxed paper, then in a kitchen towel. Her fingers move with their own practiced intelligence; her skin warms as if lit from within; her eyes grow misty. Why is it Ian has never understood? Why does he imagine his world, because it is an abstract world, is naturally superior to hers, because it is physical, tactile . . . because it is food?

Glynnis moves from counter to stove to butcher-block table, from table to counter, counter to refrigerator, refrigerator to sink, sink to table to counter, counter to stove, stove to sink to refrigerator to counter to table, humming to herself, deeply absorbed, unthinking. From time to time she catches sight of her reflection in one of the kitchen's shiny surfaces; she likes best the floating, very nearly iconic face at eye level in the coppery undersides of her pans. This face is both Glynnis McCullough's and that of an unknown woman; it reveals none of the small blemishes of middle age, the fine white lines bracketing eyes and mouth, the tiny dents, tucks, creases in the skin, the soft crepey look beneath the eyes, that ordinarily distress her. Glynnis is a beautiful woman still, she supposes; but, after all, she
is
forty-eight years old, and how much longer can beauty reasonably last? In her kitchen, however, where no true mirrors are allowed, reflecting surfaces are benign. Even Glynnis's hair, silver-streaked since girlhood, flames up a rich lustrous russet-red in this room.

Glynnis loves, too, her kitchen library: the shelf of cookbooks and food books. Many of their pages are torn and stained, the recipes annotated, modified: “corrected.” In some margins there are stars, in others question marks, or exclamation points, or those curse symbols unique to cartoons. Leafing idly through certain of these books is like leafing through old diaries; the other evening, half seriously, she'd told Ian that, when they were both old, really old, elderly, they might read these entries aloud to each other; and certain meals, certain days in their lives and evenings with friends, entire pockets of lost time, might be returned to them: as in Proust. “Won't that be lovely?” Glynnis asked, struck by the notion; and Ian smiled, and ran a hand through his hair, and regarded her for so long in silence that Glynnis thought he must not have heard her question. Then he said, “Yes. It will. Lovely.”

At five-twenty, when the table is nearly set and Glynnis is about to break off work and take a long restful restorative bath, the doorbell rings again; and it is another, and unexpected, floral delivery. This one, a half dozen pink rosebuds, filled out with those delicate lacy pale flowers—or are they in fact leaves that resemble flowers?—that florists use to such advantage, is unsigned, mysteriously unsigned: merely a small birthday card and the inscription
Happiness to both
, in what is very likely a florist's assistant's hand. Glynnis smiles, delighted as a child; puts the flowers in one of her cut-glass Waterford vases, inherited from her grandmother, thinking, Our celebration has begun.

2.

They were undressing for bed, one blowsy March night, when Ian said suddenly, in that way he had, though, since coming to Hazelton-on-Hudson, he spoke in this way less frequently, “Do you feel, Glynnis, that you have a soul?” Glynnis said quizzically, “Do I feel that I have a—?” “You know: a
soul
,” Ian said. His smile was faint, and wistful; an expression in his face that Glynnis could not have named, except that it was so uniquely her husband's: a boyish look of sobriety and doubt, on the edge of anxiety; yet there was a readiness too to smile, and make a joke of it, if his mood was not matched by hers. (For, like all the men of Glynnis's acquaintance, like all Hazelton men, in any case, Ian most dreaded seeming naïve, or foolish: being made a fool.) He'd come to an absentminded stop in buttoning the shirt of his flannel pajamas; he had taken off his glasses, and his eyes looked inordinately round and exposed.

Glynnis slipped into bed; propped herself up against her pillows, arms behind her head; considered the question seriously, instead of making light of it, or outrightly mocking it, as she might, in other circumstances, have done.
Do
I have a soul? She said, after a moment, “I suppose I do.”

“You have a soul?”

Glynnis smiled; and frowned; made an effort not to be annoyed by this old habit of Ian's, more pronounced in recent weeks, of repeating questions verbatim which had seemingly been answered. “I don't know,” she said. “Do I? Is this a quiz, or a catechism?”

“You ‘have' a soul?”

“Isn't that what you've asked me?”

Ian spoke slowly and gravely, as if transcribing his own words.

“And your soul, you feel, is somehow distinct from you?”

“Distinct from me?”

“You say that you ‘have' a soul, and you seem to be quite certain. But that means that the soul is something other than you, since you ‘have' it. The way you have a foot, or a certain shade of hair, I mean. An object to your subject.”

Glynnis saw in which direction Ian was headed, and laughed, and sighed; for really, if they were going to talk instead of sleeping, there were any number of practical things about which they might talk—household repairs, the problem of Bianca, a conflict of dates and appointments the following afternoon. She said, with an air of thoughtfulness, “It really couldn't be, could it?—I mean, distinct from me. I mean, if
it
is me. I'm sure you're right.”

“What do you mean, ‘right'?” Ian said, startled. “In what way am I ‘right'?”

“That I can't have a soul distinct from me, if it is also me.”

“Yet you speak of the phenomenon as ‘it.' As something that must be distinct from you.”

“Maybe it's a bad habit, a linguistic habit. Aren't questions like these—”

“Then do you think you might
be
a soul?—as distinct from ‘having' one?”

Glynnis laid a forearm over her eyes, shielding them from the bedside lamp. For all her sense of herself as a person of nearboundless energy, the envy of her friends, she felt, many nights, very tired; tiredness, sheer physical tiredness, pulsed from her knees, ankles, feet. “Oh Ian, could we talk about this another time?
Haven't
we talked about it already? It's nearly one in the morning,” she said, disliking both the practicality of her tone and its familiarity, “and we'll be getting up at seven. We have to figure out what to do about tomorrow. If the Honda is going to be serviced first thing in the morning, and if you want to drive to—”