Cleaving (42 page)

February 13, 2008

S
O
. M
Y
J
ACK THE
R
IPPER
theory. What I think is that when this poor, sick fucker looked at the frenzied destruction he'd wrought, when he saw what
he'd done to these women, who he'd probably hated or feared simply because they possessed a uterus, maybe the tiny flicker
of humanity remaining in him burned him. Maybe he opened them up, took out their insides, did his patient exploring, not as
an extension of his savagery, but as a sort of ritual cleansing against it. Maybe he tried to soothe his horror of himself
by bringing order to the chaos he'd created--cataloguing the parts, studying the way pieces came together. He could take the
torn, bloody evidence of his sickness and worthlessness and transform her, transform
it,
into something recognizable, sane. Neat slices of meat ready for the butcher's window. Whoever this guy was, butcher by trade
or not, he was too far gone to save himself. But what he did with his knife to these women's bodies was his attempt to anyway.
His butchery was his last bid for salvation. I get that.

Then again, maybe I'm exactly wrong. Maybe he wasn't a butcher at all, and if he had been, women would have remained whole,
he would have stayed in his shop contentedly feeding people, making something from something else, and his salvation would
have been himself.

Once I've finished my coffee, I set the cup in the sink, wash my hands--thoroughly, up under my nails and under the leather
of my Maasai bracelet. Then I slip a large translucent vacuum bag from a stack on a Metro shelf against the wall and return
to the table.

A liver is unlike any other organ--not muscular and obvious like a heart, with its ventricles and aorta clues to its function;
not like digestive organs, those tracts and sacs a passageway, concerned with the practicalities of nutrition and excretion.
A liver is a mystery. It's a filter. The liver records experience, the indulgences and wrong turns; it contains within it
a constantly updated state-of-the-union address. But it keeps what it knows a secret. Encoded. It cleans up after itself,
too, will after a time purge files, dispensing with the unnecessary information, what's been relegated to the past, keeping
what's needed. There are even some hopeful, possibly deluded souls who believe a cirrhotic liver can heal itself, with time,
and with gentleness.

I shake the bag open with my right hand while lifting the liver into it with my left, my whole forearm supporting its sagging
weight. As its surface sticks to the inside of the bag, I hoist it up in both hands, giving it a few jerks to weight it down
to the bottom, well clear of the lip. Tote it over to the big Cryovac machine pushed up against the wall, lay it inside, line
up the mouth of the bag flat against the raised metal sealing edge, and close the lid. Through the window at the top of the
machine, I watch the bag swell slowly up, then shrink quickly, tightly, around the organ with a sound like the timbers of
a ship in a heavy storm. The door of the machine hisses open, with horror-movie slowness. I take out the bagged liver, weigh
it, slap the sticker that comes sliding out of the slot at the bottom of the scale, printed with the weight and today's date--"11.2
lbs, 2/13/08"--onto the cool surface of the bag, label it with the Sharpie stuck in my right rear pocket--"Beef Liver"--and haul
it over to the walk-in freezer. Pulling up on the latch and edging the door open with my shoulder, I lean just far enough
into the frigid darkness to place the package in a bin on the metal floor atop a pile of burgundy bags just like it, but frozen
as hard as rock and rimed with frost.

I've just finished wiping down the table with a rag soaked in a bleach-water solution when Josh strides up and heaves a side
of pork onto it. "Hey, your tattoo all healed?"

"Yeah. See?" I lift the hair off the back of my neck as Josh peers to see the small word inscribed there in black ink.
Loufoque
.

"Very nice!" He slaps the hog's haunch as I let my hair fall. "So, genius, you forget everything you ever knew about meat?"

"Oh, I imagine."

"Prove it."

I peer down at the pig for a moment, contemplating my first move. Today is only my second return to Fleisher's after a hiatus
of many months. It's a Wednesday morning, the gentle midweek buzz of readying the shop to open instantly familiar when I walk
in the door. Aaron is peeking down into a big pot of soup on the stove. Jessica and Hailey are talking over receipts near
the cheese counter. Jessica has recently found out she's pregnant--which has been occasion for much amused contemplation of
a toddler running around the shop with a cleaver dangling from his hand--and is grooming Hailey to handle things while she's
out of the shop. Jesse is filling up the case.

The first time I returned was on a Saturday, and it was a bit of a disaster. Often, on the weekends, the shop is invaded by
the Weekend Warriors, old friends or colleagues of Josh and Jessica, all of them guys, up from the city, who want to practice
cutting meat because they think it's manly. On these days the wash of testosterone becomes a flood that threatens to float
the table away. The conversation, which on an average Wednesday ebbs and flows, pours out in an unceasing torrent on these
Saturdays. No talk of politics anymore, or movies. None of the usual self-aware riffs on the homoerotics of butchery and male
competition. Now the chest-thumping becomes very nearly literal. Stories about guns and hunting begin to predominate, as cycling
yarns fade into the background, unless they include viscera.

Aaron has one that does. He tells his tales with his whole body, standing in a biker's squat, holding imaginary handlebars,
his eyes wide, then tightly shut, chin pulled back, as he reenacts the moment of stopping to see lovely deer crossing the
road. One second later he witnesses their explosive death by high-speed collision, the grisly blowback dousing him from head
to toe.

(Okay, I laughed.)

My femaleness becomes an issue on these days as it never has been during the week. It's not as if they're flirting with me,
exactly. It's more like the mere presence of estrogen agitates them. In no way are any of these men interested in me sexually,
but their animal brains take over, I guess, and somehow, quiet and small though I make myself, I become the axis of some strange
male ritual, rams clashing horns, apes clapping their chests with their great leathery palms. People are suddenly calling
me "sweetheart"--a familiarity an amateur butcher has not earned. Someone drops ice down my back. Thank God I have no pigtails
and there are no inkpots around. Only Colin rises above their antics. He reminds me of Robert in a dog run with a bunch of
little yappy dogs--Colin is a creature of a whole different magnitude, indifferent or amused. He and I exchange conspiratorially
jaded glances.

It's an odd feeling. Of course I've witnessed this behavior before. So has any woman who's ever been a thirteen-year-old in
a schoolyard at recess. And any woman can tell you it can be exhilarating. In the past few years, I've quite often loved being
in the center of such a swarm, recognizing that I'm just a conduit through which macho, emphatically heterosexual men can
goad one another, but wanting to be just that. It somehow made me feel worthwhile.

But not here. Fleisher's long ago became a haven for me from my womanliness, or at least from my frustrated need to feel womanly,
seductive--and used. Used by men--by any man--to deliver whatever it is he really needs. I don't want that anymore. Here in the
shop I want to be worth something because I know how to handle a knife and crack a dirty joke. Worth something because of
who I am. So I like Wednesdays.

I flex my hands and eye the clock before I begin.

"Your hand bothering you?"

"Oh, not
so
so much. It aches a little. I'm getting back into the groove, you know."

"Momma, you're a butcher now. That ache is gonna be with you the rest of your life. What, by the way, is that fucking thing
on your hand?"

"This? Oh. It's a Maasai bracelet. I ate the goat this skin came from. Look, you can still see a few hairs on it. If I wear
it until it falls off, I get good luck."

Josh nods approvingly. "That's
disgusting
."

I snap off the kidney and its attendant fat, then attack the tenderloin, eyeing the clock. I'm not remotely ready, certainly
not after the sabbatical I've been on, to challenge the Great Side-Breaking Record, currently held by Aaron at forty-four
seconds. (A can of Colt 45 sitting on a high shelf, draped with a digital stopwatch, commemorates the great event. Aaron has
taped over the "5." It now reads, "Colt 44," and a handmade label beneath it reads, "Refreshing piggy goodness brought to
you by Aaron.") But I have aspirations. I pull out the tenderloin quickly, throw it to the table. Count down five ribs from
the shoulder, wedge my knife tip between the tightly wound vertebrae, then, once through, pull my blade down to the table,
as smoothly as I can, removing the shoulder.

"Oh, you still got it." Josh peers over my shoulder.

I shrug.

"So what's going on with that husband of yours?"

"You trying to distract me?" After raking my knife down the length of ribs, I set it into the scabbard strapped around my
waist and pick up the butcher saw to break through the ribs and separate the belly from the loin.

"I just can't believe sweet Eric would do something like that."

After withholding all this drama for so long, in the last month or so I've told Josh quite a bit about what's going on. Not
in that desperate, self-pitying barrage I used to be so good at, but just as one friend to another. Things are different now.
There are no names I can't say without falling apart.

"What, you mean him seeing the girlfriend again? Oh, she's a nice girl. And she loves him. Gotta like that about her. They
left things strange, I guess, trying to work stuff out."

"Good God, Momma. You need to take away his Wii until he snaps out of it."

"Heh." I'm through the ribs, and so I put down the saw and take up my knife again and finish the cut with it, curving up past
the bottom of the rib cage and down to take off the belly. Throw that to the table.

"Meantime, if he's getting laid--"

"I don't know if he's getting laid."

"Well, you oughta be able to get some ass too. Stay with us for a few days. I'll hook you up. And we can do some house hunting."

"Thanks, but I'm okay for now. Though I will take you up on the real estate shopping." For the last month or so I've been
having a look around up here. The idea of having a place in these curled mountains, a place of my own, makes any prospect
of my future, paired or solitary, seem less frightening. I yank the remaining side around, leg hanging off the edge of the
table.

"And what about this other asshole?"

I shake my head. "He's gone off again." After a month or so of conversations, conversations that seemed terribly healing and
measured and Adult, D--Damian, I mean--has flown the coop, without explanation. "It's what he does. He's here and he's gone,
he can't do anything else. And finally I've learned that, and I'm over it." I lean on the loin with one elbow and grab the
animal's foot with the other, in readiness to break the joint.

"Bullshit."

I grunt as I push down hard on the leg. The joint wiggles and squeaks but doesn't break open. "Well, I'm not over
him
. Over
it
. He is who he is--"

"An asshole."

I shrug again, push down again, unsuccessfully, on the leg. "He's just the man he is, capable of just what he's capable of.
And he's gonna do what he's gonna do. So am I, so is Eric. And we shall see."

"Fuck. You are like a Zen master."

On the third try, a decisive crack. With a single deep slice to wood, the leg is off the loin, in my strongly gripping hand.
Sinovial fluid drips to the floor.

"Nah," I say with a grin. I slap the leg back onto the table.

Aaron calls from the kitchen. "What was the time on that, Jules?" Josh rolls his eyes.

"Oh, about a minute and a half." Actually, no. Actually, one minute, twenty-five seconds. Exactly.

"Halfway there. You're on your way, Jules."

I take a deep breath, smell the smells of meat as I run my fingers around that impossibly smooth white cup joint, that old,
private pleasure of mine. "Yeah. Maybe so."

There are so many people who've taught, supported, helped, and plain old put up with me during the writing of this book, I'm
inevitably going to blank on some names here, so apologies in advance.

Thanks to the entire Fleisher's crew--Josh and Jessica Applestone, Aaron Lenz, Jesse, Colin, Hailey, Juan, and everybody else--who
let me poke around the shop for six months, getting in the way, and gave me much undeserved free meat. Thanks to my guides
and helpmeets on my travels--Santiago, Armando, Diego, Oksana, Kesuma, Leyan, Elly, and the park rangers of Ngorongoro Park
in Tanzania, who managed to keep a clueless traveler alive and mostly well. Thanks to my family--Kay and John and Jordan Foster,
Mary Jo and Jo Ann Powell, Carol Sander, Ethan and Elizabeth Powell--most of whom have declined to read this book, but in the
most cheerful, loving way possible. Thanks to Emily Alexander-Wilmeth, Emily Farris, Eric Steel, and Amy Robinson, who plowed
through drafts, gave great notes, and didn't hate me, as a general rule. Thanks to my "bleaders," you know who you are. Thanks
to Robert, who's just the best dog in the world, and to Maxine, Lumi, and Cooper, who are the best cats, in no particular
order. Thanks to my editor, Judy Clain, and her assistant, Nathan Rostron, who edit adroitly and remind me from time to time
that there is such a thing as too much information. Thanks to Michelle Aielli, my "publicist" at Little, Brown; I use quotation
marks not to denigrate her astounding PR powers, but rather to indicate my discomfort in attaching such an oft-mocked word
to a friend who does such a remarkable job of keeping me sane. Thanks to therapist Anna and bartender Marcel, who also pull
double shifts on sanity maintenance.