Sweet (17 page)

At ‘Trice’s insistence, they ordered pizza and opened the beer Jules had been keeping cold in the back of the fridge. Squatting amongst the half-opened boxes and piles of crumpled newspaper with which Teddy had packed the breakable things, they toasted, the three of them, the little home.

“A warning,” ‘Trice said seriously, after pulling the beer bottle from her lips with a wet pop. “He’s a real bitch in the mornings.”

Teddy laughed when Jules slapped her arm, affronted.

“Don’t touch his clothing or his hair unless he gives you permission,” she continued, and at this Jules nodded seriously.

“And most important,” she nearly whispered, pointing the lip of her beer in Teddy’s direction, “we’re sharing him now, since I had him first and all. If you break him or damage him—even just a little—I will descend upon you with a wrath you have yet to imagine.”

“You can’t be serious right now. Get the hell out. Uninvited!” Jules grouched at her, pushing at her thigh with his bare feet.

“I’m
deadly
serious,” she said, still eyeballing Teddy sideways and pointing her bottle. “Deadly.”

“I don’t belong to either one of you, so stop giving him instructions on my care and feeding like I’m a hamster.”

“Then stop storing grain in your cheeks, Fluffy,” ‘Trice laughed and squeezed Jules’s jaw. Jules pushed her hand away, and the two descended into a pile of slaps and shrieks and amateur wrestling moves. Teddy watched, still smiling stupidly, and when ‘Trice had Jules pinned under her thick thighs,
with her bottle resting on his forehead, calmly holding his head still with one large hand; when Jules flailed beneath her, helpless and indignant and shouting at Teddy, “Do something already, goddamn it, she’s going to leave a
ring
on my forehead!”; when ‘Trice slipped her other hand down over Jules’s mouth to muffle his protests and shrugged nonchalantly; when Andy shuffled over to inspect the commotion and then turned his back on Jules’s wiggling body and settled himself against
Teddy’s
thigh—when all of these things happened while Teddy sat, grinning and avoiding Jules’s grasping hands, Teddy felt, for the first time in his entire life, totally and completely present and wanted and
home.

After they’d finished dinner and the small wrestling match, Teddy busied himself in the bedroom, folding sweaters and piling them carefully in the back of the closet behind the row of Jules’s heavy boots. From the kitchen, he could hear Jules and ‘Trice clattering about as they chopped watermelon and pitted cherries and tossed them into bright ceramic bowls.

“You’re a horrible little man!” he heard ‘Trice yell, followed by a series of muffled thumps and laughter. “Horrible!”

Andy snuffled in and flopped by Teddy’s knee and immediately dropped into snoring.

“Away with you, she-devil!” Jules screeched from the other room. “Relinquish the spoon!”

“My mother used to spank horrible little people with a spoon just like this,” he heard ‘Trice scream, followed by a ruckus of metal and wood and glass and water.

“Not so little!” Jules shouted above the thumps. “Right, Teddy?”

Teddy felt both inside and outside of their circle, then; he knew he’d been invited in, and rarely did the two of them play like this in front of anyone else; he knew that this was a gift they were giving him tonight, a welcoming present at the door of his new life.
But he also knew he could never join them, and if he ran in there and grabbed a spatula and tried to defend Jules’s honor, or tried to help ‘Trice paddle Jules with the kitchen implements, they’d both stop dead in their tracks and stare at him blankly, as if he’d run in naked or invited them to help him rob a gas station. It was a beautiful and delicate intimacy between the two of them, one he didn’t want to disrupt, but one from which he felt painfully, blindly excluded.

“You, sir,” Teddy said to Andy, but didn’t finish the thought. Instead,
he flipped Andy’s silky ears back and forth in his fingers and thought
you’ll always be mine,
and wasn’t exactly sure to whom he was really talking.

‘Trice spent that night on the couch, tipsy-drunk and loudly hollering at them every time she caught Teddy’s hand on Jules’s hip or saw Jules drop a kiss to Teddy’s neck. “You’re grossing me out!” she yelled, every single time, in exactly the same tone of voice.

“It’s like having a giant baby,” Teddy had whispered to Jules, once they were finally shut safely into their own bedroom.

Teddy had slept there so many times before, though never in his own bed, and everything in the apartment had, at one time or another, already been “christened;” but Jules insisted that they’d never had sex in Teddy’s bed, and certainly not in
their
bed, in
their
bedroom, which it was now, and so, once ‘Trice was snoring loudly and constantly from Teddy’s transplanted couch and the bedroom was lit blue-white by the streetlight that shone, despite the curtains, directly across the pillows, they locked the door and christened their too-soft bed and their sheets, their dimming bedroom, their streetlight and their neighborhood and their privacy and their sweltering nighttime. They did it with whispers and heavy breath and sliding and sweat, too quickly
in the too-quiet night. Jules’s knobby long legs were opalescent and delicate with reflected light, and when they were finished, Teddy wrapped his hands around the backs of Jules’s thighs and held him there, still above him, and would not let him come down.

He had packed up his life and come here, and they’d pressed him in until he fit, and nothing,
nothing,
had gotten broken.

*

Pastry-Whipped: Adventures in Sugar by a Dedicated Crumpet Strumpet

by Chef Jules Burns of Buttermilk Bakery

July 7: Box of Chocolates? No. Life Is Like a Soufflé (A Meditation on Straying, on Coming Home and, at the Heart of It, on Domestic “Bliss”)

A movie which shall remain nameless (and which
, incidentally, was sugarier than anything I have ever baked at Buttermilk)
once gave us this treasure: “Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get.” This little bit of “wisdom” never made sense to me
—
even the cheap drugstore chocolates come with a shape key on the back, so in order to know what you’re going to get, all you have to do is turn the box over and
look at the pictures.
It’s not rocket science. It’s not even fifth grade math.

The point? It’s a stupid saying.

Me, I’ve always been more partial to documentaries. I’ve always been partial to just plain old solid chocolate, too. The basics.

I’ve got news, everyone, and it’s not a non sequitur, though it might seem like one, so
allow me a bit of slack here for a moment, and I promise to bring it all full circle for you.

Recently, the man I’ve been seeing (let’s call him, in the tradition of great literature, T
—
) moved in with me, and we are now in the throes of domestic bliss. Which means, in practical terms, lots of cuddling on the couch while watching unwatchable movies, and drowsing on Sundays in bed with the crossword, and cooking dinner together, and indulging in long, cool baths in a too-small tub, and choosing groceries and pillows and plates together and calling them “ours,” and waking up every day with less heartache about leaving for work because I know I’m coming home to him. It also means less room in the closet, and having no time to myself, and dealing with his hair in the sheets and the drain, and finding my kitchen rearranged (by, apparently, a crazy person who has never used a kitchen in his life), and fighting over the right kind of toothpaste (because really, who refuses to use gel? who in the world prefers paste? Ridiculous people, and also T—), and discovering that, as cute and loving as he is, T is the world’s loudest chewer and swallower (so much so that I actually have to turn the radio up to hear it
above the racket
—
it’s NPR, not
Stomp
, but still… that’s some loud chewing, when you drown out Nina Totenberg).

This meant accepting, taking in, yes, but also letting go: To the curb went the couch I’ve had for years, and the bed where I slept with my former love; to the back of the drawer went photos and reminders and memories. They had to go, so that there would be room for the new ones, but it was still a little scary and painful
—
a little burn with the sweetness.

Where was I? I’ve strayed again. Ah, yes, domestic bliss.

And soufflé
—
that was my original point, that life is most like a soufflé. For our Living Together for One Entire Week Anniversary (there’s no good word for that under a thousand syllables
—
I’ve looked), I baked T
a chile-chocolate souffl
é
—
a light and gritty combination of chocolate and spicy cayenne
—
and we ate it with our fingers in the candlelight of our new home. Dark, warm chocolate balanced with the bite and slow burn of pepper, a little sweet, a little painful, entirely warm and comforting and real. Airy and weightless as it was, it had nothing of the high drama of summer fruit, or the frothy sweetness of pastel frosting. It was a tribute to the everyday, the imperfect, the fragile and tentative, something that both comforts you and heats you up. (And, incidentally, something which is virtually impossible to chew loudly.)

I suppose I’m writing here about domestic “bliss,” not about life, per se. Life can go any way it will, and you just have to hang on until it bucks you off. But bliss is about being happy, and that’s something one has to craft for oneself. Bliss isn’t about perfection, at least not for me, not since I was a teenager; I learned that hard lesson quite a few times before it eventually stuck. Finding bliss is about
learning
to be happy, not about avoiding pain or engineering a situation to be exactly what you imagine it should be. Unlike a box of chocolates, bliss is
actually
unexpected and unpredictable. It has to be. When we get exactly what we dream of, we’re usually disappointed; bliss comes as a result of what we never even imagined, a little gift from the universe, which knows our needs better than we do ourselves.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and just stare at his face
—
it’s beautiful in the streetlight that shines, unrelentingly, through our bedroom window, yes, but it’s strange, too. It’s different from the face I see in the daytime, when he’s gazing at me, when he knows I’m looking. When he sleeps, there’s none of the care there, or the control
—
his face, relaxed and unconsciously open, reveals him in ways I’d never otherwise see. I think I know him better than anyone else on the planet, but I know there are things about him I’ll never know. He’s my familiar mystery, my uncanny lover, and he never stops surprising me in both beautiful and terrible ways.

I’ve come to depend on him, to expect that he’ll be there tomorrow and the tomorrow after that, but I also know from experience that he might not. That’s bliss
—
like a souffl
é
, it’s warm and delicate and absolutely delicious, but it’s fragile, too, tentative, fleeting, and more valuable because it’
s so easy to topple.

Still, I choose this. Every day, I choose it again, and again, I choose him, I choose the risk and the safety and the imperfect thing this is. I bite, knowing it’ll be sweet but will also burn, and it might fall or fail, but still, I make the choice. And every morning I choose it again when I kiss his mouth before I leave, and every night I choose it again when I decide to go home to him and curl around him in the dark. And that, more than any metaphor I can give you, is really what life
—
and bliss
—
is: a risky, heartbreaking, again-and-again, wonderful choice.

Fourteen

The first time Jules saw
him, it was that almost-happening time of the evening, just before Teddy was due to come home and the low hum of the little apartment would break into conversation and the clatter of dinner forks. In the breath-holding hour before, Jules lay curled under an afghan; a ruffled paperback slipped repeatedly from his sleep-weakened hands. Andy-the-dog snored against his thigh. The evening light poked feebly through the curtains, painting the room a dim blue.

Jules saw him first as a flash of movement down the hallway and for a moment he thought Teddy must have come home. But when he called, there was no answer, just another flash of too-tall movement, and then he was sure he must be snagged in a napping dream, because Andy-the-man suddenly stood, silently, leaning against the wall of windows and looking at him with large, mournful eyes and folded arms.

“Andy?” Jules whispered. The man’s arms dropped open and his head fell to the side in a sympathetic nod.

“What—” Jules started, unsure of what he was about to ask, but he stopped when Andy shook his head. Jules’s heart banged hard in his throat, and he gulped for breath as if he’d been running, though he lay still on the couch. He could only stare as Andy stared back. He was terrified and sad and elated all at once, so he did not breathe. They held one another with their eyes for what seemed like an hour.

“I thought you—” Jules started to say, and then everything happened in an instant: The front door banged open and Teddy tumbled noisily into the room, dropping his briefcase with a flourish by the umbrella stand, and Jules jumped and whirled toward the noise.

“It’s official!” Teddy shouted joyfully, throwing both arms up like a referee. “I’m done!”

“Done?” Jules croaked, but when he turned to look back at where Andy had been standing, he saw nothing. The curtains ruffled lightly in the draft from the open window, but no one was there.

“I quit!” Teddy yelled. “Officially!” He kicked off his shoes and skipped
across the kitchen floor, slamming open cupboards and drawers and finally emerging with a bottle of wine, the opener and two glasses. “We are celebrating my newfound freedom. Or irresponsibility and uselessness!” He threw himself down on the couch next to Jules’s feet. “However you want to view it.”

“Celebrating,” Jules said numbly, as Teddy popped the cork from the bottle. He couldn’t peel his eyes from the windows. The curtains billowed so lightly, it looked as if the wall were breathing.

“I’m free. I’m completely lost. I’m terrified I did something really stupid. I’m delirious, and anxious, and I’m excited and I’m exhausted,” Teddy said, handing him a filled glass. “I’m—I’m not sure what I am now, exactly, but I’m not a CPA at that firm anymore, for sure. And I’m an emotional tomato.” He winked at Jules and took a deep drink from his own wine glass. “And I’m pretty sure I’m happy.”

Jules smiled brightly and clinked his glass against Teddy’s in a toast. “I’m so entirely proud of you,” he said and swallowed a gulp. “I think I just saw Andy’s ghost.”

*

It was not the last time.

The second time Andy
appeared, he stood at the foot of their bed, gently looking at the two men sleeping, until Jules awoke with the strange feeling that he was being watched. He nearly lunged out of the bed when, upon prying his eyes open in the dark, he saw the figure hovering at the foot of the bed.

“No!” he yelled.

“What!” Teddy shouted, sitting up and casting about for the bedside light. “What!”

“I had a dream.” Jules soothed Teddy back down into the bedclothes. “I’m sorry. Just a dream.”

This time, Andy had not gone away. He stood still, a dark shadow against the pale wall, watching silently as Jules curled deliberately into Teddy’s side and squeezed his eyes shut. Jules could feel Andy lingering there, heatless and silent and watching them, as he willed himself back to sleep.

***

It went this way for weeks: Jules would find Andy lurking silently in the bathroom, holding Jules’s hairbrush, or sitting near Andy-the-dog as he snored on the couch, or standing sentinel in the hallway as Jules rushed through his morning routine in the gray hour before dawn. Once, he found Andy pressed in among his suits in the closet. Once, Andy lingered near the records on their shelf as Jules browsed for evening music, nodding when Jules chose the battered old Coltrane.

Teddy never saw him. Until he did.

It was late evening, the remnants of supper were long put away and the wine glasses empty but stained with dregs, and Jules lay dozing against Teddy’s side as the television flickered out the news in the dark.

“Shit!” Teddy yelled, standing so suddenly Jules was dumped onto the floor. “Get the hell out!”

He fumbled for something, anything, on the coffee table, and came up brandishing a ceramic coffee mug like a gun.

Andy was standing near the bookshelves by the television, watching them sadly and calmly.

“Get out!’ Teddy shouted, aiming the mug at him. “Jules, call the police! Get out!” He flew forward, pinwheeling the arm with the mug frantically, attempting to herd the stranger toward the front door, but before he could reach him, Andy had disappeared.

“Jesus, where did he go?” he shrieked. “Call
911
!”

“It’s okay,” Jules attempted in his most soothing voice. “He’s not going to hurt anybody. He’s gone.”

“You can’t be calm!” Teddy yelled, whirling on him. “You can’t be calm! Call
911
! I’m going to find where he went and get him
out
!
” He grabbed an umbrella from the stand by the door and lunged toward the hallway.

Jules could only repeat, “It’s ok
ay,” stumbling toward Teddy with his arms outstretched.

“Are you crazy? Call
911!
”

“I know him,” Jules said softly. “That’s Andy.”

*

And so it happened again and again like this; when Jules came out of the shower, Andy’s reflection peered at him from the steamy mirror, still and serious as a burnished wood figurine in a pink flannel shirt. When Teddy rounded the corner from the hallway into the bedroom, Andy was leaning silently against the dressing table, his long legs crossed gracefully at the ankle. Andy appeared hunched in his seat at the breakfast table, waiting patiently on the twilit couch, peering from behind the books on the shelf, patiently lurking in the dark of a kitchen cupboard.

He did not speak. He gave mournful looks, beckoned to Jules with his open arms and ran loving fingers over the pillows and record albums and battered books, but he never spoke a word. He appeared without warning, startling and stinging as a paper cut, but so frequently that he became a part of the apartment itself, like the creaking of the floorboards on a rainy day, or the low electric hum of the refrigerator—expected, always there, a constant, pleading presence.

Jules, every time Andy appeared, broke a little more deeply. At night, shut tightly alone in the whining fluorescence of the bathroom while Teddy snored in the next room, Jules cried into the mirror. He begged, at these moments, for Andy to appear, to come and cup his shoulders and smile gently against his cheek. But Andy refused to come when he was most achingly wanted; he only appeared as an unexpected shout in the dark, an uninvited guest at the table, an
interjection into the peace of the little home.

*

Pastry-Whipped: Adventures in Sugar by a Dedicated Crumpet Strumpet

by Chef Jules Burns of Buttermilk Bakery

August 25: There’s No Place Like Home

Whenever I’m creating a new recipe, I like to think like a sommelier or a perfumer, and consider how scents or tastes complement or overshadow each other, or how they might simply coexist. In everything I create, I like to imagine a base taste that undergirds all the others (perhaps the bitterness of almonds, or the warmth of whole wheat flour), topped by different notes (a floating floral, or the wince of citrus) that mingle, twist around each other and assert themselves in differing degrees.

My favorite taste to consider—and the one I find most difficult to account for in my recipes—is the taste that lingers long after the bite. There are those bright, brief tastes that flare up suddenly and are, just as suddenly, gone, easily giving way to fresh sensations as those arise. That kind of taste is all about the pleasure of newness, of variety, that showy flash and
gone of the momentary sensation. Then there are those flavors that hang on long past the initial bite, that make themselves motifs, lingering and coloring every new taste.

Those are ghost tastes, the ones you really have to pay attention to, because they’re going to haunt everything that comes after.

When I was a child, after my grandmother had died, my father and I saved her pillows,
her books, her old clothes—anything that might retain the last, fading remnants of her scent. I used to hide in the closet among her empty dresses, tucking myself under the curtain of plastic dry cleaning bags my father used to keep them safe (yes, I know I was risking my life), press my nose into the fabric and just
breathe.
I would slip my too-small feet into her empty shoes, a tiny Dorothy, and try, with my eyes squeezed shut, to take myself back to the home of her embrace.
I so missed my heart, I sought her in everything. I desperately wanted to be haunted.

Even now, I can’t love someone, can’t lean into his arms for comfort or fall asleep against him on the couch, without smelling my grandmother, the clean scent of hyacinths lingering there between us. My grandmother’s scent flavors every embrace, floats underneath the warmth of every friend’s or lover’s body. I even, sometimes, smell it underneath the paint and sweat on my father’s jacket. I wonder if he smells it, too.

When Andy died, it was the same: His smell lingered in our blankets, hid in the folds of my winter scarves and would come over me suddenly when I opened a long-closed drawer or closet door. It hid itself everywhere in my home, waiting to spring on me just as I was beginning to forget what I’d lost.

Sometimes even now, caught in the spinning of my own new life, I sense a whiff of walnuts and mint on the air
and Andy is there with me again. And I’m torn. They say you can’t go home again, but I’m not so sure Andy is my home anymore. I don’t think it’s to him I want to return.

I should say it—I should let him go. If I only had the nerve.

I’ve gotten my childhood wish: I’m a haunted man. What I didn’t realize then, when I was small and wishing so hard for my grandmother’s ghosted hands to hold me, was that being haunted—being held—is a mixed blessing. It’s memory made material, clinging hard and holding me in place, but that holding is both a holding on and a holding back. It’s stones in my pocket: M
ore gravity is both a good and a bad thing. One won’t get carried off by strong winds, it’s true, but this is precisely because one can’t be moved at all.

Marcel Proust wrote, in
Swann’s Way,
about how the taste of madeleines and tea could instantly transport him to his grandmother’s kitchen. I think he was on to something: We’re most easily haunted by remnants of the past through scent and taste. Tastes and scents are the tornadoes of our emotional lives, instant transportation to the glittering gem city of our memories.

To this day, I treasure the thin gold cuff my grandmother used to wear on her wrist because her perfume still clings there, warm and floral, cut through with the sourness of the metal underneath. After I hold her bracelet, that smell haunts me all day long, clouding around my hands so that everything I touch, every contact, releases the smell, again and again. It grounds the world for me, painting everything in it with the memory of her. Some nights, I think I can smell him, Andy, in the dark of my tiny apartment, and though he’s long been gone, suddenly he’s there again with me. I can almost hear his broad laugh. I can almost taste the salt of his skin. It’s a bitter taste, a sour note in the cream, a memory that curdles everything around it. But I crave it, even knowing that.

“Haunting” wants to tell a different story than it does: I
t’s not the ghost of the dead person imposing upon the world of the living, but the living person who haunts the world of the dead. Those ghosts don’t hold me in place; I’m not bound or weighted or held back. I choose to stay still. My past does not haunt me—those who have died have surely moved on; they are something new, now, and probably don’t even remember the lives they once lived, probably have no memories at all and exist only as motion, hurtling forward into the darkness of new space. I am the one who clings, I am the one who is the stone in the pocket of those spirits desperately trying to float home.

This week I offer up, in Andy’s memory, a recipe for madeleines—those sweet, French sponge cookies that so moved Proust. They are the simplest of cookies, at least as far as ingredients go: butter, sugar, eggs, flour and little else. But so much haunts that simple taste. Mine are cut through with a bit of citrus for sparkle and bite. And, as pliant and sweet as they are, they must be served with black tea to make a base note, a little bitterness under the bright and sweet.

When I eat a madeleine, like Proust I’m overcome with memory—for me, it is most specifically the first time I baked these cookies with my grandmother, our cotton aprons drooping in the too hot summer kitchen, my grandmother laughing at the flat, failed and slightly too-brown cookies we’d produced and ruffling my hair as if to say
It’s okay; failing is fun, too
.