The waiter holds the bottle of wine for Julian to read the label, and after a seamless uncorking and smooth pour of a splash in Julian’s glass, he stands there like he’s made of marble while Julian lifts his glass by the stem and turns it ever so slowly as if to catch light. A gentle swirl is followed by his sniffing the wine like a dog sniffing at an unidentifiable splat of something on the sidewalk. After gargling with a mouthful of Sancerre he pronounces it excellent. “Soft, zesty, yet purely structured,” he says.
The incongruity of the words—soft, zesty, yet purely structured—confounds Albie. “How do you arrive at soft, zesty, yet purely structured?”
“I can see it,” Elliot says. “Soft, zesty, purely structured. Sounds like Trudy.”
Trudy thanks her husband for the compliment, and Lydia mentions having read recently about balsamic vinegar being served as an after-dinner drink. “They said it was unimaginably delicious,” she says.
“It is,” Julian weighs in, “but it’s got to the very best tradizionale, the stuff that goes for four to five hundred bucks a pop.”
Elliot wants to know if there is really that much difference between the tradizionale and a good condimento, and Julian asks, “Are you kidding me?”
“No,” Elliot says. “I’m asking.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Julian says. “There are some very decent condimentos out there, but even the best of them can’t be compared to a tradizionale”
“There’s a lot of counterfeiting with the condimentos,” Albie tells them. “Adding caramel to simulate the aging process. It’s a problem.”
Lydia asks how would you know if it’s not genuine, and Julian drones on about the complexity of flavors, and how only someone who knows absolutely nothing about balsamic vinegar would be fooled, and Trudy says she uses the commercial grade when making a honey-mustard vinaigrette, and Julian says, “Oh, Trudy, how could you?” and Bunny wonders how much longer she can sit at a table with five people engaged in passionate discourse about balsamic vinegar, the answer to which turns out to be three seconds. “Excuse me,” she breaks into the conversation, “but do any of you really give a shit? I mean, you’re going on about balsamic vinegar like it matters. Does it?” Bunny realizes that she is dangerously near to tears or hysteria or both. “Does it really matter?”
The moment that follows is awkward. No one responds until, as if she were about to approach an animal who might or might not be friendly, Lydia asks, “What would you like to talk about?”
Bunny doesn’t want to talk about anything in particular, but put on the spot, she says, “Olive oil,” and they are relieved because it’s Bunny being Bunny. Elliot says, “That’s funny,” and the others laugh, although Lydia’s laugh skitters along the edges of anxiety and fear.
But, before any conversation about olive oil gets off the ground, their food arrives, and Albie reminds Julian, “No octopus or shrimp for Bunny.” Then he adds, “I think I’ll pass on the octopus, too.”
“You don’t like octopus? You should’ve said something.” Julian’s distress is genuine. “I just assumed everyone liked octopus. I should’ve asked. Let me order something else.” Julian’s need to please Albie, to win his admiration, is staved off by Albie’s ability to deflect obsequiousness. “Julian, it’s fine,” Albie says. “There’s more than enough food here, and it looks fantastic. It’s no big deal.”
Bunny begs to differ. “It’s a very big deal for the octopus,” she says.
It could be that she was speaking too softly to be heard, or at least it seems that way. She gets no response, but Julian says to Albie, “Okay. All the more for me then.” Julian thinks that to own up to gluttony is disarming.
“You?” Trudy asks. “What about the rest of us?”
Trudy and Julian banter about the size of the portions. Lydia says, “This is way too much. I want to save my appetite for the entrée.” Albie expresses ecstasy over the aubergines, and a buzz, a high-pitched persistent buzz, shimmies its way into Bunny’s ear and into her head where it amplifies and spreads out in all directions. Her nerves are jangling like bangle bracelets, and she grows more and more agitated, as if she can’t remember if she turned off the stove or not, as if while she and Albie are out having their lovely dinner with lovely people, Jeffery could be dying of asphyxiation. She springs up from her chair. “A cigarette,” she says. “I need a cigarette.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” Albie asks.
“No,” Bunny says. “I just need a cigarette. I’ll be right back.”
“You’re sure?” Albie says.
“It’s a cigarette,” Bunny snaps. “I’m going out to have a cigarette, okay?”
Albie takes off his jacket, and drapes it over her shoulders.
Elliot pushes back from the table and says, “Do you mind if I join you?” and Bunny says, “You don’t smoke.”
They watch her walk across the dining room and out the door. “She’ll be okay,” Albie tries to sound as if he believes this for a fact, and Trudy tells Elliot, “Go out there. Stay with her.”
The Tip of a Cigarette
With her thumb growing sore, Bunny keeps at it, keeps trying to light her cigarette, but the wind repeatedly extinguishes the flame before it can catch. As if the plastic Bic lighter were like a lawn mower or a clunker of a car and that giving it a rest before trying again might just do the trick, Bunny pauses to afford the lighter the same kind of rest as a tired engine, which is when Elliot shows up. He takes the lighter from her hand. “May I?” he asks, and then he plucks the cigarette from between her lips, too. With her cigarette in his mouth, he cups one hand over the lighter to block the wind, and he gets it lit on the first try. Taking a deep puff, he holds the smoke in his lungs before he passes the cigarette to Bunny. When he exhales, he says, “Damn, that’s good. You never lose the taste for it.” He tells her that he quit smoking almost twenty years ago, but he’d take it up again in a skinny minute, if he could.
“Why can’t you?” Bunny asks.
“That’s funny,” Elliot says, and Bunny says, “I didn’t mean it to be funny. It was a question.”
“Okay. I can’t start smoking again because I don’t want to die before my time.” Then Elliot asks Bunny when is she going to quit and she says, “Quit what?”
“Smoking. When are you going to quit smoking?”
“Never.” As if it’s meant to be an exclamation mark, for emphasis, she takes a long drag on her cigarette.
They stand there, shivering, and Elliot says, “I know how you feel.”
“Yeah,” Bunny nods. “It’s freezing out here.”
“Funny,” Elliot says. “But you know what I mean. The depression.” Elliot tells her that he, too, suffers from depression.
Bunny bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, and Elliot says, “Wellbutrin. It really helped me. Have you tried Wellbutrin?” Elliot waits for Bunny to answer his question, and when that doesn’t happen, he adds, “Of course it doesn’t work for everyone. It’s all about trial and error with antidepressants. But if you haven’t tried Wellbutrin, you might want to talk to your shrink. It’s working for a lot of us.” Us? Elliot, taciturn Elliot, suddenly doesn’t know when to shut up. “I can recommend a first-rate psychopharmacologist, if you want. This guy I go to, he’s good. Top-notch.”
Bunny drops the remains of her cigarette onto the pavement, and Elliot snuffs it out with the heel of his shoe. “Come on,” he signals Bunny to follow him inside. “It’s too damn cold out here. My hands are numb.”
“You go ahead,” Bunny tells him. “I’m going to have a cigarette.”
“But you just had . . .” Elliot stops short. “Oh,” he says, “okay,” and he returns to the restaurant to join his wife and his friends in the warm and satisfied glow of the Red Monkey and the comfort of his genius and his top-notch psychopharmacologist, and his literary success, and his having no i
dea what it’s like not to be taken seriously, having no idea how it is to feel ashamed of who you are.
Wellbutrin, now that’s funny.
Bunny takes out another cigarette but, same as before, when she tries to light it, the wind extinguishes the flame. She tries again, and again when she sees two men walking in her direction. One of them smoking, the orange glow of the tip of his cigarette is a beacon of light. Bunny steps in front of him, holding up her cigarette as if to say, “I come in peace.” Rather than fiddling with a lighter, he hands her his cigarette, and she lights her cigarette the way one candle is used to light another.
“Thanks,” she says, and the man says, “These things will kill you, you know.”
Bunny takes a deep drag of the cigarette, and as she exhales, the smoke laces with her breath and her words. “Not soon enough,” she says, and the man laughs.
Chopsticks
When Bunny gets back to the table, Albie gets up to help her off with his jacket. She twists slightly to free her left arm. Lydia says, “You must be chilled to the bone.”
“No,” Bunny says. “If anything, I’m a little warm. Is it warm in here?” Then she asks Albie what time it is, and he tells her, “It’s nine twenty-seven.”
“I hope you don’t mind,” Julian says, “but we ordered dinner while you were out. I got you Banh Cuon Chay.”
“Mushroom ravioli,” Albie translates. “With lotus root.”
“That’s fine,” Bunny says, and it is fine. Provided that her meal did not at some point have a beating heart, she’s never been a fussy eater, and now, her ability to taste, to distinguish flavors, has dulled to the point where all food is tofu. As Bunny takes her seat, her attention fixes on a patch of the glass-tiled floor where one of the fish, a big one, calico, orange dappled with white and black, is floating, belly-up dead. It bobs the way a body, tossed into the Hudson, drifts between the pylons and gently laps at the pier, as if a murder victim were a rowboat. “He’s dead,” Bunny pointedly addresses Julian, as if he’d strangled the fish with his bare hands.
“Who’s dead?” Trudy asks.
“One of the fish.” Julian crumples his napkin, sets it beside his plate and goes off to have a word with the manager.
Doesn’t this knucklehead know that it is New Year’s Eve? Does he have any idea how busy they are? The manager could give a go-flying-fuck-yourself about some shit dead fish. He flashes an icy smile, assures Julian that he’ll take care of it and offers a round of drinks by way of apology. Then, in Korean, the manager tells the waiter to bring six flutes of champagne, the cheap shit, to those motherfucking jerkoff assholes at table twelve.
That’s how it happens when you know the chef. Julian sits tall in his chair. Prompt disposal of the dead fish and champagne on the house, and they all pretend not to notice that the champagne is plonk. But only Bunny notices that the fish has not been disposed of. Rather, it has drifted off and come to rest alongside a nearby table where two couples, wearing their red paper hats, are too busy cracking each other up with the party favors to notice a dead fish, a mere ripple in the water.
For people such as Bunny and her friends, people who believe themselves respectful of the cultural norms, except of course when it comes to cultural norms like female circumcision and then the whole Margaret Mead thing goes out the window, to forgo chopsticks in an Asian restaurant would be an admission of provincialism. Because Albie has been eating in Chinese restaurants since the time he could chew solid food, he handles his chopsticks with dexterous flourish, like a pair of batons tossed in the air at a parade, as if they’d twirl overhead as a tiger prawn falls into his open mouth. Julian, not quite as deft as Albie, is nonetheless as masterful as expected, and Trudy and Elliot know what they are doing. Albie pronounces his food to be spectacular, and asks if anyone would like a bite. Trudy says, “I would, except then I’d have to offer you a bite of mine, and I’m not sharing.” Elliot says, “Not half bad,” and Julian asks, “Have I ever steered you wrong?” That Lydia uses her chopsticks the way a chimp uses a twig for a tool, to bring termite-size bits of food to her mouth, is not indicative of an inability to eat with chopsticks. Rather, it’s that Lydia is a person who eats raisins one at a time. Trudy asks if they’ve seen the Louise Bourgeois exhibit at the Guggenheim. “Not yet,” Lydia says, “but we’re planning on it. I’ve heard that it is amazing,” and Elliot says he didn’t think it was amazing, he thought it was okay but overrated, and he wants to know if any of them have read the Bolaño. That’s how he refers to 2666, as “the Bolaño.”
Bunny is not doing well with her chopsticks. Her hands are shivering, and they twitch as she tries to catch her food. The noise level in the dining room has risen, and the pitch of the din is an indefinite treble, a noise that seems to absorb all sound. Bunny sees mouths moving but she can’t hear Lydia as she goes on about some friend of hers who is expecting triplets. She sees expressions of laughter and amusement, and Trudy’s exaggerated shudder when she says, “Dear God. One was plenty for me. Triplets? I’d kill myself,” which brings the conversation not to a grinding halt, but to the kind of full and immediate stop that follows a gunshot, and with that, as if she’s woken up to find herself in a car more than a hundred miles away from home, Bunny finds herself on New Year’s Eve at the Red Monkey at a table for six, to hear Trudy say, “Bunny, I’m sorry. It was just a figure of speech.”
“What was a figure of speech?” Bunny asks, but she really doesn’t care, which is why she doesn’t repeat the question when Julian mentions how some food critic he knows just got back from New Orleans, and reported that it’s still a disaster area. “Right,” Elliot says, “heck of a job, Brownie,” and, with the exception of Bunny and Elliot, they all laugh at the foolishness and insensitivity of George Bush, and Trudy says she’s counting the minutes until Inauguration Day. Albie reiterates his hope that Obama will give environmental concerns greater attention, and Julian has a thing or two to say about industrial farming, and hasn’t anyone noticed that strawberries are now the size of gourds. “And they don’t taste like strawberries. They taste like mush with a strawberry flavored additive.”
Despite her concentration, Bunny can’t keep her hands steady. The chopsticks blur as if her eyesight, too, is trembling. For the first time in weeks and weeks, she is truly hungry, and desperately she wants the food that is eluding her the way words will elude her and the way the flame went out, again and again, when she tried to light her cigarette.
Lydia asks, “Have any of you read Anathem?”
Elliot says he heard it was schlock, but he is curious to know Lydia’s opinion.
“I’m only a few hundred pages in,” she tells him, “but already it’s a transformative experience.” Transformative experiences are big this year. Lydia tells Albie that he must, must, must read it because it deals with philosophy and mathematics. And quantum physics, too.
“I don’t know,” Albie says. “I don’t have much of a grasp on quantum physics.”
Elliot says if you really want to have a transformative experience go to YouTube and check out “hamster on piano eating popcorn.”
Lydia swats him on the arm, and, hallelujah, Bunny succeeds in gripping a ravioli between her chopsticks. Trudy asks Julian what he thinks of cast-iron frying pans and is it true that you’re not supposed to wash them while, with absolute concentration and care, Bunny brings the ravioli from her plate to her mouth when a nearly imperceptible sensation crawls along the back of her neck. It’s nothing, nothing is there, but the extreme disturbance of this virtual nothingness makes its way down her back and through her arms to her hands, and the ravioli gets away like a frog making its escape, and Bunny tells herself: do not scream.
Do not scream, do not scream, do not throw the plate across the table, do not turn the table upside down. With every effort, she maintains her calm and sets the chopsticks down alongside her plate. Picking up the fork, she grips it the way a small c
hild in a high chair grips a spoon to hack away at a bowl of Cheerios and milk. Poised and ready to spear a ravioli, she tightens her fist around the fork, as if, were she to loosen her grip, she would lose both the fork and any semblance of composure. She squeezes the fork the way you would squeeze a stress ball. Her knuckles turn white, and all she wants is for it to stop, for all of it to stop, she wants quiet, and as if she were about to pound her fist on the table, to demand it, to demand order to the chaos, to demand that everyone shut up, please just shut the fuck up, she raises her arm and in one swift move, with all her force behind it, she brings the fork down hard into the softest part of her upper thigh.
The prongs deeply embed in her flesh, the fork stands upright, as if with a flick of a finger, it would ping. Five droplets of blood weep through her dress, and then more blood comes, and it spreads like spilled wine, deep red on white velvet.
Oh, Bunny. What did you do?
What did you do?
What have you done?
PART 2
To Have and Have Not
Allowed and Not Allowed. Bunny learns that the difference between Allowed and Not Allowed is the difference between a person and a crazy person. Shortly after she is checked into this hospital, during the hours between lunch and dinner, one of the aides leads Bunny, along with Albie, to the dining room, which is now deserted except for the four lunatics at a far corner table playing Parcheesi. The dining room here is a study in institutional beige. Beige cafeteria-style tables are met with folding chairs of a slightly darker beige surrounded by beige walls. Bunny’s red suitcase, flat on top of one of the Formica tables, looks like a surprise.
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