Eat Me

by Linda Jaivin

  Philippa breathed a secret sigh of relief. This change of topic was most welcome. “So tell us more, Jules,” she enthused from the kitchen. “Tell us everything. And speak loudly enough for me to hear in here.” Julia happily obliged, saving Mengzhong for last. They were suitably impressed.

  “A snake-charmer!” cried Chantal. “How perfectly exotic.”

  Helen remembered promising Philippa a hand and joined her in the kitchen. Julia followed with an empty blender.

  “That’s where the blender is!” Philippa exclaimed. “I’m going to need that in a sec.”

  “Maybe it’s time to open up a bottle of wine,” Julia said, rinsing it out and handing it to her. “What are you making?” she asked.

  “Ajo blanco, an Andalusian white soup, made with garlic and almonds and grapes.”

  “Garlic and almonds and grapes? Wild.”

  After Julia had taken a bottle of white from the fridge, Philippa shooed her and Helen out of the kitchen. She decided she didn’t need help with the grapes after all. Just as they were exiting the room, however, she thought of something. “Hey, Helen, whatever happened with that letter you were trying to get back? Did you ever find it?”

  “What’s this, Helen?” Julia demanded.

  Helen launched into the story of the lost letter. “It’s so weird,” she concluded. “Everyone replied to my letters except Bronwyn, a colleague in Melbourne. I was pretty sure then that she’d got the hot one. Very, very embarrassing, but better, I suppose, than my parents or that academic journal. Just to be safe, I sent her an innocent little note asking whether she’d received my letter and if she’d be sending me her paper soon. When Bronwyn wrote back, it was to say she had meant to mail me her paper right after getting my first letter. She apologized for not responding sooner. So it’s still a mystery. Sometimes I wonder if I wrote that letter at all or if I just imagined it.”

  You wrote it all right, Philippa thought.

  Philippa preferred to be alone when she cooked. To make the soup, she first took the crushed almonds and poured them into the blender. Then she picked up the bread she had soaking in milk and pinched it between her fingers, letting the milk run over her hands as, mashing the soft pulp, she squeezed out the last drops of liquid. She dropped the bread pulp onto the almonds. Extracting four large cloves of garlic from the head, she lay them on the cutting board and crushed them under the flat end of a large carving knife. They gave in under the pressure with a tiny phht. Separating the lacerated and juicy flesh from the skin, she dropped them on top of the bread pulp and almonds. She put her fingertips to her nose. Inhaling, she drew in the strong garlic odor of her fingertips and then licked them, savoring the sharpness. She turned on the blender until all the ingredients turned to paste. She added the olive oil, a few drops at a time, then in a flow. Finally, she added water that she’d been cooling with ice, a touch of salt and white vinegar, and poured the creamy thick mixture into bright green bowls. She tore the skin off several fat and juicy green grapes, cut them in half, scooped out the seeds, and floated them in the white liquid.

  It was the first time she’d been able to face grapes since that morning with Jake. After he’d left, she’d suddenly remembered how he’d counted aloud as he’d sucked the grapes out of her. One. Two. Three. It only occurred to her later that there had been four altogether. What had happened to the fourth? She pulled down her pants, bent down, and prodded with a finger. Unbelievable. The thing had lodged just out of reach in the cavity just beyond her cervix. She was able to touch it and roll it around with her finger, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t pry it out. Two days later, it was still there. Red-faced, Philippa fronted up at the Sydney Hospital’s Sexual Health Clinic. A nurse, assuring her she’d had to remove far stranger objects from both women and men, managed to extract it with a speculum and a probe. Philippa decided then and there that some things were better left to the realm of fiction. Eat me, indeed.

  When at last she emerged with the soup, the girls oohed and aahed and eagerly took their places. Julia poured white wine into each of their glasses as they collectively marveled at Philippa’s creation.

  “You know,” giggled Helen, “maybe I’m just a bit silly from all those cocktails, but this looks suspiciously like semen to me.”

  “Oh, nice,” Chantal spluttered. “Thanks for sharing that with us, Helen.”

  “What’s wrong, Chantie,” Julia teased. “Don’t you swallow?”

  “Darling,” Chantal replied, dabbing at her lips with a napkin, “I don’t even taste. But seriously, it’s delicious, Phippa.”

  “It is,” Julia concurred. “Absolutely yummy. Speaking of swallowing, did you hear the one about the boy who had to break up with his vegan girlfriend?”

  Now it was Philippa’s turn to choke. Helen patted her on the back. “Lethal soup, Philippa,” she commented. “If things continue in this vein, we’ll never make it to dessert.”

  Philippa, stifling coughs, signaled that she was all right.

  “You sure you’re okay Phippa?” Julia looked concerned.

  “So what was the story?” Chantal prompted. “About the vegan?”

  “Oh right,” said Julia. “Well, it seems she wouldn’t have oral sex—didn’t believe in swallowing animal proteins.”

  Helen and Chantal chortled. Philippa’s voice, on the other hand, disappeared altogether, having apparently followed the ajo blanco down the wrong tube. “Who told you that one?” she finally managed to croak.

  “Oh, that boy I’d been seeing, you know, the young one. Jake.”

  “Jake?” Her voice fled even farther down her esophagus, and the name came out like a tiny squeak. The others burst out laughing.

  “It’s not that funny a name,” Julia protested.

  “So, what’s the latest news on that front?” Chantal asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s off, it’s over, kaput, end of story. I think.”

  “Why? And what do you mean, you think?” Chantal sucked a peeled grape into her mouth and toyed with it on her tongue, popping it out again between her full lips and then sucking it in again.

  “God, stop that Chantal,” Julia laughed. “You’re making me free-associate. As for Jake, he sort of did the nineties thing before I left, you know, saying he didn’t really think he wanted a relationship. All I said to prompt this was, I’ll write. It spun him out. I mean, he looked so panicked, you wouldn’t believe it. Tell me, is it too much to ask for a little commitment? Like, say, a promise that he’d open and read one or two pieces of mail? Is that really asking too much?”

  “But I thought,” Helen interrupted, “that the casual nature of it really appealed to you. That you didn’t actually want a ‘boyfriend’ as such. That’s what you said when you told me about it, anyway. Did you change your mind?”

  “Who knows?” Julia sighed. “Does anyone know what they really want? I mean, casual’s fine, and it lasted longer than I expected in the first place. So, like, it’s cool. On the other hand, everything seemed to be going so well. And when it’s going that well, I really wouldn’t mind, to be honest, if they’d just stick around for a year or two. Like till they turned twenty-four or something. Is that really asking for too much? This new generation really is beyond me. Without a second thought, they can make lifetime fashion commitments, to tattoos, to having earring holes all over their faces, but they can’t cope with a relationship that lasts more than a few weeks.”

  “Does Jake have piercings and tats?” Chantal asked.

  One eyebrow, one nipple, thought Philippa. And a tattoo of a scorpion on his right shoulder.

  “One eyebrow, one nipple,” replied Julia. “And a tattoo of a scorpion on his right shoulder.” She sighed. “Never mind. The sex was great. Atomic. While it lasted.”

  Helen frowned, more in perplexity than annoyance. “Sex, sex, sex. Do you think we talk about sex too much?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like we’re just bimbettes with nothing else on our minds,�
� Julia countered. “We all work pretty hard and spend most of our time pondering serious things like, oh, you know, social issues, and aesthetics, and f-stops; and there’s all your academic work, Helen, and—”

  “Fashion,” Chantal contributed. “My mind is deeply engaged with the style issues of the day.”

  “I suppose.” Helen nodded. She was well aware that she thought about sex even more than she spoke about it. “And, after all, we’re all planning to go to that Green rally next Sunday.”

  “Besides,” said Julia, “sex is the eternal mystery. It is our most private experience, yet, unless you’re talking about wanking, it’s always shared with someone else. Sometimes a stranger. As far as careers and other aspects of our lives, well, they respond pretty well to logical analysis. But sex rarely does. So we’re always trying to figure out what it is, what it means.”

  “Relationships are pretty mysterious too, of course,” Helen added. “And they seem to be getting more so, for some strange reason.”

  “Exactly,” Julia enthused. “I don’t think that either relationships or sex were less mysterious, say, in our mothers’ time. But at least they didn’t have to work out the form of things from scratch, and every time at that.”

  “Quite,” Chantal agreed. “It used to be, a boy brings you roses or sings under your balcony, you date, you establish a relationship, then, after a ceremony in which you get to wear the most excellent frock of your life, you have sex. Now it’s all, well, bass-ackward. We jump straight into the sex, and then—if we feel like it—we start worrying about the relationship. And frocks don’t come into it at all, really.”

  Philippa had finally regained her voice. “I get to think about sex all the time because I’m writing about it.”

  “Sounds like a good excuse to me,” Julia chortled.

  “I don’t know about that,” commented Chantal. “You’ve chosen to write about sex. If you were a responsible, socially aware writer, you’d do, I don’t know, environmental thrillers or child-care mysteries or something. Then again, we probably wouldn’t be so keen to read them. How’s it coming along, anyway?”

  “Seven chapters down. Five to go.”

  “You pleased with it so far?”

  “Keeps me amused and off the streets.”

  “Is it all going to be based on real life?” Julia demanded.

  Philippa hesitated. She thought guiltily of Jake and had a vision of red velvet. “What’s real life?” she countered. No one had an answer.

  Surveying the table, she observed, “Well, it looks like everyone’s decided to swallow here,” and began stacking the bowls. Julia refreshed the wineglasses.

  “I suppose I should go and get the main course ready.” Chantal rose from her chair, took the bowls and plates, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  When she emerged, each plate boasted a tangly pile of black squid-ink pasta topped with a generous spoonful of pesto, dramatically garnished with cherry tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, and a leaf of basil. She served up a large mesclun salad in an emerald green bowl with a sprinkling of miniature vegetables and brightly colored flowers. A matching bowl contained the rest of the pasta.

  “This is beautiful, Chantal!” For about the twentieth time that evening, Helen wanted simply to be Chantal. Helen had no trouble turning out nourishing, tasty dishes but, for some reason, they always turned an unappetizing and uniform brown-gray (curries) or brickred (pasta sauces). She imagined herself preparing the squid-ink pasta dish for her colleague Sam. After they’d finished, she would clear the table, still basking in the warmth of his compliments. He would follow her into the kitchen and stand behind her as she put on the kettle and poured milk into a jug for the coffees. He would fold his arms around her waist and apply his lips to the back of her neck. She’d relax against his body and he’d press himself against her. His hands would move up to her breasts and free them from her new, daringly low-cut blouse. He’d take the creamer of milk from her hand, and spill the cool white liquid slowly down her chest, rubbing it into her breasts and then turning her around to lick it off her skin. Her eyes would be closed and her neck stretched back. Removing her milk-soaked shirt, he would work his way down to her skirt, pull it down, and pour more of the milk over her stomach. He’d lick her tummy and then, rubbing her underwear with his milky hands, start to eat her through her panties, and then those would come off as well. She would open her eyes to gaze out the window of her kitchen, and her unfocused gaze would just register her handsome new neighbor standing at his window, eyes clamped upon her. He’d slowly unzip his fly and take out a dick that looked enormous even at a distance and would spank it until he came all over the window pane. Ajo blanco. She’d reach down now, wanting to pull hard at Sam’s thick, salt and pepper hair. Her fingers found his head and curled round the clumps of his lime green pigtails. Lime green pigtails? Sam didn’t . . . how did Marc get into her fantasy? Goodness. This was a bit off. She tried hard to reinstate Sam back into the picture, but the image dissolved as the dinner conversation forced its way back into her consciousness.

  “For someone who is always claiming not to be much of a cook, Chantal, you’ve done spectacularly,” admired Julia, wiping a spot of pesto off her chin.

  “It’s all in the shopping, darling,” Chantal replied. “I bought the fresh pasta, purchased the pesto. All I did was boil water. And throw two bags of salad ingredients together. I did give the woman at the DJ food hall a bit of a shock though. I wanted to ask for baby vegetables, but my mind was still on a photo shoot we’d done in the afternoon with some local rock stars, and what actually came out of my mouth was, ‘A bag of baby animals, please.’ You should have seen her face. I think she was about to call the RSPCA. But the dinner was a cinch. Credit card cuisine.”

  “Too bad relationships aren’t that easy,” Julia sighed. She hoovered up the last strands of pasta on her plate and took a second helping. “DJ’s could have a love and sex hall and you could just rock up with your plastic and say, hmm, could you let me have a look at that twenty-eight-year-old with the baby blues and the three earrings on his left ear who comes with the twelve-month good sex, high amusement, and steady affection value guarantee with an optional yearly renewal (for just a hundred twenty-four dollars a year)? Or, let’s see, maybe I’ll just take the twenty-two-year-old superspunk special with the cute tattoos and use-by-date of next week. They’d pick them off the shelf, slide their bums over the bar-code reader, and off you’d go.” Julia giggled at the thought of what her shopping trolley might look like.

  “You know,” Chantal began, a little tipsily, “there are places like that. Escort agencies.”

  “Have you ever—?” Philippa’s eyes lit up.

  Chantal smiled mysteriously and sucked up some of the squid-ink pasta through still shockingly red lips. Helen wondered how Chantal’s lipstick always managed to stay on. Whenever Helen wore lipstick, it always seemed either to feather up into the skin around her lips, or she’d have eaten it off within the hour. Sometimes, she’d look in the mirror after several hours at a party and discover, to her horror, that, as they say in academe, both possibilities had eventuated: while nothing remained on her lips, a bright red aura glowed around the edges of her mouth. But wait, what was Chantal saying?

  “Well,”—Chantal toyed with a miniature zucchini, plucking at its flower with her fingernails—“sort of.”

  “Sort of?” Julia leaned forward on the table. “Sort of?”

  “Well, yes.”

  Sharp intakes of breath.

  “I was feeling, I suppose, a bit needy. I considered my options. I could have called an old lover. But then, that gets so complicated, and you have to do so much talking, and there’s no guarantee of sex. I could have gone to a pub or a club and picked someone up. Too dangerous. When I say a bit needy, I mean, really, I was seething. Is this too shocking?”

  “I think we all know that feeling,” Philippa replied. “Do go on.”

  “I was flipping through a copy of Women�
��s Forum when I noticed the advertisements at the end where they list male escort services, ‘sensuous’ masseurs, and so on. I chose an ad and picked up the phone. No harm in asking, I thought, but honestly I never imagined that it would go further than that. Well, this man answered the phone, ‘Spunkfest, may I help you?’

  “Trying to suppress the nervous quiver in my voice, I asked him to explain how it all worked. He told me the prices and stuff, which differed, depending on whether you wanted the ‘full service’ or just escort or whatever, and then asked what exactly I was looking for.

  “This was all getting very concrete.” Chantal sipped at her wine and examined a perfectly formed, one-inch-long carrot before popping it into her mouth and chewing thoughtfully.

  “C’mon, Chantal, you can’t stop there,” said Philippa impatiently.

  Chantal smiled. “I wasn’t planning on stopping.”

  “I have to go to the loo. Then I’m getting us another bottle of wine. Don’t say another word till I get back,” said Julia.

  The other three sat silently savoring the pungent aroma of the slimy black pasta, letting the pesto sauce create garlicky trails down their throats and exploding the little tomatoes in their mouths while waiting impatiently for Julia to return. “Could you love a man who didn’t love food?” Helen broke the silence. “You know, who just ate white-bread sandwiches and refused to go to African restaurants?” A collective shudder went through the table. Most definitely not, they concurred. To revel in food and enjoy eating, they agreed, was to take joy in life itself.

  Julia returned with a fresh bottle. She freshened their glasses and sat down. “Okay. Tell us.”

  “So,” Chantal resumed, “I decided to let my fantasies take over. It was just a phone conversation after all. He’d asked what I wanted. Black, I said, thinking fast. Black American. Sailor type. Gorgeous face. Big muscles. Uncircumcised. As large as they come. Into oral, not averse to tongue kissing or a bit of light S&M. With me on top.