by Sadie King
“Now you’re really starting to tempt me. But let me get the real main course started.”
With that he grabbed a saute pan, threw in some butter and threw it on the burner. He reached into the fridge and pulled out a bloody mass of meat that overfilled the breadth of his hand.
Zora had a disturbing premonition what it was. She expected the mass to start beating at any moment.
“That better not be what I think it is.”
“It absolutely is. Coeur de chevreuil. Heart of venison. Courtesy of my dear brother and his trophy buck.”
Zora cringed—more at hearing Vane called my dear brother than at the sight of the once-pulsing, once-living slab of flesh.
“I’m making it saignant du vin rouge. Bleeding red wine. You’ll love it. An old family recipe, my dad did it this way.”
Under any other circumstances, Zora would not have touched that carnivorous filth. Bad enough it had come from Vane. And the heart of the deer? She was the kind of person who wanted her flesh anonymous, unrecognizable, a generic hunk of meat that could have easily popped from a machine, not once clothed an animal’s bones.
The heart was way too visceral, way too recognizable, way too human. Like eating a piece of herself. Her own heart. Cannibalizing her own emotions, her own identity.
But being with Victor, as with everything else about him, bent wariness into temptation. And she was touched by his piety as a son, making his father’s recipe—she was even touched by his piety as a brother.
Most of all, she was touched by his piety as a lover. In that spirit, if he wanted to cook her a fucking heart, bleeding all over her plate—red wine or actual blood, who cared—then she would eat it in the same spirit. She would smear her lips with its redness, coat her tongue with its grease. If she started to feel it pulsing in her mouth, coming back to life, she would only chew faster, swallow harder. She would eat the heart of Eros.
She watched him work. She watched Eros, working through Victor. He sliced into pieces the lifeblood of the deer, and then sprinkled the slices with salt and pepper, dropping them into the sizzling butter. He seared the heart in the golden fat, to the reddest shade of brown.
And leave it to Victor to spare no expense on wine, even wine for cooking. Ready on the kitchen counter, ready to make the heart of the deer, the heart of the god, bleed, was a bottle of 1945 Paul Jaboulet Aine Hermitage La Chapelle.
The wine was the perfect symbol of modern France, of terroir liberated from terror. An earthier wine from an earthier grape from an earthier year you could not find. The first full year of liberation. The first time in years that wine spilled in the streets might not be mistaken for blood.
Victor uncorked the wine, which hadn’t tasted air since Nazi leather retreated across the forests and fields of Europe. He bathed the seared slices of heart in the sweet fermented juices of liberated soil. The heart had the color of darkly tanned leather. He tossed in some dried herbs with a flash of his hand. The heat went down, the top went on, and he turned back to Zora. Twenty minutes was all they would need for the heart to bleed, for the life of the god to render itself fit for mortals.
“Ready to get your feet wet?”
Zora was taken aback by the question, almost as much as she’d been by the sight of a bloody deer heart in Victor’s hand. She didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. Did he want her to bathe in blood now, as if eating the heart weren’t bad enough?
“I hope you’re speaking metaphorically.”
“Here, sit down. I’ll help you.”
He brought around a stool from the other side of the kitchen counter. She sat. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet. Her white cotton pajamas were covered in light pastel flowers of different shapes and shades, scattered across the fabric as though someone had thrown them into the breeze and they had imprinted themselves where they landed. On her feet were plain white socks, with the faintest hint of dirt on the bottom. Victor was dressed. Old faded blue jeans and an ebony t-shirt that hadn’t faded in wash after wash after wash. He wasn’t wearing socks.
He peeled off her socks, her toes twitching slightly as they touched the air of the kitchen, and rolled up her pajama pants to the tops of her calves. Without bothering to sit, he rolled up his jeans.
From a cupboard beneath the counter, he pulled out a very large, and very shiny, red porcelain casserole dish. Zora noticed Le Creuset imprinted on the lid. Victor set the lid aside on the countertop, and set the dish itself on the kitchen floor. From the fridge he pulled out several small containers of fresh raspberries, glistening shinier than porcelain, and poured their contents into the dish on the floor.
“Time to get mashing. All this juice needs to be released. Hop into the dish with me.”
They were going to liberate the juice of the raspberries with their feet. Their toes squishing around in pulsing red pulp. Zora was delighted. A childlike delight. The dish barely had enough room for both their feet—they had to hold each other by the waist for stability. He held her waist loosely, she held his tight.
Their feet began to move and maneuver, crushing and grinding against the raspberries, juice squirting onto their calves, pulp coursing between their toes. They managed to sneak in a few kisses during the mashing—what else would you expect in such close, and juicy, proximity? These kisses convinced Zora that she would be better off steadying herself not by holding his waist, but by planting her hands firmly on his ass. She massaged his backside with her hands, fingers flexing, while her feet massaged the raspberries. Their feet rubbed and slid and played against each other, juice cascading around them as toes tickled and soles kissed.
Their calves played a game of their own, naked skin brushing, pushing, moving in and out, toward and away. Droplets of juice ran down their exposed lower legs; specks of pulp, jumping up from the dish, either stuck or slid.
After a few minutes everything was wet and mashed, and they stepped out of the raspberry basin. He poured the mash through a strainer, the juice going into a crystal bowl.
He ladled half the juice from the bowl into a crystal decanter, part of the same set as the bowl. This would hold the vinaigrette. Into the decanter he drizzled macadamia nut oil, half as much oil as there already was juice. Then he added just enough red wine vinegar to balance the sweetness of the raspberries. The bath of vinaigrette was ready; now to ready the bather.
The greens themselves he’d ordered from a gourmet grocery in Madison Springs. It had taken them a few days to get everything ready—some of the greens were prosaic, but some were exotic. Each type of green had been sealed in its own little produce bag. They were waiting in the fridge, eager to be joined.
Victor had dreamed up the interplay of the salad ingredients himself. He loved the beautiful argument of green and red—the marriage of the royal colors of nature. Green the color of things that leave, and red the color of things that bleed. The salad they made together, the colors and the lovers, would have le plus beau fleurons de la couronne de la nature—the brightest jewels in the crown of nature.
Fire red orach. Dandelion greens. Persian cress. Radicchio rosso. Lamb’s lettuce. Arugula. And Eros forbid we forget the flowers. The most sensual salads need flowers. Victor had chosen two, the brightest blossoms, the most radiant jewels, of them all. Red star hibiscus and red trumpet honeysuckle. The first, the petals alone; the second, the flowers whole.
He liberated each of these precious green and red things, these emeralds and rubies of sunny life, and let them fall into a macadamia wood salad bowl. He had bought the bowl on a trip two years before to Moloka’i, a bejeweled island in the Hawaiian chain.
All Zora could say was, the only words that cascaded from her lips as those jewels of nature cascaded into the bowl were, “That is beautiful.”
“It will be even more beautiful after we use our hands.”
He guided her hands into the bowl, palms up. Over her hands he poured the vinaigrette, so that the oil and juice and vinegar splashed through her fingers, falling from he
r palms onto the greens and reds below. As it fell, the liquid felt hot and cold upon her skin, its fragrance sweet and bitter upon her nostrils as it wafted upwards.
Once the cascade of vinaigrette had run its course, Victor put his hands into the bowl with hers, their fingers running down the sides of the macadamia wood. They started to mix the greens. Their hands had to be much gentler than their feet had been. The flowers in particular could be crushed by hands too strong, pulverized beyond recognition by fingers too eager, their beauty and delicacy lost.
And so their hands found a peaceful flowing rhythm, like spring waters easing themselves slowly from the earth. Each of their hands, each of their fingers, could not avoid seeking out the skin of the other, and so mixing the greens took much longer than it might have otherwise. If love and tenderness had not been the goal, but efficiency. A godforsaken thing. A truly sad thing. A truly dead thing.
“Ah, don’t let me forget. The champagne framboise. The perfect accompaniment to our meal.”
He extracted from the fridge a bottle of Armand de Brignac. A golden bottle which held a golden wine. He poured each of them a flute of the chilled champagne.
The rest of the raspberry juice would now make its entrance. With a spoon, Victor infused each of their glasses of golden wine with raspberry juice from the crystal bowl. The making of the champagne framboise reminded Zora of sacrifice, of blood spilling into honeyed water—the life of an animal draining, percolating, into the libation of a god. She blinked her eyes once and the thought of sacrifice was gone. But not the reality.
They each picked up a glass of the bloodied wine, and each brought the sacrificial glass to the mouth of the other. So close, they drank of the wine and of the scent of each other—one aroma sweet like nectar, the other musky like leather.
This would be a meal at once gourmet and primal. There would be no need for fork or knife or spoon. Such things would only get in the way. The grasping body of the other, the arms, the hands, the fingers, the fingertips, would be the only utensils. Taste buds, lips, tongues, teeth—they would be tainted by anything metal, anything without its own organic scent and life.
With dripping fingers, oily sugary fingers, the lovers fed each other the salad. They did their best to keep the juices of their food off t-shirt, jeans, pajamas. They eschewed napkins—they had to rely on licking clean each other’s fingers, wiping clean each other’s lips and chin. Zora couldn’t decide which she savored more, the salad’s burst of flavors, its colors and textures bleeding together in her mouth, or licking off Victor’s fingers each time he fed her the greens. Each time she had to fight the temptation to bite down on his fingers, to cave in to her cannibalistic urges. A gastronomy of living flesh was so very inviting.
And then the salad was done and the heart was ready. Messiness quickly began to outrace the lovers’ licks. Drip, drip, drip onto fabric and floor. So tender was the braised heart that with her eyes closed, Zora could have sworn she was eating the richest butter, flavored at its core with the wild plants of the karst.
Had she actually known any of those plants, the ones the deer loved, she could have picked up their notes of flavor by name. Notes of mesquite. Of mistletoe. Of woodsorrel. Of Venus’ looking-glass. Of coralberry. Of flameleaf sumac. Plants whose names formed a poem of nature, spun out verse after verse of life, more hopeful and enduring than a Shelleyan dream.
The heart really did seem to bleed. Its own juices, its own vermilion, trickled together with the fruited blood of the earth. The terror of the deer, its animal fear facing death, mingled together with the terroir of the soil that birthed the wine.
And oh how the diners bled on each other, feeding each other. Fingers would have a crimson cast for hours, if not days. Redness flowed down forearms, cascaded over wrists—following the same crimson line as the arm’s main artery. The lovers were culinary artists of blood, painting the palate, the lips, even the cheeks, with the luscious red of delicious death. Bloody fingers groped at mouths, played on tongues, smeared across teeth.
The lifeblood of the deer was gone almost as quickly as the life that had borne it. That blood would dissolve into theirs, the deer’s devoured heart finding new life coursing through the chambers of their hearts. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, blood to blood, heart to heart. A new verse in a very old story.
But they were not done. Far from done. For how could they fully nourish themselves without the sacred fruit of Juno Caprotina? The queen of the gods who dressed herself in figs, whose womb rained figs upon the earth? Could the lovers ignore the generations of Roman women who celebrated the regenerative powers of the goddess in the summer shadows of the caprificus, the wild fig tree?
They might hardly have realized it, but Victor and Zora already worshipped the goddess. They adored her as they adored each other. They celebrated her regenerative powers by lavishing their own upon each other, time and time again. The passion with which they played with the fertility, the fruitfulness, the fig nature, of their entangled bodies was proof enough of that. The ancients knew full well what the fig represented—its sweetness, its fecundity, its sensuality. And lest we forget—its genital lusciousness. Aristophanes himself, the great Greek playwright, put into words the highest possible blessing for two people embarking on life together:
May you have a fine house, no cares, and the finest of figs:
The bridegroom’s fig shall be great and thick,
The bride’s soft and tender.
These immortal words did fit the lovers well—Zora’s fig was indeed soft and tender, Victor’s was great and thick—but there was one minor problem: bands of gold did not yet grace their fingers. Not yet. For now an exchange of figs would have to do.
Victor laid the figs out on the counter: the freshest plumpest darkest fruits you could imagine. Black Mission figs. First brought to California by Franciscan missionaries—strange for such holy men to show such devotion to such sinful fruit. It must have been their one surrender to the sins of the flesh. They would savor a fig like other men would savor a beautiful woman. Slowly, sensually, with every part of the mouth.
Victor was far from being a Franciscan missionary—about as far away as a man could be—but he was trying to prove to Zora that he possessed the one quality that the missionaries cherished above all others: devotion.
Zora reached out to grab one of the figs from the small carton they came in. He slapped her hand away with a fruitful smirk.
“Too soon. They’re missing their filling. These figs need to have a heart. Les figues fraîches farcies au neufchâtel emmiellé. Fresh figs stuffed with honeyed Neufchâtel cheese.”
From under the counter he retrieved their heart—a package of Neufchâtel cheese, softening and gooey. You can guess from the name on the wrapping, Coeur de Bray, what shape the cheese assumed. A moment later the cheese lay bare on its wrapper. A naked milky heart.
It would need some honey, some Texas honey, oozing dark out of the Hill Country, the color of molasses. The bees in the Hill Country had their own loves. Their own blooming desires. Their own poem of nature, more floral than the deer’s. A poem of bluebonnets. Of lemonmint. Of coreopsis. Of white prickly poppy. Of goldenrod. Of mountain laurel. Of chocolate daisy.
Victor and Zora dipped their fingers into the honey, into the floral poem, and drizzled the cheese with the fruit of the bee’s desires. Of course each had to lick off the finger of the other. Eros would never have permitted them to do otherwise—nor would have Juno. The lovers were now part of both mythologies, in the midst of birthing a mythology of their own.
Victor prepared the first fig. With the tip of his index finger and thumb he pinched off the top of the fig. He burrowed his pinky into the innards of the fig so that they gushed out, sticking like seeded glue to his finger. Which he promptly compelled Zora to lick off by sticking the gooey fig finger in her mouth.
She obliged as suckingly as she could. She would not be the only one lucky enough to use her tongue. Victor brought the opened package of h
oneyed cheese up to his mouth, holding the wrapper in his palm. With his tongue, he dug out a small piece of the golden dripping whiteness. Still using his tongue, he inserted the piece of cheese deep into the fig, filling up the tiny body of the fruit.
The fig was ready to finish its journey. Ready to go back to the goddess. Her mouth open, Victor placed the honeyed fig on the center of her tongue, his fingers brushing against the inside of her mouth. As eager as Zora was to bite down, she waited a few moments for him to retrieve his fingers to the open air. Licking his fingers had been sensuous; chewing on them would be fruitless.
They fed each other a handful of figs with the same dance of fingers and fruit and saliva. The same interplay of milk and honey. Like Eros and Juno, they revolved lovingly around each other, coming together and falling apart, from two different worlds, two different soils, two different lives. Myths are made to be broken—they exist only to serve life and love. When life changes, when love transforms, the myth must grow. Bear fresher fruit on freer vines.
Their meal done, Zora and Victor went into the living room, fell together onto the couch. Completely sated. Victor had a CD he wanted to play for her while they lay together. Zora nestled in the hollow of his chest. The music started. They could feel the pulse of each other through clothing and skin as clearly as they could hear the notes that filled the room. She didn’t ask what the music was and he didn’t tell her.
A poem of sound enraptured them, a symphony of feeling swirling and streaming around them. Layered, textured, conflicted—like body and spirit, like the collision of two souls in the dark. It was Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande. The music told the story of Pelleas and Melisande, of their forsaken love. A love that could never live. How could a princess ever hope to love the brother of her husband, the brother of the prince? Love cannot defy power and hope to survive on earth. A love so perfect, a love meant for another world, could only end in death. In fratricide. And in new life—the birth of a baby girl. Zora fell asleep in Victor’s arms just as the prince killed his brother in the swelling and soaring of notes.
