“Benjamin,” Orbach said, “cooking is a fine and creative thing to do. But it wouldn’t be wise for you to pretend you are a woman when you’re having difficulty being a man.”
“Come on!” I said. “I’m not pretending I’m a woman. My mother opened canned spaghetti for supper. And complained about it. She spent more time in the kitchen drinking screwdrivers than she did at the stove.”
“Maybe you want to teach her to be domestic,” Orbach said.
“Isabel?” I said.
Orbach frowned. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“I’m not sure of anything,” I said, “except that I love to bring her coffee in the mornings and drink it with her.”
“Bring her coffee?” Orbach said. “Who?”
“Isabel, goddamn it!” I said. “If it was Mother, I’d bring her a martini.”
Orbach smiled wanly at that. “Benjamin,” he said, “as a child you had to nourish yourself, because there was little other nourishment around.”
I lay on the couch and looked at the water stain on Orbach’s ceiling. “I get tired sometimes,” I said. “I get damned tired of the whole fucking weight.”
“Clearly,” Orbach said, with sympathy. “I’d like to use chemical recall with you for the rest of our session today. I’d like to give you sorbate and take you back to your infancy and see if we can find out what you were thinking.”
I felt myself sweating. I hadn’t used chemicals in therapy for several years. They scared me. “Those pills pack a terrible hangover,” I said. “I need a clear head for…”
“For what?”
“For cooking supper tonight,” I said.
Orbach shrugged. “Very well. Perhaps some other time.”
The supper of which I’d spoken was the leg of lamb. I’d noticed it on sale that morning at thirty dollars a pound and bought it impulsively. I then wound up carrying it around with me while I spent a couple of hours with my lawyers, who were too polite to ask what in heaven’s name I was doing with a leg of lamb in a plastic bag.
It took me awhile that evening to figure out the controls on Isabel’s oven, but I managed. The combination of those electronic gadgets and a heat source of hickory wood has always seemed disorderly to me. It was a Wednesday and there would be no evening performance of Isabel’s play, so I had plenty of time. I cut slits in the fat and pushed in slivers of garlic, then rubbed the whole phallic thing with rosemary and coarse pepper. I had it in the oven by the time Isabel came home from her matinee; she gave me a quick kiss and a pat and went off to take a bath. I was beginning to feel very professional about this meal. I peeled away at my carrots, happy as a clam. Since the bathroom of that little apartment was only a few yards from the stove, I could hear Isabel splashing away merrily.
After a while the cats started nosing around at my ankles and looking pushy. It was time for their supper and I should have fed them, but I didn’t. The black one, as heavy-looking as a bag of cement, began meowing in his choked way. The brown-and-white, shyer, looked at me reproachfully. Get out of my way, you dumb bastards, I thought at them, viciously, not wanting to say it aloud in Isabel’s hearing. The black one croaked at me louder. I wanted to tell him to go back to cat school and learn to meow properly. I began to think I should open a can of food just to shut them up. I looked at them again, at their pushy, imploring faces, at their insistence, and thought, Fuck you, boys. Your lady friend can feed you when she gets out of the bath. They looked at me as though they shared an I.Q. of 3 between them. I grabbed a saucepan and threatened them with it. They slinked away.
A minute afterward, Isabel came out of the bathroom stark naked. I wanted to take her right there, but I restrained myself. Isabel could be testy about sexual advances that led nowhere. My balls had begun to tingle at the sight of her and I really wanted to drop to my knees for a while and let the lamb be well done if need be. But I pulled back from the tingle and cut it off somehow. That, I should have known by then, is how you get blue balls. That’s how you get into fights over whatever is handy—like carving a leg of lamb. I should have gone ahead with Isabel and let her decide whether she liked it or not; it would have saved a lot of grief.
Instead, I started fussing with the peas and managed to spill a third of them down into the wood fire, where they hissed at me in derision. I could feel the inanimate world gathering itself for one of its attacks on my person. I began to feel like hunting down the black cat and strangling him. I reached for the oven door and burned my hand. Instead of shouting, I gritted my teeth. Stoicism. It gives you blue balls in the soul.
But I did manage to control myself enough to get the peas into a bowl and then to get the lamb out of the stove and onto a big plate for cooling. It looked terrific. Very professional. I felt a lot better. I spooned out the carrots and circled the leg of lamb with them. It was shaping up like a sculpture. I was cheerful again despite the tight feeling in my stomach. I remembered we had fresh parsley in the bin. I got some and put it at one end of the plate. Voilà.
Isabel had pulled on a pair of jeans and set the table by the window. I was standing by my masterwork, waiting for praise.
And then my stomach sank. Somebody had to carve this fucker, and I’d never carved anything in my life. When I was a kid my mother managed to roast a turkey once a year, on Thanksgiving, with a kind of cold, hungover resentment. She always carved it herself, while my father sat around looking bored. I think that, down deep, I was waiting for Isabel to get up and carve, like Mother. She came into the kitchen, in fact, and I felt a sigh of relief in myself. But what she did was exclaim over how beautiful the lamb was. And then she said, “Hurry up and carve it, Ben. I’m hungry!”
Jesus, did I want to throttle a cat just then! If I could have just done it—or just kicked a cat around the living room for a minute, I could have sliced up that roast the way an orchestra leader slices air with his baton. With a pinky sticking out as the slices fell with gentle plops on the serving platter, arranging themselves prettily between disks of carrot. But what did I do? I gritted my teeth, stuck a fork into the roast, took a big kitchen knife and started slicing as though the lamb were a loaf of bread. Immediately I hit a bone. I tried the other end. Another bone. I slipped the lamb, greasy now and still too fucking hot, over on its side in the plate, which was now filling with juice, soaking about half the carrots and giving them the color of wet orange socks. Burning grease was sticking to my fingers. I shook it off. Some of it landed in the peas. I began slicing at the first end of the roast, but from a different angle. There was another bone. How could a white, furry lamb walk around with so many goddamned bones in its legs? How could the bones be coming from so many different directions? My cheeks were burning as though rubbed with Brillo; Isabel was watching every move in tactful silence.
And then, as I stood ready to turn my knife against anything that lived, there was an abrupt, loud plop, as though someone had dropped a fish on the kitchen counter. It was William, the normally shy cat. He must have jumped down off an overhead shelf where he’d been hiding since I’d scared him away with the saucepan. I stood frozen, staring. During my carving I had managed to get loose a piece of lamb the size of a poker chip. William took that piece demurely between his teeth, leaped to the floor and scampered across the room. I gripped my Sabatier, visualizing the mess in the apartment from feline decapitation. William huddled with his find in the corner, under Isabel’s bronze urn of pussywillows. The black cat slinked over to join him. Clearly a coconspirator. I picked up the roast, plate and carrots and all, held it over my head the way King Kong would hold a subway car, and threw it at them with all my strength. It whammed into the bronze pot with a thud that enriched my soul with relief. The plate-Isabel’s best Delft—flew apart like a comic-strip firecracker. And the carrots spread themselves over the white floor like abstract expressionism. Like the perfectly placed rocks in a Japanese garden.