Vladimir(39)
I held the ticket in my hand. Fifty dollars. A hundred for repeat offenders.
X.
When I told Sid what the department had requested, she smirked and shook her head with the reassuring arrogance of a licensed and accredited attorney.
“They can’t do that.”
“Well, I know they can’t, but they didn’t say I had to. They asked me to consider it.”
I was making martinis for us in mason jars. Before I left the college that day I wrote emails to my classes and all other pertinent people, telling them that I would be taking off the next day due to a cold. As I expected, there was an email from Priya, saying that she was sorry, and she thought I should walk around with the red letters AW, for Adulterer’s Wife, pinned on my breast as performance art. I wrote her back a quick note of thanks, and wanted to write more, wanted to ask her over for dinner to talk about it all, but my fingers felt leaden against the keyboard.
Seized with an urge to consume, I went to an upscale butcher shop that had recently opened in the area and bought expensive T-bone steaks from a very handsome, well-muscled butcher. I tried to imagine him tracing the tip of his knife over the curves of my body to cheer myself up, but the fantasy failed to displace my doldrums. I stopped at the organic market and purchased dark black kale and designer anchovies and a nineteen-dollar brick of parmesan and olives and seeded crackers and an uncut boule of whole wheat sourdough and goat cheese and salami and raspberries and a flourless chocolate ganache torte.
Usually I went to some undignified liquor warehouse for alcohol—the wines were good enough and the prices were better and the salesclerks left you alone. Today, however, I stopped at the boutique in town—used only by tourists—and let an Englishman talk me into three thirty-dollar bottles of red and a new, artisan vodka. I wanted to take substances into my body like an immoral and immoderate businessman traveling on a company credit card. I wanted everything that passed my lips to be decadent, full of sulfites or iron, with mouth-screwing flavor, to taste rich and deep.
I found Sid in the guest room, glassy-eyed and grumpy, playing a multiplayer video game on her laptop. I demanded she shower, put on a button-down, and meet me downstairs. Sensing my desperation, she complied. I stripped, ripped, and washed the kale and set it out to dry, rinsed and patted the steaks and shook them with salt and pepper. (I am of the opinion that good steak should have no seasoning other than salt and pepper.) I lightly boiled an egg and then broke it into the bottom of a wide, low salad dish with anchovies that had been mottled with garlic and olive oil. To that I added the kale and a massive amount of freshly grated parmesan, and then massaged it until it shone. I set out the cheese, salami, bread, crackers, and olives and decanted the wine. I pulled out my tray of cocktail fixings with the firm intent of getting completely and gloriously wasted.
The air was chilly, but daylight savings was still a few weeks away, so I pulled out extension cords, ran them into the backyard, and plugged in two heat lamps so that Sid and I could sit and watch darkness fall and the evening creatures peek out from the bushes. There were always a disturbing number of deer, covered in flies and ticks and savagely ripping the heads off all the flowers—those you saw every night. Often you would see a fox, sometimes reddish rabbits, and very occasionally a beaver or an opossum. One year there was an ancient-looking tortoise from God knows where who lived nearby the pool for a month as she laid her eggs.
Sid and I set up a folding table and I put the steaks on the grill. By the time they were ready I had drunk half my martini. I ate like a beast, ripping chunks of flesh with my teeth, stabbing enormous forkfuls of the salad into my mouth and letting the oil smear all over my face, shoveling crackers and cheese, alternating my red wine with my martini to wash everything down. Sid and I tore the sourdough with our hands, soaking the pieces in salted olive oil. I had a memory of my mother, back when I was twelve or so. She was a nurse’s aide, and after she and my father divorced she picked up shifts as a waitress at a local Irish pub, the kind that exists in most towns in America, with burgers and onion rings and soggy fish and chips and a perpetual stale-beer-mixed-with-cheap-floor-cleaner-topped-with-cigarette-smoke smell. Friday nights I (and I suppose my sisters if they were home, though I don’t remember them ever being there) was permitted to stay up and wait for her to come home. I would read and watch late-night TV and try on her makeup in the bathroom mirror until around 11 p.m., when her shift was done. She would come in bearing two grocery-sized bags full of pub fare, and a couple bottles of Coca-Cola, and she and I would feast on the soggy, greasy food and the sugary desserts until we could eat no more. I remember us silent, content, and chewing. It was the one time my mother and I shared a common appetite together, perhaps the time we were the closest.
I looked over at my daughter. She was staring out into the bushes, her mouth full. There were sickly gray rings below her eyes and the drawn expression on her face made her look like a daguerreotype of a morose Progressive-Era female intellectual.
“Have you spoken to Alexis?” I asked her.
She nodded. “She might come here to visit.” She said it gloomily, examining what was left on her plate.
“That’s great,” I said, forcing cheer into my voice. “Right? Isn’t that great?”
“I don’t know.” Sid shrugged. “Now there are terms.”
“Terms like what?”