Savage Feast Read online

  “How’s Alana?” he said.

  “To your health,” I said, nodding at the shot glass in front of him. An effective distraction. They all drank Metaxa, the Greek brandy, perhaps because it looked like their Soviet cognac but went down more smoothly because it was really a botanical.

  Alana and I had met in 2003. I was moderating a talk uptown, and she was a newspaper editor looking for new writers. In the post-event scrum, I barely noticed her. But when we had lunch in Bryant Park a while later, I realized that she possessed that rarest of qualities: She was not only beautiful and smart but interesting. For a season, we lived out that life that New York promises but so rarely delivers: hours of talk in elegant, low-lit places that seemed to have been built just for us.

  We were opposites in so many ways. Three years older than my then twenty-four, she was in the exit lane of a failing young marriage; I hadn’t had a serious girlfriend since high school. She was from a comfortable family, and I was a frugal immigrant. She loved New York, and I was overwhelmed by it. She loved journalism, and I resented it with all the bitterness of a twenty-four-year-old trying to publish. She was relatively at home in her skin, and I wanted to crawl out of mine. But the only thing that we remembered when we stumbled out of those bars at midnight and later was how interesting it was to talk to each other.

  She wanted to settle down, but that was the last thing I knew how to do, especially with someone so different. “I wish I could meet you in five years,” I had told her after it became clear we were interested in each other. “It’s too good not to give it a try,” she’d answered. She seemed so much more settled and knowledgeable—she had left her conservative religious community and gone to Barnard; was working, in therapy, through her parents’ disapproval and her own questions—and so I agreed. Not every love involves the kind of attraction that would make Gabriel García Márquez sit up, and we’d been blessed with just that.

  By that point in my twenties, I could tell I needed to answer some questions of my own. In my teens, something had begun to feel wrong about the responsibility that had been given to me as a boy; I realized I didn’t know what it was like to feel carefree, adventurous, unresolved, unafraid. I felt angry all the time, but I didn’t know the cause.

  It was Alana who helped me find my way to it. It was because of her that I experienced the euphoria of inchoate self-understanding, of imagining life without so much confusion and discomfort. But it wasn’t a clean line. There were a lot of detours. A lot of me yelling at her for something that had nothing to do with her, even if I couldn’t be more certain it did. Alana led me to the powder keg, and got a lot of the shrapnel.

  We still loved each other—even if it was harder and harder to be in the same room. I was constantly escaping to the Washingtons of the world, she into her career. It never stopped being interesting to talk—as long as the subject wasn’t us. When it was, the more we tried to explain, the less clear things became. Our helplessness became frightened, furious, resentful: Individually, our lives were making more sense, but together they kept coming apart. In helping each other become the people we wanted to be, we were becoming people whose differences made being together impossible. Our practical differences didn’t help. There was a map of rancor and heartbreak to be drawn, as there was for so many New York couples, of all the corners in Manhattan where we’d argued and said things we regretted.

  “Another drink,” I said to the cluster of men around my grandfather.

  “But this is what I can’t understand!” the Intellectual exclaimed from his wheelchair. “This. Is. What. I. Cannot. Un-der-stand! How can your husbands allow you to go off to another country by yourselves in this way?!” He slapped the table and drained his shot glass for emphasis.

  “Let them stay where they are,” one of the women said. I looked at my grandfather. Surreptitiously, he placed the nail of his middle finger against the pad of his thumb and flicked it against his neck. That was the Soviet gesture for “drunk”—the husbands were alcoholics.

  “The alternative,” the woman said, “is they come with you!” Everyone laughed.

  “Is it true?” I asked Oksana when she came back from the kitchen. She was the person I felt safest talking to. Then I flicked my own finger against my neck.

  “We’re an unlucky generation,” she sighed. She indicated one of the women. “Her husband came here with her. Every day, she watches him at 6:00 p.m. from their window, guzzling his last beer before coming upstairs. As if she can’t smell it. Has he even gone to work? Supposedly—he has money. But where does he get it?” She closed her top lip over the bottom. “My sister was lucky—her husband was a good man. But then he died. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

  “The one who drinks,” I said. “He was like that before he came? Or it started here?”

  “Or take that woman,” she said, speaking over me. “Her first husband died of cancer—he was younger than everyone at this table except you. So she remarried—”

  “And the second one died, too?” I said.

  She smiled; I was too naive to guess well in these situations. “Maybe it would be good if the two husbands reversed fates,” she said. “No, he just drinks. But at least he’s back in Ukraine. But she’s got children there, too. To leave him, she had to leave them. And helping them means helping him. I understand this contradiction very well.”

  “She can’t divorce him?” I said.

  “She can divorce him,” she said. “But how many of them can you divorce?” She smiled a crooked smile. “I’m lucky.” She didn’t mean herself. “My daughter, back home, she can be a woman—because she’s married to a man who knows his responsibilities. They share duties, but she remains a woman. A woman must be slabaya.” All the ex-Soviet women above a certain age said that. Their daughters didn’t say it, because they were reared in America, but often they felt it, too—it’s why I couldn’t date them. Literally, slabaya means “weak,” but in this case it meant that women had to be allowed to feel like women: supported and shielded, spared and saved, spoiled and surprised.

  I wondered if I would’ve felt the same if we’d stayed in Belarus—or even if I hadn’t left south Brooklyn. Alana had broken away from the conservative religious community in which she’d grown up, and Barnard did the rest. We referred to each other as “partner.” She was the one with the office job and the more restrictive schedule, so usually I stayed at her apartment instead of vice versa, and—though she respected my work; she had been the first person to believe in it—I had to be the one to get milk if we wanted some in our coffee. I wanted to ask Oksana what we should do about our trouble—maybe she would have something different to say from my parents and grandfather—but I was afraid to ruin the good feeling between us.

  My grandfather appeared next to us. “You haven’t eaten,” he said. “Have some of Yasha’s whiting. Oksana Greeked it up—you’ll bite off your fingers.” For some reason, fish braised in a carrot broth was called “fish Greek style.” The recipe was from Poland.

  “Arkady, let him be,” Oksana said gently. “He’s an adult, he knows what he wants.”

  “I vanish, I vanish,” he said like a clerk obeying his councillor, his hands raised in mock apology. He was flirting with her—not really, not in search of some kind of consummation, but as a man next to a woman. And she didn’t mind, despite the more than thirty years separating them.

  “What did you mean when you said you understand the contradiction?” I said after he left. “Helping the kids is helping the husband.”

  “I meant my son,” she said. “He’s very kind. He doesn’t have any dirt inside. But he’s like his father—the words go with the music, as they say. We had ‘labor passports’ during Soviet times; it said where you worked. Mine said the same place for twenty-seven years. It was like that for everyone. Whereas his father drifted between so many jobs, his labor passport ran out of room. That’s my son, too. He worked at a beer distributorship. Then he sold eyeglasses. Then finance. It didn’
t take, so I got him into service industry management. He lost interest in that, too. Then he sold fridges, poured foundations, worked at a recycling center. He’s not lazy. But he’s had so many jobs, I’ve lost count. Searching, searching, and for God knows what.”

  “It sounds American,” I said, wanting to be encouraging. “It sounds entrepreneurial. He won’t stop until he finds the right thing.”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. She was being polite. She meant: no. “He needs the Soviet way—punch in, punch out. Your generation is a hustling generation, but he’s not a hustler. And I’ve made it worse by sending money from here—he doesn’t have to worry about work in the same way. He’s always been surrounded by women—me, my mother, his sister.”

  She wished her son had more drive, but all the drive belonged to the women.

  I’d walked in during that part of the evening when new courses had stopped appearing, and soon bodies had begun beaching themselves on the sofas. Now, like wounded coming to life, they were stumbling back toward the table. I took a triangle of pie—it looked like dessert. Oksana watched me excavate it carefully with a fork.

  “Try it!” she laughed.

  “But where’s the liver?” I said.

  “It’s in the crepes.” I stared at her quizzically. “It’s in the batter,” she said. “You grind chicken liver together with onion, and add eggs, flour, and so on. It comes out like a batter. And then between the leaves you can add whatever you want. I do garlic, dill, mayonnaise. Try it!”

  Not wanting to offend, I took a bite. It was confoundingly delicious. I took another.

  The talk at the table was slower, more slurred. I tried to remember if I’d had three or four shots. Manhattan felt so far away. My girlfriend felt far away. The one time I’d brought Alana to my grandfather’s, she ended up working her phone surreptitiously under the table. Everyone had been trying to accommodate her by speaking English, and she seemed relieved when they gave up. But I didn’t mind being at my grandfather’s just then. Not in the way I’d minded for a while, my flesh burning with rage. There was something sweet about all those galactic bodies rubbing their bellies in near-catatonic contentment. Maybe just the booze in me made it seem so.

  Oksana was huddled with the woman who must have been the illegal, because they were talking about green cards and lotteries and a certain kind of visa. Next to them, the one who had the mistress was telling them all that in Ukraine, he had worked near a meat plant that was particularly well policed by the managers, preventing the employees from ferrying out sides of beef for personal resale. So they had to resort to flinging them over the fence. Chelyshki and okovalki (brisket and sirloin), flying over the fence like God himself was tossing them down.

  I poured myself a new thimble. “Sin to drink alone,” Mistress Man said. The circle of men opened up to include me. I was gratified by it. “Tell us how the young live,” he said.

  My mind was warm from the drink. I tried to think of a story that would make them laugh. “Sorry to mention medical matters at the table,” I said, and waited to gauge the reaction, but no one at this table was a stranger to medical matters. I barreled on. “I had this—I don’t know what you call it. Inflammation. On my groin.”

  “Ho-ho-ho!” someone said.

  “It was very sensitive. It got so bad I couldn’t bear for clothing to touch it, couldn’t sit down, nothing. So this woman we know, she says, ‘You have to char a half-moon of onion and clamp it over the spot. It’ll suck up all the bad stuff.’ So I do it. Char half an onion on the burner and put it over my thigh with an ACE bandage, you know, those light-brown ones. But I have a date the next night. Date number three. It’s time to—you know. Except I have a charred onion strapped to my groin. But it’s not like I can, you know, without the onion, either.”

  They stared at me. Some curious, some confused. I thought my grandfather would like it. His great fear, impervious to all counterevidence, was that I was gay. One weekend when he and my grandmother had come to New Jersey—I was seventeen—I’d had a friend visit; eventually, she and I went upstairs to my room. When I came downstairs the next day, it was nearly noon and he was slurping soup. “So what happened?” he said. “Nothing,” I said. “She’s just a friend.” He dropped his spoon into his soup. “When a girl goes to your room and stays there half the night, you fuck her, goddammit!” He used the word for “fuck” that sounds like artillery slamming its target. “I hope you’re happy,” he said. “Now she’s going to tell all her friends that you”—he stuck out his finger—“are a homo.” When I mentioned a new girlfriend, the first thing he asked—his fear mixing with the need to speak decorously around his grandson, the result nearly biblical—was: “You lie down together, don’t you?”

  At the table, the curious ones joined the confused. “Yeah, couldn’t get far with that one, could you?” someone said with unpersuasive camaraderie.

  “It was people hiding beef under their clothes that made me think of it,” I explained lamely. I thought I could buy their amusement with self-deprecation, but in this group the only disclosure that went over was the self-flattering kind. If you represented yourself in an unflattering light, the fault was only your own, schmuck.

  “When they arrested the great poet Mandelstam,” the Intellectual took over, “they put him in a cell with an informer. Sometimes they would take the informer out for ‘interrogations,’ so he could report on what Mandelstam said. Then one morning this fellow comes back from questioning—and his breath reeks of onion! They’d fed him while he ratted. That’s how Mandelstam knew he was a snitch.”

  He was rewarded with vague nods. No one knew who the hell Mandelstam was.

  “Mark Twain was a Jew,” my grandfather announced. “I read it in the newspaper.”

  “Men!” Oksana called out. She was emerging from the kitchen with a platter. “Dessert!” It was the wafer torte. That could travel well, I thought.

  As she walked past me, she said, “When you need people to leave, serve them dessert.”

  They really did begin to stumble out after that, after embraces and wet kisses. Suddenly it was just four—Oksana and her sister Nadia, my grandfather and me—in a room too quiet.

  My grandfather had a solution for silence. “How are things on the professional front?” he said, turning to me. He wanted me to impress Nadia. Alas, I told the truth.

  “I’m trying to write a book about masculinity,” I said.

  “So it’s a short one,” Nadia said, and she and Oksana burst out laughing.

  My grandfather stared at me in confusion. “Masculinity?” he said. “Is that like when they bomb a city and then you build it back up from the ruins?”

  “What?” I said.

  “So what is it?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  He thought about it. “When a man saves a woman from being beaten by another man. Or you save a child from a flood.”

  “Is it masculine to tell the truth or to lie?” I said.

  “To tell the truth and it’s against your own benefit, that’s manly,” he said. If I wasn’t going to make up things to impress Nadia, then he would. “Girls, girls . . .” he said, sighing at Nadia and Oksana. “Both of you work so hard, and you’re all alone. How I wish for you to find a man deserving of one finger on your hands.”

  Nadia shrugged, and Oksana folded her lips. “What will be will be,” she said.

  “Come on,” he said. “One more for it.” Everybody extended their shot glasses. I had had more than enough, but there were too few of us, and the toast’s wish too important. We clinked and drank to good husbands. Oksana left and returned with her laptop.

  “Arkady’s weekend aide—we tried to find her a new man,” she said.

  “Her husband died in a hot tub,” my grandfather said.

  “How can you die in a hot tub?” I said.

  “He overheated, I don’t know. His heart gave out. In fact”—he pointed at me—“she’s been wanting to sue those people. But she
doesn’t have the language. And if you took it on, she’d give you a piece of it.”

  “But I’m not a lawyer.”

  He opened his hands, meaning “Exactly.”

  “What are you looking for on that Internet?” Nadia said.

  “Recipes,” Oksana said.

  “She needed an air conditioner,” my grandfather said. “The building super says his friend has an extra. Albanian, too. And then he says the guy is a widower. So I say bring him, bring the air conditioner, I’ll put a bottle on the table, and we’ll introduce them.”

  “Does he speak Russian?” I said.

  “He’s Albanian—why should he speak Russian?”

  “Well, the weekend aide doesn’t speak Albanian.”

  My grandfather rolled his eyes. “People who want to understand each other find a way to understand each other. Anyway—I got out a fifteen-year-old bottle of cognac. Fifteen! They show up with the air conditioner. They plug it in, it works, everything’s perfect. Finally it’s time to go, and this specimen gets up and says, ‘Thank you, delicious food,’ and then he says to her—”

  “‘Twenty dollars, please, for the air conditioner,’” Oksana finished for him.

  “This Romeo wanted to charge her for the air conditioner!”

  “Did she give it to him?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “The twenty dollars.” I was interested in the wrong details.

  Oksana’s computer pinged and she smashed her hand over her mouth.

  “What? What?” they said in unison.

  “Nadia, my blood, don’t be mad at me,” Oksana said. “I’m not looking for recipes.” She looked up.