Delicious
By Tim Conley
An extra portion of lousy to the whole business of breaking up is the forced immersion in cliché, again and again. When people fall in love (especially when young) they are likewise saturated in the stuff, but they don’t mind it, or they don’t see it because everything is new, entirely new, discovered by themselves at last. When people fall out of love (especially when no longer exactly young), they find themselves making complaints that they despise, that they would not take seriously from others not long before: my ex is crazy, my ex is a total narcissist, my ex is manipulative, my ex is a cold-hearted control freak. To these complaints come echoes no less cliched, the affirmations and reassurances of friends and family: that’s so rough, that’s so unfair, you need to take care of yourself, you need to set boundaries. If only someone were to say, what, something new, what, anything, what, to have a taste of new, a glimpse of new, that new that now seems swallowed up by the earth.
But what.
–At least, pipes in Gina, stirring her coffee, you don’t have to put up with the line of consolation that goes, Men, as though men generally, the category, were the problem and not the particular bastard in question. And you get these emails full of jokes about Men, and deep advice about Men, and because this is all so well-intentioned, these people want to help, you just have to smile and nod and go along with it. A nod for a nod.
Gina’s lesbian envy is a theme as routine as it is self-declared, and she believes the latter quality pardons the former. From hidden speakers, a world today of hidden speakers, a string quartet plays a medley of pop hits fallen from the charts months before.
Cliché, the sound of minimum resistance to the moulding forces.
She wants to say
–What did I do to deserve to live like I’m in some badly translated novel?
but hears her voice recounting
–Now I hear all the things she said to me in the past few years and understand them completely differently, I see all the falsehoods that I walked past before.
Any moment she is surely going to delve into my ex is a total narcissist.
But what she really wants to say she can’t even, can’t even.
Gina’s nod is like the nods others have nodded. You need to set boundaries. The Land of Nod, where the guilty and isolated go, beyond the boundaries, reasonable rates, seasonable climate.
What she really wants to say might go something like
–Do you know, Gina, what I’ve very recently discovered is my best way for handling everything, the thing that gives me some sort of balance at the same time it doesn’t completely anaesthetize me? Eating photographs.
And with Luc, himself a photographer, besides everything else he wants to be, even with Luc she cannot say it. He shows her his new couch, raspberry is the colour, and sits her down and coaxes her to let it out, and obligingly she says she’s such a control freak, and he too nods, just as he expected, satisfied.
What she really wants to say is
–With all due, Luc, fuck this raspberry couch and your latest cocktail recipe, I’ve found such a high you wouldn’t believe it, it’s the only thing that’s really keeping me going, not all of the sympathetic fucking nods.
He insists on making her dinner, because he lives as much to insist as to make meals for other people, a photographer who cooks is a man with as many hanging pots as telephoto lenses, a man of trophies. But it is precisely for this reason that she has come to his apartment, yes to see his fabulous new couch and to let it out and in due course to hear his insisting on making her dinner, this very promising new recipe he very nearly literally stumbled over just the other day, but far more than all of this for this opportunity, this moment when he is delivering over the sizzles a monologue from the kitchen, as ever to do with the utter ridiculousness of love and sex and all of that, a moment when she is left to move about in the apartment, to scan his trophies.
There. Half-fallen behind some books on a shelf, an unframed picture of one of Luc’s lovers, an early one, she forgets the name, looks on the back to see written: ST, June 1998.
Like Gina, Luc has asked whether she has lost weight, she looks to have lost weight, she isn’t eating, is she? True, her appetite disappeared with Vi, and for weeks she had nibbled on rice cakes washed down with wine.
But. Came the day in front of the refrigerator, opened and closed and then opened and closed again, and her gaze landed on a picture held by circular magnets to the door. Was it the colour, the competing lushnesses of the of Vi’s hair of and that of the trees all around her? Something stirred in her, and she was unsure both of the precise catalyst and the effect. She pulled down the photograph and weighed it in her hand a moment, before bringing it to her lips, to her tongue. All at once it was folded into her mouth.
–I don’t understand the word delicious, Vi had once told her. When Vi invited instruction like this it was invariably prelude to serious fighting or serious fucking.
–What’s not to understand?
–It’s the prefix de, it means away, and I don’t see what away has to do with the sensual pleasure of delicious, with what is all about being in the moment, fully being in the moment.
Swallowing the photo of a woman who did not understand delicious was more than the swallower could understand.
ST, June 1998 is saltier, somehow, a less familiar blend, but no less extraordinary. In fact it was extraordinary that it should be so overwhelming, that there should be such a variety of these overwhelming tastes: the picture of Talia and her sister, the picture of the big bear’s pawprint, the picture of the abandoned tricycle on the beach, the pictures of Vi’s cats, the picture of Vi in front of Niagara Falls, the picture of Vi waiting to see the dentist, the picture of Vi, the various pictures of Vi, all extraordinary, extraordinaries.
Yet when she had tried magazines, she knew even before tearing the page: it wouldn’t work, there was something missing. Spat it out. Felt like an idiot.
–Idiot, she told herself. Just as she had when she found out about Vi’s running around. Idiot, what an idiot.
A young boy cocks his head at her in the mall where, seeing him seeing, she halts her sniffing at a rack of postcards. None of the images summon that appetite.
–Peekaboo, the boy mouths.
Evidently it had to have emotion in it, not professionalism. She could taste the feeling behind ST, June 1998 as soon as she saw it. And it had to be, who knows why, a photograph in hard copy, what a phrase, not on a screen, how could you eat a screen. She sniffed her phone’s album. Idiot.
Could she eat a picture of Muddy? She could; she did. And Duddy, too. But she resisted pictures of herself, tried to hide them away, even though she had not the slightest doubt of their – delicacy, could you say that?
–I don’t understand the word delicious.
–Go fuck yourself, Vi. No, I don’t mean that. I mean something like that. Am I speaking aloud?
–You need to set boundaries, Luc called from the kitchen.
For that she’s going to eat another of his photos.
It’s been months since she has gone to see her therapist. All too well she can hear herself mimicking her breathy way of talking, of breathily saying precisely, to naked Vi, who rolls with laughter. Precisely. That would have been (oh don’t put that together) just at the time when Vi was (yes, right, message received), when she lied about the (enough, already). You can’t go to a therapist to spite someone. Where’s the sense in that? But ask about the photo thing – does she even want to do that? One, does she want to stop; two, why on earth; three, does she just want to understand it; four, what’s to understand; five, what’s to fucking understand, it’s delicious, emphasis on the deeee.
There was a girl, Dee for Denise, before Vi for Violet, long before. Her first. Firsts together, studying for a history test the night before. Those wrists of hers, the way they turned over the pages. Over an hour of searching finally locates, in a shoebox on a closet shelf, a single polaroid of her, gangly, sunglasses, cocked head. How much of a pause, only the one picture, and whoosh it’s in her mouth, she’s washing it around, relishing it. Like none of the others, like none of the others was like none of the others.
Three months ago she had been lying on this floor like this, lost, and now she is lying on this floor not like that, lost in a new way. Lost in what sense, precisely?
–You need to take care of yourself, she replies to the ceiling fan. You should take up a hobby. You shouldn’t spend so much time on your own. You should get out and see people and get some exercise and avoid social media and take up swimming again and go to the movies and get comfortable in your own skin and reclaim your space and but
But what.
She wonders. What a picture of herself, what it tastes like.
Obdurate Gina talks her into going to a party where almost everyone is a stranger. She keeps all conversations quick and shallow, excuses herself to move on. It’s one of those apartments that seem to keep going and going, and everything looks new and exactly right in its place: hanging shimmering pots and pans, well-stocked bar, unstained tea towels, printed cushions, fresh flowers, perfect curtains. When looking for the bathroom she walks into a storage space and her eyes are drawn immediately to the stack of albums. She pulls one into the bathroom with her and locks the door all in one movement.
Hardly looking at them, she tears one picture after another from the album. She eats a young boy learning to ride a tricycle, smile triumphant. She eats someone at an airport, surrounded by luggage. She eats Roman ruins. She eats a gondola. She eats a horse. She loses track of what she is eating. She loses track of the room.
Even before the doctor says
–Chemical shock, we call it
and before Gina visits and doesn’t know what to say, saying
–I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say
and before her own treacherous tears start coming, let alone before anybody, say one of the nurses always looking in probably as much out of curiosity as anything else, offers her something to eat, she says, very clearly,
–No, thank you, I’m not hungry.
Tim Conley’s most recent fiction collection is Collapsible (New Star Books, 2019). He teaches at Brock University in Canada.