23. Geo
— ? —
Geo
The rule is that we’re not allowed to talk about anything.
“So what can I say?”
“Anything that isn’t us.”
“That’s a big category with one very specific hole in it.”
“You’ll manage. You contain an alarming number of facts.”
Val is at Linda’s until Sunday. Linda offered, clearly and enormously delighted to be co-conspiring, and I said yes before I could construct a reason not to, and now there’s a whole night in front of us with nothing scheduled in it, which is a thing I haven’t had since I was twenty-six.
We are going to cook. That’s the plan. That’s the entire plan.
Harrison has concerns about the plan.
“This is a lot of garlic.”
“It’s the right amount of garlic.”
“It’s nine cloves, Geo.”
“Then don’t eat it.”
“I’m going to eat it.” He’s peeling with the wrong knife, the paring knife, holding it like it might go off, and the peels are going everywhere except the bowl. “I’m going to eat all of it and then I’m going to be alone forever and that’ll be on you.”
“You’ve got a real gift for the romantic,” I say. “It’s uncanny.”
He looks up. There’s a garlic skin stuck to his forearm.
“Was that a joke about me?”
“It was.”
“At my expense.” He says it the way other men announce a promotion.
“Yes.”
“Do it again.”
“No. You’ll get greedy.”
We are making a thing my grandmother made, or approximately it, since I never wrote it down and have been reverse-engineering it for eleven years from the memory of a smell.
Harrison has been assigned garlic and told to stay in his lane.
He doesn’t stay in his lane. He keeps drifting over to look in the pot, and then commenting on the pot, and once he tried to add salt while my back was turned and I caught him by the wrist like he was six.
“It needs salt.”
“It’ll need salt at the end. It doesn’t need salt now.”
“That’s not how salt works.”
“Do you know how salt works?”
He considers lying. I watch him consider it. It’s the best thing that’s happened all week.
“No,” he admits.
“Then step away from the pot.”
He steps away and puts on music I don’t know, which is deliberate, because for years everything he played in a kitchen was his own rough mixes and I’d have to arrange my face into an opinion. This is somebody else’s record. Somebody terrible.
“Who is this?”
“A band Derek’s cousin is in.”
“They’re bad.”
“They’re really bad.” He’s grinning. “I’ve been saving them. I wanted a witness.”
The sauce takes an hour and we drink most of a bottle of wine while it does, and somewhere in there the conversation goes off the rails in the good direction.
He wants to know what I’d do if money stopped existing. Not in a doomsday way. In a “what would you actually spend the day doing” way.
“That’s a job interview question.”
“It’s not, because in the version I’m describing there are no jobs.” He waits me out, wine glass tipped, entirely prepared to stand there all night.
“Fine. I’d go back to school.”
“For what?”
“Something useless. Ancient history, maybe. A degree with no application whatsoever.”
He puts his glass down so hard the wine sloshes. “Geo.”
“Don’t.”
“You want to go back to school to learn about dead civilizations for the sheer uselessness of it.”
“I said don’t.”
“That’s the most attractive thing you’ve said to me in a year, and it’s not close.” He leans a hip against the counter, closer than the cooking strictly requires, wine forgotten. “You realize I could talk to you about Mesopotamia until you physically begged me to stop.”
“I would definitely beg you to stop.” I lie.
“I’ve thought about that too.” He lets that sit a second too long, and my face goes warm for reasons that have nothing to do with the stove.
“About you lecturing me?”
He grins. “About you begging me.”
Holy shit. I clear my throat and take a deep breath to calm myself and pretend he never said that.
He tells me about the irrigation systems anyway.
Obviously he does. He tells me about canals and silt and a four-thousand-year-old complaint tablet from a man named Nanni who received the wrong grade of copper and wanted everyone to know about it, and he does the voice, and the voice is genuinely funny, and I laugh so hard at the wrong moment that wine goes somewhere it isn’t supposed to and I have to put my head down on the counter.
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Did you just do what I think you did?” He has gone very still, the way people do at the start of a very good day.
“Don’t say it.”
“I think you snorted.”
“I’m going to need you to leave.”
“That was a snort. That was audible.” He is delighted. There is no other word for what his face is doing.
“Get out of my house.”
“It’s my house.”
“Then I’m leaving.” I don’t leave. I’m still bent over the counter, ribs aching, and he’s laughing too now, and neither of us is watching the stove.
Which is when the sauce becomes an issue.
Not catastrophically. It catches on the bottom in the way that means the bottom third is now a different and more assertive flavor, and I stand over it with the wooden spoon making the noise my grandmother used to make, which is somewhere between a sigh and a diagnosis.
“Is it dead?”
“It’s not dead.”
“It smells slightly dead.”
“It’s smoky now. It’s a choice.”
“Is it a choice you made?”
“It’s a choice we’re making retroactively, together, as a family.”
We eat it at the kitchen island because moving to the table is beyond either of us. It’s genuinely a little burned and genuinely still good, and he has three helpings of it, which I’d like on the record.
Somewhere around the second helping he says, “You know what I keep thinking about?”
“If it’s us, I’m taking your plate.”
“It’s not us.” He turns the fork over. “It’s that you argue with narrators.”
“I don’t argue with narrators.”
“You argued with a man about container shipping for eleven minutes. He couldn’t hear you. You knew he couldn’t hear you.”
“He was being smug about tonnage.”
“See, that’s it.” He points the fork at me.
“That’s the thing. You’ve got opinions about tonnage.
About a documentary you picked at random on a Wednesday.
You’ve had opinions about everything for as long as I’ve known you and somewhere in there I stopped asking for them, and I’ve been trying to work out when, and I can’t find the day. There’s no day. It just got quieter.”
I put my glass down.
And there it is. The forbidden category walked right into the middle of the kitchen with its shoes on.
“You want to know when it got quieter,” I say.
My voice has changed and we both hear it.
“I can find the day. I can find several. It got quieter every time I said something in a room and watched you wait for me to finish so you could get back to the part that actually mattered. It got quieter the night you looked at me in that gold dress and said nice. It got quieter in an auditorium, third row, with an empty seat next to me.” I’m not laughing anymore.
The wine is gone out of my voice. “So don’t tell me it just got quieter, like it was weather.
Like it happened to us. You did it. You did it slowly, which is worse, because I couldn’t even point at the day. ”
The kitchen is very loud with the bad band and very silent underneath it.
For a year I have controlled every version of this conversation.
Set the rules. Picked the ground. And now I have kicked over my own rule in my own kitchen with a wooden spoon in my hand, and I brace for him to get defensive, to explain, to do the thing he always did, which was to turn my hurt into a mood I was having.
He doesn’t.
He sets down the dish towel. He looks at me across a burned sauce and half a bottle of wine like I’ve handed him a thing he’s been waiting a long time to be allowed to hold.
“You’re right,” he says. “All of it. I’m not going to argue with a single word, because there isn’t one that’s wrong.
” He doesn’t reach for me. He knows better than that.
“I stopped asking because your opinions took up room and I wanted the room. That’s the whole ugly truth of it.
I liked being the interesting one. And you got quieter and quieter making space for me, and I let you, because it was convenient. Right up until it was catastrophic.”
My eyes are burning. I hate that they are burning. I have cried in front of this man enough for three lifetimes.
“This was supposed to be a fun night,” I say. “I made a rule.”
“You did.”
“I broke my own rule.”
“You did.” A corner of his mouth moves, careful. “For what it’s worth, you broke it beautifully. That was a genuinely good speech. You’ve been saving it.”
And that’s the thing that does it, the thing that pulls the night back from the edge I shoved it toward. Because he isn’t wounded, and he isn’t making me manage his feelings about my feelings. He just took it, and set it down, and made a joke small enough to fit through the door I’d cracked.
“I have been saving it,” I admit.
“It shows. It had a structure.”
I pick the dish towel back up. My hands are steadier than they have any right to be.
“Okay,” I say. “We’re back to the rule.”
“You got it.” He goes back to his plate. “You still have terrible taste in documentaries, though. For the record. I want to hear about every one of them.”
He also, over my explicit objection, puts a pan on the stove, because he has been informed that his sole contribution to dinner was aggressive garlic supervision, and he intends to redeem himself by making the one hot food he can produce without adult help, which is grilled cheese. I let him. What’s the harm in that?
He then washes the dishes. I dry, because I have opinions about how things get put away and he has learned not to have opinions about my opinions. The bad band is still going. He gets soap on his shirt and then, somehow, on his ear.
“How.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I reach over and wipe it off with the towel. It’s nothing. He goes still under my hand, and the stillness travels straight up my own arm. I take the towel back a beat slower than the job actually requires.