The foodie

[Originally published in the sadly now defunct Cadaverine Magazine]

It’s my birthday and I’m eating dinner with a man I do not love. There must have been love once, because there is a square-cut tribute to it biting into the meat of my finger. 

Tom is the kind of man who calls himself a foodie full stop. You know: Foodie. Nerd. Gin Lover. Full stop. Full stop. He eats at an amazingly slow pace, placing his knife and fork down after every third bite in order to compose a thoughtful polemic on each flavour. Every bite requires a comma. Our life is all punctuation marks.

I eat quickly: all business. Mealtimes are not church; I don’t need to molest each ingredient behind the confessional. Try listening to Bach or the Stones or whatever, note by note, and tell me how good it sounds. Tom says things like London has such a boner for American junk food at the moment don’t you think which makes my guts pulse wickedly, wet and fearful for a life I can see but can’t yet touch.

My cousin says that it is not possible for lasting love to exist between two people with such different eating habits. I don’t know what I think.

We are eating at a restaurant in North London which is expensive but also hip, which is probably how Tom would like to be described. Tom is fifteen years older than me, and fifteen years richer. The bill will be on him, but I’ll pay for it in other ways. Not sex, exactly, though there will be some of that dry-lipped congress later. He is one of those men whose actions are engineered to generate emotional debt. Gratitude gets him hard, like small girlish tits and MDMA.

He smiles at our waiter in a cinematic, Hollywoodish way that he has learned from Matthew Mcconaughey. It’s placating and faux-benevolent; selected to demonstrate that whilst he is glamorous and entrepreneurial, he is also a man of the people, a down-to-earth nice guy. Maybe that’s why he’s so terrible at making women come. Earth is no place for the celestial shriek of an orgasm.

“I think we’ll have a bottle of the Castilian sparkling wine, thanks”.

He’s pleased with this. He knows that you can only call champagne Champagne if it’s from Champagne. He doesn’t want me to see that he’s pleased, because he knows that this sort of move only works when it’s nonchalant (something he has literally never been). He places two fists squarely on the table; they look like folded up hearts. I want to pierce their plump flesh with a fork like sausage and season the tiny wounded vales left behind.

We drink the wine and toast my advancing age. Its fizz is passive aggressive; it suggests Gatsby-ish jocularity, 22-year olds padding across wet grass barefoot, and I know that it makes Tom feel 40, which is exactly one year more than he is. At 24, I am close enough to winking Daisy Buchanan to make him feel even worse and Tom is the kind of man who thinks it is his right to be made to feel good about himself. So it’s clear then: there will be a fight tonight.

I take a piece of bread from the basket, compressing it between my fingernails like play-doh, taking care to ruin it with too much butter. Tom says no thank you without actually saying it because a curated gut does not accept unworthy victuals and I should know that, shouldn’t I. 

He has a remarkable way of not eating the bread that somehow makes more of a fuss than my eating of it.

We both order the steak; his theatrically blue, mine unfashionably well-done because if I had the taste for raw muscle I would not be marrying somebody with limp cowpats for biceps. I would be marrying a fruity god with arms like ripe nectarines.

“They massage the cows for over five hours, you know, to make it taste like this. That’s why it’s so expensive.”

This is an appalling turn of events. Tom and I have eaten Wagyu beef together over six times during the course of our relationship. It’s possible that, based on the facts I have learned over four years, I could write professionally about this pampered cut of beef. A thrill of disbelief that feels close to delight slinks up my neck.

I can feel it fizzing; the desire to start the fight that’s coming and drop a smooth grenade into the placid pond of this life that I have somehow participated in the creation of yet do not want. But I don’t have the words for all these things I do not want so I swallow a lump of gristle and smile.

And so life goes.

Dessert arrives, a pristine slice of gelatinous yellow. He mmmms repulsively like he’s swallowed Rihanna. I tell him about Sarah, my flatmate; the fight we had over a chicken carcass that I left in the kitchen for three days. As punishment, she left it on my bed, slick with grease, while I was away for the weekend. A fuck you via poultry, resulting in a fabulous screaming match. I ham it up in the way he likes, emphasising its sitcom silliness. He likes me ridiculous.

“You girls” he says, indulgently. The subtext is what-are-ya-like and I’ve heard its silky familiarity in a thousand different ways before. It’s designed to communicate that he has an understanding of me that others don’t, when really he knows what’s inside me about as well as our waiter Darren. I am marrying somebody who can’t see me. I consider the butter knife, silver-shining on its canopy of white.

He pauses.

I think: don’t talk about the chicken, please don’t talk about the fucking chicken. Tell me that I’m an inconsiderate little cunt, which I am 99% of the time, explain how you’re scared that you’re old and past it, which I know that you are, and that you don’t understand the point of Snapchat and how that makes you feel like you’re stepping further and further away from who you were when you were young and cool. Describe in coldly precise detail about the darkness you feel inside you at 3am or even better, shut up and throw your glass of precious fucking sparkling wine all over me, you terrible, terrible arsehole.

“Anyway, chicken. Nice. Did you let it rest for a bit?”

We get the bill. And so life goes.