The Soil of Your Stomach
1.
Upon tonguing something calcified and sharp in the woman’s homemade clam chowder, the man weighs his options. He considers spitting the unidentified object into a napkin before remembering the woman’s cloth napkins are in the wash and that she considers paper napkins tackier than no napkins at all. He thinks about storing the object in his cheek, chipmunk-like, until he can slip away to the bathroom but fears he will end up looking bloated.
At no point does he consider telling the woman the truth. It would be far better to choke down the stony morsel—likely as harmless as a chip of clamshell or an uncooked corn kernel—than to hurt her feelings. In the words of his ex-wife, the man is petrified by even the possibility of conflict. He was told, during one of their many, indistinguishable fights that what he mistook for politeness was actually selfishness.
Now, with the woman leaning forward, elbows resting on the table, eyes keen on the movement of his mouth, the man finds himself falling into a familiar paralysis. She looks not only expectant but vulnerable, evident in the way she bites her lower lip, its rosiness fading with every agonizing second he holds her original recipe in his mouth.
The man would be lying if he claimed to be moved solely by politeness. It is his third date with the woman, and, so far, he has received only a chaste peck on the cheek. Though, both freshly divorced, they have agreed not to plummet into anything too quickly, he is desperate to bury his face in her perfumed neck, feel the waves of her hair against his cheek, explore the soft expanse of her skin.
So he swallows. And in the mush of cream and potatoes and rubbery clams, the tiny object scraping the roof of his mouth, its ridges rolling over his tongue, sharp ends pricking his throat before flowing in a warm rush to his gut, the man realizes, with terrible certainty, that the object in question is not a clam shell or a corn kernel at all but a human tooth.
Panicked, he feels for a gap in his gums but finds all of his teeth intact and can detect no soreness or bleeding. If the tooth is not his, then it has to be hers.
The woman asks him what he thinks, her hair falling from behind her ears as she peers anxiously into her bowl.
The man assures her everything is delicious, that he wouldn’t change a thing.
She flashes him a grateful smile, shining with full rows of teeth.
Later that night, they abandon the couch and half-finished glasses of wine and a dull documentary for her bedroom, where, a half-hour later, they come to simultaneous orgasm.
That’s never happened to me before, the woman tells him, pulling lightly at the hairs on the back of his neck.
The man has never grown comfortable with the dew of defenselessness that hangs in the air after sex. His ex-wife, before they stopped sleeping together, liked to ask him what he was thinking in these moments. Nothing, he would tell her, to her irritation. He didn’t mean to be withholding; he just has a hard time sifting through the detritus of his thoughts.
Now, pulling the woman back into him, the man confides that it is a first for him as well. A little while later, he succumbs to a dizzying, narcotic sleep, while the tooth works its way deeper and deeper into the soil of his stomach.
2.
In the weeks that follow, the man and woman text back and forth with the feverish devotion of teenagers. The man even has to ask his daughter to decode a string of cartoon icons the woman sends him—a peach, an eggplant, little droplets of water—only to find, to their shared mortification, the message is of a sexual nature.
They are busy people, the man and woman, he with his HR management and she with her data entry—the sort of white-collar work that is both demanding and immaterial. They savor the scant hours their schedules align, an arrangement the man finds preferable to the shared, suffocating spaces of marriage. They fill this time with equal parts famished sex and patient conversation. The more the man shares of himself, the easier the process becomes. Gradually, it begins to feel less and less like he is trying to force the clotted mess of his interior life out through a pinhole.
One night, a little over a month into their relationship, the woman broaches the skirted-around subject of their divorces. The man is returning to her bedroom from the bathroom, wearing only a T-shirt, limp penis stuck to his thigh, when he finds her fully pajama’d, sitting cross-legged atop a freshly made bed. He sits beside her, feeling filthy and ridiculous with his bare ass on her comforter.
The woman, perhaps sensing his discomfort, shrugs and says, Sometimes I feel a little disheveled after sex and need to clean up a bit, you know?
He does know. He was always amazed at how easily his ex-wife could curl into sleep after sex, he himself needing to immediately wipe down and re-dress. He assumed the woman took after her in this respect and his current Winnie the Pooh-look was intended to be a concession to that.
I guess it’s a habit I picked up from my last husband. I mean my ex, the woman says. She plucks at the fibers twirling out from her slippers. He had to shower immediately after finishing. I’m sorry, she catches herself. TMI.
Did that make you feel dirty? the man asks. Like he wasn’t just washing off the sex but also you in a way?
The woman tells him that this is exactly right. She clasps his knee, shakes him and the bed in her excitement. She has an idea: they will tell each other the precise moments they realized that their marriages were doomed.
The bedsprings groan under the man’s shifting weight. To his relief, the woman offers to go first.
At the dawn of their relationship, cooking was communal. But as the woman’s ex-husband, the head chef at a chic downtown bistro, grew in stature at work, complicating the menu with riskier dishes, importing expensive and esoteric kitchenware from Europe, pinning the bistro with Zagat ratings and Michelin stars, his presence at home began to loom dark and heavy to the point where the woman was forbidden from dipping even a pinky into a dish until he was ready to serve it to her.
While preparing a New Year’s Eve dinner for his friends in the food scene, the woman’s ex-husband permitted her to peel garlic. The stresses of dwindling time, burning food, and missing ingredients throbbed in the kitchen like a diseased heart and manifested in him barking orders at her. Amidst this verbal assault, she found herself slicing the paring knife into her thumb, leaving a crescent-shaped gash, a flap of pink flesh, and a gush of blood. Howling, cursing, alternating between sucking on the finger and waving it at her ex-husband, the woman was met with neither concern nor first aid but the demand that she stop bleeding all over the food for fuck’s sake.
Even while being forced out of the kitchen, the woman found a way to add a personal touch to the food. When her ex-husband wasn’t looking, she gnawed off the loose flap of skin and slipped it into the minced garlic. When it was time to eat, she claimed to have lost her appetite on account of the injury and sat back and watched as everyone paid their compliments to the chef.
The woman, who has been lying supine and staring at the ceiling, sits up now. You think I’m insane, she says.
The man places a hand on her flannelled thigh and assures her he thinks no such thing; he is only trying to remember his own moment.
It is times like these, when called upon to self-reflect, that the man is at his worst.
He does not want to leave the woman exposed, but his head swims murky, all stuff of the same swill, no memory standing out more than any other.
Finally, the woman tells him that it is okay, he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to, before crawling to her pillow and turning to face the wall.
The deflation of hurt in her voice is enough to spur him to action, to make one memory jut out iceberg-like from the others.
He sets the scene of his mother-in-law’s seventieth birthday at a rinky-dink bowling alley upstate. Taking his time, hesitant to get to the part where he looks bad, he describes how she was an avid bowler her whole life and how she brought her own custom ball in a leather satchel embroidered with her initials. How she beat him every frame, only half-joking when she suggested he put the bumpers up. Never an athlete, he was surprised by how much his defeat at the hands of an elderly woman bothered him and by the bitter competitiveness that festered inside him.
Then, in the final frame of the night, she fell. He had been scrolling through his phone when he heard the awful thud of her brittle body against the hard floor and the ensuing, room-wide gasps. When he looked up, the rest of the family was clustered around her, helping her to her feet, but he remained frozen in his seat. The man still does not know what was wrong with him, but whatever it was, he could not bring himself to help the poor woman. Maybe he feared the intimacy of grasping her body to help her up, as if it would violate both their privacies. Maybe he worried he would injure her further, lifting her by the arms and dislocating them in the process. Maybe he convinced himself that she was already taken care of, that he would be just one more body taking up oxygen and space. He knew these were excuses, but still he could not move.
The man and his ex-wife have never talked about what happened that night, but he knows she holds it against him. He cannot blame her. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t act, he tells the woman now, and I will feel bad about it for the rest of my life.
She pats the empty space beside her on the bed, and he fills it, curling himself around her. He is dog-tired. At the same time, he feels a tectonic shift in his breast plate, as if it is being dislodged by something sprouting up from deep inside him. For the first time in a while, he can breathe freely and wonders why he has waited so long to splay himself open like this for someone else to see.
3.
The next evening, the man sits on his old couch, feet propped up on the Ikea coffee table he built with his bare hands, waiting for his daughter to get ready for their weekend together. Normally, this is an anxious half-hour or so spent surrounded by reminders of a life that is no longer his. But tonight, he feels at peace, unperturbed by the constellation of water rings that have come to mark the table since he last saw it.
His ex-wife is in the bathroom preparing herself for a date with a guy who either sells security software to companies in India or buys it from them for cheap; the man cannot care to remember which. Over the hum of her hairdryer, she calls out her usual questions, chief among them: is he seeing anyone? He moves from the living room couch to the hall outside the bathroom to tell her about the woman.
Though it has never been her way, the man hopes his ex-wife will be jealous, unmoored by the possibility he could find someone after her.
Instead, the hairdryer comes to a halt, and she calls out that she is really happy for him and warns him not to fuck this up.
Her gentle ribbing reminds him of the early days of their marriage, before their playful teasing calcified into genuine resentment. This wave of nostalgia carries with it something like a flame-lick of indigestion and with that the memory of the tooth. The man has come to doubt this memory. And now he tries to share it with his ex-wife. But rather than reassure him that he is crazy, she stops him before he can even get past the initial spoonful to the reveal.
Over the ricocheting sound of a comb or a toothbrush loose in the sink, she warns the man that she knows what he is doing: he is trying to give himself an out before he even gets in.
There is no rebuttal to this, so the man shifts gears. He reveals that he told the woman all about that night at the bowling alley. It’s funny, he says, I don’t think you and I ever even talked about it. It is easier to talk to his ex-wife now with the wall and bathroom noises between them.
The man’s ex-wife steps out into the hallway, her hair bundled up in a white towel. She wears smoky eye-shadow, dark lipstick, and an emerald dress he’s never seen before. Looking at the man for the first time tonight, she tells him the problem wasn’t that he sat there doing nothing. The family was there for her mother. She was fine. It was that after, when the man sensed he might be losing his ex-wife, he didn’t try to win her back. That is what she could never live with.
There is no malice in her words. She states them as plainly as if relaying the mundane details of her workday, then steps back into the bathroom, the running faucet filling the silence that follows.
It occurs to the man that this is the way adults talk. He stands up from his slouched position against the wall, confident that at some point in the near future he and his ex-wife will begin to see one another as honest-to-god human beings.
4.
As the man and woman’s relationship grows more serious, so too does the woman’s dedication to her cooking. The man finds himself moving up a belt hole, as she fills him with pot roasts and fluffy biscuits to sop up the gravy; chicken pot pies with delicate, flaky crusts; stuffed cabbages marinated in zesty tomato sauce. These are not simply hearty, New England meals; there is something of the woman’s personal imprint in each of them. They are also free of teeth. In fact, the memory of that horrible discovery recedes from the man’s mind until it is once again a distant point on a foggy horizon.
These days, his thoughts are dominated by the woman, work, the woman, and the occasional sharp pain in his abdomen. The worst of these pains seizes him one evening while SOS-scrubbing a layer of chili burnt to the bottom of the woman’s best pot. It feels like a cactus blooming against his ribcage, causing him to keel over and sending the pot crashing loudly into the sink. The noise brings the woman into the kitchen and to his side. Through gritted teeth and groans, he tries to articulate his pain, which is only now starting to diminish.
She asks if the problem is her food, sounding horrified at the possibility. She confesses to having tried a new hot sauce made from ghost peppers called Earl’s Atomic Ass Scorcher.
The man pulls himself up by the lip of the sink. His ex-wife would always tease him for devolving into an infant at the slightest suggestion of discomfort. He is determined to carry himself like a fully-grown man from now on.
The woman runs a paper towel under the faucet and takes it to the man’s sweaty forehead. He tells her he is probably just suffering from stress, that work has been crazy lately with all the layoffs and whatnot. He takes the paper towel from her and stretches it across his face, tearing a whole through its center with his nose.
You would be honest with me, right? If it were my food? The woman squeezes his shoulder before taking the shreds of paper towel from him and depositing them into the trash. She says, I can’t fix something if I don’t know what’s wrong with it.
5.
Their first real fight occurs three months into the relationship on a day-drunk and sweatpantsed Sunday afternoon. The woman is hovering over a simmering pot of curry, while the man, playing at sous chef, chops peppers. Though he has been told many times, he cannot remember whether she needs the peppers cubed or sliced. He asks once more, which elicits an irritated sigh and the single-word answer of sliced. He is confused by what seems like a sudden shift in attitude but wants to apologize while he still can, before the woman’s irritation transforms into an unrepentant foul mood. And so he tries to pull her into him, but she shivers his arm from her waist and his lips from her ear. Chastened, he slinks back to his place at the counter, part of him hoping he might accidentally slice his finger and earn her sympathy.
When he looks up from the cutting board to find her emptying a container of red curry powder into the pot, he thinks, for only the briefest of moments, about slapping it out of her hand. His stomach pains—stabbings, really—have only gotten worse and more frequent. The man’s doctor, unable to locate a cause, chalked them up to middle age and urged him to lay off the alcohol and spicy foods. The man is trying his best to do the latter.
He cannot remember whether or not he has shared any of this with the woman. Regardless, having witnessed his pain, she should be able to come to this conclusion herself.
Are you trying to burn a hole through my stomach lining? he asks.
She turns to him, face cast down in hurt. But at least she has put down the curry powder. Sounding as pained as she appears, she tells him to go put on the TV. She will take care of the rest herself.
It would be so easy to do exactly that, to lapse into the cocooned comfort of retreating out of the kitchen and into the space of his skull. But the man fucked up—he knows that—and the woman deserves better. She deserves action. He goes at the peppers with an Iron Chef-like ferocity, nearly getting his wish and slicing his thumb off in the process.
Stop, she yells. You’re butchering them. She hip-checks him, forcing the knife out of his hand in the process. God, you’re like a child, she says. You need constant supervision to do anything right.
It is so hot in the kitchen, as if every burner were dialed up to ten. The cauldron of curry is bubbling, its lid rattling, threatening to fly off the stove. The man can barely hear himself think.
Well? she says, waving the knife between them.
The man tries to construct a case against the charges of his helplessness, but he has no defense. He does not say what he wants to, that maybe he would be able to help if she stopped running her kitchen like a gulag. Instead, he lets his drunken equilibrium carry him out into the living room and onto the couch where he quickly passes out.
An hour later, they eat through the thick bramble of silence that festers between them. The curry is the best the man has ever had, the perfect level of spice. He keeps this fact to himself. Like any good fight, it is as illogical as it is heated, and he has no idea how to even begin to make things right.
Taking careful bites, trying not to look like he enjoys the meal as much as he does, the man registers the tooth before swallowing. It is bulkier than the first—a molar maybe—and he nearly gags it out onto the tablecloth. The reality of this second tooth revives the memory of the first.
And like last time, the woman eyes him curiously.
He refuses to give her the reaction he thinks she wants. Instead, he seals his mouth and swallows, having to wash the tooth down with a gulp of beer, lest it stay lodged in his throat. He watches her try to stifle the crack of a smile.
I’m sorry, she says.
For what? he asks. He knows, of course, but wants to punish her in some small way by forcing her to find words for what she thinks she did wrong.
For saying you can’t do anything right, she answers. I don’t really believe that. I just thought it would be nice to cook together, that it could be this thing we shared. A new way of communicating. But you’re so checked out half the time, it makes me feel like I’m becoming my ex.
That seems a little unfair, the man says. I like to think I’m trying. He is surprised by the quiver of defensiveness in his voice. It is a familiar refrain, his not being present, but not one he expected to hear so soon into this relationship.
The woman assures him that he is helpful. She says, I shouldn’t expect you to all of a sudden be Jacques Pépin. I guess I’m taking old frustrations out on you.
This too is familiar: an admission of defeat rather than any real resolution. Can it be any coincidence that the women in the man’s life tend to bear all the blame?
The man resolves himself to being an active presence in the kitchen: taking the initiative on prep, suggesting ingredients, expanding his culinary vocabulary. And as the swallowed molar travels down his esophagus and into the pit of his stomach where it will, like a pound of baking soda splashed onto a grease fire, neutralize his acid gut, he makes a second vow: to figure out how the woman has been depositing teeth into his servings and his alone.
With that settled, he slides from his chair to the floor. He says nothing when the woman asks him what the fuck he is doing, only crawls forward, careful not to bump his head against the underside of the table, until he is a few inches away from the woman’s lap. Over her sweatpants, he presses his lips to the inside of the woman’s right thigh and, moving his mouth leftward and upward, tries to apologize.
6.
The beef has been simmering for an hour and a half. The okra sits trimmed on the cutting board, ready to be tossed in. A snowball of rice rests in its cooker. The counter is littered with serving dishes housing toasted coconut, chutney, broiled banana and chunks of pineapple, slices of fresh mango, broiled tomato slices, fried onion rings, toasted peanuts, and croutons. The only thing that is left for the woman to add to the West African Beef Stew is a tooth.
This has been the man’s plan, ever since receiving a text from the woman asking what he wanted for his fortieth birthday. The text was punctuated with a winking smiley face, suggesting sexual acts only previously hinted at might now be on the table. After letting the blood-rush pass, he replied that what he wanted more than anything was the chance to prepare a meal with her. He knew she feared becoming a totalitarian like her ex, that this was the reasoning behind her exodus from the kitchen the past month, which is why he promised to do the brunt of the labor this time around. To take the lead. All he needed was the powering flame of her culinary insight.
The man knew this text—with its demand she return to the kitchen and condescending turns of phrase like “culinary insight”—would only infuriate her. At the same time, he was confident she would oblige for his birthday. It was this contradiction between her unflagging selflessness and his complete disregard for her wishes that could only produce a tooth. Because it is not only the woman’s cooking the man has been desperately craving, but something more substantial, something like a jarring, calcified click against his teeth, something so grotesque it is perversely satisfying.
So far, his every prediction has proven to be true, and now the kitchen buzzes with the woman’s anxious energy. Busy opening and closing cupboards and drawers with no discernible purpose, she asks the man if he can set the table.
He tells her that he will in a minute. Gripping the edge of the counter behind him, needing something stable to ground him as he makes his stand, he adds that he needs to see exactly how she serves everything for his own future reference.
I put it on a plate? she says, slamming the silverware drawer shut.
Are you positive everything is ready to go? You’re not missing any finishing touches or anything? The man can tell by the way the sides of the woman’s mouth twitch that he is barreling past the limits of her self-restraint. Good, he thinks. Whatever it takes.
It’s your birthday dinner, she says. Why don’t you tell me. She stands there, arms crossed, a stained dish towel slung over her shoulder, channeling an electric storm of exasperation into a single stare.
The man withers under her gaze, longs to sleepwalk his way to the table yet to be set. But if he is to get the reaction he needs from her, it will take some serious prodding.
Weird, he says. It sounded like your ex-husband was in the room for a second there.
The man knows, the moment the woman goes vacant before reanimating with blind anger, he has unlocked the fight they have been sidestepping for as long as they have been a couple. It pummels its way out of them now in a slurry of accusations and festering resentments. They tear through every inch of the kitchen, accusing each other of never getting over their respective divorces. Dumping the beef into the trash, sauce splashing over the sides of the bin, she shouts that he doesn’t want a partner but a maid or, better yet, a mommy. Grabbing a steaming ball of rice and squeezing it so that it strains through his fingers and falls to the floor, he growls that she expects him to be a mind-reader and how the fuck is he supposed to know what she wants when she never asks. In the man’s screaming and stomping, the veins throbbing in his temples, the woman becomes blurry, as if standing at the other end of a steam room, rather than a foot away from him in the kitchen. This abstraction makes it easier to unload into her any spiteful thought that comes to him. In this way, they exhaust themselves of all the awful shit they can never take back, so that all that remains is the minutia: she talks too much at parties, he too little, and so on.
It takes the woman’s cry that they should fucking end it already to snap her back into focus. Makeup streaked across her face, arms wrapped around herself and shaking, the man can only think of her now in terms of her impending absence. No more the sour of her breath as she kisses him good morning, no flights of her hands through the air as she relays stories of the assholes she works with, no shudder of her shoulders as she drifts off to sleep at night. The thought sticks like a burr in the man’s mind: I will never see this kitchen again.
As exhausted as he is, he will not embrace the hollow calm of giving up. Instead, a charge runs through him, so that every movement, every twitch of muscle, feels right, almost preordained. As he makes his way to the closet, the woman’s cries come to him muffled, as if from outside the apartment. Once in the closet, he brushes aside the red rain jacket she wore when they first met wandering the parking garage downtown, each trying to find their car. Behind the jacket, exactly where it needs to be, is the rusted toolbox, from which he removes the needle-nosed pliers. He returns to the kitchen, stoops in front of the sink, opens his mouth wide, angles the pliers above his left incisor. The woman’s voice buzzes louder but remains undecipherable. All the man can register is the cold steel of the tool against his gums.
He closes his eyes and pulls. A galaxy of pain explodes in his skull, and his mouth fills with a copper pool of blood. Endless blood, always replenishing whatever he swallows or spits into the sink through pursed lips, careful to contain the freed tooth, its presence reassuring on his tongue. To lose the tooth is to lose the woman.
But where is she?
The man clutches the lips of the sink in the empty kitchen, his brain feeling like it is trying to float free of his skull. He sucks on his tooth. It tastes nothing like the two he swallowed, which were cool and alien, where his is warm and salty.
There comes then a jingling sound, like a jar of loose change. He follows the sound to the sight of the woman carrying what looks like a milk jug in the crook of her arm. She sidles up to him and, with her free hand, kneads the back of his neck, as she has done the many times it has grown knotted with the small stresses of the day. With her other arm, she holds the jar up to the kitchen light. It is filled a quarter of the way with teeth of many shapes and sizes. Some are brown as if coffee-stained, some sharp like spades, some chipped, some long with what look like the roots of a turnip. All of them emit a pale glow under the fluorescent light, like dozens of dying lanterns.
The heat of her hand still on the man’s neck, the woman angles the open mouth of the jar to his. The teeth rattle something awful against the glass. She smiles and nods, as if to assure him everything is going to be okay. All he needs to do now is spit.
The man peers into the jar, is faced with the remnants of the men who found it easier to let go, then pushes it away. He presses his mouth to the woman’s and finds her receptive, lips parting without his needing to pry them open. A trickle of blood escapes from his mouth and runs down their chins. Their tongues working in tandem, it takes no time at all for the tooth to travel from his mouth to hers. The man pulls back now, fixes his eyes on the gentle slope of the woman’s neck, and watches the familiar shudder that lets him know the tooth has begun its descent.