Watching him operating on the steak like that, carving a straight slice and then dividing it into neat cubes, made her think of the diagram of the planned cow at the front of one of her cookbooks: the cow with lines on it and labels to show you from which part of the cow all the different cuts were taken. What they were eating now was from some part of the back, she thought: cut on the dotted line. She could see rows of butchers somewhere in a large room, a butcher school, sitting at tables, clothed in spotless white, each with a pair of kindergarten scissors, cutting out steaks and ribs and roasts from the stacks of brown-paper cow-shapes before them. The cow in the book, she recalled, was drawn with eyes and horns and an udder. It stood there quite naturally, not at all disturbed by the peculiar markings painted on its hide. Maybe with lots of careful research they’ll eventually be able to breed them, she thought, so that they’re born already ruled and measured.
She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a real cow that once moved and ate and was killed, knocked on the head as it stood in a queue like someone waiting for a streetcar. Of course everyone knew that. But most of the time you never thought about it. In the supermarket they had it all pre-packaged in cellophane, with name labels and price labels stuck on it, and it was just like buying a jar of peanut butter or a can of beans, and even when you went into a butcher shop they wrapped it up so efficiently and quickly that it was made clean, official. But now it was suddenly there in front of her with no intervening paper, it was flesh and blood, rare, and she had been devouring it. Gorging herself on it.
She set down her knife and fork. She felt that she had turned rather pale, and hoped that Peter wouldn’t notice. “This is ridiculous,” she lectured herself. “Everyone eats cows, it’s natural; you have to eat to stay alive, meat is good for you, it has lots of proteins and minerals.” She picked up her fork, speared a piece, lifted it, and set it down again.
Peter raised his head, smiling. “Christ I was hungry,” he said, “I sure was glad to get that steak inside. A good meal always makes you feel a little more human.”
She nodded, and smiled back limply. He shifted his glance to her platter. “What’s the matter, darling? You aren’t finished.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t seem to be hungry any more. I guess I’m full.” She meant to indicate by her tone of voice that her stomach was too tiny and helpless to cope with that vast quantity of food. Peter smiled and chewed, pleasantly conscious of his own superior capacity. “God,” she thought to herself, “I hope it’s not permanent; I’ll starve to death!”
She sat twisting her napkin unhappily between her fingers, watching the last of Peter’s steak disappear into his mouth.
18
Marian was sitting at the kitchen table, disconsolately eating a jar of peanut butter and turning over the pages of her largest cookbook. The day after the filet, she had been unable to eat a pork chop, and since then, for several weeks, she had been making experiments. She had discovered that not only were things too obviously cut from the Planned Cow inedible for her, but that the Planned Pig and the Planned Sheep were similarly forbidden. Whatever it was that had been making these decisions, not her mind certainly, rejected anything that had an indication of bone or tendon or fibre. Things that had been ground up and re-shaped, hot dogs and hamburgers for instance, or lamb patties or pork sausages, were all right as long as she didn’t look at them too closely, and fish was still permitted. She had been afraid to try chicken: she had been fond of it once, but it came with an unpleasantly complete skeletal structure, and the skin, she predicted, would be too much like an arm with goose bumps. For protein variety she had been eating omelettes and peanuts and quantities of cheese. The quiet fear, that came nearer to the surface now as she scanned the pages – she was in the “Salads” section – was that this thing, this refusal of her mouth to eat, was malignant; that it would spread; that slowly the circle now dividing the non-devourable from the devourable would become smaller and smaller, that the objects available to her would be excluded one by one. “I’m turning into a vegetarian,” she was thinking sadly, “one of those cranks; I’ll have to start eating lunch at health bars.” She read, with distaste, a column headed
The telephone rang. She let it ring a couple of times before getting up to answer it. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone and it was an effort to pull herself up out of the gentle realm of lettuce and watercress and piquant herb dressings.
“Marian?” It was Leonard Slank’s voice. “Is that you?”
“Yes, hi Len,” she said. “How are you?” She hadn’t seen him or even spoken to him for quite a long time.
He sounded urgent. “Are you alone? I mean is Ainsley there?”
“No; she isn’t back from work yet. She said she was going to do some shopping.” It was the Christmas season; had been, it seemed, for several months; and the stores were staying open till nine. “But I can get her to call you when she comes in.”
“No no,” he said hastily. “It’s you I want to talk to. Can I come over?”
Peter was working on a case that night, so technically she wasn’t busy; and her brain did not provide her with any excuse. “Sure, of course Len,” she said. So she’s told him, she thought as she put down the phone. The idiot. I wonder what she did that for.
Ainsley had been in the highest of spirits for the past few weeks. She had been certain from the beginning that she was pregnant, and her mind had hovered over the activities of her body with the solicitous attention of a scientist towards a crucial test tube, waiting for the definitive change. She spent more time than usual in the kitchen, trying to decide whether or not she had strange cravings and sampling a multitude of foods to see if they tasted at all different, reporting her findings to Marian: tea, she said, was more bitter, eggs were sulphury. She stood on Marian’s bed to examine the profile of her belly in Marian’s dresser mirror, which was bigger than her own. When she wandered around the apartment she hummed to herself, constantly, intolerably; and finally one morning she had retched in the kitchen sink, to her immense satisfaction. At last it had been time to go and see the gynaecologist, and just yesterday she had bounced up the stairs, her face radiant, waving an envelope: the result was Positive.
Marian congratulated her, but not as dourly as she would have done if it had happened several months earlier. At that time she would have had to cope with the resulting problems, such as where Ainsley would live – the lady down below would certainly not tolerate her once she became rotund – and whether she herself should get another roommate, and if so, whether she would feel guilty about deserting Ainsley, and if not, whether she could face all the intricacies and tensions that would result from living with an unmarried mother and a newborn baby. But now it wasn’t her concern, and she could afford to sound genuinely pleased for Ainsley’s sake. After all, she herself was getting married; she had contracted out.
It was because she didn’t want to be involved that she resented Len’s phone call. From the tone of his voice she guessed Ainsley had told him something, but it hadn’t been clear from the conversation exactly what he knew. She was already resolved to be as passive as possible. She would listen, of course – she had ears, she couldn’t help it – to whatever he had to say (what was there for him to say, anyway? His function, such as it had been, was over); but beyond that there was nothing she could do. She felt incapable of handling the situation, and irritated too: if Len wanted to talk to anyone he should talk to Ainsley. She was the one with the answers.
Marian ate another spoonful of peanut butter, disliking the way it cleaved to the roof of her mouth, and to pass the time turned to the shellfish chapter and read the part about de-veining shrimps (who, she wondered, still bought real shrimps?) and then the instructions for turtles, which she had recently begun to find of interest: precisely what kind of interest, she was not certain. You were supposed to keep your live turtle in a cardboard box or other cage for about a week, loving it and feeding it hamburger to rid it of its impurities. Then just as it was beginning to trust you and perhaps follow you around the kitchen like a sluggish but devoted hard-shelled spaniel, you put it one day into a cauldron of cold water (where no doubt it would swim and dive happily, at first) and then brought it slowly to the boil. The whole procedure was reminiscent of the deaths of early Christian martyrs. What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food! But the only alternative for that sort of thing seemed to be the cellowrapped and plasticoated and cardboard-cartoned surrogates. Substitutes, or merely disguises? At any rate, whatever killing had gone on had been done efficiently, by somebody else, beforehand.
