I guess the truth is that butchers intimidate the hell out of me. I've long had a bit of a thing for them, akin to the way many women feel about firefighters. Burly Irishmen covered in soot are okay, I guess, if you're into that. But I prefer this world's lock-pickers to its battering rams. Anybody with enough resolve and muscle can bust down a door; that kind of force I comprehend completely. I myself possess it, psychologically if not physically — just call me Julie "Steamroller" Powell. But a man who can both heave a whole pig over his shoulder and deftly break down the creature into all its luscious parts, in a matter of moments? That's a man whose talents I can really use.
I'm attracted to a butcher's intimate knowledge. Romantically, I imagine it's innate, that his nicked hands were born knowing how to slice those whisper-thin cutlets. I'm attracted to his courtly, old-world brand of machismo. Butchers are known for their corny jokes and their sexism, but when the man behind the counter calls me "sweetheart" or "little lady," I find myself flattered rather than offended. Most of all, I'm attracted to his authority. There's an absolute sureness to a butcher, whether he is chining lamb chops with a band saw or telling his customer just how to prepare a crown roast. He is more certain of meat than I've ever been about anything. Rippling deltoids and brawny good looks are nice, of course, but to me a butcher's sureness is the definition of masculinity. It strikes me as intoxicatingly exotic, like nothing I've ever experienced. (Well, not for years, anyway, not since I was a kid. I think of the teenager I was when I found Eric and took him to me, and it's like remembering an entirely different person.)
Maybe that's why I seem unable to open my mouth around butchers.
If I'm dreading a conversation, I tend to practice it over and over in my head beforehand, perhaps not the most effective of preparation techniques. "I want to learn how to—" . . . "I was hoping you could teach me to—" . . . "I'm really so interested in what you do . . ." Ugh.
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Ripling deltoids and brawny good looks are nice, but a butcher's sureness is the definition of masculinity.
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This is far from the first butcher I've tried to ask for this favor. Weeks ago, I asked the guys at Ottomanelli's — my first butcher shop when I moved to New York City, and still my favorite. It's a tidy storefront on Bleecker Street with hams and ducks hanging in the meticulously polished windows and a tight awning overhead, red and white stripes as neat as the trimmed and tied meat and bones within. I used to be a regular there, and the guys behind the counter—brothers, I think, all of them in their sixties or seventies, white coats spanking clean despite days of blood and ooze—still always make a point of greeting me when I come in. It's not quite a "Norm!" sort of welcome, but there's warmth there.
But when I managed to ask, stammering, if they had a place for an apprentice with zero experience, they demurred. Not particularly shocking, I suppose. Instead they suggested one of the culinary schools downtown. I briefly entertained this notion, but it turns out culinary programs don't offer one-off classes on butchering, and I wasn't about to shell out twenty thousand bucks for a yearlong program teaching restaurant management and pastry making, my personal vision of hell. I proceeded to ask around at the handful of other butcher shops in the city, or try to, anyway. Half the time I couldn't even get the words out. When I did, the men behind the counter looked at me as if I might be a tad touched and shook their heads.
I press my lips together as the beseeching words run through my mind. And then, inevitably perhaps, he pops into my head, the one whom the word beseech sometimes seems to me to have been invented for, the man who called, two years ago, to ask me to lunch, the man I've wound up spending much of the last two years pleading with—for attention, assurance, sex, and love. The exception proving the rule of my marriage, the one man who, when he was not much more than a boy, small and dark, not so very attractive, found he could make me open my dorm room door in bewilderment, late at night, with a single knock. The one who, nine years later, discovered he could still do essentially the same thing. In my phone's contact list he is represented by a single towering initial, D.
But no. I'll not let him in, not now. I shake my head sharply, as if I could physically dislodge the errant thoughts. Find a butcher. Get him to teach you how he does what he does. Do it now. I don't know why I want this so much, what I have to gain from learning to cut up animals. Yes, I have a thing for butchers, but it hasn't ever before occurred to me to try to be one. What's going on here?
Maybe I just need distraction. D and I have been sleeping together for nearly two years now. I'm familiar with the landscape of addiction, and I recognize that I've built up a habit for him, no less real and physical than my habit for booze, which has itself grown stronger in the wake of all the various stresses of being an adulterer. And something is wrong lately, slightly off. Just thinking about that makes me crave a drink.
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