A Certain Hunger

a novel

Chelsea G. Summer

AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK

Copyright © 2020 Chelsea G. Summers

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com. Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.

www.unnamedpress.com

Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.

ISBN: 9781951213145

eISBN: 9781951213152

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Summers, Chelsea G.

Title: A certain hunger : a novel / Chelsea G. Summers.

Description: First edition. | Los Angeles, CA : The Unnamed Press, [2020] |

Identifiers: LCCN 2020033063 | ISBN 9781951213145 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781951213152 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Food writers—Fiction.

Classification:LCC PS3619.U45943 C47 2020 | DDC813/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033063

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover Art by Bernardino Mei

Designed and Typeset by Jaya Nicely

Manufactured in the United States of America by Versa Press, Inc.

Distributed by Publishers Group West

First Edition

To all the bad girls, but especially to Molly and Katelan.

Contents

1 Corpse Reviver #2

2 Roast Parsnips

3 French Fries

4 Tofu

5 Jolly Time

6 Lampredotto

7 Truffles

8 Rump Roast

9 Banana Bread

10 Torta ai Fichi e Limone

11 Lingua con le Olive

12 Silage

13 Punta di Petto and Tripe

14 Steak

15 Gamberetto

16 Soup

17 Duck

18 Hot Dog

19 Baked Alaska

Acknowledgments

A Certain Hunger

1

Corpse Reviver #2

They all look the same, hotel bars, even when they don’t. The oak and

the glass, the palms and the bottles, the lighting that casts that singular glow,

wrapping you in its warmth and pin-spotting your loneliness. Hotel bars

smell like class privilege, desperation, and hope.

I sat at the hotel bar, drinking a Corpse Reviver #2. Corpse Revivers, as

connoisseurs of cocktail culture know, were created as hangover cures, those

hairs of the dog encouraged by Aristophanes, who, so long ago in ancient

Greece, looked to quell the storms that come from swilling an excess of

wine. Like many of the best things, the origin of the Corpse Reviver family of

cocktails is shrouded in mystery. The obscure siblings of the Corpse Reviver

first appeared in the 1871 publication of The Gentleman’s Table Guide:

Being practical recipes for wine cups, American drinks, punches, cordials,

summer & winter beverages; Recherché bills of fare with service of wines

& c., & c. It is a heady title, and a heavy book, one that runs as dizzy a gamut

as its title suggests. Every proper young man should peruse a copy; every

improper one should own it.

Most contemporary cocktails date from Prohibition, a profoundly stupid

time in American history, and while already soundly middle-aged in 1920,

the Corpse Reviver found its stride during these years of dumb deprivation.

Harry Craddock, the legendary American bartender at London’s legendary

Savoy Hotel, ushered the Corpse Reviver into the modern age in the Roaring

Twenties, cementing the drink’s status in 1930 with the publishing of his The

Savoy Cocktail Book. Craddock’s own prim, starched lines are not to my

taste. I enjoy a man who’s kissed with a yeasty beastliness. Craddock’s staid

and studied ersatz Englishness aside, I detect a rumpled rebel’s raging heart

beating in his white-coated breast, if only when I drink his creations.

Craddock’s Corpse Reviver #2 is an exquisite drink that sits on the lintel of

anarchy: what makes it also breaks it. The splash of absinthe propels the

Corpse Reviver #2 into the territory of the faintly hallucinogenic—the

absinthe also dates and places the drink. Absinthe was, of course, unfairly

banned in these puritanical United States for about a century, returning in

2007. Those were happy days when absinthe returned to North American

shores, even with its severely decreased wormwood percentage.

The hotel bar where I sat sipping my Corpse Reviver #2 was not the bar

of The Savoy Hotel. There are not sufficient superlatives that one can lay at

the feet of The Savoy Hotel, or at least there weren’t; times change, likewise

places. This historic hotel—home to Oscar Wilde’s love that dare not speak

its name; habitat of Sarah Bernhardt; domicile of Noël Coward; and abode to

countless other filthy gorgeous stars—has fallen from grace, or at least from

the grace of those who live graciously. Still, I love The Savoy, if primarily

for its history, its unswerving devotion to the laws of luxury, and its

inordinate British taste. Others may enjoy their sex acts tick-a-tack in tawdry

motels, pilled acrylic under their backs, shag rug as pestilent as the fur of a

feral dog beneath their feet, and the illuminating, flickering, cold blow of a

television screen. To say I’m immune to the charms of no-tell hotels would

be disingenuous. But there’s nothing as heavenly as sundry perversions

perpetrated in rooms with views, high thread counts, Turkish towels, and

price tags to match. Cheap is fine; expensive is almost always excellent. The

Savoy is, above all things, expensive, even if more recent days you’d be

likely to find me in the Hotel Café Royal or The May Fair. (The decoration is

better, and, after all, only the superficial lasts.)

I was not in The Savoy, and the bar was not in London. It was the fall of

2013 in New York City, my hometown, and the bar belonged to the NoMad

Hotel. I like to visit hotel bars, even when I’m in my own city. You sit at a

bar and you’re gifted with that feeling of utopia peculiar to places frequented

by wanderers. Hotels are like train travel, like early-morning pillow talk

with a stranger. They allow you to occupy a space that’s caught in

indefiniteness.

I sat at the hotel bar, alone, the Corpse Reviver #2 beading in the glass

before me, a wicked shade of stepmother white. Five other humans, two

pairs and a single, ranged down the bar, a wide slab of wood as smooth as

fine Belgian chocolate and almost as dark. One pair: businessmen in business

suits, doing business; the eyes of one stole over his raised glass to meet mine

from time to time. The other pair: a couple, husband and wife, most likely,

who stared past each other’s dead eyes as they spoke. And the single: a

young man, tall and thin, with long aristocratic fingers and skin the color of

Brillat-Savarin. Though clearly here on business, he wasn’t wearing a suit;

his shirt gleamed lustrous, lavender as an old bruise. Unlike the man who

flicked his glances toward me like a cigarette in the general direction of an

ashtray, this young man met my gaze in the mirror and held it steady. Nothing

spilled in that cocksure gaze.

I drank my Corpse Reviver #2, I took notes on my most recent meal

(Vitals & Orts, a new gastropub helmed by Rupert Bonnard, the enfant

terrible du jour, who gleefully dished up offal to foodies desperate for some

new sensation, their mouths gaping as baby birds’, as Egypt’s Blue Hole, as

porn-stars’ assholes. The food was excellent, especially its duck liver toast

—unctuous as a Vegas emcee, salty as a vaudeville comedian—and its steak-

and-kidney pie—tender as a love song, rich as Warren G. Harding). I bided

my time.

In the wide mirror, I could see the slender single man fluffing himself in

preparation to approach me. First, he leaned into the bartender and gestured

in my specific direction; a fresh drink was placed before me, an abject

offering. Next, he caught my eye and nodded at me, a slight dip of his sharp

chin. Then, he slid off his chair, smooth as a pat of butter oozing from a pile

of hot flapjacks. I felt him slide beside me.

“You know,” he said, “you pose an interesting challenge.”

His voice was deep and kissed with an indeterminate accent. It dripped

with excellent upbringing, winters skiing in the Dolomites, summers spent in

a ten-room “cottage” on the Baltic, private school with British teachers. His

skin smelled like expensive paper and sap.

“Do I.”

He glided onto the stool next to me, sliding his long legs under the bar,

every moment as calculated as the luster on his shirt. No man wears a sateen

shirt without wanting to be petted. “You have what I call ‘resting bitch face.’

It’s interesting,” he said.

I looked at him and arched a brow. “Well, wait until you see it in full

fucking action, little man.”

Later, though not much later, I’d explore the inside of this young man’s

mouth with my tongue and my fingers; it would taste of bourbon and ennui.

His mouth would explore the lemon and salt of my pussy; it would taste of

multiple orgasms and poor judgment.

The young man in question was long and creamy. A delight; a cream puff

stuffed to bursting with pointed sweetness and cum. He was remarkably well

raised, brought up by his single mother, a British émigré from the USSR, a

woman in possession of an un-disputable fortune and inexplicable good taste.

This young man seemed to have been reared by Gigi, had Gigi lived in

Soviet Russia and served as the mistress of an unnamable party chief. This

young man was tangentially involved in hedge-fund trading by day, but he

wrote poetry by night, his long fingers tip-tap-tapping on the keyboard,

wishing that quills were not so difficult and so pretentious.

One learns so much about a person when one merely wants to fuck him.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how I should have known better. At the very

least, I should have known something. All the others were different, you see.

I’d built years of intimacy with them, great sprawling manor houses of shared

histories with vaulted ceilings and crepuscular cellars, secret rooms and

libraries shelved with books we’d read, breathless, in the dark, together. In

my time with Giovanni, Andrew, Gil, and Marco, we had built memory

palaces that telescoped with extra wings, added rooms, flying dormers,

baroque spaces that expanded with time and shared experiences. With

Giovanni, with Andrew, with Gil, and especially with Marco, I had spent fat

swaths of my life, and even if we’d not spent much of that time together, the

points had intersected often enough to create the illusion of a straight line.

From a distance an ellipses looks solid.

This man, this Casimir, which is the name of the young man in question—

and it should have told me something, a dirty translation of it means

“destroyer of peace”—was a nothing to me, a single blip in the Morse code

of my life, something too brief to read. He was a phoneme, a dangling

modifier, a printer’s orphan. He was an incomplete thought. Some cautionary

voice peeped a quiet squeak as that long, white Russian took my hand and led

me to his room, but I did not listen. I have always found it hard to listen when

a man pulls my head back by my hair. I should have listened. I should have

known. I did neither.

Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized

hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens.

Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes

to lay atop another, a mother’s love, a father’s love, a lover’s love, a friend’s

love, an enemy’s love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of

smiles and cries in the dark, of half-hushed pleasures and heart-cracking

pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in

embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an

anatomy textbook, drawing pictures of things we can only ever see in

fractions. With the coming of words, love writes and is then overwritten;

love is marginalia illegibly scrawled in your own illegible hand. In time,

love becomes a dense manuscript, a palimpsest of inscrutable, epic

proportions, one love overlaying another, thick and hot and stinking of beds.

It’s an unreadable mess.

I didn’t love Casimir. That relationship didn’t even live in the same zip

code as love. When Casimir approached me, wrapped in sateen and creamy

skin and erupting in clumsy pickup lines, I should have listened. I look back

at the loves in my life and I think I should’ve known, I should’ve seen, I

should’ve listened. I didn’t.

Instead, I fucked Casimir in his hotel room, the bed snuggled into an

alcove like a broad white tongue into a groove. In addition to a fine hand

with the hair pulling, this young Russian had, I remember, the straightest,

narrowest cock I’d ever seen. It was slender as a ruler and nearly as direct.

That night, we had sex for an hour or so, then ordered room service. I was

hungry. My ill luck to have told the waiter to wheel the cart into the room—

later, much later, he’d remember my face, wrapped as I was in nothing but the

top sheet, and testify in court.

Inconsequential things would later return to haunt me. The room service

waiter. The video cameras in the hotel lobby, elevators, and hallway. The

bartender at the chocolate-silky bar who’d so adeptly made my Corpse

Reviver #2. These trivialities would conspire against me, bear witness,

place me in exact time and space, and will my actions into repeatable being.

Later, much later, I’d see grainy black-and-white footage of Casimir and me

groping in hotel hallways, kissing in hotel elevators, engaging in erotic acts

altogether unseemly for public behavior. I looked, I thought, surprisingly

good for a fifty-one-year-old. My cheekbones are formidable.

Not that I was stupid enough to have killed Casimir in his hotel room. I

may have been shortsighted with lust, but I wasn’t crazy. Nor, for that matter,

was I prepared. It’s not easy for a woman to kill a man.

Why, I wonder now, did I kill him. Oh, Casimir, you were so little to me,

a screen for the projection of my desires, twelve feet high and luminous,

silvered and flickering. That first night, I left you in a muddled heap in your

hotel bed, dusted with room service crumbs and slumbering. As I stepped out

into the gimlet dawn, sunlight was beginning to slip like white lies between

the skyscrapers. The doorman held the door for me. I walked into the

opalescent half-light, flagged a cab, and was gone.

I could’ve left well enough alone. It would’ve been easy. The real

mistake wasn’t fucking Casimir. The real mistake was fucking him again.

And, I suppose, the next few times. I should have made it a one-off, a lone

death-defying act in a high hotel room. Maybe I was bored; maybe I was lost.

Maybe he was simply that toothsome. Maybe he was my middle-aged

madness, my little red Corvette, my last great gasp before I sloughed off into

menopause and the attendant hormonal horrors that anti-puberty has to offer.

Whatever Casimir was to me, he wasn’t just once, and now, of course, he is

with me forever. I am marked by Casimir. We are joined unto death, which is

a little ironic, if you think about it, and I do.

Thus I passed weeks with Casimir, multiple nights in his hotel room,

fucking. There was a hand job under a table, too, Casimir’s fingers parting

my labia as I slid forward on a banquette, sly paroxysms of bad posture and

muffled orgasm. There was also, if memory serves, a luxe bathroom stall, the

click-click-click of expensive heels on the vintage tiles, and the red-lipped

“O” of a surprised woman who had too much to drink (and not enough dick).

For weeks, Casimir saw me, neither of us knowing that his life was ending. It

wasn’t as if I planned it.

Just as I was not so crazy as to kill Casimir in his hotel room, I was not

so stupid as to kill him in my apartment—Casimir never saw the inside of my

apartment! Indeed, I can think of only three lovers who have seen where I

live; my home is mine, and I don’t like to share. If you followed the trial, and

I assume if you’re reading this that you paid attention to my trial, then you

already know how and where I killed Casimir—or you think you know. You

saw Nancy Grace call me bloodthirsty; you read how Vulture hung on my

trial, rated my outfits, made GIFs of my face, and thrilled at the testimony of

Emma Absinthe; you saw my episode of Snapped; you read the tweets and

you liked them, stabbing that tiny red heart with your forefinger in a hot

dopamine rush. What the tabloids named me: the “MILF Killer,” the “Butcher

Food Critic,” the “Bloody Nympho.” None got it right. You know only

enough about me to be sufficiently interested to shell out money to hear me

tell my story, or, if you’re cheap, to snag a copy from your public library. You

may think you know, but believe me, you don’t.

I had keys to my friends’ house on Fire Island. It was October. Apple and

wood smoke bit the air, but the ferries were still running skeleton schedules.

I invited Casimir to spend the weekend with me at a house in Robbins Rest, a

tiny townlet tucked between Atlantique and Ocean Beach and the only central

township that lacks a road. To get there, you had to hump your luggage hard

over the soft sand—there was no packed path on which to roll your wooden

wagon, no easy ingress or egress. If you drove to Robbins Rest, you drove on

the beach, dipping into the townlet’s small enclave of buildings like a toe

into the wind-whipped Atlantic, but mostly you walked through sand.

Easiness is not the virtue of Robbins Rest. Remoteness is.

Fire Island was barren, and it was beautiful. The air felt like a giant’s

clean hand brushing your hair back from your face. Around me, all was silent

but for the rare car whooshing in the distance, the odd dog barking, and the

ceaseless waves, beating like the heart of a great somnolent beast.

I met Casimir at the Dunewood ferry—not exactly at the ferry, but close

to it. I ran late, as it happens. I had duck confit in the oven; it takes time. The

only thing better than heating a cold house with the warm smell of duck fat is

heating the house with the scent of baking bread. I had that, too, a large crusty

loaf of saltless Tuscan bread. It’s a lovely accompaniment to duck confit, and

an ideal conveyance for duck fat. (There’s so much you can do with rendered

duck fat. Like God’s own lard, duck fat is great emperor of fat, the most

generous of lipids. Sauté anything in duck fat, and it tastes infinitely better.

You can live without many things, but to live without duck fat is the very

essence of privation, something with which I am now achingly,

hallucinatorily, hungrily familiar.)

I found Casimir wandering dazed as a startled possum near the ferry

landing. He kissed me continental style, and then I led him along the quiet

paths. We walked, he and I, the sun dropping like a final consonant; soon the

night would be navy as ’50s velvet flocked with gilt stars. He tried to hold

my hand. It’s charming, really, that affectation of affection. A stand of three

deer warily watched us as we passed, our feet clunking in heavy boots on the

wooden walkway. They watched, but did not scatter. The deer in Fire Island

are so cheeky, insouciant in the way of West Side Story Jets, standing their

ground, cigarettes rolled in their shirtsleeves, whistling a tune, singing an

expletive-free song of defiance. Someone could so easily shoot them.

Venison steak is best cooked rare and served with cherries, figs, or forest

berries. Some meats do enjoy sweet things.

Casimir and I wended our slow way to the house at Robbins Rest, and he

delighted at the secret, tree-lined walks. Fire Island feels like the place

where the elves of Lothlórien go for vacation. In the October cool, it was

empty, row upon row of homes quiet as the grave, dark as repressed desires.

Here or there a house blazed alight, like a life raft in the wake of the Titanic.

The house, when we entered it, smelled good. Warm and inviting,

reaching out with its savory tendrils, pulling us close to its breast. I had a

hard time finding the salad spinner, but then it wasn’t my house. I gave

Casimir the job of chipping the ice for our cocktails with an old-fashioned

ice pick. There were cubes, of course, but cubes are frustratingly angular and

unforgivably pedestrian.

I lit the fire (the trick is to soak wine corks in denatured alcohol in a

mason jar). We sipped Old Fashioneds and ate Marconi almonds as the duck

sizzled in the oven. Later, we ate the duck with our fingers, skin like oiled

paper crackling in our mouths, grease happily coating our chins. We drank a

nice ’99 Brunello, a hot year, but you can’t go wrong with Gianfranco

Soldera, even if he was an asshole.

Then, as one should, we fucked in the glow of the fireplace, the lambent

light turning even Casimir’s white skin a toasty tiger. I found his mouth

pressed against the vertical slit of my cunt a pretty sight until I came and was

done. Casimir snuggled me and guided his pin-straight cock into me. I locked

my legs around his pelvis and flipped him onto his back, straddling him.

Leaning back, I rode him.

My left hand found the handle of the ice pick warm, weighty. I held it,

appreciating its vintage heft, its history, and its design. I knew what to do. In

an arc as perfect as a fifteen-year-old girl’s breast, I plunged the ice pick

deep into the right side of Casimir’s pale throat. I felt it pierce his skin, his

meat, and his cartilage. I felt it graze something hard, a cervical bone, likely.

Casimir’s eyes met mine, asking something. “Why,” perhaps. I pulled the ice

pick out, and crimson jets spurted rhythmic and sure. It was a metronome of

blood, a ticking of the heart’s time, told in rich red. I stabbed again. Casimir

moved, darting away. I struck and hit his raised left hand; the point deflected

away, bouncing off the hand and skittering across his face to his eye, where it

lodged. I pulled the pick out again; it left the eye behind, drawing a slick slug

trail of mucus. I stabbed at his heart and struck the sweet spot between his

ribs. The pick stuck in his chest, quivering, like an arrow that has found its

target.

I remember there was so little sound. Gurgling, mostly, some harsh

rasping for breath. Perhaps I severed something in Casimir’s vocal cords;

they weren’t working. I stood up, and he seemed so distant below me,

huddled and bloodied on the floor. Blood jetted from his throat in rhythmic

arterial arcs; each spurt came more slowly, each weaker than the one before,

like an old clockwork toy slowing down, every surge another last tick of the

works. Casimir turned over and began to crawl toward his pants, fumbling

into his pockets, reaching for his phone. His hands were palsied. I watched

him claw the phone from his jeans pocket. Casimir cradled the phone with

his stuttering, weakened hands. He jabbed the screen with his forefinger,

vainly trying to hit the emergency number icon at the bottom of the screen.

I kicked the phone out of his hands and across the room; it made a

satisfying whoosh before thudding solidly against the wall. Casimir looked

up at me; his whole body deflated, limp and lost. He paused in an exquisite

stoppage of time, caught like a film still in the black frame of nothingness.

And then, my breath caught in reverence, I watched as his eyes grew blank

with ethereal suddenness. It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s

death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man

orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my

most divine privilege.

There was blood, a lot of blood, such great black-red sprays of blood in

the firelight. It’s shocking how much blood a body holds. I’d seen it before,

but it never gets old.

I stepped and slipped. Blood underfoot. Blood trickling like chocolate

sauce off my breasts, onto my belly, and down to the slit of my pudendum.

Blood everywhere. I read somewhere that in filming Psycho Hitchcock used

chocolate sauce to simulate blood, and looking at my delectable body, he

made a good choice. I walked across the room and checked to make sure that

Casimir was dead. Pressing fingers against his pulse points, I found nothing.

Where Casimir had been there was naught.

Naked but for a pair of latex gloves, I wrapped up the remainder of the

duck confit to bring with me; then I laid out layers of woolen clothes on a

chair by the door. I checked my steps around the house, chucking anything that

might have my prints into the center of the living room. I moved about the

kitchen, cleaning up telling traces. When I felt sure I’d wiped, tossed, and

cleaned all of my marks, I showered, taking my time, drying my hair.

Then I tossed all of Casimir’s belongings on top of his cooling body, and

I poured the rest of the mason jar of alcohol over the muddled mound of

corpse, clothes, dishes, and pans. I scattered a few corks on top of the mess.

At the door, I dressed, lit a match, and tossed it into the center of the room. A

bright, clear flame flew with a whoosh, and I turned out the door, into the

darkness. Paces down the walk, I could see the flames bright orange through

the beach-house’s wide, clean panes of glass. I walked past a row of

darkened, still houses down to the shore; the wind blew clean and hard,

cutting through my canvas overcoat as I walked along the beach.

I walked for an hour or so in the black, the smell of the sea washing me,

the stars peering like wallflowers from behind the curtains of cloud. A half

hour later, fire trucks passed me, sand whirling like dervishes after their

wheels, their sirens wailing banshee songs, their red lights blurring like two

drunks talking.

I returned to Dunewood, to the house I’d borrowed from my friends, took

another very luxurious shower, settled down on their ivory shabby chic

couch, poured a nice glass of cognac, and watched a couple of episodes of

television before falling asleep, delighted.

The house in Robbins Rest wasn’t my house, you see. It wasn’t even the

house of my friends. It was just a house, a stranger’s house, an empty house

located apart from others, one with an easily picked lock and running

electricity. A house closed for the season, empty of people and barren of

company, and now it was burnt. I’m quite certain the owners had insurance.

After all, they had a lovely Le Creuset cast-iron French oven.

That sort is always well insured.

2

Roast Parsnips

Prison is boring. It’s noisy, and it’s bright. All around you, all the time,

every day, there are people, unless you’re in solitary, which I might enjoy if I

knew I could leave when I wanted, which you cannot. Moreover, you aren’t

allowed pens or pencils or sometimes even books in solitary. I tolerate

humanity’s crush in order to be allowed to write. I behave beautifully so that

I have paper, pens, and occasional access to a computer. I suffer for my art.

In my nun’s narrow bed at night, I hear covers rustling. So much

whispering, so much snoring, so many people breathing—I might as well be

sleeping with all of them. These are not, almost to a one, people I want to

spend time with, yet together we do time. Time binds us, time flattens us out,

time makes us familiar. So much time, so many people. I’ve never liked

people, and now I like them less. They’re nearly all women, too; I’ve so

little to play with. There are male guards—the less said about them, the

better. I see them, the guards, terrifying the vulnerable inmates. They’re

bullies, these men living their fantasies of power, as if their squalid teenage

dreams cracked open and spilled incarcerated candy at their feet.

Prison company is bad. Prison food is worse. Even when you game the

system, the food is lamentable. My kingdom for a delicately roasted parsnip,

a perfectly cooked rack of lamb, a slice of coppa di cinghiale, a glass of

Montevertine Le Pergole Torte. I’d kill for some biodynamic Tuscan extra-

virgin olive oil. This last is not an overstatement, nor is it a threat—not yet,

anyway. It’s also the only item on that list that I have any chance of getting

here in the pen.

For the first time in more than a decade, I have a job—you can’t

freelance in prison. I work in the library. I am not yet allowed to help people

find books. I’m not yet allowed to check books out or check them back in—

these jobs come with nearly unfettered access to a computer, and they’re

positions of much envy. I stack books on a cart, I push the cart to the stacks, I

find the books’ rows, and I return them to their predetermined locations. It’s

dull work, humiliating and borderline pointless, but at least it’s not physical.

At the end of my working day, I’ve got energy to write. Rolling my cart under

the numerical guidance of the Library of Congress, I mark my days by

remembering meals, and they’re not the meals you’d imagine. It’s not a

parade of gourmet dishes, baroque as popes and twice as rich. No fantasy

ortolan, delicate songbird bones crunching as fat runs down my veiled chin.

No Thomas Keller-orchestrated dinners, each plate a bar played in a grand,

pure symphony that edges on Wagnerian excess. No savory, silky feast of the

seven fishes; no effusive, bubbly banquet of El Bulli foams, extractions, and

mousses.

No, the dishes my memory presents me with are stark as a wimple. A

simple plate of cut tomatoes oozing their sun-warmed guts, drizzled with oil,

and sprinkled with flaky diamond-white salt. A fat slice of fresh, hot bread

spread with daisy-yellow butter. The crackling skin of a roast chicken

spitting hot fat into my mouth. A bowl of berries daubed with obscenely thick

cream. They’re the foods, God help me, my mother would have served.

People tend to think that the most natural stories begin at their beginning

and unwind through their middle to their completion, and sometimes they do.

But that narrative structure is only as true as time, which is to say it’s as

much a construct as a house or a dress or a turducken. Stories are, like justice

or a skyscraper, things that humans fabricate. I started this story, for example,

somewhere near the end, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It makes it

artful, but not false. Let me pause to tell a story from when I was a little girl.

It’s also true. Everything here is true because, really, why would I lie.

When I was very young—long before I ever lost my virginity or even

kissed a boy, around twelve, I think—I had a vision. I imagined throwing a

lavish affair, a sort of punctuation mark on my adult life. I saw myself

inviting all my lovers, present and past, to a dinner party. I knew even as

puberty was dawning, fluffy and pointed as a kitten, that my life would be

rich with men. These men, I imagined, would be plentiful, interesting,

attractive, and, above all, devout.

In my imagination, I’d send each of them an invitation. Something etched

in black spiky ink on heavy stationery—weighty as Schlag, textured as flan,

colored the delicate white of the fat marbling a prime cut of steak. Each man

would RSVP yes, delightedly, each unknowing that the invitation was not for

him alone, and each thrilled to his core to see me. I could not then imagine

I’d ever have a lover who would not want to see me again. I still can’t.

I envisioned a long dinner table, so much longer than it was wide, shiny

and black as a beetle’s carapace, lined with tall straight-backed chairs that

were topped with long, spired skewers, like the spikes in an iron maiden. In

my imagination, these men I loved would sit together, ranged along the two

sides of the table, joined by their adoration for me, and united in their

befuddlement. They wouldn’t know one another. They wouldn’t know why

they were there, and I would sit at the head of the table, smiling.

In my jejune imagination, my dream lovers were uniform, each as

beautiful, masculine, and replaceable as an Arrow shirt model. Really, what

does a twelve-year-old know about men. To a girl, a man of thirty is

impossibly old, if inconceivably desirable and infinitely replaceable. At

twelve, my lust was little more than a vague mauve ache nestled in my cotton

panties. I knew that lust was a dangerous thing, but I wanted these men to lust

for me because, even though I didn’t know the precise shape and weight of

lust, I knew that lust was power—and I wanted power even then.

Thus my painfully specific imagined feast, the formal invitations, the long

and slick black table, the two martial lines of men, the spiky dining chairs,

the shiny cutlery, the glinting of glasses, the smell of roast meat, the quiet

sound of polite if menacing conversation, the palpable bewilderment, and my

sitting poised and plumped as a Persian cat at the table’s head. Thus my

fantasy of power. This from the fecund imagination of a twelve-year-old girl.

It’s amazing I didn’t turn out worse than I did.

It’s not as dangerous as I thought it would be, prison. A couple of women

have tested me, but being a tall, known murderess tends to keep potential

harm at bay. Just after I first arrived, two women—what do they say?—got

all up in my face. It was kind of adorable, really, their desperate grab for

dominance. They cornered me as I was exiting the shower; I looked down at

them, their faces hot with inarticulate want, and told them that I’d killed a

man with a piece of fruit. I let that assertion sit, and I saw their limited

wonder about their own personal and painful Achilles’ heels. Then I swept

out of the shower area, stunned silence in my wake. These women were

merely petty felons clad in stolen dominance, you see, while I was a naked,

dripping murderer. There’s a lot to be said for intimidating intelligence and a

dearth of conscience, and I possess both.

It didn’t take long for the forensic psychology and criminal justice

students to start fluttering to me, like common gray moths to a bonfire. Two

weeks after I’d landed at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, and I’d

received my first interview request from a Ph.D. candidate. One request

became two, then three, then more. Like hail dropping from the sky, eager

students fell before me, jostling each other for my attention. It was delightful

to be so avidly courted by so many keenly interested young things. I felt like

the belle of the carceral ball.

I was given batteries of standardized tests. I acquiesced to MRIs and

genetic testing. I was asked repeatedly about my childhood. I was plied with

cans of mineral water and the finest snacks the vending machines could

provide, and I gave my permission to have my psyche plumbed and prodded,

plumped and pushed. The students were mostly thirty-year-olds, who,

irrespective of gender, wore studious glasses and the kind of asexual, atonal

clothing that functions like mental saltpeter. But I’ve always found that being

the center of attention is an implicitly erotic state, and I spread my exotic

wings under the students’ bland collective gaze. The Hawthorne effect is real

—as I was observed, my behavior changed, not always innocently.

For one thing, I knew that the students’ interest in me was in direct

proportion to how well I conformed to their prepackaged expectations, and I

knew that the more I teased the edges of their working diagnoses, the longer I

could keep them hanging on. I enjoyed my place in the limited limelight. I

wasn’t going to let my audience down, so I bubbled in the responses that

would make me spicy to these students’ lips. And above all, I knew what

these darkly optimistic students were hoping to find.

It wasn’t hard. I do have a long, florid history of using aliases. I do have

a delicious record of nonconformity. I was convicted of violent crimes

predicated upon a piquant mélange of impulsivity and preparedness. I

genuinely lack remorse. And one of the reference books in the Bedford Hills

library stacks happens to be the DSM-IV, out-of-date but extremely useful.

Knowing what I knew, it was easy to lay the derangement on thick when I

wanted and to drizzle it with delicacy when I determined that was the right

approach. I can’t, of course, tamper with the MRIs, but even neurologists

admit that when it comes to mapping the human brain, we are Christopher

Columbus: motivated by dubious ethics to search for a route to Asia and

“discovering” these America-shaped continents by mistake. Brains are an

imprecise science, in short. Easy to fake and even easier to deceive.

I am special, the students intimate. I am valuable, their breath-lessness

suggests. I am, as one excited student exclaimed, “A perfect specimen of a

female Anti-Social Personality Disorder!”

To this, I laughed. I know what I am. It may not appear in the DSM-5, but

just because you can’t prescribe a pill for us doesn’t mean we don’t exist.

Indeed, I am the Bronze Copper of psychopaths, a big, beautiful auburn

butterfly that flaps her darkling wings as she eats. I am rare, and sequestered

in this endlessly gray penal institution, I am endangered. I first suspected I

was a psychopath years ago with an armchair test of twenty-six questions, but

even before I sat down with my computer and ticked “agree” for “I tell other

people what they want to hear so that they will do what I want them to do”

and “Love is overrated,” I knew that I was different. I merely lacked a name

for how.

One mark of psychopaths, or so I’ve learned, is that we calculate an

action’s personal benefits before we take it, and it benefits me to proclaim

my psychopathy, both in prison and out of it. Here at Bedford Hills, my

psychopathy earns me a wide berth. There in the world, my psychopathy sells

better than sex—and sex plus psychopathy, well, that’s a heady delight.

As a woman psychopath, the white tiger of human psychological

deviance, I am a wonder, and I relish your awe.

For a long time, the scientists who study such things were reluctant to

admit the existence of women psychopaths. Even with all the cliché evidence

—the bad mothers who leave their children to cry in wet beds, the nurses

who “help” their unwitting patients to die, the black widows with a wealth of

dead husbands—people did not want to believe. Female psychopaths,

researchers eventually realized, don’t present like the males. To which I

respond: No shit. We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in a

glossy patina of caring. We have been raised to take interest in promoting the

healthy interior lives of other humans; preparation, I suppose, for taking on

the emotional labor of motherhood—or marriage; either way, really. Few

women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of

girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of

feminine expectations. It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that

we fake it better than men.

Take a quick trip through history, and you see no shortage of flashy

female psychopaths. Elizabeth Báthory, who killed between eighty and a few

hundred people, mostly women, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth

centuries, before being walled inside a castle tower. Chile’s La Quintrala,

colonialism’s poster girl, who slaughtered about forty indigenous people.

Darya Saltykova, Muscovite, who dispatched a hundred or so serfs, mostly

girls, in the eighteenth century. Delphine LaLaurie, who tortured and killed

numerous slaves in her nineteenth-century New Orleans home. Women like

these punctuate time with their bloody body count, yet people are still

disinclined to believe. Even as Victorian women slayed whole families with

heaping helpings of arsenic to reap health insurance monies; even as Aileen

Wuornos shot her seven johns; and even as Stacey Castor’s matricide got her

fifteen minutes of fame on 20/20, people didn’t want to believe. Feminism

comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the

slowest.

You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you

want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should

sway. I am a psychopath—and whatever their reasoning and whatever their

diagnoses, the eager psychology and criminal justice students are right to

study me. And if they’re wrong, I still enjoy their attention, and I’ll do what I

must to encourage it.

Aside from the eager Ph.D. students—so well groomed and so poorly

dressed, especially the men—I receive few visitors here in prison. My father

comes; my sister has visited twice; my brother has sent his regards. Emma

has applied to visit, but I won’t allow it, for obvious reasons. I am impressed

that she would consider leaving her apartment for the long, intricate trek to

Bedford Hills.

(Though perhaps she knows I’d never approve the visit and she’s merely

applying to toy with me. That’s not a possibility I’m willing to indulge, on the

off chance that she appears some Sunday afternoon, dripping Vivienne

Westwood and Guerlain Nahema. I don’t even open Emma’s letters.)

It’s one small mercy that here in prison we don’t have to see anyone we

don’t choose to see. In this way, prison is beautifully unlike real life. In real

life, people from your past litter your life like cockroaches, popping out of

crevices and scuttling across the dark. In the outside world, you can’t escape

fate’s cruel crossing. You turn a corner, and there buying a hot dog is the

editor of your college paper; you engage in conversation; you go out for

lunch, and then to dinner, and then into bed, and then you love. Love is the

languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.

Prison may be the hell of other people, but at least it’s not a hell of

people you love.

3

French Fries

Just as most people don’t wake up and become a murderer, most don’t

wake up and become a food critic, but I did. Embracing this particular skill

set felt like slipping into a bespoke garment, something cut to flatter my

exact, idiosyncratic body. And yet, however much I feel put on this planet to

instruct people on how, what, and why they should eat, I am compelled to

admit that my vocation as food critic wouldn’t have been possible without

men. I owe them so much.

In 1990, you had to squint to glimpse the Internet looming. In today’s time

of newspapers and magazines gurgling a nonstop deathrattle, it’s hard to

recall that, just a quarter century ago, print was basking in a halcyon moment.

In ‘90s New York, it felt as if a new four-color magazine hatched everyday. It

was a dizzying time of weighty glossies with oddly specific names like Egg,

Paper, George, Spy, Blurt, and Spin. (These magazines, I believe, foretold

the days of single-word restaurant names: Plum, Parm, Sauce, Supper, Den,

Carnivore, and Home.) Ideas, print, writers, and money mushroomed with

sweet yeastiness. One begat another, which begat another, which begat

another, and before you knew it, you had a giant amorphous mass of words

and people, pages and layouts, advertisers and editorials, subscriptions and

readers, all demanding constant feeding.

During these Twin Peaks, Pretty Woman, “Ice Ice Baby” days and

cocaine-fueled nights, ideas grew with fungal fecundity, and relationships

were traded like currency. It was all about whom you knew, whom you blew,

and whom you’d yet to screw. You just had to be at the right cocktail party, at

the right gallery opening, at the right restaurant, in the right club’s bathroom

doing the right drug, on the right coast, in the right tight black skirt, thighs

pressed to the right person, in order to find your name on a masthead of some

slick publication.

And that was how I became the food critic for Noir.

I remember the exact night that birthed my career. It was at Beignet,

where I found myself wedged on the restaurant’s beige nubuck banquette next

to Manhattan playboy Andrew Gotien. Over the thudding bass of C + C

Music Factory and a sea of upended vodka shots, I shouted that the braised

Malpeque in lemongrass crème tasted like a fifteen-year-old boy’s fantasy of

cunnilingus. I remember Andrew heard me and laughed as he slid his hand up

my thigh. I remember going home with him. I vaguely remember some

assertively athletic sex that ended in a misfire. I remember waking the next

morning in Andrew’s Tribeca loft, and I remember, as Andrew’s sperm dried

on my belly like donut glaze, he propped himself on one elbow, looking at me

appraisingly.

“I want you to be the food critic for my new magazine,” he said.

Noir, he said, would take a dark sideways look at culture, fashion,

politics, art, and pretense. I’d be perfect for it.

“Of course,” I said, drawing an idle doodle with his spunk. “You’ll pay

me $4,000 a column.”

We sealed the deal with a sloppy kiss and a squelchy fuck.

I say I woke up and found myself a food critic, but it’s equally true that

my life’s sinuous lines led me to my career. Looking back on it now, as I

often do—prison really facilitates introspection—I feel as if I was raised to

write about food. Just as dairy cows are raised to give milk, Nebbiolo vines

are cultivated to make wine, or civet cats were created to defecate the

world’s best coffee, I was raised to give voice to food’s consumption.

In retrospect, it seems fated to be, and, much to my distaste, it begins with

my mother. You see, unlike most Americans born in the early’ 60s, I was

reared on hand-crafted food. Like Daniel Boulud, I never ate store-bought

bread unless I was at a restaurant—in fact, I never ate store-bought anything.

My mother made her own bread, kneading it with measured sensuality, dough

perpetually drying in the crescents under her fingernails. She grew her own

tomatoes, then she canned them, and then she used those jarred tomatoes to

make fragrant cassoulet, salty steam rising as from a bagnio. She drove to the

dairy and carted home great pails of unpasteurized milk from which she then

made her own butter, yogurt, and crème fraîche—creamy, blond cups of it.

She’d pour it, unctuous and fragrant and drizzled with honey, over bursting

berries, sun-warmed and brambly. My mother grew the berries and kept the

bees, too.

She made it, she made it all, and she made it well. She stood with arms

akimbo in her Connecticut garden; she strode her kitchen as a colossus. In our

small world, she was the great, ever-giving Mother, maker of mysterious

soups, magical stews, peerless fluffy loaves of bread, shiny fruit tarts

glowing like family jewels, crispy-juicy brown hunks of roasted meat,

vegetables cooked so crunchy-tender that your teeth wept, pottages of cream,

sauces of jus, mysterious dishes of rice and herbs, salads that slayed you, all

from produce grown in my mother’s own meticulously kept garden, or from

ingredients sourced with an alchemist’s care. My mother was a witch in the

kitchen and a Demeter in the garden. We hated her for it.

My father worked all day, churning out advertising copy with an electric

mind that crackled and popped syntactic snaps. His kinetic brain prickled

with quick, thick witticisms that sold stuff well and reliably. He worked

long, late hours (time that, as it turned out, was punctuated with a series of

mistresses, women whose identities blurred furry into a string of pronouns

and epithets—her, she, that one, that bitch, your whore. I’d hear my parents

argue in raw hushed tones, my mother making a show because propriety

demanded it. In truth, she expected more integrity from the jars of preserves

in her pantry). For a man given to 60-to-80-hour work weeks, my father’s

home was less his castle and more his weekend office.

My mother, who ruled our home with a floured fist, was nominally,

philosophically, and aesthetically French. Her Francophilia inflected her

speech, her cooking, and her red lipstick, which she wore even when tending

her organic garden, her hair tied up in a careful bun, giant gloves on her

hands, faded cotton jacket on her back, and Wellies on her feet. Her faux

Frenchness enabled her to roast a chicken to succulence, then take that

chicken and, with a shaman’s magic, turn it into an evolving kaleidoscope of

meals: roasted chicken became chicken in aspic, chicken sandwiches,

chicken stock, chicken with dumplings. My mother made a roast chicken

stretch forever, an unblinking eternity of chicken.

Taking her work as head nurturer seriously, my mother lived to feed her

three children—my two younger siblings, one son and another daughter, and

me—from her garden, her pantry, and her larder, places defined by my

mother’s necromantic abilities, Protestant determination, and single-minded

snobbery. (Protestant, after all, because my mother was fake French. She

was, like a gilded Louis XIV chair in a despot’s palace, a knockoff.)

In contrast to my ever-present stay-at-home mom, my father was a

presence in equal parts ephemeral and unchanging. He smelled like tobacco

and brown liquor; his voice sounded like an emery board; he carried his

slender body with a slight, resigned defeat, even as he made the kind of

money and owned the kind of property and gave his Gen-X children the kind

of education that defines privilege. My father was always precisely dressed

—Brooks Brothers during the week, L.L. Bean on the weekends, and Ralph

Lauren for special occasions—he complemented the wood-beam and cotton-

duck farmhouse like he’d been purchased to match. Limited as my father’s

home life was, you could set your watch by his presence, even if that

presence felt as solid, and as visually perfect, as a cinematic projection.

Together, my parents constructed a Potemkin village for our nuclear family; it

looked good from the outside.

But every family has secrets, and my family’s was me.

Here’s an interesting thing about privation—it causes hallucinations. For

example, sleep deprivation often brings psychosis. The human brain can go

only so long without deep REM rest, a break from our walking, talking,

acting cognitive selves, before our brains do it for us, taking a deep dip into

the waking dream state. Enough time awake, our skin begins to crawl with

insects, centipedes and butterflies alighting, itching, fluttering, inching. Our

ears ring with the voices of the dead or the detested. Our eyes see

apparitional flashes of ghosties and beasties, exploding shafts of light and

shifting landscapes; we can’t trust our hands to hold that shuddering

doorjamb. Our adrenaline spikes and our hearts beat a tachycardia tattoo.

Our brains wrap nightmares around our sleepless flesh.

Food privation similarly sheathes you in a cocoon of yearning. I’m not

saying that Bedford Hills starves its female populace—it doesn’t. We eat. We

eat puce goop and ecru glop and flat brown patties of unknown origin. We get

peas tepid from the can, swimming in an oleaginous, salty bath. We get gluey,

chewy bread spread with near-rancid margarine. Swallowing meals of

government-issued apathy, we eat, three times a day. Sometimes, to slake our

phantom appetites, we cobble together dishes from vending machines and

commissary goods.

But most of all, we want. I want so hard and so viscerally that my brain

wills food into being and floods my head with a tsunami of perfect ceviche

from Playa del Carmen in Mexico, shrimp and tilapia basking in the spiky

tang of sun-warmed limes, shivery slivers of papaya and guanabana cuddling

with serrano and jalapeño. I’ll reach to shelve a book, and I’ll be slammed

with olive oil cake, rough and crumbly, salty-sweet and scented with the fat

bellies of green olives, chased with a mouthful of bittersweet espresso. I sit

on my bed and pomegranates crush my lips, rack of lamb curls in my nostrils,

hot black bread slathered with cultured butter fills my throat, and it chokes

me. Ghost food wafting in crystalline recollection—a perfect besotted

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Índice

1 Corpse Reviver #2

2 Roast Parsnips

3 French Fries

4 Tofu

5 Jolly Time

6 Lampredotto

7 Truffles

8 Rump Roast

9 Banana Bread

10 Torta ai Fichi e Limone

11 Lingua con le Olive

12 Silage

13 Punta di Petto and Tripe

14 Steak

15 Gamberetto

16 Soup

17 Duck

18 Hot Dog

19 Baked Alaska

Acknowledgments