Confessions of a Memory Eater by Pagan Kennedy

Author:Pagan Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2013-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

My father called it a period of adjustment. “This could be the best thing that ever happened to you. Think of the opportunities you have now. The opportunities!” He’d been cutting up a steak as he said this, and now he stared petulantly down at his plate. “Goddamn it, why don’t they have all the utensils here? Excuse me, Win.” He raised one hand with a half-cocked finger to summon a waiter. Within seconds a mustached fellow in an achingly white shirt hovered over our table. My father leaned toward him conspiratorially. “I need a marrow spoon, if you’ve got one.”

The waiter hurried off. “Now where was I?” Dad said, staring down at the bloody shreds of meat to get his bearings. Around us in the dim light, old men in crisp suits drooped over their tables, faces flickering in the candlelight. They conversed in the languid way of the retired and wealthy.

“I know you’re reeling now,” my father said, “but I think this was the right move. You weren’t happy up there in New Hampshire.”

The waiter materialized beside my father, proffering a linen napkin, on which glittered a tiny spoon.

“Ah!” my father said, taking it from its pillow. He dug it delicately into the joint of the T-bone, scooping out gooey marrow, put a morsel in his mouth.

I scowled. “That’s disgusting, Dad. You’re going to get mad-cow disease.”

“Oh, don’t be so damn dark. This stuff is full of vitamins. It’s what keeps me going. Ask Gloria. Your old man has not slowed down one bit.” And then, as if the subject of his sexual vitality reminded him of what he’d wanted to ask all along, he slid his wineglass into the exact center of the table, and cleared his throat. “So, by the way, why did you and Edie split up?”

I hunched my shoulders. “Well,” I began, picking up my knife and studying it, the pieces of myself—nostrils, stubble, arched eyebrow—that flashed across its polished surface.

“You have a girlfriend,” Dad supplied helpfully. “A student maybe? Listen, I wouldn’t condemn you for it.”

“No, there’s no girlfriend,” I said, placing the knife just so beside my plate, the steak that I’d painstakingly cut up and then left there. I didn’t eat much these days, because of the chewing. It seemed like too much work.

“Oh, come on!” my father exploded. “No girlfriend?”

I gazed past his shoulder, to the spray of flowers spot-lit in the center of the room, petals casting dramatic shadows on a white-linen tablecloth. The worse my life got, the better the restaurants he took me to. “No,” I said, “no girlfriend.”

“Well, what then? There’s got to be some reason you’re not living with your wife anymore.”

I shrugged. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” he said.

“She doesn’t like me.”

“Hmm.” He began digging with his spoon again. He’d hoped that I would confess to a nineteen-year-old ballet dancer, a motel, lingerie, secret phone calls—anything, anything that would prove I had an appetite like my old man. He wanted a son with teeth.

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