Virtue by Hermione Hoby

Author:Hermione Hoby [Hoby, Hermione]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

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The first time I heard them shouting at each other, I woke to a room floodlit by the moon. They sounded ready to rip each other’s scalps off, and I tried to make out the words while my heart hammered. A door slammed. Would I possibly have to call the police? Maybe this was why the boys slept in a whole other building, so they didn’t have to hear this? But wouldn’t Pina wake up? I didn’t yet know that this was just how marriage was for a lot of people: a kind of fighting that seemed to obliterate the possibility of a future until, just a few hours later, it was as if it had never occurred.

After the door slammed they went to bed, I guess. I fell asleep, forgot about it.

Jason wasn’t working that summer. In truth, he hadn’t worked in years. He’d been “full-time dadding,” as he put it. He had other concerns now. The state of the nation, for example. There was that. But also bread. He announced one day that I was going to learn how to make sourdough and this was decreed with some ceremony, as though he were my father deciding it was time he showed me how to shave. (For actual shaving lessons I’d had YouTube, as for so many other things; in a sense I’d been fathered by familiar strangers, cheerily relatable as they said, “Hey, guys!” into their laptop cameras.)

“Oh god, Luca,” Paula said. “Jason is obsessed. He’s going to take you down with him. When you get him started on starters, that’s it.”

In the kitchen, Jason held up a mason jar of something ectoplasmic. “This, my friend, is where the magic happens.”

What started, however, wasn’t the baking itself just yet, but rather a disquisition on fermentation and bacteria, a sort of panegyric expanding on the fact (as Jason said) that it wasn’t even accurate to call a human being an organism; we were in truth whole collections of organisms, mutually parasitic bunches of flora—not our single selves but many selves. (For a moment, I wanted to tell him about walking the High Line with Zara, joking about Byron and Whitman—We contain multitudes!—but I feared I’d end up sounding like a child telling some confusing story about what happened at school that day.)

Now it seems obvious to me that he wasn’t talking about enterotypes per se, but was making, with mock grandiosity, a political argument. As he rhapsodized about interdependence, ecosystems, shared resources, and egalitarianism, he was, in effect, laying out a socialist case. I thought about my Whopper, my highly processed, probably microbiota-less Whopper, eaten en route to this house, and how long ago that seemed. This house, these people, already seemed like my life.

Paula wandered back into the kitchen eating a peach and, beholding the festoons of dough, said, “You guys . . . ,” in affectionate protest. I pulled a faux panicked face at her, as if we were flinging around cartoon rods of radium.

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