The Cook Who Wanted to Learn How to Live
‘I used the oven.’ Pleased with herself, Griet leant back in the sucking chair. She wouldn’t be swallowed, she knew now; she wouldn’t disappear that easily from the face of the earth. Too bad if she had to peer out over her kneecaps at her therapist. ‘To cook food.’
Rhonda nodded encouragingly.
‘I made a farewell dinner for Adam. I was quite nervous because he’s much more at home in the kitchen than I am. But I have this lasagne recipe that no one can mess up, not even me.’
Thank heaven for the Italians. Thank heaven for Italian fantasy and imagination, for Fellini and Bertolucci and Calvino and Moravia. Thank heaven for a country where the government changes every year, where a pope sets himself up as a king and a porn star is elected to parliament.
‘Did you always have so little confidence as a cook, Griet?’
‘No, I actually enjoyed it, long ago. Before the kitchen became a battlefield. With George, every meal ended in an argument.’
By this time, Adam was sleeping in the clouds somewhere over Africa. Like the angel she’d taken him to be that first night. Long ago, mortals had to wait patiently for death before they could glimpse the glory of heaven. These days, they hopped into the belly of an aircraft and had a preview, a heavenly sightseeing tour, while girls with wings offered them drinks.
‘I thought it only happened in cartoons – the volte-face of the married man – the thoughtful, obliging lover who is transformed into a seriously retarded baby. George brought me coffee in bed before we were married. It’s no hassle, he said, he woke up earlier than I did, anyway. In my whole married life, I never once got a cup of coffee in bed, not even when I was pregnant and felt like throwing up every time I tried to raise my head from the pillow. And I was pregnant the whole time, as you know.’
She lit a cigarette. To hell with discipline. The blue pools of Rhonda’s eyes were as inscrutable as ever.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Three days ago. Completely unexpectedly. If I think of how many times I’ve driven past his house in these last months! Or looked for excuses to pop in on someone who might have seen him. And when I finally stop wondering where he is and what he’s up to, I bump into him in the last place I’d have expected. On the beach!’
Rhonda crossed her legs at the knee, something she very seldom did. Griet realised that she knew her therapist’s body language as well as a close friend’s. She knew every gesture and every expression on her face. Admittedly, it wasn’t exactly an Italianate variety. And naturally she knew nothing of what was going on in her therapist’s heart.
‘George never went to the beach. He grew up in the Orange Free State – he’s more frightened of the sea than my Grandma Lina was – and he always thought it was ridiculous to take your clothes off and sunbathe. Where he comes from, you’d probably be roasted to death if you did that. And there he was, lying on Clifton beach like a rock rabbit in the sun!’
‘Well, he changed after you married, didn’t he? He’ll probably change again now that you’re getting divorced. Haven’t you changed too, Griet?’
‘Not from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde! I don’t know, I suppose I have. I’m more cynical than I was.’
‘A healthy streak of cynicism can be a good thing.’
‘But an overdose can kill you. Or at least kill all your emotions. In the end you can’t love anyone any more.’
‘And you think that’s what happened to George?’
‘God only knows what happened to George,’ sighed Griet with her eyes on Mickey Mouse’s crippled arms. ‘I think he sold his soul to the devil.’
Rhonda wrote something in the file on her lap. She was wearing a pale blue silk shirt, the same colour as her eyes, and shoes that could only be Italian. The caramel-coloured leather looked like creased satin. The sort of shoes a modern Cinderella would wear. You couldn’t walk down a modern pavement in glass slippers. Thank heaven for the Italians.
‘Did you speak to each other?’
‘On the beach? We said hello. He was with some other people and I was with Adam.’
It was more embarrassing than she’d admit. She had to pluck up all her courage to be seen at Clifton beside Adam’s heavenly body. She couldn’t bear to think what she looked like beside him with her winter-white skin and her voluptuous hips. What if someone thought she was his mother? she thought in a panic. If all else failed, she comforted herself, she could always expose her breasts to distract attention from her thighs.
Her breasts had always been her strong point. Not as strong as her brain, obviously. Though lately she’d developed a horrible suspicion her breasts had begun to droop, and she had her doubts about her brain as well. Unavoidable, certainly, after a succession of pregnancies and seven years with a clever man.
And then she’d bumped into George on the beach. If she’d come upon him in heaven, it would have surprised her less. She had just spread her towel out on the sand and undone the clasp of her top. She was luckily still lying on her stomach – compelled to modesty by the perfect teenage nipples on all sides – when she saw him sitting on a rock opposite. He must have noticed her, she thought, hot with embarrassment. He must have noticed Adam’s hand on her bare back. One of the women in his group was a stranger to her. Irrationally, she hoped that he’d slept with this woman recently. Anything to ease her own feelings of guilt.
But even stranger than this odd wish was the feeling of alienation. She still loved him, she realised, but it was the sort of love you store away somewhere in your heart for someone who is dead. She would always love the man he was long ago. The reddish body over there on the rock, laughing with a strange woman, was someone she didn’t know.
‘And what about Adam?’
‘What about Adam?’ Griet smiled idiotically. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘How do you feel about … what happened?’
What her therapist wanted to know was whether she’d slept with the man. She decided to be enigmatic – or as enigmatic as you could be with someone who knew your filthiest thoughts.
‘I’m not sorry.’
It wasn’t so easy to smile like the Mona Lisa with someone you’d used as your personal confessor for months. Naturally she still felt guilty, but she’d also learnt that guilt could be a more powerful aphrodisiac than seafood.
‘Three months without a man’, she had written yesterday in her Creative Arts Diary. And then she’d scratched the words out and written: ‘Three months without my ex-husband’.
‘What do you want to happen next, Griet?’
‘With Adam?’
‘With your life in general …’
What would she like to happen next, Griet wondered while she stared thoughtfully at her kneecaps, or at the floral dress that hung in folds over her kneecaps. She wanted a good fairy, or one of her grandfather’s angels, or the Egyptian goddess Aridia, mother of witches, to make all her wishes come true. She wanted the world to believe in something again. She wanted to write fairy tales. But that wasn’t what her shrink wanted to hear.
The ghastly country where our heroine lived, she was going to write tonight in her book with the beautiful pages, was a place where everything was forbidden. The king had forbidden the truth, and the pages of many newspapers had bare patches, bare as the king’s head, and white as the queen’s thighs. (Which no one but the king had ever seen, of course.) When the truth had first been forbidden, the people clutched desperately at fantasy and imagination, and so the bald king decided to forbid fantasy and imagination too. He shut down the libraries and the theatres and changed the art galleries into prisons.
Humour was all the people had left. They could laugh at the country they lived in, at the queen’s white thighs and the bare newspapers and the art gallery prisons, and they could laugh at their powerlessness to do anything but laugh. Then the king decided to forbid humour, and he threw all the clowns into the art gallery prisons, and all the banana peels into the sea, and forbade the people to laugh at anything but his own feeble jokes about other countries.
‘I want people to laugh at everything that’s absurd,’ Griet admitted to her kneecaps. ‘From politics to the power of the penis.’
‘And you yourself?’ Rhonda wanted to know.
‘I’ve been laughing at myself for months already.’
‘No, what I mean is: What do you want for yourself, Griet?’
‘You can’t take yourself seriously any more once you have a failed suicide attempt behind you. I know now that I can survive everything, even the cockroaches in my friend’s flat. Even the stupid armchairs in my shrink’s consulting room.’
Griet’s head jerked up when a strange noise came from Rhonda’s throat, like breaking glass. Her therapist had burst into tears! Rhonda’s composed face suddenly looked sloppy, crumpled, her mouth gaping and her head thrown back. No, she realised, her therapist was laughing.
This is what Rhonda must look like when she was having an orgasm, Griet realised.
It was over in a minute, as suddenly as it had begun. Rhonda rubbed her eyes, gasped for breath, and rearranged her features neatly.
‘You can’t always laugh,’ said Rhonda as calmly as ever. ‘You have to be able to cry too.’
Griet stared at her therapist. Rhonda’s legs were crossed at the ankle as usual, her back straight on the red sofa, her hands folded on the file on her lap. Griet thought of her grandmother. After she’d caught her up a tree, she’d seen her through new eyes. But Grandma Lina had looked exactly as before, with her down-at-heel shoes and her plaited bun. Or was it all just a figment of Griet’s imagination?
‘I cried non-stop day and night for three months!’ she exclaimed. ‘And then I stuck my head in an oven. And when I couldn’t even make a success of that, I began to laugh. Kundera says the devil laughs about the senselessness of everything and the angels laugh about how wonderful it all is. I laugh with the devil – and to hell with the rest!’
‘Can’t you laugh with the devil and the angels?’
‘Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds?’ Rhonda shook her head. A hint of a laughter line still lingered at the corner of her mouth.
‘My grandmother was afraid of everything,’ said Griet, and her eyes began to sting. ‘But she could climb trees. I can laugh.’