Mary Marcel and Leo were sitting in the wide first-class seats of the 747, LAX to London. Mary looked as though she might have walked out of a fashion feature on the discerningly chic older woman. Leo looked as though he had just walked out of the kitchen. Mary wore a Cardin hound’s-tooth jacket, velvet trousers that buckled at the ankles, and some heavy, Aztec-influenced chunks of jewellery. Leo wore jeans, a T-shirt and baseball boots. His stubby hands were dirty. His hair flopped greasily over his wide forehead. Mary planted a reassuring kiss on his cheek.
‘Here’s a theory,’ said Mary.
Leo looked at her uncertainly. He had not been reassured by the kiss.
‘This theory says there are two kinds of people in the world; those who live to eat and those who eat to live. People who only eat to live are a dismal bunch and once they’ve eaten they’re stuck with the problem of what to do with the rest of their lives. People who live to eat have a much easier time. Food is their life. Therefore, so long as their food is good, their lives are good. So long as they enjoy their meals, they enjoy their lives. Sounds simple, huh?’
Leo grimaced and then looked out of the window. He was being leaden and uncooperative.
‘Sounds too simple maybe,’ said Mary.
They had been served a meal that had depressed Leo. There had been a sodden selection of canapes with melon and lobster and caviar, then a fillet of turbot with champagne sauce and asparagus spears, and then there had been a terrible hazelnut meringue. The ingredients had probably been quite good when they started out, but they had been sacrificed on the altar of international cuisine, made bland and characterless, ruined as far as Leo was concerned. He could have done great things with those ingredients. He hated waste and it made him sad.
‘Another theory, Leo,’ said Mary, ‘not one of mine. One of my lovers used to say, probably still does, that the way people eat indicates the way they make love.’
Leo did not respond.
Mary continued, ‘Some people are very easily satisfied; one nibble and they’re through, and they can go a long time before they feel hungry again. Some people like a little but often. Some alternate between bingeing and starving.
‘And some people are just insatiable. They can carry on all night, hour after hour, course after course. They’re just plain greedy. You think, surely they can’t manage another mouthful, but somehow they do. It’s so important to find a lover who has the same sort of appetite as you do.’
Mary looked wistful, deep in reverie, savouring a memory of some previous lover, someone whose appetite matched her own better than Leo’s did. Leo knew he’d bitten off more than he could chew with Mary Marcel.
‘I wish you’d tell me why you’re taking me to England,’ said Leo for the third or fourth time.
Mary didn’t answer. She pointedly picked up the in-flight magazine and began to read an article on Caribbean ways with seafood. Leo knew better than to insist. He knew Mary that well, at least. But he didn’t know what he was doing on this plane to England. He was in a state of confusion, but that was a perfectly ordinary state for him to be in these days.
He still didn’t know what the hell was going to happen to him. His fate was still in Frank’s (and maybe Virgil’s) hands. He hoped Mary was maybe taking him to England so they could all get together, talk things through and speed up the decision, but if so, he didn’t understand why she wouldn’t simply say that was what she was doing. Mary preferred to hint at dark, secret motives, at manoeuvrings and game plans that he was too obtuse to follow. He thought Mary sometimes tried too hard to be mysterious.
Leo was also worried about what might happen at Trimalchio’s in his absence. Mary had been vague about how long they were going to be away; a few days, a week, maybe longer. With no Virgil and no Frank, and now no him, he feared the worst. The restaurant’s standards would tumble. There’d be complaints and angry, dissatisfied customers, and there’d be nobody left to put things right. Oh sure there’d be a few waiters, a few competent assistant chefs, but they were nobodies really. A week was a long time in L.A. gastronomy and a culinary reputation could get ruined pretty damned quick.
Mary told him not to worry, not to be silly. The jerks who went to Trimalchio’s these days only went for the name, and the name wasn’t going anywhere. Leo was pretty hurt that she should say that.
He didn’t argue with Mary, he couldn’t, never had. When she told him she was taking him to London he knew he had no choice in the matter. That was why he was on this plane. That was why he was staring out of the window, staring at the soft, feathered surface of cloud beneath, feeling leaden, uncooperative and sad.
Mary was feeling anything but sad. She was remembering her lover, her theorist. She was finding the noise and vibration of the plane reassuring and erotic. The seat seemed to support and envelop her like a strong, well-engineered lover.
She had first met him a couple of years ago in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. She didn’t have much time or taste for art but she spent many hours in that gallery, enjoying the bright sheen of the floors, the clean space, the slow, over-reverent passage of the other visitors. There was a lightness, a stillness about the place. Nothing bad could ever happen to her there.
She knew right away that he was English and older than her. He must be, what, sixty years old, not really her type. Her ideal for this kind of liaison would have been a cute but disposable young man. She knew as well that he would approach her with some rather tired, obvious pick-up line. Because he was English and rich and had an aristocratic manner, a wolfish smile, a sweep of metallic white hair, a blazer, a college tie, immaculate white cuffs, he thought he could get away with murder. And as far as Mary was concerned, he could. He had about him an authentic, enticing whiff of sulphur that she found irresistible.
They fell into conversation in front of a stack of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. He was no less corny than she’d been expecting. He said modern art was all very well, but his real enthusiasm was for the female nude; Renoir, Matisse, Klimt. The rest of the afternoon was a foregone conclusion. She followed the script. She felt as though she was on a gently descending escalator.
His body turned out to be unexceptional, not especially well-shaped. He had an appendix scar, some stretch marks, some asymmetrical flourishes of reddish hair on his back. And he had, this she had not expected, a small blue tattoo on his left buttock, a tattoo of a snake eating its own tail. He was no cute young man, and she was to find that he was not disposable either.
He was vague about what he was doing in the States. He said he was on a short business trip, the business unspecified. He said something about ‘trade’, ‘the leisure industry’, something about ‘heritage’. She didn’t much care what he did or was in the real world, but she cared about what he did for her in the private world of their rented hotel bed. He seemed to have an infinite capacity for pleasure, a formidable, unassuageable appetite. He was ruthless, voracious, omnivorous. He scared her and she liked it. She soon knew that he would be more to her than an afternoon’s anonymous pleasure. She gave him power over her and she knew he would not use it wisely, nor did she want him to.
She realised that first afternoon that what they were offering each other was destined to last far into some as yet unrevealed future, quite separate from and quite other than her marriage to Frank, or from any other casual relationship she might have, from any other lovers she might take. Her lover visited America briefly, irregularly, but often, and each time they met it was always the same; frantic, eager and dangerous. The necessary hunger was always there.
There were strange, edgy games involving knives and blindfolds and pieces of ice, and sometimes there was a third person, a male friend of his or some woman he’d picked up off the street. She did things with him, let him do things to her, that she could never previously have imagined, things she now knew she’d been waiting for all her life. She could never have told Frank that she wanted them, indeed, with Frank she would not have wanted them at all. But with her anonymous Englishman everything was permitted and desired.
Of course, he did not stay totally anonymous. She discovered his name: Charles Radcliffe. She talked to him about her life, her husband, her son, her boredom. In return he would theorise, talk to her about abstractions, ideas, things outside herself. He would construct small confections based on logic and language and thought; on the economics of pleasure, woman as cook, woman as poisoner, cookery as an act of love, consumption as affirmation, eating disorders as expressions of female revolt, the relationship between weaning and aggression.
She knew Frank suspected nothing, but even if he’d discovered she was having an affair with Radcliffe she thought he’d be somehow impressed, flattered. The snob in him would be complimented that someone so cultured, so conspicuously ‘old money’ as Radcliffe had taken an interest in his wife.
Radcliffe was not a nice man and he made sure she knew it. He told her about his other sexual conquests and about some savage business deals he’d made with the weak and unwary, and he told her tales about lechery and gluttony and drunkenness, all that nonsense at his club. He told her about the Everlasting Club, about what they got up to and why and how. She was appalled. She found it juvenile and wicked and sick and disgusting and terribly exciting. She said she wanted to be part of it all.
The occasional Leos of this world were fun but ultimately, perhaps primarily, they were not satisfying or sustaining. They were snacks, junk food. They left her feeling hungry. Radcliffe was the real thing for her. He was a feast.
Finally he had taken her to England, to the Everlasting Club. It had required all sorts of subterfuge to enable her to get to England without Frank accompanying her. She had had to tell any number of lies about wanting to see her family, but she had succeeded.
At the Everlasting Club she had been treated royally. Men fussed over her, deferred to her, offered her drinks, cigarettes, lights, seats. Like Radcliffe, these men had for her a dangerous, brimstone air about them. She loved them. She felt at home. She was staggered by the food. Who would not be? She ate all manner of things she had never tasted before. She wondered where they got their chefs. She had drunk too much, eaten too much, been indiscreet, but that was fine. That was what a club ought to be for. It was what she had been looking for. It was what she’d always wanted.
After her first visit, Radcliffe asked her if she wanted to be a member. She hadn’t even thought that women could join. She supposed women could only be guests at this all-male establishment. She interpreted the offer as some supreme act of affection, almost as a confession of love by Radcliffe. She said, ‘Sure.’ The England of gentlemen’s clubs was a long way from the England she’d known in Dartford. Radcliffe told her how few women had ever been accepted into the Everlasting Club, how special this made her. But by now, thanks largely to him, she was accustomed to thinking of herself as special.
Since joining, she had only visited the club a couple of times, and that only after even more elaborate intrigue to deceive Frank. But now she was on a plane to England, flying to London to meet Radcliffe, her English lover, her theorist, and she was taking with her Leo, her other lover.
She turned to Leo and said, ‘We’re going to England to attend a surprise party.’
He shuffled in his seat, turned his back towards Mary, concentrated on the soft emptiness outside the plane window. Once again she wasn’t making any sense. He could no longer tell when she was being serious and when she wasn’t. If she wasn’t going to talk sense to him, he wasn’t going to talk to her at all.
He stayed alone with his thoughts. He thought about lobster and caviar, and about dogfish and monkfish, and about some new ideas he had for serving John Dory. And he thought of grilled swordfish with chervil and fennel leaves, and of tiger prawns and angel-fish and conger eels, and yes, he thought there probably was something terribly sexual in all this. And he knew that this was his career, his life, and he knew that it was all in jeopardy, in danger of curdling, separating, boiling dry. He knew he had it in him to be a great chef, and that he was in danger of becoming a great nothing. He had to work very hard to stop Mary seeing a big tear roll down his cheek.