Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

She saw through it eventually. “Goddamn it, Ben,” she said in the middle of a cold night in the loft bed. “You’re the one with the problem and you’re trying to blame me for it.”

I fumed and blustered for a few minutes and finally fell back to sleep. In the morning I waked to see her sleepy-eyed and a bit grim-faced, and said, “I think you’re right.”

Things were better for a while after that. I left her alone and quit trying to act on every sexual tingle I felt—and I felt plenty of them. I slept better. But there was a lot of fury in me, and I felt it building. Much of the time I was good-humored and enjoyed doing what little work I needed to do—which took about three hours a day, mostly on the phone—but inside a pressure was building. I was becoming a time bomb, looking for an excuse to explode. I was scared by this and at the same time exulted in it. Living with Isabel and hating myself for impotence, I had become a sullen, angry, dangerous child.

My hydroponics garden stands out now in green against the gray of Belson’s surface, alive against that bleak obsidian. It is remarkable what Fomalhaut can do to power a vegetable, more remarkable that plants bred to the light of Sol flourish under this blue star. They do it with chemical fertilizers recycled, and recycled water. Part of the fertilizers are recycled through me; I defecate into a hopper that feeds the system, and then add potash; I eat the same rearranged molecules over and over. Orbach would love it; it fits his thesis that my personality requires self-nourishment.

I find deep pleasure in seeing those lettuces and carrots and beets and asparagus growing in their plastic troughs. They cover a half acre of surface that for billions of years has been lifeless. I walk down the rows, encouraging my plants, rubbing their wet leaves tenderly, muttering to them sometimes, sometimes pulling a leaf of lettuce or spinach and eating it there in the rows, warmed by blue Fomalhaut, alone and happy with my vegetable companions.

Since there are no seasons here, every season is growing season; I am already on my second crop and am improving the breed. Why can’t you just let things alone ? Anna would say at times in anger. Well I can’t. I don’t want to. So I save the best plants for seed, sensing that the new spectrum of Fomalhaut is an evolutionary spur and that some of my varieties will thrive on the short day-night cycle. Luther Burbank Belson, prodding his bush beans into stardom. It has worked, especially with the carrots; I’ve never seen such big, firm, orange carrots. I had Annie pull out one of the nuclear cooking coils from the Isabel’ s galley, and I cook my vegetables on that. It requires twenty minutes at Belson air pressure to produce a carrot al dente —neither crisp nor mushy. They are superb with Java pepper.

I remember now the pattern of sliced carrots on Isabel’s white floor the day I cooked the leg of lamb.

It was the first time I had ever roasted a leg of lamb, but I hadn’t told Isabel that. My career as a cook had begun for all practical purposes in her apartment; I knew how to scramble eggs and make a grilled cheddar sandwich when I moved in, but that was it. I started taking over the kitchen at Isabel’s when I felt I had to create something for her and me, something elemental and sensual. For one orifice if not the other. Orbach pursed his lips when I told him that, but he didn’t look convinced. “Hell,” I said, “I’ve got to do something . I can’t fuck, and I’m bored with making money.”

“Benjamin,” Orbach said, “cooking is a fine and creative thing to do. But it wouldn’t be wise for you to pretend you are a woman when you’re having difficulty being a man.”

“Come on!” I said. “I’m not pretending I’m a woman. My mother opened canned spaghetti for supper. And complained about it. She spent more time in the kitchen drinking screwdrivers than she did at the stove.”

“Maybe you want to teach her to be domestic,” Orbach said.

“Isabel?” I said.

Orbach frowned. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“I’m not sure of anything ,” I said, “except that I love to bring her coffee in the mornings and drink it with her.”

“Bring her coffee?” Orbach said. “Who?”

“Isabel, goddamn it!” I said. “If it was Mother, I’d bring her a martini.”

Orbach smiled wanly at that. “Benjamin,” he said, “as a child you had to nourish yourself, because there was little other nourishment around.”

I lay on the couch and looked at the water stain on Orbach’s ceiling. “I get tired sometimes,” I said. “I get damned tired of the whole fucking weight .”

“Clearly,” Orbach said, with sympathy. “I’d like to use chemical recall with you for the rest of our session today. I’d like to give you sorbate and take you back to your infancy and see if we can find out what you were thinking.”

I felt myself sweating. I hadn’t used chemicals in therapy for several years. They scared me. “Those pills pack a terrible hangover,” I said. “I need a clear head for…”

“For what?”

“For cooking supper tonight,” I said.

Orbach shrugged. “Very well. Perhaps some other time.”

The supper of which I’d spoken was the leg of lamb. I’d noticed it on sale that morning at thirty dollars a pound and bought it impulsively. I then wound up carrying it around with me while I spent a couple of hours with my lawyers, who were too polite to ask what in heaven’s name I was doing with a leg of lamb in a plastic bag.

It took me awhile that evening to figure out the controls on Isabel’s oven, but I managed. The combination of those electronic gadgets and a heat source of hickory wood has always seemed disorderly to me. It was a Wednesday and there would be no evening performance of Isabel’s play, so I had plenty of time. I cut slits in the fat and pushed in slivers of garlic, then rubbed the whole phallic thing with rosemary and coarse pepper. I had it in the oven by the time Isabel came home from her matinee; she gave me a quick kiss and a pat and went off to take a bath. I was beginning to feel very professional about this meal. I peeled away at my carrots, happy as a clam. Since the bathroom of that little apartment was only a few yards from the stove, I could hear Isabel splashing away merrily.

After a while the cats started nosing around at my ankles and looking pushy. It was time for their supper and I should have fed them, but I didn’t. The black one, as heavy-looking as a bag of cement, began meowing in his choked way. The brown-and-white, shyer, looked at me reproachfully. Get out of my way, you dumb bastards , I thought at them, viciously, not wanting to say it aloud in Isabel’s hearing. The black one croaked at me louder. I wanted to tell him to go back to cat school and learn to meow properly. I began to think I should open a can of food just to shut them up. I looked at them again, at their pushy, imploring faces, at their insistence , and thought, Fuck you, boys. Your lady friend can feed you when she gets out of the bath. They looked at me as though they shared an I.Q. of 3 between them. I grabbed a saucepan and threatened them with it. They slinked away.

A minute afterward, Isabel came out of the bathroom stark naked. I wanted to take her right there, but I restrained myself. Isabel could be testy about sexual advances that led nowhere. My balls had begun to tingle at the sight of her and I really wanted to drop to my knees for a while and let the lamb be well done if need be. But I pulled back from the tingle and cut it off somehow. That, I should have known by then, is how you get blue balls. That’s how you get into fights over whatever is handy—like carving a leg of lamb. I should have gone ahead with Isabel and let her decide whether she liked it or not; it would have saved a lot of grief.