T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

I poured her a glass of milk, set my drink down and settled into my chair across the table from her. I plied knife and fork. I lifted one chunk of meat after another to my mouth, patted my lips with my napkin, vigorously tapped the inverted pepper shaker over my plate, chewed green beans, slathered my potato with sour cream and butter. There was no conversation. Nothing. I might have said, "Good meat," or something along those lines, some little dig at her, but that was about it. She never moved. She just bowed her head and stared down at her plate, the potato and beans no doubt contaminated by the juices from the steak, and the milk, which she'd never much liked but only tolerated in any case, entirely ignored. Even when I got up from the table to rinse my plate and dump the rest of my drink down the drain, she never so much as glanced up. And later, when the phone rang and rang again, her friends on the other end of the line anxious to communicate their own dire secrets, she never flinched. She sat there rigid at the table as the daylight faded from the windows, and when I found her sitting there in the dark an hour later, I flicked on the counter lights.

I couldn't look at her face or focus too long on the back of her bowed head and the sliver of white that was the perfect parting of her hair, because I was determined not to waver. Let her get away with this and she'll rule me, that's the way I felt, and then it'll be junk food and candy, then it'll be stunted growth and rotten teeth and ruined skin, delinquency, early pregnancy, bad debts, drugs, booze, the whole downward spiral. At eleven, I crept into the kitchen and saw that she was asleep, head cradled in the nest of her hands, the plate pushed to one side, untouched, preserved like a plate under glass in some museum of Americana: Typical American meal, circa 1987. I lifted her in my arms, no weight to her at all, as if the forfeit of one night's meal had wasted her, and laid her gently into bed, covers to the chin, a kiss to the cheek, good night.

Pork chops the- next night, breaded, with German potato salad, sauerkraut, hot apple sauce and reheated green beans. She wouldn't even look at it. What did I say? Nothing. She sat there at the table doing her homework till she fell asleep, and this time I left her there. On the third night it was pizza, with anchovies and mushrooms, her favorite, but she wouldn't touch that either. I gave vent to my feelings then. I roared and I threatened, slammed things, stretched her over the rack of guilt and stretched her again-did she think it was easy for me, with no wife, to come home from a numbing day of work and put on an apron, just for her? Huh? Did she?

On the morning of the fourth day of her hunger strike, I got a call from the school nurse: she'd fainted during gym class, halfway through the rope climb, and had fallen twelve feet to the gym floor. Nothing broken, but they were taking her to the hospital for precautionary X-rays, and by the way, had she been eating right? The windows were beaded with rain. Sevry Peterson, owner of the failing stationery store in the shopping center, was sitting across the desk from me in the hopeless clutter of my office, explaining how she'd come to be six months behind in her rent. I waved her off, grabbed my jacket and made the Mustang scream all the way to the hospital.

Sierra was sitting in the waiting room when I got there, looking glum in her leggings, big socks and Reeboks and the oversized fluorescent pink T-shirt she insisted on wearing every third day. Mrs. Martini, the school nurse, was sitting on one side of her, a hugely fat man in sandals and a dirty white sweatshirt on the other. The fat man periodically dabbed his forehead with a bloody rag and moaned under his breath, and Mrs. Martini sat stiff as a cadaver over a copy of People magazine. Sierra's eyes leapt up when she saw me come through the door, but then they went cold with the recollection that meat was murder and that I, her father, was chief among the murderers. And then what?

Then we went home and she never touched another scrap of meat in her life.

Mac's house-his Versailles, his pleasure dome, his city under a roof-was built during the nineties, the last age of excess in a long line of them. It has three dining rooms, eighteen bedrooms, twenty-two baths, the aforementioned giftwrapping room, a theater, spa, swimming pool, gymnasium and bowling alley, not to mention the twenty-ear garage and a scattering of guesthouses set amongst the remains of what were once formal gardens. There's plenty of room for everybody Andrea, April Wind, the ghost of Sierra, Dandelion, Amaryllis and Buttercup, refugees from the condos (though none have showed up yet and the winds are still raging), the two Als, Mac and his collection of gauze masks, even Chuy, who insists on sleeping beneath the vintage Dodge Viper in the garage. And, as I'm about to discover, there's food too. Mac pulled me out of the dining room by the arm, and now I'm following his sloping shoulders down a long corridor to an elevator with hammered brass doors. "It's down two," he says, pulling a gauze mask from his pocket and holding it out for me.

What can I say? I take the mask and loop it over my head without — a word. My role here is to play the angry old man, and I let my eyes, fully stoked, do the talking for me. Down we go, and then the doors part on another hallway, magenta carpets, recessed lighting, some of the last mahogany paneling ever installed anywhere on this earth. In the confusion of yesterday we herded the warthogs and peccaries into the bowling alley, and that's down along here somewhere, I think, and though I can't hear them, I can smell the lions. No doubt they're asleep-even in nature, when there used to be nature, that is, adult lions would sleep something like twenty hours a day. I can picture them laid out like corpses amongst the rags and tatters of the dismantled furniture, only the slow rise and fall of their rib cages giving them away. (It's a crazy picture, I know it, this whole thing is crazy, but welcome to life in the twenty-first century. And who am Ito complain-I'm surviving, aren't I? If that's what you want to call it.) Mac's shoulders work, the fedora rides. We follow a corridor to the right, make a left up another corridor, then pass through the swinging doors of the lower kitchen. Mac fumbles for the light switch and a world of kitchen implements bursts into gleaming view: saucepans, colanders, whisks and graters depending from the ceiling above stainless-steel worktables, a big industrial-sized dishwasher, the polished doors of a walk-in freezer. "Check this out," Mac says, his voice muffled by the gauze, and then he pulls back the door on the right and we're engulfed by a creeping cloud of super-refrigerated air. Another light switch illuminates the interior and we can see the carcasses arrayed on their hooks and casting their frozen shadows.

"To be a host-to be the host of the baddest, hippest and grooviest parties-you just have got to have meat, you know what I mean?" Mae is saying. "Plus, these poor things were already dead and slaughtered, and its like, if you're going to have a wine cellar, why not a meat cellar too? I mean, it's an investment. I've got the last Argentine beef in here, you know that? Buffalo tongue, elk, mutton, spicy salsiccia from Palermo — I don't know what all. And fish. Two whole bluefin tuna, maybe the last ones on earth, and you know what the Japanese would pay for them? For just a slice as long as your little finger?" A wave of his hand. "They're back in there somewhere. Or at least they used to be." His breath is steaming through the mask in a weird billow of light, shadows everywhere, the naked beasts on the naked hooks, meat with a vengeance. "Some of this stuff is twenty years old."

We've both edged into the locker. Here's something right next to me, frozen like granite, and with a hoofless leg at the end of it. "So you're saying we can maybe feed some of the older stuff to maybe the fox, the hyena, the lions-in a pinch, that is? You don't mind?"