Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“I’m going back to college after Labor Day,” I said, because her saying I want to spend more time having fun seemed to implicate me. “I won’t be around much.”

I could not eat this strong briny meat quickly, but I was nearly done. I wanted to dispose of it, think of an excuse and get out of here. If she started crying I was stuck: I could never leave her in tears.

“I can drive up and see you. We can go for picnics. There must be lots of good restaurants up there. Bon appetit!” That was jolly.

Making plans for the future like this made me feel like a prisoner who has no choice but to follow that narrow track until he has served his sentence.

“Your husband must be really upset,” I said.

“Stop talking about my husband. You don’t even know him. Some of the things I’ve found in his drawers. You wouldn’t believe!” That was scandalous. She drank again and said sadly, “I was hoping you’d go to New York with me some weekend. Maybe take in a show. Wouldn’t you like that?”

No , I thought, but I said, “Sure. The trouble is I don’t get any time off. If I don’t work—”

“I’ve got lots of money,” she said, and gulped another drink defiantly. “You’re eating too fast. You’re going to make yourself sick.”

“I have to get back to the pool.”

“You don’t care about me,” she whimpered.

Then I was determined to go. She’d be tearful in two seconds.

I stood up and kissed her and said, “I’ll give you a call — I want to hear more about it.” But I didn’t want to hear anything about it, and I hoped she would get drunker and forget about me. I thought I would no more go to New York with her than I would do this again — spoil a good whale steak with a fruitless argument. Mrs. Mamalujian was smoking with all her food in front of her when I left. Almost an inch of cigarette ash was suspended over her shrimp salad. I did not want to see it fall.

That lunch with Mrs. Mamalujian made me lonely and restless. Reading didn’t help. I had to see Lucy. I called her the next day at the bookstore.

She said, “I was trying to get you all day yesterday, Andy,” and that made me feel better. “I want to talk to you.”

“How about having dinner with me tomorrow night? There’s somewhere I’d like to take you.”

She said, “You weren’t at the pool” in a monotonous way. It was very unusual of Lucy not to listen to me.

She hardly looked at the menu the next night.

I said, “I usually have the whale steak. Ever had it?”

She didn’t reply, she wasn’t looking at the menu, she wasn’t listening.

“Lucy, what would you like to eat?”

Her eyes were staring at nothing in a blind wide-open way.

I was silent, but after about fifteen seconds my question reached her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

Then she looked straight at me.

“I mean, if I eat anything I’ll throw up.”

She had not smiled once.

“They have whale steaks here,” I said.

She looked at me as if at a moron, with a kind of hopeless pity.

I said, “You think whale’s going to be gray blubbery stuff with square edges and about six inches of white fat. But remember the line in Moby Dick where Stubb says something about the ‘red meat’? That’s not Melville’s usual hyperbole, that’s a literal fact. The whale steak is red like a sirloin, and very sinewy. There’s a strange contradiction between the look of it and the taste”—Jesus Christ, it was so hard talking to someone who didn’t reply—“it looks like beef but it has a fishy taste.”

It occurred to me that the odd salty fishy taste was the taste of Lucy herself, for after she did the nameless thing to me and took me into her mouth and lovingly noodled with me, I did a nameless thing to her. I knelt down and lifted her legs and, as if making a deep dive, put my face against her and madly moved my tongue. My ears rang from being squashed between her thighs. And now I knew that her wetness on my twisted tongue was whale. So I had tasted it before I knew its name.

I wanted to tell her, but we never talked about sex. It was all done by touch. In bed we shut our eyes and were very silent and active. When it came to sex we were blind and deaf and mute. It was as if we were adventuring in a prohibited place, in a landscape so forbidden none of it had a name.

And I thought that if I told her she tasted like a whale steak she might become very shy and self-conscious, and that would be the end of it. We were different people in bed from the people we were on the street. In this restaurant it was almost impossible for me to imagine making love to her.

She looked very sad. I asked her whether anything was wrong. She let a long moment pass and then she sighed.

“Why do they kill them?” she said, not answering my question. “They are beautiful creatures. They’re enormous. They’re very friendly. They’re intelligent, too. And they sing — haven’t you heard that record?”

I said, “No.”

I hated the direction this conversation was taking. It was like showing someone a target with a cluster of holes you had brilliantly shot into the bull’s-eye, and the person making a face and saying I hate guns , undermining the whole subject.

Lucy screwed up her face and said, “It’s very haunting.”

You always had to take someone’s word for that. When someone said haunting I was never haunted, I was only annoyed.

I said, “If you stick up for whales you get a pretty distorted impression of Moby Dick . The whole sense of it is ruined. I mean, Jesus, the whale’s supposed to be evil.”

“Please don’t yell.”

That plea was always a provocation to yell, and I was on the point of it when the waiter came over.

We ordered — a whale steak for me. Lucy languidly said that she’d have half a grapefruit and a bowl of soup. I thought she was deliberately ordering those dull things to get back at me for eating whale. She didn’t know she tasted like whale meat.

I said, “It’s like hating that Hemingway story, ‘Francis Macomber,’ because you’re against killing buffaloes.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Then you miss the whole point of the bad marriage and the symbolism in the story.”

“I hate that story. I hate Hemingway. He’s a bully and a brute. I know you’re not supposed to say that because he won the Nobel Prize and he’s so important and all that. But I can’t stand all this animal killing. It’s murder.”

“Jesus, what are you a vegetarian or something?”

“What if I am?” she said, sounding tearful.

But I was so exasperated I kept on, and said, “And you only read vegetarian stories — no hunting, no fishing, no meat-eating, no trespassing. That leaves out Hemingway and Melville. What about that great Faulkner story, ‘The Bear’? Would you like it better if it were called ‘The Cabbage’?”

“You’re angry. Please don’t be angry.”

“Or ‘The Head of Lettuce’?” I said. “Actually there is one called ‘The Dill Pickle.’ I’ll bet you like that one a lot.”

“You’re making me feel like the woman in it,” Lucy said.

I tried to remember what it was about. Was it a woman seeing an old lover and being very disappointed because the man was such a crumb?

Lucy said, “It’s just that I heard that whale record recently. We had it in the record section of the store. I was moved by it — the haunting sound, sort of echoing and calling out in a watery and yearning—”

It was very unfortunate that she was rhapsodizing about whales at that moment, because as she was talking, with a plaintive half-smile on her lips, the waiter put my plate down and a whale steak was bleeding on it.