Kyung-ran Jo - Tongue

The youngest prep cook, Choi, forgot to order salumi and mozzarella, creating problems for dinner service. It’s not the end of the world if we don’t have salumi, but if we don’t have mozzarella, we can’t make caprese salads, the most popular appetizer on our menu. Mozzarella demands freshness, so we don’t order huge batches of it. To make it worse, today is the day that Mr. Choe—the leader of the most influential group of gourmet eaters, Mido—is scheduled to come for dinner. Manager Park said it would be best not to tell Chef and I’m chosen to go to the closest market this afternoon. I feel a little uncomfortable that the market closest to Nove is actually the Costco in Yangjaedong, the one I used to frequent with him, but I’ve already stepped outside into the windy street.

When there is a huge crack in your relationship with someone, you wonder what others do in similar situations. I realize I’m trying as hard as I can to present myself as the most un-threatening being in the world, like a small animal. I hunch into myself, avoiding going back to the same places I frequented with him. Obviously I don’t eat the kind of food we ate or made together. But I don’t think I’m going to move to a new house, because I have the kitchen and the large fridge that I’d wanted for so long. People say you can’t possibly like your lover every single second of your life. But that’s not true. I liked and looked to my lover every single second we were together. And I still can’t admit that he’s gone. True sorrow is when one person desires but the other doesn’t. I don’t know any better words to describe it, and I can’t yet express this feeling through any kind of food. The one thing we know about sorrow is that it’s a very personal, individual feeling.

WHAT DOES A WOMAN DO as she waits for her man? She may wash her hair, put on makeup, choose the kind of outfit any woman would be eager to try on, spray on perfume, and look at herself one last time in the mirror. If she does these things, it’s when she and the man she’s waiting for are in love. It’s different when a woman waits for a man she still loves but who has broken up with her, because the pure joy of it is missing. Loving someone is like carving words into the back of your hand. Even if the others can’t see the words, they, like glowing letters, stand out in the eyes of the person who’s left you. Right now, that’s enough for me.

I wonder whether I should clean up a little or give Paulie a bath but instead just end up lying on the sofa. I try to think of something we did together when he loved me, something that has to do with me, not with washing Paulie or cleaning up, but I can’t think of anything. Even though I’d once wanted to share so many things with him, so many things that would make us happy or excited. I rustle around. By the time he gets here at two P.M. as promised, I’m deep in slumber. I had been lying in the street just like this when we first met, and when I opened my eyes I saw him looking down at me, his nose almost touching mine. Paulie alerts me to his presence by tugging on the slipper dangling from my foot. I open my eyes. I see him standing just inside the pocket door, looking uncomfortable. Come here, like before. Come close . But he doesn’t budge. I sit up and smooth my hair.

“How’ve you been?” His greeting isn’t really addressed to me, but not really to Paulie either. He unslings the bag from his shoulders and puts it down on the floor near the pocket door like he’s going to leave very soon. Paulie approaches him slowly and licks his outstretched palm. With his other hand, he strokes Paulie’s neck. Paulie’s neck is going to smell like you for a while .

I rise from the sofa. I hadn’t wanted him to see me asleep. “Would you like to eat something?”

“No, I already ate.”

We’d usually get ready for lunch around two, leisurely, after our midmorning brunch.

“Already?”

“I’ll go take a walk with Paulie and be back.”

You haven’t been here for more than two minutes! “Okay, then.” I walk toward the kitchen. Paulie glances at me but pads out the door when he hears his whistle. The sound of him whistling. It’s been a long time since I heard it. No matter how hard I practice, I can’t make the sound. I hear the door closing. What’s the best thing to eat at two in the afternoon? I pucker and try to whistle as I open the fridge door. I have potatoes in the fridge, along with zucchini and flour and pasta and an assortment of sauces and frozen fish—flounder, turbot, mackerel—and fresh anchovies and caviar that would be great in a salad. With these I can put together a decent—though not sumptuous—meal. I used to feel I was being given a special privilege every time I opened the fridge.

In the novel The Edible Woman , Marian bakes a cake in the shape of a woman for the man who’d tried to make her change but nearly destroyed her. “You look delicious. Very appetizing. And that’s what will happen to you; that’s what you get for being food,” she says. She calls him to her place and displays the cake. When he panics and leaves, she takes a fork and digs in, starting with the feet. It could be that she was only looking to share something with him and feel satisfied. The novel ends with Marian announcing that it’s only a cake, as she spears her fork into her cake body, neatly slicing off the head.

Roman women would bake a vulvalike pastry and put it on the table when they were upset with their husbands. A fresco depicting a cake baked in the form of breasts—made from sweet, thick, yellow custard and finished with red cherries perched on top as nipples—adorns a small church in Sicily. When women cook, they’re not just doing it for sustenance. An expression of rage and unhappiness and desire and sadness and pleading and pain may lurk in their dishes. Of course, the best kind is food filled with love.

Just as it’s important to be happy when you’re in a kitchen, the most crucial thing to keep in mind when you cook is the people who are going to eat your food—their tastes, their desires, their likes and dislikes, what will satisfy them, what will move them, what will make them want it again. A cook should understand the people’s eating habits, too. People can’t change their eating habits easily. They take their habits with them even when they leave home for somewhere far away. When I first started cooking, Chef would often tell us to cook the way our mothers did when we were young. Having had no mother, I changed that word to Grandmother. When I was working at that restaurant in Napoli, the head chef told me that proper Italian cooking had to give customers the feeling that their grandmother was in the kitchen, and I found myself smiling despite myself. It’s not so when I cook for customers or the students I teach, but when I cook for him, I want to make the kind of food that would pique his hunger for me.

Taking lettuce from the fridge, I pause to look out the window, lit brightly by the spring afternoon sun. I look around at everything I have here—a kitchen spacious enough to conduct a cooking class for ten people, an interior and a yard roomy enough for an English setter, and a thirty-one-year-old man, as tall as a palm tree, walking across the yard. They’re not things that would come easily to me at this age. I have it all. Even if things have been bad between us, these I can’t easily give up. The problem now isn’t whether we love each other, but whether we can return to what we used to be. I need to say to him, subtly, suggestively: Even if we can’t return to what we used to be, it can’t be completely futile. We can learn something truly valuable as we pick up the broken pieces and float up to the surface. Let’s wait until then . Being inside the house in the spring, with him there, makes me a more positive person, more outgoing and cheerful.