A hunger to be satiated.A yellow book about a man who could not be satiated, he just ate and ate and ate until the entire world was subsumed by his stomach.
Each time Alice recognized one of Madeline’s phrases, she felt a tremor of rage, as if Madeline was taunting her.
“You could see the Eiffel Tower from the windows of the café, so I asked if we could sit in the front, even though the cold bled through the windows.”
A cold that bleeds through the windows.A purple book. A girl whose lover is the cold and she follows him from south to north, chasing winter the way the elderly chase the sun.
“Alice, are you listening?”
Alice smiled. “More than you know.”
Madeline held her wineglass up to the light, and Alice could see her own reflection contorted in the crystal. “I shivered through the wine. My teeth chattered through the pâté. It wasn’t until the oversized porcelain bowl was placed at the center of the table, cooled just enough to eat, that I finally warmed up. I remember the porcelain was a milky white without any stains, which contradicted the boiling red stew inside. Surely the tomato, the duck confit, would leave some remnants on that blank canvas of a bowl, but they hadn’t. It was defiantly clean.”
Defiance.A blue book, a red, a green. Everything was defiant. The sun, memory, shadows, love. Love was the most defiant act of all, at least in Madeline’s books.
“I’m sure my memory has made the dish grander than it was. It was my first cassoulet. And it was the only time we went to Paris.” Madeline brought a bite of beans and duck to her mouth and shut her eyes as she slurped it from the spoon. The corners of her mouth twitched, and Alice could see her eyeballs moving behind her closed lids as the cassoulet brought her back to that first one in Paris.
“When was that?” Alice tried to sound merely inquisitive, but she could hear the tinge of accusation at the end of her question. “When were you in Paris?”
Madeline chewed indulgently, savoring the memory of each bite, in no rush to answer Alice’s question. “Our honeymoon,” she finally said, and Alice realized that she’d already known this would be the answer.
“I didn’t realize you were married.” Madeline had never described Gregory as her husband, though it explained the wedding bands.
“We weren’t.” Madeline tilted the bowl to extract the remaining beans congealed to the side of the porcelain. “Not in the conventional white dress and chapel sort of way. We made vows to each other, but they were our own. You have to write your own love story. You can’t borrow someone else’s.”
Alice laughed despite herself. The gall of this woman.
“Isn’t that why I’m here?” she asked, emboldened. It was a glorious feeling. One largely unfamiliar to her. “To write you a love story.”
“And how is that going? You’ve been to see me what, five times? You’ve said nothing of your progress.”
“You can’t rush inspiration,” Alice said.
“Procrastination by any other name is still stalling. I don’t have all the time in the world, you know.”
“What exactly, may I ask, is wrong with you?” Was Madeline even sick? Had anything between them been honest or real?
“You can ask.” Madeline wiped her mouth. “That doesn’t oblige me to answer.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
“Because you’ll see me differently when I do, and I don’t want that.”
This Alice believed. But she was already seeing Madeline differently.
“Now, shall I continue my story, or do you have any other loosely veiled accusations you’d like to lob my way?” Madeline spooned the very last of the broth from her cassoulet. “Gregory’s family was quite religious and never would have settled for anything other than a church wedding. We didn’t want anyone telling us how to consecrate our love, so we chose to do it in Paris, a city that had already heard every type of love story. It was perfect, even if Gregory’s mother didn’t speak to us for a year.”
“Our families will never understand our love, so it’s best that we save it for ourselves,”Alice said, reciting Madeline’s words back to her. They were from a blue book about a couple whose mothers were battling to create the perfect wedding for them, so they absconded with their love, marrying in Vegas with an Elvis impersonator crooning in the background. Alice had liked that line about love and families.
“There are all sorts of reasons to be greedy with love.” Madeline wiped the orange residue from the cassoulet off her lips, evidently not recalling her own words.
“I’ve never wanted to save love for myself.” Alice had not meant to divulge something quite so true, but she was angry, and anger was its own energy source. It made us say and do things we shouldn’t. Much like love.
Madeline’s eyes softened. “How can you do what you do if you don’t want love for yourself? A chef must try her own food. A teacher must first be a student. A writer needs to read. You need love to give love.”
You need empathy, sure. Compassion. Intuition. Those qualities could be cultivated without love.
“Love is a distraction from what I do,” Alice told her, meaning it.
