By Jesse Salvo

I guess the wheels really started to come off me and Tom after the thing with the food. I don’t think Tom could get over the thing with the food, and it really set him on a bad trajectory. We’d married young too, which maybe is incompatible with how people live now. But everybody thought it was a really good idea then. My dad, who’d not emerged from his study for most of my childhood on account of, he said, “spiritual rheumatisms” had, upon meeting Tom, given me only that one piece of advice: “Marry early.” 

Though he hadn’t specified I should marry Tom precisely, but given the context, his comment seemed to indicate it. My mom had said Tom seemed like a solid guy. Those were her words exactly. “Solid guy. Not a Publishers Clearing House type pick, but…” She seemed to think I couldn’t do better. I didn’t think I could do better, either. 

We weren’t an orthodox type of couple. I mean we weren’t the “you cook, I clean” people. I mean he was very domestic and sweet and seemed to regard my career as more than an afterthought, Tom. I think for this reason the food thing hit him a little harder than it would have most. He couldn’t make it work. He used to be a great cook, everyone in his family said. On my twenty-third birthday, he executed a perfect vitello tonnato with capers. He was always brining things in the cold cupboard. He got a lot of pleasure out of it, and I got pleasure watching him work.

It started really basic. Sorry I burnt the toast, ha-ha. After that, he put together a shark-fin ceviche with too much acidity. I wouldn’t ever say anything because that’s not how I was raised, but he brought it up and kept pushing me on it for an hour and a half until I conceded yes, yeah, there was too much acidity.

Then it started to feel like nothing could go right for him, cooking-wise. He braised a duck confit for Christmas, and everyone who ate it got salmonella. He sent profuse notes of apology to all the families who’d been affected and a lavish bouquet of flowers to my one great-aunt’s funeral. He couldn’t stop blaming himself, even though we all assured him she’d had a lot of comorbidities going into the holidays.

He’d try and make a fruit salad on Sundays, but half the produce he bought seemed to have gone bad without him noticing. He would stand, inspecting blueberries for half an hour, sweating in the produce section, then finally come home feeling assured, and pull everything from the bag and notice fuzzes of white mold hidden on the undersides. Maceration gave him a huge amount of difficulty. He cut off part of his thumb trying to use the mandolin my sister bought us. He was a nervous wreck around cheeses, even. I did lose a lot of weight, I will admit, we both did. He became convinced he was under some kind of a curse. The pork chops he broiled in the oven were unspeakably dry.

Our dinners became tense and quiet. It wasn’t that I was critical; if anything, I was a font of false brio and enthusiastic yummy noises. But he couldn’t hold a conversation, was constantly reapplying the meat thermometer, and peppering me with questions about my gut health. It became, like, too much.

How does one foul up pasta salad in such a way that the town selectmen prohibit the bringing of homemade dishes to all future potlucks in public parks? He enrolled in therapy and made brief stabs at spiritualism and the occult. Anything to fix the pain that seemed to trail him. I’d offer to buy us takeout, but he’d blanch at the suggestion and mutter we didn’t have the money. Odd smells issued from the kitchen at all hours. I’d wake at three in the morning to see him sweating over gray-looking London broil or putrescent nicoise. I couldn’t shake him from his pain.

Everything tasted burnt.

I told him I didn’t mind making my own food.

He asked me tearfully, “Why do we make what we make for each other?”

“Love,” I hazarded.

“Love, no,” he said. “To demonstrate we are capable of loving.”

So there, he’d said it.

Capable.

He fetched his things in a duffel bag, from the dresser and from beneath the marital bed. I hurled curses at him while he packed. I am not proud of the things I said, but they seem far away from me now. He hauled his things out to a waiting van on the dark sidewalk. I still write him letters, but he never answers.

He left everything in our kitchen just as it was.