AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I know. You should. I hate it, too.”
She felt herself soften in relief. He reached out his hand to catch her hip and hold her in place. “But the thing is, I don’t completely hate it,” he said. “There’s this … righteousness to it. I’d never felt that way before I started running a kitchen—like I could be a pissed-off, self-important bastard, and that was fine. It was my kitchen. I was entitled to it. Have you ever felt that way?”
“When I stabbed Dan,” she said. “Except I feel bad about it now.”
“Well, sure. But in that moment, just for a little while …” He met her eyes.
“You feel like you can do anything.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He squinted, looking past her at nothing, and she touched his arm to bring him back. He glanced at the spot where her fingers met his skin, inches above their joined hands. “It’s addictive,” he said quietly. “Even though it’s no good. Even though it kind of rots you, it’s hard to stop.”
Wasn’t everything that was bad for you that way? Where he’d pushed his anger out, she’d curled herself around it and convinced herself it didn’t even exist. But the result was the same. If you tipped too far in any direction, you ended up dangling over empty space, clinging to whatever bad habit had put you there in the first place.
“The point is, I was sick of the cameras. I didn’t want to do the show. Sandy wasn’t listening. She was walking from the kitchen, yapping at me, so I followed her like I was meant to, and I finally caught up with her in the street, where I tried to make all my objections clear by shouting them at high volume right in her face. And even right then in the moment, I could see myself from the outside. I was watching myself be this worst possible version of me, and I had this moment of complete clarity.”
He looked at her. “I hated it. I hated every single thing about it. But I didn’t know how to stop.”
May tried to think what to tell him, but there weren’t any words for what she felt. She couldn’t say it was fine, or that she didn’t find the story disturbing.
She did find it disturbing. She found him disturbing.
But it wasn’t always a bad thing, being disturbed. And she understood him better right now than she had at any time in all their hours together.
He thought his anger was inside him, twined around his essential self. Maybe even part of him, black and rotten at the roots. But when she put together the pieces of his story, he didn’t sound furious to her. He sounded starved.
All the anger he’d witnessed when he was too young to know what to do with it—that was the legacy his father had handed him when he took away the farm. This is how the world is, his parents had taught him. This is how it treats you, and this is how you cope.
The restaurant kitchen he’d wanted so badly. His marriage. His obsessive ambition. Every choice he’d made had taken him out of the sunshine, away from the bees and the dirt and stuck him in the dark, with people pressing around him, demands pressing down on him, heat and sharp edges and relentless expectations.
This is how the world is, he’d told himself. This is how it treats you.
Cope.
No wonder he’d started snapping. What were the other choices, if you were Ben?
He exhaled. “That was the night I asked myself what I was doing. I thought I had this … passion, I guess, this thing I found in Sardinia that made sense to me. But then the way it worked out, was that what I’d really wanted? To be stressed all the time and have headaches and insomnia and cameras rolling while I flipped out? Is that passion, May? Because if it is, it’s fucking miserable, and I don’t want any part of it.”
“I think that’s obsession.”
“Yeah. Well, I couldn’t tell the difference. It all felt the same to me, by the time I split with Sandy, and for about a year afterward. But I’ve been trying to figure it out. You know Tiger Woods?”
“What, the golfer?”
“Yeah. You ever see him play?”
“I can’t watch golf. It’s so boring.”
“Okay, well, he’s amazing. But he wanted to be better. So he and his coach, they spent, like, a year breaking his swing down into all the components, then teaching him how to swing a golf club all over again. That’s what I’m trying to do. With my life.”
“How will you know when you’re done?”
“It’ll get easier. This is just what it’s like to be in the middle of the process, I think. Feeling broke-ass and lost, like you’ll never get back to where you were before. But sooner or later, if I keep at it, it’s going to click into place. That’s what Tiger said—it all clicked into place. And I’ll be able to … you know. Swing again. Without getting pissed off and screwing up so much. Without thinking about it all the time. And when that happens, I’ll open another restaurant.”
He thought he was broken. That there was some mechanism in him he could fix, if he tried harder.
God. God.
It was the saddest thing anyone had ever told her.
