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Once back in Brooklyn, he'd dragged Carol into the house. While she initially said she was traveling with "friends," she was actually single and touring the United States on her own for a month, thinking of writing an article about her adventures.
Alone...
He'd been debating what to do with his trophy.
Now he knew.
Yes, no?
Yes.
She'd given up staring at him pleadingly and whispering pleadingly and now turned her damp eyes to the Deba as he sharpened susss, susss. She shook her head occasionally. Swann had bound her wrists and legs to a very nice and comfortable Mission-style chair, a la Lydia Foster.
"Please," she mouthed, her eyes on the blade. So the pleading wasn't quite abandoned.
He examined the knife himself, tested the edge carefully with his thumb. It gave just the right resistance; perfect sharpness. He sipped more wine and then began to remove ingredients from the refrigerator.
When Jacob Swann was a boy, long before college, long before the military, long before his career after the military, he came to appreciate the value of meals. The only moments when he could count on spending time with his mother and father involved preparing and eating supper.
Bulky Andrew Swann was not stern or abusive, simply distant and forever lost in his schemes, obligations and distractions, which derived mostly from his job in the gambling world of Atlantic City. Young Jacob never knew exactly what his father did--given his own present career, Andrew might have been on the enforcement side of things. That genetic stuff. But the one thing that Jacob and his mother knew about the man was that he liked to eat and that you could get his attention and hold it through food.
Marianne was not a natural cook, probably had hated it. She'd begun to work on her skills only after she and Andrew started dating. Jacob had overheard her tell a woman friend about one of the first meals she'd served.
"Whatsis?" Andrew had demanded.
"Hamburger Helper and lima beans and--"
"You told me you could cook."
"But I did." She'd waved at the frying pan.
Andrew had tossed down his napkin and left the table, casino bound.
So she'd bought a Betty Crocker cookbook the next day and started to work.
In the afternoons in their tract house, young Jacob would watch her feverishly fricasseeing a chicken or pan-sauteing cod. She fought the food, she wrestled. She didn't learn first principles and rules (it's all about chemistry and physics, after all). Instead she attacked each recipe as if she'd never seen a steak or a piece of flounder or pile of cool flour. Her sauces were lumpy and bizarrely seasoned and always oversalted--though not to Andrew, so perhaps they weren't over, at all.
Unlike her son, Marianne stressed mightily before and during the preparation of each meal and invariably had more than one glass of wine. A bit of whiskey too. Or whatever was in the cabinet.
But she worked hard and managed to produce meals functional enough to hold Andrew's presence for an hour or so. Inevitably, though, with a clink of dessert fork on china, a last gulp of coffee--Andrew didn't sip--he would rise and vanish. To the basement to work on his secret business projects, to a local bar, back to the casino. To fuck a neighbor, Jacob speculated, when he learned about fucking.
After school or weekends, if he wasn't slamming his wrestling match opponents into the mat or competing on the rifle team at school, Jacob would hang out in the kitchen, flipping through cookbooks, sitting near his mother as she laid waste the kitchen, with dribbles of milk and tomato sauce everywhere, shrapnel of poppy seeds, the detritus of herbs, flour, cornstarch, viscera. The spatter of blood too.
Sometimes she'd get overwhelmed and ask him to help by removing gristle and boning meat and slicing scaloppine. Marianne seemed to think that a boy would be more inclined to use a knife than an egg beater.
"Look at that, honey. Good job. You're my little butcher man!"
He found himself taking over more and more and instinctively repairing the stew, chopping more finely, offing the heat at the right moment before a disastrous boil. His mother patted his cheek and poured more wine.
Now Swann looked at the woman strapped to his chair.
He continued to be angry that she'd ruined his plans that afternoon.
She continued to cry.
He returned to preparing his three-course dinner for tonight. The starter would be asparagus steamed in a water-vermouth mixture, infused with a fresh bay leaf and a pinch of sage. The spears would rest on a bed of mache and be dotted with homemade hollandaise sauce--that verb being key, "dotted," since anytime yolk meets butter, you can easily overdo. The trick about asparagus, of course, is timing. The Romans had a cliche--doing something in the duration it took to cook asparagus meant doing it quickly.
Swann sipped the wine and prepared the steamer liquid. He then trimmed the herbs from his window box.
