A shy public reference librarian, and a college dropout who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, encounter each other in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over...
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Roasting a turkey is surprisingly easy. I'd always thought it involved staying up all night to slow-roast the bird in the oven, basting every hour on the hour to keep it from getting dried out, which is what I remembered my grandmother doing prior to our family gatherings; but apparently, all I need to do is follow a recipe, and "following a recipe" involves putting the thawed bird in the roasting pan, covering it with foil, setting the oven for 325 degrees, and then letting it sit in the oven for an amount of time calculated by multiplying the weight of the bird by a certain number of minutes. There's even a little embedded plastic pop-up timer in the turkey that indicates when the bird is fully cooked and safe to eat. All this is right there on the turkey's label if the cook doesn't happen to have a cookbook handy as a reference.
That's it.
Gosh.
"If you want to get creative with flavoring," Magister says, "think about what tastes good with turkey, and you can put it in a sauce at the bottom of the pan. Every so often, use the turkey baster to squirt the sauce on top of and inside of the turkey. There's really no need to be intimidated by the thought of making a marinade from scratch."
I think.
"Wine?"
"That sounds good," he agrees. "I've already used the pinot noir for the cranberries, but there's an extra bottle of chardonnay you could use for the marinade if you want. Turkey's the sort of meat that would go just as well with white as it would with red."
In the end, I wind up adding some random green herbs, butter, Hungarian paprika, and a little chopped garlic and onion from the plastic storage containers in the refrigerator to the wine I've used as a base, and pouring honey on top - the honey, he says, not only brings out the flavor of the turkey, but it turns the turkey a nice golden brown on the outside when it roasts.
"I did it!" I exclaim. "I prep cooked a turkey!" I feel absurdly pleased with myself.
"Cooking, and feeding other people, is as much a form of magick as any other act of love," he replies, kissing me on the cheek, and we exchange places. The kitchen only has room for one cook at a time, and it's his turn to play with raw ingredients.
I take up a place on the living room couch and start reading. He has me studying Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, and Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Aristotle is obviously the odd one out here. I'm pretty sure the message for this week has something to do with altered states of consciousness - There are two paths possible on the quest for gnosis: Classical and Romantic. The former is rational, and exact, and were every aspiring magus aligned with the Temple of Apollo, this would seem the most logical way to achieve self-perfection and wisdom. However, let us not assume that the rational path is the path best traveled. For deep magick is hidden in a stranger place, that being the ivy and grapevine-bound bower of Dionysos. Some seekers of wisdom are given the gift of Romantic sickness, and for them, the only way to access it is through destruction and change. For them, magic is madness, I write. That's assuming this week's lesson has something to do with altered states of consciousness, the rational versus the irrational, and the need to get out of one's own head when doing energy work, but I won't know for sure until I finish all the material, even though I've already read most of the assigned books at least once before.
Given that the readings are well in my bailiwick, consisting of stuff I read in college for my philosophy classes (except for Pirsig, whom I read in high school, and Nietzsche, who I had never got around to studying - my knowledge of existentialism is embarrassingly sketchy) it looks like the next oral critique of my essay will turn into one of our long rhetorical debates. I find myself getting excited.
I'm still reading when he takes my turkey out of the oven to carve it, and to put it on the kitchen table (which we're using as a buffet) along with all the other Thanksgiving dishes: a salad of mixed chopped figs, spinach leaves, pomegranate seeds, and nuts; something he calls Fallen Angel Eggs made with ham, bacon, chives, Chinese mustard powder, and hot pepper sauce added to the usual mustard and mayonnaise base; fresh white bread with cinnamon honey butter for spreading; oyster stuffing; jasmine rice pudding made with fresh cranberries, grated ginger, and coconut; herbed new potatoes; steamed green beans; tiramisu; pumpkin cheesecake; and a boozy cranberry tart that he made on the stovetop after chopping the contents of an entire two-pound bag of cranberries in half and soaking them overnight in Metaxa and wine (the pie shell, meanwhile, was made from hazelnut flour, well in advance). He made a good half of this from scratch yesterday and the days before, cooking throughout the day and storing the dishes one at a time in the refrigerator. And yes, there is still Chardonnay. He was not wrong when he described the bottle I used up on making turkey marinade as his extra Chardonnay. So, we have that to drink with our meal.
There will be leftovers for days.
It's so good to be able to have Thanksgiving dinner with somebody again.
We pile food onto our plates and eat in the living room because there's no space for us to sit at the kitchen table. The stereo plays Mozart softly in the background.
I attack my dinner with desperate abandon.
He gets a pained look on his face.
"What is it?" I ask.
There is a moment of awkward silence. Finally, he answers, "You're obviously starving. I'm not blind; this isn't the first time I've seen you eat like you'll never get another meal again, and I've noticed you losing weight over the course of the past couple of weeks or so. And you can't afford to lose weight; you never had much padding to begin with. I hate to ask this, because you seem to be rather sensitive about your situation, but I don't think you have an eating disorder - are you having a problem affording groceries?"
I shrug.
"No. Stop that. Starvation is not something to just shrug off." He puts his plate of food down and reaches under my shirt. "Here, look: you're getting dangerously thin. This is not acceptable. Mens sana in corpore sano. You need to be healthy to keep up your studies; hunger ruins concentration. It also makes you more susceptible to pain and lowers your endurance, which I have reason to find objectionable. When did you stop eating?"
"When I lost my job. In a few weeks, I should start seeing the commissions added to my hourly at my new job."
"Meanwhile, you starve? No, that's not right. Come to think of it, you weren't eating all that well even before then, were you? It would explain a few things. Your ribs, for instance. I take it you don't know where the nearest food pantries are?"
"Food pantries? But those are for people who have nothing. I can't take a needy person's food away. That wouldn't be right."
He stares at me. I don't think I've ever seen him dumbfounded before.
"And anyway, I remember my parents donating lots of canned goods and boxes of spaghetti to food pantries when I was a kid. I don't have any way to cook that kind of stuff right now. My stove isn't working."
He sighs. "My eromene, I know you will not accept financial assistance, but would you at least let me raid my cabinets and refrigerator and give you food? Please? I don't want to order you to take home food and eat more regularly - in case you haven't noticed, I really don't like ordering you to do anything outside of the context of the bedroom, or the closed circle, because I don't feel it is appropriate to order you about in other aspects of your life when you aren't my slave, and don't wear my collar, and haven't consented to that level of power exchange - but I can ask."
I don't want to be a kept woman. I don't want charity, either. I don't like this. I don't know why, but for some reason, I see a difference between eating what he cooks for me and accepting the raw materials of groceries.
