Vegetables or Sex?

Why choose, you might say? Because our choices make us who we are.

In this short scene, I play a girl in a bookstore. The bookstore will be represented by Green Apple Books on Clement Street, a haven of narrow aisles and tall shelves for the lit-addicted and cash-poor. With only $7 in her wallet, my character is torn between two novels by Emile Zola, Nana and Le Ventre de Paris.

Narrator: Nana tells the story of Anna Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class cocotte during the last three years of the French Second Empire. Nana first appears in the end of L'Assommoir (1877), another of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, in which she is portrayed as the daughter of an abusive drunk; in the end, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_%28novel%29)

Girl: What's a cocotte? Is it made with squash?

Narrator: Le Ventre de Paris (1873) is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It is set in and around Les Halles, the enormous, busy central marketplace of 19th Century Paris. The plot is centred around the escaped political prisoner Florent...There are several excellent descriptive passages, the most famous of which, his description of the olfactory sensations experienced upon entering a cheese shop, has become known as the "Cheese Symphony" due to its ingenious orchestral metaphors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ventre_de_Paris)

Girl: A symphony of cheese! I wonder if there's anything about vegetables in here... [flipping pages] Ah, yes, here we are:

Heads of lettuce, escarole, chicory, still slick with earth, lay open to display their glistening hearts; bunches of spinach, bunches of sorrel, bouquets of artichokes, jumbles of string beans and peas, and bales of romaine tied with straw sang every note in the scale of green from their lacquered pods to their richly colored leaves: a scale of intensity that faded as it rose all way to the faint polka-dot pattern of celery bottoms and leeks. But the most piercing notes, the ones that rang out highest, were the vibrant splashes of carrot and the clear splashes of turnip, dispersed in prodigious quantity throughout the length of the market, illuminating the mottled canvas with their two colors. At the intersection of the rue des Halles, cabbages rose in a mountain: enormous white cabbages, hard and firm like balls of pale metal; savoy cabbages with large leaves like bronze basins; red cabbages that bloomed in the dawn light, wine-red, bruised carmine and purple. On the other end, at the intersection of the pointe Saint-Eustache, the entrance to the rue Rambuteau was blocked by a barricade of orange winter squash, splayed in two rows, thrusting out their fat bellies. And while the bronze varnish of the onions, the blood red of the tomatoes, the self-effacing yellow of the cucumbers, and the deep violet of the eggplant gleamed all around him, the black radishes, deep in their mourning cloaks, sunk dark holes in the vibrant joy of the sunrise.
(p. 44; tr. courtesy of R. Bunny)

[Sigh...]

Narrator: Hardly a choice at all.

Fin

The Boil: A Fictional Account of Worry

I have a boil. It is small -- the size of a jellybean, I told the nurse on the phone -- reddish blue, and irritated. She told me to wait it out. "It may come to a head on its own," she said.

Now I am waiting for it to come to a head. I don't know what this means, quite, or how I will know it has happened. I picture the foamy head of a beer, frothing up to but over the smooth side of a glass, or a train bearing along its head of steam. Is that how my boil will appear? Unlikely, for I doubt its capacity to either refresh or transport. If you were to enter it as a query in any search, I bet "boil" would show up near verbs like "fester" or "lance" and very far from adjectives like "bitter" or "punctual" or "roomy," although the homonymous verb might yield the more benign "tea" or "kettle."

I lie in the down-sloped grass of Duboce Park, well away from the dogs, waiting for my boil to make progress of any sort. I made my partner inspect it last night but didn't have the heart to ask him again this morning when I woke up to go swimming, even though we have been together for more than two years and his capacity to be repulsed by the vivid truths of my body -- or maybe just my fear that he will be repulsed by them -- has mostly faded away.

He views my skin's strange inventions with untroubled calm and my reaction to them with distant amusement. "You body will heal itself," he says, "if you just wait." I can't wait, I tell him, because what if it gets worse? We've had this see-saw conversation before. He believes in the power of the natural world to right itself; I believe the natural world to be a chaos habitable only by virtue of our constant intercession.

Perhaps the boil has changed since last night without my knowing. This is the risk I took in not asking him to look at it again. Perhaps there are key steps in its trajectory that I am missing, even as I lie here watching a black dog bristle over the sharp green lawn, back and forth, retrieving a tennis ball. The dog's trajectory, unlike the boil's, is easy to follow: he is happy going forth and happy going back, happy either way, happy accomplishing nothing that isn't almost immediately undone. I can't tell if I am happy or not, watching him, although my mind is also easy to follow: it hums along two tracks, pursuing only its own motion.

One track is stitched to the present, obsessively aware of the boil as it exists in this moment. A single, jellybean-sized lump of flesh fills its viewfinder, the first and the last, the earth's own bellybutton. The boil's every quiver must be monitored for any moment could be the one, at last, when it comes to a head. If enough energy is channeled towards it in the form of close, careful attention, perhaps it can even be coaxed -- willed -- to this much-desired end. I wait. It tingles a little, then stops. Then it does nothing for many minutes.

The other track denies that the boil is the cause of all things and instead searches for the cause of the boil. It must be that I have been eating too much yogurt, or else not enough, swimming more of late or sleeping less, that I do not let my towels dry completely before using them again, that the tilt or height of my office chair is off. But how can I know how much yogurt is enough and how much is too much? Enough must be however much it takes to prevent boils and no more. So I must simply go back to eating as much as I used to eat before I had the boil. Likewise regarding the towels and the chair, and the thousand other unregulated and suspect activities I engage in all week, including using the StairMaster at the gym, showering at the gym, eating several pieces of fruit every day, sitting at my desk in the office, sitting at my desk in the apartment, lying in the grass at Duboce park, and swimming at the public pool.

Why do I worry so much, some people want to know. Why does the dog chase the ball, is the answer. Because it would look stupid running back and forth with nothing hanging out of its mouth but its own tongue.