A Good Appetite

"The first sign of a hunger is not wanting more. It is no longer being satisfied by what once was enough."

Five months earlier

Inside the Gourmet went on sale on the fourteenth of May, and by the end of the third day there was not a copy to be found between Boston and Washington.

Sophia learned it from the radio. She was standing in her kitchen at seven in the morning with a spoon of yogurt halfway to her mouth when the announcer said, in the chipper tones of a man reading a weather report, that a memoir by a convicted-in-all-but-name cannibal had sold two hundred and ten thousand copies in seventy-two hours and had been reprinted four times. She put down the spoon. She turned up the volume. And the bright voice went on, while the sun slanted in across the table and a cardinal fussed in the window box, to report that the book's co-author, a longtime Manhattan editor named Sophia Lindqvist, had so far declined all interview requests.

Nathan, at the counter, looked at her over the rim of his coffee.

"They're saying you're mysterious."

"I'm saying I'm busy."

"Soph." He put the mug down. "They are about to ring you for the television. You have been told."

"I know."

"You have been told that you have to say yes."

"I know what I've been told."

She picked up the spoon. She put it in the sink. She had a distinct, odd feeling of watching a woman in her own kitchen do these things, a woman in a gray cashmere cardigan with her hair in a knot and a pale, intelligent, closed face, and wondering who on earth she was.

…

The launch party was held on the nineteenth floor, in the glass room where she had once been offered the book, and for two hours it seemed to her that the whole of New York had gotten into the elevator.

There was champagne in a silver trough. There were canapés on tiered trays, tiny things, poached pear and goat cheese, shrimp on blinis, rolled slivers of rare beef on toast. A string quartet in the corner played something by Debussy, and under the high bright windows a crowd of publishers, critics, agents and television producers moved in slow swirls, like the water in a basin. She wore the dark green silk dress that Nathan had bought her in Paris on their tenth anniversary. She had a glass in her hand. She had not touched it.

"Darling." Margaret appeared at her elbow in a haze of tuberose. "You are the most beautiful woman in the room, and you look as though you're waiting to be shot. Smile."

"I'm smiling."

"You are baring your teeth." Margaret slipped an arm through hers and steered her toward the window. "Look at them. They're mad for you. The man from the Times is practically in tears. He says he read it in one night and had to stop twice to wash his hands."

"That's an odd thing to tell an author."

"It's the highest praise they have." She lowered her voice. "You do understand, don't you, that you have done something astonishing? That this will be the book that you are known for? That in three months nobody will remember the Maine lighthouse keeper, or care?"

"It was Maine."

"What?"

"The lighthouse," said Sophia. "It was in Maine."

Margaret blinked, and then laughed, softly, and patted her arm. "You see? You are exactly yourself. I love you for it."

Sophia smiled. It felt, from the inside, like wearing a mask made of her own face.

She had been trained for twenty years to stand beside a book and receive praise on its behalf. She had done it for novels that sold four thousand copies, with the gracious, unemphatic humility of a person standing guard over a grave. But she had never been the one it was for. And she found now, as the crowd pressed closer, as hands were shaken and cards pressed into her palm, as a pretty young woman from a morning show said breathlessly, "Oh, I have to book you, you have the most extraordinary presence," that something was happening to her chest. A slow warmth. A swelling, like a loaf rising in a cold oven.

It was pleasure. It was very simple. It was the pleasure of being looked at.

She had not known she was so hungry for it.

…

At nine, a girl in a black dress stopped her by the stairs.

She was about twenty-two, with a round, earnest, pink-cheeked face and a tote bag from a bookstore, and she held out a copy of the book with the dust jacket slightly creased, as if she had been carrying it for days. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I'm an intern at Vanity Fair. I'm not supposed to be here. I came with my boss. But I just wanted to say. I read it last night."

"Thank you."

"I couldn't put it down. I stayed up until four. And I want to ask you something, if I may." She swallowed. "Was it true? About the taste? I know it's silly. I know it's the most awful thing anyone could ask. But when I got to the part about the silence, I found that I was... that I could feel it. And I felt so hungry, afterward. Isn't that strange? I went into the kitchen and ate a whole loaf of bread."

Sophia stood perfectly still.

Behind the girl, over her shoulder, the quartet had begun a gentle, climbing passage, and a champagne cork went off like a distant shot, and a ripple of laughter ran across the room. The girl's face was shining, earnest, innocent, shamefaced. She had asked it as one asks a priest about a sin that has pleased her.

"I think," said Sophia carefully, "that you should ask yourself why you needed to know."

"But did you?" The round pink face tilted. "Did you ever want to know? When he was telling you?"

"No," said Sophia.

She had heard her own voice answer. It was low and level and sounded entirely sincere. And behind it, in the quiet back chamber of her mind, a voice that was not hers, courteous and amused, murmured: Does it frighten you more that I said it, or that you want to keep it?

She smiled at the girl. She signed the book. She wrote, in her small neat hand, For Hannah, with all good wishes, and when the girl had gone, clutching it to her chest, she stood at the head of the stairs for a long moment with the pen in her fingers, and noticed that there was a dark smudge of ink along her thumb. She had pressed too hard.

…

They took a cab home in the rain.

She sat with her head against the cool glass and watched the city slide by, a long wet shimmer of red and gold, and Nathan, beside her, said nothing for eleven blocks. He had come to the party late, from a site meeting, in a rumpled suit, and had hovered at the edge of the room with a glass of seltzer, a tall tired man looking for a chair. She had seen him across the crowd. She had seen him watching. She had turned her face away, and gone on smiling.

"I'm proud of you," he said at last.

It was a lie. He said it in the voice of a man reading a line he has rehearsed in the car.

"Thank you."

"I mean it. I think it's a remarkable book. I read the galleys last week, while you were asleep."

She turned her head. "You said you wouldn't."

"I know. I'm sorry. I wanted to know." The cab turned a corner, and a flare of neon crossed his face and was gone. "It's good. It's terribly good. I was sick twice. I think it will make you famous. And I think that I would give a great deal, Soph, if it had never been written."

"Nathan."

"I'm not asking you to stop. It's too late for that. I'm only telling you, so that you'll know I said it." He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I used to be able to tell what you were thinking. For fifteen years. I could read your face across a street. And lately, I look at you, and it's like trying to read a letter in a lit window from the road. The shape is there. I just can't make out the words."

She said nothing. The rain ran down the glass.

"Do you remember," he said, "after the hospital?"

Her throat closed.

"You didn't eat for four months," said Nathan gently. "Do you remember? I used to stand in that kitchen at midnight, making things. Soup. Custard. Noodles. I would have sold the house to see you eat a bite of toast. And one night in March you came down, in your nightgown, and sat at the table, and ate a bowl of rice with soy sauce, and cried. I had never been so glad of anything in my life."

"I remember."

"That was hunger, Soph. That was somebody coming back to life." He turned toward her, and in the dim light his big untidy face was naked and tired and full of a grief so patient that she could hardly look at it. "I have been watching you cook for six weeks. At two in the morning. Steaks. Chops. Things I didn't know we had. And you eat standing up, over the sink, with your eyes shut. And it isn't that. It isn't that. I would know."

"It's just that I'm tired. I've been working."

"Please don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't tell me a story," said Nathan. "I've been married to an editor for fifteen years. I know what they sound like when they're rewriting."

The cab stopped. They had arrived. The brownstone stood in the rain with its stoop light on, and the plane trees swayed over it, and the driver turned off the meter and waited, politely, with his eyes on the road.

…

She cooked that night after he had gone to bed.

She did not turn on the overhead light. She worked by the small lamp over the stove, in her stocking feet and the green silk dress, with her hair coming down, and she took from the refrigerator the thick dark steak she had bought on her way home from the office that afternoon from a butcher in Cobble Hill. It was a beautiful piece of meat. Two inches thick, marbled, deeply red. She laid it on the board and looked at it for some time.

Then she heated the pan, until it smoked, and set it down.

The hiss was extraordinary. It rose in the little kitchen like a held breath released, and the smell came up with it, rich and savage, iron and salt and dark char. Her eyes closed. Her whole body, from her throat to her knees, drew taut as a bowstring. She turned the steak with her fingers, because she could not wait for the tongs, and the heat bit her, and she did not care.

She ate it at the counter. She ate every bite.

When it was gone she stood quite still with her hands flat on the cold marble and her chin down and her heart going slowly, heavily, like a man walking up a stair. The kitchen was dim and warm and silent. A faint drip came from the tap. She was aware of a curious, gentle fullness, and of something else beneath it, a hollow, quiet and unlit, like the room at the back of a house where no one has lived.

It's only beef, she thought.

She said it aloud, in a small clear voice. "It's only beef."

The words fell into the silence and were not answered, and she waited. She waited, in the lamp's yellow light, with her mouth still tasting of iron, for the sense of satisfaction, the sense of rest. She waited for the hunger to stop.

It did not stop.

It had not gotten smaller. It had turned, very quietly, to face her.

Sophia opened her eyes. On the counter beside the sink, beside the pan and the knife, lay the small gold twist of foil that she had taken out of her coat pocket that morning, and put down, and forgotten. She looked at it. She looked at it for a long time. Then she picked it up, and unwrapped it, and put the butterscotch in her mouth.

It was sweet, and thin, and ordinary. It tasted of a child's pocket. It tasted of a man in a cardigan standing in the cold with a flashlight.

She turned off the lamp, and the dark closed in, and she stood in it, sucking on the candy, and weeping without a sound.