Broken
In the five star restaurant I drank a strong cocktail, sipped at a second. I pretended the modern chair was comfortable, our silence was companionable, and smiled when the server set the platter between us.
Seven miniature portions of pasta, beautifully plated.
She described them and I thanked her, although I hadn’t heard a word, would not have understood if I had. When she walked away I looked across the table at my husband, the man I thought I still loved. “I’ve been studying the Rotarian four-way test,” I said. “I really don’t understand why it’s okay for a Sergeant at Arms to have an extramarital affair with his president-elect.”
He didn’t compose himself quite quickly enough.
I whispered the acidic words out loud. “You and Rosie are having an affair.”
I waited.
For years he’d denied all his infidelities and claimed I was insane until I almost believed him. When he started accusing me of cheating I had no idea how to prove a negative. Not that it mattered.
I waited, blinking hard at the tiny garnishes, imagining the Chef using tweezers to place the basil leaf, pistachio shards and sliver of parmesan on the first, wondering if the gold leaf on the next had any flavour. This was before cell phones, Instagram, taking photographs of meals.
“Nigel?”
Nothing.
My hope that he would take this opportunity to finally speak the truth was not to be realised. The heart-shaped drops of lemon sauce which must have been painted on to the matte black stoneware with a pipette started to split.
That afternoon we had stood in the queue for our allotted fifteen minutes with a crowd of strangers to see da Vinci’s The Last Supper. In a piece of fiction this metaphor would have been too implausible.
I shoved my chair away from the table, causing the quail egg’s yolk to slip from its perch atop a twirl of spaghetti. It should have been tucked down into a nest, protected on all sides. Too fragile to survive the fall, it broke open, bright yellow on black.
The guide had explained that in da Vinci’s time, Judas was usually dressed in yellow, to symbolise greed, betrayal, treason. The choice to clothe him in blue and green, but cast him in the shadows, had changed the course of colour theory in art.
I dipped my finger into the egg, smeared it across the platter’s edge, licked my finger. But without the Pecorino Romano and black pepper, it only tasted like raw egg.
Louise Ells earned a PhD in Creative Writing. The author of Notes Towards Recovery and Lies I Told My Sister, she currently teaches at the University of Toronto and Cambridge University, and can be found at https://www.louiseells.ca/and https://www.instagram.com/louiseellsauthor/ .