“Ziegelman’s Astrology” by Evan Wiig

Author Questions:

• To whom do your tastes belong?

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Each night they’ve set the table for five, pouring just a few drops in Ziegelman’s glass. An old pewter chalice of course, three times the size of their own. They took it down from the mantel for good measure. Lay it out on the table as bait. Still no sign. Three days now and already they’ve polished off what Alice set aside for his arrival: a vintage she carried with her on the plane, managed to keep hidden within her suitcase until early that morning when its stray cork nearly brought her tumbling down the stairs.

Escaping the evening winds just in time, Zoey and Joel return from town with more provisions. Alice holds a wet bundle of rags against her swollen knee, the ice melted hours before. She waits at the kitchen window until the view clears—towels and baskets evacuating the beach outside—before turning to peek in the grocery bags they’ve left on the counter. Joel doesn’t notice. Never does. But to Zoey it’s obvious, the contortion of Alice’s lips, how she rotates and fingers a tin can’s ribs. “You wanted them on the vine, I know,” says Zoey. “But they’re out of season. All they had were these spotty tumorous things.”

“Never seen an heirloom tomato?” asks Alice.

“They looked unhealthy. And they were charging up the ass for ‘em. And for everything else, too.” Zoey taps the list that Alice made for them. “Any idea what your little bottle of truffle oil cost us? Blessed by the Pope, is it? Could’ve bought another handle for that price.”

“A handle?”

“Oh, come on,” says Zoey, rummaging through the cupboards. “You’re on vacation, for fuck’s sake, a thousand miles away from that snooty academy. Don’t you think we’ve had enough bordeaux and sancerre for one week?”

“Is that—?”

“Sancho’s. For old time’s sake.”

Should’ve stayed in Paris, Alice tries to say, but Zoey steps on her line, laughing, “Ah ha,” and sets out four glasses, breaks the seal of a plastic bottle, its half-gallon bulk dimpled in her grip. “So you haven’t forgotten. Joel! Adam! Come quick.”

“Those are coupes,” says Alice. “For champagne.”

“And would you look at that,” Zoey holds hers up, first toward the Virgin, wood-engraved and staring down from the doorway beneath which the boys appear in the kitchen, then higher, toward an unsteady ceiling fan. “Tequila fits in ‘em, too. Now then, to Ziegelman: whenever, however, and with whatever havoc he may soon enough stumble in with.”

“Must be hitchhiking,” Alice says after a clumsy clinking makes it rounds.

“Then we’ll be lucky if he ever makes it.” Joel’s lips are still wet and puckered. “People around here, same as they’ve always been: good hearts, but guarded; hard-pressed to find them going out of their way for another.”

“No,” says Zoey, “Ziegelman can do better than that. My bet’s that he rolls in behind the wheel of a fire truck with an entourage of geriatrics liberated from that old hospice down the road.”

“That place still open?” asks Alice, recoiling from the sniff she takes in place of her shot. “If so, they’re bound to remember him; won’t get past the gate.”

“It’s Ziegelman. Dare you expect anything less? He’ll say it was the moon, how it’s rising tonight above the celestial hydrant. That he had no choice but to find a way.”

“Well, the new rector wants this place cleaned up by end of the week,” says Joel, “so the sooner the better and, considering the last time Ziegelman was here—”

Beneath the room’s breath, laughter swells. An old story doesn’t need to be retold. Just its conclusion. Adam, as if prompted from offstage, finally lifts his eyes to the others and recites, if a few beats late, “They never did find that squirrel, did they?”

At last, a constellation. Joel’s shoulders sink as their voices align around him for the very first time that week. It was Ziegelman who’d held them together, not God’s plan, nor even just the seating assignments at St. Vincent’s—certainly wasn’t Joel’s doing, though somehow the last seven years had him thinking otherwise. A matter of astrology, Ziegelman’s astrology. Only he could’ve taken a disparate gaggle like that, once floating aimless in the same pleated uniforms through the same halls of that seaside orphanage, and decipher in them a single myth.

Another toast then, to their astrologer! The others oblige Joel’s outstretched glass—even Alice swallows her shot. Better that than celebrate what’s really brought them here.

*

To all but Joel this house smells of the clergy’s quarters, of the half-cracked doors and forbidden stairwells that once stirred childish curiosities. Adam had worried he’d be the first to arrive that week at St. Vincent’s, didn’t want to be alone to watch the last remaining tie to their old home sever. Joel’s decision, nine months shy of ordination, didn’t fully set in until Adam, strolling down the hill from their old dormitories to that sand-swept porch of the seminarian residence, found Joel hauling out boxes and what furniture didn’t belong to the Holy See. Their handshake lingered, as neither could let go until they’d determined who’d drawn first. Sixteen years of their lives they’d lived within view of each other’s bedrooms and not once had their hands clasped in that starched configuration. Might as well move onto surnames, too—though calling Joel a mister might broach what Adam vowed to avoid.

Later that first evening, pretending to stargaze while searching the horizon for the others’ headlights, Adam broke the silence that settled in as soon those rooms’ stench lost their mystery, saying, “Sure as hell don’t get stars like these back in the city.”

“No,” said Joel, “Suppose not. Remember that telescope?”

“What telescope?”

“Come on, you know the telescope. His telescope. Whatever happened to it?”

It was tucked beneath Ziegelman’s arm when he first arrived at St. Vincent’s, twice the boy’s length when fully extended. Their palms and noses pressed against windows facing from opposite wings of that old stone building on the hill, Joel and Adam watched as he emerged from a van, a tripod dragging behind him. When a disapproving deacon confiscated both it and the cashmere scarf that Ziegelman wore wrapped around his head, Adam said while Joel thought, in a unison that otherwise they’d never have known, What the fuck?

“Couldn’t tell you.”

“He always talked about getting it back, didn’t he?”

“It was a gift,” said Adam, pushing against the porch railing and turning towards the door. “From his parents before they died. I do remember he used to say he’d grow up to be an astronomer. But he got the words jumbled.” Before giving up on the interruption of headlights and returning inside, Adam paused just long enough to break his vow, “Don’t really need a telescope for astrology. It’s like our old faith, isn’t it? Hardly need to look up at the sky.”

*

Without Ziegelman there to point out their constellation, Joel placed his next hope—his only hope of salvaging that handshake’s aftermath—in Zoey. She’d planned on driving down with Adam, but not until the second morning did a cab with city plates pull up, a Vishnu ornament dangling from the rearview mirror. Duffle bag slung around her sleepy shoulders, Zoey stumbled out from the back, onto the driveway and still, three days later, she’s not let it go: “But I did wait,” says Adam, lining up the vegetables that Alice has thoroughly instructed him to julienne, not dice. “For two hours I waited. Like I did last week in the garden. Like I always do.”

Only the two of them have remained within a hundred miles of each other: in the same neighborhood, on the same subway line, complaining of the same faulty driers at the same laundromat. The very moment St. Vincent’s grip loosened, Zoey and Adam made a break for the city, children arriving at a playground unsupervised and with fake ID’s. Between jobs scanning barcodes and buttressing smiles that once earned priests’ suspicions but that now garnered patrons’ tips, they spent nearly every night together, gathering up new and exciting and easily forgotten names, afterward sharing or trading them like baseball cards.

Then the yawns began. “It’s only ten o’clock,” Zoey would say as those first few years wore on. Those smiles stiffened as the bright sheen beyond their old hilltop dulled, their once wide eyes leveling out like those of everyone around them. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

But Adam was plotting out his morning even before their second round arrived. Over the jumbled din of crowded bars, he’d begun counting seeds and rearranging woodchips in his mind, how they’d meander through a garden salvaged from the empty lot across the street from his new apartment. “The season’s getting hot,” he’d tell Zoey who at first hardly noticed the heavy boots he’d walked in with or the grass stains on his knees. “By noontime I’m useless out there.”

“Out where?!” she’d yell, but for once it wasn’t a deadpan charade he’d stumbled in with; the soil beneath his fingernails wasn’t just for laughs. “But it’s still happy hour!”

The earlier Adam let those nights go, the later Zoey went out chasing them. Life isn’t meant to be shoved into the ground, watered, waited for. Depending on the sun like a lazy agriculturist was no better than waiting for salvation back at St. Vincent’s. The best of life is here and now. And it’s nocturnal too, an elusive creature to be sought out, tracked down, seized. The first stop on that hunt: their local bar. She knows it won’t remain there long, not such an easy mark as that. Reconnaissance is all, to analyze droppings, capture the address of a crowded loft. And when finally among readjusting shoulders in hallways, she listens, ear against the ground, trying to overhear which rooftop will later brim over from fire escapes or from a stairwell. And up there, feet crunching gravel and tar, under stars no one can see with all those city lights, she’ll mingle enough to find another set of tracks, another invitation—the further out the better; the more inconvenient the more worthy of the trek; and if the location is to be strictly kept secret or discerned only with clues, by all means, onward. At last, from a vibrating warehouse out near the canal where a film of oil shimmers in the daylight, a hundred more hunters like her will pour out to make their way home or, if they still have it in them, to each others’ homes. Empty-handed perhaps, but they always have stories to tell.

“What is it you’re after?” Adam would ask and though he’d listen to whatever reason she gave, it wasn’t long before his first yawn arrived even before Zoey’s daily call, dialed while still tangled in her sheets, mascara smeared, glitter strewn, to relate the hunt he’d so sadly missed out on.

“It’s not us,” said Zoey, phone set between her cheek and pillow, the week they’d both received Joel’s news and invitation. “It’s our lives that no longer align. They’re two different things, aren’t they?” They resolved to converge the next day upon Adam’s garden, to meet up in person at least once before setting off for St. Vincent’s. She for a nightcap and he for his day’s first cup of tea, they’d meet among the summer’s overgrowth to do their yawning together, one waxing, the other waning.

“I don’t get it,” says Adam, who’s not just dicing but thoroughly mincing what might’ve been the tubers Alice found that morning in the farmers’ market. “How could you still manage to be late?”

“But I did show up,” says Zoey. “You weren’t there.”

“It was noon,” says Adam.

*

Alice had worried about leaving the vegetables unsupervised (pureed now, spilling over the sides of that cutting board in the other room), but her hands are full back in the kitchen. Joel won’t stop lifting the lids from pots and burying his face in the steam, blessing every skillet on the stove with a long, inhaling smile. “At least someone,” she says, “appreciates my work.”

“Your gifts,” says Joel, pausing to let that word sink, to dissolve like the salt Alice holds pinched between her fingers just above a boiling surface.

Before letting it drop, she tilts her head toward Joel. “Didn’t expect to get that call, you know. Not about your leaving this place, that is,” she says, “but about—what I mean is—I thought, all this time, you were still angry with me.”

“I was,” says Joel, the dimples of his smile fixed. “Perhaps not angry; flustered. You left without saying goodbye. Before we’d finished our oath.”

Alice finally lets that pinch drop from between her fingers and returns to a bowl of dough on the counter. “I had to,” she says. “We began that silly fast because of Daniel, right? His revelation while wandering Babylon hungry? Well, it worked. Six days without food and suddenly there it was, my own: I had no choice but to leave as soon as I could.”

“To become a chef,” Joel laughs. “A master of earthly delights. But seriously though, I’m happy for you. Proud of how far you’ve come. Look, it’s very kind of you all, beating around the bush like this, trying not to pry into my decision, but I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. What, you think I’d invite you out here just to help box up my things? Look at the way you devote yourself to this meal, how you allow for what’s possible; you’re inspired. It’s no different from what I’ve been trying to do here. But the collar and the incense, you know, it’s all just decoration, garnish.”

Alice glances down, as if suddenly realizing her hands are covered in flour, that her wrists are rolling, that her fingers are her own. But seeing them, and seeing Joel’s gaze now steady upon her kneading, Alice slows her pace, takes notice of the dough, how it pulls at the patterns of her palms. And the rhythm, too—her movements that Joel, with those same inflexible dimples set, begin to imitate beside her as if just another ritual practice of devotion. Alice’s cheeks burn red. Joel laughs, “See? No need for divine revelation. This, it’s your own. And you came back to show for it, share of it. I only wish you didn’t have to go back so soon. Gonna get expensive, inviting myself over for dinner. When I’m all cleared out of here, maybe—just maybe I’ll join you out there.”

“Taste this.” She holds up a wooden spoon and cups her hand beneath his chin. “More pepper, you think?”

“Add or take away one single grain,” he says, broth still steaming from the back of his mouth, “and it’d be a crime against gastrology.”

“Gastronomy. Do me a favor, will you? Go make sure Zoey isn’t fucking up the table arrangement? And that she’s left a little for the rest of us to drink with dinner.”

*

The setting and drinks, Alice thought when first assigning tasks, no need to enroll in culinary school for that. But with the lids returned to their pots, Joel skips into the other room to find only Ziegelman’s chalice set. Zoey’s plopped down a big cardboard box between what remains of old Sancho’s and the carnage of Adam’s cutting board. Something full bodied and just slightly astringent were Alice’s instructions, given their evening’s menu. “Schlitz,” was Zoey’s solution, found and announced, halted in the aisles of a grocery store in town, with hand placed over her heart, “the beer that made Milwaukee famous. ‘Bout as astringent as they come, no?”

Joel’s never had a Shlitz. Doesn’t know what astringent tastes like. But when she throws him a can, there in the dinning room, and when he cracks it open, slurps up warm foam that returns to his throat carried in a belch, that same long inhaling smile again spans his face. “An excellent choice,” he says and sets in Zoey’s arms a pile of napkins from the cupboard. “Now then, why don’t you set these out and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Skipping away in search of the extra silverware he’s never had the need nor chance to use, Joel’s whistling echoes in the hallway, then fades. Zoey leans in, over the table. “I’m bound to get cavities.”

“From the Schlitz?” says Adam, scraping aside the ruins of carrots. “Malabsorption, chronic pancreatitis, perhaps a failed liver. But I think when it comes to cavities, you’re safe.”

“Not the beer, dumb ass; him.”

“Joel take you on a date to the candy store in town? Is that why you two took so long getting back?”

“My sweet tooth’s gone. He hasn’t changed. After all this time—even after giving up on the whole cassock and collar—he’s still the same.”

“You used to like that: him, adorable little—” Adam’s words slow to a jog, like a runner who’s forgotten where he’s headed, “bowl of sugar.”

“Used to love it,” says Zoey, oblivious to how his words ambled off course, stammering to a halt. “Or I loved that I liked it. Made me feel better—about myself, that I could like something so sweet.”

Adam watches his own lips as they move with no more grace nor thought than the knife in his hand, saying, “Still think he’s for real, then?”

“Wish that he wasn’t,” she says, “I’d prefer that he’d grown bitter. In town, walking around from store to store, I kept having these thoughts. Nothing unusual, just thoughts: snide jabs at the locals, sarcastic quips for that town’s contempt for us, the reject orphans disowned now even by God. We passed this taxidermist’s shop. I’d have scoffed, but how could I when Joel starts going on about the under-appreciated craft of stuffing road kill with plaster? He wanted to ask the artist—and yes, Joel used that word: the artist—how they settled upon a single pose to sum up a life. Said it must’ve made them think about their own lives in single moments, that it could make us do the same. Should have seen his eyes, Adam. Like he’d just found god for the millionth time. It was that same look that always made my meanest thoughts just float away.”

“You know,” says Adam, moving on to the radishes, though still his eyes are neither on them nor with Zoey, “I’m pretty sure they don’t find those animals on the side of the road.”

“And now?” Zoey sighs, twirling then tossing the napkins aside, “I’m just censoring myself. Those same old thoughts are just quarantined. Perhaps you’re right; perhaps I am safe from cavities. It’s contamination I need to worry about. Today, on our drive back from town, I swear I could feel it leaking or brimming over inside of me. I wanted to sing for him. Swear to god. A hymn! Just belt out Ave Maria with all the tone-deaf glory my voice could summon. Then I’d take the tears that would appear so predictably on his cheeks, as if I’d really moved him, then place them into that quarantine. A sterilizer. Or maybe to save for later, to pity, poke fun of when we’re back home, safe in the city. Don’t look at me like that; of course I still care for him. Sweetest little fucker in the world. Wouldn’t feel the need to keep him safe from it all if I didn’t.”

“We promised before we came out here not to dwell on the obvious,” says Adam. “People change.”

“Not him.” Zoey cracks open her second beer and holds out another for Adam. “That’s my point: he hasn’t. Call him a bowl of sugar.”

“What?”

“Call him an adorable little bowl of sugar like you just did. Or that name you used to have for him.”

“I had a lot of names for him.”

“Holy Driftwood? Wasn’t that it? Stiff and drifting. Call him that, will you? Just once, I need you to be mean with me. Right now. Drink this shitty beer, mock the goofy smile Joel smiled when he sipped it, and then tell me he’s a bowl of sugar. Or just say something that’s not so. Anything.”

*

Zoey never was much for observations, not of the most obvious kind. At least in that she herself hadn’t changed. When gathered together in the kitchen earlier that evening, Adam had joined in toasting Ziegelman, as he’d done the previous night and the one before that. Joel won’t stop insisting they lift their glasses to a reunion still one man short. But each time, while the others closed their eyes and tilted back their heads to drink, Adam returned his glass to the table.

Zoey began calling him an old man soon after his first yawn. But now, with that beer extended out before him, it’s she who seems old, senile, oblivious. Like the old woman who tended the garden before Adam took over. Must be pushing ninety, he’d guessed, the first time he noticed her early one morning—which in those days was still late in the evening for him and Zoey. The sun was rising over rooftops and water towers as Adam stumbled back home, his head pounding from the bass amp he’d been pushed up against all night. But he hadn’t minded; it was a good beat. Or was so bad it was good.

As he turned the corner of his block, the woman emerged from the basement of an old row house, a watering can dangling from her arm. She shuffled past him as if he were invisible, towards the fence of an overgrown lot. From a faucet she filled the can, turned, unlocked the gate and made her way back to where a single row of azaleas stood among knotweed and dandelions. When streams trickled beyond the soil as far as the yellow stalks, she turned, locked up the gate and returned home, again shuffling past him without a word.

Scaffolding appeared on the building beside the garden a few months later. The roof was stripped, the facade repainted and new windows went in. But not a single step in the old woman’s routine changed. Didn’t even flinch when dust swept from behind tarps flapping on the top floor. When plumbers arrived, Adam prepared for a showdown; they’d left the faucet outside the garden’s gate intact, but entirely pulled up the pipes that led to it. Yet the old woman didn’t put up a fight. The plumbers came and went, the scaffolding came down and new units were on the market by the following month, selling better than anyone had intended. The old woman hardly noticed. Each morning, and for this Adam had to wake up early enough to see for himself, she’d rise and shuffle past his stoop where he’d taken his seat with a cup of coffee. She’d twist the faucet and hold out the can for as long as it once took to fill it up. Then she’d turn, unlock the gate and make her way back to that row of azaleas. The empty can dipped, leveled back. She’d wipe its dusty nozzle. And like usual, with the gate locked behind her, she’d return home.

Though there’s not a wrinkle to be found, that’s what Zoey looks like now, oblivious with that outstretched beer. She’s only seen the garden from the outside. And from the sidewalk there isn’t much to see except chain-link laced with bindweed that Adam now spends his days pulling up instead of recovering from evenings out. The azaleas wilted long before summer arrived that year, but not until October did his neighbor, after a full season tending that barren plot of dirt, do the same, her own roots pulled and carried from that basement by unhurried paramedics.

“You know,” Adam says, unsure if the new azaleas he’d planted will be okay without him for just a few more days, “if you don’t mind, I’d rather not be mean with you or say what’s not so.”

Ziegelman, people say whenever they meet him, is a character; Adam plays a character. The others had now confused the two. After that first night on the porch with Joel, Adam figured he’d give it a try, for the very first time: not saying what isn’t so and seeing what he gets. So far, judging from Zoey’s disappointment, it isn’t going over well. She and the others preferred his old thin veneer. It made them comfortable to have that space between his words and what he meant to maneuver around and within. Growing more nervous by the day, even when lounging on that porch, all they do is skim the horizon. At the very least, Ziegelman’s arrival will fill the silence they all know has nothing at all to do with reminiscence or an ocean’s tranquility. Until then, they’re looking to Adam for a stand-in. But not saying what isn’t so hasn’t been as easy as Adam had hoped—as easy as Zoey thinks that it is for Joel. Maybe there isn’t room enough for two so-sayers.

Certainly there isn’t room for three. Even Ziegelman, though what he says when pointing up at the sky is rarely so in any scientific sense; for him and that batshit astrology it is without doubt what’s so. Adam used to love mocking those absurd constellations. While wandering lost through city streets, between parties, or while lying on a rooftop just before dawn, he’d describe them to Zoey as Ziegelman once described them to him. “That one there, that’s old Rat Maxter. Used to live in my walls and chew holes in the cereal boxes. But that’s before he joined a band.” No matter how hard she laughed Adam wouldn’t break character. “Now he’s a star. See? Those are his ears. And if you follow along that cluster, that’s his guitar.” Adam savored it because, for him, it’ll never be so. They’re just stars, burning balls of gas seen through—what was it? A few too many hallucinogens? No, because Ziegelman’s always been that way, from the day he arrived at St. Vincent’s. The drugs that came later just make it easier for strangers to understand the way he is or at least saves his friends the explanation.

*

The azaleas won’t mind the new silence. Because in trying not to say what isn’t so, Adam hasn’t said much of anything. But someone needs to make up for the noise that Ziegelman isn’t making. “Goddammit,” Zoey shouts, slamming her hand on the cutting board, fingers nearly severed under Adam’s knife that carries on chopping nonetheless. “You have to say something!”

For once, Alice doesn’t cringe at another of Zoey’s outbursts. In fact, she’d have done the same had the girl not beaten her to it. Never did Alice expect a standing ovation at every meal’s conclusion, but each time they gather around the table, Adam’s new volume has grown only more shrill, a deadening restraint applied to more than just words.

Alice couldn’t help watching Adam, as thin now as when they first met at St. Vincent’s, slide around on his plate the oysters she’d so carefully prepared on the first day of that lopsided reunion. Joel’s right: this is her calling, her gift, and it’s being pushing aside, the card left unread. That he’s gone dry certainly hasn’t got past Alice. The prince of liquids, she remembers reading in class, transports the palate to the highest pitch of exaltation. And though she’s lugged all the way from Paris the best bottles she could afford only to find Adam’s glass crusted with oxidized Bordeaux, she respects his decision. But the moment when he reached over the gomasio salmon and eel pâté she’d made for them on their second night, Alice felt her eye twitch, watching him twist off only a heel of bread, the rest of the meal spent slowly pinching its insides out from the crust.

“I’m sorry about your vegetables,” Adam says.

Spinning around the kitchen, Alice gracefully dashes paprika and crowns plates with leafy garnish. “My vegetables?” she says. “I’m not upset about the vegetables, Adam, or about how you chopped them. It’s that you refer to them as my vegetables. They’re not mine. They’re ours. Meals aren’t owned, they’re shared.”

An instructor had said that on her first day at the Academy, in a requisite course they call The Table’s Foundation. Though a long way from Paris and in someone else’s kitchen with unfamiliar tools, those words now return to her like mantras.

“My apologies,” Adam says, tries to leave it at that.

“Jesus, Adam.” Her mantras fall short. “What’s gotten into you?”

“People,” he says, turning away, “they change.”

With one hand she grabs his shoulder while the other grips a ladle aimed at his ribs. “But they still need to eat. Feed the stomach and you feed the soul,” she says, releasing him and returning to the watercress, carefully laying leaves over five plates exactly the way her instructors did in class, as if each ingredient were a question.

“Feed the soul?” says Adam, gazing at the last leafy stem she holds out for him to take. “What the fuck is this, communion? And you wanna know what’s gotten into me? I’ve been trying to keep my feet on the ground, that’s what. Someone’s gotta do it. Staying present, head not stuck in the clouds. Seeing what’s so. The dirt all this shit came out of. Avoiding frills and distractions.”

“Distractions?” says Alice, and for the next minute the beurre noisette is left in the saucepan to burn. “And exactly what, might I ask, are these frills and distractions distracting you from?”

“What’s so,” says Adam.

“Beyond food, you mean? This? Beyond food and making food and sharing food? And having a nice conversation with old friends over a good meal? What, Adam, please, do tell me, is beyond that?”

“That’s my point: nothing.” But now Adam isn’t sure whether his words or their intonation are in fact so. “But if that’s what’s so, nothing,” he says, staring past his fingers pinching at his chin while smoke from the pan drifts past his eyes, “then so be it.”

“Perhaps nothing, yes. I see,” says Alice, reaching for a wooden tenderizer and searching the counter for an excuse. “Well, I’m afraid I’m too busy doing something to worry about nothing. I’ve been distracted all these years learning the arts of distraction—making and learning and perfecting and refining so that I might give something while you’ve made and perfected and refined and given nothing the whole time we’ve been here. Well, perhaps you’ve enjoyed your nothing, but we haven’t. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some somethings to take care of, some frills and distractions I’d very much like now to distract you all with.”

“Gladly,” says Joel, sneaking in along the counter behind them. “Anything else you need me to taste?” In one hand he holds his Schlitz and with his other, leaning over the stove, wafts the smoke from the beurre noisette, caked black to the bottom of the pan, into his face. With another of his long inhaling smiles Joel coos, “Such a tragedy, Ziegelman, that he won’t get to savor any of this. To Ziegelman, yes?”

He lifts his can. But Adam doesn’t have a drink. A glass sits beside Alice on the counter, but she’s remained still and silent, a first since early that morning when that stray cork left her stretched out on her back, clutching the banister. The ladle in her hand, like her shoulders, drops. Uncertain glances convene amid a cloud of smoke. The saucepan snaps. Curling his can of beer inward, Joel wraps his lips around its foam, fumbles with a peppermill, taps the knolls of a cheese grader with fingertips, stutters, “Anything I can do to help?”

After years spent at the bottom of a strict kitchen’s hierarchy, learning French by way of angry demands thrown at her from sweaty chefs, Alice had felt confident applying to the Academy. But by the end of her first semester, the space between stove and counter had transformed from her sole refuge into a mystery. The questions posed by her instructors began reaching beyond leavening techniques or the cuts of meat.

With the same tilt of the head that she was left with at the end of each class period, Alice slowly reaches out and turns off the stove. “Yes,” she says, as if maybe she’s finally got an answer—for them, for Joel, to her own life’s calling. “Yes, there is. Why don’t you take this all out to the table while I finish up the soup. A little something special. Almost ready. Just a few more minutes. It’ll be worth the wait, I promise.”

“I have complete faith,” says Joel.

“Do you?” says Adam.

*

It’s a long few minutes. Long enough for Zoey to fill her champagne coupe with Shlitz three times. Long enough for Joel to begin a few more stories about Ziegelman—hopping trains or when he lived for a summer with that lobster boat captain or the time he was expelled from St. Vincent’s when he arrived at mass wearing nothing but a—“please,” says Adam. The stories begin tonight but they never get far. “Can we please stop talking about things we already know? And things we know everyone else here already knows? We all know we all know Ziegelman. We were there. We get it.”

With only a thin dishrag between her fingers and the searing handles of the pot, Alice could make her entrance now. But she lingers in the walkway from the kitchen. It was during her third semester, when the kitchen finally began reverting once more into a safe and sacred space, in a class, Gastronomy of the Mind they called it, that she learned what it truly means to whet an appetite. Hold it, she chants, just a moment longer; let the room breath like a good cabernet.

Zoey’s posture remains fixed, slumped back in her seat; Adam’s too, curled over in his; but when Alice finally emerges and places that soup in the middle of the table, Joel’s chair tilts forward until he’s lifted from it, hovering over it. “Dinner,” she announces, ladling carefully out a single bowl and setting it down in front of Joel, “is served.”

Forgetting her own and the others’ plates, Alice closely watches Joel behold a skin form on the steaming surface. His neck strains and his face stretches, eyes and jaw gaping as wide as they’ll go. Reaching for his spoon, a salty condensation gathers above his lips, sliding down where still only whiskers sprout, merging with the spittle at the corners of his mouth. A few drops splatter, some back into the bowl and others onto the tablecloth. Blowing impatiently, he inches a spoonful closer and closer until it vanishes into his mouth. Before a single drop tickles his tonsils, Joel’s eyes shut and that old familiar inhaling smile reaches back to launch a euphoric moan across the table that, like his stories of Ziegelman tonight, won’t get very far.

Only Joel will know the taste of that soup. A single spoonful aside, the rest will remain for years in the sandy tufts of the seminary’s carpet. Cutting short his cry of ecstasy, Alice slurs, “For fuck’s sake, really?” and sweeps her arm across the table, toppling candle sticks and knocking loose from Joel’s hand his spoon. Folding the napkin in her lap and placing it upon the empty plate before her, Alice stands, turns and walks out. The screen door closes softly. Over the steaming stain she’s spread across the length of two rooms, Zoey and Adam are quick to follow.

Her legs dangle from the porch’s edge. Up on the hill, the lights from their old home go out one by one, as Alice puffs away at the cigarettes she started smoking soon after running away, then quit before joining the Academy. When they find her, no one interrupts. Even the few stray gulls are quiet in a blackening sky. Only the crickets go on chirping until Joel stumbles out, wiping off his splattered shirt, rubbing the red swollen streaks across his arms. Alice finally looks up, sets her gaze upon him. Can he discern yet the Shlitz poured into their soup the moment they left Alice alone in the kitchen? Is he still unaware of old Sancho’s last-minute contribution? Certainly the aftertaste of that blackened crust, scraped from the bottom of the saucepan with her spatula, surely he must notice by now, if not quite able to name the taste.

Alice rocks back and forth, reviewing the answers to her last examination, flunked, for a class she’d always feared taking, never thought relevant until now: Chemistry of Taste. She hadn’t prepared for it, distracted by a sudden invitation overseas, by what she feared might be her last chance to revisit a childhood left behind. But the hours she spent booking last minute tickets and preparing a week’s menu, they really should’ve been spent memorizing periodic tables.

Some questions didn’t appear on that test, though. Like would Joel notice the spices grabbed blindly, stirred in with the innards and skin from the previous night’s salmon? And the baking soda and grape juice concentrate from the fridge; half a can of Mighty Nibbles cat food, left behind by the previous tenant, Rev. Mallory, long since ordained and off now on mission, beloved pet in tow; and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, pink swirls that vanished amid a boiling frenzy when Alice slowly poured it all together? Or wouldn’t he? In what began on Joel’s tongue, its ten-thousand buds—papillaes, Alice remembers now though she’d forgotten on test day—then in what continued on up the vagus cranial nerve—or was it the glossopharyngeal nerve? Either way, through the nucleus of the solitary tract it would go, and from there on into the thalamus and the cerebral cortex. And the limbic system, too—hypothalamus or amygdala, she can’t recall, whichever it was—or is. Chemistry, it was merely chemistry that lit up inside Joel like the Fourth of July when that spoon disappeared behind his sweaty lips. But had he really tasted the soup? She really should have studied more.

*

The blasting of a fire engine’s siren isn’t necessary; the soft crunch of sand beneath Ziegelman’s feet is enough. They all look up and out, beyond the beach’s trailhead where their old friend emerges from stalks of cordgrass with a backpack slung over his shoulder, a cashmere scarf around his head. No one rushes inside for that pewter chalice. Nor do they ask by what means he arrived. His eyes are already skimming the sky, but not a one of them will demand tonight to know what it is he sees up there.

© 2011 by Evan Wiig