His Girlfriend’s Love Is as Poisonous as a Mushroom

His Girlfriend’s Love Is as Poisonous as a Mushroom

Jess Gibson

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“Wild Food” by Jess Gibson

Sebastian saw Emily’s internet search history on the afternoon before the dinner party. When he’d checked his email on the desktop in their home study, the browser had been open. He always closed it himself, which cleared the cache. Total transparency in relationships was overrated, he felt. But Emily had simply left her windows on the screen, the Google searches right next to the risotto recipes. He’d always thought mushrooms tasted like mildew. How had she forgotten that?

He could have challenged her, but they’d already had some minor friction about the menu. Buying a dessert was fine, he’d said. It could make a dinner seem fancier, less haphazard; he was only trying to be helpful and he couldn’t imagine that she wanted to cook every single course. The weather was too hot to keep the oven on any longer than necessary. Moreover, he wasn’t sure she had the kind of sensual touch he associated with gourmet cooking. Because Emily worked longer hours, Sebastian usually prepared their meals, although she sometimes made bland, virtuous breakfasts: oats, spirulina protein shakes, egg white omelettes.

Emily had rebuffed his dessert suggestions—she had a culinary theme, she said—but asked if he’d mind going out for another bottle or two. Sebastian thought they had more than enough wine. They really should be buying a dessert, he said again, but Emily smiled firmly: “Sweetheart, there is nothing worse than a dinner party that runs out of booze.”

Don’t sweat the small stuff, Sebastian thought. He’d read somewhere that relationships survive not through single dramatic gestures but through daily acts of kindness. So he gave Emily a pat on the arm, slipped on his shoes, and descended the stairs two at a time into the humid summer street. The late-­afternoon sun cast a diffuse golden glow, and sex seemed to hang in the air like smoke—pairs of university students cluttered the sidewalk, their bodies taut as violin strings. None of the girls noticed Sebastian at all anymore, no matter how much he willed them to. He hadn’t been expecting to glide so quickly out of their orbit: aren’t older men supposed to be attractive? He walked slowly, watching the couples locked in embrace until a girl finally gave him a sharp look, the kind you’d give a pervert. He didn’t speed up, though: Emily wouldn’t become impatient if he was late. Impatience wasn’t in her nature. Her solid, dependable, reasonable nature.

Before Emily, Sebastian had always fallen in love with women who were easily upset and had urgent, sudden emotions. Electric, he’d thought, and feral. His friends had rolled their eyes, but Sebastian had believed that these girlfriends were good for his art. When they’d trapped him on street corners, arguing, their voices raised, mascara blacking their tears, Sebastian had felt calm and strong. There had been something invigorating about the way they’d seen everything as a matter of life and death. Especially when the fights had ended up in bed. Musicians, poets, fellow artists. They drank too much and left dirty dishes everywhere. They flirted inappropriately, they stayed out late, they didn’t give a fuck what people thought. And they often had short attention spans, which must have been why they’d broken up with Sebastian. Again and again. They weren’t cut out for commitment, he’d told himself.

Not like Emily. Emily was all tight skin, healthy flesh, and an orderly, efficient mind. You could almost see that mind alphabetized like a library when you looked into her eyes. She wore a wristwatch, paid her bills, and left for work punctually every morning at 8:15 a.m. She listened to TED talks on the subway, and had insisted that they get extra dental insurance because—she’d said—there was no guarantee you would never need a root canal. Sebastian had initially found it refreshing to wake and find her not sprawled across the bed in a chaos of limbs and the musk of discarded lingerie but rather showered and dressed, sitting in the kitchen doing the crossword. However he soon began wishing that they could spend weekends together with her clinging to him—a maenad whose hair hadn’t been blow-­dried and flat-­ironed—but Emily seemed to count sex as a type of irregularly scheduled exercise, part of healthy living. She certainly wouldn’t let it make her late for work, and she always got up immediately afterwards to pee because she didn’t want a bacterial infection.

Sebastian walked home slowly from the liquor store. The wine bottles clanked together despite the piece of cardboard the cashier had placed between them. The dinner party had been his idea: he’d thought they should start socializing more. His college friend Christopher, Monique from the artists’ book centre where he taught illustration classes, and Gabriella, a Brazilian painter he’d met at a gallery opening. To his surprise, Emily had loved the idea. She’d said it was the perfect excuse for her to take the foraging workshop she’d been interested in.

“You’re interested in foraging?” She’d never mentioned it before.

“Very interested,” she’d replied. “There are delicacies right out there in the park! Totally free from industrial agriculture.”

It was supposed to be a casual evening. He honestly hadn’t thought much about the guest list—simply the fact of other people warm and breathing in their dining room would be helpful—creative people, people he could talk to—but Emily insisted on micromanaging. Not only would she cook everything, she planned the seating in advance, asking him more than once why he’d invited Monique. She was a bit young for the group, wasn’t she? They’d be crowded at the table—even with three people seated on the bench—and wasn’t Monique just a work colleague? Of course, Sebastian said, but in the artistic sphere, work-­life boundaries were fluid.

He got in the door just as the guests entered, everybody talking at once. Monique was wearing a voluminous silk dress that hung off one dark shoulder and her eyelids were iridescent lilac, as if a kindergartner had gone at her with crayons. Sebastian thought it looked attractive: unusual cosmetics had been a hallmark of his girlfriends before Emily. Gabriella the painter kissed him on both cheeks, her lips dampening his skin, and Sebastian made introductions: Monique’s friend Paul, this is Christopher and his girlfriend Julie, and has everybody met Gabriella? Monique waved her fingers in greeting and Paul and Julie continued a conversation they’d been having on the way up. Just having them all in the room energized Sebastian.

Emily wasn’t really the creative type. Not that she didn’t have a kind of talent: a few months earlier she’d shown him a series of big drawings she must have been working on for some time, in secret. Intensely patterned fields of weird interlocking figures, woven through with plants and animals: mouths and limbs and leaves and feathers all twisted together. Nothing like Sebastian’s own work, which he described as neo-­conceptualism. Emily’s images reminded him of Surrealist automatic drawing, but they were less childlike and, he realized with a slight bitterness, very original. How had she made them?

She’d stood watching shyly while he studied them.

“Wow,” he said finally, shaking his head just slightly. “I had no idea you did this, Emily.”

“You don’t like them?” She’d looked unusually vulnerable.

“It’s not that.” Sebastian had tried to sound like a person being kind. “They’re very interesting. And I’m very impressed with how long you must have worked on them. But you’re not planning on exhibiting them or anything, right?”

She stared at him.

“Because the life of an artist is very hard. And anyway, you’re a fantastic archaeologist.” He’d grinned. “So why devote so much time to hobbies when you’re so great at your job?”

It was for her own good, he told himself afterwards.

Emily didn’t shake anybody’s hand. She waved stiffly from the stove where she was pouring water into the risotto, stirring hard with a wooden spoon. As the guests gathered in the kitchen and clinked glasses, she hefted the pot to the sink and ran the tap into it. Sebastian made small talk about summer weather, the beach, and his exciting new series of works on paper. Monique fluttered her glowing purple lids at him and told a story about swimming in the Mediterranean.

It was very hot in the kitchen. Gabriella the painter said that she hated air conditioning: it was always too cold, and so wasteful. Anyway, she said, perspiration cleansed the pores. Sebastian gave her an appreciative smile: sweat looked good on her, he thought. The guests began to fan themselves and when Sebastian picked up his glass, he found several fruit flies drowned in it.

Because Emily’s mushroom risotto kept sucking up liquid—more and more with a loud splatter of thick bubbles—everybody had to stand around in the kitchen eating olives. Sebastian poured another round.

“My God,” said Monique, looking at the gluey rice in mock horror. “Is it really supposed to do that?”

“Yes,” said Emily curtly.

By the time she ladled the rice into individual ramekins and topped them with slick yellow sautéed mushrooms, everyone was slightly drunk. Which Sebastian supposed was half the point of a dinner party, so he refilled the glasses. He went to help Emily pass around the risotto, but she stopped his hand. “No,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

Sliding onto the bench beside Monique, Sebastian jostled her and she laughed, pressing against him for balance. Her thick braid brushed his arm as she moved closer, near enough so that he could see the grain of her skin and the vellus hairs on her earlobe, an earlobe that he imagined sucking.

“What an interesting taste,” said Christopher.

“Wild mushrooms.” Emily smiled. “There’s such a great selection of fungi at this time of year—chanterelles, puffballs, meadow mushrooms, boletes—I was actually foraging a few days ago.”

“These mushrooms?” asked Christopher. “You picked them yourself?” He looked a bit worried.

Emily laughed. “Oh no,” she said. “I’m just a beginner. Most of these are from the farmers’ market. You really have to know what you’re doing with mushrooms. I stick with what I’m good at . . .” She met Sebastian’s eyes. The steam had flushed her cheeks, and her usually perfect hair clung damply to her neck.

“I think wild foods are fascinating,” said Monique.

“I think wild everything is fascinating,” said Sebastian recklessly.

“As opposed to boring,” said Emily. “Is that what you mean?”

Emily’s internet search had been about wild mushrooms—specifically the a-­Amanitin neurotoxins found in certain species of agarics that caused minor to fatal gastrointestinal and neurological disruptions. Archaeologists had speculated that several Nordic and Steppe cultures had used them as aphrodisiacs. “Don’t try this at home,” quipped a blogger. Probably she’d googled them to be doubly sure her ingredients were safe. Those mushroom guys at the market always looked a bit stoned.

After the penultimate girlfriend—the one before Emily—Sebastian had realized that his bounce-­back wasn’t as good as it’d once been. Single, he’d spent months watching crime shows on late-­night television and eating from cartons and having cereal for supper because the girlfriend, a photographer named Kiki, had taken most of the cooking pots. She was, he’d heard from friends, doing extremely well. Looking fantastic, they’d said, and she had two upcoming solo shows.

Sebastian had wondered if his tolerance for pain was wearing thin. Maybe he needed to make better choices about what kind of life he wanted to have. Maybe he was finally ready for something stable, affirming; a house, a dog, a partnership that lasted. Not some bursting-­into-­flames situation with broken dishware and midnight screaming. He’d started to compose online dating profiles in his head, using adjectives like “straightforward” and “mature,” whereupon Emily had appeared and saved him the trouble of filling out the forms.

They’d met at a conference in Los Angeles. Sebastian was there to take part in a panel discussion on illustrated artists’ publications and the status of books as objects in the era of digital technologies. He thought his participation would be a good career move, but nobody in the room seemed to fully grasp what he was talking about, nor were they interested in finding out. Which was fine because he hadn’t gone to art school to sit on fucking conference panels with a bunch of mid-­level apparatchiks.

The auditorium had featured a white drop ceiling perforated with black holes that had looked like negative stars. Sebastian had studied it instead of contributing to the discussion, which had continued without him. Afterwards he’d walked the carpeted halls aimlessly and had stood on a roof deck with some lone smokers, contemplating the blue-­tinged glass of high-­rise facades. He’d gone to Emily’s presentation because it was in the nearest room and he’d needed to sit down. When he slid into the back, Emily was blurry and far away, buttoned tight into a tailored navy jacket. She’d delivered a well-­organized paper on the role of forensic archaeology in Renaissance history. Above her on the screen was a picture of two blue-­gloved hands shaving bone samples into curls like grey cheese. Sebastian had closed his eyes and let the monotone of her voice run through him in the dark. Instead of the anxious thrill that usually accompanied his early moments of erotic interest, he’d felt sedated.

The dinner guests were discussing their apartments. Christopher and Julie had bought a place upstate and Julie was using a special kind of plaster on the walls imported from Europe because natural materials helped preserve the authentic historic character of the building. Christopher had done the windowsills himself with linseed oil paint. Emily stared across the table, her smile fixed, her gaze blank and inscrutable, and offered everybody more wine. The bottle neck dripped and a red trickle ran down her arm. She must have been slightly tipsy herself because she didn’t wipe it away.

“God,” said Christopher, “is it really hot in here?”

Sebastian let his leg rest casually against Monique’s thigh.

In the kitchen there were abandoned glasses, olive pits piled in cairns, and a mess of spilled risotto on the counter. Sebastian stood in the doorway and watched as Emily took two roast chickens out of the oven: they were huge, and their cooked flesh was swollen around the bikini suntans of their trussing cords. In the other room everybody laughed, Monique with a lovely throaty sound. Emily had tied the birds with neat loops of kitchen twine that she began to ease down the crisped skin like too-­tight pantyhose.

“Let me help you,” said Sebastian and tried to take her hands, which shone with grease in the low light, but she twitched away. Tucking some of the browned crumbs back inside the first chicken’s interior, Emily slid a knife under the twine and the bird’s legs fell abruptly outwards. Back at the table she carved thin ribbons of meat and spooned sauce and vegetables over each portion.

“What an unusual taste,” said Gabriella, pink tongue probing red lips. “Like licorice?”

“It’s an early American recipe,” said Emily, smiling graciously. “With cattail stems, wild yarrow, and fennel blossoms that I picked this morning.”

She ate very little, hardly touching her food at all, just pushing it around her plate, picking up her fork, putting it down. Sebastian had never seen her look so distracted. He drank some of the wine she’d poured for him, and the conversation washed over and around him. By the time Emily served a pavlova she’d decorated with purple flowers and a slightly bitter fruit sauce—local huckleberries and chokeberries, she said—he was starting to feel quite good. When he wiped the moisture from his brow with his napkin, his arm brushed Monique’s and neither of them moved away.

When the guests finally left, flushed with heat and wine, Sebastian and Emily stood in the kitchen. It still smelled of mushrooms and the cigarette Monique had smoked out the window. Emily turned on the overhead light, which was searingly bright, and suddenly Sebastian’s pulse felt like a foreign thing inside his chest, beating as if going downhill and picking up speed.

“That went fairly well, didn’t it?” Emily said as she began stacking plates.

“They certainly stayed late,” said Sebastian. “Everybody seemed to be having a good time.”

“I didn’t make them wait too long for the risotto?”

Sebastian leaned against the door frame, which was sticky as if the apartment walls were leaking in the heat. Sweat trickled through his hair and his shirt dampened against his chest. He rubbed his temples with a clammy hand.

“You don’t look very well,” Emily said. “Are you drunk?”

It was true that he’d had too much wine, enough so that objects trailed when he turned his head, and he did feel strange, as if all of the extremities of his body were molten and newly alive. Emily smiled expectantly, then shook her head when he tried to smile back. His mouth wouldn’t move properly; it felt almost paralyzed.

“God,” she said, studying him carefully. “You’re trashed.”

“I love you,” he said. And all at once, as if for the first time, he really did love her. He loved her madly. He could feel it in his body, an actual physical pain burning inside his ribcage like a hot stone. His heart was on fire. His entire body was licked by flames. He loved her so much he felt he was going to die.