Dear Monica Lewinsky

Chapter 1

THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 2019

JEAN RECEIVES A MESSAGE

The day that Jean Dornan first prayed to me began for her like any other—­with a coffee and a soft-­boiled egg and an unspeakable sense of dread. Well, unspeakable in that she never speaks about it, but she could describe its texture in detail: She might be doing something normal, washing her face or spacing out on the train, and suddenly her stomach drops and she thinks, I have to get back. But back where? To some juncture where she went wrong.

Mornings, she feels most acutely the pressure to stuff her dead day like a taxidermist into a convincing position.

“Bye, Jeannie,” her husband called up from the front door.

“Bye, Michael,” she responded sweetly, imagined divorcing him, and felt fine about it.

See, none of your choices make any sense to you. I know this rot, have lived it—this deepening suspicion that your existence is a remnant of an event long since concluded. Maybe you foolishly wandered away from your path. Or maybe—­maybe you were tricked.

So on this Thursday, Jean sat at the kitchen table and idly looked at her phone. And suddenly, she saw an email that gave her a shock. She had to put the phone down and peer into it as if it were a well. She read the whole email. A racy heat swirled in her sternum and flooded her cheeks; a feeling of doing something wrong, getting caught. The past had been swung into her body like the dull end of a big tree. She murmured his name aloud in disbelief, and his name, voiced, poured out of her with the alarming materiality of blood, of a substance usually withheld.

“David.”

Stunned, she drifted into the guest room, which was cluttered with empty suitcases and storage bins. She found her old chef’s kit, slipped out the boning knife, and slit open boxes, sliced tape. Her fingers moved quickly. She knew what she was looking for. She shoved aside the wedding album, dug past the tax forms, went further and further back in time. Finally she reached the right sedimentary depth, the right era: She found some photographs, flicked through them, and brought one—­a group shot—­up close to her face. A dozen or so people, smiling into the bright sun in front of the ivy-­covered stone façade of a castle in France. He stood to one side of the group, his public self, affable, enthused. She opened a spiral notebook, filled with flowing script that sometimes gave way to doodles—­of people, of shapes; a thick cross drawn in wobbly black pen, dotted with markings.

She thought she knew the story, roughly, its essential beats: the silly girl, the greedy man, the setting so lush and seductive that all of life after had seemed like the hallway outside a theater. But then she settled down to read. And after some time, she encountered something surprising, a figure she had forgotten, lurking in the archive of her notes: me.

This morning I found everyone in the salon watching yesterday’s news from home. Clinton admitted on TV to an affair in the White House with a skanky intern, and everyone was saying how stupid they were.

Putting down the diary, eyes closed, Jean made a noise that started as a low moan, like a choir girl holding the bass line, and ended in a high scream that she strained to stifle in her throat.

Then, in a weak pile, she whimpered, “You idiot.”

This time she meant herself, not me.

Chapter 2

Jean’s day went on in a braid: She tried to read a book, but the memories of that summer cut before her eyes and she had to return to the photos. She put on sneakers and ran, literally ran out of the house as if she could escape her mind like some folk fool, like Jonah, who thought almighty God couldn’t track him to Spain. She came back from running clapping her hands as if she were a new person named Trudy from Wichita who only smiles—­it was honestly adorable. But the weaving wouldn’t stop and in came the thick thread of the past and soon she was crying on the floor or else sitting at her desk, looking nowhere with eyes that were opaque, that saw only inward, like the chalky orbs of an ancient bust.

Michael marveled at her thirst for wine later that night. She brushed it off:

“This Sangiovese goes so well with pizza.”

When he talked about the hospital—­he’s a nurse—­she pretended to listen, dispensing ready-­made replies like “Maybe you can delegate more.”

She has never told him about what happened the summer before her junior year of college because she cannot find words that suit the truth. Affair—­too glamorous and grown up. Relationship—­too stable, with a ship in the word, the inhabiting together of a big, wooden noun. Sexual impropriety—­too legalese and small, like shoplifting, like bad manners, like this man had burped at the table with a hand on her ass. Molested—­too Catholic church, not fun enough. But fun isn’t the word, either. Nothing is the word.

No words, only the feeling of coming into existence, of the hard plastic casings of her organs popping inside like grapes, good, warm, in their time, running with the juice they were meant to give. All the fallout, all the pain that came with its calamitous end, had been worth it for the sweet center, hadn’t it? Her last two years of college had been berserk, unfocused, humiliating. But that’s college, riiiiight? You partied too much, you woke up in recycling bins and laughed about it, relishing the colorful contrast it would make with your stable, productive future.

But what if the future never stabilized?

She graduated with grades that were beneath her and a major—­Modern Languages—­that seemed like code for “just talking.” At first she could argue that college didn’t matter, that her real talent was cooking, anyway, and out of the three people who had trained with her at Le Cheval d’Or the summer after her senior year, she was the only one the restaurant hired. She learned hygiene codes and how to bond a broken sauce, fell easily into cooks’ camaraderie, and kept her shit together in the service crush. And the early 2000s were thrilling years in New York kitchens, when high-­end food was becoming not just refined but delicious; when you’d serve bone marrow—­beyond blood, the brown gel that makes blood, what the dog knows to gnaw for—­with gros sel and rough bread to people in Theory blazers. Jean loved it, could not imagine a life spent away from little pinches, little metal teaspoons all day long of some torched meat, some bashed herb, all these carefully waged violences come good on the tongue.

All the while, an infection from long ago was doing its work—­not a physical one, although she worried about her body as she began to puff up from booze and the kind of snacks that only line cooks make (sweetbread lollipops; deep-­fried strawberries; shooters of cold cream, vodka, and orgeat: They treated the kitchen like a meth lab for flavor). She had strategies for managing her attractiveness: skipping meals, running obsessively. But she couldn’t starve or outrun the doubts that undermined her existence. Would she be a lawyer or an architect, would she have kids and a sturdy umbrella, if her filthy little sex scandal hadn’t turned her toward restaurant kitchens, this nocturnal, underground arena full of grab-­ass men and gratuitous butter? Maybe I cook because I’m a people-­pleaser. Maybe I cook because I’m a pig. Maybe I was destined to do something more sustainable and cerebral, but I fucked it up. It was easy to be struck with these doubts while doing a bump of coke before the brunch rush, or waking up next to Shlomo the Garnish King in a part of Brooklyn so far out she thought she’d pass fur traders on her way home.

Jean is no dummy. She has always known that David is involved in the self-­doubt that accompanies all her choices. And even so, for this first decade out of college, she managed to think of what had happened between them as painful but affirmative, proof of her attractiveness, of her femininity; an unusual but necessary introduction to the sour colors and thick breath and delicious rot that lay beyond innocence.

Until she imploded. In 2009, she had a relationship with another cook, the executive chef of the restaurant where she worked, a sort of gentlemanly divorcé who put work before everything. He was well-­meaning but exhausted, and he broke up with her over pastrami that he paid for, explaining that he was overwhelmed, which anyone could see in his stoop, in the purple hammocks under his eyes. He knew nothing of David, the man who had come ten years before and broken all of Jean’s bones just as they were hardening. So when the executive chef cut off their relationship, he shattered her along the old fracture lines. Another woman might have taken it reasonably, gotten shit-­faced, keyed his car, spent a week crying. But Jean saw that she would never get it right, that she was always doomed: a pest, bothersome, easy, not worthy of the center but pushed to the margin, not a partner for the day but a mistake in the night, not good but greedy. She had to leave, not just kitchens but her life, her skin. She had to find her way, if not back, then elsewhere. She imagined herself boiled like a pickling jar, sterilized. With ten years of knowledge accumulated in her mind, in her hands, in the fine, diagnostic organ of her tongue, having earned the high regard of some of the city’s best cooks, she quit.

A period of intense darkness lasted almost a year; she was jobless, lost, desperately trying to purge herself of her sickening drives, of her addiction to the urgent touch, the thrilled palate. At nearly thirty years old, she crashed with her mother, a lifelong dieter, whose habits of self-­denial suddenly suited Jean. Special K was the woodchip that might scrape her clean; low-­fat cottage cheese squeaked against her teeth, lactating a sour, soapy water. A job-­search website identified her language skills and sent her to assist a certified translator at the federal courthouse in Manhattan. The first time she entered the courtroom, she found a pale linoleum heaven: dead, sterile, the opposite of a kitchen, bright and odorless, no one fuckable and nothing delicious. Safe.

I will tell you that she could have been an astronaut, alone in the amicrobial void, all shiny tools and mineral dust and pee that floats up, and she would not have been safe. When they get to you young, they’re in your blood, in your brain stem. Like Jonah, you’re a fool to run. Horrified by her own compulsions, she still fantasized about David, tried to keep him a constant in her mind, to retain the timbre of his voice from so long ago, to lick the old bones of the phrases she’d saved for licking: “You were wonderful, Jean.” “How do you know how to do this, Jean?” She refreshed memories with fantasy, put him in scenes art-­directed like a Merchant Ivory film: ecru hotel suites, train compartments where silver rattled, a thatched cottage out of Jane Austen’s England except with wall-­thumping simultaneous orgasms.

Even after she met a nurse at a christening in 2010 and married him (she’s doing her best!), she always returns to the well where fantasies of David’s affection pool, ready to be slurped up for instant, guilty gratification. But something has happened now, over the past few years: The well is polluted. She tries to pull David out of the armoire of her erotic props and set him up all ready to go in the four-­poster bed in the stone room with her crawling toward him on the floor with her big young waterbed boobs swaying, and he’ll say, in her own fantasy, “I don’t think we should do this anymore—­don’t you understand that I fucked you up? It doesn’t feel very feminist.” Take your pants off, for fuck’s sake! screams her subconscious like an angry director with a bullhorn on an expensive set. But the celluloid stand-­in shakes his head and moves to get dressed.

The trade-­off—­he hurt and humiliated her, but he cannot be removed from the white-­hot center of her deepest mental pleasures—may be a terrible bargain, but it has always been hers to make.

That’s a secret. If you asked, she’d say she never thinks about him.

But she thinks about him more and more. Now she is forty—approaching the age he was—and when a twenty-year-old boy scans her almonds at Trader Joe’s, she looks at him and thinks of the long interspecies distance between them, uncrossable: He is like a spotted salamander, a ropey caloric sinkhole whose skin is shiny with some adolescent slime and whose moves are quick and jerky and who looks at her with animal uncaring because she is, to him, some old brown horse. How could David have loved me when I was nineteen? she thinks, staring at the salamander in the Hawaiian shirt who has to ask twice if she wants her receipt.

“No, thank you.”

“OK. Have a good day, ma’am.”

Then what was it? Pure exploitation? Were my resources extracted? She imagines a pit in the earth, her soul a pretty ore, shimmering like eye shadow, there for the scraping.