Perfection Read Free

housekeeping. Once, during one of our more heated battles, he threw volume one of The Oxford English Dictionary at me. It missed, but I still felt wounded by the weight of a book with so many words I didn’t know, words I hadn’t been able to summon up as a clever retort to his insult. Later he had apologized, as he did now, quickly and tenderly.
    I rushed to the cellar to hunt down the plastic champagne glasses. Although alcohol inspired carelessness in our guests that made me fear for our beautiful Venetian glass champagne flutes, Henry always insisted on releasing them from their glass case for the early birds. Delighted by their flamboyance, Henry liked showing them off to guests, even if there was a risk of breakage, while I treasured them as objects and would rather have saved them for more intimate gatherings. They were a wedding gift from a generous friend, too expensive to replace. Returning upstairs with the plastic glasses, I placed them and the paper plates, napkins, and cutlery on one side of the dining room table, soon to be heaped with a mighty spread. A large cooler waited with ice and several dozen chilling oysters, ready to be shucked. I didn’t dareask Henry what those oysters had cost. Urging restraint seemed pointless. When he took my debit card to go food shopping for our dinner parties, I made a point of barely glancing at the receipts. Living with Henry meant embracing the necessity of a $150-an-ounce white truffle.
    When I reentered the kitchen, he smiled and offered me a taste of his potion. The sauce was velvety and impenetrable, the tastes of dinners past mingled with the present drippings and port, a bay leaf sailing on the surface of the dark liquid. I gazed around at the mess in the kitchen—my mopping and tidying had done nothing to calm the hurricane.
    “What does it need?” he asked.
    “Nothing.” I watched him stir with tenderness. For him a sauce was such a serious business. Too bad he hadn’t become a professional chef, with a staff of minions to admire him and clean up after him.
    He fussed some more, stirring and tasting. “I think it needs more salt.”
    “It’s excellent,” I said. “Perfect. Really.” But I suspected that his sauce just needed a larger, more appreciative audience.
     
    Liza galloped down the stairs, looking for her friends. At six and a half, her face had the look of children from another time and place, with an eclectic combination of traits from the available gene pool—Henry’s Asian-Anglo background and my mishmash of Eastern European Jewry. She had inherited Henry’s olive skin, and the bowed lips that reminded me of a pink rosebud. Dark honey-colored hair fell in perfect corkscrew ringlets to her shoulders, framing large almond-shaped eyes the color of seawater cupped in gray granite. She had my firm chin and my square-tipped fingers, purposeful and charming in diminutive size, especially when painted with robin’s egg blue nail polish, as they were that evening.
    Our first guests arrived, bringing an icy blast of snow and the musty scent of dead leaves from the wintry backyard. They carried cold bottles of champagne, and the bakers of the group brought homemade Swedish chocolate cookies and almond torte.
     
    Emily and her husband, Justin, arrived early. I could always rely on Emily to provide a bit of bohemian glamour, a taste of the urban life I had left behind. I had sought her out after spotting her with her family at a local restaurant. The cute haircut, the red lips, the cloche hat. That woman, she could be my friend. Like many women in our town, she wasn’t working and spent the time while our kids were in school on her personal writing and artwork. My life was all about deadlines, but since I was a freelancer we talked daily about books and art, often while I worked at my computer. In the afternoons after school, I often took Liza to her house. Her younger daughter Zoe had become one of Liza’s good friends. While the kids played,