Toast
She decided to invest her lover’s personality in a loaf of bread, as a kind of test. Were her feelings for him tied up in his supple form, his clear skin, red with exertion or passion? His laconic look, his reluctant smile: there were things she could transfer to another form, and perhaps discover whether she really missed him or not.
The loaf of bread was not her first choice; she initially tried projecting his mannerisms, his style of loving, of being silent and of easy talk, onto a teapot. Unfortunately the teapot that came to mind was too small: it felt cruel and too comical to make its tiny lid and potbelly speak for him. She’d tried simply imagining a bigger teapot – you would think, compared to the greater feat of picturing her lover as a household object, a simple change in scale wouldn’t be so difficult – but she couldn’t hold it together in her mind. Its proportions became unreliable and its handle and spout began disappearing and reappearing at irregular intervals; its lid could no longer be counted on to fit its opening.
The loaf of bread was the next object that suggested itself: an ordinary loaf, of the regular, pre-sliced, rectangular kind that comes in cellophane from the supermarket, and which she didn’t even have in her house, because low-carb was all the rage. It was no problem imagining such a loaf; its texture and size, the way its soft slices eased from one another, its propensity to become rhomboid if subjected to too much pressure in any direction, even its bland yeasty smell, were all so familiar to her that she could focus on any imaginary detail and still find it convincing. Close up, amongst the fibrous, cellular folds, the yellowish waxy shape of a seed shone.
The next problem was prompting the loaf to speak. At first, whenever she tried, she would see instead in her mind her lover in human form staring back at her from under heavy baleful lids, a look she always found irresistible. From his eyes she would be drawn to his arms, muscular but almost hairless, or the responsive skin of his belly: pretty soon she would be lost in appetites and her poor lover would have vanished completely.
When, with the aid of deep breathing and concentration, she achieved the discipline of making the loaf assume her lover’s tone and vocabulary, when she was troubled by only the occasional mutiny in which the loaf spoke in a sarcastic or cartoon voice, she began her interrogation. Disappointingly, she found that while the loaf was now a clever mimic, she could only make it produce words her lover had spoken in the past. “I have a terrible cold,” the loaf said, or “I’ve had a lot of work on.” Stripped of the aura of her lover’s physical attractiveness, his activities – repairing the chook house or walking the dog – became as cryptic as the actions of any stranger. There were long, awkward pauses, when she thought hard, trying to fill in the blanks, and the loaf remained sullen, silent, and still, regarding her with a patient but judgemental expression, as if it found it only too easy to perceive her every thought. She wished it to spontaneously offer something of itself: its love, for example, although anything honest would do. Irritation, whimsy.
“Make me,” it said.
This was not useful. To surprise her, to present her with the parts of her lover she was ordinarily unable to recognise, the loaf required a capacity for invention. She needed, next, for the loaf to acquire her lover’s true feelings.
Inevitably, she confused her own feelings for her lover with those of her lover for her. The loaf became a kind of crude puppet for her desires. The effect was pathetic; if she’d wanted a fantasy, she would have chosen another form. And it was the nature of such phantasms, she knew from past experience, to evaporate at the crucial moment. What remained of her lover’s authentic character clung to the margins of her projection with a superior smile.
She endeavoured to return in memory to the very beginnings of her relationship with her lover, in an effort to produce a psychological substrate from which the loaf could speak, divested of memories, of her own projected doubts and longings. The feelings of that time, which rejected words, made her wild with a species of impatience better suited to another kind of transformation, one which changed each of them into things more elemental, like fire and wood.
What did she really know of her lover, after all? She was left only with a recollection of his tastes, for kitsch china and unusual music, for real butter and gluey, traditional cocktails, and no longer for her.
The real problems began when she wanted to talk back to her lover-loaf. She could not remain passive and receptive. Inevitably, she wanted to provoke specific responses, and she wanted to express her own feelings; she wanted in turns to pummel the yielding loaf, tear it, knead it into a form with hands and lips to please her, and most of all to eat it all up. The loaf, in her mind’s eye, responded to her violence with a stillness she interpreted as confusion. She recognised this look, having seen it on dogs struck by their masters, and once on the face of a porter she yelled at when, without asking, he kept shouldering her packages as she shopped in a Madagascan marketplace. It was a look that inspired shame and impeded violent impulses, but simultaneously made the heart withdraw and shrivel a little, like a flower held close to a flame, leaving her with a feeling that made her despair of the possibility of communication.
She remembered, once, seeing a loaf of unsliced bread into which a young mouse had crawled; having hollowed out a cavity, tired from its prandial feat, it slept. Her first love had been like that, both feast and nest, with no anticipation of the knife.
END
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Originally published in Island 115 Summer 2008: 107-109
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