Black Beans and Wine

by Joey Bui

I was dating a new guy. That was on my mind as I stirred the saucepan-full of black beans and water. I had said something terrible to him. I looked down at the yellow eyes of the beans, magnified in water, and felt sudden paranoia. I was doing nothing wrong. I brought the water to a boil, turned down the heat and let the pot bubble gently.

Our little Arlington kitchen was full of onion and garlic, covering the day-old smell of Payal’s spinach curry still crusting in the sink. I was frying zfor a dollar-fifty each. For our first date, Sean took me to an Italian restaurant in DC, where my vegetables were puréed and squeezed out into flowers around my plate. I couldn’t tell what they were, maybe a blend of squash, peas and brussel sprouts, whipped into a cool blue cream. What would he think if he saw me in my own kitchen, picking at a week-old rotisserie chicken or manhandling a jumbo-sized bag of frozen peas from Capitol Supermarket? He said that I smelt of madeleines when we first met. I was testing a new mix of essential oils: four parts orange zest, one part lemon, one part vanilla and a touch of nutmeg. Sean told me about a French patisserie on the way to high school that sold orange-peel madeleines in white boxes with gold lettering. He sent a box from Georgetown Bakery to my workplace the next day, of two golden discs nestled in blue tissue paper and an invitation to dinner. Payal and I ate them on the train home.

It was the first time I’d cooked black beans. I bought them because I was constipated that week and read that black beans are full of fibre. Also, the 500g bag was on sale for a dollar. I was googling as I cooked, and found that the beans take a long time to tender and really I should have let them soak in cool water overnight. But never mind that.

I had a lot to think about as I watched the pot bubble. Why was I look ing for distractions even though Sean was so good to me? Also, did I have any tomatoes left? I had been thinking about tomatoes all day. Guillermo, the new law grad intern at work, showed me Neruda’s Oda al Tomate and in the evening I ran with gusto around the Arlington high school track, thinking about the tomato juices running in the poem, cold and fresh, la totalidad de su frescura, and lying down on the conference room floor with Guillermo where the watercooler bubbled like streams. Some basil would be perfect on top of the fresh tomatoes.

When the beans were ready, I used a tea-towel to lift the lid—the handle had fallen off a week ago. They were overcooked, I could smell it right away in the smokiness that escaped the pot. But when I tasted the beans, I decided that the smokiness worked with the flavour, onion and garlic galore. And even that the crispy (burnt) edges were a nice touch for texture.

I balanced the bean pot on the arm of our sofa, where the faux leather was already cracking and ripped. My plastic spoon had wilted a little bit from the heat and made me want to laugh. I wondered where Sean was sitting. Probably still at the same Dupont Circle bar since happy hour, with the remnants of buffalo wings before him—bright orange paste and chicken bones—and texting for more friends to come for dinner. I told him I was busy tonight, that I had promised to Skype my dad.

“Send him my regards,” Sean had said, which was funny. I don’t know if anybody’s ever sent Dad regards before, and certainly not a Senator’s staff assistant. I shook out my hair from its bun and sniffed it, full of the smell of garlic (powder). My hair always used to smell of garlic (powder) when I worked part time at Dad’s shop, from the garlic-batter shrimp curry. It was funny because I started to talk about Dad’s business and Sean interrupted me.

“Oh, he’s an entrepreneur,” said Sean.

I laughed at that too. Dad had a notion of fanciness about his takeout shop. He took everything he could from grandma’s faithful kitchen and deep-fried it in beer and butter batter. Even the rice was tossed in oil, cloves and chicken salt.

“You know what this is, Areej?” Dad said, pumping oil out of a plastic canister. “This is fusion Pakistani-American food. You should take notes.”

His Urdu accent dragged down the u in ‘fusion,’ adding four more tones to the word, like a handful of garam masala mixed into baked beans. I laughed then too, and took very serious notes on how to avoid his accent. In DC, ‘fusion’ was pronounced with the curt, funnelled ‘u’ of a Japanese accent and the dishes were deconstructed on long rectangular plates, with slices of fresh ginger on the side.

Sean only watched me, smiling. He used to ask me why I laugh, and at first I said, ‘at you, you knob,’ very nicely. Then he asked when we were in bed and he was eating me out: ‘why are you laughing?’ I was laughing because his hands were stroking my sides, where I was ticklish, and I screamed, ‘at you, you fuck.’ He stopped for a moment and looked at me. I didn’t know what to say, I just wanted to finish. He went back down and stroked the length of my thighs, to my calves where his hand fit all the way round. I wanted to thrash from the feeling of his cool tongue inside me but he had me pinned. I could feel the hard muscles of his arms clamped around my knees. He stroked the nook under my right knee, kneading deeper and deeper as I came, laughing and screaming. As he leaned up to kiss me, I tasted sourness on his lips and decided to be very kind to him.

“You’re so beautiful,” said Sean. We were on the lawn of the National Monument after work, where the Navy Band Northeast was playing Prokofiev very badly. I’d forgotten what part of the conversation we’d gotten to and couldn’t place his mood. I was thinking about sex. He took my hand gently.

I looked up and felt shocked by how unfamiliar his face was. His bright blue eyes, the colour of candy shell or club lights, were so concerned for me (what are you thinking? How do you feel? Are you having a good time?) that I couldn’t turn away. I lifted a hand to close his eyes, but stopped myself just in time.

“What,” he said softly.

I rested the hand on his cheek. I thought about telling him that he was a stranger to me, but realised that it didn’t sound nice, even if I said it nicely. I traced back our conversation and thought that maybe I should say, ‘not really, my dad owns a Pakistani-American fusion takeout shop in Georgia.’ But our conversation had already moved beyond that.

“What,” he said again, even more softly. So I said:

“I love you,” and laughed, and went home to cook black beans.

I woke up with my face in the cracked leather and Payal swearing fluently in the next room. She was wrestling with a large bucket that had spilled thin red liquid all over the bathroom floor. I helped her pull it upright and the liquid sloshed loudly inside.

“What the fuck is this, did you period into this thing,” said Payal.

“No fuck you, this is the wine I said I was making, and it’s not supposed to be opened for another month,” I said.

I squatted over the bucket, stuffing the thick lid back into its seal, but it was already too late. I couldn’t rack it now that the airlock had broken.

“Well, I’m not cleaning it up,” said Payal. She had taken off her underwear and was stepping into the tub, muttering ‘fucking wine in the bathroom.’ I mopped it up with an old shirt, but most of the spill had already seeped into the exposed concrete where the tiles were missing, leaking down into the foundation of the house.

I first started making wine when I was unemployed and staying in Aurora, Ohio with Aunt Laksha and her family after graduation, determined to get out of the south. They had a little house with dirty white walls sitting on a bed of weeds and I started making wine in the barns in between sending off resumes. The kids thought it was fantastic, my cousins Sara and Eric. They used to come visit me in the barn and I did a bit like I was a witch concocting potions to turn children into mushrooms. They ran screaming, ‘Areej is a witch! Areej is a witch!’

Aunt Laksha sat me down one night.

“I’m worried about you. You are a very lucky girl, you know. You have good family and you are so beautiful. Look, what man would not want this?” she patted my boobs. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“But you are so strange, Areej,” she said. “You are not normal.”

“That’s just because I’m drunk, auntie.” Her eyes instantly filled with tears.

“How shall I answer to your father!” she wrung her gold bracelets hysterically. “Oh Allah help me.”

I was drinking a lot because there was no one else to try my wine and nothing else to do in Aurora except scare the children and send off resumes. After the talk with Aunt Laksha, I took a long walk around the neighbourhood, picked up hibiscus everywhere I could and took it back to boil in the barn. After dissolving the flower water with sugar (and a touch of acid), I let it cool before plunging my hands in the bucket to squeeze the flowers for more flavour. It took me the whole day and my arms were tinged with hibiscus red up to my elbows. Sara and Eric came in before dinner.

“Tell auntie that I’ve already eaten,” I said. “But she made kofta,” said Eric.

“Hey, come here.”

I dried my hands on my shirt and stuck a hibiscus flower behind each of their ears—I had saved two of the prettiest ones for them.

“This is a very strong flower and if you wear it close to your head, it will grow beautiful thoughts inside of you,” I said.

“You smell like a goddess,” said Sara.

“I thought I was a witch,” I said, laughing. The whole barn smelt of flowers and sugar—that was before the yeast—and they stayed playing with the wet hibiscus mulch until bedtime. It was the last time I felt fully beautiful.

Two weeks later, the wine was ready and I went to DC for an interview with two bottles in my suitcase. I rented an outhouse in the back of an old Filipino couple’s house with Payal. For half-off electricity, we mowed, weeded and watered the garden, where they had been trying to grow vegetables for a decade or so. It was a good deal. All I ever wanted was a tomato garden.

“This is where you live?”

I watched Sean crouched and squinting as he climbed down the stairs to our kitchen. It was the first time he’d seen my place. We were back from a ball in the Library of Congress, where Sean introduced me to his boss. “Ajeer, is that Arabic?” she asked.

“I’m Pakistani.”

“Oh yes, wonderful. Your people have such a rich and interesting culture,” she turned to Sean. “She’s so beautiful.”

“She’s an Institutional Philanthropy and Partnerships Officer with the ROC,” he said.

I took a passing hors d’oeuvre and bit into it: hard bread, chopped tomato and herb topping with black vinaigrette. The vinaigrette dribbled to the sides of my mouth and stung. I washed it down with champagne, which I had been doing all night. Sean leaned in to kiss me. I knew my mouth was dank from the vinaigrette and I said into his mouth:

“If you don’t take me home right now, I’ll break up with you.” “What’s that smell?”

He was wading to the couch, through the throws, cushions and footrests that Payal and I had collected from the Salvation Army over the years. I only looked at him. I was standing with my back to the sink.

“What?” he said, frustrated. He had never spoken to me like that before. “It’s the wine I’m making.”

“You make wine?” “Yeah.”

“Well then I have to try some,” he said. I went to the bathroom to fill a pitcher with the thin red liquid and swilled it in Sean’s face. I drank my glass in one gulp. It was awful. The flowers were bitter and dry, so tart with the yeast that it made my mouth sore. I filled another glass and it sank hot and sour to my stomach. I hated the way Sean was looking at me. He drank his glass and didn’t say another word. I started undoing his belt and he gripped my arm suddenly as though in shock. I laughed into his face, my breath full of yeast, until his grip loosened and he let me pull down his pants. I turned around and we had sex against the kitchen sink, where the dishes were still crusted with spinach curry and everything was ugly.

I woke up sometime at dawn, my head finally clear. Sean was still sleeping on the couch. I was horrified to find half of the bucket empty and worried that I had gotten him seriously sick, though I didn’t know if I still hated him. I went out into the garden. All the plants were in a sheen of frost and I laid down on the grass to cool my skin against it. I noticed a bud of orange above my head and plucked out the first tomato of the year, raw and young, and ate it, crying for all the things that I had made and ruined.