Free The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak Page B

mind. The kitchen was the one place in her life where she could avoid the outside world altogether and stop the flow of time within herself. For some people sex might have the same effect, she imagined, but that always required two, whereas to cook all one needed was time, care, and a bag of groceries.
    People who cooked on TV programs made it sound as if cooking was about inspiration, originality, and creativity. Their favorite word was “experimenting.” Ella disagreed. Why not leave experimenting to scientists and quirkiness to artists! Cooking was about learning the basics, following the instructions, and being respectful of the wisdom of ages. All you had to do was use time-honored traditions, not experiment with them. Cooking skills came from customs and conventions, and although it was clear that the modern age belittled such things, there was nothing wrong with being traditional in the kitchen.
    Ella also cherished her daily routines. Every morning, at roughly the same time, the family had breakfast; every weekend they went to the same mall; and on the first Sunday of every month they had a dinner party with their neighbors. Because David was a workaholic with little time on his hands, Ella was in charge of everything at home: managing the finances, caring for the house, reupholstering the furniture, running errands, arranging the kids’ schedules and helping them with their homework, and so on. On Thursdays she went to the Fusion Cooking Club, where the members merged the cuisines of different countries and freshened up age-old recipes with new spices and ingredients. Every Friday she spent hours at the farmers’ market, chatting with the farmers about their products, inspecting a jar of low-sugar organic peach jam, or explaining to another shopper how best to cook baby portabella mushrooms. Whatever she hadn’t been able to find, she picked up from the Whole Foods Market on the way home.
    Then, on Saturday evenings, David took Ella out to a restaurant (usually Thai or Japanese), and if they weren’t too tired or drunk or simply not in the mood when they came home, they would have sex. Brief kisses and tender moves that exuded less passion than compassion. Once their most reliable connection, sex had lost its allure quite a while ago. Sometimes they went for weeks without making love. Ella found it odd that sex had once been so important in her life, and now when it was gone, she felt relieved, almost liberated. By and large she was fine with the idea of a long-married couple gradually abandoning the plane of physical attraction for a more reliable and stable way of relating.
    The only problem was that David hadn’t abandoned sex as much as he had abandoned sex with his wife. She had never confronted him openly about his affairs, not even hinting of her suspicions. The fact that none of their close friends knew anything made it easier for her to feign ignorance. There were no scandals, no embarrassing coincidences, nothing to set tongues wagging. She didn’t know how he managed it, given the frequency of his couplings with other women, particularly with his young assistants, but her husband handled things deftly and quietly. However, infidelity had a smell. That much Ella knew.
    If there was a chain of events, Ella couldn’t tell which came first and which followed later. Had her loss of interest in sex been the cause of her husband’s cheating? Or was it the other way round? Had David cheated on her first, and then she’d neglected her body and lost her sexual desire?
    Either way the outcome remained the same: The glow between them, the light that had helped them to navigate the uncharted waters of marriage, keeping their desire afloat, even after three kids and twenty years, was simply not there anymore.

    For the next three hours, her mind was filled with thoughts while her hands were restless. She chopped tomatoes, minced garlic, sautéed onions, simmered sauce, grated orange peels, and kneaded dough