Free The Temporary by Rachel Cusk Page B

he had bought expensive things to put in it, whichprobably could have formed something more impressive if he assembled them in a different way, but the expansive, forgiving framework of the risotto offered an indispensable form of insurance against disaster.
    He went to the sitting-room and looked at the answering machine. There was a message on it, and he regarded it for a moment with foreboding as he realized it might be Francine, saying that she couldn’t make it after all. He pressed the button and heard Stephen’s voice saying something clipped, which sounded like ‘let’s see’ – probably ‘it’s me’, Ralph thought – then a kind of long sigh and the clamour of the phone being put down. Everything was fine, then.
    *
    Some time later, Ralph lay in the bath. Next door, the risotto lay in the oven, warming. He had been too frightened to taste it, but he knew there was something wrong. At first it had been too liquid, and he had added more rice, in his enthusiasm rendering the whole thing rather glutinous, its parts indistinguishable . More worrying, however, was the peculiar smell it emanated, which Ralph had attempted to track down to some infestation of the fridge or kitchen cupboards but which finally he had had to admit was the perfume of his offering to Francine. He had attempted to identify it – it was a bitter, floury smell – from the parade of ingredients from which he had assembled the dish, but it had resembled none of them. In the end he had tried to disguise it with the addition of stronger presences which he had hoped would somehow crowd it out. The spices he had added had succeeded only in transforming its colour, against which he had had no complaint in the first place, and he had been forced to resign himself and place the muddy, odorous mass in a large dish in the oven.
    The incident had burdened him with a sense of indifferencewhich was prolonging his lazy, lukewarm immersion dangerously close to the half-hour zone he had cordoned off for last-minute preparations. His bath had thus far been a nihilistic event, an exercise in detachment involving the objective scrutiny and contemptuous dismissal of each immobile, ghoulish part of his body. In the day-dreams with which he had readied himself for Francine’s arrival, the bath had been a hearty, foamy affair, a steamy and fragrant series of whale-like dives and merry purgings, from which he would emerge tousled and shining to spray and slap himself with pungent substances. Only enforced contemplation of the inescapable and fast-approaching evening succeeded finally in urging him into a cursory scrubbing, and he rose from it dripping and slightly more cheerful, thinking of how he and Francine could laugh together at his risotto and how all he had to do was relax. His hair didn’t look so bad in the bathroom mirror either, and after one or two different attempts his clothes seemed all right too. He went back to confront the hall mirror, and found that he had improved himself.
    In a moment of largesse, filled with the growing sense of his own urbanity, he decided to open a bottle of wine and drink some of it, just to show Francine that he knew how to be sociable with himself. She wasn’t due to arrive for half an hour yet, taking into account the fifteen minutes by which he assumed she would be late, whether by accident or design. He opened the oven door and peered in through the crack. His oven had a light in it which gave the risotto the appearance of a museum exhibit, a dish of planetary matter brought back by astronauts, or a porridgy alien captured and held hostage. He slammed the door shut and opened one of the bottles of red wine he had bought at the delicatessen. Sitting at the kitchen table with it, he realized that he hadn’t spent an evening – well, this kind of evening, anyway – with a woman for a long time. He had thought that he had, of course, but the quitesuffocating excitement and fear with which he currently trembled