We at Fusebox are thrilled to publish the full text of David Fruchter’s “Sweet Betrayal“, which created a new sweetness blended with bitter looks, soured loves, salted tears, and carnal betrayal as part of our Digestible Feats program.
SWEET BETRAYAL
by
David Fruchter
As attendees enter the space they are given a small flyer. The text of the flyer is in the second person and it informs the attendee that they just entered their own home, breathless and shaking, only to find that these amazing desserts have been left for them by their Signficant Other. On the flyer there are hints and foreshadowing that they are in shock and horrorstruck by something that has just recently happened, but also that they are surprised to find themselves ravenous with hunger after that terrible event, whatever it may have been. The entrance flyer ends with the protagonist (whose place, again, the attendee is in) moving forward to take a bite from the first dessert.
As the attendees move into the space, they see four large platters of desserts, a different dessert on each platter. Each platter is on a table and surrounded on the table by printed note cards, each with different text. These cards are also printed in larger versions and hung on the walls all over the space, except where Kaci will be painting.
Most of the cards are face up, but some few are face down – the Secret cards, which are particularly revealing or disturbing. Attendees will have to pick these up and turn them over to see the text on them. On the walls, the Secret cards will have a flap you need to lift up to read the text. “Please turn face down again after reading.”
Each dessert represents the pairing of the basic flavor of sweetness with one of the other basic flavors – salt, sour, bitter, and umami. Each flavor and accompanying set of cards is intended to represent a moment in the protagonist’s life, and in their relationship with their Significant Other.
As the attendees move through the space, from one dessert to the next, they will also be moving from one moment to the next, and a narrative will form for them as they go. There is a chronological order to the desserts – Salt, Sour, Bitter, Umami, as it happens – but they will not necessarily experience the narrative in that order.
Meanwhile, as they circulate through the room, Kaci will be painting a painting of these desserts, a quadryptich, right on the wall of the gallery space.
Here’s a rough outline of the moments associated with each dessert, as far as the narrative goes:
Salt – the moment in which they first came together, and the taste of the Other’s tears.
Sour – the moment the Other first confesses their betrayal.
Bitter – the moment of the protagonist (who, again, is the attendee in this conceit) walking alone and brooding.
Umame – the moment of violent confrontation with the Other.
Upon exiting, each attendee is given another flyer – the dénouement. They have eaten of each dessert. They have reflected upon their crimes and what led up to them. They are full and oddly content. Then they begin to feel the slow effects of the poison….
sweet betrayal
prologue
You stagger into the dining room, still short of breath, eyes rolling in your head like a frightened dog’s. You look wildly here, there. You are alone in the room – but there is something here with you. What is it?
There is a delicious smell. And you feel your body respond, nostrils flaring, jets of saliva under your tongue, a constriction of your viscera, your head extending out as your neck stretches forward. The last thing you expected was to be hungry, but you discover that you are. In fact, you’re ravenous.
You recall coming home with her one time, after the funeral of close mutual friend – once her lover – and the two of you tearing into each other’s clothes and bodies, wordless, desperate. Life itself feeling its inevitable endpoint, scrabbling mindlessly for more and more. This hunger reminds you of that one.
You think too, in passing, of Lorca’s writing on the Duende, that most essential life force, which can only be conjured in the full awareness of the presence of death. Thus is kindled the most glorious performance of the matador, the flamenco dancer, the cantadora. Duende is the dark fire that rises within, the full possession of oneself, the most acutely aware and yet self-immolating state of being, and you wonder if this is what it feels like.
Also, you have diabetes, and the behavior brought on by low blood sugar is not always something you can control. When you spot the luscious desserts arranged on the dining table, you move toward them automatically, as if in a trance. Your motions are smooth and deliberate-seeming and you note this to yourself. Another strangeness. Is this always what happens?
There are four of them, four individually crafted, beautifully presented desserts laid out in advance of your arrival. She must have spent hours on their creation, and knowing her, probably hours more on the arrangement you now see before you. All that, before….before. Was it meant to win you back? How could she have believed that was possible?
It was the type of gesture she made so often, grandiose in its generosity. Elaborate productions for an audience of one. Too much, much too much, to the point of inducing guilt in the recipient (although in this case of course that guilt is a drop in the bucket.) And always the sense that the big show should justify, or ameliorate, or make you forget the daily disappointments. Neglect and inconsideration and faithlessness and flaking; an everyday, wearying program of one small forgiveness after another required from you, just to get along. But then, huzzah! Flash and light and old mad joy, and it’s all supposed to be worth it.
And, you have to admit, for a long, long time, it was. It might still have been, if. If only.
You reach out a hand toward the nearest dessert, and bring it to your lips. As you take the first taste, you close your eyes. Something surprises you, and suddenly, you’re back where it all began.
From Salt:
[white border on the cards]
Tears because the waiting was over.
Tears because of the ones left behind as you came together. Their pain hurt you both but did not stop you.
You tasted every tear, one by one. Some you caught with a kiss, some with a swipe of your tongue. Once it darted out and with its tip you felt the orb of her eye, wet and springy. You were both surprised.
A glass jar of salt, overturned and spilled across a table, in a room surrounded by windows and white walls, in a white saltburned clapboard cottage on the shore of the salt salt sea. It was the place where you got away.
Every crystal of salt, spread out like a field sown with sharp white seed, seemed like its own world, glittering in the dark heavens – every one a world of possibilities, and you thought you’d explore them all, together.
SECRET CARD: In the snow angel that your thrashings left behind in the spilt salt – both of you swept up in terror and childlike glee, in that terribly exposed house of wind and waves – you could distinctly make out, afterward, a human skull: the sign of poison and piracy. (Or do you only see that now, looking back?)
SECRET CARD: She was already betraying you – yes, from the very beginning.
From Sour:
[yellow-bordered cards]
As soon as you smelled sweet sharp lemon you knew something must be wrong.
She only sucked on lemon drops when things got very stressful, when she just didn’t know what else to do. The smell was practically overpowering you.
You think of how incongruous and ridiculous it’s always seemed to you to see someone eating something sweet in public, but with a grumpy or irritated or sad expression. You’re starting to understand it now, though. In the past, you’ve believed that pleasure was the only reason to seek out the sweet. Now you realize that the relief of pain is another.
You called this the sun room – a title both hopeful and ironic, like both of you tended to be. It was the only room in your small place with a window, and together you painted its walls bright yellow and set it aside to only use “for special.” Now everywhere you look the brightness seems stark and unforgiving.
You begin to yearn for the time, so very recently, when shadows still covered the truth.
She looked stricken, surrounded by yellow walls. There was pleading and shame in her gaze.
You feel your mouth begin to pucker and pinch, a tight feeling in your throat and chest. You’re angry before she begins to speak – you don’t know why yet, but some part of you knows you’ll have good reason.
You just look at her. You feel sour and used-up, and the moment sours as well. You turn and walk out the door without saying a word.
SECRET CARD: Did she betray you with another person, or with drugs, or by telling your secrets, or stealing your ideas? Does it matter?
SECRET CARD: And from nowhere you understand, a deep welling of relief that you could never admit to, which thus curdles instantly into shame. Still, when was the last time you breathed like this, heavy breaths deep in your chest, so fierce and free?
From Bitter:
[dark brown bordered cards]
Brooding, walking by the coffee roastery, smelling that acrid tang.
Your jacket is too thin for this bitter wind.
Raucous calls from a nest of foul black birds, set high up on a utility pole. In their song is mockery and derision. They know how you’ve been played.
Now it seems like you always knew you were fooling yourself – but that’s memory. We retrofit our visions of past selves, animate them with our current minds and perspective, absurdly. So, when you’re depressed, you feel like you’re always depressed, even if it’s really a recent or sporadic phenomenon.
You know you haven’t always felt this helpless rage but it feels like it’s always been with you.
In your mind you take her in your arms, you assure her that everything is going to be OK. This is a lie, even in your mind.
SECRET CARD: In your mind you are taking her by the back of the head and forcing her lips to your own, mashing her jaw open with yours, making her taste this bitterness in your mouth.
SECRET CARD: Your hands clench, imagining squeezing one of the sarcastic birds between your fingers until its cries are utterly stilled.
From Umami:
[red bordered cards, smoky brick red]
The oriental rug, torn and shoved into a corner. Three broken mirrors – some insane part of you does the math. 21 years, old enough to drink. An overturned decanter of cut glass, cracked.
Wax spattered across wall-hung tapestries, a blank book you wrote in together, the obligatory Buddha. One thin tendril of smoke still rising from the wick of a broken candle. Could it have happened so recently? Surely you’ve been here for hours, frozen in place. You were possessed by the void.
This had been your inner sanctum, the Cave of Love, your Chamber of Secrets. You kept it reserved for love and languor, and decorated accordingly, like a Persian pleasure house or opium den. Once intimate and seductive; now, to you, abhorrently lurid and trite. Context is everything.
Shelves and tables once laden with carefully placed mementos, each one representing a moment of your love affair, now a jumbled and undifferentiated mass of wreckage. Your struggle turned love into death and a home into archaeology. What it did to you there’s no way to know.
Stumbling, staggering back, wiping your mouth with the back of your hand, still feeling her life in your fingers, squeezing, squeezing into nothingness, like a magician folding a handkerchief in half over and over until it suddenly disappears.
The scent of old incense, heavy and thick, now with a sharp metallic note and a rich meaty undertone in the melange.
You found her in the Chamber, and that might have been what pushed you over the edge. The idea that she had something to lose here too. This pain was yours. She did not deserve it.
SECRET CARD: She placed your hands around her throat and begged you. She wanted this, and you wanted to give it to her.
SECRET CARD: Your teeth in her cheek, tearing, chewing.
epilogue
a digestivo
You feel satiated, stunned into dormancy by the intensity of all that your senses have taken in today. Eating those desserts, one after another, was like traveling back in time – at once a mindless orgy of consumption and a reverie, like a highlights reel of your accursed path, made of memory and conjured by flavor. Did she know, creating these desserts, of the moments each would cause to rise up in your mind? How could she have known? After all, that would mean…that would mean…
Had she made these desserts with Duende? Had she foreseen her fate? Was it subconscious intuition on her part, or had she known?
Was everything that happened, all the way along, just another step in a recipe – a recipe she had created from scratch?
Suddenly everything in the room feels too close to you, things are very crowded all of a sudden. Your clothes are beginning to feel tight, you’ve eaten too much, perceived too much, done too much. You are so full that you feel your entire being could rupture. Fresh air. You need fresh air.
You stand and stagger; you move toward the door and stumble, falling against it. The door opens and you collapse outward into the evening air. In your throat the air is still thick with the day’s humidity. Even the atmosphere is overloaded, and you just can’t catch a breath.
You just can’t catch a breath.
finis
