Doug tells me it’s Pterodactyl Tarator and I tell him how scrumptious it is, but only after the obligatory mmm of satisfaction I know he likes to hear. “It’s so good” is never good enough. I must say things like “scrumptious” and “exquisite” if Doug is to be appropriately affirmed. Carelessly using non-words or phrases such as, “I like it,” to compliment, say, Doug’s wild mushroom uttapam, could result in Doug taking up my dinner plate, scraping what he spent the day preparing into the trash, and shattering the porcelain in the sink.
“A proper meal alters your reality,” is something Doug likes to say. “Food should continuously challenge what you think is possible. Every meal should change your life.”
Arby’s doesn’t exactly bring me to my knees so every meal cannot be life-changing, obviously, but such blind, naïve ambition really turns me on. Doug has cooked and dined in every corner of every country, but nothing seems to satisfy him quite like watching someone who doesn’t know the difference between a spice and a seasoning eat his food. In fact, I’m quite certain I could ask Doug if he’d like to masturbate while I slurp and suck whatever delicacy he’s prepared from whatever far-off region of the universe, and he’d call it the best sex of his life. I’m working up the confidence to suggest it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, coquettish and swallowing the cold cucumber soup. A stray dill leaf catches in my throat and I clear it. “But what did you just say this soup was?” I touch the napkin to my burgundy lips. He likes them done up when I eat.
It’s all we’ve done since we’ve met. Eat and fuck, fuck and eat.
“Tarator,” he says. “It’s a cold summer soup from Bulgaria.”
The sex is good and the food is great, but so is trash TV and ordering in. “No, that first thing you said…”
“Oh. Pterodactyl,” he says.
I touch the napkin to my lips once more, though there’s nothing there to clean. It’s just something to do. “Like the dinosaur?”
Doug moves a stray crumb from where he’s going to rest his folded hands. He does not swipe it away like you or I most certainly would, but gently places the stale debris near the edge of the table to properly dispose of later. It is careful moments like these that keep me coming around. I’m not getting any younger and Doug here goes out of his way to keep crumbs from grinding into the carpet. “Yes,” Doug says. “Like the dinosaur. Pterodactyl—”
“—Tarator. I got it.” My spoon wavers before my pursed lips, my stomach tumbles. It’s been tumbling for weeks. I thought perhaps I was pregnant. I can feel something pressing against my insides, though I know the hand I’ve been dealt and it’s best not to linger on that sort of hope. Still, I went to the physician anyway to confirm what I already knew and something I did not.
“What’s the matter?” Doug wants to know. “Don’t you like it?”
I find taste and presentation to be luxuries. Food has always been about one thing and one thing only for me: survival. Considering one must eat to live, rarely am I one to question the origin of my meal. “What am I really eating, Doug?”
“Think of it as chicken. In fact, they’re all covered in feathers. I couldn’t believe it myself. They look more like chickens than flying lizards. It’s just like eating duck. Or quail. Only more exotic, right? Have I not made you my Madeira Braised Pheasant? I’m certain I have.” Doug reaches across the table and plucks my spoon from the bowl, ladling out a cold mouthful for himself. His bicep stretches and flexes with his reach, and the t-shirt he wears looks as if it came from my own closet.
“Have you been working out?” I ask.
“Oh, it’s marvelous,” he says, almost surprised by the quality of his work as if no one ever profiled him in The New Yorker, featured him on Eater, or listed him on Buzzfeed. Watching Doug cook is like watching an ice skater at the Winter Olympics—every carrot sliced, every potato cut, every onion chopped is a carefully choreographed movement combined to astonish and applaud. Yet Doug never serves himself whenever he invites me over for dinner. He likes to cook and watch, but never eat. Which confounds his staggering form. I’ve yet to see him consume a real meal, only the quick nibbles and samples he sneaks from my own prepared plate. We’ve not been out to dinner, not a single time, for the entirety of our relationship. I suggest it at odd moments to try and catch him in the act (times when no one of sound mind or reason would want to cook), and Doug asks what it is I am in the mood for. I tell him things like Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut—impossible things to prepare at home—because the sex is good when he’s angry. When he finishes, he says he’s not going to pay for food he could better prepare in his own kitchen, and his extra crispy chicken fingers are finger-lickin’ great. I want to be mad at him, I do, but I’m willing to bet the dough doesn’t rise in Italy (let alone Pizza Hut) quite the way it does in Doug’s oven. He roasts his own coffee, brews his own beer, and it’s a miracle I met him at all considering his lifestyle is not exactly conducive to a meet-cute. But the man has to get his ingredients from somewhere, and I just happen to work somewhere.
“Your total is $79.98,” I said.
“Let me cook for you,” he said.
tI ask him again. “What’s in the soup, Doug?” and he says it again like an irritated waiter. It says it right there on the menu, Ma’am, “Pterodactyl and cucumber.”
Doug says, “Come on, let me show you something.”
“Do you have any Pepto-Bismol?” I ask. “Tums? Alka-Seltzer?” I want to know because I’ve just found out my boyfriend has a shimmering purple portal in his basement out of which, every so often, a dinosaur emerges and Doug eats. “A digestif, perhaps?”
Doug says, no, he does not have any Tums or Alka-Seltzer, but he does have the boiled testicles of a baby Tyrannosaurus in his fridge. “You know how I never like to use the same ingredients twice?” Doug asks.
Out of all the men in all the world who might have a shimming, purple interdimensional portal in his basement with access to Jurassic-fucking-Park, I’m sleeping with the one who scrambles me eggs from the Cretaceous Period. This should come as a shock, I know, or feel more tragic, perhaps, but if I am being honest with myself, I’ve been dating dinosaurs-eaters since high school.
“You’ve been feeding me dinosaur meat?”
“Well, what else am I supposed to do with them?” Doug asks.
“I don’t know, Doug, call the local zoo? Give them to a paleontologist? Push them back inside?”
“You don’t understand my art. You never have.”
My hands are clammy. “I don’t feel well,” I tell him.
“It’s in your head,” Doug says. “You’d feel perfectly well if I’d never told you the name of the soup.”
Is now the time to tell him there’s a growth on my uterus, and it’s been there for weeks? “How long have you been feeding me dinosaur, Doug?”
Doug shifts his weight from foot-to-foot the way one does when they’re guilty of feeding their girlfriend brontosaurus meat for months while calling it steak.
His impeccable pecs and bulging biceps won’t get him out of this one. “How many times, Doug?”
“You’re the only person alive, aside from myself, who’s ever dined on a prehistoric delicacy. Do you have any idea how much someone might pay for a plate of my glazed Gallimimus? I thought you’d be—”
“You’d thought I’d be what, Doug?” Unbelievable. He wants me to be impressed. The lengths some men will go to impress a girl when literally all it takes these days is wiping up the tiny black hairs from the sink after a shave or, in Doug’s case, letting me pick the dessert for once. I can’t believe I even considered letting him father my hypothetical children. Think of the horror two years from now when he’s “run out of ingredients” and little baby Philip won’t stop crying.
Doug twists his toe into the carpet, folds his hands behind his back. “I thought you’d be…impressed?”
See?
“A picnic in the park would have impressed me, Doug. This fucking portal impresses me. But feeding me a dinosaur…oh God, it’s not passing.”
“Just sit down.”
“What? Near that thing?” I point to the purple. “Not a chance. What if it sucks me in?”
Doug considers this then shakes his head, confident. “No. Things only seem to come out.”
“Something’s about to come out of me if you don’t let me get to the bathroom.”
“It’ll pass.”
“Oh, it’s passing,” I say and proceed to vomit all over Doug’s shoes and carpet and purple prehistoric portal.
Doug’s cooking has given me Cretaceous Cancer.
When I come to, Doug informs me of the exciting news. “Your vomit went into the vortex.”
I’m going to be sick again. Doug brings me a wastepaper basket and holds my hair, but nothing comes. “How long has that been there?” I ask, nodding toward the swirling enigma.
“It came with the house,” Doug says. He’s being rather cavalier about having access to interdimensional time-travel if you ask me. This is the same guy who put a critic in a headlock after he called Doug a “foodie.”
“It came with the house? It’s not a credenza that was too heavy to move, Doug.”
“I never thought to go in.”
“Thank God.”
“But your, well, uh, vomit went in,” my boyfriend shrugs. “Should we go in?” he suggests like we’re window-shopping on a Saturday. I call him my boyfriend but, truth be told, we never quite ironed that out. He’s mentioned he’s not seeing anyone else, and while I am not seeing anyone else either, I don’t want him to think he has me all to himself just yet. Men don’t treat you as well when they’re not fighting for your undivided attention. I want men to sail oceans for me, or at least buy me flowers on a day that isn’t February fourteenth. Mom thinks I’m being too picky. She’s worried I’ve squandered my potential. That I waited so long, my body became barren. “You could have been a great housewife,” she likes to say. “And a wonderful mother. But instead you wanted to be a CEO. Now all the good men are gone.”
“I’ll get my things,” Doug says.
“Your things?”
“Supplies. We’ll need supplies. There’s no telling what we’ll encounter. Gosh. Think of the ingredients.”
Jesus, how am I thinking about sex at a time like this? Doug the Dinosaur Hunter. I shake the image from my head. “Doug,” I say. “Dinosaurs eat people.”
But Doug has something else on his mind: cooking me a meal the likes of which the world has never tasted. He’s stuffing things like gauze and itch relief cream and collapsible mugs into a backpack. He’s filling his pockets with knives and pens and pills, and I guess this is my ocean. He slings a rifle over his shoulder. “I only have one sleeping bag,” he says, “We’ll share.”
Doug suggested we hold hands in the event we could lose each other while traveling interdimensionally, but I countered that by holding hands, something worse could happen along the lines of us fusing into one hideous Juliedoug reminiscent of Brundlefly. On the count of three, Doug jumped and I remained firmly planted in a reality that still airs Bachelor in Paradise.
I stood at the edge of the portal for some time that first day, willing Doug to come back through, to realize he’d made a horrible mistake or, better yet, that time passed differently where he was. I kept thinking he’d come back any minute grizzled and bearded with a devastating tan and a tattered t-shirt, lugging behind him a reluctant Stegosaurus. Any minute, I thought, he’ll be here telling me he’s been gone for months while I’d only had time to clean the kitchen. I don’t know what stopped me, exactly. The thought of indoor plumbing and a hot shower later in the evening, probably. Or maybe it just took the threat of an interdimensional vacation as opposed to the Bahamas to realize I’ve spent my entire life conforming myself to the interests of men in order to appease them.
When Doug the dinosaur hunter did not come back through and the minutes turned to hours, I began to wonder if this tear in the spacetime continuum tore his body apart; he’d been eaten by a velociraptor, or captured by an indigenous tribe and eaten again—a fate I felt he’d be oddly comfortable with as the hours swept into days. I stayed in the house until I could stand it no longer. Until the milk in the fridge soured, and the last of the leftovers rotted. Until I was certain of my decision. I slept next to the portal after eating his frog legs and reindeer paté and last remaining mangosteen while it was still ripe. I imagined Doug there on the other side of the portal, watching me. He enjoyed seeing me eat his mangosteens most of all, saying if he were apprehended right then and there for having it, watching me gorge myself on its white, creamy flesh, would make the crime of sneaking them across the border worth the punishment. I even stripped down to my underwear while eating one, impossibly believing it could bring him home.
I haven’t had a bowel movement since Doug left. My doctor prescribed me prescription-strength laxatives and asked if I’d ever been to Burning Man and did I want to grab a drink after work?
I would call Doug’s name, wondering if he could hear me. I was lucky. It occurs to me now, but never then, that on any one of those nights I could have woken up in the jaws of the Tyrannosaurus whose son’s balls Doug took and turned into an appetizer, or falling, falling, falling from a great, great height into a canopy of sixty-five million year old trees and nesting Ptreranadons—a result of having rolled over too far on Doug’s basement floor.
Rummaging through his childhood belongings to pass the time, I found a set of old mix tapes on cassettes recorded from the radio (the beginning of every song clipped by whatever DJ was on the air and young Doug’s slow reaction time), and played them in the ancient, silver boom box he’d also kept. When Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You” played, I sobbed, imagining the girl he recorded it for. I played these tapes on loop, hoping he could hear them and find his way home. I showered in his bathroom. I used his razor to shave my legs, and wiped away the tiny black hairs. I opened his mail, hoping for a letter from the future that never came because who’s to say there aren’t dinosaurs in 2099. Doug’s credit card payment was past due. I paid the first one for him.
I came upon some old rope in the closet covered in Boy Scout knots and tied one end to the banister at the bottom of the basement stairs before tossing the length of it through the vortex. That was the last time I set foot in Doug’s house. I left my key on the counter. Our relationship had to come to an end.
I am impossibly strong without having jogged or down-dogged in months. Because I do not want to go to Burning Man, I have not been back to the doctor. I stare at myself in the mirror each morning, poking a bulge in my abdomen I know should not be there. I have not told anyone what I have eaten or discussed Doug’s whereabouts with the authorities or otherwise. His sister came calling once, and all I could tell her was that he left me, which was true in its own way, but I couldn’t sleep that night, thinking only that I left him, didn’t I? Was he scared where he was? Filled with regret that he’d “taken” me with him, only to lose me to the void of space, which I tell myself is exactly what happened. I am lost to the void of space. I do not know if the portal has been discovered or vanished, though I assume the latter seeing as I have not seen a dinosaur on the news terrorizing the Empire State Building, but that’s about to change because it turns out I’m not dying. I just laid a football-sized egg in the toilet, and I’m not sure how long I can keep a thing like that to myself. I guess I’m going to be a mother after all.