For our fourteen-year wedding anniversary I bought a box of instant cheese fondue. It is our anniversary ritual: I bought his favourite food, and he bought mine. Like most marriages, we have household agreements based on an accumulation of repeated experiences, confining ourselves to the comfortable nooks of our shared life. Since we lost our sense of flavour three years ago due to the infamous virus, we mostly eat slight variations of the same microwave meals. In the beginning I panicked a lot, trying to hold on to memories of flavours, trying to find solutions to my new bland life, but all aromas left my deserted mouth after a few months. After two years, my panic left. My world reeks and tastes of vast abandonment, free of both stank and savour. Francis and I both suffer from this, and even though we mostly just watch TV together, we’ve become bound to each other in a calm, kind and stuffy way.
Francis had become fond of fondue. His favourite type of fondue is instant fondue, the type that was popular in the 1960s. It is sold in a paper box, containing mustardy yellow powder that turns gluey when dissolved in hot water. It then becomes a slightly solidified slime, gummy and gooey, with drops of liquid sweating out of the faux cheesy pores, glistening on its surface. He eats it by the mouthful, choking a tiny bit from time to time when he swallows too fast. I loathe the stuff, but eat it sometimes against my will.
Anniversary meals are consumed in front of the TV, like we do for meals every day, except today we gorge on our favourite mouthfeel. My food of choice is strawberry shortcake. My numbed mouth has taken away the guilt for eating sugary or fatty goods, and I could eat an entire cake on nights like these. I like the feeling of stuffing my mouth with whipped cream, one of the few foods that can fill up your whole mouth while leaving you with a sensation that is pretty close to chewing on a whole lot of nothing, all the while making you feel heavy and sick to your stomach. Maybe I like it because it gives me the feeling of being alive. Maybe I like it because it brings me a tad bit closer to death. I don’t know. He and I both know that our desire for cheese and cream has not come from a craving to still our hunger, but to fill a different void that we had promised to do for one another fourteen years ago.
‘The cake was sold out,’ Francis says while closing out the summer evening air behind him. ‘Oh,’ I say, staring into the cooled yellow slime in front of me. ‘I went to two different supermarkets, but it was sold out everywhere,’ he says. ‘That’s all right,’ I reply. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, avoiding the resigned look in my eyes. Francis shuffles towards the kitchen and places his plastic shopping bag next to the pot of fondue, carefully unpacking it under the fluorescent light striking our kitchen counter: five spray cans of whipped cream, three packs of mascarpone and a small, silver sealed sachet. ‘Got this instead,’ he mumbles, mostly to himself, while placing our biggest metallic bowl next to my pot. He seems a bit nervous, slowly ripping the plastic off the packages with trembling fingers. Our silence veils the room, the sound of the fluorescent light buzzing above our heads. Francis takes the caps off of his bottles of whipping cream, shaking each with precise attention, eyes on the bowl.
Creating a human spoon by aligning his three left fingers, Francis scoops a chunk of mascarpone from its container, transferring the white lump with his shaking hands to the shimmering bowl. My hands have been clenched to the metal border of the yellow fondue ocean from the moment Francis entered the house. His goopy fingers continue to scoop mascarpone into the bottom of the metallic well. He fondles the cream into a thick, flat layer, stroking the surface of his freshly birthed white moon. With utmost concentration he decorates the surface with small hills, spraying creamy snakes out of the cans, one can after the other, filling the bowl up to the rim. He sprinkles the top of the resulting white mountain with the insides of the small sachet, which seem to be crystals of sugar; they make a crackling sound when touching the snowy surface. Francis looks up at me, his eyes serious and scared, like a guilty but determined dog wanting affirmation. He carefully takes my closest hand with his pillowy, greased fingers. He guides my hand towards the bowl, and upon touching the foam I close my eyes.
The sugar crystals crackle and tickle my skin, tingling my spine, creating a shivering sensation around my body. I am floating on a heavy cloud, alongside the large hand of my lover, our fingertips talking to each other in a language foreign to my reality. My whole body plunges into the white moisture. Here I swim, in my peaceful bouncy paradise. A dense, sticky lightness hugging my skin, caressing my palm. As he thrusts my hand deeper into the mascarpone, I reach for his other hand and carefully dunk it into the warm fondue. While the world smells of everything, we warm each other in the odourless darkness of fake cheese and white cream.