What We Fed Each Other

The bull-necked man across from me at the dinner party was explaining vitamin supplementation with evangelical intensity, his thick fingers pointing at my plate like he was conducting a sermon. I stared at my wilted spinach, suddenly unable to remember why I'd come. Why any of us came to these gatherings anymore.

"You're not eating," said Lena, my oldest friend, her voice carrying that familiar note of concern she'd perfected over twenty years. But her eyes were somewhere else — checking her phone beneath the table, where a thread of messages from him was surely unspooling.

The bull at the head of the table laughed, a sound like heavy furniture being dragged across hardwood. He owned three startups and believed in optimization, in biohacking, in the perfectibility of the human animal through the right combination of compounds and discipline. I'd slept with him three months ago, in a fit of self-destruction so clean it felt almost spiritual.

"Spinach," he said, pointing at my plate again, "is nature's multivitamin. But you have to eat it with fat for absorption." He winked, and I felt something small and vital die inside me — not dramatically, but like a house plant someone forgot to water.

Lena's phone vibrated against the table. Everyone glanced over. She didn't apologize.

I'd known about the affair for weeks. I was waiting for the right moment to tell her I'd always been in love with her husband, not that it mattered. The vitamin deficiency in my blood was real, though. The doctor had called it 'concerning.' Some things can only be fixed from the inside out.

"Are you okay?" Lena asked, and I realized I'd been gripping my wine glass so hard my knuckles had gone white.

"The spinach," I said, hearing my voice as if it belonged to someone else, "isn't sitting right."

The bull laughed again. No one else did.

Later, I would find out that Lena already knew. About her husband. About me. About everything. She would tell me this over drinks, months later, her eyes clear and terrible: 'We're all just eating what we can afford to.'

But at the table, surrounded by the clinking of silver and the murmured agreements, I simply pushed the spinach aside and reached for the wine bottle again. The night was already lost. Some deficiencies are structural.