Laced

On Implacable Love: Or, The Story of Zaira and the Pie

In the last couple of hours before I had to catch my train I packed my things, did laundry and tidied up, whomped down a slice of Zaira’s pie, shut off the water and turned down the heat, and tried to schedule a ride to the train station. I’d been feeling increasingly anxious in an elusively familiar way, almost feverish, as if I might be coming down with something, but it was around the time I got a text alert that my train would be delayed that I started to wonder whether this was what a panic attack felt like. Even though external events were authentically anxiety-inducing—I kept getting conflicting information from Amtrak’s texts, website, and automated agents about whether my train was on time, delayed, or cancelled, plus my ride app suddenly wanted to charge me $100 for a twenty-minute ride to the station—I knew, intellectually, that none of these last-second complications merited the kind of clammy, palpitating freakout I was experiencing. It wasn’t until I realized I was rapidly sucking down the last of my precious seltzer reserve that it occurred to me to text Zaira:

Um, question: there isn’t anything I should know about this pie, is there?

My editor Zaira and I are more like a couple than a lot of couples. Zaira had, catlike, already more or less moved into my new house—at this point she’d probably spent more time there than I had—and she’d been the last person here before me, getting some work done in a distraction-free environment and interfacing with some subcontractors for me. If I find a jar of honey from Mick Jagger’s country estate in my pantry, I know it came from her; if I can’t find my sewing supplies, I can text her in New Orleans or Paris or wherever she’s alit and she’ll tell me it’s in the drawer by the stove. We both take pie seriously—a former student of algebraic topology, she taught me to weave a lattice-top crust—and often send each other photos of our latest successes. This one, which she’d left in the freezer after her last stay, had looked to be some variant on apple. She replied at once, from Tokyo:

Yes I wouldn’t operate heavy machinery after eating it.

I urgently requested some no-fucking-around clarification.

It is a sour cream apple pie with yes a bit of weed in the crumble top! Sorry not to have had a chance to tell you sooner.