To be honest, Tseng preferred tunafish. Not too mushy, not too dry, on fresh sliced whole wheat bread with salt and pepper and a little pickle relish. The kind of sandwich he could eat in the five minutes or so that constituted his lunch break: discreet, efficient, unassuming.
The bread in the aluminum pan popped and sparked as Tseng swirled it around in the browning butter. Shaking his head, Tseng gingerly laid on slices of cheese, hacked off the end of a brick that was gloriously, artificially orange, each slice almost half an inch thick. Increasingly doubtful, he loosened the bread with a metal paint scraper—there hadn't been anything resembling a spatula in the dark and tiny kitchen—and set more bread on top of the cheese.
"It won't melt," he muttered.
Of course Tseng could make toasted cheese. He called it "grilled cheese," actually, the once or twice a year he had a craving for it. Tseng's grilled cheese usually involved a scanty amount of good emmenthaler procured from Orlando Furioso's, a tiny specialty shop that also sold beakers of exquisite feng u, fresh pine nuts, and edible flowers. To get the cheese to melt right, you grate it fine; to give depth to the bit of unsalted butter melting in the skillet, you add a little rosemary.
The bread was starting to sag under the weight of the cheese.
Tseng had been put out to discover that Furioso's had none of the necessary ingredients for this particular sandwich. And every store he tried after that—Criers, Malbury's, More Weddell's—had been the same, far too fine, too up-market to serve his purpose. Tseng had growled and marched straight on into the Dogends, furled umbrella beneath his arm, ignoring his beeping cellphone, until finally he found a Radley's and made his purchases and began the long, rainy walk back to the apartment with his bread loaf and salty butter and orange cheese in a wrinkled plastic bag.
He had fumbled with the hacked keycard a little bit, had had to watch his footing in the crumbled concrete of the yard.
Tseng, still in his raincoat, standing in the strange kitchen, waited, the scraper in his hand, holding himself mercilessly to task while the pool of melted butter browned and smoked and the pan started roaring softly. Finally unbearable; and Tseng at last slid the scraper beneath the bread, pried the sandwich free from the bottom of the pan, and flipped it. Seething butter leapt from the pan. Tseng started backward, cracked his head on an unfamiliar cabinet, and cursed. The bread—the fluffiest, whitest, cheapest Tseng could find—was a deep brown, verging on burnt. The cheese, he noted, was not melted through.
The last minute of cooking was a kind of agony. Tseng brutally ignored his own instincts, instead following the recollected voice, that voice with the grain running through, feeling it between his shoulder blades--almost real, almost present--feeling the little hitch of emotion as it described the way your teeth would sink into the still-solid central layer of the melting cheese, the texture of the nearly-burned bread, the color of the butter dripping from the sandwich's core. It was unlike any sandwich Tseng had ever dreamed of or attempted to create, and it required all his training to adhere to the instructions in the remembered words.
I'd give, Tseng thought. What? What would I give?
He ate the sandwich, sitting in Reno's empty apartment, watching grey afternoon light track across the clothes strewn over the carpeting.