“I want your curd,” I whisper into the ear of the ripe, squat little man as he stands behind the heaving cheese table. Porky Pig himself, an adorable, moustachioed hog.

He’s my wedding cheesemonger. Bertolio Fiorucci, a completely authentic Romano émigré from Trastevere, Roma (the real thing), who came to Melbourne’s East a few decades back. And thank God, because he’s been loving me hard with his fine artisanal cheeses ever since. Their quality is simply beyond.

“My what, Mrs?” he replies pleasantly. He knows what. But Bertolio is a professional – the cheese must take priority.

He weaves around where I lean, working his way up and down the long table, administering to the gorgeous tree-stump boards that weigh about 6 kilos each. Upon them he lays cheese: crescents of Jarlsberg, rougher cut blocks of truffle Manchego, ribbons of slick, shining camembert, all exquisitely interrupted by dates, bloody raspberries and folds of Prosciutto di Parma. Little empires of cheese rise and fall. Their histories measured out in the placement of chevre, as their maker’s hands dance with fate.

Bertolio is utterly devoted to the cheese. Art! I sway a little.

“De Meaux, Berto.” My whisper smells like plum and smoke. “I want your brie de Meaux. On a frond lavosh, with the mule pâté and the balsam-fig jam.”

I do want the brie but even more I want Bertolio’s fuzzy belly, bulbous and warm as a fig in the sun.

With great economy he hands me my cheese, then unzips his fly and lifts my dress. He flops his belly over my naked buttocks and ruts me against the table in quick, rhythmic pumps, precise as his positioning of each hors d’oeuvre.

All my bones give way and my head rolls on a cheese board. Rubbery, wet cheeses stick to my cheeks and a diabolically rancid smell fills my nose. Some part of me emits a deep whine.  

But my sound is cut by a blunt blow that comes down against the back of my head, mushing my nose into the wood. It’s something very heavy but with the most subtle spring to it. A giant wheel of pecorino, its surface pocked like a small planet.

I look up and see Husband looming over me on the other side of the table. He’s leering at us, and his eyes look crazy. Little pink party lights dance across his cheeks and the muscles in his forearms are twitching. He dropped the pecorino on my head.

“Fucking our wedding cheesemonger, on our wedding night?” Husband’s words push out like cold lard through a grill, slow and thick with rage. “You’re a sick wife.”

“Dave,” I say, “please.” I’m spread, prostrate below him, Berto still buried deep. I blink at Husband, make my eyes wide and dewy. I even sound a little scared.

But something about my tone sends him nuclear. He expels a sharp, half-laugh, like he’s spitting out rot, raises two shaking hands and hurls his body towards me.

But before he can seize my neck, Bertolio grabs the back of my dress in his fist, almost ripping the carmine silk, and starts sprinting towards the dance floor, dragging me behind him. I fall into a stumbling gallop. My dress is covered in crumbs, grapes that popped against my breasts and smears of a particularly heady liver pâté.

We reach the dance floor and Berto launches me into my guests – a seamy, smelly, bedazzled mass. There are simply hundreds of the fools, drinking and writhing to the sounds of the wedding band like God’s last surviving brain cells. My dress keeps catching on their serrated sequins and plastic horns; of course I had to make the dress code Woland’s Spring Ball ⚘.

I spill over the back of Bridesmaid Pavlovic, who’s on all fours, bucking the air with his hips and spreading his fingers on the floor like a frog. I laugh and laugh, and Berto pushes me on, my open mouth smearing against people’s backs and faces, eating their hair, until finally we crash into Maid of Honour, their slick brown bob and an empty martini glass wobbling in time to a jaunty little jive.

Maid of Honour registers my face and their eyes glaze over in ecstatic outrage. “BRIDE, BRIDE!” they scream at pitch, “HENS, assemble, I have found BRIDE!” A summons to my dearest nincompoops.

I catch a quick flash of Bertolio’s face. His gentle smile is gone, his face hard with worry as he scans the dark crowd for Husband’s tall, bandy figure. My poor, sweet monger. “Mrs…” he whispers harshly in my ear, “we must get to my van…it’s parked next to the house. My phone is in it, then we can drive back to the city –” he’s cut off as the hens descend upon us – pummelling through the gaps in the crowd, crawling between their boyfriends’ legs and scraping their limbs to get to me. They swallow us up in the yards of pink organza that I forced them to wear.

“Ninnies!” I sing to them. “Bride!” they sing back, and I let my body dissolve in a jelly of nuptial bliss. I’m flopped from hen to hen as they pass me around like their favourite doll, and then borne up in the air on their exalting shoulders. Stretched out beneath the sky, I glimpse the moon above me, close enough to touch, and I whisper, She is not sweet like Mary. She is bald and wild.[1] Tonight my moon is made of a pure, silvery liquid that I long to drink.

“I’ll drop by on Tuesday before the school run for the Parmesan, and don’t forget I added that imported loaf!” Bridesmaid Helfenbaum shouts at Bertolio, while Maid of Honour sucks the cheese residue from each of his fingers and winks at me. Fresh meat? I wink back. “I’ll see you Tuesday, Natalie,” Berto replies. Then he wipes his fingers and stares at me. His eyes tell me that we have to go – now.

Back on the ground, I turn to see Husband fighting to reach us, ripping rudely through my guests like a ravening beast. And again Berto has me, he tears me away from my throng and ejects me out the back end of the dance floor. We sprint holding hands across the vast, green lawn that’s bordered by hedged paths and little fountains shaped like tortoises and cupids.

My raptures were ended too soon, I think, with the slightest nip of irritation at the man. But the night must go on. My Husband doth come. And so, my monger and I must run! The mansion begins to block the sky above us as we close in on it, the detail of its arches and Corinthian pilasters illumined by my moon. It really is an exquisite venue. Berto pulls us to the left of the mansion towards the carpark out back, but I quickly slip my hand from his fingers and run for the front entrance.

“Where are you going?” he yells, frustrated and scared, his breath jumping out in sharp gusts.

“Follow me, amour fou! We’ll be safe in here. I know where we can hide!” My voice tinkles like a bell.

Once I cross the yawning threshold I slow to a walk, then tiptoe through the dimly lit foyer, past the gold and marble staircase, down the glorious hallway that snakes to the other end of the mansion. I hear Berto’s dogged footsteps following me.

At last I find the big, industrial kitchen. Berto follows me in and I close the doors behind us. My nipples grow tender at the heavenly sight that awaits us.

On a row of stainless-steel counter tops, platters and platters of large shells, their succulent little inhabitants just begging to be suckled and swallowed whole. Pacific oysters with a slightly blue sheen, fat, juicy Portarlington mussels, the most prized flesh of the Tasman. Caviar like the buds of midnight, ready to burst their brackish secrets on one’s tongue. Lobsters and crab claws stacked with a rustic grace. And arranging it all, their graceful stacker – Shane Willis, my fishmonger. A real salt dog. A real seaman, raised on nothing but ocean spray and the call of the icy Victorian breaks. Seafood is the tongue in which he speaks. He sees me and smiles like a hound, toothy and wicked, then stretches out a long, amber arm in a gesture of welcome.

“Bertolio,” I say, “meet Shane. He catered the engagement party.”

“How are ya, mate?” Shane says. Berto just stands there, puffed and speechless. But before my Berto can say another word, I am engulfed in the warmth of my fisherman’s broad, muscled chest, his silvery hair brushing against my cheek. “Shane,” I whisper, “the salmon roe,” and Shane feeds the briny eggs straight into my mouth with his nimble fingers, all the while softly kissing and nibbling the edges of my lips.

When Husband breaks through the doors to the kitchen, causing splinters of heritage wood to splay across the tiles, I’m in such ecstasies I barely even notice. Always an interruption!

Berto makes to lunge for him, but I intercede – “stop, Bertolio, let him come!” He freezes, and Husband, with his hands held meekly in the air, his furies finally expired, stumbles towards me and Shane and falls on his knees at our feet. As Shane gets back to kissing my face and smearing my breasts with roe, Husband, in a posture of perfect melancholy, begins to massage and kiss my manicured feet. “Sick wife. Sick, unfaithful wife,” he whimpers.

I lock eyes with Berto, my bounteous, delectable Cheeseman. My juicy prized pig. I fear I may be drooling. “Berto, my love,” I rasp, “it’s time. Come here. I want your curd.”

But Bertolio doesn’t come. He just stares at the three of us with the strangest expression on his face.

Then he says, in a deadpan voice that somehow sounds like laughter, “all the bread at this wedding is completely stale.”

Horror – tepid horror in my gut. “What did you just say?”

“Ingrid,” he says, as he turns his back on me, “never come back to The Providore again.”

I begin to shake. My breathing feels highly irregular; I know for certain I will collapse at any second. Fucking pig cunt bastard. And then – the longest, loudest and most heinous fart I have ever been subjected to blasts up from somewhere beneath me. I look down, my entire body quivering with mortification. “Sorry all,” grumbles Dave from the floor, “think I’ve got bad indigestion.”

[1] “The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath

Image: Floris van Dyck, Still Life with Fruit, Nuts and Cheese (1613)