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were enormously curious about this new boyfriend named Manny. She said that more than one of the guys (protective of her in a brotherly sort of way, she preempted) had inquired about my lineage.
    Malachi and I arrived on Friday evening; Lisa met us in the drive-way and made the introductions. I barely retained a single name. To my surprise, there were nearly two dozen residents of the summerhouse. The alarming numbers had nothing to do with my inability to engage socially, however. The pig was all I cared about. We needed to dig a deep pit in the sand, as well as prepare a fire and superheat those granite bricks, all before breakfast the next day.

    That night, with help from Lisa’s protective brotherly types, we dug the pit. Just after dawn, while the cobbles baked, Malachi and I stuffed the pig with papaya, jalapeños, limes, and other bright fruits. We wrapped the critter in banana fronds, sealed the leaves with soaked burlap, and encased the package in wire. Finally, we lowered the ungainly cocoon onto the granite bed and covered it with four feet of sand. Everything was going just the way I had planned.
    I spent the intervening hours trying to learn everyone’s name and attempting to limit my beer intake. We unearthed the pig. It was hot and fully cooked, but to my horror it looked like an East River floater. The beast wasn’t roasted. I had steamed it in the sand. At best you could call it poached. Whatever it was called, dinner was a wrinkly abomination—not the least bit appetizing.
    The assembled crowd had doubled in size, but no one in it understood what had happened. They were all drinking, and they were getting hungry. We only had moments to make it right. The sun was setting and the women were rooting around in beach bags for sweaters and shawls.
    Malachi delivered a clearheaded appraisal: “We’re fucked.”
    Not yet, I thought. The meat might have been ugly, but it was cooked. To make it attractive and that much tastier, we just needed to hack the carcass up into grill-size hunks and caramelize it. I retreated inland to buy as much charcoal as I could find in town. Malachi took up a surreptitious collection of kettle grills from neighboring decks. We finished off the pork on an assembly of flaming taiko drums set at odd angles in the sand. Their orange glow was the only light to eat by.
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    This instinct for the culinary high-wire act has manifested itself regularly since Lisa and I married and started a family. I’ve shucked hundreds of oysters for a driveway crammed with parents in order to celebrate our daughter’s second birthday (and I’ve found numerous, similarly flimsy excuses to repeat the effort). I have tempted the fates by preparing paella for fifty, cooked outdoors on the grill. “This is the traditional way paella is prepared,” I boasted to any guest who dared approach their host, the dervish at the grill. Nobody needed to know I’d never made the dish before.
    I can trace the source of this unwieldy urge to overreach directly to my father, a trained chemist from England who worked here as a rocket scientist on the Mercury rocket mission for NASA. He made a mythical, breathtakingly spicy curry whenever he entertained at home. In fairness, though, my impulse for stunt cooking is a dangerous mutation of his much more benign intentions.
    I can recall sitting cross-legged in my footy pajamas under my parents’ kitchen table, the bare bulb at the ceiling casting a harsh light over the mayhem beyond the table’s unvarnished maple legs. Every time my father assembled his friends, he served a curry. I marveled at his ability to single-handedly prepare a massive pot of fiery food while presiding over a riot of 1970s booze- and dope-fueled, shaggy manliness. It was a meal he encouraged me to share, always with the same disastrous, and apparently hilarious, results.
    I know now that this vindaloo was less the orthodox hot-and-sour stew, with its uniquely Goan amalgam of the Portuguese