Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (11 page)

Does this mean that I starve myself when I can’t find company? Not quite. What I do, though, is put off eating until I’m ravenous. I also deny myself the richest possibilities. I don’t throw that pat of butter into the pan (though I wish to). I scrimp on the smoked shrimp. It’s a little deal I make with myself, just in case someone shows up later. Then I sit down with my quesarito and a glass of sweet juice and, when I can bear the hunger no longer, I go to town.

Grill-Curried Shrimp Quesarito with Avocado Raita

SERVES 1

7 to 8 tiger-tail shrimp

1/4 cup teriyaki sauce

2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

1/2 teaspoon curry powder (or to taste)

1/4 cup yogurt

1/4 cup guacamole (see recipe, page 123)

1 burrito-style flour tortilla

1 ounce Monterey Jack, shredded

1/2 roma tomato, diced

1 handful of iceberg lettuce, chopped

Soak the shrimp in a marinade of teriyaki, brown sugar, and toasted sesame oil, dust with curry powder, and smoke on the grill.

Combine yogurt and guacamole to create the raita.

Pan-fry the flour tortilla and layer with cheese.

Layer with shrimp, tomato, lettuce, and raita.

Eat, using mouth and hands in conjunction.

A short story

N
ineteen seventy-one was the Year of Spaghetti.

In 1971 I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the aluminum pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in life.

I’d gone to a cooking specialty store and bought a kitchen timer and a huge aluminum cooking pot, big enough to bathe a German shepherd in, then went round all the supermarkets that catered to foreigners, gathering an assortment of odd-sounding spices. I picked up a pasta cookbook at the bookstore, and bought tomatoes by the dozen. I purchased every brand of spaghetti I could lay my hands on, simmered every kind of sauce known to man. Fine particles of garlic, onion, and olive oil swirled in the air, forming a harmonious cloud that penetrated every corner of my tiny apartment, permeating the floor and ceiling and walls, my clothes, my books, my records, my tennis racket, my bundles of old letters. It was a fragrance one might have smelled on ancient Roman aqueducts.

This is a story from the Year of Spaghetti, 1971
A.D
.

As a rule I cooked spaghetti, and ate it, alone. I was convinced that spaghetti was a dish best enjoyed alone. I can’t really explain why I felt that way, but there it is.

I always drank tea with my spaghetti and ate a simple lettuce-and-cucumber salad. I’d make sure I had plenty of both. I laid everything out neatly on the table, and enjoyed a leisurely meal, glancing at the paper as I ate. From Sunday to Saturday, one Spaghetti Day followed another. And each new Sunday started a brand-new Spaghetti Week.

Every time I sat down to a plate of spaghetti—especially on a rainy afternoon—I had the distinct feeling that somebody was about to knock on my door. The person who I imagined was about to visit me was different each time. Sometimes it was a stranger, sometimes someone I knew. Once, it was a girl with slim legs whom I’d dated in high school, and once it was myself, from a few years back, come to pay a visit. Another time, it was none other than William Holden, with Jennifer Jones on his arm.

William Holden?

Not one of these people, though, actually ventured into my apartment. They hovered just outside the door, without knocking, like fragments of memory, and then slipped away.

Spring, summer, and fall, I cooked away, as if cooking spaghetti were an act of revenge. Like a lonely, jilted girl throwing old love letters into the fireplace, I tossed one handful of spaghetti after another into the pot.

I’d gather up the trampled-down shadows of time, knead them into the shape of a German shepherd, toss them into the roiling water, and sprinkle them with salt. Then I’d hover over the pot, oversized chopsticks in hand, until the timer dinged its plaintive tone.

Spaghetti strands are a crafty bunch, and I couldn’t let them out of my sight. If I were to turn my back, they might well slip over the edge of the pot and vanish into the night. Like the tropical jungle waits to swallow up colorful butterflies into the eternity of time, the night lay in silence, hoping to waylay the prodigal strands.

Spaghetti alla parmigiana

Spaghetti alla napoletana

Spaghetti al cartoccio

Spaghetti aglio e olio

Spaghetti alla carbonara

Spaghetti della pina

And then there was the pitiful, nameless leftover spaghetti carelessly tossed into the fridge.

Born in heat, the strands of spaghetti washed down the river of 1971 and vanished.

And I mourn them all—all the spaghetti of the year 1971.

When the phone rang at three-twenty I was sprawled out on the tatami, staring at the ceiling. A pool of winter sunlight had formed in the place where I lay. Like a dead fly I lay there, vacant, in a December 1971 spotlight.

At first, I didn’t recognize it as the phone ringing. It was more like an unfamiliar memory that had hesitantly slipped in between the layers of air. Finally, though, it began to take shape, and, in the end, a ringing phone was unmistakably what it was. It was one hundred percent a phone ring in one-hundred-percent real air. Still sprawled out, I reached over and picked up the receiver.

On the other end was a girl, a girl so indistinct that, by four-thirty, she might very well have disappeared altogether. She was the ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine. Something had brought them together, this guy and this indistinct girl, and something had led them to break up. I had, I admit, reluctantly played a role in getting them together in the first place.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said, “but do you know where he is now?”

I looked at the phone, running my eyes along the length of the cord. The cord was, sure enough, attached to the phone. I managed a vague reply. There was something ominous in the girl’s voice, and whatever trouble was brewing I knew I didn’t want to get involved.

“Nobody will tell me where he is,” she said in a chilly tone. “Everybody’s pretending they don’t know. But there’s something important I have to tell him, so
please
—tell me where he is. I promise I won’t drag you into this. Where is he?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I told her. “I haven’t seen him in a long time.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. I was telling the truth about not having seen him for a long time, but not about the other part—I did know his address and phone number. Whenever I tell a lie, something weird happens to my voice.

No comment from her.

The phone was like a pillar of ice.

Then all the objects around me turned into pillars of ice, as if I were in a J. G. Ballard science fiction story.

“I really don’t know,” I repeated. “He went away a long time ago, without saying a word.”

The girl laughed. “Give me a break. He’s not that clever. We’re talking about a guy who has to raise a noise no matter what he does.”

She was right. The guy really was a bit of a dim bulb.

But I wasn’t about to tell her where he was. Do that, and next I’d have
him
on the phone, giving me an earful. I was through with getting caught up in other people’s messes. I’d already dug a hole in the backyard and buried everything that needed to be buried in it. Nobody could ever dig it up again.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You don’t like me, do you?” she suddenly said.

I had no idea what to say. I didn’t particularly dislike her. I had no real impression of her at all. And it’s hard to have a bad impression of somebody you have no impression of.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “But I’m cooking spaghetti right now.”

“What?”

“I said I’m cooking spaghetti,” I lied. I had no idea why I said that. But that lie was already a part of me—so much so that, at that moment at least, it didn’t feel like a lie at all.

I went ahead and filled an imaginary pot with water, lit an imaginary stove with an imaginary match.

“So?” she asked.

I sprinkled imaginary salt into the boiling water, gently lowered a handful of imaginary spaghetti into the imaginary pot, set the imaginary kitchen timer for twelve minutes.

“So I can’t talk. The spaghetti will be ruined.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I’m really sorry, but cooking spaghetti’s a delicate operation.”

The girl was silent. The phone in my hand began to freeze again.

“So could you call me back?” I added hurriedly.

“Because you’re in the middle of making spaghetti?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Are you making it for someone or are you going to eat it alone?”

“I’ll eat it by myself,” I said.

She held her breath for a long time, then slowly breathed out. “There’s no way you could know this, but I’m really in trouble. I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” I said.

“There’s some money involved, too.”

“I see.”

“He owes me money,” she said. “I lent him some money. I shouldn’t have, but I had to.”

I was quiet for a minute, my thoughts drifting toward spaghetti. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’ve got the spaghetti going, so…”

She gave a listless laugh. “Goodbye,” she said. “Say hi to your spaghetti for me. I hope it turns out OK.”

“Bye,” I said.

When I hung up the phone, the circle of light on the floor had shifted an inch or two. I lay down again in that pool of light and resumed staring at the ceiling.

Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.

Now I regret, a little, that I didn’t tell the girl anything. Perhaps I should have. I mean, her ex-boyfriend wasn’t much to start with—an empty shell of a guy with artistic pretensions, a great talker whom nobody trusted. She sounded as if she really were strapped for money, and, no matter what the situation, you’ve got to pay back what you borrow.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to the girl—the thought usually pops into my mind when I’m facing a steaming-hot plate of spaghetti. After she hung up, did she disappear forever, sucked into the four-thirty shadows? Was I partly to blame?

I want you to understand my position, though. At the time, I didn’t want to get involved with anyone. That’s why I kept on cooking spaghetti, all by myself. In that huge pot, big enough to hold a German shepherd.

Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields.

Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really
loneliness?

—Translated by Philip Gabriel

F
or the better part of two decades I have lunched alone in Manhattan restaurants several times each week. Although my work requires me to break bread with a continuous stream of fascinating (and self-fascinated) personalities, I still prefer, if given the choice, to eat by myself. It’s not that I fancy my own company so much as I enjoy the company of complete strangers. I like the communal anonymity of watching people as they go about their lives, and a restaurant is a good place to do this. The best table in any restaurant, so far as I’m concerned, is in a corner next to a window. From that spot I can be entertained by the infinite variety of the street or the enclosed drama of the restaurant itself. There’s
always
a lot to see.

I was introduced to the pleasures of eating alone at the VG Bar/Restaurant at the northwest corner of Broadway and Bleecker in the late 1980s, where the enormous plate-glass windows were so close to the sidewalk that I felt as if I had my own box seat on the live theater that was the city. Across the street and down a few steps from my office, the VG was a simple place, stripped down to the bare brick, with narrow aisles of wobbly tables and wooden ladder-back chairs. It helped that I was—and remain—not fussy about what I eat. With a burger or a tuna melt steaming on a plate in front of me, I happily watched three-card monte games, fire engines racing down Broadway, homeless people shuffling toward their doom, minor car accidents at the light, an infinity of leggy young models on their way to photo shoots in the neighborhood, loud packs of teenagers up to no good whatsoever, the occasional duo of fat-necked mob bill collectors calling on the businesses where payment was late, and the hunched widows of NYU professors who lived in the neighborhood and in winter appeared outside for a few hours of sunlight in the midday warmth.

I ate at the VG in every month, in every kind of weather. Rain, especially the kind of slashing cold rain that hits New York City in late fall, improved the voyeuristic fishbowl effect. Here I was, warm and dry, but a few inches beyond my nose, nature flung itself downward, blowing umbrellas inside out as the taxis sprayed puddles onto the sidewalk. And during several of the huge blizzards that hit the city in those years, I made my way through the falling, piled snow, eyeglasses wet with it, and watched as the traffic slushed its way slowly along, the cornices and pediments of the building façades piled with white. You could hear the wind howl as it tried to turn the corner at Broadway, and the plate-glass windows would be cold to the touch. The VG had a very moist German chocolate cake that was particularly delicious to eat when the weather outside was foul. Don’t ask me why, it just was.

Turning my eyes toward the inside of the VG, which allowed smoking back then, an atmospheric element I enjoyed, I could see the midday alcoholics already at the bar, the young waitresses clawing out a living in the city, having just arrived from Seattle or Denver or Des Moines in hopes of discovering the version of themselves that they’d always dreamed about. The waitresses cycled through quickly, the very pretty ones finding better jobs or rich boyfriends within days of arriving, and the less beguiling settling in for a few months, or more. The most permanent employees were the Mexican busboys and cooks, although the VG had a couple of bartenders who had earned their stripes. The bar, a long, beautiful curved piece of mahogany, had been salvaged from some greater origin—a swanky hotel or midtown restaurant, or even an ocean liner, for all I knew—and on the wall next to its last seat hung a Nynex pay phone; here, while leaning back against the wall, it was possible to simultaneously knock back a beer, smoke, and make a phone call. The staff paid no attention to the wall soiled by heads and hands, nor to the tiny phone numbers etched in pencil and pen around the phone. The proximity of alcohol to the telephone attracted a stream of marginal middle-aged men whose loud conversations announced their identities as struggling salesmen working lower Manhattan territories or gambling addicts calling in their afternoon racetrack or baseball bets, as well as an endless cast of struggling writers, painters, musicians, photographers, composers, playwrights, sculptors, and would-be movie directors working some desperate angle that might forestall the inevitable.

When the dollar was cheap, the restaurant was flooded with German or Japanese tourists who irritated the regulars with their fat shopping bags. After lunch, the heat and smoke and chatter of the VG virtually expelled me out into the street, caffeinated and sugared up, ready to return to work. And yet the place
was
addictive, and once I found out that the restaurant quieted down after lunch, I began to stay there and work next to the window for longer stretches of time, leaving word at my office where I could be found, if truly necessary. Of course, I did not want to be found, and in those days before cell phones, rarely was.

The VG is gone now, replaced by a succession of increasingly upscale dining establishments and I, too, have moved on, through a series of restaurants where I came to know the menu, the staff, and the clientele. For a little while I frequented Fanelli’s, an old establishment half a dozen blocks away, where the lunchers were older and more grizzled than those at the VG. I liked the patterned tin ceiling, the cup of chili, the old wood floor. The waitresses were pros—tough Manhattan chicks in their thirties and forties who had heard, seen, smoked, or ingested it all long ago. They seemed to like the guys in jean jackets with dirty hands—men who worked, not fops or frauds or delicate geniuses. But as SoHo boomed, Fanelli’s became difficult to get into. Its authenticity made it a cool place, and the guys in jean jackets went elsewhere, as did I.

For a time in the early nineties, I ate in the Noho Star, another corner restaurant one long block to the east of the VG. Once while dining alone, I looked up from my plate of shrimp linguini to witness ten New York City police officers run south on Lafayette. They sprinted with great urgency, their guns drawn and pointing down. They passed by the window in less than five seconds, and I turned back to see if any of the restaurant’s other patrons had noticed; they had not. In that same restaurant I spied over the years, and spied upon, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Sam Shepard, Gregory Hines, Wallace Shawn, and Lauren Hutton, among others. Dining alone, I noticed them all.

Now I work in midtown Manhattan. A few years ago, I found myself frequenting a not particularly distinguished Indian restaurant that I nonetheless returned to nearly every day. Within a week or two of my first visit the Indian waiters had pegged me as that rarest of patrons—the daily diner who never changes his order. I was an odd duck and that endeared me to them. Indeed, my familiarity with the restaurant and the staff became so complete that I was allowed to walk past parties of businesspeople waiting to be seated and proceed directly to what I came to think of as “my table,” a two-seater next to a giant carved marble Ganesh. I was even allowed to enter and exit through what was more or less an unmarked doorway. The act of ordering became nothing more than a quick nod at whichever waiter glanced at me first. In this way, a plate of food usually arrived at my place within a minute or two of my arrival. One of the waiters, who often pumped me for possible connections in the hotel supply industry, despite my protestations that I had none, made it his special duty to brew a particular version of Indian tea for me. It was not as good as I pretended it was, but he meant well, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

Although the midtown crowds are not nearly as interesting to watch as the downtown crowds, I was content in this restaurant. The food was hot and fast, and no one much cared if I dropped a pea or spilled a little curry sauce on the white tablecloth. Again, I began to work through and past lunch there, and it became known that if I could not be found in the office, chances were good that I was in the Indian restaurant nibbling on aloo matar gobhi amid the sitar music. I expected to eat there for the indefinite future, but not long ago one of the waiters in a black-and-white uniform came up to me during lunch and solemnly whispered that the restaurant would be closing the next day, due to a lack of patronage. He seemed anxious to break the news to me gently, perhaps worried that as I was a man of habits I might be undone by the forced change in my routine. I thanked him for the information and returned to the restaurant the next day, hours before it was to close. What was going to become of the place? I asked. It was being turned into an expensive steakhouse, I was told.

So it was, within a few months. Hoping to renew my affinity, I passed through the doors again and ate a good if expensive meal. The decor had been upgraded to a kind of forced luxuriousness. Not my thing. And the finely dressed waiters struck me as too hawkishly watchful; this was a place where you didn’t drop a pea on the floor. I left the restaurant knowing I wouldn’t return. The place itself had lost the casual indifference, the sloppy humanity, that had invited me to eat there every day.

Soon I was launched on my quest to find my next regular restaurant. I flirted with a two-story place festooned with shamrocks on the outside that I called “the Irish dump,” having developed a fondness for their tuna melt, but the joint had too many televisions on, placed inescapably in every corner. From there I visited a kosher place a few doors down, which had a great view of the street from the second-floor window, and the added attraction of Diamond District jewelry dealers coming in to eat clannishly together. Little did the restaurant owners know that I was auditioning them for a regular place in my life. But although the food was criminally inexpensive and served by kindly Israeli matrons who seemed genuinely interested in whether I liked what they set down before me, I found the kosher dishes to be impossibly bland, overcooked into a sad paste. It’s infrequent that I won’t like a meal, as long as it’s
hot,
but this stuff was—well, not great. So I moved on, somewhat disconsolately, through several of the panini and pizza joints on Forty-eighth Street, experimenting with yet another Indian restaurant a block west, also a second-floor joint where you climb a narrow, irregular stairwell. But this didn’t do it; neither did a cheap sushi place with a great window seat. I quite enjoy the well-known Café Un Deux Trois a few blocks to the south, which has elegant food, great windows, and a fantastic people scene inside, but it’s pricey if you’re going to eat there every day. And maybe a little too visible.

No, I’m looking for a joint. My version of the VG ten years later. The right combination of street view, grease, and ambience. A great place that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Not too expensive, either. With a decent burger, perhaps. It’s clear I’ll have to keep looking. Just last week I extended my search down Fifth Avenue, not discovering any place I liked. I’ll find it, though. My new lunch place has got to be around here somewhere, and when I see it, I’ll know.