Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (12 page)

A
gray and muggy afternoon. The walker returning from an errand that was as dreary as the day is crossing a street near Times Square. Behind her two teenage hookers are standing in a doorway; ahead there’s a man selling funny hats. Beyond him is the man who sells incense, and beyond him the one who sells fake Vuitton bags. Beyond both a bag lady is perched on her usual branch, a fire hydrant, gumming something out of a cardboard carton.

The walker turns into a Japanese restaurant, sits at the counter, and orders
sushi
and Scotch on the rocks. Halfway through the Scotch and the third
tekkamaki
she suddenly realizes that she is happy. But it’s not the food and drink alone that have lifted her spirits. It’s watching the
sushi
chef wielding his knives and the customers wielding their chopsticks. It’s picking up the threads of conversations, imagining the speakers’ lives, and following laughter as it rises to the ceiling. The walker is, of course, myself, and when I leave that crowded, noisy room for that sad street I have been fed in more ways than are known to cooks.

There are people who bring books to restaurants, and who hide behind them, blind and deaf to everything beyond their pages. They hide behind menus, too, and order carelessly, and they never glance at the other diners. Maybe they’re afraid the glance will reveal a hunger that has nothing to do with food. Or maybe they are so ashamed of being companionless that they court invisibility. But I am not one of them, because to me a restaurant is a theater, and my table a seat on the aisle.

The first time I ever dined alone—dined, that is, in a restaurant that had tablecloths, waiters, and large, stiff menus—was in London many years ago. I had gone there ahead of my husband for a few days of bookstores and museums, and I had not imagined that I would be lonely. But I was, and I saw the city with the eyes of someone who was peering through smoke. I lived on Wimpeys and Wipseys—pathetic versions of American burgers and shakes—at a nearby Lyons’, and I went to bed early, believing that sleep would shorten the days until he arrived. But each night I woke around two o’clock, to stare at the ceiling and the thin line of light from the hallway under the door and the white curtains stirring in the sullen September air.

Early on the third evening, however, I passed a restaurant at which my husband and I had eaten on a previous trip. It was in Leicester Square and famous for its fish; I thought of Scottish salmon and Dover sole and, without thinking any further, walked right in.

The headwaiter was startled. I was young, I was alone, and besides the hour was ridiculous. Perhaps he thought I was there to see whom I could pick up, or perhaps he was simply trying to spare me the embarrassment I was bound to feel when I saw that ladies did not dine alone in so fashionable a place. In any case he put me in the back, by the kitchen door, and I, not realizing the insult, settled in happily and unfolded my napkin.

The salmon was as good as I thought it would be, and so was the sole, and I drank a white wine I remembered my husband once ordering. The restaurant filled with men who looked like Trevor Howard and women who looked like Celia Johnson, and I eavesdropped on two middle-aged couples discussing the Queen. “She likes hock, you know,” one wife said while the others marveled, and I, citizen of a country in which a president’s taste for bourbon, say, is interesting only if it drowns him, marveled too.

Outside, moviegoers were lining up for the old-fashioned picture palaces in Leicester Square, and buskers were assembling with their flaming torches and their golden balls and their tap shoes. And I, because I was eating the food of this particular country, listening to its dialogue, and spying on its entertainment, was part of its spin round the sun.

When I refused coffee the waiter, thinking it might be beyond my purse, leaned down and whispered, “It’s all right. It comes with the meal.” “No thank you,” I said, “I don’t like coffee,” and paid the bill with a flourish. Then I sailed, rather than walked, out and if I had left a wake I wouldn’t be surprised. Pleasure had transformed me from a leaking skiff into a three-masted schooner, and I was running before the wind.

When my husband finally got to London I was glad to see him, but I have never thought of that first evening I dined (in the grand sense of the word) alone as an evening I spent without him. Rather I think of it as the first I ever really spent with myself. We—that other person with whom one’s conversation is perpetual and I—were free to concentrate on everything that was assaulting our senses, which is why the sensations are remembered so clearly now.

Since then I’ve dined alone a lot because I’ve traveled a lot and wouldn’t think of incarcerating myself in a hotel room, captive to room service and fears I’ve read about but do not understand. Why should it take courage, as I’m told it sometimes does, to treat oneself as generously as one would a guest?

It wasn’t courage, for instance, but a terrible hunger for lobster mayonnaise that once drove me to dinner in the garden of a restaurant in Dubrovnik. It was a romantic garden, I suppose, with rosebushes and leafy walls and candles on every table, and I was the only person there who was dining alone. But an old woman sitting in the second-storey window of the building that backed the garden watched my every move. When the light failed—it was summer and the sun set very late—and a younger woman came and took her away, I waved at her with that dippy bend of the fingers one gives to babies. I was saying good-bye because we had, in a sense, dined together.

Nor was it courage but an enthusiasm for the faintly seedy that took me to the dining room of a hotel in Istanbul. The hotel was respectable but run-down and past its prime, and the man who played old show tunes was as dusty as the potted palms that drooped over his piano. I, who might have been created by Mary McCarthy, stared at characters out of Graham Greene and wondered at our unlikely conjunction. Meanwhile the pianist played songs from
South Pacific.

There was a time, though, when I did need a bit of courage: when all I had to wear for dinner in a rather fancy place in Ankara was a sweater and corduroy pants tucked into lace-up boots. But I stood very straight when I asked for the table, and there was no pause before I got it. Good posture, it seems, will take you far if what you have to navigate is other people’s notions of propriety.

Nonetheless there is a restaurant to which I will never be brave enough to go by myself. It is close to the house in which I grew up, and its menu hasn’t varied since it opened, which must have been when my parents were newlyweds. Its specialties are boiled live lobster and shoestring potatoes, the kind of coleslaw that isn’t creamy, and a lemon meringue pie made by a woman who must be about 115 years old by now. I had my first mixed drink at that restaurant, a Martini, and drank it with what my father called policemen’s sandwiches—oyster crackers split with one’s thumbnail, heaped with horseradish, and closed again.

The restaurant is on a harbor and faces west, so my family and I try to get there in time for sunset. “Remember my daughter?” my mother is apt to say to any of her old friends who might be there. “She’s all grown up now.” Oh, how I am, with grown children of my own, but to her I am, as I suppose my daughters will be to me, a just-hatched butterfly still waiting for my wings to dry. This is no place for solitary dining. I couldn’t see my fellow eaters for the memories.

But there is another place only a few miles away that belongs exclusively to me. It’s on a raggedy waterfront street of spruced-up houses and tumble-down derelicts, of secondhand shops and aspiring
antiquaries,
and if the wind is right—or, more accurately, wrong—the smell of fish from the packing plant down the road can set one to staggering. I like that street; I walk it every weekend I am home to see if any of the shopkeepers are stupid enough to sell a treasure for a song (they aren’t) and to peek into the windows of the latest restoration. Then I go to the restaurant, with its small patio and smaller bar, for fish chowder and a view of the town’s businessmen, the occasional secretarial pool celebrating somebody’s birthday, and those tweed-and-walking-shoes widows who march through New England ever on the alert for a new knitting yarn, a new decoration for the Christmas tree, and the ultimate Indian pudding.

Two hundred miles due south is its city counterpart, also on a raggedy street not far from the water. It’s a new restaurant with a silly name and two small rooms. The first has a bar to the right and an elegantly programmed juxebox to the left. The second has small tables over which hang little stained-glass lamps and on which stand mustard pots filled with daisies. The waiters try hard to memorize the specials, the chef appears to be a serious striver, and the neighbors have taken to dropping by. So far I have been there only with friends but soon, I know, there’ll be a night when I find myself deserving a kindness. When it comes, I’ll take myself out for the calf’s liver with Sherry vinegar, a glass of the house red, and a look at how life is being lived in one small restaurant on one small street in Greenwich Village on one night in 1985. And when I leave I’ll be going home happy.

…
a
nd so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

There are few people alive with whom I care to pray, sleep, dance, sing, or share my bread and wine. Of course there are times when this latter cannot be avoided if we are to exist socially, but it is endurable only because it need not be the only fashion of self-nourishment.

There is always the cheering prospect of a quiet or giddy or warmly somber or lightly notable meal with “One,” as Elizabeth Robins Pennell refers to him or her in
The Feasts of Autolycus.
“
One
sits at your side feasting in silent sympathy,” this lady wrote at the end of the last century in her mannered and delightful book. She was, at this point, thinking of eating an orange
1
in southern Europe, but any kind of food will do, in any clime, so long as
One
is there.

I myself have been blessed among women in this respect—which is of course the main reason that, if
One
is not there, dining alone is generally preferable to any other way for me.

Naturally there have been times when my self-made solitude has irked me. I have often eaten an egg and drunk a glass of jug-wine, surrounded deliberately with the trappings of busyness, in a hollow Hollywood flat near the studio where I was called a writer, and not been able to stifle my longing to be anywhere but there, in the company of any of a dozen predatory or ambitious or even kind people who had
not
invited me.

That was the trouble: nobody did.

I cannot pretend, even on an invisible black couch of daydreams, that I have ever been hounded by Sunset Boulevardiers who wanted to woo me with caviar and win me with Pol Roger; but in my few desolate periods of being without
One
I have known two or three avuncular gentlemen with a latent gleam in their eyes who understood how to order a good mixed grill with watercress. But, for the most part, to the lasting shame of my female vanity, they have shied away from any suggestion that we might dally, gastronomically speaking. “Wouldn’t dare ask
you
,” they have murmured, shifting their gaze with no apparent difficulty or regret to some much younger and prettier woman who had never read a recipe in her life, much less written one, and who was for that very reason far better fed than I.

It has for too long been the same with the ambitious eaters, the amateur chefs and the self-styled gourmets, the leading lights of food-and-wine societies. When we meet, in other people’s houses or in restaurants, they tell me a few sacrosanct and impressive details of how they baste grouse with truffle juice, then murmur, “Wouldn’t dare serve it to
you,
of course,” and forthwith invite some visiting potentate from Nebraska, who never saw a truffle in his life, to register the proper awe in return for a Lucullan and perhaps delicious meal.
2

And the kind people—they are the ones who have made me feel the loneliest. Wherever I have lived, they have indeed been kind—up to a certain point. They have poured cocktails for me, and praised me generously for things I have written to their liking, and showed me their children. And I have seen the discreetly drawn curtains to their family dining rooms, so different from the uncluttered, spinsterish emptiness of my own one room. Behind the far door to the kitchen I have sensed, with the mystic materialism of a hungry woman, the presence of honest-to-God fried chops, peas and carrots, a jello salad,
3
and lemon meringue pie—none of which I like and all of which I admire in theory and would give my eyeteeth to be offered. But the kind people always murmur, “We’d love to have you stay to supper sometime. We wouldn’t
dare,
of course, the simple way we eat and all.”

As I leave, by myself, two nice plump kind neighbors come in. They say howdo, and then good-by with obvious relief, after a polite, respectful mention of culinary literature as represented, no matter how doubtfully, by me. They sniff the fine creeping straightforward smells in the hall and living room, with silent thanks that they are not condemned to my daily fare of quails financière, pâtè de Strasbourg truffé en brioche, sole Marguéry, bombe vanille au Cointreau. They close the door on me.

I drive home by way of the corner Thriftimart to pick up another box of Ry Krisp, which with a can of tomato soup and a glass of California sherry will make a good nourishing meal for me as I sit on my tuffet in a circle of proofs and pocket detective stories.

It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster. Enough of hit-or-miss suppers of tinned soup and boxed biscuits and an occasional egg just because I had failed once more to rate an invitation!

I resolved to establish myself as a well-behaved female at one or two good restaurants, where I could dine alone at a pleasant table with adequate attentions rather than be pushed into a corner and given a raw or overweary waiter. To my credit, I managed to carry out this resolution, at least to the point where two headwaiters accepted me: they knew I tipped well, they knew I wanted simple but exellent menus, and, above all, they knew that I could order and drink, all by myself, an apéritif and a small bottle of wine or a mug of ale, without turning into a maudlin, potential pick-up for the Gentlemen at the Bar.

Once or twice a week I would go to one of these restaurants and with carefully disguised self-consciousness would order my meal, taking heed to have things that would nourish me thoroughly as well as agreeably, to make up for the nights ahead when soup and crackers would be my fare. I met some interesting waiters: I continue to agree with a modern Mrs. Malaprop who said, “They are
so
much nicer than people!”

My expensive little dinners, however, became, in spite of my good intentions, no more than a routine prescription for existence. I had long believed that, once having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat, in proportion of course. And there I was, spending more money than I should, on a grim plan which became increasingly complicated. In spite of the loyalty of my waiter friends, wolves in a dozen different kinds of sheep’s clothing—from the normally lecherous to the Lesbian—sniffed at the high wall of my isolation. I changed seats, then tables. I read—I read everything from
Tropic of Cancer
to
Riders of the Purple Sage.
Finally I began to look around the room and hum.

That was when I decided that my own walk-up flat, my own script-cluttered room with the let-down bed, was the place for me. “Never be daunted in public” was an early Hemingway phrase that had more than once bolstered me in my timid twenties. I changed it resolutely to “Never be daunted in private.”

I rearranged my schedule, so that I could market on my way to the studio each morning. The more perishable tidbits I hid in the watercooler just outside my office, instead of dashing to an all-night grocery for tins of this and that at the end of a long day. I bought things that would adapt themselves artfully to an electric chafing dish: cans of shad roe (a good solitary dish, since I always feel that nobody really likes it but me), consommé double, and such. I grew deliberately fastidious about eggs and butter; the biggest, brownest eggs were none too good, nor could any butter be too clover-fresh and sweet. I laid in a case or two of “unpretentious but delightful little wines.” I was determined about the whole thing, which in itself is a great drawback emotionally. But I knew no alternative.

I ate very well indeed. I liked it too—at least more than I had liked my former can-openings or my elaborate preparations for dining out. I treated myself fairly dispassionately as a marketable thing, at least from ten to six daily, in a Hollywood studio story department, and I fed myself to maintain top efficiency. I recognized the dull facts that certain foods affected me this way, others that way. I tried to apply what I knew of proteins and so forth to my own chemical pattern, and I deliberately scrambled two eggs in a little sweet butter when quite often I would have liked a glass of sherry and a hot bath and to hell with food.

I almost never ate meat, mainly because I did not miss it and secondarily because it was inconvenient to cook on a little grill and to cut upon a plate balanced on my knee. Also, it made the one-room apartment smell. I invented a great many different salads, of fresh lettuces and herbs and vegetables, of marinated tinned vegetables, now and then of crabmeat and the like. I learned a few tricks to play on canned soups, and Escoffier as well as the Chinese would be astonished at what I did with beef bouillon and a handful of watercress or a teaspoonful of soy.

I always ate slowly, from a big tray set with a mixture of Woolworth and Spode; and I soothed my spirits beforehand with a glass of sherry or vermouth, subscribing to the ancient truth that only a relaxed throat can make a swallow. More often than not I drank a glass or two of light wine with the hot food: a big bowl of soup, with a fine pear and some Teleme Jack cheese; or two very round eggs, from a misnamed “poacher,” on sourdough toast with browned butter poured over and a celery heart alongside for something crisp; or a can of bean sprouts, tossed with sweet butter and some soy and lemon juice, and a big glass of milk.

Things tasted good, and it was a relief to be away from my job and from the curious disbelieving impertinence of the people in restaurants. I still wished, in what was almost a theoretical way, that I was not cut off from the world’s trenchermen by what I had written for and about them. But, and there was no cavil here, I felt firmly then, as I do this very minute, that snug misanthropic solitude is better than hit-or-miss congeniality. If
One
could not be with me, “feasting in silent sympathy,” then I was my best companion.