Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (13 page)

Y
esterday, I poisoned myself cooking three eggs. This is not an easy thing to do, but I managed to pull it off.

How did it happen? Well, I put the flame on beneath the frying pan and then got the butter and eggs out of the fridge. This may have been a mistake. The frying pan was too hot. When I put the butter on, it burned. Bubbled. Turned brown. Screamed out in pain.

But I ignored the screams and pressed on. Was too lazy to start over. I cracked three eggs on the side of the pan and dropped their yellow and white selves down into the brown grease. I wished I had organic eggs, but I consoled myself with the thought that the antibiotics in the eggs might be good during flu season.

The eggs immediately turned brown like the butter. A bad sign. But I ignored this sign. I flipped the eggs around a bit with my fork.

I put two pieces of thin German bread into the toaster. I poured a cup of very dark, ink-black coffee, which I had made a few minutes before.

Usually, I do a tablespoon of coffee for every cup of water, but this particular morning I had emptied out the can of Cafe Bustelo because it was nearly finished and I can’t bear scraping metal against metal—in this case, the spoon against the bottom of the can. Fingernails on a chalkboard, car keys against aluminum siding, coffee spoons in Cafe Bustelo cans, my father eating—there are certain sounds I simply cannot tolerate.

But the problem with my having dumped out the can is that it looked to be about ten tablespoons of coffee and I had only poured into the coffeemaker three cups of water. A ten-to-three ratio is probably not even practiced in Rome or Bogotá, but it seemed like the kind of coffee Philip Marlowe would drink. And I’m always game for playing the hardboiled detective. It helps make my semi-alcoholic bachelorhood feel rough and romantic.

It would have been nice to add a little milk to the cup of petroleum I was calling coffee, but I had sniffed the milk in my fridge and it was bad. I knew it would be rotten, but I sniffed it anyway. Why? Well, human beings often do things when there is no hope. For example, I’m always trying to flag down taxis that have their “occupied” light on. I see the light, register what it means, and yet I still wave at these unavailable taxis. In this way, it’s like one’s romantic life—we all want the cabs that won’t stop for us.

So that milk was several weeks old, like everything else in my refrigerator. But did I throw it away? No. I’ll probably sniff it again in two weeks’ time, just to torment myself. I have two personalities. Two idiots. The one who sniffs the milk and doesn’t throw it away, and the one who sniffs the milk two weeks later.

The inside of my fridge is more like a mortuary or a ring of hell (things dead and waiting for the next stage of the afterlife) than an icebox for edible foodstuffs. If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to jot down a brief table-of-fridge-contents, as a way, perhaps, to show what kind of person I am (lazy and doesn’t take care of himself):

1. Bouillon, capers, and an onion, all left by the French girls who used to live in this apartment six months ago.
   
2. A thickly congealed Paul Newman salad dressing bought during a very brief do-it-yourself-campaign—making salads and such.
   
3. Hardened organic peanut butter from my son’s visit in October.
   
4. Two small containers of plastic applesauce forced on me by my great-aunt in Queens and taken from her meals-on-wheels package.
   
5. The aforementioned eggs, butter, milk, and German bread.
   
6. A container of expired orange juice (to keep the expired milk company).
   
7. A box of Cuban cigars—Cohibas, Castro’s brand—that Angelo, my Italian movie star friend, smuggled back from Havana, and which I plan to give to my dad.
   

Well, thank you for indulging me. See how this fridge contents compares to your own. And now back to the riveting story: I took a sip of the coffee and the toast popped. I buttered the toast, put it on a plate, and then I took the frying pan and tilted it over the toast. The brown, curdled eggs fell onto the bread. I then sat down at my kitchen table with the
Post
and my breakfast. I went to work with the knife and fork, while I read the gossip, the atrocities, and the sports. This was around ten-thirty
A.M.

The next twenty-four hours is a blur of delirium and stomach pain. At first things weren’t too bad, though. The caffeine caused mild psychosis and I found myself walking around my apartment and shouting “Motherfucker” a few times, which is interesting, since I’m not much of a curser and find it unattractive when others use vulgarities, but this caffeine-psychosis profanity was brought on, I vaguely recall, by going through my piled-up mail—a pile that has been neglected for two months—and being horrified at finding an invitation to a very nice party I had missed, as well as several enormous phone and credit card bills, all of which should have been paid weeks ago.

I also recall—though it’s dreamlike because of the Cafe Bustelo—glancing at the pages of my new book, which had been sent to me by my British publisher for me to proofread. The Brits had computer-scanned the pages from the American publisher, and the scanning had created all sorts of strange typos. A classic, Joycean turn of phrase like “I let a fart leak out” had been turned into “I let a fart lead out.” I thought of leaving that typo for a moment, as I sort of liked the idea of a fart leading somewhere, but then I changed my mind, thinking that the meaning of the sentence was too botched. And I realized after finding that typo that I was going to have to do more than just skim the pages. I was going to have to work hard and reread the whole damn book,
What’s Not to Love?,
which is a narrative based on all the columns and articles I’ve written for the
Press
these last three, happy years.

The book will be in stores here in the States sometime in May, at which point my life will be seriously destroyed. It’s one thing to write these self-revealing stories for the
Press,
where they’re gone in a week and quickly forgotten, but it’s another thing to have them put in a book, a book that will be around for a while and can be read by one’s relatives. For example, future relatives like women who could be wives, but who will have nothing to do with me as the evidence mounts—three perverted books now—that I am too strange and damaged to be loved.

Anyway, the poisonous eggs and coffee had me in bed by two
P.M.
, where I more or less stayed for the next twenty hours. The amphetamine-like coffee had overstimulated me and then I crashed. What happened to me was similar to that game at circuses that tests your strength—I was the weight and the coffee was the hammer and I went flying to the top, rang the bell, shouted “Motherfucker” for about an hour like a Tourette’s sufferer, and then came sliding down, back to the bottom and went into a coma. I slept fitfully and with great nausea until about eleven
P.M.
, and then I was up for hours with nauseous insomnia. I hate to vomit and so fought the urge all this time. For a few hours, I tried to read Wodehouse, usually a great pain reliever, and it helped some, but mostly, I lay there tormented, my stomach puckering like the overly fried eggs.

So I was clutching my pillow to my belly around three
A.M.
and felt quite alone in the world. Being by yourself and being ill can provoke despair, and so I indulged in Tom Sawyerish reveries of my funeral should this stomach ailment have proved fatal. It bothered me, though, that being Jewish, I’d be buried the next day and the service would have to be quickly put together and that many people wouldn’t even know about it and would not come, making it a poorly attended performance. But I tried not to focus on this drawback of Jewish burial rites, and I selfishly imagined lots of weeping, crying, and impassioned, impromptu speeches. It was a way for me, on my faux deathbed, to feel loved. Pathetic, I know.

So what’s the moral of the above tale? Well, I see two morals emerging: (1) I shouldn’t cook for myself; and (2) I want to be loved. Now there’s a perfect solution to both these issues: Go to restaurants. It may seem obvious why this solves number one, but it also solves number two, and that’s because restaurants are staffed by waitresses. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I have a great love for waitresses. No waitress has actually ever loved me back, but that’s why I tip well—it’s an act of courtship. I have this insane hope that if I leave a 30 percent gratuity that the object of my affection will think that I am a worthy suitor. And when I come across a waitress whom I greatly admire, I swear to myself that I will go to her restaurant for as long as it takes until we are man and wife or at least have a one-night stand.

But I’ve never followed through on these waitress courtships, except this one time a few years ago. There was this absolutely charming waitress in the East Village who had these translucent blue eyes and who always wore shirts that exposed one of the most beautiful stomachs in the Western world. So inspired by her eyes and belly (not to mention her very sweet personality and gorgeous face), I made a conscious effort, almost as a performance-art piece, to go to her cafe—a quiet little place—every Monday night for weeks on end (it was my treat to myself after teaching a fiction-writing class on Mondays). The secret rules of my endeavor were that I was to never make a flirtatious remark or go out of my way to have a conversation with her; if she wanted to speak with me that was fine, but I was to take no real action—all I could do was leave a handsome tip and behave like a gentleman. Well, after only four weeks, if she had a moment to herself, she started sitting at my table and would talk to me. I think she admired the way I always read a book with my meal. So a friendship began. She was from Spain and had come to New York to study film. We talked about movies and books.

Week seven, she hugged me goodbye and kissed me on the cheek when I left the cafe. I couldn’t believe how well it was going. Week eight, she again hugged and kissed me—when I arrived and when I left! This was the greatest experiment of all time. By week nine, I was preparing to ask her out, but then outside the world of the cafe, I unexpectedly met a wonderful girl and we fell into an immediate serious relationship, and I abandoned the waitress.

Several months into this new relationship, almost as an act of infidelity, I went back to the cafe on a Monday night. My waitress beamed when I came in and my heart broke a little. Maybe I had chosen the wrong girl. And then while I was eating, a young handsome man came into the cafe and my waitress kissed him all over. She had a boyfriend, and this actually soothed my broken heart, because I thought to myself, as if taking a powerful aspirin, “It was not meant to be.”

So there are a couple of reasons why I love waitresses. First of all they are often beautiful and men love beauty and are drawn to beauty. It can’t be helped. Secondly, waitresses mimic the behavior of my mother—they bring dishes of nourishment to me. My mother was very much a 1950s mother and she served the family all our meals for years, thus creating this early association with love and the placing of a dish of food in front of me. (My mother also cooked the food, but I don’t seem to love cooks; perhaps because I never see them.) And thirdly, I love waitresses because of the angle at which I observe them—I stare right into their asses and vulvas, two of my favorite spots, and when they bend over sweetly to warm my coffee, I catch glimpses of breasts, another all-time favorite spot. For example, my wonderful breakfast waitress in Brooklyn says to me all the time, “Do you want a warmer in your coffee, honey?” And she smiles at me when she says this; it’s so lovely; and I say yes, and she bends over and I sneak a peek at her kind chest. I only see shadows, but it’s enough.

I
t started, as all self-indulgent habits do with me, in the midst of a failing relationship. I was twenty-five, drinking and drugging my way through the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, and desirous of something steady to hold me in place. He was twenty-seven, a pot-smoking recording engineer who had been raised to seek normalcy within an artistic life. He was the kind of man who calls you the day after a first date to tell you he had a nice time, even if you both got so drunk the night before you couldn’t remember what happened. He also had a hairy back, so I thought he would never leave me, but that I could easily leave him. I will never get attached to this back, I thought, the first time my fingers became entangled in the hair. But the safer I felt, the more I fell for him; soon enough, he pulled away and he was working late, always working late, and the only time I would see him was:
late.
And it made me feel empty, as if he had taken two scoopfuls of my insides with his hands and hollowed me out. Then one Friday night, I’d had enough. If he wouldn’t take me out on a date, I would take myself out. A movie, I thought. No, wait.
Dinner.

I dressed up, which meant long unruly curls and a short skirt and black tights and Doc Martens, a baggy cardigan, and glitter on the eyelids. I smelled like incense, like something purchased on Broadway Avenue, a hundred sticks for two dollars. This was me being fancy. I was a ragged stoner rocker then; I was doing the best I could. I took a book and went down to Broadway, to the one sushi restaurant I could afford, the one in the minimall that had torn carpeting in the upstairs seating, which is where they wanted to put me, the table for one, but I insisted on sitting downstairs. I wanted people to
see
me. This was a declaration of independence. I liked the idea of being served. Someone out there was going to take care of my needs. I ordered a pile of sushi and rolls, fresh eel and tuna, California rolls. I indulged. Still young enough to hear echoes of feminist lit classes ringing in my ears, I read something by Margaret Atwood. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I flipped the pages with great gusto. At home, I ate quickly, but here I was eating leisurely. I was daring someone to see me alone on a Friday night.

At the end of the dinner, as I paid my check, I counted out a few extra singles, tipping harder than usual. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t afford it. In my world, a dream date ended with an outrageous tip (although ideally I would not be the one tipping). I stretched, finished my water, and strolled to the door. I rubbed my belly. Even if I was still alone, I felt
full.
The fullness and emptiness could somehow live side by side. I didn’t feel lonely. Certainly, I was happier than if I had waited at home, miserable. If I had to be alone, this was the best way to do it.

A few weeks later I found out he was screwing a stage manager in her thirties who reportedly had a British persona in bed. She said things like
arse
and
bum
in a Cockney accent, and she gave fantastic blow jobs. How do you compete with that? Still, I cried in his beat-up Toyota Tercel when he broke up with me, sad that I would never again tangle my hands in the wild tropical forest that grew on his back.

But I knew now that some kind of fullness could be attained by dining out alone. I’ll show you who I am, I thought. I’m the girl who knows how to take care of her own needs since no one else knows how. Or is willing. I returned to that sushi restaurant many times on Friday nights over the next few years. I read a lot of books. I stuffed my face until I couldn’t eat another bite. I was full. I was empty. I was learning how to survive.

After a while I started doing drugs alone instead of dining alone. It was a different kind of self-indulgence, but I was still spending money on something I didn’t really need—Does anyone
need
to eat so much sushi her belly expands an extra size? Or to get so high she feels like her face is going to fly off?—but that I knew would make me feel special in some way. They were both highs of a kind, although one made me fat and one made me skinny. This was after I had left Seattle and moved to the East Village in New York in the hope of changing my life forever, which I did, although it has changed several times since then, as is New York’s wont.

But first: I became slightly flush with dot-com money, all of which is gone now. In particular there was a summer when I consumed thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine, and I distinctly remember this was often in lieu of food. And while I did do it with friends on occasion, I enjoyed being alone on a Friday night, so that I could have it any way I wanted, whenever I wanted. At least until the bag ran empty.

Eventually, I took a trip to Jamaica to clean out my system. I know this seems preposterous, but all I knew about Jamaica was that people smoked pot there, and pot seemed to be a minor disturbance in my life compared with my all-consuming desire for cocaine. Plus, without any of my usual resources—no friends, no pager numbers—it might be easier to avoid. Of course, within five minutes of my arriving at Sangster International Airport, a boy approached me while waiting for my baggage and asked me if I wanted to buy drugs. He was probably about seventeen years old, and if I had let him, he probably would have tried to feel me up.

“We have to do it fast,” I said. “I’m waiting for my bags.”

The boy laughed at me. Those bags were going to take
forever.

I went with him to his car, a two-door piece of tinfoil with a cardboard protector in the window to keep out the sun. He pulled out a few bags of pot in different sizes, the smallest of which still contained more than I could smoke in several months. I think it probably cost twenty-five dollars. I bought it. Encouraged, he pulled out a white sandwich baggie of cocaine. My heart leapt at the sight. I was sure the same math applied—all you could eat and more.

But I passed. The sun already felt so nice on my skin, like I was an egg heating up in a pan on the stove. Besides, the resort was all inclusive. I was most excited about the meals. It would be like a whole week of dates with myself. Everything was going to be just as I liked, and I was looking forward to eating again.

At the resort—one that I had specifically selected because it had no hedonistic selling points in the brochure—I checked in, drew a bath, and lit up a joint. I had stayed up too late the night before. I hoped I was sweating out every last drop of coke in my system, though of course I missed the irony of replacing it with another drug. (I missed a lot of ironies in those days.)

I took a pleasant walk around the grounds, took off my shoes and squished my feet in the sand, and then headed to dinner by myself.

The open-air restaurant glowed in candlelight, and at every table sat pairs of madly-in-love young couples, holding hands across the table, leaning in close, their fresh sunburns glowing against their stiff, new formal summerwear.

“Table for…?” asked the maitre d’.

“One,” I said, with slight uncertainty. I was just one, yes, but oh boy did I not want to be at that moment. How had I missed the fact that this was a romantic getaway?

I ate quickly, shoveled that food in my mouth, and got the hell out of there. It was one thing to be alone on a Friday night in a major metropolis. It was quite another thing to be alone in a room full of people hell-bent on romance. Proclamations of love would be declared that night. Marriage proposals would be made. Babies would be conceived.

No, I won’t have any dessert or coffee.

The food barely filled me. I could have eaten forever, and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.

The next morning I went to breakfast, in search of the smashing buffet of tropical fruits that the brochure had promised.

“Table for one, please,” I said.

“Just one?”

“Just one.”

I sat at the table, and the maitre d’ promptly removed the opposing place setting. Minutes later, a waiter walked by, saw me with my lone place setting, and tried to set another one.

“No, it’s just one,” I said.

That I was forced to be insistent seemed unfair. I felt my “one” transforming into “alone.” That was an entirely different sensation.

As I walked to the buffet, I passed sleep-deprived couples, still rosy with the memories of their morning copulation. I tried hard to ignore them, focusing instead on my destination, which was indeed smashing: a gigantic circular table piled with sliced mangoes and strawberries and oranges and pineapples, steaming trays of scrambled eggs and eggs Benedict and sausage and bacon and five kinds of bread, plus those little minibagels and English muffins
and
French toast—oh, they were so international!—all surrounding a lustrous flower display that burst forth from the center as if the flowers were fireworks on the Fourth of July, asking us to God bless America, although in this case, it was Jamaica.

When I returned to my table, the place setting had been restored; some anxious waiter unable to bear a half-dressed table, I suppose, had compulsively followed some training manual to the letter.

As soon as I put down my plate a waiter swooped on my coffee cup.

“Would he like coffee?” said the waiter, pointing to the cup across from mine.

“It’s just one,” I said firmly.

The place setting was once again removed.

I won’t bother mentioning what happened when I went up for seconds.

I felt my heart sink into my gut. My morning buffet fantasy, crushed by the heel of a well-shined waiter’s shoe! This game could not be played for a week, this “Who’s on first?” for the solo female traveler. I would be devastated by the end of the trip, I knew it. I liked
choosing
to eat alone. I did not want to be reminded I had no other options.

So I took protective measures. For the rest of the trip, I ordered room service and ate in my hotel room. I would wake up in the morning, pick up the phone, and order an omelet or a fresh fruit plate and lots of coffee, please. Then I would smoke a joint from the never-ending bag of pot until the food arrived. Eventually I grew to hate that bag of pot. I was never going to be able to smoke all of it. And strangely, it was making me feel emptier.

Halfway through the trip I walked out onto the balcony of my room and emptied it. The green leaves flew into the sea air.

Now I live in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, far enough from Manhattan and my bad habits. My dates with myself are quieter now; drugs are no longer involved. The dates are no longer designed to attract attention, nor are they declarations of independence. Dining alone is simply a part my life, a ritual I can’t imagine living without.

What I do is this: I buy a copy of
Us Weekly
(a magazine I usually read only on long airplane rides, when indulgence is necessary to get through the deadening claustrophobia), and I go to a restaurant in my neighborhood called Diner, a hipster-appropriated version of an original diner. They serve cheeseburgers but they also serve things like roasted beet and cucumber salad with ricotta salata. The members of the waitstaff could double as dirty downtown New York models. And probably are dirty downtown New York models. The food is always fresh, and they play great music, an on-point indie rock soundtrack, and there’s plenty of eye candy, young and old (and by old I mean not yet forty) folks from the neighborhood. Usually they don’t distract me from my magazine or meal.

There’s a long bar in the center of the restaurant lined with comfortable leather stools perfect for the solo diner, although I sometimes I feel I’m sitting too close to the person next to me. We are all good at ignoring one another, though, the solo diners.

Sometimes I see someone from my apartment building. I live in a huge building, eleven floors, ten apartments or so on each floor, with an ever-changing influx of residents, artists, musicians, Europeans, and the occasional slumming advertising executive who wants to see what all the fuss is about with this neighborhood of ours. But it’s the old-timers, the artists, who I know the best. We nod hello, not much more than that. It’s fine. I’m here with someone. Me.

Once I talked to one of my neighbors, a guy in his late thirties who lives a few floors up from me. He was sitting at one corner of the counter; I was on the opposing side of that corner. It’s the only way you can sit comfortably and have a reasonable conversation. I was drinking wine; his glass was full of a caramel-colored liquor and some ice. I asked him about being an artist in Williamsburg, as I was writing about that a bit at that time, and he seemed suddenly eager to talk.

“I work mostly with metal,” he told me, “but I do some film work, too.”

There was something faint in his voice, a far-off accent scrubbed mostly away. I thought maybe he was Austrian. Or Dutch. I knew we were both surprised to hear our voices out loud—I hadn’t spoken to anyone in a few days, except via e-mail—and we talked carefully, testing them. It was nice to be heard.

And then I said, “You know, I’ve heard the art scene in Williamsburg is kind of a boys’ club.”

And he cooled to me. I saw him recede. And I realized I had fucked it all up. I almost always fuck it all up.

So mainly I sit and eat quietly. I smile at whatever bartender is working, but never engage him (or sometimes her) in conversation. I tip well. I eat whatever I want, and I take as long as I want, but I am usually in and out in less than an hour. It’s just enough time to please myself, to satisfy the urge to be served and fed delicious food. I also want to make sure I’m connecting with the world since I spend so much time by myself, scribbling in my notebooks at home. But I know not to stay too long. I eavesdrop too often. I notice happy couples coupling. Too long and I’ll wonder why I’m still alone.