Life From Scratch (13 page)
I like that he remembers the small details. “Well, I was only seventeen. I was there on a school trip. So no bars.”
“No bars at all?”
“No bars. Not even any restaurants. I think we ate in the hotel most nights. It was a place that catered to large school groups. They made this awful vegetable soup every night we were there. It was this pureed vegetable mixture. We called it
culo
.”
Gael almost chokes on his olive and starts laughing. “You say that very well. Are you sure you don’t know Spanish?”
“Only the curse words,” I admit.
“And
gracias
.
And, strangely enough,
cacahuete
.”
“Peanut?”
“Yeah, I don’t know why, but I remember
cacahuete
.”
“You know
hola
,” Gael prods. “And
bueno
.”
“But those are words that everyone knows. That’s not knowing Spanish. I’d like to learn Spanish. It has always been on my to-do list.”
“To-do list?” Gael questions.
“Like a list of things you want to accomplish.”
“Aaaah, a to-do list,” Gael repeats as if he’s trying to commit this phrase to memory.
“I’m just impressed by how well you know English,” I tell him. “I’ve always been jealous of people who can speak more than one language. And you know so many. Three?”
“Well, English, you have to learn in school. It was a requirement for graduation. And you learn it for a long time. Many years. But my mother speaks French; she is from
France
, so we spoke French in the house too. French and Spanish, depending on who was winning the fight.”
I imagine Gael’s parents, an older male and female version of himself, yelling at each other in their respective languages over the breakfast table. Our bottle of wine arrives, and the waitress pours Gael a small taste. Without lifting his glass to try it, he motions for her to fill both of our glasses. Then he lifts up his glass and clinks it against mine.
“
Salud
,” he says.
“Yes,” I answer, waiting for him to continue. But he simply places his glass down and takes another olive. I try to think up something to ask him, but my mind keeps returning to the scar on his forehead. I wonder how that question will sound. That I only notice his flaws? But if I tell him how I love his heavily lidded eyes, even without telling him how they make me daydream about how they’ll look after sex, do I reveal that I’ve spent way too much time thinking about him? Picking apart his many gorgeous features? I stare at the menu mindlessly while I rack my brain for something non-physical to ask.
“What are you going to order?” I blurt out. That was definitely not the astute, sensual question I was aiming to concoct within the silence.
“I am going to get the wild boar.
Pappardelle al cinghiale
.”
“You know Italian too,” I say softly, glancing down at the table.
“No, it was written in the menu,” Gael says, pointing at the words. He repeats the words, this time with a terrible Italian accent. A man at the table next to us glares at him as if he were personally offended by the imitation. “Have you ever eaten wild boar?”
“No. The whole Hebrew school thing,” I say by way of an explanation. “I’m not kosher, but I can’t seem to try pig.”
“Maybe you’ll take a bite of mine tonight. Try something new.”
“Really, I know it’s all psychological, but I can’t. I can’t try wild boar or tame boar.”
“What about kosher boar?”
“There is no kosher boar,” I tell him. “Pigs aren’t kosher.”
“What is this kosher thing if it keeps you from tasting anything good? What, can you only eat white bread and . . . what is the most boring food, I can’t think of something else like white bread.”
“Tuna fish. That’s pretty boring.”
“Oh, I don’t like tuna fish,” he says, wrinkling his nose. “What is the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten, Rachel Goldman?”
He doesn’t know how loaded this question is for me. Little Mike Teavee Adam dances back out onto my mental stage. That was always my question to Adam when he returned from a trip or checked in with a phone call. “What was the strangest thing you ate today?” I’d ask. Because there was always a good answer. Scorpion during a business trip to
Vietnam
. Blood sausage during a vacation with friends. Cactus apples sent from a client who took a trip to
Arizona
. The fact that he would put anything and everything into his mouth was always a point of awe, something that attracted me to him. It was urban daring. Urbane courage.
I’ve never been very adventurous with eating. I like all the standards, as much as sushi and the like can have standards. I am more
pho
than tripe, more
kappa maki
than
unagi
, more matzo ball soup than
gribinis
. I’m not even sure if Adam enjoyed choosing the most outlandish offering on the menu or if he did it for me, but before he would order, he would get this small smile as if he was trying to appear serious and run his finger across his pick on the menu very slowly so that I would flip back open my menu and try to figure out which item he was lingering over.
“The lamb heart and kidneys?” I’d ask. “The calf’s tongue? The sweetbreads?”
I loved having a good story to tell the next time we were with friends. I loved watching him take the first bite without a moment of hesitation or consideration.
It’s just food
, he always told me. He had the same attitude about travel. The same attitude about calling the credit card company to fight a claim or calling the cab driver on a wrong fare or asking someone if they’d stop talking in the theater. It was a confidence that made me feel as if he were getting more out of life than I was. His willingness to put himself out there and try anything made me fall in love with him. That was the real Adam.
But his attitude had its dark side. It’s just food, it’s just a place, it’s just a company.
It’s just a marriage.
He’s just an ex-husband
, I repeat to myself.
Whoa, I have got to get myself out of my head.
I blink several times and then place my finger against some random words on the menu, as if I’ve been trying to decide what to order.
“Snails.” I tell Gael. “In
France
. Is that weird? It’s actually this awful story,” I tell him.
“Snails are quite good,” he tells me. “Salty.”
“Well, these snails were not quite good. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were in
Paris
.”
“With your husband?” Gael interrupts.
“With my husband,” I agree. “We forgot to make a reservation, so we were going from restaurant to restaurant, trying to find someone to seat us. Every place was, of course, filled, and we were starving. We finally found this place on a random side street that had an open table. Adam kept goading me and goading me to try something crazy so I picked the snails. I think I made it through two before I quit. About an hour after the meal, I started feeling queasy, so we left the bar we were at and went back to our hotel room. I ended up in a Parisian emergency room with food poisoning on New Year’s Day. It was awful. Really really awful.”
I give a small laugh that I hope conveys just how glad I am not to be with a man who would take me to a nasty-ass restaurant that gives me food poisoning, but I’m not sure Gael is convinced. It’s probably not the best idea to talk about your ex-husband ten minutes into the second first-date-of-the-rest-of-your-life. I should have waited until the dessert course to trot out my little divorce shadow.
“I’m sorry, Rachel, that it didn’t work out with him,” says Gael in a voice that is definitely more brotherly than romantic.
I really know how to turn a guy off.
The entire walk home,
I am hoping that he’ll kiss me. It’s not just that I want to be kissed by Gael, but it seems like an important step—getting that first kiss on the first date with him. Like a skater nailing that first triple lutz right at the beginning of her routine. When we pause outside my building, I take my keys out of my pocket because I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I tuck them into my hand. My keychain peeks out from the valley between my thumb and index finger. It is a hula girl I purchased on my honeymoon in an airport gift shop, originally meant for Arianna. I try not to think about my honeymoon, about Adam.
Gael makes small talk about the weddings he has lined up for the next few weekends. About a restaurant that was recently replaced on my block. I twirl the hula girl, watching her plastic grass skirt become a blur. I wonder if we’re ever going to make it to the Kandinsky exhibit at the Guggenheim.
It happens while I am looking down at the sidewalk. First he strokes my cheek, my left cheek, with his ungloved hand, which is still warm from being jammed in his pocket while we walked back. Then he cups my cheek gently and tilts my face towards his. I help him out the rest of the way by straightening my back and leaning into his lips. They are softer than I thought they’d be, softer and gentler than Adam’s. More uncertain. Slower. Present. He smells like wood and winter, and the heat from the restaurant is still embedded in his scarf.
He breaks free first and pulls back to smile at me. My God he is gorgeous. He kisses me again, and I know that if I invite him upstairs that we’ll end up having sex on my living room floor. And I cannot have sex on my second-first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life.
When he realizes that I’m not going to invite him up, he mumbles something that I think might be in Spanish that I want to ask him to translate and promises that he will call the next night. I don’t watch him walk down to the subway even though I really want to, because I am trying very hard to play it cool. I smile to myself the whole elevator ride up to my apartment.
What good is having a really great first kiss if you can’t blog about it? I mean, I
could
blog about it, but then he
could
read about it and then there probably wouldn’t be a second kiss.
Reading
about how much your date is into you after one kiss is a little uncool. I practically have to sit on my hands when I get to the computer. I log into my account and stare at a blank post box and then close it again.
I open up my stat page and stare at the number of people who have read about my life in the last 24 hours. 3,576. I bypass scanning the list by location, already aware that my readership stretches to the far ends of the earth, and instead look at the referring pages. A lot of visitors come through the Bloscars, but there are also a host of other food blogs that have all linked to me either in posts or on their sidebar. I click through to Bakerella and bookmark her recipe for cake pops, even though the instructions are way beyond my capabilities.
In the dark recesses of the stat counter are the more technically advanced searches that come in the form of initials. Search IP address. Scan by
Ohio
. Another from Sloan Kettering, here in
New York
.
I scroll down the list until my eye catches on a name. My body feels like it is moving so slowly that it doesn’t get the message until I’m well past the entry. I scroll back up, not sure that I saw it correctly. I could just be seeing things, a name that is close but will turn out to be a few letters off. Or maybe I imagined the whole thing, that I’ll spend the next ten minutes scrolling back and forth and finding nothing that could have ever been misconstrued.
But then, my heart pounding in my ears until I can’t even hear the hum of the computer, it jumps out of the screen. I feel like
I’ve
just been caught with my nose in someone else’s diary instead of the other way around, because there, on the screen, unmistakable, in Sitestalker’s familiar courier font, is Adam’s law firm of Brockman and Young.
