You can tell everything about a person, says a common piece of wisdom, by how he or she treats the waiter. It’s a dependable and convenient yardstick, given how the bistro tables and corner booths are, very often, the places where we decide upon whom we let into our lives – acquaintances who might become dear friends, depending on how urged we feel to linger on after the bill has been dropped; those we may choose as colleagues, gauging by whether their ideas are so dull we require a second coffee; dates who remain just that, failing somehow to attach to our ideas about the futures we’ve imagined. Beyond bantering with the staff or failing to, forgiving the waitress her misstep or snapping at her for it, there’s another element of our comportment as diners that serves as a kind of shorthand: the public element of the transaction ends up serving as a kind of censor, limiting the largeness of our expression but placing a premium on the smallest of gestures and phrases. In the expensive cities where I’ve spent all my adult life, where the luxury of the space to cook is rare and a halfway point between subway stops seems the only polite solution, white tablecloths and Edison bulbs and pale green espresso machines have almost always been the backdrop when I have chosen people, and likewise when I have let them go.
Shortly after I arrived in New York, 22, the ragtag child of hippies, a girl who had never learned to use a fork and knife quite correctly, I sold my first novel and began attending the sort of meals I’d rarely been able to afford before. The first came as a surprise; my editor called late one afternoon to let me know that the house’s publisher, an imposing and rigorous woman with an interrogative Belgian accent, happened to be in town from Boston the next morning. Could I have breakfast at the ungodly hour of 8am, somewhere uptown? I have always been the type of person who remains monosyllabic until noon, but I agreed, with the kind of excitement I have never felt before or since. It seemed I had entered the next part of my life. I wore a pencil skirt striped vertically in blue and white and a short-sleeved secretary blouse in peach silk and some absurd purple suede flats, still convinced glamour was something that waved and winked from every angle. Early to arrive in the empty dining room, I sat alone at a pristine table in the deepening morning light and watched the water glasses take on the greens of the park across the street. When they showed up, both towering over me at six feet, my editor hugged me but the publisher only shook my hand. It was the first in a series of what could only be described as appraisals. My coffee had only just appeared when the publisher, who had spent the first 20 years of her career as a Lacanian psychoanalyst, looked at me with the scrutiny of a fairytale stepmother before launching a missile into the conversation. Jacques Lacan, I had read, believed the heart of the matter could be reached in under three minutes; this woman apparently believed she could trim that down to 30 seconds. Our orders not yet taken, she asked, in reference to my novel, which concerned two children who grow up as neighbours and enter a sexual relationship too early, “What happened to you? Incest?” It makes me laugh now to think of it, having to address that query before I was even caffeinated, but at the time I was nailed to my chair, actually apologising, “No, actually, but …” flailing to provide the biographical summary that would explain my dark little book. What did I learn there – besides that I didn’t trust the Lacanian method? That I was afraid of a person who could speak so freely before espresso, that I communed best with those who were soft and gentle in a conversation’s opening notes. In the many lunches I shared with my first editor after that, we babied each other upon greeting, complimenting earrings and taking quick squeezes of the other’s hands, and it was in that way we developed the space in which we could truly discuss the work before us. She also never winced when I sent a fork clattering to the floor or managed to leave a little childish halo of breadcrumbs around my plate, but rather asked for a new utensil and swiped a napkin across the table I’d littered without a word, small acts of elegant kindness for which I’ll always be grateful. It is those who cringe easily, or ask for a more appropriate spoon to stir their americano, or apologise for the volume of the music, who are the most likely to prove rigid and pedantic colleagues. To put it another way, I would never do business with anyone who would never drink wine out of a plastic cup.
My dining manners, I’m happy to say, have improved with time, but I spent half a decade with a man made deeply uncomfortable by them, as well as any marked public sentiment, and it took a great portion of that relationship to understand that the emotional censorship in place for him and not for me when out to eat was an indicator of how intrinsically, prohibitively different we were. In the months after my mother died, we ate out constantly, neither of us able to care for ourselves or the other, and though she was the only thing on my mind we had to develop a kind of semaphore for talking about her; worried it might bring me to tears, he didn’t believe it was proper dinner discussion, but I had little else of which to speak. In one of many such conversations, which took place in a Brooklyn farm-to-table establishment where the staff were rumoured to have breastfed their children while taking orders of grass-fed meat, we discussed our different attitudes about grief under the systematic metaphor of someone who has lost a limb.
“What would I say if you had lost your arm,” he began. “It would be insensitive to go around talking about it all the time, pointing out your disability.”
I’m embarrassed to admit that my rejoinder came in the form of a primordial hiss. “You would say, ‘I’m so sorry about your arm,’” I replied. “You would say, ‘I know you must not believe it’s actually gone.’”
It puts a pain in my ribcage to think of us, now, unable to enjoy those peach chutneys and mushrooms foraged upstate, both of us intent on conversing in a way the other could not stomach. Some time towards the end, during a month we spent on my native northern California coast, I braked and accelerated around serpentine curves to get us to Nick’s, an oyster bar always rich with the smells of eucalyptus and the bay lapping just below the window. Given my foolish tendency to see favourite places as talismanic, I hoped that the visit would restore something we’d neglected or forgotten. It was late afternoon and beginning to rain by the time we settled into the dark wood dining room, and we were one of a few tables, and there was no music, only the tinks of spoons hunting the last of the clam chowder. The water stretched and glowed and after 10 minutes we were bickering, following a squalid conversation to its rotten end: I had wanted to behave loudly, to tell bawdy punchlines, to lean dramatically across the table and kiss him, and he had stiffened like an austere grade school teacher and tsked my outsized affection. There was nothing the matter with my inclination, but neither, I’ve come to think, was there with his. During the drive that followed, which felt reflective in the manner of incarceration, I finally saw the way we functioned in restaurants as the performance of our relationship that it was. Like the appearance of a rich meal in a room with a view made me loose with feelings of all kinds, I needed my life to mimic the arrival of courses, for milestones to be processed and the next step to be celebrated and the closing of the ceremony to be well-noted. My ex-boyfriend, who had grown up in a home where the dinner table was a great stage of conflict and eventually divorce, wanted to live his life very much inside of himself, for one phase to pass seamlessly into the next. He wanted the hushed and gentle description of specials, the plates brought without fanfare, the matter of who was to pay and whom was owed never discussed. The greatest luxury, to him, the greatest comfort, was quiet. I will never eat that way and I will probably never live that way, but now that I’ve left it puts a happy tear in my eye to think of him in his favoured seat, at the marble bar of an Italian restaurant we visited at least once a week, never talking too long, never glancing at himself in the long mirrors, folding the pages of the Times back along the old-fashioned wooden holder.
If my understanding of my working and romantic lives has been helped by observing colleagues and lovers as diners, my assessment of friends has been supplied almost entirely by seeing them in this way: it is easy, in the setting of a restaurant, to offer the little kindnesses that reveal an innate generosity, and easier still to withhold them. I often think of the poise of the friend who, should the water carafe become empty, without commenting or asking, raises her pretty hand to transfer a swallow from her glass into mine. Likewise fondly remembered is the pal who, upon receiving his dish but noting the absence of yours, asks after it on your behalf – in the transference of the question from your mouth to his, it changes from a complaint to a gesture of affection. It’s a small act, but it’s the selfsame equation that matters in times of crisis, when our friends are willing to ask questions we cannot, to meet the needs we are helpless even to voice. The person who scans the whole table at a group dinner, asking after untouched appetisers and drinks that seemed daring but ended up exorbitantly sweetened, is always the one who calls to check in without our having to say we need that, always the one who shows up with the little trinket or surprising plan that provides a needed shift of focus.
I feel privileged to know this, having spent this summer licking the wounds of the aforementioned separation, shuttling between guest rooms and airports while I looked for a new home, seeing friends always in public although everything about my life felt dark and private. In Los Angeles, a girlfriend from adolescence made us reservations at her favourite restaurant, a converted Craftsman home with a narrow, twinkling back patio of two tops. In a brilliant gauge of my assertiveness at that moment – why does making the largest decision always render us incapable of facing the tiniest? – she ordered a litany of small plates, charred chilli octopus and watermelon salad and pâté with pomegranate, without truly consulting me, only squeezing my hand under the table as she spoke. All you have to do right now, she was saying, is show up. The rest has been arranged. It was an act of compassion that caught in my throat, as was the tendency of a friend in New York to look out for my newly diminished appetite. A blond and a gesticulator who functions as a devoted diplomat in our group of friends, forever on the phone, forever making another’s emergency his emergency, he took me to lunch as though it were his vocation. Though my normal meal tends to include a cream-based soup and an amount of bread that would cover any dieting witnesses in sweat, this summer I often felt undeserving of anything rich or warm, and I took to ordering enough kale and quinoa to bore even a rabbit. The friend in question would let me order my anaemic beet dish without protest, but then he’d put in a side of fries “to share”. Oh, I’d say, once his heaping sandwich arrived. But yours already comes with some. He’d feign weary surprise and gingerly place a half-eaten one on the side of the plate and mutter, like a heartbroken fatalist: “We can’t send it back now. I guess you’ll have to eat them all.”
I’m already losing the visceral memory of splitting up a home and a life, how it felt to recycle the children’s books I bought for daughters we never had, to leaf through the dinner party guest book we kept so zealously, convinced we’d return to it fond decades later. What I see instead is the flashing wrists of the friends who batted away my advances on the bill, the wine lists pushed across the table as though they were contracts that needed my signature immediately. I’ve learned to be many things in a restaurant – a young woman in love, intent on communicating a great breadth of affection or hurt with a certain touch of another’s elbow or a failure to look up; a writer learning to speak about her work, to understand that she must never apologise for it – but of all these educations in miniature, it’s the lessons in platonic devotion for which I’m most grateful. Sometimes I consider how foolish it is for someone with a middling income to spend considerable money and time on the theatre of eating out, and I have certainly snorted at the preposterousness of the hay reduction or the dinner menu sewn into some vintage book, but I can’t think of the institution that has taught me more – about who I am, and who I’ll sit across from, and when to ask for the bill.
Kathleen Alcott is the author of Infinite Home (Harper Collins, £8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
This article was taken from Observer Food Monthly on 15 January 2017. Click here to get the Observer for half price.
