There is perhaps no clearer a sign that a man does not love you than that he will not eat with you. I’m sorry to say I know this from experience, and further sorry to admit the man in question, whom I never saw ingest more than some crisp or pastry, was obligated to someone else. During the last acts of the obscure films we saw at the repertory cinemas of New York, on the subway platforms where he would run one finger down my arm, I was almost always starving. Though he was forever short on time, occasionally we made the desperate stop at a bodega, where I’d purchase a pathetic abbreviation of a meal, a suspect banana and salted cashews, and I would eat them as we walked, further contributing to the impression I was a woman who had planned nothing well. Our perverse friendship went on for a year, during a time I was licking my wounds from an awful separation, and just as we never ate together, neither did we sleep together. It occurred to me, after the fact, how telling the first part of the equation was, how indicative of all that followed. In every relationship there’s a mutual diet that evolves (or doesn’t), modified by allergies and preferences and begrudging compromises, and a set of behaviours that accompany it, and inside of all this a very readable code about who we are to each other, and what kind of unit we become or fail to remain.
The first man I ever loved, 24 to my 18, had the sort of perfect name that people always spoke in full, first and last, and he loved to cook for great groups of people, pork roasts that took the whole day, root vegetables julienned so flawlessly they looked like birthday ribbons. I would fly up from college in the south of the state to attend these dinners, in his railroad apartment off Haight Street or his father’s rambling house, an hour north in the hills of our hometown. This was long before I learned to cook anything by myself, and so I would sit a little hamstrung on a counter nearby, a kid in the way, and occasionally he would say something like, “Do you know how to make a roux?” But given his skill and my incompetence, this was like a ballerina demonstrating a fouetté for a toddler with a broken leg. I would nod and listen mute to what he said, never asking for or offered the flour or the spoon, apparently content to take admiration over intimacy. I noticed, after a while, that the elaborate dinners were only prepared for an audience, and that when it was just the two of us, we mostly ate burritos with our hands as we watched television programmes about the bottom of the ocean. We can sense real connection, I’ve come to think, by how much being alone together feels at first like an occasion, something requiring collaboration and argument, tools and time. What he liked about me was similar to what I revered about him – how he thrived in a full room, how he catered his stories to the people in it – but that didn’t help us on those evenings with Blue Planet, where we each might as well have been on our own, greasy fingered and half asleep. It’s easy to remember him hurtling around the corner of a grocery aisle, his cart ahead of him full of the things he’d chosen, and also how young I was, how I failed to place anything in it myself.
My next great target of affection, in my early 20s in San Francisco, was an impoverished painter who wore the same beige workman uniform every day. He took pride in living on as little as possible, and often went days surviving only on the generosity of friends and the Ziploc bags of nuts and fruits he kept in his pockets. His pieces were enormous and intricate, maps of scientific processes traced first in pencil, and they were the principle around which his life was organised. I was making a little more money, so I would often leave the studio where he also slept and return with dinner. What qualified as a feast then was panang or massaman curry, chased by a bottle of pale ale, spread out on the concrete floor on a spare sheet. While I took things out of the bag he would move around the room putting on a record and changing the lighting, on his left hand a ring of mine I had slipped there late one night which he never took off. Try as we did to meet in the middle, between my standards that were rising and his that remained ascetic, there was an underlying rift about this, about how flexible life as an artist could be. It was understood that no matter how deeply he might thank me for the meal, no matter how much he had needed it, he would not, soon or ever, be in the business of returning that favour. During a camping trip to Big Sur, where the physical beauty is a kind of punchline, even the sand an over-the-top lilac, he teased me for ordering an overpriced pastry from a seaside cafe. Shortly after, with a kind of quiet haughtiness that made my very molars itch, he retrieved a clingfilmed croissant from the garbage and began to eat it. I’m the first to admit I laughed too loudly when his face changed and he spat it out, having tasted the mould that had kept it from the day-old basket. A few months after that I moved to a city across the country, where he couldn’t follow, given how precisely his life was arranged, the cheap rent he couldn’t give up and the California light he was content to believe was better than anywhere else. Maybe his way of seeing was blinkered, but he had cornered fulfillment in a way I never have. Those dinners in that warehouse, talking quietly and insistently about my work or his, were an event from which he took pure and human pleasure – but even as they unspooled for me in real time, my aspirational self already envisioned them as a memory, part of a scrappy, fallow period that occurred before I stepped into the rest of my life. I wish I could have been there with him more truly, allowed both feet in that water, and there are more moments than I’d like to admit, eaten by ambition as I can be, awake at 2am writing a convincing and rotten review of my next novel, that I’d like to return, go barefoot on that concrete for a jar of water in the middle of the night.
Because it was harder to survive on less in New York, where there was not a famous taqueria on every corner and avocados could not be purchased three for a dollar and spread on sourdough equally cheap and perfect, it was where I finally began to cook in earnest. It embarrasses me to mention my culinary skills deepened largely in service of a relationship where I occupied a very traditional female role, the lesser earner, the inhabitant of the brownstone my boyfriend owned. It always felt part of a performance in which I had been grievously miscast, and so I overcompensated, preparing meals that took four hours and three burners, insisting on courgette flowers and napkins folded to look like jewels. Though I never enjoyed the basic dishes my boyfriend very occasionally prepared – a fillet sautéed just in butter or some omelette that tasted like a scavenger hunt of the fridge’s darkest corners – neither was I ever totally satisfied with the way he received what I gave him. No “thank you” seemed to account for the time I had taken. It may not be possible to be the feminist and the housewife, or if it is I never mastered it, given how I expected my rhubarb compotes and squid risottos to be seen as much more than meals. I wanted them to signal my right to that home and that life, which never was mine, this much in evidence by the house guests I was always learning of just before their arrival, the sheer density of things bought with his money versus those bought by mine. Packing up my cake pans and vintage pitchers in that magazine-ready kitchen a year ago, my manner remote and my appetite nonexistent, I could not imagine any meal that I wanted. I spent the summer hidden in a linen kaftan to disguise all the weight I had lost, which friends remarked on as freely as they might some menacing weather system.
If I’m brave enough to identify the through line here, at the small compromises that add up to unhappiness, I know it is not the men in my life but I who chose them. Whether it comes from the socialisation that tells little girls we should be accommodating before we are anything else, or some aspect of my itinerant bohemian childhood that made me more comfortable visiting than hosting, I have always been too willing to trim down my life so that it will adhere to another’s. I have often mistaken brilliance for goodness, a life rigidly defined as a kind of merit. The idea of a table where my place was waiting appealed to me, and I failed to see what that would mean for how welcome I’d feel there, in the long run, once the dishes were cleared and the candles snuffed. There was something I lost, letting the men I loved pick up the bill or otherwise dictate the terms, some apology I felt I couldn’t ask for later. We consent to the wrong life in small ways, less by what we say than what we don’t, maybe less by how we behave than by the behaviour we accept.
Lately, my life is work and then dinners with L. He interrupted my thoughts on the subway, where he sat down across from me with his hair in his face, looking like a schoolboy sulky after being punished for a brilliant prank. Somehow I had the courage to wave, low and brief, and somehow providence was kind enough to get our train stuck with the doors open, allowing our exit and search for a drink to seem like the only option. When I was halfway through my first cocktail, a nervous choice that tasted like a cotton candy cone had set a forest fire, L took the glass from me and set it on the next table. You’re not enjoying that, he said, and asked me what I wanted instead. The first time he asked me to a meal, it was pouring. Without telling me his plan, he picked me up in a taxi that went straight back to a place in his neighbourhood, a small kindness that moved me inordinately. At dinner, at a Mediterranean restaurant where plants tumbled from pots sliced in half and mounted high on the wall, he was shiny in his face and clumsy in his movements, once swiping a hooked hand for a glass of wine that was not there, having been cleared by the waiter, and gawking at the table like a cartoon character who has passed the end of the cliff and looked down at his sorry fate. Everything we ate was taken from the same plate, everything we drank was passed back and forth, everything each of us said was annotated by the other. This is how our time together has continued to look, gestures I begin but he finishes. Last night in bed, deep in conversation, both of our gazes somewhere around our feet, I unhooked an amethyst pendant I keep around my neck to find that his hand was already there to take it and place it on the nightstand. The question was in my mouth – could you? – but I hadn’t said it. These are the sorts of behaviours that move me now, apparently, small acts of anticipation that don’t require a please or expect a thank you. This is classic you, he started to say, frustrated and delighted, just a few weeks in, at some behaviour of mine he had already classified, my tendency to pause mid-sentence to look closer at a tree or a building, and it made me wildly happy, to be the thing seen and known.
It’s been a few months now and I still haven’t cooked for L, though I’m imagining it slowly. What I want is to prepare it all in his absence, for the meal’s creation to be totally separate from its reception. I am thinking pulled pork with apricots and curry powder, I am thinking cucumber gazpacho. Rules about meat pairings be damned, the only wine I want in the summer is a falanghina as light as the evenings here. Stuffed high above the cabinets in my pea-sized kitchen is a picnic basket I oiled and refinished in my old life, and I think I’ll take it down. I like the idea of carrying what I’ve made, out of the apartment where I’ve been living alone, a few blocks down to the park nearby. It is small in size but rich in hills, lending to the feeling that there is, with a step in any direction, a different view to be had.
Kathleen Alcott is the author of Infinite Home (Borough Press, £8.99)
