The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [95]
Instead of a restaurant, maybe it was time to move the all-important date meal to a home setting. What would be the perfect date meal? I began to wonder. It’s a term you hear thrown around a lot, though when it came to the actual food I could think of no limitations to or clear objectives regarding what was on the plate. Was it something elaborately planned, executed, and plated just so, or a slap-dash, easy meal so there was enough time left for the really fun stuff? Was it a bloodred, juicy steak? A communal bowl of spaghetti to slurp at like Lady and her Tramp? Seafood didn’t smell to me right for this category. Neither did anything that was too cheesy or garlicky. I could see how a really rich, chocolaty dessert could be defined as romantic, but that was no main course.
One of my favorite short stories, “The Nice Restaurant,” by Mary Gaitskill, is about a couple dining out one night. The woman, Laurel, is said to be much older than her youthful, energetic companion, Eric. While they are sitting in the restaurant together, Eric says of Laurel: “Your face was just wildly expressive right then.” She replies, “I just got sucked into the whole you know, nice restaurant thing, then got disgusted by it all too quickly.”
Then, after a leisurely meal, the narrator concludes this about Laurel’s feelings toward Eric: “She absolutely loved him. Even though she knew they wouldn’t be dating longer than a few months.”
I think the story is saying, in a way, that the nice restaurant dinner is sort of like a cad: It has the power to temporarily seduce, transport, and haunt. But the effect is short-lived. You go to the restaurant fully aware of the limitations of its spell; you date him, even though you know he won’t be there in the long run. But you do it anyway.
What I wanted was this, the reckless seduction, passion, however fickle it may turn out. The “nice restaurant” factor—but at home. I wanted to see my apartment transformed into this ultra-romantic place, too, so that the mood could exist in an enclosed bubble for that time and place. And I wanted it to be gone in the morning. Theoretically, this would be impossible to do, since my home would still be my home, and I’d have to do the dishes and take the trash out, just as usual. But, with a little imagination, I wanted something greater than the sum of the parts of an extraordinary meal to take place in my home.
Nick called me the next day. I had responded to his e-mail saying he could give me a ring sometime, adding that my number was on the card. It was Sunday, and my schedule that week was packed, so when he called, we decided to try to hang out the next weekend. We settled on Saturday but made no certain plans.
Later on in the week, Nick e-mailed me, asking for suggestions. I had a couple of ideas: there was a supper club that we could drop into for cocktails. I was friends with the group that ran it and had gotten into the habit of doing so, even without coming for the sit-down menu. Then, there was a new cocktail bar we could check out, I suggested.
He e-mailed back: “Do you ride a bike? What about a bike ride in the afternoon; then we could maybe check out the supper club, or the bar.”
Wow, biking around for a first date is totally my speed, I thought.
“I have plans with friends until 5-ish,” I wrote back. “But I’ll be out with my bike anyway. Give me a call.”
We met up at the entrance to Prospect Park, where I’d just finished picnicking with some friends. We didn’t end up going very far. We began riding but stopped at the statues in Grand Army Plaza. There was a fountain with a statue of the sea god Neptune surrounded by mermaids, and we discovered the engraved