The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [98]
I was planning to blog about what I made for dinner—a perfectly seared, ten-minute tenderloin steak, marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil beforehand, a spicy braised cabbage side, and creamy, wasabi-spiked mashed potatoes. But when I was done eating and rinsing the dishes clean, I walked into the bathroom and began to run a hot bath. Afterward, blithe and bleary from the bath’s soporific effects, I turned in early. It was perhaps the single greatest meal in the history of one-person dating, and the greatest single-person date.
Nick had followed up with an e-mail earlier that day. In it, there was a link to a website.
“Read the part about the Italian name for basil,” he wrote.
I clicked on the link and found a page that described various beliefs and legends about the sweet basil plant. First, there was a Hindu story about basil. The next legend was the one from Italy. My eyes scrolled through the text, catching, “it is used in love spells,” and “a pot of basil on a windowsill is meant to signal a lover.”
Hey—that was where I put basil, I thought.
Then I read the kicker: “In Italy, sweet basil is called ‘kiss me Nicholas,’ ‘bacia-nicola.’”
The moment I put the name together with who the message had come from, I let out a huge cackle. I continued to giggle, intermittently, throughout the day. At the same time, there was a deep feeling of discomfort growing inside. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of anything we’d done—there was no harm in it, as far as I was concerned. But whatever attraction I’d once had for Nick just seemed to have disintegrated, in a mere day. That wasn’t what was supposed to happen, right? Maybe it was all because of the basil.
There were other things bothering me about Nick, too. Over the course of our conversation the night before, he’d mentioned that his parents recently struck it rich with a new business of theirs, and how embarrassed he’d felt about their success in front of his friends. He also glorified his job at the coffee shop as if it were the only humane place to work, making slight jabs at the cubicle nine-to-fivers. I could hardly care if he disapproved of my work environment, or his own family, but I felt a bemused reproach toward his more-proletarian-than-thou attitude.
That Saturday, after politely but pointedly avoiding making plans with Nick during the week, I went out to celebrate my friend David’s birthday. We began the night early. By nine o’clock, we were all pretty tipsy and had each played at least one bad game of pool each. At that point half the party decided to break off and hit up the restaurant next door for a quick, late dinner. This, I’d learned, was one of the dangerous aspects of not eating out: When other people feel the need to eat, like, really stuff themselves with tons of food, I can’t participate in the obvious fun of overeating while drunk, unless it’s something I brought, or junk food from a convenience store.
Luckily, both Matt and Jordan had also already eaten, and we stayed behind to drink and play pool. Jordan turned in a little while later, not feeling too well, so it was just Matt and me until the rest of the party returned.
Of course I’d told him and the rest of my friends about my rendezvous with “the twenty-four-year-old,” as they referred to him. Everyone had been pretty amused by the tale. After a trip to the ladies’ room, I came back to find Matt waiting for a drink at the bar. I poked around in my pockets for extra cash and felt my cell phone instead. On impulse, I picked it up and rang Nick’s number. It rang. And rang. And rang. And went to his voice mail. I closed it without leaving a message. Matt had just turned around with his new drink to watch me put the phone back in my pocket.
“Did you just call the twenty-four-year-old?” he asked.
“I think so.”
Matt threw his head back and laughed. “Why?”
“I have no idea. I don’t even