Chapter 1
The Alley View Grill
MATTHEW never takes notes in a restaurant. That’s one of his cardinal rules: Never take notes. He’s worried that if he were seen taking notes he’d be identified as a reviewer, and it’s important to him that he not be identified. He’s also a little worried that if he were identified as a reviewer there would be some kind of scene, a row. He knows that that’s not likely to happen, but still it does worry him at times. Worries aside, he enjoys feeling that he’s not himself when he’s reviewing. He signs his reviews B. W. Beath, a short version of Bertram W. Beath, an anagram of his own name, Matthew Barber. No more than five or six people in the world know that Matthew is B. W. Beath, and there’s no reason why anyone who doesn’t already know would connect a toy company executive with a restaurant reviewer. He’s rather proud of his pseudonym; there is no apparent connection with his own name, but, if he chose to, he could easily demonstrate their correspondence.
The assumed identity, the disguise, is part of the pleasure. He has a theory that most of us are in disguise much of the time, a theory not original with him, but one he came to independently and therefore feels a proprietary affection for. His version goes like this:
“We spend much of our time not as our true selves, but disguised — to suit our occupations, or to appear to be the people our friends or relatives or spouses or lovers expect us to be, or to appear to be what we wish we were. The last is the important one, because when we disguise ourselves as what we want to be, we’re doing it to hide what we think we are.”
He uses himself as an example: “I used to be a fat boy. Really I’m still a fat boy, but now I’m a fat boy disguised as a fairly slim, fairly good looking, not-yet-middle-aged man, an interesting man, if you took the time to get to know him.” For quite a while now he has been working to perfect this disguise. Currently he’s concerned that he has been a little too subtle about it, that the disguise errs on the side of anonymity, so he has been trying to make himself a little more noticeable, to bring the inner, interesting man a little closer to the surface. He has begun to dress with a certain flair. He still buys his suits and shirts at a conservative shop — a department store, to tell the truth — but he’s buying his socks and ties at a little place with marble floors and brass doors, where everything is imported, up-to-the-minute, and breathtakingly expensive. He doesn’t buy anything that really stands out, only things that are a little out of sync with his conservative suits. The combination is intended to make him look a little out of the ordinary, but the other day the worrisome thought struck him that he might be making himself look even less remarkable than before, that the new mix of dull and chic had made him more generalized, spread him out all over the culture: a graying toy designer, moonlighting as a restaurant reviewer, in a conservative suit with an interesting Italian tie and startling socks, at heart still a fat boy, a suffering fat boy, for all fat boys suffer, are made to suffer, tormented by slim boys, teased and tormented by girls.
Sometimes Matthew uses the routine about disguises at cocktail parties or dinners, including the part about his having been a fat boy, but omitting the business about his still being a suffering fat boy at heart. He keeps a great deal to himself. He doesn’t want to seem to be whining.
When he was concocting anagrammatic pseudonyms, he came up with two women’s names: Beth W. A. Bertram and Martha T. Webber. At first he was strongly attracted to them, but eventually he decided against them. For one thing, although he might have been better concealed behind a woman’s name, he wasn’t comfortable hiding behind a woman’s skirts. It made him feel like a sissy, reminded him of the time in the sixth grade when he let his mother break up a fight he was losing. For another, he couldn’t seem to make himself sound like Beth or Martha, but he found that he sounded exactly like Bertram W. Beath on the first try, and his, or their, reviews were a success from the start. Matthew has been reviewing as B. W. Beath for a couple of years now. He thinks of his alter ego as “BW,” what BW’s friends would call him if he were able to have friends, which he can’t, because he must remain concealed. When Matthew’s out doing a review, he’s disguised as B. W. Beath, the well-known restaurant reviewer, almost a celebrity, who, because he must not be recognized as a celebrated restaurant reviewer, is disguised as Matthew Barber, a nearly anonymous man, a stand-in, a shell who lends BW a pseudonym to use when he makes his reservations, who is disguised as BW, and so on, round and round in a circuit of disguise, each self concealing another, each hiding within another. It’s an idea that Matthew enjoys playing with, as he does with the notion of BW as an older brother, whose background is identical to Matthew’s, but who is more worldly, whose tastes are so sophisticated that he can find the shortcoming in any experience. Sometimes Matthew has the feeling that BW is watching him, as if Matthew were his creation, not the other way around, watching his performance from an elevated position, a superior point of view, judging Matthew, reviewing him, looking for his shortcomings. BW probably takes notes. He doesn’t have to worry; he knows that no one can see him. He’s well disguised.
In Topical Guide 409, Mark Dorset considers Self and Alter Ego and Author and Character from this episode.
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🎧 409: Matthew never . . .