FOR A WHILE Liz and Matthew sit in silence and eat. Matthew is eating something really delicious, a concoction of the chef, identified on the menu as “bouillabaisse stir-fry over angel-hair pasta.” He ordered it partly out of incredulity, but he’s finding, to his surprise, that the chef swims very well. Topping the pasta is something like bouillabaisse — with shellfish, saffron, all that good stuff — but what would have been broth is a sauce, so insistently delicious that it keeps nudging him toward a happy contentment. The chef has had the good sense not to serve too much of this wonderful stuff, and Matthew wants every bit of what there is. What’s needed is a spoon. There’s none at his place setting, none at Liz’s, either, and the elegant sauce barely clings to the tines of his fork. “My God, this is good,” he says.
“This is awful, really awful,” says Liz. She pokes the squid-ink pasta with her fork.
“Too bad,” he says. He looks at her heap of black bands, with shreds of something orange and something green threaded through them. “This is simply incredible,” he says. He looks around for the waif; he really would like a spoon.
“Don’t gloat.”
“Why don’t you send that back and get some of this?” he suggests.
“No, I don’t want to do that.” She picks at the dish, eats a strand.
“Don’t be a martyr. Here, try a bite of this.”
“No. You hardly have enough for yourself.”
The waif cruises by. Matthew catches sight of her in the mirror, just her hips and legs as she walks past, but he’s learned to recognize her from that slice of view. He turns, but her back is toward him and she’s drifting off elsewhere. Matthew gets out of his chair and walks after her. When he catches up to her, he says, “Excuse me,” and puts his hand on her shoulder. It’s a nice shoulder, just poking out of the wide neck of a nubbly sweater.
Nice in the hand. Wonderful to the touch. Smooth. So smooth.
He dares to give the smooth shoulder a squeeze when the waif turns her head and smiles her blank, all-purpose smile at him. “Would you bring me a spoon?” he asks. “The sauce on that bouillabaisse stir-fry is so good.”
Smooth as your shoulder. Sauce as smooth as a woman’s shoulder. I can use that.
“I want to get every bit of it, but I don’t want to offend the other diners by licking the plate.” She doesn’t laugh. “And, I tell you what, bring another order of it for the woman with me, okay?”
“Sure. A spoon and another order of bouillabaisse stir-fry.”
That smile. What teeth. My crooked yellow teeth.
He returns her smile with closed lips. He feels wonderful, for just a moment, and even considers that it might be possible, if he were to begin patronizing Two-Two-Two regularly again, that she’d get to know him, and that once she got to know him she might fall in love with him. That is really what he imagines, that she might fall in love with him.
Why not?
Then she asks, “Where are you sitting again?” and he realizes that he has made no impression on her as an individual, none at all. Perhaps none of the diners has, no one in the room. Maybe she sees only a congeries, not a single face or voice or desire.
She should sign up for a course with that tweedy faker. Learn to see the grains. Not just the beach.
When he tells her where he’s sitting, she says “Okay,” and when he says, “Thanks,” he touches her hand. Why not?
Maybe if I always ordered the bouillabaisse stir-fry, nothing else, she would eventually remember who I am. Maybe.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 539, Mark Dorset considers Food: Fictional: Bouillabaisse Stir-Fry from this episode.
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🎧 539: For a while . . .