Food Robert Fromberg
Forty-one years ago, I was in a dark Chinese restaurant up a few steps from the sidewalk on MacDougal Street with a group of people I had just met that night. We sat at a large round table. My overwhelming sense was of simultaneity. They talked simultaneously. They drank from the same wine bottles (pulled one after another from a brown paper bag on the floor next to the man who appeared to be the host). The people looked alike—all dressed with a kind of blissfully casualness, all with unrestrained hair and big, relaxed laughs and gestures. (The host had a handlebar mustache.) They all ate the same food from multiple bowls on a lazy Susan that occupied much of the table. The food made me nervous. I had just moved here. I had never been to a Chinese restaurant before. But the first bite I took—chicken in a brown sauce—made my chest and head expand. (The man who appeared to be the host wore a belt with an ornate buckle. Before dinner, I had been told that he ran an antique shop and a furniture-refinishing shop in the West Village near the restaurant. Two days later I began working at the refinishing shop. According to a New York Times article published five years after his death, he was well known for selling antiques from the American West.) * The man with the handlebar mustache and his wife invited me to a Western themed bar on the Upper East Side (forty-one years ago there was a Western-themed bar on the Upper East Side), where upstairs a Western musical comedy based on a Bret Harte story was being performed. It took place in a mining town and featured a strong-willed schoolmaster’s daughter, a villain, and bouncy music. The couple ordered Irish coffees. They suggested that I order an Irish coffee. (Forty-one years ago, no one asked a 16-year-old for proof of age in this city.) I tasted the drink, and it make my chest and head expand. * (The actress who played the hotel landlady was a friend of the couple. She had dark hair and called people by their full names even when they went by nicknames, an affectation I was not at that age able to interpret. One night, after her boyfriend had left her a note saying he was moved to the opposite coast, she invited me to take a walk with her. She was sad and that night did not call people by their full names. The hot dogs were especially good. Winter was coming, and as we walked I studied her black wool coat, and her longing and loneliness became mine.) * The musical director of the Western play needed a roommate and moved into my apartment. A few days later, we stood in our kitchen. (The kitchen, which contained a bathtub, was the largest room in 1
the apartment.) He produced a brown paper bag from somewhere and pulled from it a round carton with an ornate gold design. He pulled open a squeaky drawer and produced an old bread knife and two spoons. (After only a few days he seemed to have mastered where things were kept while I did not even know that I owned a bread knife.) He set the carton on its side and cut across its width. He handed me half the carton and a spoon. When I started the spoon toward the ice cream, he told me to wait, that it needed at least 15 minutes to soften. The ice cream tasted like rich, sweet coffee. The flavor was like the first part of trick, the second part of which would involve my being told that what I was eating did not actually exist. My chest and head expanded in joy. * (Later my roommate moved into an apartment across from three Indian restaurants and next to a church. The apartment doorbells did not work. My former roommate instructed me to climb over the church fence, walk up the stairs and around the side of the church, lean over the areaway, and knock on his tall kitchen window. Once, when I got to his window, I saw him standing in his tiny kitchen, naked, juggling. When he saw me, he shrugged and caught the three balls.) (Over the years, he worked as a pianist, singer, impersonator, improvisational comic, bicycle repair person, and tour guide. He became well known for organizing Christmas caroling on the streets of the East Village. A few years ago, I told him I was going to be in town, and we set up a date for dinner, but he had a stroke just a few days before and died the day we were supposed to meet. I walked by his building and was tempted to climb the church fence, but didn’t. Or couldn’t. Someday I will record the story of him ordering a doughnut at a restaurant, a story that suggests to me how a person finds a sense of home in an unfamiliar place.) * Forty-one years ago, I met a guy who said he hated things. For example, he said, “I hate art.” However, he liked some things, and those things he liked a lot. Two of those things were coffee and cheesecake. He served them to me at his mother’s midrise apartment. (She was out of town and had left him some money. He told me that he doubted that she intended for him to spend the money on coffee and cheesecake.) He made coffee in a percolator, which I suppose was old fashioned even then. I had never had coffee that tasted so good, and I had never tasted cheesecake, and they both made my chest ache in a happy way and made my head float. After I took the train home, I bought a percolator from a tiny hardware store and the same kind of coffee he had from a tiny grocery store. (I looked at a cheesecake, but I could not conceive of having something so large in my refrigerator.) The first pot of coffee I made in the percolator tasted wonderful. The next time my friend came to my apartment, I made him a pot of coffee, but when I went to pour it we discovered that a cockroach had crawled in. My friend made the same scowl he made when he said he hated something. But then he said he wouldn’t let a cockroach ruin a pot of coffee. Still, I knew he wasn’t happy. (My roommate said that my friend who hated things called one night when I was out and seemed to be on drugs and said sexual things about me in an aggressive manner.) (My friend often talked of moving to Guatemala to study its insects.) 2
(In the acknowledgements section of a book about entomology, the author, after thanking many people, wrote that he did not thank my friend.) * I know no one. Everyone looks familiar. Everyone looks like someone else. Everyone looks like someone who was laughing when I knew him. Or smiling when I knew her. * The downtown in this city seems empty. Perhaps the sudden cold is keeping people inside. Perhaps in this city people simply do not go downtown on a Friday night. It has begun to snow—the kind of snow that swirls, does not hit the ground, and stops. The restaurant has few tables, and although the tables are mostly unoccupied, the host seems relieved when I offer to sit at the bar. The young bartender hands me cocktail and food menus before I have even settled on the stool, and I have just begun to review the cocktail menu when he returns. “My favorite drink,” he says, “is this one.” He points to the first one on the list. The ingredients are unfamiliar. But to formulate another choice, a better choice, is not possible. “All right,” I say. The drink appears before me quickly, so quickly that I wonder if I could have fallen asleep. The drink is in a shallow glass with a wide mouth, a type of glass that surely has a name, if I knew the names of such things. The thin top layer of the drink is white and foamy. The white foam is dotted with stars, each formed by bisecting gold lines. My first sip barely disturbs the white foam or gold stars. I feel a hand on my upper arm. The bartender is now at my side. He is silent for a moment. 3
“I knew,” he says, “that you would like it.”
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