Life From Scratch

by Melissa Ford

  I stare at the caller ID, heart pounding. Gael Paez. Two days. In zone terms, this is perfection. Any time before the second day and the guy seems too desperate. Rob Zuckerman, for instance, started calling the day after our date. I have been letting his calls go to voice mail for two weeks because I am too chickenshit to pick up the phone and tell him that while he is really nice, I’m just not interested in dating another lawyer-trying-to-make-partner. Perhaps I should come up with a better strategy than avoidance, since five phone calls later he still hasn’t gotten the message.

  I’ve already fallen back into bad dating habits of wanting the kind of man who makes me wait.

  Gael says hello as if he isn’t quite sure whose number he has called, and my heart sinks. “Hello?” I ask back. There is a moment of silence and then Spanish spoken at rapid speed and finally, his voice returns to the line at full volume. “Right as I dialed your number, a friend asked me directions. Hello, Rachel Goldman, how are you?”

  “I’m fine, Gael Paez,” I say, closing my cookbook and sitting down on the stool in my kitchen. We are on a full-name basis. Which can be formal or it can be intimate. I decide that I’d rather have it be intimate. I wonder if Gael still smells like cinnamon and sex. “How are you?”

  “I have been giving a lot of thought to your desire not to go back to work at the library,” he admits. “To be a cooking travel writer, instead. And I think I have some solutions.”

  “A cooking travel writer who juggles?” I suggest.

  “Well, these solutions are quite wordy. Maybe it would be better if we got together, and then I could tell them to you.”

  “But what if they’re no good?” I flirt. “Getting together could be a complete waste of time.”

  “Oh no, I worked hard on these ideas,” Gael says with mock seriousness. “I will make it worth your while.”

  “Are you going to cook for me?” I question. “I cooked for you.”

  “I will do my version of cooking. It’s called going to a restaurant. I may not know how to make pasta, but I can buy it quite well.”

  If I had only waited a few weeks, Gael Paez could have been the first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life instead of Rob Zuckerman, who spent five hours in Bali. That’s the whole problem with this not-knowing-what-the-future holds thing. Arianna is always talking about trusting that the next step will become obvious, but I’m not so sure this is the best way to live. A few weeks—that’s all that separates me from the best first-post-divorce-date story of all time from the most boring story of all time. Just as a few hours a day was all that separated Adam from the home life, the married life, I’d thought we both wanted.

  Wait, I am not supposed to be thinking about Adam right now.

  I am on the phone with Gael Paez, Madrileño photographer, who smells like sex. I am supposed to be concentrating on that.

  So I imagine my ex-husband on a dark, empty sound stage, standing there expectantly as if he’s waiting for the right time to shout his lines. I picture my hands, triple the size of his tiny image (think Mike Teavee after he shrinks himself in the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), shoving him off the stage while he trips over his own feet and shouts out feeble, silent protests.

  Well that’s what he gets for popping into my head at an inopportune time.

  “Oh, I know all about that whole restaurant thing. I used to be that way myself. So you’re an armchair chef?”

  “What is that? ‘Armchair chef’?”

  “It’s like an armchair traveler. Someone who reads about traveling rather than doing it,” I explain.

  Gael likes this term and repeats “armchair chef” several more times before he finally gets around to asking me on a date. “How about this Saturday night?”

  Shit. I have plans with my sister, Sarah, which I would normally cancel, but the lunch date includes her husband, Richard, and my niece, Penelope. I do some math in my head, calculating out the time it would take to return to my apartment in Murray Hill from Park Slope, shower, and get dressed in something that says, “No sex tonight, but it’s a definite possibility in the future,” with Arianna’s help.

  “What about a late meal? Eight?”

  “That is late?” Gael asks. “Eight is perfect. I’ll come to your apartment, and we will go be armchair chefs.”

  “I’m a real chef now,” I remind him.

  “Okay, real chef,” he corrects. “I am looking forward to this, Rachel Goldman.”

  “So am I, Gael Paez,” I respond.

  And I mean it. He doesn’t realize how much I truly mean it.

  Despite being angel cake-less (how can I be expected to attempt baking after securing a date?), I head over to Arianna’s apartment after Beckett is asleep, carrying a package of Pepperidge Farm cookies and a bottle of semi-expensive wine. We are toasting my return to the dating scene as well as becoming a finalist for the Bloscars as well as celebrating the fact that I don’t need to take my blog commenters’ advice (“Call the guy after three days,” was their consensus), because he has already called me.

  Plus I have decided not to write about him again. It is too risky in case we don’t end up married with 2.4 kids, and he finds my blog posts in the future while I am licking my wounds. He knows already, at the very least, that I do have a blog, even if he hasn’t asked for the url.

  That is the whole problem with using blogs as free therapy. At least in therapy, you state your situation, and you get to hear the words outside your head and receive feedback from another person. But how can I discuss the anxiety I feel over spending the evening alone with Gael, of finally being attracted to a man other than my husband, in a public forum such as a blog? What if he’s secretly reading it, and we sit down to dinner, and he knows exactly what I’m thinking and feeling in the moment?

  “You can tell if he’s reading your blog. I don’t mean definitively, but there are ways of figuring it out,” Arianna tells me mysteriously, turning down the volume on the baby monitor. The baby monitor is completely pointless in a small, New York apartment. I can hear the “monitor Beckett” gurgling at his mobile in unison with the real-life Beckett in the other room.

  “How? And how would you know? You are more computer-deficient than I am.”

  “I obviously knew about the Bloscars when you didn’t,” Arianna points out. “I read blogs. I read articles in the New York Times. My finger is on the pulse of the World Wide Web.”

  “Hardly,” I say, cracking open the Milanos. “So how do you know?”

  “You can install trackers on your blog, and then it tells you who has been on.”

  “Wait,” I tell her, suddenly panicked. “Do other people know that I’ve been on their sites?” Though I haven’t gone back in months, right after the divorce, I spent more than a little bit of time still visiting Adam’s photograph over at his law firm’s website. Now I imagine the IT staff gathered around the computer, cracking up as they see my name popping up every night around 1 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep.

  “You don’t see a name,” Arianna says, “but you do see an IP address. I’m not exactly sure what that is, but you can tell where the person came from. Do you want to find out if Gael’s reading?”

  Arianna, it turns out, knows exactly what she is talking about. We turn on her computer and it boots up slowly, giving us time to eat through a layer of cookies. She takes me to a site called Sitestalker, which sounds dirty, as if I’m by the window in a trench coat waiting to flash everyone who visits my site. I set up a profile and follow the instructions to add the tracking program to my site. It’s relatively easy even if my computer skills are limited to being proud that I’ve learned how to add hyperlinks to my blog posts. We sit there, staring at the counter on zero.

  “Why isn’t it adding us?” I ask, clicking back and forth to my blog open in a separate window. “Did we do it wrong?”

  “Try closing down your blog and reopening it,” Arianna suggests. Lo and behold, the counter refreshes with one, lone visitor. I chew on my lip,
hitting refresh a few more times, but we’re the only people reading my blog tonight.

  Seeing that in black-and-white feels quite lonely. I poke around on the site and see that we’re logged as coming from New York, New York. We figure out a way to label Arianna’s IP address, and she comes up on the main screen under her name instead of a series of numbers.

  “It makes me feel better to see that it’s you reading instead of a string of numbers. It feels more human . . . less mechanical,” I tell her.

  “But you’re reading right now.”

  “I don’t mean now. I mean, in the future, when I log on to check who is reading, and I see your name. I’m trying to have a sweet moment here, connect as humans rather than allow the cold plastic-and-metalness of computers to come between us.”

  “Hit refresh again,” Arianna commands.

  I hit refresh and stare at the number on the screen. Twenty-one. Not just me and Arianna. Twenty-one people have been reading my blog while Arianna and I figure out Sitestalker and eat through two levels of Milanos. Holy shit. I click through each of the links, staring at the different lists of information. They have been on for a range of two seconds to fourteen minutes. They are from London, England; Reston, Virginia; Brooklyn, New York, and elsewhere. They are entering from blogrolls and comments and links inside posts. Who the hell are these people, and why didn’t I know they were reading before this point?

  We hit refresh again, and the number jumps. Forty-nine. As we sit there, making our way through the final layers of Milano cookies, the number jumps into the hundreds and then two hundred, finally hovering close to three hundred before Arianna tells me that she’s getting tired.

  “But who are these people?” I ask for the fortieth time.

  “Sweetie, people love your site. You can’t go by the number of comments they post. I knew there were more people reading it than you thought. First of all, your blog is funny. I mean, you really are a great writer. People connect with your story, with how honest you are and how much you lay your heart out there. It’s not just your cooking stories. It’s the divorce and when you write about Beckett or me or your life now in New York. People want to connect with a whole person, and you let them. Some of the cooking blogs are so boring. They’re just dish, dish, dish, recipe, dish, dish. But you tell stories. You have meat and potatoes. Did you like that? Was that a clever food reference for your writing?”

  Hearing my blog, my writing, described this way makes me blush. I bury my hand back in the cookie bag, trying to make myself busy searching the Milano crumbs.

  “I didn’t know anyone was reading,” I say, again, for the forty-first time.

  “That’s why you should have loaded this software on your blog ages ago. I told you that people were reading.”

  “How many do you think there are in all?” I question, hitting refresh again.

  “You’ll know in a few days. Let it run for a bit, and you’ll see a trend in how many visitors you get on average.”

  “But how do I know which one is Gael? If any of them are Gael? There are too many from New York to know.”

  “I thought of that too,” Arianna says, suddenly remembering the second part of her plan. “You need to create a fake site . . . well, not a fake site . . . a real site but one you’ll only use for bait. Load the Sitestalker stuff on it. Make the site something about ideas for future dinner parties. Then send a link to Gael making it sound as if you’re sending the url out to a bunch of people, but only send it to him. When he clicks over, you’ll be able to see his IP address.”

  “You’re a genius,” I tell her. “A complete genius.”

  “And all of my brilliance is wasted on hem lines,” she laments. “Anything to help a girl out as she dives back into the dating pool.”

  “Do you think Gael’s reading my blog?” I ask, the other question that has been returning all night. I check my stats one last time then log off on her computer.

  “There’s only one way to know,” Arianna tells me in her best secret agent voice. “Set up a sting.”

  I know you're not supposed to say this, you're not even supposed to think it, and anyone in their right mind would whisper it into a pillow rather than broadcast it to the world via their blog, but here goes: I don't like Park Slope.

  There.

  I said it.

  Now that those of my readers who are deeply offended by that admission are gone, clicked away to go write another ode to the neighborhood, I can finish the thought. I don't like the tempo of Park Slope.

  It's like Brooklyn is pudding to Manhattan's ice cream. Manhattan has bite, it has substance. It holds in your mouth. Brooklyn? It sort of slides around on your tongue. There's a little flavor, and then it's gone. It doesn't even change with the temperature. Brooklyn is always Brooklyn, just like pudding is always pudding.

  But Manhattan? It's an overly sparkle-lighted mess in the winter and it’s sweat stains under your arms in the summer and it's dodging the weirdoes in Central Park in autumn and spring. It's three scoops of Heath bar crunch one day and a pool of ice cream soup another and . . . well . . . I like it like that.

  I am thinking about Park Slope because I have to go out there today to meet my sister. She and I will undoubtedly have the Manhattan/Brooklyn argument, so I like to warm up here, get my verbal boxing gloves on so to speak. Can you believe two people I'm related to live over the bridge? You would think that we'd get an equal portion of the common-sense gene, but unfortunately, that gene seems to have skipped my parent's first and last borns.

  The largest reason why I hate Park Slope is that there is no place to get a good vegetarian egg roll in Brooklyn. Before you get all up in arms and start screaming something about your favorite Chinese restaurant over the bridge, notice I said "egg roll," not "spring roll." Not even Tofu on 7th—a vegetarian haven—has a vegetarian egg roll: the chunky golden jewel of the Chinese restaurant menu.

  If I could, I would wear one around my neck like a lariat necklace, with shredded cabbage as the chain. Fatness and the dough are the main differences between an egg roll and a spring roll, but I only like the egg roll version of the appetizer. And egg rolls traditionally contain pork. While I've never kept kosher, I've also never been able to overcome my Hebrew school teacher's voice in my head that starts shrieking every time I go to take a bite of something that contains swine.

  I would love to learn how to make my own egg rolls, since I rarely get to order one since I realized how much carryout actually costs. Does anyone know how to make one like the ones at Hunan Chow? An easy recipe that will not make me weep and shake like my angel food cake recipe?

  Chapter Five

  Snapping the Carrots

  Over the next few days, I see just how popular my little blog is as each reader is logged by Sitestalker. I have readers from around the world—from American Samoa to a telecom call center in India. They stay for an average of five minutes on the blog, which doesn’t seem like a long time at all, but Arianna promises that is eons in blog years.

  I feel like an average girl who was just told by someone that she’s popular. You know the rule of the average girl, right? Popular girls always know that they’re popular. They don’t need to ask, and they really don’t need you to tell them, but they’re always glad when you do because it just confirms what they already know.

  But average girls can never believe it when they’re told that the cute boy likes them or that they’ve been nominated for homecoming queen or that their blog is being read by thousands of people each day. It seems a little surreal, as if they’re part of a joke and now they need to cringe and wait for the punchline. There are average girls who have been working successful jobs for years and are still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Movie stars who can’t believe their luck that they married their gorgeous, rock-star husband, and so they are still checking People magazine religiously to confirm that their entire life is not a dream.

  I am an average girl.

  So who are the three-thousand
or so readers who stop by Life From Scratch each day, downloading recipes and checking out my photographs of onions caramelizing? How many of them are people I know; neighbors in the building, old friends from the library, potential boyfriends that hail from Spain?

  It is a bit unnerving. I am well-aware that the entire point of a blog—the very fact that you put your journal online instead of tucking it between the box spring and mattress—is to get people to read it. But now, seeing them swing by the site, sometimes three times a day, makes me uncomfortable. What have I said that will bite me in the ass later? I don’t remember ever writing about anyone other than Arianna or Adam or family (well, except for a few hints about Gael because he is so incredibly delicious that he is the human equivalent to food), but what if I’ve upset someone along the way? And, on that end, what if Adam ever finds my site?

  Sitestalker gives me a PhD in paranoia.

  I follow Arianna’s plan and send out an email written to a fictional group of people announcing my latest site, a dinner party blog where I’ll be talking about all the dinner parties I’ll have in the future. I send the link to Gael without mentioning the fact that I’ll be seeing him that weekend, which I think is pretty damn clever since it’s supposed to be a group note.

  And for once in my life, everything works out according to plan. He clicks over, I label his IP address, and then scrawl it on a post-it note hidden under my pocket dictionary on the table so I can look it up in the IP search bar every time I log onto Sitestalker.