by Melissa Ford
I imagine Gael’s parents, an older male and female version of himself, yelling at each other in their respective languages over the breakfast table. Our bottle of wine arrives, and the waitress pours Gael a small taste. Without lifting his glass to try it, he motions for her to fill both of our glasses. Then he lifts up his glass and clinks it against mine.
“Salud,” he says.
“Yes,” I answer, waiting for him to continue. But he simply places his glass down and takes another olive. I try to think up something to ask him, but my mind keeps returning to the scar on his forehead. I wonder how that question will sound. That I only notice his flaws? But if I tell him how I love his heavily lidded eyes, even without telling him how they make me daydream about how they’ll look after sex, do I reveal that I’ve spent way too much time thinking about him? Picking apart his many gorgeous features? I stare at the menu mindlessly while I rack my brain for something non-physical to ask.
“What are you going to order?” I blurt out. That was definitely not the astute, sensual question I was aiming to concoct within the silence.
“I am going to get the wild boar. Pappardelle al cinghiale.”
“You know Italian too,” I say softly, glancing down at the table.
“No, it was written in the menu,” Gael says, pointing at the words. He repeats the words, this time with a terrible Italian accent. A man at the table next to us glares at him as if he were personally offended by the imitation. “Have you ever eaten wild boar?”
“No. The whole Hebrew school thing,” I say by way of an explanation. “I’m not kosher, but I can’t seem to try pig.”
“Maybe you’ll take a bite of mine tonight. Try something new.”
“Really, I know it’s all psychological, but I can’t. I can’t try wild boar or tame boar.”
“What about kosher boar?”
“There is no kosher boar,” I tell him. “Pigs aren’t kosher.”
“What is this kosher thing if it keeps you from tasting anything good? What, can you only eat white bread and . . . what is the most boring food, I can’t think of something else like white bread.”
“Tuna fish. That’s pretty boring.”
“Oh, I don’t like tuna fish,” he says, wrinkling his nose. “What is the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten, Rachel Goldman?”
He doesn’t know how loaded this question is for me. Little Mike Teavee Adam dances back out onto my mental stage. That was always my question to Adam when he returned from a trip or checked in with a phone call. “What was the strangest thing you ate today?” I’d ask. Because there was always a good answer. Scorpion during a business trip to Vietnam. Blood sausage during a vacation with friends. Cactus apples sent from a client who took a trip to Arizona. The fact that he would put anything and everything into his mouth was always a point of awe, something that attracted me to him. It was urban daring. Urbane courage.
I’ve never been very adventurous with eating. I like all the standards, as much as sushi and the like can have standards. I am more pho than tripe, more kappa maki than unagi, more matzo ball soup than gribinis. I’m not even sure if Adam enjoyed choosing the most outlandish offering on the menu or if he did it for me, but before he would order, he would get this small smile as if he was trying to appear serious and run his finger across his pick on the menu very slowly so that I would flip back open my menu and try to figure out which item he was lingering over.
“The lamb heart and kidneys?” I’d ask. “The calf’s tongue? The sweetbreads?”
I loved having a good story to tell the next time we were with friends. I loved watching him take the first bite without a moment of hesitation or consideration. It’s just food, he always told me. He had the same attitude about travel. The same attitude about calling the credit card company to fight a claim or calling the cab driver on a wrong fare or asking someone if they’d stop talking in the theater. It was a confidence that made me feel as if he were getting more out of life than I was. His willingness to put himself out there and try anything made me fall in love with him. That was the real Adam.
But his attitude had its dark side. It’s just food, it’s just a place, it’s just a company. It’s just a marriage. He’s just an ex-husband, I repeat to myself.
Whoa, I have got to get myself out of my head.
I blink several times and then place my finger against some random words on the menu, as if I’ve been trying to decide what to order.
“Snails.” I tell Gael. “In France. Is that weird? It’s actually this awful story,” I tell him.
“Snails are quite good,” he tells me. “Salty.”
“Well, these snails were not quite good. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were in Paris.”
“With your husband?” Gael interrupts.
“With my husband,” I agree. “We forgot to make a reservation, so we were going from restaurant to restaurant, trying to find someone to seat us. Every place was, of course, filled, and we were starving. We finally found this place on a random side street that had an open table. Adam kept goading me and goading me to try something crazy so I picked the snails. I think I made it through two before I quit. About an hour after the meal, I started feeling queasy, so we left the bar we were at and went back to our hotel room. I ended up in a Parisian emergency room with food poisoning on New Year’s Day. It was awful. Really really awful.”
I give a small laugh that I hope conveys just how glad I am not to be with a man who would take me to a nasty-ass restaurant that gives me food poisoning, but I’m not sure Gael is convinced. It’s probably not the best idea to talk about your ex-husband ten minutes into the second first-date-of-the-rest-of-your-life. I should have waited until the dessert course to trot out my little divorce shadow.
“I’m sorry, Rachel, that it didn’t work out with him,” says Gael in a voice that is definitely more brotherly than romantic.
I really know how to turn a guy off.
The entire walk home, I am hoping that he’ll kiss me. It’s not just that I want to be kissed by Gael, but it seems like an important step—getting that first kiss on the first date with him. Like a skater nailing that first triple lutz right at the beginning of her routine. When we pause outside my building, I take my keys out of my pocket because I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I tuck them into my hand. My keychain peeks out from the valley between my thumb and index finger. It is a hula girl I purchased on my honeymoon in an airport gift shop, originally meant for Arianna. I try not to think about my honeymoon, about Adam.
Gael makes small talk about the weddings he has lined up for the next few weekends. About a restaurant that was recently replaced on my block. I twirl the hula girl, watching her plastic grass skirt become a blur. I wonder if we’re ever going to make it to the Kandinsky exhibit at the Guggenheim.
It happens while I am looking down at the sidewalk. First he strokes my cheek, my left cheek, with his ungloved hand, which is still warm from being jammed in his pocket while we walked back. Then he cups my cheek gently and tilts my face towards his. I help him out the rest of the way by straightening my back and leaning into his lips. They are softer than I thought they’d be, softer and gentler than Adam’s. More uncertain. Slower. Present. He smells like wood and winter, and the heat from the restaurant is still embedded in his scarf.
He breaks free first and pulls back to smile at me. My God he is gorgeous. He kisses me again, and I know that if I invite him upstairs that we’ll end up having sex on my living room floor. And I cannot have sex on my second-first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life.
When he realizes that I’m not going to invite him up, he mumbles something that I think might be in Spanish that I want to ask him to translate and promises that he will call the next night. I don’t watch him walk down to the subway even though I really want to, because I am trying very hard to play it cool. I smile to myself the whole elevator ride up to my apartment.
What good is having a really great first kiss if you can’t blog about it?
I mean, I could blog about it, but then he could read about it and then there probably wouldn’t be a second kiss. Reading about how much your date is into you after one kiss is a little uncool. I practically have to sit on my hands when I get to the computer. I log into my account and stare at a blank post box and then close it again.
I open up my stat page and stare at the number of people who have read about my life in the last 24 hours. 3,576. I bypass scanning the list by location, already aware that my readership stretches to the far ends of the earth, and instead look at the referring pages. A lot of visitors come through the Bloscars, but there are also a host of other food blogs that have all linked to me either in posts or on their sidebar. I click through to Bakerella and bookmark her recipe for cake pops, even though the instructions are way beyond my capabilities.
In the dark recesses of the stat counter are the more technically advanced searches that come in the form of initials. Search IP address. Scan by ISP. I choose the button for Internet Service Provider and smile when I see that the top visitor is coming from the Department of Justice. I picture Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the bench with a laptop, searching for directions on caramelizing onions. From little old me. Maybe she’s like my mother and has never held a spatula. The next visitor comes from Comcast in Ohio. Another from Sloan Kettering, here in New York.
I scroll down the list until my eye catches on a name. My body feels like it is moving so slowly that it doesn’t get the message until I’m well past the entry. I scroll back up, not sure that I saw it correctly. I could just be seeing things, a name that is close but will turn out to be a few letters off. Or maybe I imagined the whole thing, that I’ll spend the next ten minutes scrolling back and forth and finding nothing that could have ever been misconstrued.
But then, my heart pounding in my ears until I can’t even hear the hum of the computer, it jumps out of the screen. I feel like I’ve just been caught with my nose in someone else’s diary instead of the other way around, because there, on the screen, unmistakable, in Sitestalker’s familiar courier font, is Adam’s law firm of Brockman and Young.
One of the things I used to love to order was artichoke and spinach dip. It's so gooey and yummy. It is healthy love. It has to be healthy—right? I mean, it has vegetables in it and protein. It's green. Green things are good.
Since I no longer have the funds to go out and drop ten bucks on an appetizer (and before you start, I am not ordering that on a date. Are you kidding? Admit that I enjoy eating what amounts of green liquefied fat that leaves a stringy cheese beard hanging from below my lip? Attractive!), I thought I'd see if I had the skills and equipment to make it myself. Not that my hips need unrestricted access to artichoke and spinach dip.
So I Google the recipe and Alton Brown's smiling face comes onto my screen. Frozen spinach? Check (and thank you, Mr. Brown, for not suggesting fresh spinach). Frozen artichoke hearts? Check. Cream cheese for lovely smooth cheesiness? Check. Sour cream. Um, okay, not my favorite thing but fine. And then, like finding a cockroach in your salad, I let out an internal scream: MAYONNAISE?
There is mayonnaise in spinach and artichoke dip? There is mayonnaise in the dip? Why didn't anyone tell me? How could they let me put it in my mouth—on a chip no less? Were they trying to kill meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?
I hate mayonnaise. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
Further Googling brought me to recipes that did not contain mayonnaise, but here's the rub: how do you know if the spinach and artichoke dip placed in front of you contains my edible kryptonite? Obviously, in some situations you can ask, but how do I know if a waiter is telling the truth or if they're just telling me what I want to hear?
It made me really sad that there isn't a rewind button, a way to undo knowledge. Because I'm not sure I can ever eat spinach and artichoke dip again.
Chapter Six
Rondelle the Celery
Let me get this straight. Adam ignored me for the last several years of our marriage, never got home early enough so we could share the events of our day, and now—NOW—after we’re divorced, he is taking the time to read my blog so he can see what I’m doing?
Hell hath no fury like a woman once ignored, who is now receiving attention several years too late.
I can’t really explain why I’m so bothered over the idea of Adam reading my thoughts. If he wants to learn that I now know how to use the waffle maker we got for our wedding (and that my waffles are better than anything I’ve ever gotten in a restaurant; seriously, he’s missing out on the best breakfast ever), let him. The divorce is over and done with and nothing I’ve written up until this point can be used against me. Who cares if he knows that I missed him sometimes? If he knows that I have dipped my toe in the dating pool? Good, he should be up all night thinking about another man’s hands all over my body.
I am so over him.
Except a tiny voice in the back of my head coolly asks: “Well, are you?”
Yes, I am. I’m so over him that I’m dating other people. I’m telling complete strangers about my life, and they love it—three thousand of them love it. They think I’m funny and smart and . . . so yes, I am over him. I think I am over him. I think about him sometimes, usually when I least expect it, and sometimes I miss him . . . all of that is normal. So yes, I think I am over him.
I sleep on the fact all night, tossing and turning as if it is an uncooked pea hidden under the mattress. In the morning, I throw on some clothes and head out to Arianna’s to bitch about it in person. The point, I decide to make, is that reading my blog means that however distant, Adam is essentially involved in my life. And the whole reason we divorced was because he wasn’t part of my life. And frankly, he missed his chance to know me.
Someone is coming out of Arianna’s building right as I get there, so I slip inside, waving to the woman at the front desk, and jump in the elevator, taking it up the six floors to her apartment. The elevator doors open and I see Ethan talking to Arianna at her door. He is holding Beckett and standing in the open door jamb. They both startle when they see me, and then look back at each other as if they’re equally surprised that they’re there.
“Hey, Rach, Arianna asked me to come over this morning and help move some stuff,” he tells me.
“Oh,” I say, watching Arianna take Beckett out of his arms.
“I actually have to get going. Photos to take,” he tells me.
“Can you stay for a second?” I ask. “Because I need to talk about the fact that Adam has been reading my blog.”
I expect this news to elicit the same gasp that I gave last night, but they both stare at me a bit blankly, as if they’re trying to grasp why this news would need to be discussed, not to mention, delivered in person. I try again: “Adam? As in my ex-husband? The one who never asked me how my day was or came home before 11 p.m. and complained every time I suggested that we spent time with one another? Who flipped out every time I suggested we go on a vacation and actually relax with one another? Ringing any bells? Well, he was on my blog last night.”
Ethan shrugs but clearly gets the message that more is expected, because he turns and heads back into the apartment. Arianna begins to clean up the kitchen, setting coffee mugs and plates into the sink while Beckett gurgles at me from her hip. She sets him in the playpen with a few toys and then pours me a cup of coffee without asking first if I want any. She knows me that well. I slide an enormous vase filled with chrysanthemums to the side and squint at them for a moment, wondering why she bought herself such an enormous bouquet of flowers.
“So I was playing around on the computer after I got home last night. I had a date with Gael,” I tell them, catching my brother up on this new development with his friend.
“With my friend, Gael? The one I brought to your party?”
“He asked me,” I say defensively, as if I hadn’t been attracted to Gael’s lopsided smile and droopy eyes.
“I just thought you might have told me first,” Ethan starts, but he’s silenced by Arianna.
“It was fine. I’ll tell you about it in a second. So I was on Sitestalker, and I looked at the ISP list, which I never do, and there was Brockman and Young.”
“It’s a big firm,” my brother offers. “It could be anyone.”
“Anyone? Seriously? How many people do you think work until eleven or later at night and read cooking blogs in that office? Wait, scratch that part about working until eleven. But the part about reading cooking blogs? Lawyers do not care about mastering risotto. I don’t even understand how Adam found me.”
“Sweetie, your name is all over the site. Your full name. Google yourself—you’re the first entry that pops up.”
“Are you kidding me?” I ask, wondering why I hadn’t been a little cleverer with my sign-on name. Rachel Goldman is the most common Jewish name in the world. There has to be at least eight million Rachel Goldmans in New York City alone. I cross the room to Arianna’s computer and Google myself. Sure enough, my blog is the first, third, and fourth entry for Rachel Goldman. I wish I had known more about search engines and how Google works before I started the site.
I return to my coffee cup and stare at the layer of oil glistening on the top. “Assuming this wasn’t his first time on the blog, I think I’ve pretty much stated that I’m a complete loser and still miss him and think about him. So he knows all that, and yet he hasn’t reached out at all? I . . . ”
I what? I put my heart out there? Not directly to him. But it feels like I’ve been more open, more forthcoming than he has, and in return, he has gotten to bask in the fact that I haven’t moved on, while I have no clue how he feels about me. Except for a handful of conversations after our divorce, we haven’t had a phone call in months.