Considering all that had come before on the menu, I tried not to feel that the family potatoes seemed rather minimally described — set forth without the words spring or buttery or meaty or milky or golden or crisp, not even smuggled, not even grown in rich stiff mud to help condense the taste. Still, there they were, apparently just speaking for themselves. That was something. My father’s name had been on this menu all this time, perhaps for years, without my knowing. And since it was just a printed sheet I asked: “May I keep the menu?”
“Of course,” said the waiter, who not only refilled my wineglass with Prairie Fumé but offered me a black napkin. “I notice you are wearing black,” he said.
I didn’t understand. “So I can match?” My jeans were black, but my shirt was actually navy.
“Well, you might not want to get the white napkin lint on your outfit.” He backed away a little. “It’s up to you.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. Eating was serious business here, I knew. “It’s a good thing I brought my black dental floss!” Maybe I was crazy; he certainly looked at me as if I were.
“Dental floss comes in black? Or it just gets black?” Perhaps he hated me.
“I’m not sure,” I said. I stared back at the menu. “How are the potatoes?” I asked without looking up.
“Very good.” He smiled. “And there are two things not on the menu that I can tell you about if you want. The first is an almond-encrusted lake trout for thirty-four dollars.” Thirty-four dollars for a fish probably caught in the pond across the road from Dellacrosse High seemed, well, high. (And here, silly us, we’d called it high school because everyone seemed so stoned!) Oh, the wine: the wine was plummy like juice. Now, here was some real wine research!
“Thank you.” I nodded and put my black napkin in my lap, setting the white one on the side of my seat, in case I had to blow my nose. “And what is the second?”
“Oh. Sorry. It’s a skirt steak served with shiitake mushrooms and its own jew.”
“Its own jew?”
The boy looked startled. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.” He looked quickly at the jottings on his notepad he had jammed in his pocket.
“Yes,” he said.
“Thank you.” I tried to smile. The sound of Delton County was never terribly far away. “I thought for a second there you were going to say, ‘a skirt steak with its own skirt.’ ”
“No,” he said, turning and rushing away.
The angle of the sun slowly lowered and heated the room, then lowered some more so that the room began to fall into shadow.
The waiter brought me a baby cup of parsnip puree with watercress and crème fraîche. “What is this?” I asked, and he explained. An amuse-bouche.
Would it poison me as the tapenade did Murph? Who cared?
“Right,” I said, and lifted the tiny handled cup to my mouth and slurped. I was like a giant raiding a dollhouse. A huge Goldilocks among teeny tiny bears. I felt monstrous to myself. The stem of watercress went up my nose.
I was then brought another tiny thing for a dolclass="underline" a fig with caramelized phyllo and pine nuts. A candy bar for the gods.
I had never eaten such intricately prepared food before, and doing so in this kind of mournful, prayerful solitude, in a public place, where by this time no one but I was seated without a companion, made each bite sing and roar in my mouth. Still, it was an odd experience for me to have the palate so cared for and the spirit so untouched. It was a condition of prayerless worship. Endless communion. Gospel-less church.
As if a compote were a chauffeur, every dish seemed richly to have one. I ordered the homemade asparagus ravioli — ravioluses! — with thyme and asparagus and chopped herbs, a vegetable tag-teaming itself. Gradually, I felt I had started to ascend into some kind of low-level paradise. It was astonishing to eat food that tasted like this. Was there ever a time on the planet before now when people had eaten this well? Surely people were eating in a way that evolution had no preparation or reason for. It was a miracle, gratuitous, dizzying and lovely. A “celeriac puree” could no doubt mend all cracks, remove all stains, but what was a “torchon”? A “ganache”? A “soffrito”? A “rillette”? Even the tenderly braised escarole offered up a phrase in a seemingly new tongue, familiar words reshaped in the high-scoring points and busy luck of Scrabble or Dutch.
I ordered a side of the Keltjin Farm potatoes.
“With the ravioli?” asked the waiter coldly.
“I’m related,” I said.
“To the ravioli?”
“To the potatoes.” I would spare him the conversations I’d sometimes had with Sarah — about the terroir, the key element being sand that would move and let them push out but not too far.
“Oho!” he said, as if this were even funnier.
I ordered a kind of fish called kona kampachi. Was that not the name of an exotic starlet from the 1940s? Did she not wear a one-piece skirted bathing suit, her breasts like pointed party hats? She came served with a lemon half wrapped in a beribboned little net. I squeezed and sprayed and dripped and did not have to pick out the seeds. I’d never before seen a lemon in a beribboned net. A lemon dressed like a fairy princess. Bring this to the homeless shelter, I heard one of the Wednesday-night voices exclaim. The potatoes arrived perfectly parboiled and could have been strung as a necklace for Barbara Bush.
I found myself eating slowly, ordering more, and staying late. The waitstaff had begun cleaning as I sat there in an almost deserted dining room. “Don’t worry. Though we’re shutting down early, as it’s our last night, there’s no need to hurry.” I ordered some sherry and dessert cheeses, with their lingering taste of rot, ammonia, and adhesive bandages. There were truffle cheese with specks, twelve-year-old cheddar with crystals of salty sugar, slivers of goat cheese with the consistency of dried toothpaste. Cow cheese, sheep cheese, goat cheese — all the animals of childhood were here. Except for a pig. Where was the pig cheese? I refrained from asking, despite the wine.
I ate a bowl of fresh strawberries drizzled with a balsamic vinegar so rich it had the viscosity of honey. The berries were garnished with the same carmelized sage I’d once tasted in Sarah’s kitchen. Every serving I’d had so far, however, seemed tiny and delicate, so that it seemed less like dinner than a metaphor for dinner. I began to order more. I ordered a second dessert of homemade sorbets herbally accessorized with chocolate mint, and lavender and raspberries, their little sacs burst and smeared across the dish like bloody bugs. I’d heard Sarah speak of these sorbets: last February she’d said that she would make them in various flavors and colors and put them out on the fire escape to keep them cold and there they would sit in their little dishes, sparkling all evening outside beneath the winter moon. When I mentioned this to the waiter, that I’d heard these sorbets were homemade and chilled out on the fire escape in cold weather, under the moon, his face pinched inward, as if there were a small stink in the room. “Who told you that?” he asked.
My scooter was not really intended for a sixty-mile journey at night, but it would have to do. I gunned it past a slow city bus that was wheezing its way along, spewing exhaust. Once I was outside of Troy the smell of manure rose up on either side of me in the thickening dusk. The sky, which had begun looking the deep color of a plum, had now opened up in places to a plum’s eerie gold-green flesh. The winds were switching in a way that made me edgy. Rain moved in like a pattering animal. Riding home like this — was this stupid of me to do?