 How can I tell the story of our love affair that never took place? There are no words for it. It was not a liaison, a dalliance, or a fling. It was not friendship and not family. It’s an attachment, I would say to you. An attachment with no usefulness in real life.
It happened in a city on a faraway coast. In that hilled city, winter shadows lengthened early, and so our attachment flourished in the dark. Our darkness was not frightening or cold. Our darkness gleamed with happiness, it was sustaining; it wrapped around us like a curtain and kept us safe from gossip. You were beautiful and I was old, and we were both with other people. We were not allowed to touch. We never held hands. We never made love and so, instead, we ate.
We ate hamburgers and sushi and pancakes with pecans. We ate chicken fingers, tapenades, French chocolates, and ice cream shakes. To carve out time, we had late lunches, early dinners, and frequent duplicate meals, reassuring each other that we had not eaten recently and could use a bite. We ate for love, for sympathy and fun. We ate out of confusion and emptiness and lust. We ate our meals in public and kept our true hungers a secret.
Although you could not come to Hangzhou, your letters followed me there, and I wrote back to you about the beggars’ chicken and crisp fish. You flew home to Boston for two weeks, surfacing after an eternity with tales of Portuguese tapas and stuffy family recipes. Together we visited the cuisines of China, Japan, and Thailand; over lunch we went to Pakistan, Ethiopia, and France. We traveled far in search of our meals. We sneaked off in the middle of the day and drove to the wine country. We ordered too much and sat in restaurants for hours. And at those meals we never discussed the people nearby. We never chatted with the waiters and we never paid attention to the silverware, the dishes, the artwork, or the atmosphere. I don’t remember the names of the places where we went. I don’t remember the prices. I remember laughing on the street, winter rain in your brown hair. I remember watching the dark descend: soon it would be dinnertime. |
