A Letter to a Dear Friend (on Dining Alone)
First of all, thank you for the kind words in you letter, I’m terribly sorry that it’s taken so long to write back. I wasn’t expecting one from you, you know, and yet here we are—you were the only one to write me since I’ve been recovering. How did you hear about me? Mostly everyone else has heard about my illness from my mother (who, I assure you, is exaggerating the severity of my condition immensely). I did not “break my back,” as she would have it; the doctors have a much simpler and benign name for it— spondylolysis (it sounds like it would be the Latin name for a bunny rabbit, no?). Nevertheless, the condition is fairly recoverable, and I’ve almost gotten back to my old self. I should be able to get out of here and back to the world in a matter of weeks, or so the doctors say. Please don’t pity me; I’m quite all right—although if a little pity is what it takes for a letter, my friends could certainly serve to oblige me.
What do you busy yourself with these days? Last time we spoke you were still working on something big—I hope I can read it one of these days .How your eyes lit up when you spoke of it in those secretive, nervous tones. You had such a fire inside of you—it’s hard to imagine now, and I’m sure you noticed it too, but it simply melted everyone who could get near to you back then. We all spoke of it in secret too, we felt so seared by your ambition. It was as if you knew some terrible secret about the universe we didn’t—we tried to pry it out of you, but nothing ever worked; we settled for picking the bones you would leave behind like vultures, constantly circling around your head for you latest kill, and hungry at all times. Only you were hungrier, and hardly ever left us enough to eat. Perhaps we were even more nervous that you’d up and leave, realize the absolute truth and disappear into complete obscurity or godliness or both. Perhaps that’s why we circled around you so closely. Even now I get anxious thinking about it. I haven’t read about you in the news yet, but every day I look anyways for word of your something big .We all had “something bigs” back than, probably just because of you. I guess in the end you were the only one to see it through to the end, to follow it wherever it led you. I hope it finally brought you what you wanted.
Or if it didn’t, and you ended up tragically like the rest of us, I’d still like to thank you for you letter and little parcel. I didn’t know when you must’ve stolen it from me, or how I hadn’t noticed it’s disappearance from my dresser in the first place, but thank you finally returning it to me, that little red matchbook. You were even kind enough to leave me a couple matches left over. I wonder what you used them to light—or maybe you’d strike them for fun against a wall, or when you wished to think of me when you couldn’t sleep. I’d like to think it were the lattermost, personally. You were always one for sentimentality. I don’t know how, but I could’ve told you that these matches would’ve ended up in your possession as soon as I took them from the lobby of that restaurant of our second date. I was taking them for myself yes, and I was taking them for you eventually too, yes, but maybe I hoped we could eventually share them too; fate would have it however, that we never did own that red matchbook at the same time.
Or maybe I took them, unknowingly so, as just a symbol that we could share eventually, to be codified in our own unique language, and to be tossed back and forth between us, so that like perennials poking their heads year after year, so too would my image in you head, and yours in mine, could sneak its way past your eyes in the form of a little red matchbook someday. And yet here it is, back in my hands, only a couple matches left, the design on the front almost completely faded, (a bearded man sporting a turban and a Cossack-looking uniform, riding a distinctly Chinese-looking dragon, which only seems out of place because the restaurant was the “Russian Tearoom” after all, and one would think the dragon should look at least somewhat Slavic) unable to think about or see anything else but your face on that night, lit up by the huge bleacher-lights at the top of tat castle in central park, your hair whipping you face, you lips quivering and your cheeks pink from the cold, or perhaps from our not knowing if we should kiss, right there and then under the bleacher lights and the cold on that castle. I hope somehow that it makes you think about the same moment, if you were even thinking about anything—the bleacher lights, me, kisses, castles—or maybe you were just still thinking about your masterpiece, and just gathering sights and sounds to write down eventually; I’d like to think it weren’t that, however, and at that moment we were in fact thinking in chorus, that we were even closer in that moment than we knew.
But you blushed like a little girl and I very possibly the same, and we turned to leave as if it was the overlook itself causing us to blush, and by leaving it we could save ourselves the embarrassment of unknowing. If I only knew it would be the last time we would blush together I would’ve stopped us there for just a single moment longer—if I had known that only this matchbox would sustain that image there, I would’ve taken a better, more thorough look at your face, your shadow, your nervousness.
We walked around for a while longer, but of course the window had already closed. I tried to open it again, trust me, tried to walk us to similar spots I knew in the park, but of course you know, it was to no avail. Of course thinking that somehow if we recreated all the physical details of that spot on the castle, I could get you to blush again the same, as if by changing perfectly your surroundings I could get at what was inside your head. But either the night became warmer or you didn’t let the cold show on your face, your expression never gave an inch from then on. What was in there that I got so close to? If you had been gracious enough to let me know that night, I wouldn’t have to conjecture like this, I wouldn’t have to strike these matches one-by-one either like I do now, nor would you have had to. You certainly would’ve saved me an uncountable amount of hours late at night when I would stay up and think, stung by the cold, rough edges of my wondering.
Nor could I open you up on our way back to the train station, where I hurled at you question after question, trying to make sense—if not through space then trying through time—of you, only to be met by those same iron gates, unflinchingly grand and permanently shut. I suppose however that it was worth a try; I remember that day being such an odd confluence of events anyway, it was only natural I wanted to pull some kind of deeper answer out of the whole thing. I’m sorry if it felt particularly directed at you, maybe it was maybe it wasn’t—I of course didn’t know if would be the last time I’d ever see you in your beautiful flesh.
I was terribly on edge, you see, my best friend had, the night prior, had some kind of psychotic break (and I only say that because he has a long and frightening family history with schizophrenia), and I must have been up for about forty-eight hours straight by the time I had met you there in the park, the last sixteen of which were spent trying to calm him down, half in this world and half in the next one. And you take quite a fair bit of energy to be around, I hope you know that, or have at least come to know it since, the ambiguity of our meeting not making it any easier on me.
I had spent the night by his side, trying to keep him tethered to our side of the universe, and watching him roll back and forth, rambling about how he was trapped, a prisoner inside his own head, and wondering if I had ever seemed like that to anyone. I really hope not, because by the end of the night—somehow managing to have put him to bed—I had to wrap him in blankets and lie next to him, taking extra precaution not to move or breath too heavily, lest he wake up from his fitful sleep in a frigid sweat and scream about how the floorboards had been ripped out of the ground from underneath him or some other ungodly like hallucination. And so there I lay all night, painfully awake and wondering how in god’s name I was ever going to seem sane to you the following evening. My eyes fixed on the cracked ceiling, ears attuned to my partners fragmented muttering, I wondered if this type of illness was at all contagious, and if it was possible for me to have the same sort of breakdown on my way to meet you, or worse, while we were together—each time I tried to assure myself of its improbability I imagined the ease and rapidity through which my friend had descended into his madness: there we were taking a lap around the block for a quick smoke when he must’ve inhaled something the wrong way, and started to cough, at first slow, but working himself into a frenzy, and we stopped for him to catch his breath on the curb. By the time he was finally able to breathe again, the trees were already reaching out their branches as if to greet him, the ground slowly breaking open to swallow him.
And so that’s how it was that I got no sleep that night, and met you under the same crazy night sky the following evening. I was sad when you left me at the train station, your declaration at the entrance to the steaming underground, “until next time,” hitting me in the chest like a fist; there were never in my life three harder words to swallow, let alone digest. We both flinched towards each other as if to hug, and once again the same mysterious force held us at arms length. The night air after you turned around was cold and smelled like ice. And only after you walked through the turnstiles (of course I could only see the tips of your heels at the shallow angle I was spying down through the narrow staircase) was I able to exhale.
I dared not bring up during our conversation the reservation I had made at the Russian Tea Room on 57th street for fear that you’d fly away from me; startling you must’ve been as grave a sin as murder to me back then, and only after you had actually left me for good did I begin to kick myself for the obviously worse mistake I had committed in not asking you at all.
I stood there as long as I could until I started to get odd looks from a policeman on a horse stationed nearby, his horse exhaling more steam out of her nose, grumbling something in a foreign language, and I figured it was best to continue kicking myself elsewhere. I ended up making my way back to 57th street anyway, wanting to at least take a look at the restaurant where I had imagined us going, and at the entrance I was met by a school bus full of children, all getting off in single file in a cloud of steam and laughter, right in through the giant revolving door of the place, squeezing right in between the door slats, sometimes more than four or five at once. What this huge group of children was doing at such a high-end restaurant I had no clue. I remember wondering at that point if I was slipping into some kind of episode like my friend’s from the previous night. They were all dressed up in little black uniforms, and it reminded me of that children’s book with the nuns.
For whatever reason I decided to follow them inside, indulge my delusions or what have you—whether they were real or not, I still had a reservation for eight o’clock and I wasn’t going to waste it. By the time I got inside, however, I had lost sight of the school children, instead met at the entrance by a particularly stern looking maître d, a woman with deep lines cut into her tiny face from age, and big black eyes she must’ve been born with. She sat me down at a table in the back of the place set for two. When I told her it would only be me, and that I just wanted tea, she swiped the plates and utensils off the table and stuffed them beneath her armpits before walking off briskly. I wiped down the rest of my utensils with my shirt.
I imagined you sitting at the other end of the table, admiring the décor with me, and the thought about what you may have actually been doing, probably still on the train uptown. But as much as I wished you there, there was something so mesmerizing about dining alone in that place. Dim orange lights seemed to wash everything away, so that the dining rom, all its patrons, the staff, the paintings, all seemed to be separated from the rest of the world outside; everything else simply ceased to exist at all.
I was transfixed by one painting in particular, hanging directly across from me, as if I had been placed across from it on purpose—two bulls twisted around each other over a backdrop of green silk, possibly they were in front of a curtain over a stage, I couldn’t tell for sure. One bull, a smaller, sicklier looking one, looked to be almost floating, and was nuzzling the side of the other bull, a golden, much more robust-looking one, which had its neck held high and hooves planted firmly on the ground. I couldn’t tell if they were fighting, playing, or neither—but I felt like I could’ve have summed up the entire prior forty eight hours in this one painting if given enough time.
At some point the stern-faced maître d came back with the tea menu, and I ordered a fancy blend called “Russian Country,” which, according to the velvet and leather-trimmed menu, was supposed to be a rare in-house blend of five imported teas; it was ten dollars, but I figured it could be worth it to someone. When I picked it off the menu, it was the first time I had seen the maître d smile, and I hoped that someone would be me.
From my seat I spotted the schoolchildren again, all politely sitting around the perimeter of a huge circle holding hands, probably saying grace. I tried to listen in briefly, but quickly felt like an intruder upon their sanctity and stopped. You would’ve listened in if you were there, I’m sure. When they put their hands down and started to eat, I turned to ask you what you had heard them say, and saw you weren’t there. At that moment, the waitress came back instead, and poured me a little glass of tea, putting the rest of the pot down behind it. I was disappointed it wasn’t in an actual samovar, although I’m not sure what I really expected. She also put down on the table a tiny tray of candied red strawberries; I’m not entirely sure what they were for—although presumably for eating, as the small silver spoon she placed along with it suggested I do so. At that, however, for the first time in the night, I felt acutely glad that you weren’t there, as I’m sure you would’ve asked me about how to eat or when to eat them, assuming that either my far-off Russian ancestry or my interest in their writers, (which was becoming increasingly distasteful to my friends as the war in Ukraine smoldered on) would have informed me their purpose on the sparkling white tablecloth.
But I was alone at the table, and the black circle of students had begun to eat. Steam rose from my little glass that smelled like grass—I wrapped my hands around it and watched them eat neatly but with relish, and slurping down their bowls of thick soup with a zeal only hungry children are able to do. It’s odd how certain details can last in one’s mind for so long, like the ferocity of these schoolchildren slurping their soups, and others, like the dozens of other tables full of people that presumably surrounded me that night, make absolutely no impression at all.
I tried my hardest to drink my tea with the same fervor as they were doing with their soup but couldn’t, either because I wasn’t particularly thirsty in the first place, nor very fond of the tea. It tasted too fragrant, like someone was trying to mask the taste of some horrible poison by pouring in perfume and hoping that the flavors would cancel out. Still, however, in case anyone was watching, I pretended to be impressed with the fancy flavor of a Russian countryside while I watched the many tables of the restaurant fill and empty out repeatedly, like perfectly rounded stones in a river, tumbling over and over again by the current until they’re absolutely smooth.
Occasionally I stopped my people watching to stare at the painting with the two cows. One of them, the yellower, sicklier looking one, was marked with a big red splotch on its side, a single red-polka-dot shaped welt the size of a dinner plate. I thought about an ancient Mayan exhibit I had been to the week prior at the MET; on every depictions of humans giving sacrifices to gods (of which there were many, all painted in thin black paint onto clay pots and vases), the people were always covered in big welts just like the one on the cow; when I read about it later, they said no one knew why it was that all these people were covered in big, saucer-sized welts, but I knew why, and so the painting on the wall continued to draw my attention while people came and went.
The maître d eventually came back to my table and handed me the check without me having asked for it, in an apparent act of niceness or annoyance that went over my head. She said something to me I didn’t hear, and I gave her my credit card, which succeeded in shooing her away for a while. Right as she was leaving, however, I happened to open the top of the teapot and saw a Lipton tea bag sitting limply at the bottom, its little yellow and red tag still attached. Furious that I had paid ten dollars for a pot of plain black tea, and upset that you weren’t there to have been scammed along with me, I reached out to demand a refund, but as I opened my mouth to call her back, I was instead suddenly struck by a vigorous fit of coughing and choking. It was so loud in fact that mostly everyone in the restaurant turned to look at me. I ended up eating some of the candied strawberries too in an effort to quiet myself, which ended up helping a fair amount, and I was able to stifle it just enough to the point where I could breathe and the restaurateurs could return to their eating. Just when I thought the worst of it was over, however, I looked down and noticed a raised, saucer-sized welt on my forearm—the left one—and immediately I stood up, knocking over the chair behind me in the process, and once again attracting the attention of the entire room. I quickly pulled my coat over my arm, covered my face with my scarf, and starting to cough again, almost as vigorous as before, scrambled to make my way out the front door before god knows what would happen.
As I passed by the table of schoolchildren, they pointed at me and whispered to each other with their hands covering their mouths. They all looked the exact same, and looked just like you, only much younger. Only then did I notice that there were no schoolteachers at the table with them, or for that matter, adults of any kind. I also noticed somehow on my way out that in front of each of them was a little glass of steaming tea just like mine, and that the bowls of soup I had seen them slurping so feverishly just a minute before were nowhere to be found. I broke out into a cold sweat, and barely managed to escape back onto 57th without stopping to collect my credit card.
Still when the pungent, sulfurous smell of matches fills the air, I think of your face first and foremost, lit up by the yellow bleacher lights in the whipping cold, and this whole episode with the Russian tearoom only second. But really, all this is a long way to say that I hope you still think of me sometimes too—if you decide to write me back, please attach a copy of your something big, I’d love to read it.