D

We went to a Chinese restaurant in Cupertino. It was coyly named “Ping Pong,” which I found disturbing, in such close proximity to badminton. I paranoiacally hunted through the menu for squash dishes.

We were seated comfortably in a velveteen booth, in semi-darkness. The table was high, so that I the runt was hidden up to the shoulders. A swift relief stole through my mind. Dinner might work.

I realized that, as long as I was looking at the menu, no one would expect me to speak. Therefore I pored doggedly, long after any normal person would have chosen a meal. Repeatedly I attempted to read the text, out of a sense of duty, but the very headings – “Seafood Dishes,” “Chef Recommends” – blinded me with loathing. Seafood Dishes! As if it matters!

I could not, for the life of me, put the menu down.

Its pages were embellished with sketches of Chinese coolies bearing bucket-laden yokes. I felt it was bad taste to depict the poor in a menu. It seemed like gloating. Those coolies would have liked a few seafood dishes.

Of course I really was as good as starving. So these thoughts should have been had by the fat people at other tables, but that is the way of the world (I thought).

I peeked at Ralph, who was a large-sized person. He ate plenty. Yet was a guru. Conclusion: eating plenty is not at variance with goodness, though of course that can’t be true. (I had eaten plenty before, and it was at variance with goodness.)

What’s more, the idea of Ralph eating Egg Foo Yung – in any quantity – made him seem irretrievably unenlightened. Yet the sage must eat. Should he only eat lentils, locusts and wild honey? What if the sage is offered a Ding Dong by an innocent child, who would be desperately upset, should the sage refuse the Ding Dong? Dilemma.

“Have you decided?” Ralph suddenly asked.

I slapped the menu down. “Would you mind ordering for me?”

He burst out laughing. I had delivered the punch line to whatever he’d been thinking: probably he had known all along I wasn’t choosing. I’m very transparent.

When he settled down, I confessed: “I don’t like restaurants.”

That struck him even funnier. He was actually handsome when he laughed, because of his beautiful teeth, though I later learned two were not his. Now he laughed and laughed, flashing his white teeth/dentures, until tears came out of his eyes. The great misfortune was that, watching him, I began to cry just at the very idea of tears coming out of eyes.

I thought: Why is he so heartless to me? Et cetera. Once I start crying, I can think of hundreds of reasons to cry. Furthermore, years of therapy have trained me to home in swiftly on the most harrowing possible cause for my distress.

“You’re crying,” Ralph noticed, still smirking with the tail end of his laugh.

I said in a chokey voice: “I just need . . . I don’t know. I wish –”

Ralph’s face went cold and he interrupted me: “You can’t carry on like this if you’re going to manage the institute.”

We sat for a minute at loggerheads. I said, “But I couldn’t manage it.” I rubbed my eyes with the cloth napkin, shook it out, and spread it on my lap. Then Ralph got up and walked out of the restaurant.