A gray and muggy afternoon. The walker returning from an errand that was as dreary as the day is crossing a street near Times Square. Behind her two teenage hookers are standing in a doorway; ahead there’s a man selling funny hats. Beyond him is the man who sells incense, and beyond him the one who sells fake Vuitton bags. Beyond both a bag lady is perched on her usual branch, a fire hydrant, gumming something out of a cardboard carton.
The walker turns into a Japanese restaurant, sits at the counter, and orders sushi and Scotch on the rocks. Halfway through the Scotch and the third tekkamaki she suddenly realizes that she is happy. But it’s not the food and drink alone that have lifted her spirits. It’s watching the sushi chef wielding his knives and the customers wielding their chopsticks. It’s picking up the threads of conversations, imagining the speakers’ lives, and following laughter as it rises to the ceiling. The walker is, of course, myself, and when I leave that crowded, noisy room for that sad street I have been fed in more ways than are known to cooks.
There are people who bring books to restaurants, and who hide behind them, blind and deaf to everything beyond their pages. They hide behind menus, too, and order carelessly, and they never glance at the other diners. Maybe they’re afraid the glance will reveal a hunger that has nothing to do with food. Or maybe they are so ashamed of being companionless that they court invisibility. But I am not one of them, because to me a restaurant is a theater, and my table a seat on the aisle.
The first time I ever dined alone—dined, that is, in a restaurant that had tablecloths, waiters, and large, stiff menus—was in London many years ago. I had gone there ahead of my husband for a few days of bookstores and museums, and I had not imagined that I would be lonely. But I was, and I saw the city with the eyes of someone who was peering through smoke. I lived on Wimpeys and Wipseys—pathetic versions of American burgers and shakes—at a nearby Lyons’, and I went to bed early, believing that sleep would shorten the days until he arrived. But each night I woke around two o’clock, to stare at the ceiling and the thin line of light from the hallway under the door and the white curtains stirring in the sullen September air.
Early on the third evening, however, I passed a restaurant at which my husband and I had eaten on a previous trip. It was in Leicester Square and famous for its fish; I thought of Scottish salmon and Dover sole and, without thinking any further, walked right in.
The headwaiter was startled. I was young, I was alone, and besides the hour was ridiculous. Perhaps he thought I was there to see whom I could pick up, or perhaps he was simply trying to spare me the embarrassment I was bound to feel when I saw that ladies did not dine alone in so fashionable a place. In any case he put me in the back, by the kitchen door, and I, not realizing the insult, settled in happily and unfolded my napkin.
The salmon was as good as I thought it would be, and so was the sole, and I drank a white wine I remembered my husband once ordering. The restaurant filled with men who looked like Trevor Howard and women who looked like Celia Johnson, and I eavesdropped on two middle-aged couples discussing the Queen. “She likes hock, you know,” one wife said while the others marveled, and I, citizen of a country in which a president’s taste for bourbon, say, is interesting only if it drowns him, marveled too.
Outside, moviegoers were lining up for the old-fashioned picture palaces in Leicester Square, and buskers were assembling with their flaming torches and their golden balls and their tap shoes. And I, because I was eating the food of this particular country, listening to its dialogue, and spying on its entertainment, was part of its spin round the sun.
When I refused coffee the waiter, thinking it might be beyond my purse, leaned down and whispered, “It’s all right. It comes with the meal.” “No thank you,” I said, “I don’t like coffee,” and paid the bill with a flourish. Then I sailed, rather than walked, out and if I had left a wake I wouldn’t be surprised. Pleasure had transformed me from a leaking skiff into a three-masted schooner, and I was running before the wind.
When my husband finally got to London I was glad to see him, but I have never thought of that first evening I dined (in the grand sense of the word) alone as an evening I spent without him. Rather I think of it as the first I ever really spent with myself. We—that other person with whom one’s conversation is perpetual and I—were free to concentrate on everything that was assaulting our senses, which is why the sensations are remembered so clearly now.
Since then I’ve dined alone a lot because I’ve traveled a lot and wouldn’t think of incarcerating myself in a hotel room, captive to room service and fears I’ve read about but do not understand. Why should it take courage, as I’m told it sometimes does, to treat oneself as generously as one would a guest?
It wasn’t courage, for instance, but a terrible hunger for lobster mayonnaise that once drove me to dinner in the garden of a restaurant in Dubrovnik. It was a romantic garden, I suppose, with rosebushes and leafy walls and candles on every table, and I was the only person there who was dining alone. But an old woman sitting in the second-storey window of the building that backed the garden watched my every move. When the light failed—it was summer and the sun set very late—and a younger woman came and took her away, I waved at her with that dippy bend of the fingers one gives to babies. I was saying good-bye because we had, in a sense, dined together.
Nor was it courage but an enthusiasm for the faintly seedy that took me to the dining room of a hotel in Istanbul. The hotel was respectable but run-down and past its prime, and the man who played old show tunes was as dusty as the potted palms that drooped over his piano. I, who might have been created by Mary McCarthy, stared at characters out of Graham Greene and wondered at our unlikely conjunction. Meanwhile the pianist played songs from South Pacific.
There was a time, though, when I did need a bit of courage: when all I had to wear for dinner in a rather fancy place in Ankara was a sweater and corduroy pants tucked into lace-up boots. But I stood very straight when I asked for the table, and there was no pause before I got it. Good posture, it seems, will take you far if what you have to navigate is other people’s notions of propriety.
Nonetheless there is a restaurant to which I will never be brave enough to go by myself. It is close to the house in which I grew up, and its menu hasn’t varied since it opened, which must have been when my parents were newlyweds. Its specialties are boiled live lobster and shoestring potatoes, the kind of coleslaw that isn’t creamy, and a lemon meringue pie made by a woman who must be about 115 years old by now. I had my first mixed drink at that restaurant, a Martini, and drank it with what my father called policemen’s sandwiches—oyster crackers split with one’s thumbnail, heaped with horseradish, and closed again.
The restaurant is on a harbor and faces west, so my family and I try to get there in time for sunset. “Remember my daughter?” my mother is apt to say to any of her old friends who might be there. “She’s all grown up now.” Oh, how I am, with grown children of my own, but to her I am, as I suppose my daughters will be to me, a just-hatched butterfly still waiting for my wings to dry. This is no place for solitary dining. I couldn’t see my fellow eaters for the memories.
But there is another place only a few miles away that belongs exclusively to me. It’s on a raggedy waterfront street of spruced-up houses and tumble-down derelicts, of secondhand shops and aspiring antiquaries, and if the wind is right—or, more accurately, wrong—the smell of fish from the packing plant down the road can set one to staggering. I like that street; I walk it every weekend I am home to see if any of the shopkeepers are stupid enough to sell a treasure for a song (they aren’t) and to peek into the windows of the latest restoration. Then I go to the restaurant, with its small patio and smaller bar, for fish chowder and a view of the town’s businessmen, the occasional secretarial pool celebrating somebody’s birthday, and those tweed-and-walking-shoes widows who march through New England ever on the alert for a new knitting yarn, a new decoration for the Christmas tree, and the ultimate Indian pudding.
Two hundred miles due south is its city counterpart, also on a raggedy street not far from the water. It’s a new restaurant with a silly name and two small rooms. The first has a bar to the right and an elegantly programmed juxebox to the left. The second has small tables over which hang little stained-glass lamps and on which stand mustard pots filled with daisies. The waiters try hard to memorize the specials, the chef appears to be a serious striver, and the neighbors have taken to dropping by. So far I have been there only with friends but soon, I know, there’ll be a night when I find myself deserving a kindness. When it comes, I’ll take myself out for the calf’s liver with Sherry vinegar, a glass of the house red, and a look at how life is being lived in one small restaurant on one small street in Greenwich Village on one night in 1985. And when I leave I’ll be going home happy.