AT THE TABLE AND BEYOND

from top left: Katherine serves "Two Soups Happy Together"; Cassie and Aki in conversation; plates mid-meal; Cassie and Aki post-revelation; order tickets staked on the table; Aki's thoughts on comedians; drinks on the table; Cassie's thoughts on comedians; Mission Dolores at dusk.

The table is the place of confessions. At the far back, in the corner, we're checking out everyone who's coming and going from the bathroom. 

Everyone looks at everyone, especially those people we know from Instagram, or even from real life, and my line of sight to the front door means I get to keep tabs on who's arriving. Nobody is leaving.

When the New Yorker uses the word "buzzy" to describe the scene at a restaurant, I guess this is what they're talking about. 

The scene has showed up. The bartender who made me a Paloma on Saturday afternoon is here, as are the DJs, the painters, and the hot Australians.  

As we watch all these people and they watch us, the ricocheting noise of conversation and music creates an ambient and shifting blanket of privacy. So as we are very much on display, the confessional takes shape.

Here's the thing about age. On the internet, which takes up so much space that it becomes tantamount to or even surpasses the reality of reality, I am led to believe that this time in my life is about "Finding a Partner" or "Building my Career." 

It is becoming my job to decide whether or not I should watch the following videos: "MARRY THE RIGHT PERSON?", "Therapist_Dave's Red Flag Warning," "He Did THIS 13 Years After Retiring," "RYAN GOSLING'S DAUGHTER IS A BIG FAN OF THE [thumbs down emoji]." 

But in this bar, and at the gallery and on the street, and especially at the dinner table, it is possible to stop gulping from the ocean. People who look like people. Friends who feel like friends. 

We have heard that the prefrontal cortex reaches maturity at the age of 25. We turn to each other wondering, "Does your brain feel like it's done cooking? Does yours?" 

Maybe not, but at least we've come far enough that Cassie is able to go full circle with Hooked on Phonics. 

The Mushroom is serving tonight and we order a "Carrot Pile and Crudités," "Savory Pancake" and "Mizuna Salad." "#1 Hippie Sandwich" is already sold out, but "Sexy Vegan Cheese Plate" is still on offer, as is "Two Soups Happy Together," which Katherine serves nymph-like through the crowd. 

Alex wears Kermit green from toque to toe and appears at the mouth of the makeshift kitchen, which is also the last remnant of the dive bar that used to be. The chef's domain is like a cave with cracked red paint and a string of halogen lights that adorn a staircase which recedes into a dark and unseen corner. But what exits from such darkness is the bright and spicy flavors of sharp, fresh greens and a pile of carrots so true to its name that I laugh deliriously when it's placed on the table. 

This is the kind of food that makes me sure that my brain's still cooking, new neural pathways opened up by the ingenuity of two slices of radish sandwiched together by a generous dollop of hummus. 

IT FEELS GOOD

The train drops off in the dell. To become acquainted with the subsequent upswings, we climb the walls of the bowl to the cruising spot, to the Victorian delta. Imagine you follow on her shoulder, so subtle is the we here, because to her she is joyously alone.

Triangulating the first path with the second is a simple matter. Hike up Clayton, pause for the overgrown lamp shining toffee yellow. 

The air is so good. 

Our girl finds a market and stops in for a bar of chocolate. She is already feeling beautiful. The man behind the counter says, "This bar is my gift to you today, because you have beautiful eyes." She accepts. She agrees. 

The market is on Uranus street, high above the city, and she starts to sing "Top of the World" by the Carpenters. 

I'm on the top of the world lookin' down on creation and the only explanation I can find ... is the love that I've found ever since you came around your love put me at the top of the world... 

She feels radiant. She turns right on Mars. 

Our girl has an idea about God. Belief? Hm, no. She is making and then meeting God. Prayer usually goes something like this: 

In a dark room, with eyes closed and hands tucked together, she begins by getting in touch with the idea of God, which can be done by envisioning the paths water droplets follow when flung off an object in motion or the random collisions of molecules in a gaseous state. Realizing that the veins of stone printed on the linoleum of her bathroom are the same as the sprawl of alluvial fans and flood planes, we can add these to the list as well. Then, she says, "Hello, God," and imagines that there is a heavenly phone bank where a representative picks up the line and eventually passes on her information to the main entity. 

This is a very good way. 

In the bustle of this place, it is easy to worry that God is not here. But upon reflection, to look out a back window at sunset and see a scoop of sorbet sitting on the horizon was an affirmation. God showed itself to her, to assure her, to usher her in. Perhaps the God encounter is to be in the discovery of things, like walking out from the dell to crest sequential wooded hills. 

And to quote herself, God has left the building, but He is still in the room. 

It is a good thing to arrive to where she is known and unknown, interceded by four years of more flesh and living.

There are many things to say, apparently. Questions to be asked about the appropriate cultural categorization of various animals -- cottage, cabin, trade wind? There are so many statements that prompt her to ask, "Today?" 

She says "Behind my house there is a garden, next to my house is another house, because I live on a street, because my street lives in a city." They all laugh, him especially. 

One day around a large table in a small library someone read a poem aloud, perhaps about the sea. He began to cry. He took his water bottle. He left the room. 

One day he arrived to the large room on the first floor carrying a small homely tea cup pinched out of clay and glazed a morose yellow. 

One day he tacked two long sheafs of brown paper to the wall and two people took up position writing single words at the same time until they came to the same conclusion. 

Sweetness. 

Our cosmic family. Is that what friends are? Is that why love or some promise of it seems whispered in the touches and glances of men with wives and girlfriends? 

A sing-song name to call him baby. 

Really, wondering if the pope will come to pizza. Is it enough to sit shoulder to shoulder in the plaza? 

Perhaps. It is good. 

FERNAND

The cloves closest to the core of the head are not fully articulated. Cooking in the half-light is a practice of tactile discernment, thumbing the cloves as they decrease sequentially in size. The first rain of fall spits against the windows, but the door to the balcony is left ajar. Later, one might see a strip of water accumulated there. 

Oil is heating in a skillet on the cooktop and water approaches a boil. As she cooks, she thinks back to the drive over the airport tarmac last night. As she sat on the bus, a different model this time, the phrases she'd written about this same drive resounded in her mind. She'd written her own narration to this drive, and she recognized its exactitude as it rang out to describe the same sights. 

As she cooks tonight, she's turning these phrases over already in her mind: "first rain of fall" and "the cloves are not fully articulated" as she moves about the small kitchen. Thinking about "she" and "our girl". 

The story she wrote is out for first reading with two of her most trusted friends. When she wrote it, it had felt like a potent record of something that needed to be captured. But now, the line between recollection and fiction has become significantly blurred. Memory and feeling turn out to be incredibly fickle.  

"She" is obviously a deflection. A way to say what she's thinking without explicitly claiming it as hers. These days, she feels as though she is hiding, cloaking herself in solitude to avoid being caught out. 

She feels as though she is straddling two large pieces of ice, floating in a frigid ocean. They slip and jostle, threatening to upset her footing. She feels exhausted by the fluctuations in her own hopes and perturbations. She cannot fathom how or why the people around her put up with her vicissitudes. She wonders if it would be easier to cut them loose, to allow them to find stability elsewhere. Perhaps that would show real mercy.

In the morning, the sky had been blue with trailing wisps dispersed, but in the mid-afternoon the sycamores began to flail with an almighty wind. Then approached a purplish stand of clouds from the north and just at the crux of darkness rain began to fall. 

In the afternoon, she'd found a thick volume in a book shop. Annuaire de la Jeunesse: Education et Instruction, published 1914. The pages were crumbling, in no fit state to be left on a shop shelf. She'd opened the book carefully. It seemed to be a catalog dedicated to schools in and around France. "Instruction of English or German begins in grade six, but Spanish is integrated into instruction from grade one." "The school is half-boarding and is accepting new pupils." 

The book was shelved just feet away from a pocket-sized Inferno, in its original Italian, bound in red cotton. No distinction had been made as to their relative literary merits, to their relative truths or untruths. 

She was not an altogether sheepish recipient of the past, in fact she often occupied herself by trying to imagine places in their states of antiquity. Like holding a photo transparency over the present topography, it was a practice that required accepting a certain level of dissonance.   

She closed the Annuaire gingerly. Leaning in to read a quote in small print on the cover, her eyes strayed to the upper left hand corner. Previously unnoticed, she saw there an inscription in faded brown ink, Fernand Démousseau. The F had been carefully serifed and the tail of the final u curved around itself to become a self-assured diagonal. At one time, the ink had been raised, wet and mutable. A warm hand had carefully, expertly drawn a pen across the gray-green paper cover. 

Besides the sheer humanity of the name written on the page, she had been struck by the absolute beauty of the script. In its regularity, it was nearly as perfect as the mechanically printed text on the cover. But in the tall vertical stroke of the D, it was possible to see where the nib had splayed, drawing ink unevenly.

Years ago, she'd happened upon a resplendent Caravaggio portrait of a man in a red cap. It was in a dark corner of a museum, and she'd been captivated by the beauty of the sitter. She had found herself leaning in towards the painting, willing the man to tilt his head in her direction, to bestow his depths upon her. When she had finally left the painting, she did so with dismay, feeling as though she was leaving behind a particularly beautiful prospect, sighted from across a room. 

The signature on the book had left her with this same sense of lingering pleasure. The grace of its curves, the uniformity of its lines, belied a slight wrist and long, elegant fingers. Just like Caravaggio's sitter, this imagined signer had his basis in truth. There was a Fernand who had really lived to ink his name. 

And yet the Fernand that she encountered, as with the man in the painting, was someone else entirely. He was someone of her own invention, a product of the intervening years, which had erased fact and proffered figment instead. 

But, so we are told, that is history. Neither truth nor fiction, but a cumulative record, imagined as much as it is lived.