From work breakfasts with her editor to arguments over oysters with an ex-boyfriend, eating out has been an education for novelist Kathleen Alcott
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You can tell everything about a person, says a common piece of wisdom, by how he or she treats the waiter. It’s a dependable and convenient yardstick, given how the bistro tables and corner booths are, very often, the places where we decide upon whom we let into our lives – acquaintances who might become dear friends, depending on how urged we feel to linger on after the bill has been dropped; those we may choose as colleagues, gauging by whether their ideas are so dull we require a second coffee; dates who remain just that, failing somehow to attach to our ideas about the futures we’ve imagined. Beyond bantering with the staff or failing to, forgiving the waitress her misstep or snapping at her for it, there’s another element of our comportment as diners that serves as a kind of shorthand: the public element of the transaction ends up serving as a kind of censor, limiting the largeness of our expression but placing a premium on the smallest of gestures and phrases. In the expensive cities where I’ve spent all my adult life, where the luxury of the space to cook is rare and a halfway point between subway stops seems the only polite solution, white tablecloths and Edison bulbs and pale green espresso machines have almost always been the backdrop when I have chosen people, and likewise when I have let them go.
Shortly after I arrived in New York, 22, the ragtag child of hippies, a girl who had never learned to use a fork and knife quite correctly, I sold my first novel and began attending the sort of meals I’d rarely been able to afford before. The first came as a surprise; my editor called late one afternoon to let me know that the house’s publisher, an imposing and rigorous woman with an interrogative Belgian accent, happened to be in town from Boston the next morning. Could I have breakfast at the ungodly hour of 8am, somewhere uptown? I have always been the type of person who remains monosyllabic until noon, but I agreed, with the kind of excitement I have never felt before or since. It seemed I had entered the next part of my life. I wore a pencil skirt striped vertically in blue and white and a short-sleeved secretary blouse in peach silk and some absurd purple suede flats, still convinced glamour was something that waved and winked from every angle. Early to arrive in the empty dining room, I sat alone at a pristine table in the deepening morning light and watched the water glasses take on the greens of the park across the street. When they showed up, both towering over me at six feet, my editor hugged me but the publisher only shook my hand. It was the first in a series of what could only be described as appraisals. My coffee had only just appeared when the publisher, who had spent the first 20 years of her career as a Lacanian psychoanalyst, looked at me with the scrutiny of a fairytale stepmother before launching a missile into the conversation. Jacques Lacan, I had read, believed the heart of the matter could be reached in under three minutes; this woman apparently believed she could trim that down to 30 seconds. Our orders not yet taken, she asked, in reference to my novel, which concerned two children who grow up as neighbours and enter a sexual relationship too early, “What happened to you? Incest?” It makes me laugh now to think of it, having to address that query before I was even caffeinated, but at the time I was nailed to my chair, actually apologising, “No, actually, but …” flailing to provide the biographical summary that would explain my dark little book. What did I learn there – besides that I didn’t trust the Lacanian method? That I was afraid of a person who could speak so freely before espresso, that I communed best with those who were soft and gentle in a conversation’s opening notes. In the many lunches I shared with my first editor after that, we babied each other upon greeting, complimenting earrings and taking quick squeezes of the other’s hands, and it was in that way we developed the space in which we could truly discuss the work before us. She also never winced when I sent a fork clattering to the floor or managed to leave a little childish halo of breadcrumbs around my plate, but rather asked for a new utensil and swiped a napkin across the table I’d littered without a word, small acts of elegant kindness for which I’ll always be grateful. It is those who cringe easily, or ask for a more appropriate spoon to stir their americano, or apologise for the volume of the music, who are the most likely to prove rigid and pedantic colleagues. To put it another way, I would never do business with anyone who would never drink wine out of a plastic cup.
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