Eating alone

I am in New York City for two nights, doing a bit of literary volunteer work.  Today has been a long day, nine hours in a hotel conference room.  By the time our group is released from duty just before six, I’m ready to get outside and seize the last minutes of sunlight on the first day of the year that truly feels like spring.

I walk twenty blocks or so with my coat flapping open, cell phone pressed to my ear like a native, checking in with every family member.  Then I slip my phone into my pocket and watch Times Square grow even brighter as night falls, a vast neon panorama of news and temptation and blandishment.  For a while, it’s fun just to be swept along by the tide of humanity, gazing into shop windows and considering my options.

Not knowing how long my meeting would run, or how tired I’d be after trying to be articulate all day, I haven’t made a plan for the evening.  But now, watching the world go by — families, couples, groups of friends — I feel a little unmoored, wishing for company.  I think about going to a show, scoring a last-minute ticket at the half-price booth, but I’ve been sitting for hours; actually, dinner and bed sound even more appealing.  Time was, I would have given anything to even have such a choice.  Now I wonder if I’m settling for too little, behaving like a boring, middle-aged mother cut adrift, when I should be taking advantage of some big-city experience.

Twenty-five years ago, I was an editor in New York, young and ambitious and poor, putting a life together for myself on a salary of $11,000 a year.  One day during my first few months in the city, my boss paused at my desk around lunch time and asked what I was doing.  “Reading a manuscript,” I said, through a mouthful of tuna fish sandwich.

“I don’t want to see you here, eating in the office,” he admonished, surprising me.  “Your job is to get out there, meet people, and hustle.  The best stuff always happens at lunch.”   In those days, even junior editors had expense accounts, but until Cork Smith gave me a little kick in the butt and told me to pick up the phone and start using mine, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

As it turned out, my publishing lunches kept me from starving.  Knowing I would get a decent meal at noon, which would cost the equivalent of my own food budget for an entire week, I could subsist on a grapefruit and English muffin for breakfast, and a small salad from the Korean grocer on the corner for dinner.  Once a day, I stuffed myself.  If I was careful, I could just manage to pay my bills.

“You certainly eat a lot, for such a small person,” I recall one elderly literary agent observing. No doubt I nodded, demure, not telling her that my next proper meal was twenty-four hours away.

I think of those days now, as I sit down to a solitary Saturday night dinner in a French bistro in midtown Manhattan.  In a year of stepping out of the comfort zone and learning to say “yes,” this is another little first for me: a restaurant meal without the easy company of a spouse or child or friend along to split an entree, make conversation, share the moment, pay the tip.   I have a magazine in my purse, but it’s too dim in the restaurant for reading — no chance of hiding out after all.  The waiter whisks away the other place setting at the table, hands me a menu, and I’m on my own.  I take a quick survey, relieved to spot a middle-aged man nursing a glass of red wine, a single woman at a banquette against the wall, my compatriots in solitude.

The memories of my long-ago weekends in New York are still fresh.  I’d put my sneakers on and walk the city for hours, soaking it in — smells, sounds, images and glimpses of how other people lived. The bustling restaurants and alluring boutiques were way off limits — the Sunday Times was my one big indulgence.  I often wondered what being truly “grown up” would feel like, whether I would ever be one of those casual, perfectly turned out women with the right sunglasses, jacket, and shoes.  Whether I would ever wander into a sidewalk cafe for Sunday brunch, without a thought for how deeply those scrambled eggs would dent my paycheck.  At twenty-five, I was working hard to fake it till I made it, a New Hampshire girl with a passion for books, a mostly empty Rolodex, and a miniscule alcove of an apartment on West 83rd — an address that surprised me every time I wrote it out.

Now, twenty-six years later, I confront the truth:  I will never have the right shoes.   And the “right” sunglasses these days — oversized, bug-like — would look ridiculous on me.  But I also realize that it doesn’t matter much anymore.  One good thing about turning fifty is the realization that we don’t have to impress anybody. No one cares what kind of shoes I wear.

Still, there is a part of me that feels a little exposed and uncomfortable here, claiming a valuable piece of New York real estate — a restaurant table — all to myself.  I order a glass of white wine, and look around. Turns out that the other two solitary diners aren’t alone after all — a delicately beautiful red-haired woman has joined the man, full of apology for her tardiness, and the lone woman’s husband has returned from the restroom. I am the only unaccompanied person in the room.

“We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available,” writes Buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Han. “We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.”

All of a sudden, it occurs to me that at twenty-five, much as I would have liked a date, I also would have been quite thrilled to eat a restaurant meal alone.  How grateful I would have been back then, to be able to just enjoy my food, without having to act like I knew what I was talking about, or feign interest in some unsaleable first novel.  And so, in an instant, I make a decision:  I will eat this particular meal in a way that allows me to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available.   I’m here, I’m alone, and I am going to fully experience the experience. My salad arrives, and I savor every bite of lettuce and warm goat cheese.  I smile at the waiter, observe my fellow diners, take in the convivial atmosphere, the clatter of silverware, the low din of voices, the exuberance of the two artfully dressed young French women seated next to me, tucking into their steak frites.  I linger over a dish of mussels, with undistracted appreciation.  Happiness, it turns out, is available after all. It was right here all along. By the time dessert arrives (I never order dessert!), I no longer feel alone, but intimately, joyfully connected.  Alive in the moment, grateful for what is, full and content and ready for the long walk back to my hotel.  Tomorrow at this time, I will be back at home in my own kitchen, making a meal, setting the table.  Tonight, though, I am dining alone, and glad to be here.