Encounter

On a recent trip to India, I wanted the full Indian experience, so in addition to wandering through crowded markets on foot, riding in a rickshaw bicycle and tramping through endless city palaces, I at least tasted all the food put in front of me. Breakfast, my favorite meal, was easy; nothing too spicy there. After initial testing of some Masala-this and Tikka-that, I learned that the safest thing to order for lunch was a club sandwich. The Indian version comes with a fried egg inside, a welcome addition for a breakfast lover. Dinner was more dicey; even the vegetables were hot-ish land mines. And of course, cows are considered sacred in India where they wander freely on the streets so there was never any beef. As a consequence of all this foreign fair, after a few days back at home, I was dying for a good, old, American hamburger.
No one was available to join me for my hamburger, so I decided to just go it alone. I hadn’t shaved – and didn’t want to – but figured that although my whiskers are now all white, if Harrison Ford can make unshaven a fashion statement, so can I. And I’d worn my most comfortable clothes all day – an old T-shirt, a pair of soft khakis and my orange Crocs – and didn’t feel like getting gussied up. So I just threw a black sweater over my T-shirt and got out that black, soft leather jacket I bought in Turkey some years ago, the precious one I’m always afraid I’ll damage in the rain. If not now, Phil, when? I added a black baseball cap from the Chepe Railroad in Mexico and headed out, feeling vaguely sophisticated in my schlumpy, Harrison-Ford-like adventurer finery. Still, I didn’t want to go where I thought I might see anyone I knew – although the City Café has great hamburgers, it was definitely out; too country club – so I decided to try Alize (or whatever it’s now called), where I’d heard one could just sit at the bar and the hamburgers were, as they say, to die.
Although I hadn’t eaten there in years, I know the restaurant well. Tucked into a semi-grand hotel cum condominium complex, it’s been through several incarnations, each a little more down-scale than the last (and patronized less and less) until it’s now thoroughly flushed of its former haughtiness. Where the so-called socially connected once fought for the prime table opposite the entrance, where they could see who was coming and going, and be seen in return, four men in shirt-sleeves were having an animated discussion over beers and chips. The bar, which used to be marble-topped and subtly shrouded in an air of sweet success, where you might score the latest scandalous gossip or a connection to cocaine, is now just a long top of simple whitish plastic slightly embedded with flecks of mica, which give it a sparkling air of aspiration to its more glamorous past but must make it hard to keep clean. When I arrived, there were only two patrons at its long, Swoosh-shaped expanse, a man sitting near the long side of the angle and a youngish woman a couple of bar stools beyond. Both projected a subtle aura of being from someplace else, as though guests in the hotel, just in the bar, like me, for a solitary meal. An over-large TV slung from one wall was tuned to a football game and even without the sound on, was hard to miss. Underneath it, the woman bartender was busily washing glasses, bent over her work, her hair falling down around her toward the suds. I wondered how she got away with that. I took a place near the angle at the short side of the bar, far enough away from the man so that we might maintain everyone’s natural need for separation but close enough for conversation should that ensue. The bar stools were uncomfortably soft and far too low, and instead of the pose of adventurer I had so carefully assumed, I felt like Lily Tomlin in her sketch as Edith Ann, sitting in an oversized rocking chair. The bartended finally tore her attention away from her dishwashing and came over to ask me what I wanted to drink. Although I usually drink vodka on the rocks, I ordered a Bombay Sapphire gin and tonic, partly because I’d drunk them in India where they’d helped me capture a feeling of the Raj, and partly to boost my flagging sense of adventure. While the bartended moved away to create my illusion, I studied my companions at the bar.
The woman, probably in her late thirties and conventionally attractive in that on-the-road-professional way of a lady drug salesmen – she might be called Diane – in a tailored suit and rimless glasses, was eating her dinner while engrossed in her laptop, perched on the bar next to her plate. The man – let’s call him George - sitting closer to me, had a professorial air, all graying curly, with a full beard, probably in his forties, wearing a non-descript suit with a non-descript shirt, open at the collar. His cell phone was on the bar in front of him as though he was waiting for an important call and he was consulting a sheaf of papers while he nursed his martini. Years of sensitivity to what’s inside and underneath, I concluded that he had a good mind and an average body, but leg man that I am, I could see he had very good thighs. And no wedding ring. In-ter-est-ing. My drink came and I ordered my hamburger, medium please, and hold the proffered garlic aioli, a taste, and a pretension I could do without.
Since there was so little else to do, I watched the football game, but could see that George often glanced in my direction as though tempted to initiate a conversation. I quickly lost my feeling of being Edith Ann as my sense of Harrison-Ford-adventure returned. The next time he looked, I smiled. He said hello and we began to talk. I moved immediately into my Gentleman Host mode and asked him many questions. He was a biologist from Houston where he was engaged in research at the University of Texas. No, he didn’t actually perform the research, but managed a group of people who did. He was moving his whole lab to Hopkins, which had just agreed to fund his research – I was too engrossed in his twinkling eyes to understand just what kind it was.
Shortly after our conversation began, Diane joined in from the other side of him, almost as though she had been laying in wait for her opportunity to attract his attention and now that I had – or we had – broken the proverbial ice, she wanted into the pool.
George turned in her direction to respond to her smiling comments. But I wasn’t to be outdone. I asked him some more questions and he turned back to me. Then she made more comments and he turned to her, his head swiveling back and forth from one side to the other as we, in turn, engaged him. I wasn’t forceful in this competition, not wanting to be too obviously attracted to him, which I was. But I wasn’t going to give him up either. He also seemed more interested in me and she finally went back to her computer. I contemplated him more thoroughly. Could he be gay, and available? Might my evening’s adventure have a productive ending? Should I invite him home? For a drink? Or to see my etchings? I was getting way ahead of myself. But I was having fun.
George was moving here from Houston, he said, and was looking for a house to buy. He’d had trouble finding one but had seen one today that attracted him.
“What attracted you to the house?” I asked, an inane question but one that could at least keep the conversation going.
“Oh, it had a great kitchen,” he said.
“I gather you like to cook.” He wasn’t married and he liked to cook. Not a bad beginning.
“Yes,” he said. “I love it.”
We cha cha-ed some about cooking and he further explained the merits of the kitchen in an end-of-row-unit in Rogers Forge, not the neighborhood he would have chosen – he really preferred to walk to work – but a good one nonetheless. He’d made an offer on the house and in a move he said unusual to him, and vaguely worrying, he’d agreed to a $500.00 escalation over every other offer up to a certain dollar limit. I thought that a good idea. He was creative as well as attractive. My interest grew.
His food came, a breast of duck, he said, a dish he loved. I was surprised that my hamburger joint even offered a breast of duck on their menu and couldn’t imagine it being very good. But after his first bite, he declared it “perfect.” I wondered if he was truly a connoisseur, or only a poseur. Hard to tell.
At this point in my adventure, which up to now had been going well, Diane turned to him again and said, “Oh, you like the breast of duck.” She hadn’t given up after all and had just been waiting for her chance.
He turned away from me and said to her, “Oh. You had the duck, too?”
“Yes,” she said, pointing to her plate. “It was delicious.” She smiled. She had very good teeth.
Harrison Ford would never be defeated by a lady drug salesman I thought, but I didn’t know where to go from there. Luckily, George turned back to me to continue our conversation about his prospective house. I noticed that he attacked his breast of duck in true Falstaffian fashion, his right fist firmly curled around the fork that skewered the meat while he sawed away with the knife in his left hand. He shows gusto, I thought. And a touch of low rent. Not an altogether good combination.
Then my hamburger came, without the aioli, as requested, with French fries in a little wire container with a handle, like a miniature fry basket, the kind used in McDonald’s. Cute, I thought. I dug in.
“How’s your hamburger?” George asked.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ve been away for a while and when I come home, one of the first things I always want is a hamburger.”
“Yes,” he said. “An American tradition. But it can’t compete with a breast of duck.”
So, he was competitive as well. “No, I guess not,” I said. “Not in the same league.”
Then his phone rang. He picked it up from the bar and put it to his ear, looking off into the near distance behind the bar, like we all do, focused more on what he was hearing than what he was seeing. He frowned and got up from his stool and walked away, outside the bar area. Diane went back to her laptop and I concentrated on my hamburger, not the best one I’ve ever had, but serviceable.
When George returned, he was grinning. He also had good teeth. “I got it!” he said.
“You got your house?” I asked.
“Yes. They accepted my offer.” He stabbed the last few pieces of duck and ate them quickly, asking for his check at the same time, with his mouth full. Definitely not a good sign.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Thanks. I’ve got to go and sign some papers.”
“I hope you’ll be happy in your new kitchen.”
“I’m sure I will be,” he said, sticking out his hand. “It was really nice talking with you.” And he was gone.
A few minutes later, Diane closed her laptop and rose from her place at the bar. As she walked past me on her way back to the hotel lobby, she smiled (or was it a smirk?) in a way that said it all. “Nice game,” it said. “But neither of us won, did we?”
I finished my hamburger and went home.