Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (38 page)

I was usually at a desk when this happened, and desks usually had reference books, so I dined out in these early days as Mr. Webster and Mr. Roget, Mr. Fodor and Mr. Frommer, Mr. Strunk and Mr. White. There were sometimes novels lying nearby: I dined out as Mr. Wharton and Mr. Eliot, Mr. Didion and Mr. Turow, though never as Mr. Naipaul, because I didn’t want to present a face at odds with the ethnic suggestion of the name.

If there weren’t books nearby, there were periodicals, so I dined out as Mr. Libby, with a first name other than Scooter, and as Mr. Manning, with a first name other than Eli or Peyton. There were movies in my head, so I dined out as Mr. Pitt, as Mr. Crowe and as Mr. Stiller, though I really screwed up on that last one. When the reservationist asked me for a first name, I blurted out what instantly came to mind, and what instantly came to mind was Ben.

What a way to avoid a red flag on a reservation! Go out to eat under a famous actor’s name! But because I often ended up hearing restaurant-world gossip about me, I later found out that this Ben Stiller gambit actually
did
throw the restaurant off my scent. Although the host and servers thought the man who showed up for the reservation looked an awful lot like me, they assumed it couldn’t be, because a restaurant critic would never reserve a table in a movie star’s name.

For one week I happened to make most of my planned reservations using the Italian surname Gentile, pronounced jen-TEEL-ay, and I simply changed first names from one reservation to the next: Paul, Marc, Anthony. One of these reservations was for the restaurant Solo in Midtown Manhattan. It serves haute kosher cuisine and is, for the most part, run and patronized by observant Jews. Because I was thinking of the surname in terms of its correct Italian pronunciation, and because I said the surname that way on the phone, I didn’t realize how it might look and read to a third party noticing it in the reservation book. So I was unprepared for the Solo hostess’s tone of voice, at once skeptical and withering, when I showed up, mentioned a reservation for four people at eight p.m., and heard her fill in the remaining information by asking: “Oh, are you the
gentile
party?” Oy.

On occasion I lost track of things, what with all the different reservations and all the different names.

One Saturday night I walked into the Red Cat to meet three friends for dinner. Although Biff had reviewed the restaurant right after its opening years earlier and had given it a single star (“good”), I liked it more than that—thought it might deserve an upgrade to two stars (“very good”)—and went there periodically with that possibility in mind. On this night I approached the host station, smiled at the woman standing there, opened my mouth . . . and froze. As I’d rushed out of the house on my way to the restaurant, I’d forgotten to look at the dining schedule in my computer and refresh my memory of the name under which I’d made the reservation.

I combed my brain, feeling like an idiot. I had some vague recollection that the reservation name might be Carlisle. I knew I had a reservation at
some
restaurant I was due to visit in this span of days under Carlisle. Maybe it was this reservation. Without any other alternative, I gave the name a try.

“Carlisle party of four at nine forty-five,” I said. That I had reserved for four and for nine forty-five was definitely the case.

“That’s so funny,” the hostess said, “because someone else checked in under Carlisle”—she motioned toward the bar—“but we don’t have any Carlisle in the book.” I looked in the direction she’d indicated and saw my friend Charles there. I’d apparently given him this same reservation name to use, and I’d apparently been as wrong then as I was now.

The hostess asked, “Which other names should I look for?” She obviously assumed that if I ticked off the people in my party, we’d trip across the right name. She assumed wrong. The reservation wasn’t in the real name of anyone in this group of regular dining companions.

“Well,” I said cheerily, sidestepping her question, “it must just be whichever party of four is in your book for nine forty-five!”

“Like Langston?” she asked, glancing at her reservation book.

“Yes!” I said, not because I was trying to pull a fast one but because, as it happened, Langston sounded like a name I would use—or, in this situation,
had
used. It was the last name of a good friend’s husband: that’s no doubt where I’d gotten it.

“Langston,” I repeated to the hostess. “That’s me!”

She looked at her reservation book more closely.

“Mrs.
Zoe
Langston?” she said, noting the first name on the reservation.

I could have told her that I’d meant to say I was part of Zoe Langston’s
party
, but, unfortunately, all my companions that night were men. So instead I stood in front of the hostess silently and glanced around idly, trying to buy time, hoping a hole might open up below me and swallow me. When I looked back at her, she shrugged her shoulders, laughed and just went ahead and led Charles, me and our other two friends, who had shown up by that point, to a table.

I made other blunders, too.

In an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side, I put, on the table, in full view of our server, a bag of prescription medicine with a label stapled to the outside. I didn’t notice how clearly the label spelled out Frank Bruni for a good long while. In an Asian restaurant in the East Village, I left behind an issue of
The New Yorker
with the subscription information, including my name, on the cover. A server gave it back to me while I stood in the vestibule, zipping up my coat. He looked at me closely and smirked just a little.

 

 

 

 

A
few months after I resettled in New York, I heard again from Scott: Scott, my first-ever boyfriend from Carolina, the one who’d found me when I was living in Washington. Back then I’d told him I was too busy for the two of us to catch up, when really I was just too fat. This time, when he told me that he and his partner had relocated to New York and that he’d love to see me, I said yes. I invited the two of them to join me for dinner. We had an effortlessly chatty, comfortable time, and soon afterward I made plans to meet Scott and a friend of his for drinks.

On the night in question, he gave me the time and place: nine thirty at Therapy, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen.

I hadn’t been in a gay bar in nearly a decade. In New York in my early thirties and then in Washington, I’d avoided gay bars on purpose, not wanting to subject myself to any visual assessments by men who might be looking for someone to date, men who might look right past me. But I wasn’t so afraid now. Besides, I was heading out to Therapy at a relatively early hour on a weeknight. The atmosphere wouldn’t be sexually charged.

At the bar Scott, his friend and I ran into two men that Scott knew, and the five of us grabbed beers and found an open table in a lounge area. The man I was seated next to, Paul, focused his attention on me, but I assumed that it was just a logistical thing, a matter of my being physically closest to him.

When I got up to leave around ten forty-five, he got up, too, saying it was time for him to head home as well.

As I set out on foot for the short-term rental nearby where I was living until the purchase of my apartment went through, he tagged along, talking all the time but never saying a word about what he was doing, where he was heading.

I wondered if his place was also just blocks from Therapy—if he didn’t need to hail a cab or hop on the subway—and was in the same general direction as mine.

I wondered if he was some strangely gallant guy exercising an atavistic impulse to escort me.

Finally I accepted the most likely possibility. He was wordlessly hitting on me.

I went with it, letting him accompany me into the building, letting him through the door of my apartment, and never really pausing at all to ask myself what I was doing, or whether it was something I wanted to be doing with this man. I was too caught up in the excitement—in the relief—that I
could
do it.

I’d gone from romantic exile in that dingy upstairs bedroom in Georgetown directly to Louis, who had seemed to me like some sudden and random gift from nowhere, and quite possibly a fluke. Apart from him, there had been almost no dates and no kisses for the vast majority of my thirties. Now here I was, on the edge of forty, aware of my imminent slide into middle age, angry about how much of my youth I’d squandered. Could I make up for it now? Before it was too late?

There were months during my first years back in New York when I went out to a gay bar as often as once a week, a frequency unusual for some other men but extraordinary for me. Even in Detroit, before Greg, I hadn’t found myself in a gay bar more than once a month.

But in my current state of mind and need, I liked the terms and dynamics of a gay bar—liked knowing that the men who approached me or invited my approach did so without any knowledge of my job, which was considered unusually interesting by many people. These men were attracted by the way I looked. And for me that was an affirmation more powerful than it was for many others.

During the long period when I’d been sure nobody could possibly want me, I hadn’t consciously asked myself: What if I never climb out of this? What if these size 40 pants are as good as it will ever again get? What if I can’t lose more than 15 of the 268 pounds I’ve somehow managed to put on?

But I realized now that on some level, I had pondered and dreaded all of that, because my behavior and elation on the far side of fatness were those of someone living in a country he never thought he’d see, with privileges he never thought he’d have. And I saw that there might be something harder to repair than the physical damage Aaron and I had gone to work on a few years before.

After about six months in the job, a friend e-mailed me one day.

“Had an excellent lunch at V Steakhouse,” he wrote, “and I had a great meal at Bar Tonno, where the owner reports you have been spotted twice.”

I shook my head, amazed. “It’s very interesting,” I responded, “that the owner of Bar Tonno says he’s spotted me twice there. I’ve never been!”

The friend explained that he had asked the owner if many reviews of the restaurant had come out yet, and the owner said he was anxiously awaiting mine. “He said he wasn’t there when you came in, but that ‘everyone’ spotted you instantly,” my friend reported. “I love that! You are like a ghost!”

I wished.

With each passing month I got more of an education into just how much of a premium restaurants put on identifying me when I was there and just how much energy they put into being able to do that.

I turned one day to the Web site Eater, a gossipy report on restaurant news and restaurant-world personalities, and saw an item headlined: “To Catch a Critic: The Case of the Kitchen Flyer.”

It presented a snapshot and description of a piece of paper that apparently hung in many a restaurant kitchen and was meant to help the staff recognize me when I was dining there. At the top of the flyer was a fuzzy copy of the
Ambling
book jacket photograph. Below that was a list of six aliases and two fake phone numbers I’d been known to use. It was precisely the sort of compendium I’d been warned about, and I assumed it would be considerably longer if I weren’t taking all the precautions I was.

And below
that
were some descriptions of me intended to be helpful to any restaurateur wondering if I was in his or her midst.

“He looks very young,” said the first line of the description, and—I’ll admit it—I paused happily after reading it, then read it a second time.

“His guests are very often female,” the description continued. “He is extremely polite with staff.” Here I paused again, this time for Mom. She’d always been adamant about proper etiquette. She would have been thrilled.

The flyer finished: “Questions about food are asked in a very casual, unassuming manner.” This was true, and this was on purpose. For all that I messed up, I wasn’t about to press servers for the specifics of a dish’s cooking or ingredients in a rapt way that tipped my hand. I wasn’t
that
clueless.

The flyer was only a part of it.

At Le Bernardin, I’d been told, the chef Eric Ripert insisted that his staff do more than merely round up whatever pictures of me existed on the Internet. A staff member also researched where I’d appeared on television during my political-reporting years, then went to those networks and acquired footage, so the workers could get a sense of my facial expressions and body language.

Sometimes I’d be sitting at a table near the front of a restaurant and I’d notice someone walk in the door, huddle with a server or manager, look in the direction of my table, then loiter in the vestibule or bar area for just a few minutes, stealing second and third and fourth looks my way. Minutes later the person would leave, without having had so much as a glass of water. And days later I’d see that person again—standing at the host station of a new restaurant that critics, like me, were in the process of visiting. I was just starting to make sense of this when a friend in the restaurant industry explained it for me outright: managers at restaurants that had spotted me would instantly send word out to peers in nearby establishments so they could hustle over and see me in the flesh.

When it came to identifying critics, restaurants weren’t in competition with one another; they were in cahoots. One night I stopped by a Midtown restaurant for a glass of wine with my brother Mark, who was visiting from Boston on business, before the two of us joined two friends of mine elsewhere. A manager at the restaurant recognized me and heard me say, as I paid the check, that I was off to dinner. She assumed for some reason that I was on foot and destined to eat somewhere nearby. So she called several prominent restaurants within a five-block radius to warn them that I might be walking through the door at any minute. They waited for me in vain. I was in a taxi headed to an Upper East Side restaurant some twenty-five blocks uptown.