Don't Get Too Comfortable (3 page)

WHAT IS THE SOUND OF
ONE HAND SHOPPING?

O
ur waiter is looking wistful, his eyes cast downward, the merest hint of a smile playing gently upon his lips. He is about to speak. We lean forward, expecting perhaps a treasured but bittersweet memory: heedless young lovers in Paris, the specter of war looming. Instead, he begins, “There's a
really
lovely story about the calzone . . .”

This is a Temple of Food, a well-known restaurant in northern California whose owner is world famous as an advocate for humane and sustainable agribusiness, as well as being a renowned chef in her own right. I have three of her cookbooks myself. There is a sense of occasion in just being here, an awestruck thrill on the diners' faces, as if we have been chosen for something miraculous, like the people massed in the desert at the end of
Close Encounters.
Various members of the waitstaff beam at me as I walk through the dining room on my way to pee. They smile the way one might at a twelve-year-old clutching his first copy of
Catcher in the Rye,
their eyes shining with vicarious, anticipatory excitement at the journey I am about to take.

The meal is an undeniable pleasure. The food is unfussy and simply prepared, the impeccable ingredients each a Platonic example of itself: the tender micro greens of my composed salad, the piece of line-caught fish in its fragrant herbal bath. And for dessert, one medjoul date and a just-picked local tangerine, both perfect. In the same elegiac calzone tones, our waiter tells us, “We'd like to encourage you to bruise the orange leaf between your fingers.” We nibble our delicious dates. As instructed, we crush the orange leaves and the airborne oils create a lovely perfume that mingles with the steam of our post-supper coffee.

Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form wherein a dancer applauds his own ass. There's a lot of flamenco going around the room tonight. Smiles of mutual congratulation beam from table to table. Glasses are raised. We celebrate not only our small part in this incremental triumph over factory farming that just being here this evening represents but also our elevated capacities. It takes an exceptionally fine tongue and palate, you must admit, to appreciate a dessert of a single date. One so very different from the cratered, preservative-strafed mouths of the masses. I overhear one bartender say to the other, “I think I'm going to stay in this weekend and roast garlic.” The man of a departing couple leans in and says something to his date. She listens, and gives an almost electric start. Like Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in
Reds
who, caught up in the joyous throngs of the ten days that shook the world, had no choice after witnessing something so glorious and world-changing but to race home and fuck each other silly, the man and woman share a look of smoldering, unbridled lust. What did he whisper? “I was just told that they hadn't served that vinegar
in twenty-four years
!”

SUBTLETIES OF FLAVOR
previously thought nonexistent or at the very least nonsensical are now the subject of earnest interrogation. It was easy enough to avoid such conversations—once the sole province of stultifying wine talk—by faking a coughing fit or simply bleeding from the eyes whenever your oenophile friends got going. Such discussions now cover just about anything you put into your mouth. In the food section of
The New York Times
(a newspaper which, in the interest of full disclosure, I read every day and have worked for extensively in the past), Amanda Hesser, a generally very fine journalist, writing about
fleur de sel,
had this to say about the sea salt that is harvested in France and available in New York City for $36 a kilo: “As I ate them, fine crystals of salt sprinkled on the potatoes crackled under my teeth, releasing tiny bursts that tasted of the sea and its minerals. There was no sting at the back of the mouth, no bitterness, just a silky, salty essence wrapping each bite of potato.” Sting at the back of the mouth? Bitterness? What has poor Amanda Hesser been doing all these years to add some savor to her food? Licking undeveloped Polaroids?

The general
New York Times
reader enjoys the privileges and plentitude of life in the world's wealthiest country, so articles on rolling cigarettes out of pocket lint or recipes on salvaging that last bit of rotting pork would make no sense. But is it completely naïve to think that a squib in the same newspaper about ice cubes frozen from a river in the Scottish Highlands and overnighted to your doorstep—the perfect complement to your single malt—necessarily demands, if for no other reason than to preserve some vague notion of karmic balance, either a great big “April Fool's!” scrawled across the top, or a prefatory note of apology that such a service even exists? Surely when we've reached the point where we're fetishizing sodium chloride and water, and subjecting both to the kind of scrutiny we used to reserve for choosing an oncologist, it's time to admit that the relentless questing for that next undetectable gradation of perfection has stopped being about the thing itself and crossed over into a realm of narcissism so overwhelming as to make the act of masturbation look selfless.

It would be peevish and ungracious after being taken to such a lovely supper in this Temple of Food, I know, but I am desperate to ask the question that begs to be posed: “Just how fucking good can olive oil get?” I will stipulate to having both French sea salt and a big bottle of extra virgin in my kitchen. And while the presence of both might go some small distance in pigeonholing me demographically, neither one of them makes me a good person. They are mute and useless indicators of the content of my character.

Or at least I used to think so. Since anyone with taste buds will respond to the trans-fat bells and whistles of a hot fudge sundae or super nachos, how better then to show a nobility of spirit than by broadcasting your capacity to discern the gustatory equivalent of a hummingbird's cough as it beats its wings near a blossom that grows by a glassy pond on the other side of a distant mountain? No surer proof that one is meant for better things than an easily bruised delicacy. Such a perfectly tuned instrument can quickly suss out the cheap and nasty. So, the bitterness at the back of the throat; the polite refusal of the glass of whiskey marred by those (
shudder
) domestic ice cubes; the physical and psychic insult that are sheets of anything short of isotopic density. What is the thread count, Kenneth? We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas.

There are those who might argue that the materials focused on—cotton, salt, oil, water—are themselves so basic, almost beneath notice, so much the opposite of a ski chalet in Gstaad, for example, that such epicurean monasticism is itself an act of humility by association. The temporal and vulgar rejected in favor of what really matters most in life. And what is it that matters most in life? Here's a hint: it's a pronoun that can be effectively conveyed without any words at all. Just take your index finger and point it to the center of your chest, an inch and a half from your precious,
precious
heart.

I TUTORED ADULT
literacy at a men's shelter for about two years a while back. Have no fear, this isn't going to be one of those Capraesque anecdotes full of lachrymose inanities like “There are those who might say that I taught Tito. But if you ask me, it's
Tito
who taught
me.”
I only want to tell the following story: Christmas was coming, and Sylvia, the amazing woman who ran the career center, mentioned that a lot of the guys in the program would be going to see their kids, wives, and girlfriends, etc., for the first time since getting back on the road to recovery. All of the men had histories of drug abuse or alcoholism, a lot of them had been homeless. Their families had really gone through hell and Sylvia thought it would be nice to somehow arrange it so that the men weren't showing up empty-handed. Even a small token would go a very long way in repairing relationships that had been sorely tested over the years. I called up my friend Rory, who raided the giveaway closets of the various glossy women's magazines at which she works, eventually filling up two large boxes with fancy cosmetics and toiletries. More than enough for all the men to arrive bearing gifts.

Since the program had both a strong recovery and a Christian foundation, Sylvia went through the boxes, setting aside those things she thought might be less than suitable. Anything boozy or overtly sexual—bourbon-flavored massage oil, for example—would be out. When I looked over what she had discarded, I saw that, without exception, she had taken out the big-ticket, really expensive items.

“They're not going to understand that these are fancy things,” she said, indicating the exorbitant bottle of witch hazel with its unadorned, text-heavy label like a purgative tonic from an old dispensary, and the bar of soap resembling a rough, gray river stone wrapped up in brown paper and tied with waxed string. “They're going to think the guys got them medicine from the drugstore. It would look like the exact opposite of a present. These things just look . . . ,” she searched for the word, “poor. They're already poor. Why would they want to be reminded of that?”

Clearly Sylvia and the men of the mission had no appreciation for the soul-cleansing charms of Kiehl's blue astringent. It's also a safe bet, given the mission's cafeteria-style dining hall, that the austere and rustic appeal of Le Pain Quotidien—a small chain of restaurants in the city where you can enjoy your salade niçoise sitting at a long unvarnished table beside your fellow New Yorkers as if you had all just come in from reseeding the north forty—would also be lost on them. What would they make of other such high-end examples of commodified faux poverty, like Republic Noodles, which looks like a Chinese Cultural Revolution–era reeducation facility. For models.

Or the wallpaper from Scalamandré called the Rogarshevsky Scroll, named after the family who occupied one of the apartments in the building that now houses New York's Lower East Side Tenement Museum? The design is a faithful copy of the fourteenth layer of paper found when they renovated. A pretty floral pattern, it must have put up a valiant fight against the grime and cold-water squalor of the place. It's nice to think that those Rogarshevskys fortunate enough not to have had to pitch themselves out of burning shirtwaist factory windows were cheered by the sight of it when they returned from their fifteen-hour piecework shifts. Might an immigrant family employed in one of Manhattan's sweatshops that still exist today have access to the same visual solace? Not likely. The Rogarshevsky Scroll is available to the trade for upward of $80 a roll. And how about the armchair designed by Brazilian brothers Huberto and Fernando Campana out of a seemingly random assemblage of hundreds of pieces of wooden lath? The ingenious and counterintuitively comfortable chair is called the Favela, named for the jury-rigged, destitute, crime-ridden shantytowns that climb the hillsides of Rio de Janeiro. According to the International Finance Corporation, a public policy organization associated with the World Bank, the average monthly income for a family in the Brazilian favelas is two hundred reais, or roughly $72. The Favela armchair retails for over $3,000.

Oh Sylvia
, I want to say,
don't you know that if you curl your lip enough, you can make “poor” sound just like “pure”?

It's nice to have nice things. Creature comfort is not some bourgeois capitalist construct, but framing it as a moral virtue sure is. It's what the French call
Nostalgie de la Boue
: a fond yearning for the mud. Two things have to be in place to really appreciate this particular brand of gluttony posing as asceticism. First, you have to have endured years and years of plenty, the mud a long-distant, nearly forgotten memory. One must have decades of such surfeit under your belt that you have been fortunate enough to grow sick of it all. (Using this economic model, Russians thirty years hence might pose less of a threat to the imperiled world supply of Versace and sequins.) And second—and this is what really separates the men from the boys—in order to maintain a life free of clutter and suitable for a sacred space, you'll need another room to hide your shit.

And it is shit, ultimately. Or some corporeal, effluvial cousin thereof. This sloughing off and scouring down to the walls is about a denial that has little to do with doing without. It is not so much the forgoing of one's fleshly desires as much as a terrified repudiation of the essential nature of what we are: great sloshing, suppurating bags of wet, prone to rupture. Mortal messes just waiting to happen.

And who wants to be reminded of that? An apocryphal story attributed to Diana Vreeland tells of a young woman working as an editor who is done dirt by her man, who turns out to be a crumb, so she throws herself in front of the rush hour IRT. She sustains only minor physical injuries and is packed off to some place like Payne Whitney or Austen Riggs where she can get better. Returning to her job months later, repaired but shaky, she is called into Mrs. Vreeland's office. The arbitrix of style rises from her chair and taking the wounded bird's hands in both of hers, says consolingly, “My dear, here at
Vogue
we don't throw ourselves in front of trains. If we must, we take pills.”

THE COURT OF
Heian Japan, which existed a thousand years ago, was a society of exquisite indolence. Nobles might spend hours choosing the perfect shade of silk underrobe, barely an inch of which would be glimpsed from the gaping sleeve of a kimono
.
Days passed in splendid idleness playing arcane word games where one had to match the first half of an ancient Chinese epigram written on one clamshell with the second half written on another (yahoo!). Hours were taken up composing erudite mash notes to one's lover of the moment. Sei Shonagon, a lady of the court, kept a “pillow book,” a compendium of her rarefied observations and impressions. It is an amazing volume, covering a wide range of topics, about all of which she had very strong opinions. Although it was written a millennium ago, its frequent blazing triviality and tone of aphoristic certitude on matters aesthetic can make it seem eerily contemporary and magazine-ready: “These are the months that I like best: The First Month, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, The Seventh, the Eighth, The Ninth, The Eleventh, and the Twelfth.” “Oxen should have very small foreheads . . .” “Things That Should Be Large: Priests. Fruit. Houses.” And this entry from Unsuitable Things: “Snow on the houses of common people. This is especially regrettable when the moonlight shines down on it.” Simplicity, it seems, has always been wasted on those who simply cannot appreciate it.