Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Cody half believed that Ezra had some lack — a lack that worked in his favor, that made him immune, that set him apart from ordinary men. There was something almost monkish about him. Women never really managed to penetrate his meditations, although he was unfailingly courteous to them, and considerate. He was likely to contemplate them in silence for an inappropriate length of time, and then ask something completely out of the blue. For instance: “How did you get those little gold circles through your ears?” It was ridiculous — a man reaches the age of twenty-seven without having heard of pierced earrings. However, it must not have seemed ridiculous to the woman he was addressing. She raised a finger to an earlobe in a startled, mesmerized way. She was spellbound. Was it Ezra’s unexpectedness? The narrowness of his focus? (He’d passed up her low-cut dress, powdered cleavage, long silky legs.) Or his innocence, perhaps. He was a tourist on a female planet, was what he was saying. But he didn’t realize he was saying it, and failed to understand the look she gave him. Or didn’t care, if he did understand.

Only one of Cody’s girlfriends had not been attracted to his brother. This was a social worker named Carol, or maybe Karen. Upon meeting Ezra, she had fixed him with a cool stare. Later, she had remarked to Cody that she disliked motherly men. “Always feeding, hovering,” she said (for she’d met him at his restaurant), “but acting so clumsy and shy, in the end it’s you that takes care of them. Ever notice that?” However, she hardly counted; Cody had so soon afterward lost interest in her.

You might wonder why he went on making these introductions, considering his unfortunate experiences — the earliest dating from the year he turned fourteen, the latest as recent as a month ago. After all, he lived in New York City and his family lived in Baltimore; he didn’t really have to bring these women home on weekends. In fact, he often swore that he would stop it. He would meet somebody, marry her, and not mention her even to his mother. But that would mean a lifetime of suspense. He’d keep watching his wife uncomfortably, suspiciously. He’d keep waiting for the inevitable — like Sleeping Beauty’s parents, waiting for the needle that was bound to prick her finger in spite of their precautions.

He was thirty years old by now, successful in his business, certainly ready to marry. He considered his New York apartment temporary, a matter of minor convenience; he had recently purchased a farmhouse in Baltimore County with forty acres of land. Weekends, he traded his slim gray suit for corduroys and he roamed his property, making plans. There was a sunny backyard where his wife could have her kitchen garden. There were bedrooms waiting to be stocked with children. He imagined them tumbling out to meet him every Friday afternoon when he came home. He felt rich and lordly. Poor Ezra: all he had was that disorganized restaurant, in the cramped, stunted center of the city.

Once, Cody invited Ezra to hunt rabbits with him in the woods behind the farm. It wasn’t a success. First Ezra fell into a yellowjackets’ nest. Then he got his rifle wet in the stream. And when they paused on a hilltop for lunch, he whipped out his battered recorder and commenced to tootling “Greensleeves,” scaring off all living creatures within a five-mile radius — which may have been his intention. Cody wasn’t even talking to him, at the end; Ezra had to chatter on by himself. Cody stalked well ahead of him in total silence, trying to remember why this outing had seemed such a good idea. Ezra sang “Mister Rabbit.” “Every little soul,” he sang, blissfully off-key, “must shine, shine …”

No wonder Cody was a cuticle chewer, a floor pacer, a hair rummager. No wonder, when he slept at night, he ground his teeth so hard that his jaws ached every morning.

Early in the spring of 1960, his sister, Jenny, wrote him a letter. Her divorce was coming through in June, she said — two more months, and then she’d be free to marry Sam Wiley. Cody didn’t think much of Wiley, and he flicked this news aside like a gnat and read on. Though it looks, she said, as if Ezra might beat me down the aisle. Her name is Ruth but I don’t know any more than that. Then she said she was seriously considering dropping out of medical school. The complications of her personal life, she said, were using up so much energy that she had none left over for anything else. Also, she had gained three pounds in the last six weeks and was perfectly obese, a whale, living now on lettuce leaves and lemon water. Cody was accustomed to Jenny’s crazy diets (she was painfully thin), so he skimmed that part. He finished the letter and folded it.

Ruth?

He opened it again.

… as if Ezra might beat me down the aisle, he read. He tried to think of some other kind of aisle — airplane, supermarket, movie house — but in the end, he had to believe it: Ezra was getting married. Well, at least now Cody could keep his own girls. (This gave him, for some reason, a little twinge of uneasiness.) But Ezra! Married? That walking accident? Imagine him in a formal wedding — forgetting license, ring, and responses, losing track of the service while smiling out the window at a hummingbird. Imagine him in bed with a woman. (Cody snorted.) He pictured the woman as dark and Biblical, because of her name: Ruth. Shadowed eyes and creamy skin. Torrents of loose black hair. Cody had a weakness for black-haired women; he didn’t like blondes at all. He pictured her bare shouldered, in a red satin nightgown, and he crumpled Jenny’s letter roughly and dropped it in the wastebasket.

The next day at work, Ruth’s image hung over him. He was doing a time-and-motion study of a power-drill factory in New Jersey, a dinosaur of a place. It would take him weeks to sort it out. Joining object K to object L: right-hand transport unloaded, search, grasp, transport loaded … He passed down the assembly line with his clipboard, attracting hostile glances. Ruth’s black hair billowed in the rafters. Unavoidable delays: 3. Avoidable delays: 9. No doubt her eyes were plum shaped, slightly tilted. No doubt her hands were heavily ringed, with long, oval fingernails painted scarlet.

When he returned to his apartment that evening, there was a letter from Ezra. It was an invitation to his restaurant this coming Saturday night. You are cordially invited was centered on the page like something engraved — Ezra’s idea of a joke. (Or maybe not; maybe he meant it in earnest.) Oh, Lord, not another one of Ezra’s dinners. There would be toasts and a fumbling, sentimental speech leading up to some weighty announcement — in this case, his engagement. Cody thought of declining, but what good would that do? Ezra would be desolate if a single person was missing. He’d cancel the whole affair and reschedule it for later, and keep on rescheduling till Cody accepted. Cody might as well go and be done with it.

Besides, he wouldn’t at all mind meeting this Ruth.

Ezra was listening to a customer — or a one-time customer, from the sound of it. “Used to be,” the man was saying, “this place had class. You follow me?”

Ezra nodded, watching him with such a sympathetic, kindly expression that Cody wondered if his mind weren’t somewhere else altogether. “Used to be there was fine French cuisine, flamed at the tables and all,” said the man. “And chandeliers. And a hat-check girl. And waiters in black tie. What happened to your waiters?”

“They put people off,” Ezra said. “They seemed to think the customers were taking an exam of some kind, not just ordering a meal. They were uppish.”

“I liked your waiters.”

“Nowadays our staff is homier,” Ezra said, and he gestured toward a passing waitress — a tall, stooped, colorless girl, open mouthed with concentration, fiercely intent upon the coffee mug that she carried in both hands. She inched across the floor, breathing adenoidally. She proceeded directly between Ezra and the customer. Ezra stepped back to give her room.

The customer said, “ ‘Nettie,’ I said, ‘you’ve just got to see Scarlatti’s. Don’t knock Baltimore,’ I tell her, ‘till you see Scarlatti’s.’ Then we come upon it and even the sign’s gone. Homesick Restaurant, you call it now. What kind of a name is that? And the decor! Why, it looks like … why, a gigantic roadside diner!”

He was right. Cody agreed with him. Dining room walls lined with home preserves, kitchen laid open to the public, unkempt cooks milling around compiling their favorite dishes (health food, street food, foreign food, whatever popped into their heads) … Ever since Ezra had inherited this place — from a woman, wouldn’t you know — he’d been systematically wrecking it. He was fully capable of serving a single entree all one evening, bringing it to your table himself as soon as you were seated. Other nights he’d offer more choice, four or five selections chalked up on the blackboard. But still you might not get what you asked for. “The Smithfield ham,” you’d say, and up would come the okra stew. “With that cough of yours, I know this will suit you better,” Ezra would explain. But even if he’d judged correctly, was that any way to run a restaurant? You order ham, ham is what you get. Otherwise, you might as well eat at home. “You’ll go bankrupt in a year,” Cody had promised, and Ezra almost did go bankrupt; most of