Recipes for Trouble

I heard a story on the radio. About a woman who disappeared. She left her family and her farm, walked across a field and was never seen nor heard from again.

What if you met someone, not through friends or work, but via an anonymous configuration of pixels and megabytes, router signals and servers and domains? What if you reached out through the computer screen and found someone there.

What if someone appears suddenly, out of nowhere – can they disappear as suddenly, too?

Have the boundaries between stranger and friend become too porous? In this society of screens and images, is there no real, as the postmodern philosophers have argued?

(And yet, you know it was real, all of it).

This how we live. Molding words on a laptop while watching TV. Tightly holding onto a cellphone on the street, as though you are clutching someone’s hand. Texting during meetings, emailing in the cafe, facebooking in the office. This is how we meet people, how we stay in touch with loved ones. The shimmer of screens, the blur of people coming and going, the dizzying movement of it all.

But it is also true that people met in person can disappear too. And that sometimes people return, they emerge out of nowhere it seems, an old friend one has lost touch with, her round boyish face smiles tenderly at you in a cafe and suddenly you are meeting regularly to mark papers and gossip and drink smooth lattes in that same cafe and a ritual has developed where there was none before, a still point in this disembedded global chaos.

Perhaps it is community, the mesh of history and obligation, that human configuration of friends, family, gossip, that keeps it real.

I forgot to pack my camera when I went to Cuba

Hmphh said my mother. Polysporin. But. No. Camera. Bug. Spray. But. No. Camera.

It was a bigger adjustment than the language, or the currency, or the wall-to-wall Canadian tourists.

When I travel, my camera is my shield, my toy, my paintbrush, my prosthetic memory.

How would this trip get remembered? These fragile, final few years with my mother, and this precious time we have together, after so many years of being estranged.

I had to drink everything in, My eyes, my journal, and my own memory became a shutter, blinking constantly.

After awhile, I began to notice how preoccupied people were with their cameras, sometimes, several to a table, conversations punctuated by the white flare of the flash. How, when we were in a tour bus entering Havana, the men across the aisle from us poised their cameras aloft in a grasping, hungry, almost desperate gesture. I watched a woman on the beach crouch low and take pictures of shells. I would have been that woman. Instead, I dozed on a lounge chair.

From time to time I pulled out my sketchbook and watercolours, and tried to paint a portrait of my ma sitting amid coconut palms, drinking a pina colada and reading. (All through my childhood, I never once saw her sit down to read a book). Impossible to capture the benign satisfaction there, hers and mine.

I bought a disposable camera in a shop in Veradero, and these few grainy, oddly coloured shots with the red flare where the light leaked in, are what I managed to bring back.

The week after I returned, I told the story of forgetting my camera to my students. I wanted to illustrate what Guy Debord has called “the society of the spectacle”, the way we communicate, these days, through images and screens. One student told us about her dad, who went backpacking in the 70’s; for some reason there are no photos of that time.

So he tells me the stories, and I remember them, she said.

It was the lunchtime rush at one of those generic Asian fusion restaurants that have sprung up all over town. I sat alone at a table for two, the waiters hovering like nervous birds. I told them I thought I’d been stood up. The head waiter gave me a professionally sympathetic frown.

As it turns out, there are two eateries named Spring Rolls at Yonge and Charles. He was at Spring Rolls To Go. I was at Spring Rolls proper.

Thank god for cellphones.

We figured it out, and he came over to my Spring Rolls. A middle-aged fag, Tony, bald, swarthy, and with a wide, expressive face sat himself down at my table. The head waiter, perhaps expecting a heterosexual man in a tie, allowed himself a single raised eyebrow.

I’m doing research for a new novel, The Undead Chef. The main character is a gay chef, who also happens to be living with a potentially fatal medical condition.

Sometimes a research subject falls from the sky. I hadn’t even called Tony, he called me. He immediately addressed me as My Darling. He enthused about the food at Spring Rolls. He said he’d love to talk to me. We arranged to meet.

He’s been working in the food industry for twenty years. He told me about his work, how he came to it, how he learnt his trade. Between bites of House Green Curry with Tiger Shrimps and Chicken, I scribbled down all the important details, small jewels of authenticity that will help to solidify the character who’s steadily growing in my imagination.This is what I love about writing fiction. It’s not just the research, itself a portal into wild and beautiful lives ; but also the way that character and plot begin to animate themselves.

The thing about research is that it, too, takes on a life of its own. If you’re confident and loose enough about an interview, it goes down paths you hadn’t expected. It changes the shape of your story, but sometimes, also, the way you look at your own life.

My fictional character, George, is on disability. He spends much of his time choosing elaborate recipes and then letting the recipe guide his travels through the city as he searches for the right cut of meat or the one obscure spice he needs.

I asked Tony about that. Is That. Something. You. Would. Do.

Oh. My. said Tony and then took a long pensive slurp of his Tom Yum Kai soup.

His eyes clouded over with a kind of dreaminess. I. Have. My. Barbra. Day.

I watched him closely as he fiddled with his napkin in a sudden, shy gesture.

I. Love. Barbra. Streisand. he blurted, like he couldn’t hold it in anymore. I have all her music, all of it. He leaned forward, lowering his voice. Saturday is my Barbra day. I put her songs on shuffle. I go through my recipe books, choose a recipe. Then I’m off to Kensington Market, early. Come home, start cooking. I’ll cook a three or four course meal, and Barbra sings to me all day. It’s. Fantastic.

I asked him if he invites people over to eat what he’s cooked. He looked bewildered, like it was the wrong question to ask. I don’t know. he said. I guess I do sometimes. Not always.

The point of it was the pleasure he got in making it, the expressive gestures of prepping, marinating, sauteeing, braising, searing, tossing, plating. The point of it was the comfort of ritual. And the point of it, I thought, was the courage of building those rituals in a life lived alone, or on the margins, yet also in community.

We talked some more, finished our meals. He was right, the food was unexpectedly good for a chain. Tony gave me a warm embrace and thanked me for lunch and the copy of my book I’d given him. He had an afternoon date with his new boyfriend, giggling as he told me , and disappeared down Yonge Street, his bald head glimmering in the sun.

For the next few days, I couldn’t get Tony out of my mind.

I haven’t cooked much of anything for over two months. I’ve been a bit down. I’ve been managing on take out, toast, tuna melts, crackers and cheese. Oh, and The Librarian’s home cooking, and brunches with friends.

That Friday, in the middle of a day of marking, I found myself pulling out cutting boards, and some vegetables and condiments I’d bought in a hopeful moment the week before. I thought about finding some inspirational tunes but instead cranked up some old Jon Stewart episodes I’d missed, on the laptop.

I chopped leeks, red pepper, mushrooms, zucchinni. Made a kind of satay sauce with peanut butter, loads of garlic, chicken stock, lime, fish sauce, chili sauce. Boiled up egg noodles – I was out of rice noodles. Mixed the whole thing up with some chopped peanuts on top.

It felt good.

The days passed quietly, sometimes almost wordlessly.

I’d usually wake before my mother. I didn’t sleep well in Cuba, it was hot; my mother can’t tolerate air conditioning; I’d toss in sweaty sheets as my personal black box of voices spun its tedious reels.

I’d wake, tangled in sheets, to the relief of a delicate sepia filigree of light coming in from the patio.

Slip into capri pants, a light cotton shirt, sandals. Write a note for my ma, emerge into luscious Caribbean colour: purple and pink bouganvilla; the lime green tracery of palms; pale blue sky.

I’d walk, slowly, carefully, to the hotel bar, savouring the citrus scent of the air. Uno cappucinno por favor. Cuban coffee: thick, sweet and bitter.

Ignore the tourists ordering pina coladas at eight in the morning, and their jocular, awkward speech. Sit on the patio and watch the lemon light turn to deep gold, sipping coffee, writing in my journal.

Wait for my mother, dressed in newly purchased cruise wear, finding her slow, ceremonious way to where I’m sitting.

The day would unfold, like the slow-motion opening of a flower, temporary and grace-filled.