My job requires constant travel, and I’ve discovered that in most cities, if you admit you are alone for dinner the hostess looks at you either with pity, because you obviously have no friends, or fear, because you are probably dangerously unstable. But this is not the case in New York City, which is the one place where I have no qualms about eating alone, even on a Saturday night. If you are eating alone in Manhattan, the hostess sensibly assumes that you are merely hungry. As an added bonus, since restaurants are small and tables are close, I can shamelessly listen to the conversations of the people around me.
I always bring a magazine with me so I can pretend to read while I eavesdrop, and I was pretending to read “Time” in a tiny bistro on the Upper East Side recently while I was listening to a well-dressed elderly couple talk about people they knew or had known. It was pretty mundane, but my ears picked up when the woman, with a voice that bore testimony to decades of cigarettes and gin said, “I told Jackie that Jack would break her heart, but she married him anyway.” This caused me to spin around so fast that I knocked over my glass of wine on the old man, which annoyed him. “Jesus!” he said while the woman looked at me and said, “Yes, I meant that Jackie.”
On another trip, things were getting pretty dull at a Greek place in Hell’s kitchen, and I actually was reading my magazine but as I started on my salad two African American women were seated next to me, and things instantly got interesting. The one woman was harping about her daughter’s boyfriend, who really did sound pretty worthless. “I told her to dump that loser,” the woman finally told her companion, only she did not say “loser.” She used a word I most commonly associate with men in white sheets, causing me to aspirate an olive and start coughing wildly. The woman smiled and patted me on the back while her friend looked concerned. “I can say that,” she said, not unkindly, “you can’t,” and I nodded meekly.
I was in a Mexican restaurant in Chelsea and the two middle aged couples next to me were talking politics while I drank sangria and pretended to read. Suddenly one of the guys told a joke about Hillary Clinton, the pope and a pickle. The joke was politically incorrect, in powerful bad taste and absolutely hysterical. I looked down at my magazine, closed my eyes tight, held my breath and willed myself not to laugh.
A moment later I started breathing again, and then the guy told a joke about John Boehner, Michelle Bachman and an elephant, which was even funnier than the first one. Somehow when he got to the punchline, (“Good God, it’s an elephant!!”) I managed to restrain myself and remain silent, although my chest was heaving like the sea. I caught the guy looking at me and then he was off: the jokes came fast and furious, one after another. Each one was more foul, more filthy and more hysterical than the last, and I was maintaining a stony silence while pretending to read “Newsweek.”
I was still maintaining tenuous control when he told a joke about Mitt Romney, a can of hairspray and a flock of sheep, but then I briefly made eye contact with him, and all was lost. I started by snorting sangria out of my nose, threw my head back and roared. I was pounding the table, stomping my feet and crying. I was laughing so hard that my breath came in short, hard gasps, my stomach hurt and other diners turned to look at me.
When I recovered, red-faced and sweating, I saw that the jokester looked pleased. “You’re a tough audience,” he said, refilling my Sangria from the pitcher on his own table. “Besides,” he said kindly, “if you’re going to eavesdrop,at least turn the page of your magazine occasionally; it’s more authentic.”