Christmas Sushi

December 28, 2008

Our neighborhood was dead quiet last night, everyone away for the holiday. Deborah and I didn't go anywhere, just lounged around the house playing Scrabble and watching the Yule Log on our 10-inch TV. Our former neighbor Adie came by in the afternoon with homemade cookies. We told her the story of the sprinkler explosion, and she laughed, happy to now be living in the clean, fresh, hipster-free country air. "It's some kind of mass hallucination," she said about living in New York City. "People somehow convince themselves that it's okay to live in the middle of a garbage pile. I don't know how I was able to do it for so long."

And there I was, about to ask her if she missed the city. People who move out of New York are a lot like people who give up smoking. Their tolerance falls to zero.

Although she bought her house upstate by herself and lives alone, she has a friend helping with her renovations in exchange for free rent. When the work is finished, he'll be leaving, so it's hard to say how lonely she'll be. She told us about a handsome man who lives across the street from her — an architect of some kind, which is a convenient detail. Since Aide has a habit of dating guys who live across the street — she's dated four of them, and knows the pitfalls— she was making a conscious effort to avoid such a temptation with the new guy.

A friend of Adie's was visiting when the architect stopped by to ask Adie on a walk. Adie explained she had company and took a rain check.

"Who was that?" Aide's friend wanted to know.

Aide explained the situation and how she thought there might be some mutual attraction — he stopped by to invite her on a walk, after all — but that she didn't think it was a good idea to get involved.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" said her friend. "You move upstate, all alone, to the middle fucking nowhere, and there just happens to be a tall, dark, handsome single guy who lives right across the street, and you're not interested? What are the fucking chances?"

"I know," said Adie. "I don't know. We'll see."

Adie didn't stay long. She invited us to visit anytime, wished us a Merry Christmas, and went to deliver more cookies.

Deborah and I hadn't made any dinner plans and just hopped in the car and drove the empty streets looking for an open restaurant, finally settling on a sushi place on Bedford Avenue.

We sat next to a young couple who didn't seem to be a couple, exactly. They didn't seem to know each other very well, if at all. The guy was exceptionally clean, a pseudo-intellectual-type wearing a wool sport coat with a tartan scarf tied neatly around his neck. The girl was scruffier, sounded Polish, Eastern European anyway, with not much to say. The guy was telling her about apartment hunting. He'd seen a nice place that was out of his price range as a single, but too cozy for a roommate. "It would be a perfect place for a couple," he said.

I wondered if it was a hint. If it was, either the girl didn't pick up on it, or she willfully ignored it. The guy shrugged and said, "Maybe this will be the year I hit it big."

A thirty-something guy entered the restaurant. "One?" the waitress asked and sat him alone at the table to our other side. The waitress brought him a menu, but he never opened it. He looked around, then got up and left. I imagined he was looking for a dark, lonely place to brood all alone on Christmas, but the sleek, modern Amerasian decor and the upbeat, updated Christmas soundtrack didn't fit the bill.

They were playing Latin reinterpretations of classic Christmas carols. Have yourself a merry little Christmas cha cha cha. The guy commented about it to his date. "This music is weird," he said. "It's like Christmas in Hawaii or something."

The comparison wasn't quite accurate, but the girl perked up. "Two of my best friends just moved from there," she said.

"From where?"

"Hawaii."

"They moved from Hawaii to New York?"

"Yes. A couple of months ago."

"Why would they move from paradise to this shithole?" he asked.

She just shrugged and said they were moving to Italy in the spring.

The guy nodded, looked at the screen on his iPhone, clicked, shuffled, dragged, and pinched at the screen until their food came.

Deborah took lip balm from her purse, put it on and smacked her lips.

"I love my new bag so much," she said, as she put the lip balm away. She fondled the bag for a minute, then bent over and sniffed it. That's what this post was supposed to be about when I started it.