The Dinner Party

Still, the world finally felt like it was just there, within reach. I was no longer a kid, but I didn’t feel like an adult. I struggled in the classes meant to prepare me for the law school where I thought I’d apply. I didn’t know how to find myself, largely because I didn’t know how to say who I was. I circled around the literary magazine; I avoided the creative writing classes. Instead of returning home, I spent my last summer before senior year in the city. My roommate E. and I had stolen one of our mattresses from the dorm, and we carried it on our heads one hot, summer afternoon as we trekked across 125th Street to the sunny bedroom we had rented off craigslist in East Harlem. That was the first friendship where I felt as though I found someone who shaped the world to herself, who ignored the limitations I had felt so boxed in by. We spent the long, languid nights talking to each other. I can’t remember what we ate. It didn’t occur to me to be envious of the people eating in the nice restaurants because neither of us could afford it. Food that summer felt secondary to whatever education I was finally imposing on myself, one that finally let me believe that the city belonged to me, too.

When I was 21, I entered a relationship with someone who loved to cook. He came from a wealthy family and his father eventually purchased us a beautiful apartment on 12th Street, a single floor of a townhouse, with high ceilings, fake moldings, and French windows. It was easy to play house. We filled the kitchen with the most expensive things: English pottery, copper pots and pans, elegant steak knives, and pearl-handled oyster forks. I found it uncomplicated, in this environment of plenty, to be generous. I became more relaxed, but not any more secure. Mostly, we cooked a lot. For friends, for his family. His preoccupations possessed an aura of slick ostentation (an espresso machine worth thousands, for example). I discovered fine goods like white truffles, greasy Spanish almonds, and sea salt harvested by hand in France. I can recall his small corrections (“you’re slicing that onion wrong”), that I interpreted at the time as helpful. I think I knew, deep down, that we often veered, when entertaining, into a place that wasn’t quite comfortable, even if it was convivial. My own understanding of cooking for people was skewed. I interpreted hosting dinners as a means to show something off—whether it was skill, overpriced ingredients, technology. Meanwhile, as the years went on, I was falling more and more out of love.

I had discovered that I wanted to write, and my wanting—different from the actual act itself—became proportional, I suspect, to my growing dissatisfaction within the relationship. Whatever we had built didn’t make room for writing, which requires isolation but also a kind of introspection and self-awareness that I didn’t have, and that materialism didn’t bring. Though I was too immature to articulate it at the time, I was beginning to see how being in possession of wealth often confused one’s own privilege for something else—superiority, knowledge, taste. Eventually, with an acceptance letter to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I was out. I was not entirely disentangled, but on my own, living off a fellowship. Here, in the midwest and her wide open skies and icy planes, was legitimacy.

I spent my first year living with a poet named Sara in a pretty farmhouse with a porch and a yard full of weeds. I wrote upstairs, at a tiny desk, in a bedroom whose walls were painted baby blue, with a large window from which I could watch the street. My second year, I moved into a larger house on Dodge Avenue, its lawn surrounded by a stately brick wall, with a formal dining room covered with floral wallpaper, and a swinging door that led into a kitchen with steel cabinets and coiled springs on the electric stove. We could hardly afford to fill the house with furniture, and the heating bill in the bitterest winter months was criminal. But I hung my pretty cotton curtains from my bedroom windows and I wrote and wrote. When I wasn’t writing, we cooked for each other.

I never loved cooking more. We came together constantly over food. Sometimes weekly, in workshop, with our teachers cooking us meals or baking us pies. We came together when distinguished writers came to town, hosting them in these large houses of ours that weren’t useful for much else. Or we saved up our own money and splurged on creating feasts for ourselves. These dinners were seductive. We laid out lace-thin ivory tablecloths that we discovered in thrift stores and stuck cheap wax candles into wine bottles. We put on music (Grant Green, Solange, Norwegian folk music) and we spoke passionately of literature, television, our lives—of the novels and short stories we were writing, of the poets (who we thought were mad, and drank too much, but who possessed enviable kind of self-destructive quality, as if the ghosts of former teachers like Raymond Carver and John Berryman still hovered nearby). It was always humble food. Pastas and stews and roasts. Recipes from our mothers. You have to understand: those were long winters, weeks could drift past me like glaciers. Iowa City could feel empty, the gray corn fields flooding the horizon. I never connected that my own happiness, the fact that I felt everything was possible, might have stemmed from the fact that I was finally writing, not tentatively or secretively, but pages and pages.

Spring always came very late, and with it suddenly a blur of green grass that constantly needed to be mowed, the thrum of the cicadas outside, the heat. There was a final rush of gathering before the end of the semester, warm dinners on the porch or picnics in the garden, a kind of bloom returning to all of us. Our novels were a little bit fatter and longer, our hearts hopeful of what we believed we might be able to do.

What happened between then and now is not especially interesting. I finally jettisoned the boyfriend of my twenties. I left bad jobs and found new ones. I submitted my stories to editors and received kind rejection notes. I got others published. I traveled alone—to Tokyo, to Venice, to Rio de Janeiro. I kissed people I shouldn’t have and then suddenly, like the break of an ocean wave on the shore, I fell in love, got married, and settled into a new kind of maturity. My cooking got a little better, less showy, I think, but more confident. Braised meats. Poached fish. French apple rum cakes. And even if my dinners lost a little bit of the allure they acquired in Iowa—now a little less bohemian and a little more bourgeois (nicer wines, better cookware)—there was something genuine I had finally discovered in myself, a true pleasure in inviting friends into my home, in offering them my food, in weaving their thoughts and ideas against mine, in gently sliding into a state of intoxication that could remain with the night. The last dinner I threw—before the pandemic arrived, before we crossed over to the other side of hibernation—was approximately a year ago, for a few friends at the end of February. We were apprehensive to meet, but we did it anyway. One friend was pregnant, another newly sober. I cooked beef bourguignon, the smell of the meat slowly roasting in my oven all afternoon filling the apartment like it was Christmas. I stood as I peeled the potatoes, my feet already aching. But I was calm. My path felt more set.

For the last several months, I have been at home, barely venturing outside some weeks. The days fall dark without warning, and if I don’t sit facing the windows, I can’t remember what time I ate lunch or what my body needs. Time is marked by packages that arrive at the door, the days when my Bird of Paradise has sprouted a new leaf. I write and I read. I take walks. I call people. I watch junk television. My husband and I move around each other like the different orbiting moons of Jupiter. We are lucky, I know this. I don’t miss the grind, of saying yes to people when I should say no, of staying for one more drink when I should be on my way home.

When I think of other dinners and dinner parties, I look to literature. There’s James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, where that first meal between David and Giovanni is pure chemistry and anticipation, a kind of intoxicated love everyone else can see. Often, a meal creates an occasion, it allows for a pivotal moment in the narrative, where two characters will meet fatefully for the first time (Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus) or where conflict is inevitable (Herman Koch’s The Dinner). There are dinners where a character isn’t supposed to see something and does (the stories of Lucia Berlin), and dinners where someone realizes something about the world they hadn’t understood before (Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country). There are dinners where lust or contempt manifest for the first time. Meals can be elaborately described (or the remains of them, as in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun) or they are glossed over, often the afterthought to the actual story (Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast). Just as with sex or happiness, a meal in literature isn’t actually very useful on its own. It’s too banal, too bourgeois, though that, too, is its own literary device, a way to convey the stifling boredom that comes with following convention.

Still, the dinner—or the party, really—that came to mind in writing this is the one in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. On that fateful day that spans the length of the novel, Mrs. Dalloway sets out through the streets of London to gaze at Mrs. Pym’s stall of sweet peas, carnations, and roses from which she will choose her arrangement for the evening. Woolf writes the opening scene with a sense of jubilation, though it is not without the weight devastation of what has just occurred:

For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven—over. It was June.

In the first few months that followed the pandemic, I felt unmoored and bewildered. I couldn’t understand how the ease with which I had moved through the world was now lost to me, to all of us. I can remember with picture-like clarity scenes from the end of February—of dancing in a hot, crowded room full of strangers on the Lower East Side, of stepping out into the cold to stand with a friend smoking a cigarette. Did any of us believe that life could suddenly stop like this? As the months have passed into another year, I have settled into a tedium of acceptance. But soon, I hope, the pandemic will finally be over. Maybe, like in Mrs. Dalloway, it will be June. Likely, a little later than that. We will face immeasurable loss. What we will have crossed, the grief we will carry, will now be ever-present—in what’s changed, who is missing, in the spare mask I’m certain I’ll find in my coat pocket next winter.

As I write this, a bowl of white beans are soaking beside me. They’re for the dinner I’ll make today. The leftovers will last us for a few more meals. Still, it’s hard not to try to think of a time much later from now. When, eventually, I will force myself to actually tidy up the living room, which has been a mess with our winter coats slung over chairs, my books piled next to me on the dining table. I will buy some flowers. I will set out plates and wine glasses. I will light the candles, and put on music. I’ll have meant to have changed into nicer clothes but will have run out of time. Because by then our friends will have arrived. I’ll hear the elevator first, their laughter in the hallway. I’ll set out a bowl of olives. The apartment will smell of cake, now cooling on the table. We’ll open champagne, maybe. There will be conversation: catch-ups; sincere questions; thoughtful, rambling responses. I’ll be able to say everything to my friend across the table with a glance. Jokes and gossip will slide into more earnest discussion and debate. I’ll open another bottle, insist no one go, please, I’ll say, stay for one more. We will have the whole night ahead of us.

Thessaly La Force is a writer and features director at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.