Half a chicken reuben, beets, cauliflower, hearts of palm, fennel, and frozen yogurt

I was reading A Thousand Plateaus back when I first met D., all intensities and becomings, a desiring machine, and it’s still like that for me, these dozen years later, only now we’re becoming old, our intensities cohere around the choice of vegetables from a too-long menu, enough for sharing, my desiring self complicit in the social reproduction of fro-yo. We sat and ate and pored over the leavings of the year or even two it’s been since we last saw each other, and the recitations were more of lessons learned than the complicated sets of steps and missteps that got each of us here. Like old times, we went out in search of treats, mine ending at the Pinkberry on Astor Place. We sat in that funny little park behind Cooper Union and I watched the pigeons courting while D. gave his pitch for Seattle. You can live in a house with the water right out your front door for less than you pay for a place in New York! he says. A hammock on the roof! The air smells like flowers! I don’t believe it.

 

Chickpeas and tomatoes and a frozen yogurt

Long story short, I ended up sitting on a bench inside the Atlantic Center mall, eating my chickpeas and watching the man inside the Liberty Travel office shuffle a stack of papers, fidget in his rolling office chair. I wonder if he’s received a call from anyone other than his mother since 1996. The mall radio station played UB40 and Bonnie Raitt. People sat mostly alone but also in pairs on the rest of the benches. Since it was after all a mall and I’m on a bit of a fro-yo bender, I nabbed a small cup of chocolate from the combo Pretzleriffic/Mrs. Fields/TCBY store just before you exit into the Hanson Place office lobby. Because it’s not after all actually a real mall but instead just poor imitations of suburban stores built around the LIRR/MTA station, the yogurt place was cramped, dirty, full of cardboard boxes and surly staff, and something about the yogurt tasted off. Still, I ate about half of it as I wandered upstairs to check the scene at Chuck E. Cheese.

 

Taco and a frozen yogurt

I rolled my eyes inwardly at the guy sitting across from me at the taco place. The seating is tight in there, and he wouldn’t move his Jarritos so I could fit my whole tray on the table! God! And then I looked at his face. D.! What are the chances in a town of ten million! It’s like when Emily Valentine returned on 90210! We caught up, though mostly on what we were each doing at the taco place alone in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. (I was killing time before the bus; D. was waiting for G. to text him back.) Then we left and D. got a pack of cigarettes and I got a frozen yogurt and he walked me to the train station where we lingered outside, reminiscing about Siberia, how neither of us ever left that place anything but blacked out, and agreed that we should definitely meet soon for a drink. I believe he still owes me for a year and a half of vodka-crans.

 

Mushrooms and tomatoes over pasta, plus frozen yogurt

As I scraped out the last mushroom from the bottom of my dish of pasta and MBWF downed the last bite of her banana, I asked plaintively, do you think we can get a treat anywhere? She walked toward the bathroom, turned back to me, and threw the universal sign for driving down the hill to get frozen yogurt: Holding an imaginary cup in her left hand, she made a scooping-spooning motion with her right and looked delighted. I hadn’t even dreamed we’d do something so extravagant, but why not? I decided the occasion called for something new, so opted for the chocolate and vanilla swirl instead of the coffee, and MBWF did too, though she also added sprinkles. (Should have gotten the coffee, she said about halfway through her cup.) We sat inside and ate and talked about how it feels like I’m moving to an entirely different city even though I’m only going to Brooklyn, a foreign land I actually return to every night. Asked to tote it up, I could hardly believe how little time I’ve spent in Queens that wasn’t at Shea since I arrived in 1993. It’s shameful, really.

 

Portobello, goat cheese, arugula, and black olive sandwich, plus frozen yogurt

I looked at S. over the top of her laptop and said, I cannot read one more word of this without a sandwich. So we popped down the block and ordered sandwiches and waited. And waited. And waited. The wait at this place is apparently the knock on them in Zagat’s, which I understood from the backchatter that followed one particularly angry pair who ended up getting theirs to go and storming out sans tip. Me, I didn’t mind much today, being pleasingly hot and relaxed and happy to sit and listen to S. talk about the hows and whys of his current project, which involves a lot of cutting, burning, and inking that I really don’t understand. We said goodbye at the corner of Union so she could go catch a show and I could head home. On my way, I stopped and picked up a blueberry frozen yogurt as a treat. I ate a couple bowls of this stuff initially as a joke–look at me partaking in this ridiculous trend!–but I’m a sucker for anything I do two or three times, and now I really like it.

 

Vegetable sushi roll special with miso soup and sesame noodles, plus coffee frozen yogurt

MBWF drove us down into Bronxville for lunch, mostly because we both wanted the coffee frozen yogurt and MBWF’s due diligence confirmed that the ice cream place in Cross County doesn’t have it. So we went to the sushi place I’d never been to before and I opted for the lunch special–a vegetable roll, a sweet potato roll, and miso soup, and MBWF ordered us some sesame noodles to split. We ate and chatted, aka MBWF listened to me go on and on about last night’s show. Then we spun around the corner and had the aforementioned frozen treat. Moods were a little low, I’ll admit–we’ve only got a few more chances to have lunch together before my lunchtimes move 90 minutes away. I might as well be moving to Pluto. The whole thing is sad, even though we both know we couldn’t have gone on like this forever. Before dropping me back at the office, we swung through the gas station and marveled at the decision to place the pumps pretty much inside a building. Light no matches, please!