Our guest judge, Janice Eidus, wrote of Alice’s essay: “I admire how the writer uses food as a romantic metaphor in such an original way. Also, the ending is truly an ‘inevitable surprise.'” This week, we share Alice Lowe’s finished essay, followed by an excerpt from the original draft she entered, with my responses. Alice worked to expand the ending of the original, which paid off nicely. I strongly believe in sharing drafts for response and then working with the response to grow one’s writing in the areas that need development. Response is different than critique. Critique means in its root “to tear apart.” “Response” is a “reaction, as that of an organism or a mechanism, to a specific stimulus.” The words of a draft are a stimulus to which the reader reacts. The better we get at offering our reactions in language that owns them as our own, the more benefit we can be to the writers we work with.For a refresher on how to do this, see the three-step response method article. And don’t forget to visit our current contest guidelines page. This time, in addition to response from me on the work you send in, there are cash prizes and the award of free consults by phone. –Ed.

Five Stars: An Adventure in Amatory Dining
by Alice Lowe

The spark between us sizzled with delicious promise, like bacon crackling over a hot burner. We met at a holiday party over salmon savories and eggnog and discovered that we both had tailless white cats, loved nineteenth-century music and between-the-wars English literature, relished ethnic food, and were quite smitten with each other. But an immediate liaison was taboo — no, not adultery; think of lesser infractions, like employee/boss, student/teacher, Capulet/Montague. I was willing to shrug it off, but he was apprehensive, said he wanted to abide by the rules. I respected his integrity but later learned why he was being cautious; he’d gotten his fingers scorched going down this path before.

**** 

So we embarked on a platonic but provocatively spiced friendship, the frisson of possibility always bubbling out from under the lid. Forays for food became our preoccupation, a quest for the new and unusual or the comfort food, just like mom’s, at neighborhood haunts. The Japanese Noodle House in Kearny Mesa was our prize discovery; gyoza like savory pillows of paradise, cold chewy soba noodles pungent with onions, seaweed and wasabi. At the sushi place on University we would order the special for two, a boatload of sushi, artfully composed pairs of nigiri displayed on a seaworthy wooden vessel. I would trade my unwanted uni — an ochre globule that looked like brains, said to be a delicacy when eaten fresh from its spiny shell — for his salmon roe, each glistening orange marble popping on my tongue in a salty surprise. Everything else we shared equally, accompanied by carafes of hot sake.

***

We weren’t seeking haute cuisine. Acolytes of Jonathan Gold in Los Angeles and Calvin Trillin in New York, we scoured San Diego for its well-kept secrets: a cactus and potato taco in the Barrio; a chocolate-cherry muffin fresh out of a café’s oven at 7 a.m.; the perfect slice of anchovy and garlic pizza. The sandwiches we took to the park were from the deli on Fifth, chicken salad that we agreed was the best; something about it, was it a hint of curry? Mexican take-out was from the little place in Hillcrest where Bronx Pizza is now — El Charro, I think it was called — with the smooth and sultry, bitter dark chocolate and chile molé. He was a fearless and inquisitive eater, and I was a willing, though sometimes wary, accomplice. At an Argentinean steakhouse in Tijuana he selected an appetizer of grilled pancreas. It was cooked and served in small bits, and I picked out the smallest one on the plate, expecting it to taste like liver. I was agreeably surprised at the pleasant piquancy that disguised anything offensive or for that matter unique — the fundamental flavor of pancreas, whatever that might be — it was just spicy morsels of lean meat. I balked at the brain soup, in spite of its garlic and herbs perfuming the air with promise, but he insisted I take “just one bite,” as one would to a child. I dipped my spoon into the broth. “That doesn’t count,” he said as he added some solid matter to my spoon. Repulsed by the gray, gristle-like blob I swallowed it whole, succeeding in avoiding both the taste and texture.

****

We were prosciutto and melon, grilled cheese and tomato soup, ideal dinner companions. On Monday nights he would cook for me and we would watch “Brideshead Revisited” on PBS, relishing each episode, absorbed in its almost word-for-word faithfulness to the novel. In homage we planned to search out a bottle of Chateau Lafaurie-Peyraguey to drink with strawberries, but we never did. He was an innovative and exacting chef, using the finest ingredients, everything fresh and from scratch, whether an authentic recipe or one of his own creation. His pasta sauce would simmer for hours with imported linguiça instead of plain old Italian sausage; he used marrow bones for the stock of his hot and sour soup and wouldn’t consider substituting ordinary mushrooms for dried cloud ears. He would wow me and woo me with his culinary creations — our meals were subliminal sexual encounters, eroticism heightened by abstinence. But aphrodisiacs are supposed to be a prelude to heightened physical pleasure; for us the food was becoming the end in itself.

*****

We continued to honor the spirit of the law if not the letter — or maybe it was the letter but not the spirit — and we didn’t seem to mind as perhaps we should have. When after some months our obstacle was removed, we didn’t rush into each other’s arms for the long-awaited consummation, our reward for fair play. I traveled for a month, my first trip to Europe. On scenic or arty postcards I regaled him reports of icy fresh cockles and eels at street stalls in Amsterdam, lemony weissworst in Munich, gnocchi in Milan, the trattoria near Il Duomo where I ate most of my meals in Florence. I wasn’t distracted by eagerness or longing, and by the time I returned, I realized that it was only his dexterity in the kitchen that turned me on. His ardor had clearly cooled as well — I had gone from being an exotic cloud ear to an ordinary mushroom. We had been enjoying each other’s company and our gastronomic adventures; we didn’t see that the promise of passion that we thought we were fanning and feeding had withered like week-old greens, its bubbles dissipated like flat champagne. Maybe the pressure was too great, expectations that reality couldn’t possibly live up to. And with our failure hanging over us like a curdled hollandaise, we brought an end to the feast. We folded our napkins, pushed back our chairs and politely excused ourselves from the table.

Sheila’s Response to Alice on the First Draft

Here is the ending of the draft that Alice sent first, along with my comment back to her. I am very pleased that the final ending is longer and that it ends with the action of pushing back from the table, which works literally and figuratively and perfectly twines the two threads of the essay together — food loving and loving for a while being with one another:

We continued to honor the spirit of the law if not the letter — or was it the letter but not the spirit? But then the situation changed, the obstacle was removed. We rushed into each other’s arms, metaphorically anyway, but that was the beginning of the end. Our ardor had cooled, its bubbles dissipated like flat champagne, its essence curdled like a bad hollandaise. Maybe the pressure was too great, expectations grown beyond any possible reality. Or maybe it was just about the food, and we’d had our fill.

This is what I wrote back to Alice:

Oh, too bad. I wanted the romance to go on! It is hard to feel ready to leave the essay — we see the romance for so much of the essay, I feel left out of seeing what when on as the bubbles dissipated, the sauce went bad. More, more, please.

An idea is to leave the essay before the obstacle is removed and the romance flounders. Maybe you can work with “dried cloud ears.” What an image. Can that describe somehow how you were in this relationship that couldn’t be consummated? It seems that a relationship like this is like trying to substitute ordinary mushrooms for the delicacy of a full relationship or maybe the other way around — this relationship was like a delicacy, and we can’t have only delicacy and no ordinary. I know you can work it out using the image as metaphor for the relationship and its downward spiral and then proceed to the dissipated bubbles and curdled sauce, showing some of that in the behavior and words of the two.

I want to see what went wrong with the same zest that I see the food adventures.

The new ending is satisfying. When you compare the ending of the first draft entered with the revised draft’s ending, you see how keeping the essay’s characters on stage makes all the difference in keeping the reader involved.

Bravo, Alice!