The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  I pointed to Signed, Sealed & Delivered.

  “Nice.”

  I admitted that I only had it on CD.

  “I’ll accept that,” Amanda said, and from the way she said it, I decided to ask for her phone number. She gave it to me, and I handed her my business card.

  “Senior Writer,” she said, reading the title. “OK, Senior Writer. Call me.”

  Our first date was dinner at a tapas restaurant in the Mission District. I ordered paella and fried plantains. I remember not knowing what to do with my arms. I tried putting them on the table. I tried putting them in my lap. Back on the table. I learned that she worked in public relations for the National Football League, and that she was constantly traveling around the country for promotional events. Often she was accompanied by famous football players. I found this attractive, but also intimidating. “Jamal Lewis says I have a nice butt,” she told me over dinner. It wasn’t Jamal Lewis, but another football player whose name I can’t remember. Sipping sangria, she listed her favorite activities, which included triathlons and long bicycle rides. “Basically, I’m looking for a guy who can keep up with me,” she said, and right then I wanted very much to keep up with her. She said that whenever she felt depressed, she would repeat her father’s mantra, “Positive, positive, positive!” Her parents had moved to Fort Lauderdale, where her father, a former salesman, ran a stickball league for retirees. He sent out an e-mail newsletter every month with statistics about the league—team standings, runs bat-ted in, earned run averages.

  “So, tell me more about you, Senior Writer.”

  I wondered if the fact that she already had a nickname for me meant that she needed shorthand to keep track of all the men who were trying to keep up with her.

  I told her who I thought I was, which means that I told her about the company I had founded, and that I used to be a management consultant and that I had an MBA. I told her that I played the trombone in a funk band, and that I could speak Japanese.

  “I hope this doesn’t bother you,” she said, “but of all the places I want to visit in the world, Japan is not very high on my list.”

  By this point, Momofuku, I had so little idea of who I was that I pretended the rank of Japan on her travel wish list wasn’t an issue. I changed the subject, commenting on her accent.

  “Are you from New York, Amanda?”

  “Westchester. You?”

  “Brooklyn. Then, when I was twelve, we moved to Long Island.”

  “My dad grew up in Brooklyn. Did you play stickball?”

  In my part of Brooklyn (or maybe it was just in my generation), stickball was not as popular as stoopball and punchball. We played some stickball, but not that much.

  “We played stickball all the time,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “If things work out, Senior Writer, maybe you can pinch-hit one day in the league.”

  I kissed her later that night, and in the future that I imagined, we would do triathlons and go on long bike rides. She would introduce me to famous football players, and we would visit her parents in Florida. I would play stickball with her father, hitting mostly triples and home runs. The next thing I remember about Amanda is waking up in her bed. I think it was two weeks later.

  “What’s your favorite book, Senior Writer?”

  Shota’s Sushi had usurped the top spot from Cooking Papa, and Ramen Discovery Legend was rising fast in my rankings.

  “Don Quixote.”

  “What’s so great about it?”

  I told her about how it was funny, and about the meta stuff.

  “What’s yours?”

  She pointed to a title in her bookcase across the room. It was the chick-lit best seller Good in Bed.

  “What’s so great about that one?”

  “It’s just so much like my life. It feels really real.”

  I wanted very much to know about her life, and I thought that maybe I could read about it in the book.

  “Can I borrow it?”

  The next day, she flew to Las Vegas for an NFL event. I gave her twenty dollars and told her to bet it on red at the roulette table. At night, my phone rang.

  “Sorry, Senior Writer. It landed on black.”

  She sounded slightly drunk.

  “It’s OK,” I said.

  Slot machines churned in the background.

  “Did you read Good in Bed?” she asked.

  “Just the first chapter.”

  “What did you think?”

  I wasn’t getting into it. But I felt that I should like a book that was like her life.

  “I like it.”

  “You don’t sound like you like it.”

  “I like it.”

  “Tell me, Senior Writer. Do you think you’re good in bed?”

  The question caught me totally off guard, and I realized there was no good way to answer it. If I said that I was good in bed, then I would sound conceited. If I said I was bad, then I would sound like I lacked confidence. Truth is, I had been having a problem in that area. After the gallbladder surgery, a kidney stone began wending its way through my ureter, and my urologist had prescribed Vicodin to dull the pain. Between the stone and the heavy doses of Vicodin, I wasn’t functioning normally. An old friend who’s a psychiatrist offered to send me some Viagra samples, and I had been taking them for a couple of weeks. I was too ashamed to tell Amanda.

  “It’s not whether I’m good,” I said, “but whether we are. A couple is good or not good in bed, not an individual person.”

  “Well, I don’t think I’m good in bed,” she said.

  Looking back, it was an opening, a moment when she had lowered her defenses and admitted that she was afraid of something. But I had no idea how to respond to such a thing. Or maybe I was afraid that if I did respond, she might return to her question about whether I was good in bed. So I didn’t say anything about it, and made an excuse to get off the phone.

  We had been dating for two months when she invited me to a ski house near Lake Tahoe that she rented with several friends. We made the four-hour drive in her Jetta on Saturday morning, and skied at Alpine Meadows in the afternoon. We bought groceries at a supermarket in Truckee, and in the kitchen I made tomato sauce and meatballs. The first night it was just the two of us, so after dinner we had sex on the brown, L-shaped sofa in the living room.

  “Do you think anyone can see in?” she asked in the middle.

  I looked behind me at the large, open window across the room.

  “The houses are pretty far apart,” I said, “and the snow is piled high next to that window. Would you feel better if we went into the bedroom?”

  “No,” she said. “I like this.”

  It was the one moment I remember feeling close to her.

  The next morning, I awoke alone, and when I got out of bed, a large man walked up behind me. Fully clothed, he began thrusting his hips toward me. “Yo, Andy, welcome to the house!” he said. It was Amanda’s friend Hadman, and he was mock buttfucking me.

  Momofuku, mock buttfucking is what some straight guys do to show they like each other. It’s so fake gay that you aren’t gay, but you still get to express your feelings for one another. I used to do it with my high school friends—Dan and Dave and Sam—when we got together during college vacations. Still, I wasn’t into it with Hadman because it was one thing to do that with your high school friends but quite another to have it done to you at seven in the morning by a six-foot-three, overweight stranger who has just arrived in Lake Tahoe. Nevertheless, I tried to play along. Hadman was being friendly, and I wanted to show Amanda that I could be buddy-buddy with her guy friends the way I always saw guys being buddy-buddy with each other on reality TV shows like The Real World.

  “Hey, Hadman. How’s it going?”

  “Dude, you keepin’ up with her?”

  “Tryin’.”

  Hadman finally left the room. I got into the shower and tried to forget what happened. Where was Amanda? She must have been making breakfast i
n the kitchen. I got dressed and went out to the living room. Amanda and Hadman were sitting at a long dining table, eating eggs and bacon.

  “See those two snowdrifts out there?” Hadman said. He was pointing with his fork at two white mounds outside the window. “We call those Sarah.”

  I poured some orange juice into a glass, joining them at the table. “Why Sarah?”

  “She’s a gal in the house,” Amanda explained. “Really big boobs. Hadman thinks the snowdrifts are the exact shape of her chest. He wants to date her, but I keep telling him, ‘Sorry, dude, not going to happen.’ ”

  “We’ll see,” Hadman said. “We’ll see.”

  Hadman had brought along his dog, a hulking Labrador mutt. I tried to pet him, but he drooled on my foot.

  “Oh, man, we had so much fun last weekend,” Hadman said to Amanda. “You were crazy!”

  Crazy?

  Amanda and Hadman began reminiscing about the weekend before. I felt so left out, but I also felt that I would not look like a guy who could keep up if I admitted feeling left out, so I didn’t ask them to change the topic or include me. As Hadman related the story—it involved a dance club and booze and a band—he kept sprinkling in the word bitch. He pronounced it “beeyotch.” Sometimes he would say it looking at Amanda.

  “Beeyotch!”

  And she would say it back to him.

  “Beeyotch!”

  Finally, he said it while looking at me.

  “Beeyotch!”

  He was expecting me to say it back to him, but I couldn’t say it. I just sat there thinking about what a great time Amanda must have had the weekend before, and how what she really wanted was to be with a man who enjoyed saying “Beeyotch!” What was wrong with me that I couldn’t be that kind of man? She wanted a guy who could get mock buttfucked by strangers and be OK with that. I pretended to laugh at Hadman’s jokes. Amanda was howling. Her laugh seemed less charming now. I was mad at her, but I had no idea why. I thought that maybe it was the Vicodin. Or maybe I knew why, but I was too afraid to acknowledge it.

  I had been silent for so long at breakfast that when we retreated to the bedroom to change into our ski clothes, Amanda knew I was upset.

  “Are you mad at me?” she asked.

  “No. I think it’s the Vicodin.”

  “You are mad at me. You know, he’s not even a close friend of mine. I’m just humoring him.”

  I denied again being mad, which made me even madder.

  “Maybe we should skip skiing today and go home,” I said.

  She heaved her ski boot off of her leg and threw it on the floor. She didn’t look at me.

  “Fine.”

  We packed our bags and loaded them into her car. Hadman waved good-bye, and I was embarrassed because he must have known we had gotten into a fight over the fact that I couldn’t handle him. It was a long ride. Amanda didn’t make it any easier by playing a cassette tape of James Taylor singing “Fire and Rain.” I thought about how she was always so confident and how tight her abs were and how I liked the shape of her breasts under her T-shirt and how I would never see them again. “We’re going to be together in this car for four hours,” she said. “Can we just pretend to like each other?” She had a great job and friends like Hadman, and she didn’t need me. We didn’t say anything else the whole way home.

  After she dropped me off, I called my sister, who still lives in Long Island. I told her what had happened and that it looked like it was the end of things between Amanda and me.

  “This doesn’t sound like the end,” my sister said. “It just doesn’t.”

  Amanda talked to her friends, and they must have said something similar, because she wanted to give our relationship another shot. I did, too, because all I had been thinking about since she dropped me off was how I couldn’t keep up with her and how I wished I could figure out what was wrong with me.

  The next weekend she went to the ski house but didn’t invite me, and that night I placed an ad on Craigslist. This was just a few weeks ago. The title of the ad was “Sushi Tonight?” and the woman who responded was Cathy, a petite twenty-four-year-old Chinese American with a beautiful body and an Ivy League degree. We met for dinner at Sushi Groove South, a sushi restaurant that has a deejay. Over dinner, I asked Cathy if she cared about the age difference between us.

  “I’m not an ageist,” she said. “Just as long ask you don’t need Viagra.”

  As she laughed, I excused myself to swallow one in the restroom. Later, as I was taking my clothes off in Cathy’s apartment, I remembered that Amanda had once said, “You can’t eat off a broken plate.” She meant that once one person in a couple cheated, the relationship was doomed. I tried not to think about that. I tried not to think about anything at all.

  The next week, Amanda e-mailed me a video of a man playing the trombone while dancing in a sexy way. Above the link she had written, “Can you play trombone like he can?” I saw it as a chance to prove that I could keep up. Maybe I was just feeling guilty. I grabbed my trombone and a James Brown CD and drove to her apartment. I put the CD into her CD player and skipped to the song “Papa Don’t Take No Mess.” It starts with a solo by Fred Wesley, James Brown’s longtime trombonist.

  Amanda sat on her couch, watching. “Show me what you got!”

  I pulled my horn out of its case, screwed together the bell and slide sections, and slipped in the Bach 7 mouthpiece. Then I tried to do a striptease while trombone-synching along with Fred Wesley. I slid my trombone slide when Fred slid his, and tried to move my hips like the guy in the video. But I was too self-conscious, and not very sexy. I got my jeans partly off, but I was too embarrassed to go further. I went to the couch to kiss Amanda; she didn’t seemed turned on. Mostly, she looked sorry for me. The next weekend, she left for Lake Tahoe again. I was researching a magazine story in my apartment when my doorbell rang.

  “Buzz me up, Senior Writer.”

  She had come home early from the ski house. I thought it was because she missed me, but it was because she wanted to break up with me.

  “I feel like you’re not really there,” Amanda said. “I think you have some things to work on before you can be in a relationship.”

  I pretended not to know what she was talking about, and asked her to reconsider. I sat down on the sofa in my living room. Amanda tried to hug me, but I pushed her away.

  “You don’t have to get violent,” she said.

  Soon after, Amanda walked out the door, and when she was gone, Momofuku, do you know what I thought about? I thought about how I would never get to play stickball with her father. And there was something so horrible about that, something that made me feel so alone in the world, that I posted an ad on Craigslist with the title “Drinks Tonight?” A serious woman who spoke fluent Italian and worked in human resources responded, and all we did was have a drink, but after the date, I still felt this unbearable loneliness. The next day, I posted another Craigslist ad, and it didn’t help. The day after that, when I sat on the couch for my therapy session, I talked about feeling so incredibly alone, and then, for the first time, I talked about the Craigslist ads and the America Online member directory and how I had dated Harue and Kim at the same time, and how I always cheated in relationships. I talked about everything I’ve told you, Momofuku, though in even less detail because I had only fifty minutes.