Olive Garden

When Arthur texts me saying he wants to “have dinner at Olive Garden on Monday,” I think he’s saying he wants to eat my pussy. His posh dialect is so antiquated that a phrase like “lady garden” seems well within his vernacular. And, even though my name is Olivia, he insists on calling me Olive. Still, I’m hesitant to respond as forwardly as the moment seems to call for. Although it’s unlikely—with his Oxbridge degree in comparative literature and philosophy, his tasteful pre-war Brooklyn Heights apartment, his vague hints at a royal title, and his salaried job, the responsibilities of which he describes as “thinking, mainly”—there is still a possibility that he is actually inviting me to the chain restaurant. I don’t want to insult him, in case he hasn’t yet heard that it is not a place real New Yorkers go. Or does he think it’s something I would like? Why, because I’m from New Jersey? Surely, he can tell that I’ve ascended those provincial roots. If he does want to go to the actual Olive Garden and was not speaking in innuendo, does he imagine us scoping it out together ironically, or is he making fun of me? Is it a test?

I see my reflection in the kitchen window, hunched over the counter, eating popcorn with all the overhead lights on. I tell him to send me a time and address, and I’ll be there. I figure this works for all possibilities. He replies, “2 Times Sq, New York, NY 10036. 7 pm.”

It isn’t until Monday, when I’m sitting on the packed rush-hour train, eye level with twill crotches and bouquets of roses, that I realize it’s Valentine’s Day. The men who surround me are all someone else’s idea of a catch. They’re wearing light-blue button-down shirts in plain, gingham, and pinstripe varieties. Blue for banking. Their jaws look tense, their eyes sharkish and tired. Listerine strips barely mask their breath, tinged with too much Nespresso. The more miserable and unappealing I find these men, the more I feel assured that there is someone for everybody.

I get out at 42nd Street to hoards of Midwestern couples on holiday. A pregnant woman with air-wrapped extensions ties her red, heart-shaped, foil balloon to a scaffolding rod, and widens her eyes in nervous excitement as though she’s committed an act of vandalism. Her beau reassures her that it will still be there after dinner, but she doesn’t seem convinced. I follow them into the swarming Olive Garden lobby. The host tells them that the online waitlist is at its two-hour cap, but they should keep checking just in case. The woman looks crushed and reminds her husband that she organized the entire trip itinerary—she’s seven months pregnant—and that his only responsibility was to manage dinner reservations. I feel sorry for her, but I’m relieved that we won't get in either. Then he texts me, “I’m upstairs by window facing hershey.”

“My date is upstairs,” I tell the host, and she points me to the escalator. I wonder if she remembers seating Arthur. I like the thought of her picturing us together as a couple.

I find Arthur in a rich burgundy cashmere sweater that fits his beautiful body perfectly. He’s still toned from a decade of fencing and martial arts, and his hairy belly is only just beginning to plump. I look at his thick eyebrows, his Roman nose, his leather belt worn just right, and his two handmade silver rings. Everything on his body, much like his apartment, is congruous. He retains nothing from an earlier, less cultivated period of his life because there is no such thing. Every item in his carefully curated collection appears to have been with him for decades, though he’s only twenty-six. I envy his dandy-like self-assuredness. Every couple of years, I buy a completely new wardrobe, thinking this one is timeless, this one is truly me. But after only a few months, I find myself putting everything in the dryer, hoping the clothing will lose functionality before I lose interest. We’ve crossed paths at a time when my hermit crab shell fits into his collection of trinkets, and I want to stay there forever. I want him to dress me up like a doll and take me everywhere.

He’s been writing something, probably a poem, in a little clothbound notebook. He puts it into his satchel before standing to greet me. I don’t understand his poems, a disconnect I blame on my weak vocabulary. But I always tell him I love them to encourage future gestures of vulnerability. I wish I could skip ahead to the part where we have decided to trust one another. Intimacy with him so often feels like a game of double-dutch that we’re both trepidatious about jumping into.

He kisses me on the cheek, gently taking my hand in his, and says, “Hello, darling,” in a stale tone. I smile timidly, and we both sit down. On the table in front of us are two cursive-laden pink cardstock menus detailing the prix fixe Valentine's Day dinner deal. For $69.99, we can get one appetizer, two entrees, a bottle of wine, and a dessert of our choice. The restaurant is packed to the gills. All of the tables, accustomed to seating tourist families of four, have been split up to accommodate the influx of couples. As a result, tables are several feet closer to one another than I imagine they would be on a typical night. It smells like a Victoria’s Secret.

“How on earth did you manage to get a table?” I ask him.

“A magician never reveals his secrets. You know that,” he says with a wink. I wonder if, through his confident English charm, he finagled his way in through the crowds, or if he cared enough to research the reservation rules and registered online hours in advance. He would never tell me.

Our server, a slight girl, a couple of months into her Accutane journey with a septum ring and maroon hair, comes by to ask if we’d like to start with any wine. Her name tag says “Riley.” She’s about twenty and either new to the city or invigorated by an impassioned pre-shift pep talk. Her voice is high-pitched with a phlegmy quality, residual from an adolescent speech impediment. Arthur asks her, with a hint of sarcasm, if she prefers the house red or white.

“I’m actually sober, but if you know what you’re going to order, I can tell you the chef’s pairing suggestions.”

“Hey, I’m sober too,” Arthur says, to my horror and Riley’s confusion. “She’s forcing me to drink this Valentine’s Day, the devil!” He points at me.

“Oh, um. Well, yeah, I’ll give you guys a minute to think about your order, and then I can tell you more about those pairings.” Her initial pep punctured, a thin stream of leaking air propels her aimlessly away from our table.

“Why did you say that?”

“Say what?”

“That you’re sober.”

“Oh, I was joking, of course.”

“You threw me under the bus! I would never force a sober person to drink.”

“Are you worried the waitress now thinks you’re a bad person?”

“I don’t want her to think that I don’t take sobriety seriously if that’s something she’s working through.”

“You’re too sweet, Olive,” he says with genuine affection, and I thank him, feeling puzzled still. Noticing my unease, he says, “Oh lighten up, it’s all jokes anyway. You’d never come here in earnest. We’ll never see any of these people again.”

I feel relief in the alliance he seems to have drawn between us, even at poor Riley’s expense, and in fact, at the expense of every other patron. I’m not just some random, unworldly girl being strung along for my beauty and my willing body. I’m a person of legitimate taste and sophistication. An equal, almost. I smile assuredly; he reciprocates, and we turn our attention to the menus in front of us.

There are more than a dozen takes on Alfredo, including an eye-catching photo of an appetizer I can’t place. It’s multiple deep-fried, parmesan-breaded lasagna pockets served over Alfredo sauce, coming in at 1,130 calories.

“You know what’s just occurred to me?” I ask him, preparing to share something I’ve thought about many times before and have discussed at length with others.

“What’s that?”

“You guys don’t have Italian-Americans in London.”

“Well, of course not. We don’t have French-Americans either,” he says before adding, condescendingly, “And did you know that we don’t call Black Brits ‘African-Americans’ either?”

“No, of course. It’s just funny to me that the Italians in London are just, like, actual Italians. Whereas growing up in New Jersey, being Italian is a whole other thing. You guys are totally deprived of Guido culture, is what I mean to say.”

“You’re right,” he concedes. I unfold my napkin and smooth it out over my lap. He watches me but leaves his on the table.

Riley returns, still sweet, but less open as she goes through the motions of taking our order. She probably felt kinship with us initially. I assume she moved here to pursue the arts in some capacity. Probably theater, maybe painting. It’s evident that Arthur, with his poems, and I, dressed like a chic French witch, are closer to the artist types she hopes to mix with, far more so than the other patrons. But with his careless joke, built on the pretense of a bond with her, a joke that he’s surely since forgotten about, he’s cast her out into the abyss.

In the warmest, most appreciative tone I can muster, I ask for the eggplant parm, because it seems least likely to give me food poisoning. Arthur orders the “Tour of Italy”: a platter of lasagna, chicken parm, and fettuccini alfredo, because he finds the name funny. We agree to share fried mozzarella sticks and settle on red wine.

“Have you ever been in love?” I ask him when Riley walks away. I want desperately to crack his shell. Given his book collection alone, I know he possesses a rich inner world, but I can never get him to stay on one subject for long enough to access it.

“Well, I’ve been married,” he responds promptly.

“What?”

“Did I never tell you about my wife in Algeria?”

“No. You have never told me about your wife in Algeria.”

“Oh. I could have sworn I had.”

Well, go on, my face pleads. His phone dings.

“Sorry, just one second.” He flashes me the charming smile of a parent taking a work call on vacation. He laughs at a text from someone he has a real, easy connection with, maybe his ex-wife. I prepare my mouth to ask him what’s funny, but he intercedes, suddenly anxious to tell me about his marriage.

“My brother and I went to Algiers a couple of summers ago and met these Canadian sisters on holiday. Dancers. We latched onto one another at first because we could all speak English together. They felt limited in public by all the religious laws, so we bought rings at a street market and pretended to be two married couples for the rest of our trip. We’d go out to dinner and introduce them as our wives. We booked a hotel with two beds and all got a little bit too into it.”

“What do you mean you got too into it?”

“We started fighting like married couples and all.”

“How did you decide who went with whom?”

“We paired off naturally because of age.”

“So were you, like, actually... involved?”

“Well, yes...” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“Did you fuck in the room next to your brother?” I whisper, sliding my elbows towards him on the table.

“Hey! You can’t ask me such vulgarities!” he scoffs, lightheartedly, evading the question while maintaining enough severity to make me recoil in shame for crossing the invisible threshold into perversion.

Our wine arrives, and he deftly spins his glass to aerate it. I laugh, thinking he’s doing a bit, playing the part of a pretentious European at a shitty American restaurant, but the motion comes so instinctually that it might be sincere.

“You’re allergic to answering questions directly.” I feel my feet rocking slightly on the carpeted floor.

He swishes the wine around in his mouth and makes a sour face as he swallows it. He looks at me and raises his eyebrows. I’m worried I confronted him too aggressively.

“It tastes like Manischewitz,” I say, as if I think that’s a bad thing. He sits, unfazed, taking another sip of wine, feeling no urgency to respond to my probe. I defused the tension too quickly, and now I look weak.

“Ordered special tonight for my Jewish-American Princess,” he squeezes my knee under the table and leans in as if to tell me a secret. Our elbows clink.

“I’m not allergic to anything, Guppy. But I’m gonna give you anaphylaxis tonight when I throat fuck you.” He smirks and inches his hand up my pantyhosed thigh underneath my skirt. I feel a stirring in my vagina. It's a tiny bit itchy in the way that all vaginas are when you think about them too much. I suck my teeth to suppress a blushing grin.

“Do you want that?” he whispers.

I nod.

He’s looking me dead in the eyes. A mean smile creeps across his giant mouth as he watches me fall back under his spell. He pulls his hand away abruptly and starts laughing with an air of detachment. His eyes have gone cold; he’s somewhere else entirely. I grab a mozzarella stick the moment the platter hits the table. He watches me remove it from my mouth, almost as quickly as it went in.

“Changed your mind?”

“No, it’s just too hot.”

“Good girl. I want you to get fat for me tonight,” he says. I roll my eyes a little bit. He’s more than once invoked my “cute little tits,” which I less than appreciated. In the months before meeting him, I unintentionally lost fifteen pounds, knocking my boobs down three cup sizes. I had eliminated dairy, alcohol, gluten, and sugar, trying to cure a medication-resistant yeast infection. Relief only came when I ended things with the avoidant man I was seeing. I found myself back in my teenage body and increasingly suspicious that any man attracted to me was a pedophile. 

“I can never tell when you’re joking.”

“I’m always joking,” he says, flippantly, as though I should find that comforting. He takes a bite of a mozzarella stick, twisting the stretched, melted cheese around his finger. He holds his greasy, cheese-covered finger to my mouth, and I consider whether sucking it off would read as playful or desperate. Before I come to a decision, he pulls it away, wiping it off onto the table. “No, stay skinny for me, babe. I like you skinny.”

I pour us more wine, emptying the bottle.

“Babe,” I imitate his accent.

“Babe,” he butchers an American one.

We look at each other, feeling the wine now, and start to giggle.

“There was this horrible couple in my co-op in college. Every time I’d be with them in the communal kitchen, it was, ‘Hey, babe? I asked you to put the soup on the oven, babe. Didn’t I?’” I raise my eyebrows, embodying their stern faces. “‘Um, babe? That’s called the stove, babe.’ ‘Okay, babe? Obviously, you know what I meant.’ ‘Babe, I really don't like your tone, babe.’”

“You’re quite good at impressions,” he tells me, laughing hard.

Our entrees arrive, and I thank Riley, telling her, truthfully, that the mozzarella sticks were delicious. Arthur requests another bottle of wine, and places an order for tiramisu.

“It’s not so bad,” I tell Arthur of my eggplant parm.

“Of course not, it’s chemically engineered and focus-grouped into oblivion to be delicious. Also, you’re drunk,” he teases and wipes sauce from the corners of his mouth before dropping his napkin onto the floor.

“You’re drunk,” I say.

“I do feel I’ve been on a tour of Italy, and at what a bargain.” He looks at me intently. “Olive. After Olive Garden tonight, let’s get a hotel.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to get a room? It’s Valentine's Day.”

“We got in here, didn’t we? New York’s hottest reservation,” he says. “You’re so bound by logistics.”

“I know, I am.”

“Stop worrying so much, babe. Leave some room for magic.”

“I’m trying.”

“My neurotic little Jewess. Everything is going to work out fine. You just have generational trauma.” He kicks my feet playfully under the table and smiles at me in a way that feels personal and unrehearsed. Two glasses of wine in, he’s unlocked a giddy but deeply serious, almost childlike energy. The corners of his mouth are stained with marinara sauce, and I can picture exactly what he must have looked like as a little kid. I’m overcome with tenderness for him.

I wonder again if he put our names into Olive Garden’s digital queue in advance. And has he already booked us a hotel room? There’s something so touching about imagining him making arrangements for us in advance. He obviously likes me enough to spend Valentine’s Day with me. Even shrouded in impenetrable irony, that must count for something. Why do I always assume that men know what's actually happening? He’s figuring it out in real time just like me.

I sink into my seat.

“Really, there’s no need to be so anxious. It’s Valentine’s Day, and I like you.” His simple, direct language reminds me of a sweet, naive high school romance. He takes hold of my hand, lifting it from the table, and plants a soft kiss on each of my knuckles. He’s smiling at me, his eyes intent on mine, still a little bit crazed.

“I like you too,” I say, patting his hand. “And I really like hotels.”

“Oh, I love hotels,” he says, an earnest grin forming, “And frankly, I love Olive Garden, and Olive, I love you!”

We look at each other like we’ve hit a pedestrian on a remote country road and are deciding whether or not to keep driving. His shoulders stiffen. I see the wine evaporate from his bloodstream as his warm, rosy cheeks go pale.

“I don’t love you,” he says, with the tone of a philandering father revealing his divorce to his unsuspecting child. Cold, final, no room for questions.

I look at him, stunned by the finality of his statement. “Yeah, I mean, we probably don’t know each other well enough yet for that.”

“I’m sorry.” Now he looks like the child of said divorce. His mouth is bent into a guilty frown. The bottom right corner of his face is twitching, an anxious tic that’s never surfaced in my presence before. I feel the urge to comfort him, or at least escort him to other options.

“It’s fine. I mean, it’s too soon.” 

I want him to respond: I’m just not there yet. Or, I love this and that about you, and I’m loving getting to know you. ‘I don’t love you’ imparts a complete absence of love that I can’t imagine saying to someone unless they truly meant nothing to me. Its extremity feels almost impossible to comprehend. I need him to acknowledge the distinction between not being in love with someone and plainly having no love for them.

“Can we just pretend I didn’t say that? Like, forget it completely.” He can barely look at me. He’s playing with his rings. It occurs to me that “I don’t love you” might have been the only one hundred percent truthful thing he’s ever said to me.

Our tiramisu arrives with the check. Riley tells us to take our time, but her loyalty has clearly shifted to the people on the two-hour digital waitlist. Arthur gives her his credit card, and she runs it through a portable kiosk. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom.

Standing up, I’m much drunker than I realized. On the toilet, I let my vision go in and out of focus, absorbing the blackness of my skirt to stave off the seeds of a migraine. I try to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, to calm myself, but I keep getting the order wrong, and it’s having the opposite effect on my vagus nerve. Folded over, I scan the smudges on the tiled floor and the scuffs on my leather boots. My head is positioned just a foot over the crotch of my black underwear, where I notice a dollop of what looks like Alfredo sauce, or, to put it in medical terms, cottage cheese. I wipe it out with toilet paper and discard it into the toilet.

Back at the table, Arthur looks at me with raised eyebrows, trying to look fun, gentle, and

a little contrite.

He’s eaten half of the tiramisu and tries to spoon-feed me a bite. I shake my head.

“I have a fucking yeast infection.”

“What’s that got to do with tiramisu?”

“Sugar exacerbates it.”

Talking with him so openly about my venereal problem feels strangely intimate. I hope I’m coming across as someone more comfortable with my body and sex than I actually am. I have a flashing thought that maybe now he’ll love me, and I wince. How pathetic.

“Well, how about that hotel?”

“I can’t have sex either.”

“No tiramisu, no sex, what can you do?” I can tell he wanted this to sound playful, but his genuine frustration pokes through. He’s watching the skinless, premature animal he’s been poking at take its last labored breaths, and he can only wonder: what will I play with now?

I hope he’ll say, Let’s go anyway. We can just lie together. I can hold you. But he says nothing.

I look up at him on the slow-descending escalator, but I can’t see him. I can only see myself through his eyes, in higher resolution. I see my gold-plated earrings, bearing their nickel cores, tugging down on my lobes. My bangs are defying layers of products and applied heat, giving in to the whim of my cowlick. I feel the thermal tights under my stockings bunching at my crotch and in the toes of my shoes. I feel the lack of oxygen in my underwear and my pores, spackled with concealer, suffocating. I think of the piles of rejected garments I auditioned for tonight’s outfit, waiting for me on my bedroom floor. I’m wearing a costume, my best impression of someone I thought he would take more seriously than me. Underneath these layers, my body resists the transformation. I'm still just a girl. 

We enter succeeding compartments of the revolving door, and it spits me out first. The February wind beats the heart-shaped balloon against the scaffolding it’s tied to. Slowly leaking helium, it waits to be cut loose.