Free Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent

was still snowing lightly, but even the waters of Hell Gate seemed calm. I was alone, on the snowy banks of the river. In the silence immediately following the storm, the lights of the Upper East Side and Harlem seemed to grow brighter. Without any real sense of why I was doing it, I stood up, took out my iPhone, inserted my earphones, and scrolled through iTunes until I found a samba.
    Suddenly, I was immersed in Afro-­Brazilian drumming. I began to move my feet, hesitantly at first, and then the samba just
spilled
out of me, and I felt my soul move—in my hips, my stomach, my feet, my ass.
    I wanted desperately to call Edward, to shout, “Yes!” into the phone. But it was late, and Edward was probably already asleep.
    And, anyway, he knew. “I hope you’re happy, darling” contained no question mark. In my mind, there was no punctuation at all. It was a floating affirmation, as simple and as complex as smiling.

9

    Oysters Rockefeller
    Avocado Salad with Homemade Blue Cheese Dressing
    Tarte Citron
    Pinot Blanc
    M y transformation didn’t happen overnight. It was gradual. I still took the lonely walks along the East River, but now I plugged headphones into my phone and began to listen to music. I went to parties, to the theater. I ran six miles a day, and I started to reread the poetry I had once loved as a university student.
    The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
    Crushed.
    â€œThe grandeur of God?” I don’t know if I shared poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s religious convictions. If I believed in anything during those years, it was the grandeur of dinner. I believed in the magic of Edward.
    My job also buoyed me. When I first arrived I was unschooled in the world of New York tabloids. When my editor told me to go out and “get a wood,” I had no idea that it was slang for the front-­page story. Nor did I understand when he sent me on a “door knock,” by which he meant an ambush in which you arrive without warning and knock on the potential interviewee’s door. I also had no idea how to proceed when he barked, “Look for more johns.” But I quickly got the hang of it.
    On occasion, Melissa and I bitterly complained about our circumstances at work, both of us veteran reporters approaching middle age and the respectability that was supposed to attend that, but didn’t. Mostly, though, we shook it off, drawing some kind of reassurance that no one else was given any kind of special treatment at the paper. We sought ways to make our workdays more enjoyable.
    We took solace in our mutual love of food, taking turns buying Petrossian croissants—fat, chewy, and buttery—whenever we had to go on a stake out. When on assignments in Flushing, Queens, we conducted “source” meetings at Joe’s Shanghai so that we could order the soup dumplings—pork meatballs encased in delicate little pagodas of white dough, steaming from the broth. We picked up tuna sandwiches—on thick slices of freshly baked, crusty rye bread, with finely chopped iceberg lettuce and tomato slices—from a Westchester deli when we were in the area. It was unlike any other tuna sandwich I’d had, and I am not sure if it was because it was truly great or because food just tasted better outside the newsroom, where on many days we ate three meals at our desks piled high with documents, which, in my case, intermingled with crumbs, stray pouches of Heinz ketchup, and old paper coffee cups.
    Melissa’s desk was, if not quite pristine, always better organized and definitely cleaner than mine. She kept a bottle of hand sanitizer near her computer, and used it several times a day. She had a stash of alcohol wipes from the first aid kit in the newsroom’s small kitchen to wipe off the earpiece on her phone. She did this if I happened to be coughing