The Man Who Came to Dinner

I met many people at Harvard Law School during my Boston hiatus. One of them was a tall, lean, and muscular Austrian (accent on the lean) named Heinrich Willke. After graduating from Harvard, Heinrich was unwilling to go into the workaday world, so he started another advanced law degree at NYU. This put him in the part of town with the best falafel shop in the world. For 75 cents (in 1980s money) you got a great sandwich. Heinrich looked me up in New York and introduced me to The Best Falafel Sandwich. At that time a ride on the subway was 75 cents and then went up to 90. (Later I was worried that the Falafel sandwich price would go up with it, but it didn’t. )To repay Heinrich for treating me to The Best Falafel Sandwich (quite a stretch for him being a student and always short of cash), I invited him to dinner on a particular date about a week in the future.
Living in New York is exhausting. I used to say that one could not manage more than three errands in one day. Bit by bit I was accumulating all the things needed for dinner with Heinrich. I dragged home to the studio apartment one evening after work the chicken, which was going to be the centerpiece of the dinner. Sodas would be too heavy to carry along with the other groceries and I was leaving them for the last night. It was just too much to walk mixers back from 86th Street and Lexington with the groceries.
Fred was home for a change. He was having one of his simple dinners of popcorn and Coke. I had made the pie for dessert and was still running elaborate plans for the chicken through my head as I relaxed.
The buzzer went off.
Now, those of you who don’t live in New York City probably don’t realize that people do not just drop in on each other. Fred and I looked at each other. Then I got up and pressed the intercom. “Who is it?” I asked, tremulously. “Iph eye ncck.” Fred looked up at me. “Who is it?” “It sounds like … like Heinrich!” I whimpered. The intercoms are notorious for garbling just about anyone’s words, but I’d caught enough of it. “I thought he was coming tomorrow.” “Yeeeessss!” Fred didn’t bother to get up, but he held his next mouthful of popcorn poised in his hand.
This is one of those slo-mo-moments where time drags out, like that Einstein guy said. I hope it didn’t seem like the eternity it was to me to Heinrich. I buzzed him in.
“What are you going to do?” Fred asked.
“Have dinner,” I said.
Fred put his popcorn up and rushed around trying to find things that would go together (all we had for beverages was Fred’s open bottle of Coke, vodka, and a bottle of Château Neuf du Pape, which probably didn’t go with chicken, but would have to do) while I just fired up the oven and threw the chicken in a pan.
Heinrich came in and we served him lukewarm lashings of vodka and Coke, red wine, and plain baked chicken topped off with some sort of fruit pie probably.
To this day, as far as I know, Heinrich has no idea that he was not, in fact, a fashionable hour late, but 23 hours early. He may think that I am a terrible cook and an indifferent or disorganized hostess and he is free to think that rather than think he committed any sort of social gaff.