I sip a hot Americano from a steaming mug, the white enamel worn through along the places I grip the handle most often, the stainless steel showing through bright and shiny like the spots where pilgrims touch old metal statues of saints.
It’s dark in my apartment, even though it’s morning. I turn on a couple of lamps that approximate the light of soft incandescent bulbs. But they’re not incandescents, they’re LEDs, and they give an uncanny approximation of real light that feels sickly and wrong, even when it’s close enough that it doesn’t seem like it should matter so much.
It does, though. Matter, I mean. How much in our lives has been changed by these compromises we never asked for, made by people who don’t care if it’s what we want or not?
I’m editing video at my desk, cutting and mixing and color grading and correcting the audio dynamics. Through the gap beneath my front door, the one that lets in the light and the leaves and the bugs, I hear the sound of fat raindrops slapping the cement sidewalk. It’s really coming down.
I finish my coffee — my second and final double shot of the morning. I’ve been drinking my coffee with just cream, no sugar, for so many years now that I don’t remember when I started. But lately I’ve been cheating, putting a splash of sweet creamer in with my usual half and half, and I’m as sure that I don’t need it as I am that I love the taste. Too much in my life has been bitter of late. A little sweetness feels almost like a hug.
It’s close to noon, and I’m finally hungry enough to make breakfast. I grab a white ceramic bowl from the drying rack and crack in a few eggs. For my entire marriage, I deferred to my wife on proper egg-making technique. She was particular about them in a way I never was. Couldn’t be overcooked. Couldn’t include cheese. The fact is, she’s an excellent cook, and her eggs almost always came out better than mine, so I acquiesced. But she’d always crack her eggs straight into the pan, then mix them as they cooked with her spatula.
Since we’ve been apart, I’ve gone back to the old ways. I grab a fork and start the rhythmic movement at the universal egg-beating cadence. The one any of us could recognize in our sleep, the sound of fork against bowl, moving through viscous liquid.
“Whisk whisk whisk whisk whisk whisk whisk…”
It’s funny, but every time I hear it, it makes me think of the final scene in the movie Big Night.
Primo and Secondo are two Italian brothers who are trying to save a struggling restaurant they’ve opened in America. Primo is the cook, obsessed with quality and quantity and authenticity and correct pairings. Secondo is the manager, the pragmatist, focused on trying to make his American customers with their American tastes happy enough that the business can make ends meet. As the film draws to a close, they have just put everything they had left into a magnificent banquet at which they expect an appearance from the great American singer and musician Louis Prima. It is their hope that this one event, this “Big Night,” will save their failing business. But Prima, whose visit was promised as a good-faith gesture from their rival restaurateur, Pascal, never shows up — because he was never actually invited at all. It appears to have been an act of final sabotage by their much more successful competitor. Their last resources spent, the brothers get into a big fight in the dark on the beach near their shop, Primo wanting to go home to Italy, Secondo wanting to stay and make the American Dream work. They have been brought to ruin, and each blames the other for what went wrong.
The final scene begins the morning after the feast (and the fight) that failed to save them. Cristiano, their dishwasher, lies sleeping on the counter in the restaurant kitchen when Secondo comes in, placid, resigned to his fate. “Are you hungry?” he asks, as Cristiano rouses himself, then moves as though he will take the task from his boss. “I’ll do it,” Secondo says reassuringly, grabbing a frying pan from the rack.
What follows is five minutes of pure visual exposition, no dialogue, one continuous shot. He adds oil to the pan, and places it over a gas flame. Cracks the eggs. Beats them with a fork. Adds a pinch of salt. Cooks the eggs as Cristiano nibbles on a crust of bread. He plates the eggs just before Primo walks into the kitchen, but Secondo has saved him a portion. He plates the eggs for his brother, then they sit, eventually putting their arms around each other in a mutual gesture of conciliation before the end credits roll.
It’s a scene about life going on, despite loss, despite heartbreak, despite everything. It’s a scene about fraternal love surviving even the toughest conflicts. It’s incredibly moving, if you’re in the right disposition to feel what it’s trying to tell you.
And for me, for some reason, it’s all anchored by the everyday sound of those eggs being whisked in that bowl.
What I’ve learned since surviving my own big night — the one where I had to leave, to let go of my dream, my marriage, my family, after giving it everything I had and discovering it would never be enough — is that scrambled eggs taste better, come out fluffier and with a better texture, if you mix them in a bowl first, get them aerated and properly beaten, before putting them in the pan. They don’t come out the same way when you mix them while they cook.
I’ve learned a lot of other things besides, of course, but the eggs have become, somehow, a condensed symbol of the rest. Things known but forgotten — or left unexamined. Ways of being changed to please another, to fit in, only to lose yourself in the process while never actually becoming more loved or wanted as the end result.
You can spend your whole life trying to be who you think another person wants you to be in the hopes of earning their affection and respect, and only diminish yourself by the effort.
Breakfast made, I return to my desk. I don’t own a kitchen table. I have a little folding kind, but I usually just keep it stowed. My desk is where I work, where I write, where I edit, where I eat.
The rain outside has me thinking about the coast again. It’s the kind of day where nobody else is likely to go. The kind of day where I can brood in peace, savoring a dark mood.
But I keep working, keep doing other things, until it gets so late I know I won’t make it until the sun is already setting. So I don’t go.
Still, the idea has its hooks in me, and I can’t resist the pull forever. On the following Monday morning, staring at screens I’ve been looking at for too many days in a row, the urge becomes overwhelming.
Just go. Just go. JUST GO.
I decide to stop fighting it. I don’t give myself time to second guess. I don’t shower or shave. I grab my keys, my wallet, some water, and an old towel for sitting on, and I head straight to my car.
