I’m the reason Taddy left, I guess. Or at least that’s the easiest way to say it.

Because it was me, who, one Saturday last July, told her that I wanted to try the thousand-year-egg at a restaurant in Flushing.

            "Flushing?" she asked, half-covered with a quilt that her grandmother back in Colorado had knitted her for the New York winters. "That's, like, out there."

            "It's a thirty-two minute drive. Twenty-six without traffic."

            "Still: Flushing?"

            She shivered, repulsed, if I had her right, by the neighborhood’s anachronisms. Alienlike finger foods. Prostitutes in leopard print halters. Cigarette ash fishtanks with seabass that weren't quite dead, but that nevertheless lay on their flanks at the bottom of the tanks.

            "It'll be an adventure."

            "What about Lucky Garden? You love their dumplings, and they're on GrubHub."

            "I'm tired of the Garden. We should switch things up, try somewhere real."

            "Real?"

            "Real."

            "I’ve worked all week, Ben. I don't want ‘real.’ I want, I don't know. Reruns of the Great British Bakeoff. I want confection. Real? Last week I saw a man shoot heroin into a vein on his dick.” She shivered. “I get enough reality on the commute.”

            Taddy was being unempathetic, but I knew where she was coming from. Life in our apartment wasn’t nearly as vital as life on the streets, and to her this was a relief. On her commute to and from Broome Street, Taddy encountered the fearful and the blissed—which is to say, those New Yorkers who had found something true enough to shoot into their dicks. But wasn’t she well-compensated for her pains? On top of her familial allowance, she’d received a substantial raise when the boutique handbag designer she worked for went viral when an influencer showcased their spring collection. Lately, her boss had been putting down her AmEx for happy hours at fashionable bars that were nevertheless empty because bots had snatched the reservations to sell on third-party sites. So what if, slightly buzzed, she witnessed jubilant souls who succored maggots with their wounds, or improvised love songs to Señor Suboxone, gushing the jumbled languages of their hearts as they writhed around subway poles in pure euphoria? Could she not imagine that I was stranded at home, writing copy for a terribly funded start-up that sold form-fitting t-shirts to in-between-sized Americans who skipped our ads during YouTube commercials? The closest I would come to tasting the reality of Taddy’s life was scrolling food videos on our murphy bed, which I would have to remake and close by the time Taddy returned home. And even this experience was spoiled because I knew that I ultimately cared less about the food than about discovering holes-in-the-wall that Taddy and her SoHo posse would never hear about. In short, I had become resentful.  

            Later that night, complacent with four tins of Lucky Garden pork and crab xiaolongbao, Taddy said she needed space to digest. She pulled down our bed and pretended to read a novel that she’d heard about on a podcast three weeks ago: a character-driven something-or-other about an indecisive woman who resorts to Chinese mysticism to make important life decisions. I scrolled on the couch, pulling up the account of Sylvia_Landauer, an as yet undiscovered, but totally natural food influencer who, tonight, had tried the thousand-year-egg at the nameless Chinese restaurant where I’d hoped to encounter her filming the episode.

            Taddy dropped her novel as soon as I started the video:

            “Who’s that?”

            “You wouldn’t know her,” I said, not to be rude but because, as soon as Taddy asked the question, I realized how difficult it was to answer. “A girl who travels the boroughs to discover new foods” sounded too summary. “A food tourist”, too judgmental. “A girl who, as far as I can tell, the Albanians and Ghanaians and Hondurans and Laotians and, let’s face it, all the people of the city would love to call their own” would be closer to the truth, but would run the risk of making Sylvia sound adrift and desperate for community, which she was not. “An unexpected guide” would be the most honest, but humiliating because it assumed reciprocity. And so when Taddy said:

            “Oh?”

            I said:

            “I don’t know. She’s got it though. I think she could blow up.” 

            “Come here.”

            I joined Taddy on the bed, removing the novel to the crevice, where it slept neglected most nights. Taddy surprised me by joining me under the covers:

            We began with Sylvia’s first video. In it, she visits an Albanian grandmother’s shop in the central Bronx: Teuta Qebaptore, one of the many holes-in-the-wall that now constellate my Google Map. In the video, Sylvia arrives unannounced. The only other patrons are men. They eat communal platters of fatty sausages, cabbage salads, icy-white tomatoes. They sop up vinegar and crumbled cheese with loaves of Italian bread. They glare at Sylvia over their shoulders. She doesn’t notice them, which compels them to turn in their seats. She approaches the counter and, for the first time in her career, asks her signature question: “So what’s your secret?” The cashier, a middle-school girl in a black apron dusted with flour, defers to her grandmother, who delicately rolls sausages over a small flat-top grill. Suddenly, Sylvia is in the back alley, asking the grandmother which spices she is massaging into a bowl of hand-ground veal. The grandmother deflects Sylvia’s questions by speaking about her own grandmother, and then, by a fiat more substantial than editing, Sylvia sits beside the Albanian men who are transformed, spearing sausages, laughing and joking and vulnerable: men who would, by the way they wrap their double-eagled biceps around Sylvia’s shoulders, risk their lives to protect this girl from danger.

            “Looks good,” Taddy says, and though she’s not wrong I say:

            “That’s not the point.”

            “What is?”

            “Look at those guys.”

            “They’re, like, obsessed. It’s embarrassing.”

            “Exactly.”

            “I mean, she’s very pretty.”

            “Do you think that’s it?”  

            “Maybe.”

            “I don’t know.”

            Taddy was only wrong because Sylvia was more than pretty—she was hot. Her full lips, cute nose, blonde hair, dark eyebrows. Her spotless Nike AF1s. Her form-fitting yoga clothes, the suggestion of the well-fed but well-exercised body that filled them. Her light but determined step. The unlocatable strain of immigrant that cleared her face of origins. The delicate balance of her tone—a calculated wonder that concealed a voracious appetite and, therefore, a violence that charmed people into revealing the secrets of their cultures—a tone that was, I’d realized, distinctly American. These Albanian men didn’t embrace her because of her prettiness, but because she was as primal as any American could be, and, therefore, she was irresistible, a testament to the plenitude of success. Luckily, I didn’t have to say any of this to Taddy because Sylvia, without my help, had worked her charm.

            That night, Taddy fell asleep to videos of Sylvia conquering the boroughs of New York: uncovering the secrets of a Chinese noodle shop whose counter was piled with lamb carcasses; infiltrating a Dominican cigar shop where a fan scattered loose piles of tobacco while the men placed bets on a chicken fight broadcasted through a CCTV. In every video, Sylvia remained confident, undaunted, charmingly entitled. Taddy woke up when I raised the volume to watch the livestream of her visit to the thousand-year-egg spot.

            “Shh…” Taddy pleaded, then, seeing the fare, asked, “What even is that?”

            “The thousand year egg.”

            “The one you wanted to try?”

            I was caught, and I was a terrible liar.

            “I wanted you to see her live.”

            “She was there tonight?”

            Taddy separated her head from my chest. We beheld the egg:

“Why is it green?”

            “It’s a million colors,” I said.

            “It looks like mold.”

            “Like layers of earth.”

            For a moment, we watched Sylvia reveal the gelatinous, striated egg to the camera. Even she marveled at its bruised blues, greens, and maroons. Before Syvlia ate it, Taddy snatched my phone and deposited it in the crevice, as if she knew that that egg contained an exciting and dangerous secret. She shut the lights and abandoned me for the far side of the bed.

            Taddy was on the couch when I woke up. I’d overslept, lulled by the unfamiliar terrain of our bed. I didn’t see her at first, so I assumed that she’d gone to the bagel spot for her weekly everything with lox and scallion cream cheese. Whenever she left, our apartment became spacious, livable. Light flooded our street-facing window, sparkling on the walls like freshwater, making them appear liquid, endless. I was eager to open the window to let in fresh air that would set the curtains swimming. But when I passed the couch, I heard a video streaming. Sylvia’s voice rode the sunlight. She was hiding beneath the Colorado quilt. I lifted it. Taddy looked at me, guilty and childlike. She shielded her eyes with her forearm, her hand twisting outward so that it revealed a video of Sylvia eating cuy with an Ecuadorian woman in Pelham Bay Park.

            “What’s up?” I asked.

            “Would you eat this?”

            “Guinea pig?”

            “It looks like a rat.”

            “Is she eating it?”

            “She’s trying.”  

            I sat on the floor. We watched the video:

            “Is that an Ecuadorian flag?” I asked.

            “They put it on her.”

            “Like a cape.”

            “This video is different than the others. They like her because she doesn’t like their food.”

            “Most would spit it out.”

            “She swallows it. They offer her another bite. She says ‘no offense, but…’”

The Ecuadorians console Sylvia. An grandmother kisses her cheek and gives her some chaulafan. She eats. It’s more her speed.

            “They respect her honesty.”

            “So do her subscribers.”

            Taddy clicked on Sylvia’s profile: Sylvia Landauer, UCONN ’22, Culturally Curious, Culinarily Adventurous, Donations Appreciated.

            “She’s blowing up.”

            She had approximately 88k followers, a number that was too small for someone whose talent embodied a perfect humanity. But 88k was also too large, because it meant that 88k others understood her message that people like us, trapped in webs of difference, are all without origin, without root. This degraded my personal revelation to an obvious truth, and so I was upset when Taddy suggested:

            “We should go to her next event.”

            “Oh.”

            “It’s next week. And it’s in the neighborhood. On New York Avenue. Some Haitian spot.”

            “Fidele’s Corner?”

            “That’s it.”

            “I’ve wanted to go there for years. I’ve asked you before.”

            Taddy typically would have fed upon the accusation crouching behind my words—a silent but very “active aggression” that came from a “really, really unattractive jealousy.” That day, she ignored the remark and made room on the couch:

            “Now we have a reason to go.”

            Fidele’s Corner was a small restaurant that had been around since the early 90s. It was as old as any establishment in Crown Heights. But Taddy and I rarely crossed Nostrand Avenue, the neighborhood’s unofficial dividing line. It wasn’t because that part of the hood was dicey. There just wasn’t much to do there, even if some restaurants regularly made it onto Reddit food lists. Fidele’s Corner was a favorite. Redditors raved about their Haitian Spaghetti, a strange mix of pasta, hot dog, hard-boiled egg, ketchup, and epis, which, as far as I could tell, was a kind of Caribbean sofrito. But whenever I passed Fidele’s on my bike, a crowd of Haitian men stood in the middle of the dining room, forming, it seemed to me, a rearguard that would be humiliating to pass through to reach the takeout counter. Unfortunately, they didn’t deliver.

            When Taddy and I exited our Uber on the night of Sylvia’s event, the dining room was mostly empty. Some of the men who guarded the counter had moved outside, but others had been convinced to sit down to make the place look busy. They picked at small mason jars of pickled something. Those who had left stood in a circle in front of the giant glass windows, making fun of Claudette, the proprietor who bumped into tables that she had moved closer together to accommodate Sylvia’s crowd. She had decorated these tables with tiny battery-powered lamps that toppled over each time she bumped into a chair. When this happened, a younger girl appeared from the back to set the lamp upright. One of the Haitians said:

            “If one of those candles breaks, Dollar Tree won’t take them back.”

            “Claudette’ll make Angie pay for them.”

            “No, no. Claudette’s not a cruel boss. She knows Angie’s tips go to real electric.”

            “Con Edison.”

            “The real con men.”

            “Watch out, Tien.”

            The men made room for Taddy, and me, to pass through.

            “Get the griot,” one recommended.

            “Worth the price.”  

            “Thanks.”

I followed Taddy inside. Angie, the young girl, met us at the door.

            “Do you have a reservation?” she asked.

            “We couldn’t make one online. We tried calling.”

            “That’s because we usually don’t…Hold on. Claudette,” Angie called. “Claudette, there’s two without a reservation.”

            “What time is it?” Claudette asked from the open kitchen, where she was stirring a smoking pot of something.

            “Seven.”

            “Are we too early?” Taddy asked Angie.

            “No, no.”

            “Sit them near the window.” Claudette dipped her finger in the stew and licked it. “And tell those dummies to clear the sidewalk. They’ll scare customers away.”

            Angie sat us. When she returned with our water and one Cola Couronne with milk on ice to share, we ordered the griot (misspelled griyo on the menu), plantains, soup joumou, the spaghetti, and two dishes that Angie said we couldn’t miss.

            “Will that be enough for two?” Taddy asked Angie, courteously.

            “I hope so.”  

            “Everything’s so cheap. The guys outside made it sound expensive.”

            “They’re used to their grandmas giving it to them for free,” Angie said.

            “Should we get more? We want a real taste of Haiti.”

            “You ordered the whole country.”

            Angie couldn’t laugh because Claudette was already calling her to the kitchen. But also because she wasn’t joking. We had ordered too much food. It began to arrive before we could even get a glimpse of our surroundings. This was no loss. Aside from a Haitian flag above the door, the décor, I’d say, was lacking. Even a Popeyes did more to capture the Creole spirit than Fidele’s did the Haitian. The only culture was in the aromatics, which were strong, spicy, terrestrial, but which I couldn’t differentiate from the smell of the brown stew chicken we’d ordered from a Barbadian restaurant last winter. While we ate the joumou, tempting ourselves by softly blowing on the hot, generous chunks of squash and potato and marinated beef before chewing, Taddy said:

            “I wonder when Sylvia’s coming.”

            I didn’t need to turn around to ensure that she hadn’t arrived. Aside from the Haitians, we were the only ones in the place.

            “Maybe she’s not coming.” 

I bit a potato too quickly, burnt my tongue, spit it into the soup, splattered broth on my shirt.

            “Shit.” Now I looked around. “Is there a bathroom?”

            “I don’t see one.”

            “Excuse me.”

            Angie arrived with our plantains:

            “The rest is coming soon.”

            “Oh no,” I said, “There’s no rush. I just…”

“Is there a bathroom?” Taddy saved me.

            “Back there.”

            “In the kitchen?” I asked.

            “Through the kitchen,” Angie said. “I’ll show you.”

            In the kitchen, I squeezed past Claudette, who presided over flaming cauldrons and gristly meat cleavers. I complimented her soup. She was too busy to give me much more than a self-conscious “Good.” It was a relief to reach the bathroom, even if it was little more than a closet with a toilet, an empty mop bucket, a slow dripping sink—but no paper towels and no mirror:

            To this day, I believe that the paper towels weren’t an impediment. I used toilet paper and cold water to clean the stain, but quickly realized that I wasn’t going to remove it. I accepted that, but I could have used a mirror and a moment to reflect that things weren’t yet out of my control: my company’s form fitting shirt made me look presentable; the soup joumou, spritzed above my navel, barely showed through the navy blue; Claudette’s passing “good” had actually been a compliment, since it meant she respected my taste; and I, cramped in the dingy bathroom of Fidele’s Corner, was actually a trailblazer and a taste-tester, paving the way for Sylvia Landauer, who would soon put this place on many people’s Google Maps. But there wasn’t a mirror. There wasn’t a moment of reflection. I left the bathroom feeling dirtier than when I’d entered, as if the joumou stain had seeped into my pores and was percolating a million tiny pimples. And worse of all, Sylvia had arrived while I was away.

            Claudette had abandoned the kitchen to greet her, making it embarrassingly easy for me to return, still blemished, to the dining room. Sylvia and her crew (a lone camerawoman dressed in a leather dress) stood at the entrance, right beside Taddy, who sat in front of an absurd amount of food. Angie brought another table to accommodate our feast. Claudette tried to usher Sylvia to a table in the middle of the room that she’d preset with two shaved ice drinks topped with peanuts (“frescos”, I later discovered on their website) and some plantains to snack on while they got settled:

            “No menus, for you,” Claudette said. “For you, the grand tour.”  

            “We’re so excited,” Sylvia said. 

            Like the locals at Teuta Qepabtore, the Haitian regulars kept to themselves, unaware of the miraculous transformation their environment was about to undergo—a chasm would open, and their artificial differences would be swallowed into the gut of an insatiable humanity. But Sylvia saw us. Claudette, who had already begun cooking their first courses, was frustrated when Sylvia approached our table, and asked:

“What’s their secret?”

            The subtle change from “your” to “their” made me feel uncomfortable, as if I should know something that I hadn’t ever thought about.

            “We haven’t tried much,” Taddy tried to save me.

            Her answer was misleading. I would’ve said so if I wasn’t busy searching the floor for my paper napkin. We had tried the joumou, which was delicious in a home-cooked way—uninteresting but tasty and substantial. The Cola Couronne was a lot for one person (Taddy had forgotten her Lactaid). My opportunity was lost. Sylvia moved on:

            “First thoughts on that?”

            She pointed to the bowl of pasta with ketchup-sauce, cartoon-pig-pink hot dog, and a soft-boiled egg. I speared the meat. Taddy said:

            “He’s the expert.”

            I resented her duplicity. We all knew that “expert” was a disguise-word for “male Wikipedia reader”.

            “How is it?”

            “It’s Oscar Meyer,” I chewed.

            “Nothing special?”

            It wasn’t: again, not because it wasn’t good, but because home-cooked meals stimulate the mind more than the tongue. And here in Brooklyn, what access did I have to home? I didn’t have a grandmother to knit me quilts like Taddy. Unlike the Haitians, I didn’t have a grandmother to cook me stew that recalled Port Au Prince before the gangs took control. Even my apartment was only a home when I was alone, and then never fully, because I knew that Taddy would soon reclaim her territory. Unfortunately, Claudette loomed behind Sylvia, waiting for her to take her seat. I couldn’t offend her by saying that, without imagination or memory, her food was mediocre:

            “It’s like nothing I’ve had before.”

            “We’re so excited.”

            Sylvia joined Claudette at the table, sat down, and chatted with her friend about how a date from the apps had taken her to a Senegalese café down the block from Fidele’s where the staff was totally rude, which, I get that they must feel conflicted serving derivatives of French cuisine, but be real, you can’t alienate your customers.

            As Angie began to bring out Sylvia’s food, Taddy asked:

            “Do you think she’ll like it here?”

            “She likes it everywhere.”

            I chewed some spaghetti. I forced myself to swallow, frustrated at Sylvia for locating something special in a place like Fidele’s Corner. While she and her friend ate succulent plantains and sucked spoonfuls of soup joumou, I took bite after bite seeking to unlock something true—a flavor of the earth. While Claudette allowed Sylvia to film her giving a history of Haitian cuisine, “a food that’s spiced with a little this, a little that”, I was swallowing the difficult truth that I was a body without even the memory of a home. Sure, I had family in Hartsdale who, despite a move to the suburbs, honored their Bronx immigrant roots with Sunday gravies. But over the years, I’d learned that this wasn’t a home at all, but the succor of luxury and privilege—my dear maggots. I felt so empty that when Taddy asked:

            “Do you think she’d do a spot for the brand?”

            I said:

            “Yes,” not caring that Taddy, whom I’d introduced to Sylvia, had assumed that Sylvia’s life was as narrow as ours. People like us were stranded in a cultureless desert populated with gorged stomachs that had been knotted and tossed into the sand like hefty bags. Sylvia hailed from a land of plenty beyond those gustatory sands—a land of secrets.

            “Should I ask her?”

            “No.”

            “Do you want to?”

            “Let’s leave her alone.”

            “You can give her my contact.”

            “She’s not a careerist.” 

            “A careerist? I hate to break it to you, weirdo, but she cares about her career just as much as I care about mine.”

            I tried to escape by looking at the Haitian men outside, but was thwarted by the reflection of Claudette serving Sylvia the Haitian spaghetti, which she lauded as a unique take on spaghetti and meatballs. I watched Sylvia’s reflection spear a medallion of hot dog and, with a slow twist of fork on spoon, swaddle it in pasta. A lesser critic would have eaten with repulsed delight—“oh, that’s too much for me”—allowing the shameless authenticity of foreign food justify the civility of our puritanical American cuisine. Sylvia treated her forkful like a child, and took that child back into her womb. Her every gesture was a homecoming.

            “It really is like nothing else,” she said.  

            I couldn’t even look at her reflection. I returned to our food. There was so much of it. Taddy surrendered her napkin onto her plate. She said:

            “Is there something you want to say?”

            “I can’t eat anymore.”

            Taddy needed me to directly accuse her of careerism, of superficiality, of abandoning me in the wake of her very local success.

            “Say something,” she said. “We’re going to look rude.”

            “We’ll take the leftovers home.”

            “Not to me.”

She tilted her head towards the dining room.

            “What?”

            I glanced at the reflection in the mirror. Sylvia was looking right at me. Her shadow was enough to make me explode into a human stew.  

            “I have to go.”

            “There’s still food.”

            “I can’t eat anymore,”

Leaving my jacket behind with Taddy and her soft manipulation, I said:

“I’ll see you at the apartment.”  

            “I don’t have my wallet.”

            But I was already outside, walking past the Haitians, who asked if the griot was worth the price.

            “No.”

            “See?” the man boasted. “Supposed to be free.”

            I couldn’t explain that, far from free, the market price had been my dignity.

            I didn’t hear Taddy come home that night. I’d put in my headphones and buried myself under her Colorado quilt. I rewatched Sylvia’s videos on the couch until I fell into a long dreamless sleep. When I woke the next morning, Taddy had left. She’d texted me hours before, telling me that she was on her run, but that she would stop by Fidele’s to settle our bill. Luckily Claudette didn’t think she was an asshole just because I was one:

“But don’t worry, Ben, Sylvia edited your freakout out of her story.”

I didn’t apologize because, after last night, I knew that Taddy and I needed to have a longer conversation about our relationship than a simple “sorry” could handle. We needed truth. To get there, we would need to say many things we didn’t mean in order to stumble upon a mutual understanding. So I checked Sylvia’s profile. She’d posted a new story. Tossing aside Taddy’s quilt, I opened the window in case the sight of Sylvia brought back last night’s nausea. Fresh air washed into the apartment. The curtains caressed my face. Through the sheer fabric, I watched families walk towards Prospect Park. On the next corner, a Mexican woman was selling tamales from a large spaghetti pot in a shopping cart. My appetite, in spite of me, began to rise. I watched Sylvia’s story:

It began with a picture of Fidele’s, its windows glowing, its door flanked by regulars. Then came Claudette, the Queen of the Corner. Then, before Sylvia posted the dishes, there was a picture of Taddy and I. It captured the moment when I’d lost my appetite, but somehow in the photo I look wistful, almost happy. Taddy is smiling as if I’d just told a joke. I’m looking outside. The room is bright. Our table is full. Sylvia had captured a fleeting moment—a nanosecond in an eternity of dread—when I’d overlooked my happiness. And in that wistful pose, I saw myself as a man with desire, a man with hunger, and a man with a will if not to discover, then at least to create a home.

            Folding the quilt and putting on my slippers, I left my apartment, hoping to catch the tamale lady before she packed up for the park. I wouldn’t get the same rate as Mexican families, but I was happy to pay the surcharge. The air outside was delicious, seasoned with burger smoke from our bodega. Luckily, the tamale lady was slow moving. I’d be there soon. Before I caught up to her, I texted Taddy, “Picking up snacks. Can I bring you something home?”