At Eli's
"Will you kill me, if I go to 5:30 Mass instead of 12:30?"
I put down Three Junes with a sigh. I ought not to be reading Three Junes; I ought to be reading The Economist and the Times. But I'm totally absorbed by the story of Fenno McLeod, and transported back to the days when nobody remained merely HIV-positive indefinitely. "Yes, I will kill you," I say. "At 5:30, you'll postpone to 7:15, and at 7:15 you won't go at all, and I'll be a wreck from wondering when to get dinner on."
"All right," Kathleen retorts, with mock petulance, as she gets up from the dining table, which is completely covered with trays, bottles, and boxes of beads. In a benign sort of way, Kathleen is addicted to beading: once she begins, she can't stop. She'll stay up until all hours to finish a piece, only to be thwarted by some concluding knot that she's much too tired to be attempting.
Wondering where we will eat dinner, given the occupation of the table by semiprecious materials, I accompany Kathleen downstairs and as far as Third Avenue. I know what we are going to have for dinner, and I am on my way to Eli's to pick up a few ingredients: I can't always find gingerroot up here. (That will probably change when Whole Foods opens up a local branch, in a building yet to be erected, on a site yet to be cleared, at the very corner at which Kathleen and I have just parted company.)
Eli's is a sprawling market - in a basement. The building used to be a storage warehouse. (A big art heist took place there some time ago.) The building, on the northeast corner of Third Avenue and 80th Street, was stripped to the beams and refitted as a luxury condo. Eli's occupation of the ground floor is challenging: three spaces that do not communicate. You enter what seems to be a modest flower shop by a door near the corner, cross a tiled floor and board a downward escalator. It is a two-storey drop, or feels like one, anyway. Keep yours eyes left if this is your first visit; the aerial view of the premises will come in handy. At the bottom of the escalator, you grab a caddy or a shopping cart, and make your way through produce. The produce at Eli's is always gorgeous, and so artfully arranged that it seems to have come from very special, possibly metaphysical acreage. It takes at least five trips to develop any restraint in the produce department.
Then you wend your way past the tomatoes, along the wall of refrigerated items - such as the gazpacho that I picked up for Kathleen's lunch (I was in the mood for hot dogs). Confronted by a cornucopia of cheeses, you are now in the pinball area of the store, where you must navigate between round tables and shelves through spaces not quite large enough for two carts. Meat and fish are the the right, while the eternity of cheese continues along the left. A display case of salamis, bacons, and other cured products neatly hides the escalator that will take you back upstairs when you have done all your downstairs shopping. I was accosted, near the tomatoes, by a somewhat befuddled elderly lady who wanted to know where the exit was. I would point toward the escalator, but without the benefit of my height she could see nothing but round tables and shelves. I would help her toward the escalator two more times before she finally escaped.
Eli's is so not a supermarket. There are no aisles. There is no cookie section (the bakery is upstairs), no cereal section, no cat food or personal hygiene department. Packaged goods are likely to be Eli's own, and very fresh. The dairy department (also upstairs) offers a galaxy of butters but assumes that you will probably buy your milk at lower prices elsewhere. Like coffee, rice is sold by weight: you scoop it into plastic bags, at one of those round tables. The butcher's counter is about the only part of the store that resembles what you might find in a typical suburban supermarket. Except that, as in the produce section, everything is very beautiful. Where are the Cézannes and Caillebottes of today, come to paint these opulent heaps?
No wonder the lady was disoriented. Overwhelmed by the massively unusual stocks and their massively unusual arrangement, she had forgotten what she'd come for. She stood at the foot of the escalator, uncertain about getting on. (Why did she ask me and not a white-uniformed employee? Probably because she thought that they wouldn't speak English.)
By the time I went upstairs, the loudspeaker was playing what I'm almost certain was Karajan's recording of The Blue Danube waltz (more correctly: On the Beautiful Blue Danube) - the one that Stanley Kubrick used in 2001. I could not keep myself from whistling along, taking all the repeats. I don't care who minded.
As we are finishing lunch, a little while ago - the gazpacho was "TRAY good" - I realize that I'd forgotten to buy coconut milk. Happily, there is a can in the larder.
