![]() She didn't like beer much, so we divided the cans, two for her, four for me. It was a lot better than eating those onions. We did the only thing we could do: opened the beer. Which is why-the almost grotesque intensity of my hunger notwithstanding-I all but automatically agreed with her thesis (or declaration). This is a fairly accurate description of the image that arose in my mind during the two or three seconds between the time my wife said she refused to go to an all-night restaurant and I agreed with my "I guess not." Not being Sigmund Freud, I was, of course, unable to analyze with any precision what this image signified, but I knew intuitively that it was a revelation. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water's surface, but just how close I cannot tell. ![]() Two, I look down, and in the water I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea. I can present it here in the form of a cinematic image. But when she said this to me, I began to think that this was a special hunger, not one that could be satisfied through the mere expedient of taking it to an all-night restaurant on the highway.Ī special kind of hunger. Maybe that's what happens with newlyweds, I don't know. Whenever my wife expressed such an opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated in my ears with the authority of a revelation. You're not supposed to go out to eat after midnight." She was old-fashioned that way. "Let's get in the car and look for an all-night restaurant," I said. I expected her to ignore my attempt at humor, and she did. "Would madame care for some French dressing sautéed in deodorizer?" They are not the kind of food you use to satisfy an appetite. Onions are meant to be eaten with other things. It might have been possible to sauté the onions in the butter, but there was no chance those two shriveled onions could fill our empty stomachs. Beer and onions and butter and dressing and deodorizer. We took turns opening the refrigerator door and hoping, but no matter how many times we looked inside, the contents never changed. What could have caused such violent hunger pangs? We got out of bed an ddrifted into the kitchen, ending up across the table from each other. On the other hand, we were also too hungry to do anything useful. We both felt too hungry to go back to sleep, but it hurt just to lie there. Groceries were the last things on our minds. I was either twenty-eight or twenty-nine-why can't I remember the exact year we married?-and she was two years and eight months younger. I had a job in a law firm at the time, and she was doing secretarial work at a design school. With only two weeks of married life behind us, we had yet to establish a precise conjugal understanding with regard to the rules of dietary behavior. We had a bottle of French dressing, six cans of beer, two shriveled onions, a sitck of butter, and a box of refrigerator deodorizer. Our refrigerator contained not a single item that could be technically categorized as food. These were tremendous, overpowering hunger pangs. A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. For some reason, we woke up at exactly the same moment. ![]() We had eaten a light supper at six, crawled into bed at nine-thirty, and gone to sleep. It hit just before two o'clock in the morning. What reminded me of the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger. I hadn't been planning to bring it up-I had forgotten all about it-but it wasn't one of those now-that-you-mention-it kind of things, either. If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told my wife about the bakery attack. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack.
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