Night of the Golden Weasel
It’s New Year’s Eve, and Susan says we’re going to the Hong Kong Flower Lounge. She’s wearing a straight black forties cocktail dress with a pink lace bodice that matches the restaurant’s tablecloths and big, brazenly fake pearl drop earrings. Though there are only three of us to entertain, she’s pumping full voltage already, priming herself for the party to follow.
John sits on my left, getting serious about the menu. The waiter fills our water glasses from a sweating aluminium jug. “What’s this one – braised game?”
The waiter plants the water jug in the center of the table. “You won’t like it.”
Personally, when a waiter in a swanky Chinese restaurant tells me I’m not going to like an entree, that’s an expert opinion I’m willing to go with. John and Susan are made of sterner stuff. They order the braised game and rattlesnake soup, I order crab, I don’t hear what Chris, on Susan’s opposite side, is having.
We know Susan is leaving for grad school soon, but not so soon that we have to think about it as anything real, as anything other than ... an idea. Though she lives fifty miles south in San Jose, one of us makes the trek up or down the peninsula every weekend. Most of the people I know, I know through her.
“Game just means it was running when it died,” I say. “It could be any creature with an instinct to flee.”
“Excuse me!” She brandishes a hastily lipsticked spoon to lure our waiter back. He sifts his way warily through the crowded tables. “What animal is in the braised game?”
He thinks a few seconds and waves his hand over her head. “It’s colored like you – grey. Everybody knows it.” Further thought. “It’s from around here.”
Pause again, while the quartet of us take a mind’s eye walk three blocks to Golden Gate Park. It’s not a happy trip. “Why did he say my hair is grey?”
“Well, it does have a silvery tone,” offers Chris.
After one twitch of the brow, Susan swivels her gaze outward onto the waiter’s back, disappearing behind brass-studded swing doors. “He didn’t define here.”
When he brings out the rattlesnake soup, we’re ready to play twenty questions. Does the braised game live in a tree or a burrow? Does it have hooves? What does it eat? The waiter slides his ordering pen out of the breast pocket of his snug coral jacket and draws a little figure on the tablecloth beside Susan's left hand.
We crowd around the shaggy glyph – a capybara, a woolly mammoth, Snugglephagus?
With visible triumph, he clicks shut his pen and lumbers off to greet a young Russian couple who have just blown in the door.
It’s a long interval before the main entrees arrive, but the platter of braised game is beautiful – medallions of an even walnut brown, clothed in a thin, sinuous sauce and a few shallots. My crab, on the other hand, looks like it passed through the esophagus of a pelican. While I fork my disconsolate way down to an untouched layer of snow peas, John contemplates the steaming morsel at the end of his tines. “Could you get pieces that big off a cat?” Susan throws a piece of silverware down and waves to the waiter. He doesn’t want to see her, but when she stands up and starts to push her way toward the cash register, he hastily moves to meet her. “Does the braised game suckle its young?”
His glasses are clouded with steam. He is a young man, solemn and plump. This is probably his first job, his paycheck probably a significant addition to his family’s income, and his English probably no more extensive than more tea? Steamed rice with that? Come again! No one told him he would be serving crazy people who don’t recognize common mammals, even when they are clearly marked on the tablecloth in front of them. He stabs his artwork with his forefinger. “You know him. I know you know him.”
It takes forty-five minutes and three of us coming at him from three directions around a circular table, to get our check. Susan brings up the rear, waving a napkin like a flag of truce. “Write it down. Write down its name, and we’ll get it translated. Write down the animal’s name.”
He scratches two words onto the napkin, glad to get off that easy. We collect our coats, go laughing to our cars, are greeted with glad cries by our host, who had long since forgotten we were coming. While John and I are cornered on a balcony by drunks who want to learn all the lyrics to "Auld Lang Syne," Susan carries her napkin from guest to guest with the dogged optimism of a cat trying to find someone to appreciate this nice fresh mouse. Finally, a slim girl with a blue cocktail squints at it, wrinkles her nose and says, “Golden… weasel?”