The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

scarcely lunched and then got caught up in overtime, and he is now back from the gym ravening like a lion. Stuck with cold anything in a brown bag, Tom gazes upon Lloyd’s old-fashioned hot homemade with the look of one who has somehow managed to hurt his own feelings.
    Lloyd, about to squeeze lemon onto the fish, asked, “Do you want my dinner, Tom? I can make myself another in a jiffy.”
    Tom knew he should express gratitude and say no. But he was madly hungry and Lloyd’s meal looked irresistible, set out in a curved-bottom wooden bowl with the fish nested beside the pasta in a delicate red-and-yellow sauce.
    “Take it,” said Lloyd, as he happily pushed the bowl across the table, then went into the kitchen. It’s a marker.
    Tom immediately dug in, calling out, “Could I have seconds while you’re at it?”
    So Lloyd made two more servings, and when he gave Tom his second plate (and a hunk of Italian bread), Tom gobbled it up as he had the first.
    “You were hungry,” Lloyd observed.
    “That’s a tasty recipe,” Tom replied as he scarfed up the last of the sauce with the bread. “After my work and the gym, I don’t always get a square meal.”
    “Tom, you never get a square meal. You’re going to fast-food your way through life.”
    “Time,” Tom explained. “Convenience.” Then: “You eat slow, the way kids do.”
    “Would you like me to make you dinner now and again? Cooking for two is as easy as—”
    “Yes, I want that, and why is this sauce so nice?”
    “It’s my own invention, where you…Tom, why do you always eat take-out and donuts?”
    “Sometimes my girl dinners me, though I’m usually over there way after eating time. Lucy. She can do steak bits in a pie.”
    The two agreed that Lloyd would cook their supper three nights a week. Once Tom got home, he would shower and change into shorts and a T to sit at the kitchen table nursing a Löwenbräu in a ceramic mug with his name on it. Lloyd would play chef, occasionally coming out of the kitchen to trade opinions with Tom over local events.
    Tom was easy to cook for: he liked everything. Sometimes Lloyd would fetch chicken cutlets from the hot-food salad bar in the mall across the road, adding crusted rice and a green salad. Or he would platter up the parts of make-your-own BLTs, Tom’s favorite.
    “I didn’t know you could order this at home,” Tom would say, chomping into a rickety pileup of eight slices of bacon, three of tomato, and lettuce in passing. “I guess it’s weird, one guy cooking for another. My old pal Jake would score us off as a pair of degenerate characters.”
    Lloyd’s BLT was evenly balanced and cut into quarters. This allowed him to wax philosophical.
    “Why are so many people,” Lloyd asks, “instinctively hostile to anything they’re not already used to? You mention some new thing and most folks put it down or wave it away.”
    “Let me try you on something,” Tom replies. “Are you comfortable with novelties? Don’t you really just like what you’re used to, like everyone else?”
    “But surprise is our education. The smarter you get, the younger you stay. Oh, wait—is there a column in that?” Grabbing his pad and pen, Lloyd hastily jots down a few words while expanding on his theme with “And the older you get, Tom, my man…yes…just let me…is the sooner you will go all befuddled…and grouchy about everything…” Note taken, Lloyd snaps back with “Right! You’ve got to maintain your curiosity about things to the end. It’s like exercising a muscle.”
    After a swallow of beer from his mug, Tom fixes Lloyd with a wry look and says, “‘Are you comfortable with novelties?’ was a yes or no question, Lloyd, my man.”
    Then, one day, Lloyd found tall, stemmed glasses in the garage and made frozen parfaits in them: chocolate and strawberry ice cream, fresh peaches, and nuts on top. There were six, and when Tom found them he ate the set.
    “Tom!” cried Lloyd, laughing.