Lobsters, a Slow Boil and the Blues

It’s spring break, and everyone except me is in New York. I was left behind to paint the house. My daughter, Paige, phones me from the top of the Empire State Building. “Guess where we went for breakfast?” she asks breathlessly. I can hear the wind whipping around and the chatter of other tourists in the background. “Dean & Deluca!” she shouts.

“Was Javier there?” I ask, cradling the phone between my shoulder and head so I can continue painting while talking. If you don’t already know, Javier is the store manager of Dean & Deluca in the TV show “Felicity.” Paige loves Felicity. And Javier. But she is annoyed by my silly question. “No, Dad,” she says, sighing.

On the way to the Empire State Building, she tells me, they stopped at Tiffany’s so her mom could take a picture of her wearing black sunglasses. She sings me a little snippet of “Moon River.”

Paige adores Audrey Hepburn. Next to “The Breakfast Club,” which she probably has watched 50 times, her favorite movie is “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” She is a born romantic.

“We are having such a good time,” she says.

“That’s great,” I tell her, trying not to sound as envious as I feel. She’s looking at the Manhattan skyline and I’m trying to wipe up a trickle of gray-blue paint dripping onto the Swiss Coffee trim. “Bring me back a bagel,” I tell her, but our call is breaking up and she doesn’t hear me.

Bored with painting, I turn on the computer and check my e-mails. There’s a note from Karen, a fellow writer. She also has the blahs. “All three children are home, it’s raining cats and dogs, and part of the roof is peeled back, exposing rafter beams. Buckets are ready. Mary Rose has outfit No. 3 on for the day. Annie and Breck are fighting. There’s laundry--and I am going to explode if I don’t get out of the house. Please don’t tell anyone I have no life.”

I know how she feels. I call her and invite her to dinner. “You mean tonight?” she asks.

“Why not? You’re going crazy and I’m feeling sorry for myself. We can have a little pity party.”

So that’s what we do. We dress up and pretend as if we have real lives. We go to the Golden Truffle and are seated at a nice table in the dining room, but then ask to move to the bistro side of the restaurant because the ceiling fans annoy Karen. “You don’t think that’s strange, do you?” she asks.

Of course not, I tell her. Ceiling fans are obnoxious. Ceiling fans should be banned from restaurants just like smoking and cell phones.

Instead, we sit at a little table across from the fish tank, where two of the largest lobsters I have ever seen in my life are waving at us with their little antennae. They look like sunburned elderly people at the beach.

We look over the menu and, perhaps because we are tired, end up having an Abbott-and-Costello type conversation about what to have first.

“Are you thinking of an appetizer?”

“Maybe Some Kind of Soup.”

“Which one?”

“That’s what it’s called.”

“What?”

“Some Kind of Soup.”

“I know, but what is it?”

Karen glares at me. “That’s what the menu says, ‘Some Kind of Soup.’ ”

This is one of chef Alan Greeley’s little jokes. He’s probably peeking out from the kitchen right now, laughing at us. He could call it Soup du Jour like everyone else in the world, but it’s more fun to call it Some Kind of Soup.

The lobsters are snickering at us, I’m certain. I close my menu. “I think we should let Alan decide.”

That’s the thing to do at the Golden Truffle. Instead of sorting through the dishes of duck tacos and Jamaican jerk chicken salad and roasted gypsy chicken, you just let Alan pick out what you’re going to have. It’s more fun that way.

“Really?” Karen says.

“Absolutely.”

Karen shrugs, closes her menu. “Fine,” she says. “But I need a glass of wine. Now.”

We order a Napa viognier and agree that each of us will tell a little story to go along with our four courses. I start. With the upright hand rolls stuffed with tempura crab and diced avocado chunks, I tell Karen about meeting this psychic in Sedona last week named Eagle Feather who had a long braid down to his waist that he said was an antenna for tuning in the angels. Before reading my Tarot cards, Eagle Feather rang a little bell attached to the end of his braid to call the angels. Then he turned over a card and told me I should move from my neighborhood because it was constraining me.

“Are you going to listen to him?” she asks, concerned.

I shrug. “Maybe.”

Second course is a wild white salmon on garlic mashed potatoes. It inspires Karen to tell me a story about the first boy my daughter kissed. A story I have not heard. I try not to act shocked. The elderly lobsters leering over Karen’s shoulder are making lobstery faces at me. I wish now I’d ordered them instead of the prix fixe menu. I hate smug lobsters.

The main course arrives. Steak miyagi on a potato puree with a wild mushroom sauce. It is my turn for a story. “When I woke up this morning, there was a giant pink stork on my lawn,” I tell her.

It’s a Girl! the sign said. The thing is, I didn’t half mind having the stork on my lawn. And I kind of wished it was true. About the girl.

“Why don’t you just wait to be a grandparent,” Karen tells me, slicing into the aged strip steak.

The overweight lobsters behind her are doing some sort of minuet in the tank. They are really getting on my nerves. Don’t they know that by the end of the weekend they’ll be boiled live and served on some sort of mixed green salad with a caper vinaigrette? They deserve it, the pompous little creepy crawlies.

Dessert comes. Some sort of cheesecake thing we eat in little baby bites because it is so rich. Karen tries to think of a story and finally admits to having once gone into the Condom Connection store next door to the restaurant. “It was creepy,” she says, wrinkling her nose. I went into a store like that before, I tell her, but thought it was kind of entertaining.

“Really?”

“Yeah. It was mostly couples. They were buying toys for each other.”

“Uhhhh,” Karen says, putting down her fork. “Don’t tell me!”

She can’t finish her dessert. The lobsters are pressed up against the glass of the fish tank making faces at me. I pay the bill. Before we leave, I go to the tank and bend down.

“I’ll be back,” I whisper.

They only smile. And wave their antennae, mockingly, as we leave the restaurant.

Lunch, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday. Dinner, 5:30-10 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday.

David Lansing’s column is published on Fridays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com.