The Translator's Appetite

Joanie Koch was thirty-six years old, and she could count her impulsive decisions on one hand with fingers left over. She worked as a logistics coordinator for an aid organization, which meant her whole life was shipping containers, customs forms, and spreadsheet cells that turned red when things went wrong. Things went wrong a lot. She was good at fixing them from a desk in Geneva, which was where she lived, or mostly lived, when she wasn't being sent somewhere for six weeks at a time.

This time the somewhere was Lisbon. A regional warehouse reshuffle, three months of it, hotel apartment near the river. She'd been there nine days when the story actually starts.

At home there was Lenny. They'd been together six years, living together for four, and if you asked her she'd say it was fine. If you pushed, she'd say it was comfortable. He was a kind man, forty-one, worked in insurance, liked his routines the way she liked hers. They ate dinner at seven. They watched whatever show was on. On Sundays they went to the market and bought the same things they'd bought the Sunday before. There was nothing wrong with any of it. That was the strange part. There was nothing wrong, and there was nothing much right either, and Joanie had decided somewhere around year four that this was simply what adult love looked like when you weren't the kind of person things happened to.

She'd never been the kind of person things happened to. In school she'd been the one with the neat notes. In her twenties she'd had two relationships, both sensible, both ending with the same polite conversation. Her mother used to tell her she was careful the way other people were brave. Joanie took it as a compliment because she didn't know what else to do with it.

So on the ninth evening of the Lisbon assignment, when her colleague Rui said she simply had to try this little place in Alfama, Joanie did the sensible thing. She booked a table for one, Tuesday, eight o'clock, under Koch. She put on the one decent dress she'd packed, the dark green one, and she walked up the hill in flats because the cobblestones in that neighborhood would kill a person in heels.

The restaurant was small and warm and loud in a good way, all conversation and clinking and something savory going hard in a pan somewhere out back. There was no host stand, just a young woman behind the bar with a tablet and a smile.

"Good evening. Name?"

"Koch. Table for one, eight o'clock."

The woman scrolled. Scrolled again. Her smile got that fixed quality Joanie knew from her own customer-facing days. "Koch. Tuesday."

"That's tonight, yes."

"Ah." The woman turned the tablet around as if Joanie could fix it from her side. The reservation was there, dated the following Tuesday. "I am so sorry. Tuesday of next week. Someone wrote it in wrong, or I read it wrong, I don't know which is worse. We are full tonight. Completely full."

Joanie stood there in her one decent dress and felt the whole evening tilt. She could have gotten upset. She thought about it briefly. But she'd spent her career in airports watching other people get upset about things that couldn't be fixed, and she'd never once seen it help.

"It's fine," she said. "Honestly. Do you have space at the bar? I'd rather eat here than walk back down the hill."

"We can feed you at the bar, yes. Tá bem?"

"Tá bem." Her Portuguese was bad and getting slightly better by the day, and every attempt still made people smile.

The bar had six stools, four of them taken by a pair of older British couples deep in wine. She took the end seat and ordered whatever the woman recommended, and a plate arrived that she couldn't have named if her job had depended on it. Grilled fish, some kind of beans, oil and garlic and something green on top. She ate it slowly and realized about halfway through that it was the best meal she'd had in a year, maybe longer, and that she had nobody to tell.

That was when the man at the other end of the bar spoke up.

"You ate that like you meant it."

She looked over. He was leaning on the pass side of the bar, still in his whites, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a dish towel over one shoulder. He was maybe thirty-eight, Black, built as if he lifted heavy pots for a living, with a short beard going gray at the jaw and an expression of honest, unhurried interest.

"I did mean it," Joanie said. "Is that against the rules?"

"Against the rules is leaving food. Eating it properly, that's a compliment to the kitchen." He held out a hand across the bar. "Mateus. I'm the chef. This is my place."

"Joanie." She shook it. His hand was warm and rough, dark against her pale one. "Your reservation system ate my Tuesday, so I'm afraid you're stuck with me a week early."

"Then I got lucky twice." He said it easily, without weight, the way some men say things and mean nothing by them, except she got the feeling he meant exactly what he said and was too comfortable to pretend otherwise. "The fish was good? The beans?"

"The fish was perfect. I don't know what was in the beans."

"Nobody knows what's in the beans. Family recipe. My grandmother would come back and haunt me if I wrote it down." He grinned. "You're not Portuguese."

"American, mostly. I live in Geneva. I'm here for work, three months."

"Logistics?" He nodded at the laptop bag under her stool.

"How did you know that?"

"You have the look. Practical shoes, tired eyes, you checked the time twice since you sat down and then stopped yourself." He laughed when she stared at him. "We get the NGO people in here. You all eat late and sit at the bar and apologize for existing. It's all right. Apologizing is optional here."

Behind him somebody in the kitchen called out something, and he raised a hand and answered without turning around, then turned back to her like she was the only thing on the agenda.

"Stay there," he said. "I'm off the line in ten minutes. I'll bring you the thing that's not on the menu."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know I don't." He was already walking back through the doors.

Joanie sat there with her glass and thought, absurdly, of Lenny, who would be finishing dinner right now in Geneva and would text her goodnight in about an hour, a thumbs up or a heart, whichever was closer to hand. Six years. She tried to remember the last time she'd told him a story from her day and gotten more than a nod. She couldn't, and that frightened her a little, in a quiet way, the way the mold behind a wall frightens you, faint and out of sight.

Mateus came back with two small plates and a bottle of something unlabeled, and pulled up the stool beside hers without asking, which somehow was not the same as a stranger crowding her. It was more like a man sitting down at a table he'd been invited to. He set one plate in front of her.

"Now," he said. "Tell me what's in this one."

She tasted it and guessed. "Salt. Lemon. Something smoky."

"And?"

"And something I've never had before, which I assume is the point."

He laughed, a low laugh that came from his chest. "It's the point. It's a fish my uncle catches up north and nobody exports because it bruises. You have to know a guy." He ate a piece off his own plate, watching her do the same. "So. Geneva. What does a logistics woman do when the containers stop moving?"

"She fixes it from a desk."

"And when the desk doesn't work?"

"Then she calls someone who owes her a favor and drinks bad coffee until it does."

"Ah." He refilled her glass from the unlabeled bottle. It was some kind of herbal spirit, sharp and green tasting. "You know what I did before cooking? I worked on fishing boats for four years. You learn two things. The sea doesn't care about your schedule, and a crew eats together or the crew falls apart. So now I feed people. That is the entire philosophy. Feed people."

"It's a good philosophy," Joanie said, and was surprised to find she meant it as more than a polite thing to say.

They talked until the British couples paid and left, and then past that. He told her about growing up in Salvador, about his mother cooking for the whole street on Sundays, about the year he'd nearly given up and taken a hotel job in Porto and hated every minute of it. She told him things she didn't usually tell people. About the shipment that sat in a port in Djibouti for eleven weeks while two governments argued over a signature. About her mother, who had died three years ago and whose voice she was starting to lose the shape of. She hadn't meant to say that last one out loud. It came out anyway, sitting at a bar past midnight, and he didn't do anything with it except nod and let it be true.

Somewhere in there the kitchen staff finished and left through the back, calling boas noites, and the two of them were alone in a small warm room with the smell of garlic in the walls. Joanie looked up and it was a quarter to one. She was shocked. She had never in her adult life talked to anyone until a quarter to one.

"I kept you too long," Mateus said, following her eyes to the clock.

"No. Yes. I have a call with Nairobi at eight."

"Then go. Sleep." He stood and walked her to the door and held it open, and the cold street came in around them. "Come back tomorrow. Kitchen's closed Wednesdays, but I'm here doing prep. I'll feed you again and you can tell me about the containers."

"I have work," she said.

"You have work every day for three months. One night of it won't fall apart." He wasn't pushing. His voice was level, easy. If she said no he would have said até amanhã, quem sabe, and meant it, and that was plain in his face. "After eight. The door with the green paint, up the stairs. It's just a drink, Joanie."

"All right," she heard herself say. "Just a drink."

She walked back to her rented room with her collar up and did not text Lenny, and slept badly, and got through her Wednesday of customs forms with half her mind elsewhere. She told herself the whole day that it was just a drink, that she was lonely in a foreign city, that this was what normal people did. By four o'clock she had stopped believing it. She shut the laptop, stood at the one window with a view of the river, and understood that if she went up those stairs she could not do it as somebody's partner in Geneva. That wasn't who she wanted to be, not even for a drink.

So she called him. It was five o'clock in Geneva, and he'd be home from work.

"Lenny. Do you have a few minutes? I'd rather not say this in a text."

A pause, the sound of a chair. "Is something wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. That's what's wrong." She'd rehearsed it in the shower and it still came out in the wrong order. "I don't think we're in love anymore. I don't think we have been for a while. I think we're very good housemates, and I've been calling it a relationship because that was easier."

He was quiet a long time. When he spoke he sounded tired, not angry, which was somehow worse. "I've wondered. For about a year. I kept waiting for you to say it first so I wouldn't have to be the one."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Is there somebody?"

"No. Nothing has happened with anyone, and that's not why I'm calling. But I met someone I might want to, and it made me see how long I've been absent from us. I'm ending it, Lenny. I'm sorry it's over the phone. When I'm home we'll work out the flat and everything else properly."

"All right," he said softly. "Thank you for telling me straight. You always were good at that."

Afterward she sat on the bed with the phone in her lap, waiting to feel like a person who'd done something terrible. What she felt was light, the way you do after a long flight when the seat belt sign finally goes off. Then she put her shoes on and went back up the hill, because it was still, just, only a drink.

She came back just after eight, by which point she'd already circled the block twice. The green door was propped open with a brick. Mateus was in the kitchen in jeans and an old t-shirt, hands dusted with flour, and he looked glad to see her in a plain, unguarded way that did something to her chest.

"You came back."

"I came back."