How to Cook a Moose by Kate Christensen Read Free Book Online Page B

look like that, who actually do make these things, because they can’t afford not to (plus, beards are warm). Mainers do it themselves because no one else is going to do it for them. They’re not aware of being trendy; they’re doing the best they can with what they have, according to the old ways.
    Even on the sidewalks, watching people walk, I see how unstudied they are, how idiosyncratic, as if the furthest thing from their minds is how they might appear to anyone watching. A simple thing: Everyonewalks naturally here, probably because they’re all too busy thinking about what they’re doing to worry about how they look.

    In New York, I had a handful of favorite bars, among which were a hipster bar, a hotel bar, a secret bar, a neighborhood hangout, and a faraway bar. Like most people I knew, I felt possessive, passionate about, and proud to know these places. I felt the same about my friends in New York, who were just as carefully selected and highly cherished. Instead of a group of them, I had individual close friends. I preferred to see them all alone, on “dates,” so we could hunker down face-to-face and really talk. And so, drinking in bars was, for many years, a nighttime, one-on-one thing for me, in a favorite place with a favorite friend.
    And now, once we’d moved to Portland, it still was, but only because Brendan was the only person I knew in town. During our first winter here, we spent a lot of time alone together in a place around the corner from us; it was big and airy but cozy, full of couches and comfortable tables, with an open kitchen in the back and a full menu. It was comforting to have other people around us, thronging the couches and tables, greeting one another, but we had yet to find a tribe of our own, or even a friend. Luckily, we loved each other’s company, because that was all we had for months.
    Finally, in early May, a Brooklyn novelist friend who was temporarily homeless came to live with us for a few weeks. She took stock of our sorry lack of a social life and intervened.
    â€œYou need friends,” she said. “I’ll introduce you to my writer friend Ron and his girlfriend, Lisa.”
    I’ve always been slightly leery of other writers, as well as friends of friends. I’m afraid they’ll be competitive and/or standoffish, and that Iwon’t like them as much as I should. But I couldn’t afford to be leery of meeting anyone right now. In fact, I leapt at her offer like a hungry dog catching a thrown tidbit.
    The next night, while Brendan was out of town, she and I met Ron and Lisa at the place around the corner. I liked them instantly. Ron was a novelist and Lisa worked in local politics; they both grew up in a small town north of Portland called Waterville. They were friendly, charming, low-key, smart, and (it must be said) extremely good-looking. The four of us chattered the night away.
    Happy as I was to meet them, they were her friends, not mine. And then, after she went back to Brooklyn, Brendan and I spent most of the summer in the White Mountains, writing in his family’s farmhouse, while contractors banged and sanded away in our Portland house.
    So that might have been that. But in September, when we were back in town, we got an e-mail from Ron, inviting us to come and meet some of Portland’s other writers at a bar called Sonny’s. Improbably, this was to take place on a Wednesday at the astonishingly early hour of five p.m.
    When I lived in New York, I rarely met anyone for a drink earlier than seven-thirty (except, of course, for brunch dates). Dinnertime was generally around ten p.m., so to me, five was arguably still lunchtime. Nonetheless, we accepted Ron’s invitation with gladness in our hearts.
    When Wednesday came around, I closed my laptop at four-thirty and walked downtown to Brendan’s café and picked him up from “work.” We walked together around the corner to Sonny’s,