In your arms, what I love you for

I slept last night in air conditioning and dreamed of reading a picture book drawn in a two-tone, Robert McCloskey style, a green-and-blue-black descent to the abyssal seafloor with characters of lost sailors and unimpressed sea life, in between rounds of a group exercise which was enacting a kind of allegory of changing rights across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Everyone else in the group was fictional except for Van Heflin, whom I feel I may slightly owe an apology. I actually owe him some movie reviews, which will have to wait.

rushthatspeaks picked me up around three-thirty in the afternoon. Today was our sixth anniversary. We had a reservation at SRV in the South End. The restaurant's initials stand for Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia; they are Boston's only Venetian-style bacaro and they have a painting of a lion to greet their guests, although Rush pointed out that properly speaking it should have wings. (I said that since it was a head-on view, clearly the wings just didn't fit in the picture. Hershel of Ostropol sells a painting of the crossing of the Red Sea.) First we drove around the South End in search of parking, in the course of which we were reminded that most of Boston is much closer together than a bus transfer and two changes on the subway would lead a person to believe—it was not perceptible to either of us until we'd driven all the way around the Prudential that St. Botolph Street adjacent to NEC was exactly on the other side of the Mass. Ave. T station from where we were trying to eat—also after turning up a side street to look for non-permit parking we were distracted by a beautiful stretch of confusingly car-friendly greenery and wound up in a kind of residential back alley directly behind SRV, so we drove through an apparent dead end into an even tinier cobblestoned alley and back out onto Columbus Avenue, which is definitely the most Italian thing that has ever happened to me in this city. The guy on a smoke break behind the restaurant did not wave his arms at us and tell us to stop. Eventually we stashed the car in a lot on the other side of Mass. Ave. and used the half-hour remaining until our reservation to walk the Southwest Corridor Park to Titus Sparrow Park, which is how we found multiple community gardens, a butterfly garden full of monarchs, and one of the nicest, most successful public spaces I have seen in some time—kids playing with their families, teenagers hanging out, adults hanging out, all ages and all diverse; the dude idling his motorcycle was the most disruptive person we ran into and he probably wasn't disruptive at all to people who don't mind the sound of idling motorcycles. I cannot ever remember having spent time in the South End, but it turns out to be full of rowhouses, brownstones, and the kind of mixed residential-commercial walkups I associate with New York City, frankly. Most of them covered with ivy. Trees all over the place. A wrought-iron fountain in the middle of one street, with a very happy corvid bathing in it. We saw more than one window with a rainbow flag, in one case harmonizing nicely with the stained glass. I glimpsed someone's second-floor bay-window library that called out to me. I probably don't even want to think about the rents, although I will.

So, SRV. It is an airy space, brick-walled, with a trio of doorways through its main interior wall that open the space out rather than chop it up; there were wine bottles on the wall behind us and epiphytes on the facing wall and not so many mirrors that it becomes a dominant part of the design, but the diner still catches the allusion. We had the option of a patio, but stuck with the cool interior, which was even more impressive considering one side of the restaurant was entirely open to the street except for the front door. It made a good surrealist image and I was momentarily sorry I had not brought a camera. The soundtrack opened with Frou Frou's "Let Go" and Beyoncé's "Hold Up" and transitioned into various hip-hop I did not recognize but enjoyed, partly because it never got so loud—even later in the evening when the restaurant was full; we'd ended up with the five-thirty reservation because when I'd called on Wednesday it was all that was left that night—that it was not possible to converse at a normal volume. We each ordered a cocktail, the 63 Fairbanks in my case, the Garibaldi Spritz in Rush's. And here I feel that if I were an actual food blogger, I should have started taking notes, because we ordered the nine-course tasting menu, the Arsenale, and the last time I had food like that was Journeyman. I can remember starting with the classiest cheese sticks either of us had ever encountered, breadcrumb-fried mozzarella with preserved tomato underneath and bonito flakes on top, and equally perfected polpette on wooden toothpicks, little pork-and-beef meatballs, Romano-dusted. We held on to the cup they had come in just to finish off the red sauce. And then we moved straight from "really impressive bar snacks" to "food I have not ever had before" with the meltingly crunchy fried beef tendon powdered with black pepper and Parmesan—as impossible to eat neatly as a good cream puff—and the baccalà on squid ink crostini, which I believe was the point where I started rhapsodizing. "Bread is your quintessential agrarian food, it grows in the earth, we've got myths about it, it's not supposed to bring you the sea"—mussel-black, ocean-sweet, with the umamibomb of the salt cod on top. "If the Italians had invented sushi!" said Rush. I would eat a lot more bread if it were all made with squid ink. I would eat a lot more most things if they were made with squid ink. I believe after that we got the break of a small arugula salad with a clean, lemony dressing and enormous shavings of what was either the world's largest radish or the world's sweetest turnip before being presented with luminously sunset-colored chunks of smoked sea trout over green lentils and, Rush thought, a kind of mostarda, with a mayonnaise-like fizz on top. The lamb belly was rich and deeply savory and served with shaved carrots of all colors, slices of roasted stone fruit, and a yogurt dressing that I mopped up with the sourdough that had arrived two or three plates earlier. New plates and new silverware for the last two courses, the pasta, which was first silky sheets of maltagliati with fava beans, lamb sausage, and dark green bursts of cilantro, then house-made curls of creste di galli with 'nduja and pine nuts, finito. That's nine, right? For dessert, we got as part of the Arsenale menu a jar of Venetian cookies and I added a couple of scoops of gelato, which is how I found out that stracciatella—buttermilk ice cream with shavings of dark chocolate—is a flavor I really like, although the mascarpone with folded-in figs and red wine was also pretty ridiculous. Rush had some after-dinner Amaro Averna and the bar sent us each a small glass of Zucca Rabarbaro, which the server explained to us was made with "toasted rhubarb." I should not be surprised after my feelings about mezcal and peat monster whisky, but I like smoky rhubarb. The waitstaff were unfailingly attentive throughout, never making us feel either overlooked or rushed. We had told them ahead of time that Rush was allergic to onions and that I didn't do great with huge amounts of dairy and the menu accommodated in all respects. We wrote nice things in the moleskine that came with the check and staggered out into the night.

And since the second part of our anniversary for at least the last three years has involved the sea, we sat by the reflecting pool outside the First Church of Christ, Scientist until Rush felt sure about driving, and then we set out to find some. To be honest, I am not entirely sure what went wrong that we worked our way back to 93 easily enough and then wound up facing, instead of the Atlantic, a sudden and unenviable choice between Logan Airport and the Tobin Bridge, but we straightened ourselves out after only one determined reversal of direction and an unnecessary rotary or two and successfully stuck with the Lynnway after that. (We must have mislaid Route 1A. Malden got into the mix somewhere along the line. I have no other explanation for the appearance of the Charles Ro Supply Company. We appreciated the fireworks that seemed to be taking place over the Mystic River, near the Valley of the Things—with no other obvious aetiology in sight, we decided they were for our anniversary.) I am a little sorry that we did not know until we got home again that one of my mother's friends lives in Point of Pines in Revere, because it looked like an ideal night-walking beach except for all of the regularly posted signs declaiming "PRIVATE BEACH" and sternly cautioning us not to park on any of the streets. It was demoralizingly unwelcoming. I think we would both have felt morally buoyed by leaving our un-permitted car in my mother's friend's driveway and loitering on the beach without living there. As it was, we continued up the coast into Lynn, past the causeway for Nahant—our sea-destination of two anniversaries ago—and pulled the car over at the sight of long, white-curling waves breaking on the heads of rocks clustered like seals against a seawall, a streetlit promenade curving out around Nahant Bay. The tide was just beginning to draw out. We had seen a half-moon earlier as we left SRV, but now the sky was clouded over, the charcoal matte of coming rain, so that the ship out at sea in a net of orange lights looked suspended between darknesses, no horizon. Light pollution made the difference, looking across the bay into Swampscott: we sat on a park bench and I rested my head on Rush's shoulder and the central railing of the promenade precisely ran the line of the horizon, so that I had a stripe of night sea and a stripe of night sky to look at. A young man with a yarmulke went by on a hoverboard lit up the same electric blue as Wonderland Station. Twice. From the same direction every time. We figured either he was doing laps or he was a time ghost. A man with a fishing pole greeted us as he walked past. Several dog-walkers, some other couples. Some beachcombers as the tide slid farther and farther out over the silky pleating of sand. The air was deep salt, a faint fog under the streetlights. Afterward we almost went to Nahant again, but instead drove home, talking about vampires and Chris Evans. I feel quite familial toward the Green Tea Chinese Restaurant by now, though I will probably never eat there. Later we determined we had been at Red Rock Park.

Happy anniversary, my night-driver, my Poseidon-haired love. It is still inexcusable that Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" is not the state song of Massachusetts, so I will just have to consider it one of ours. It is raining lightly. It is time for me to see if I can sleep in the same summer kitchen as some neglected little cats.