The Ramen King and I by Andy Raskin

because she wanted to give our relationship another shot. I did, too, because all I had been thinking about since she dropped me off was how I couldn’t keep up with her and how I wished I could figure out what was wrong with me.
    The next weekend she went to the ski house but didn’t invite me, and that night I placed an ad on Craigslist. This was just a few weeks ago. The title of the ad was “Sushi Tonight?” and the woman who responded was Cathy, a petite twenty-four-year-old Chinese American with a beautiful body and an Ivy League degree. We met for dinner at Sushi Groove South, a sushi restaurant that has a deejay. Over dinner, I asked Cathy if she cared about the age difference between us.
    “I’m not an ageist,” she said. “Just as long ask you don’t need Viagra.”
    As she laughed, I excused myself to swallow one in the restroom. Later, as I was taking my clothes off in Cathy’s apartment, I remembered that Amanda had once said, “You can’t eat off a broken plate.” She meant that once one person in a couple cheated, the relationship was doomed. I tried not to think about that. I tried not to think about anything at all.
    The next week, Amanda e-mailed me a video of a man playing the trombone while dancing in a sexy way. Above the link she had written, “Can you play trombone like he can?” I saw it as a chance to prove that I could keep up. Maybe I was just feeling guilty. I grabbed my trombone and a James Brown CD and drove to her apartment. I put the CD into her CD player and skipped to the song “Papa Don’t Take No Mess.” It starts with a solo by Fred Wesley, James Brown’s longtime trombonist.
    Amanda sat on her couch, watching. “Show me what you got!”
    I pulled my horn out of its case, screwed together the bell and slide sections, and slipped in the Bach 7 mouthpiece. Then I tried to do a striptease while trombone-synching along with Fred Wesley. I slid my trombone slide when Fred slid his, and tried to move my hips like the guy in the video. But I was too self-conscious, and not very sexy. I got my jeans partly off, but I was too embarrassed to go further. I went to the couch to kiss Amanda; she didn’t seemed turned on. Mostly, she looked sorry for me. The next weekend, she left for Lake Tahoe again. I was researching a magazine story in my apartment when my doorbell rang.
    “Buzz me up, Senior Writer.”
    She had come home early from the ski house. I thought it was because she missed me, but it was because she wanted to break up with me.
    “I feel like you’re not really there,” Amanda said. “I think you have some things to work on before you can be in a relationship.”
    I pretended not to know what she was talking about, and asked her to reconsider. I sat down on the sofa in my living room. Amanda tried to hug me, but I pushed her away.
    “You don’t have to get violent,” she said.
    Soon after, Amanda walked out the door, and when she was gone, Momofuku, do you know what I thought about? I thought about how I would never get to play stickball with her father. And there was something so horrible about that, something that made me feel so alone in the world, that I posted an ad on Craigslist with the title “Drinks Tonight?” A serious woman who spoke fluent Italian and worked in human resources responded, and all we did was have a drink, but after the date, I still felt this unbearable loneliness. The next day, I posted another Craigslist ad, and it didn’t help. The day after that, when I sat on the couch for my therapy session, I talked about feeling so incredibly alone, and then, for the first time, I talked about the Craigslist ads and the America Online member directory and how I had dated Harue and Kim at the same time, and how I always cheated in relationships. I talked about everything I’ve told you, Momofuku, though in even less detail because I had only fifty minutes.
    “What is wrong with me?” I asked the therapist.
    She talked for a while, and then