What women — and men — really want

When I walk to the main road, I try to give people I pass a friendly, “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” with my best pronunciation.  Mostly I pass Rwandans, but this weekend a tall white man and I approached each other.  For some reason, greeting white people makes me exceedingly shy — but I could tell this guy was good-looking, even from afar, and I thought, Well, why not be neighborly?

He was, up close, uncomfortably handsome.  He had a dead-giveaway accent — Belgian French, charming in its own way but also a bit like chewing the words as they leave your mouth.  We traded the one-liners about why we are here, and I asked if he liked Rwanda.  He nodded.  “But I miss things,” he said.  “Like what?” I asked.

He paused a bit too long, and said, “I know I should say I miss the people at home, but what I really miss is the food.”  I howled. “Any special food?” I asked.

He looked away from me, a bit dreamily, like he was thinking of a woman he still loved but couldn’t have and said, definitively, “Sandwiches.”

I positively guffawed.  I was delighted by so honest and earnest an answer, by the sheer surprise of the word and the intensity of his emotion.  For five minutes, we were the most kindred souls in Rwanda.  I waxed romantic about sandwiches from home, and he gave an obliging ear.  He was grateful, he said, to find someone who understood.  I was about to take my leave when he asked me the most perfect question a man has ever asked me.

“What kind of sandwich is it that you miss?”

I was taken aback.  He wanted to know my secret desire, and to share his with me.  We would understand each other.  We would connect.  We would salivate  together as we talked about cheese and meat and bread.

Overwhelmed by my desire for everything I cannot have, I settled on the most exotic thing I could think of.  “Pastrami,” I said.  “New York pastrami.  You?”

“A club,” he said.  “It’s a Belgian sandwich with cheese and meat–”  He talked faster, more excitedly, and in his accent I missed a few words “–and it does not matter which cheese, which meat, as long as they exist in a perfect relationship with each other.”

He shook his head and sighed.  “But here,” he said, “eating a sandwich is like getting a divorce.”