I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti

  Copyright © 2009 by Giulia Melucci

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: April 2009

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55094-9

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Antipasto

  Kit Fraser Would Prefer a Drink

  My Father

  The Victory Breakfast

  The Ethan Binder School of Cooking

  Mitch Smith Licked the Plate

  Marcus Caldwell Ate and Ran

  From Sex and the City to Nun

  Single-Girl Suppers

  Lachlan Martyn Was Passionate… About Food

  Baci e abbracci a…

  For my mother, who taught me how to cook and how to love

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: Most of the names and some of the identifying details have been changed to protect the innocent and less so.

  Antipasto

  Whenever I start dating someone new, I just can’t hold back. No matter how often my girlfriends warn me, “Take it slow, let him win you over, don’t give it away so quickly,” I just can’t resist—I have to cook for him.

  For me, a new boyfriend is a tantalizing opportunity to show off the thing I’m most confident about: my cooking. I assess the gastronomic inclinations of the man in question at first sight, and my guesses are usually right. I’ve made every kind of food from simple pastas to slow-cooking stews and moist, beautifully seasoned roasts accompanied by perfectly browned potatoes and bright, crisp vegetables. I’ve made chocolate cakes, cheesecakes, and cakes filled with seasonal fruits. And I’ve dated every sort of man: artist, lawyer, banker, and writer, kind and unkind, ready to commit and as amenable to commitment as I am to eating at the Olive Garden.

  In each of my relationships, I have honed my skills and developed my own style and assurance in the kitchen. The men who have passed through my life have all been culinary inspirations, and if I haven’t figured out anything about love, at the very least I have learned how to cook with the greatest simplicity, delivering the maximum flavor, because when you’re in love you want time for other things besides food. But good food is the best complement I can think of to the many pleasures love offers. It can also be the greatest comfort for the pain it can sometimes cause. I am not talking about obvious remedies, like pints of ice cream! That has never been my style. No, the best balm for a broken heart is nourishing food you make in your kitchen (or better yet, food cooked for you by a dear friend; I am fortunate to have many who are great cooks). Food that tells your heart and mind that you are taking care of yourself, at least for now, until the next man comes along, as he always does, and you’re happily cooking for two again.

  Kit Fraser

  Would Prefer

  a Drink

  Igot a late start on the whole dating thing.

  Kit Fraser was my first real boyfriend. He entered my life in January 1990, the day after I moved into my first New York apartment: an East Village sublet I shared with Jennifer Warren, a close friend from college. For the first eighteen months after graduation, I lived with my mother in the house where I grew up in Brooklyn. This was not exactly my ideal postcollege habitat; the transition to a place of my own had been delayed by my father’s death, which occurred simultaneously with the end of school. I was loath to leave my mother alone in that big gray stucco house, but I was also fed up with my two brothers using the basement for band practice while their girlfriends sat in the kitchen helping themselves to the provisions as if they owned the place. It was loud and it was uncomfortable. I had to get out.

  That Monday morning, Lucy, my boss at Spy magazine, the legendary satirical monthly where I was employed as a picture researcher, said to me: “Now that you have a new apartment, you’ll probably get a new boyfriend.” What new boyfriend? I thought. There had never been an old one. Well, at least not for any significant amount of time.

  Up until then, the only man I could honestly have called a boyfriend was Steve Sullivan, a local boy four years my senior whom I dated for about four weeks around the time of my sixteenth birthday. I remember this because Steve took me on a real grown-up date to a restaurant to celebrate and gave me a bracelet made of jade beads for a present. He wore a coat and tie—and I, a dress from Bergdorf Goodman. My mother played it free and easy with her stash of department-store-specific charge cards in those days, sending me into “the city,” as we called it, for shopping and haircuts at Bergdorf’s, the quintessence of elegance, on a regular basis. I would also have on my person a note in her scrawl explaining that I had permission to use the card, just in case anyone questioned me (they never did).

  I considered myself a punk rocker back then, and the dress was a Bergdorf Goodman take on punk: The top half of it was made of aqua T-shirt fabric cut off sloppily at the neck and sleeves, while the bottom was white cotton, gathered and painted by hand. I thought it was just the right level of sophistication for Steve, who was in college but lived at home and liked to hang out with his sister Lizzie’s friends, among whose number I counted myself, if only marginally.

  I grew up in Bay Ridge, a neighborhood that—tragically—is best known for being the setting of Saturday Night Fever, a movie that did about as much for Italian-Americans as the Gotti family. Although the film may have contained some truths, we liked to believe they were Bensonhurst’s truths. The neighborhood I knew had Irish families as well as Italian. My friends had real problems: divorced parents, parents who were alcoholics, or both; siblings who were addicted to drugs. But they didn’t turn to the disco floor to get a sense of mastery over their troubles; they made jokes. Any time there was a homeless-looking man walking down the street, my best friend in high school, Denise O’Dea, would wail pathetically: “Daddyyyyyyyyy! Daddy, come hoooooooooome!” I still think this is funny.

  Denise and I would go to the Sullivans’ every day after school. There Lizzie held court over a throng of her former classmates from Our Lady of Angels, a parish school that stood directly across the street from her house. I was somewhat in awe of the girls who went there, as they played basketball and attended classes with boys. My primary education at Visitation Academy, an all-girls school run by cloistered nuns situated behind big stone walls that wrapped around an entire city block, was a bit more precious and left me with no inclination whatsoever to dribble.

  Still, it was a fun group to hang out with, so hang out we did. Steve got a kick out of us while he himself maintained an air of superiority: He went to Fordham University and attended the ballet; he would argue with my father about the war in the Falklands. After he railed against British “self- determination” (being Irish, he was against it), we would go make out on a piano bench—the only seat that accommodated two in the enclosed front porch of my family’s house. While listening to Billy Joel’s “She’s Got a Way” on the record player in my basement, I thought to myself, This must be exactly what he feels about me. I, however, wasn’t so sure about him. I got a little queasy thinking about him when he wasn’t around, though when I was with him it was fun. I liked kissing him, but I had no interest in going any further. “You can touch me if you want to,�
� he cooed once during a make-out session. Why ever would I want to do a thing like that? I thought.

  One evening on the piano bench, Steve declared that he was going to give it a go with the woman he had always wanted, Bernadette Corrigan. She was a big girl, a basketball player; her father owned a tugboat company, and their family had money. My father was a golfing buddy of Bernadette’s father and helped him get into the country club. (And this was the thanks we got!) Two months later, Bernadette was on the Sullivan stoop showing off the gifts Steve got her for her birthday—those Russian dolls that open up to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside, with the last doll containing a Claddagh ring (the Irish wedding band, though they weren’t engaged). I came up with imaginative reasons why this scene wasn’t an excruciatingly painful one for me to watch.

  The year before I got together with Kit, I had been seeing a psychologist—a strict Freudian who resembled Cher—to get to the bottom of why, at twenty-three, I had never had a boyfriend for any significant amount of time and had not yet had sex. I was haunted by my lack of experience and convinced I would die a virgin. I felt alienated from my friends (late starters all, but I was the latest), who had been let in on some cosmic secret that remained a mystery to me. The odds were against me for more reasons than just my neuroses: I had gone to all-girls schools until college, and then to Sarah Lawrence, where the female-to-male ratio was four to one—really more like eight to one, considering that the majority of the “ones” were gay. Every boy who wanted a girlfriend at Sarah Lawrence already had one or even two. It was survival of the fittest, and I was neither physically (I was a little plump) nor mentally (I was terrified) fit enough to compete with the willowy bohemian heiresses who surrounded me.

  Without particularly wanting to, I remained the good Catholic girl. The only reputation I ever had was for being funny. The cruel truth that men might prefer to get their yuks in one place and their ya-yas in another was brought home to me in my thirteenth summer when I discovered that Tony Sirianni, my constant companion at the country club pool, was spending his nights on the golf course making out with Connie Cambria. Granted, Connie looked a lot better in a bathing suit than I did. At college, I spent countless late nights talking to boys I had crushes on, but the activities never went past conversation or, that great tease, listening to music. The sheets and my virtue always remained pristine when we parted in the wee hours. I didn’t know if I was doing something wrong, giving off some bad vibe, or misreading whatever signal they were throwing. I did know it had me totally flummoxed, a conclusion I could have drawn without a psychologist’s corroboration.

  That was behind me now. A new decade was beginning; my boss and I decided to call it “the decade of love.” Her prediction concerning the change in my romantic status proved strangely prescient. That very afternoon, a hand-delivered letter arrived from Kit Fraser. I had met Kit three years earlier when he showed up unexpectedly at my family’s house one summer evening with Michael Petriano, the brother of my oldest friend, Larisa. She and her family had moved to New Jersey after first grade, but despite the distance, our friendship continued with regular weekend visits in New Jersey or Brooklyn right through high school. I enjoyed getting to experience the lures of suburbia—sundaes from Friendly’s and public school (with boys and no uniforms), to which I would accompany Larisa when I took a day off to see her. Larisa still lives in New Jersey, and we remain friends thirty-five years later.

  Michael was my first crush. When I was ten I would join him on his paper routes, getting up at five in the morning to have some time alone together, riding Larisa’s borrowed bicycle around the neighborhood. Michael was brilliant and incredibly funny, and for this he suffered. He had a nervous breakdown the summer after he graduated high school; the week he appeared on my doorstep with Kit, he had chosen to go off his meds, and in my childhood bedroom he ranted about the bomb he was going to create to eradicate evil from the earth, which would be controlled by a specially selected group of clerics and rabbis. Then he went to take a shower.

  While Michael was in the bathroom and my mother went about the house hiding sharp objects, Kit watched me unpack my books from the school year that had just ended. I talked to him about my current intellectual obsession, Dante, and played him an Aztec Camera record. According to Kit (I don’t remember this), I strung a bunch of tiny seed beads and tied them around his ankle. The evening stayed in Kit’s mind not just because of our friend’s odd behavior, but because of me. The bracelet stayed on his ankle until it fell apart, and when it did, he kept the pieces.

  Two years later, while waiting for the elevator up to the Spy offices after lunch, I noticed a cute preppy guy wearing wire-rimmed glasses and an L.L.Bean hunting jacket waiting there, too. I wondered where he was going and became even more curious when he got out on my floor. He walked up to the receptionist and asked: “Is Giulia Melucci in?”

  “I’m Giulia Melucci,” I said.

  Kit, who later purported to have been infatuated with me from the moment he met me, had forgotten what I looked like when he came to find me. I, in turn, was unaware that I had spent hours with the guy I had been checking out on the elevator. Kit, fresh out of Georgetown, was staying with the Petrianos in New Jersey until he could find his own place in New York. When he landed a job at Atlantic Monthly Press, a small independent publisher whose young, hard-partying editors were often skewered in the pages of Spy, Larisa told him his officewas right next door to mine. Standing next to the reception desk, he invited me to a party with him and Michael that weekend. I couldn’t go—nor did I want to. I could tell Kit was interested in me, ergo I wanted nothing to do with him. But I did notice when I didn’t hear from him over the next few months. Then the letter arrived, the day after I moved out of my mother’s house, the perfect day for such a letter. “New apartment, new boyfriend.” I was ready. I called him right away, and we made a lunch date for that Thursday.

  Bizarre, springlike weather had taken hold of New York City that January, so Kit and I picked up lunch at an upscale takeout down the street and ate on a bench in Union Square Park, facing our offices. Kit hardly touched his smoked turkey and Brie on baguette because he talked so much. As he reminisced about college, he made a reference to bongs made out of apples, which put me off a bit—my drug days, however brief, were behind me. This seemed incongruous; Kit appeared the proper young gentleman in every other respect, from his Church’s handmade English shoes to his antique cigarette case. I had plenty of time to study him. I finished my split-pea soup, roll, and cookie, and there he was with most of his lunch still in front of him. It made me restless just sitting listening to him talk on and on with no food left. (When I eat and talk simultaneously, neither activity gets neglected.) I was immensely relieved when Kit pulled out a cigarette—finally, something to do with my antsy appendages. I was also pleased that the man who was going to be my boyfriend was a smoker—especially if he was such a slow eater. Kit walked me to the lobby of my building, where he bade me call him. “You call me,” I said. He called, and we made an evening date for the next week. Kit asked me to meet him at his office; from there we’d go have drinks at nearby Cedar Tavern.

  Not only did Kit seem nervous when I picked him up, but he was wearing a pair of jeans that were just awful. They weren’t anything so unforgivable as stonewashed—one of the many fashion horrors of the late eighties—but they were a uniform powder blue, which was almost as bad. This didn’t make sense, since Kit had exhibited a well-honed sense of style in our previous meetings. The fact that Kit so clearly liked me made him seem vulnerable, and those jeans weren’t helping. But at this point, I wanted a relationship enough that I rallied myself to rise above it. Kit was a good man, a gentle and kind man. He was undeniably handsome, he had an excellent build, nice lips, and thick brown hair flecked with blond. He was smart, and he looked it in his horn-rimmed glasses. Powder blue jeans be damned!

  Kit’s fashion faux pas was further redeemed by his ability to talk about the abstract express
ionist painters who made Cedar Tavern their watering hole in the 1950s. I studied art history at college and intended to pursue a higher degree in the discipline, but then I didn’t bother to study for the GRE; on the two mornings I was scheduled to take the graduate school entrance exam, I opted to stay in bed instead. It wasn’t a bad decision (or lack thereof); I liked the rhythm of office life and the dependable paycheck, however pathetic that paycheck was. (At the time, I was making $12,000 annually.) I was working at one of the coolest places in New York media, which went a long way toward enhancing the terrible wages—a fact my employers were well aware of. Still, I was delighted that Kit brought some of my stifled scholarly leanings back to my day-to-day, and his riffs on the canvases of Mark Rothko and Franz Kline were undeniably alluring.

  As Kit and I talked, we found we had something even bigger in common: Both our fathers had died, Kit’s just before his high school graduation and mine just before my college graduation. When you lose a parent at an early age, you have an instant feeling of kinship with others who’ve had the same experience. There’s no way you can describe that sort of grief to someone who hasn’t yet known it. You can’t describe it even to yourself. I was seeing the psychologist about that, too.

  Kit complimented me for not making a big deal over the fact that he was from North Dakota, as people often did. It wasn’t that I was so worldly; it’s just that I was from Brooklyn and had spent all my life in New York. North Dakota, to me, was no different from, say, Ohio—it was just another place that wasn’t New York. Kit knew how to hunt and fish, and his father had been a taxidermist. The youngest of four, he was the only one in his family ever to venture east. Drug references continued to pop up in Kit’s conversation—there were his own stories of golfing at night on mushrooms or more historical detours on Oscar Wilde’s penchant for absinthe. He seemed obsessed with Rimbaud, which I found both romantic and, as I learned more, worrisome.