I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Read online

  My plan had been to take the summer off from dating. In early spring, a few weeks after I said good-bye to Mitch for the last time (well, pretty much the last time—I don’t count random sexual encounters years apart, and neither should anyone else), I met a handsome Indian of British extraction on the subway. He asked me the time and kept on talking. He said he was a journalist. I gave him my card. I wasn’t averse to the idea of a relationship initiated on the subway—in fact, I believed that public transportation was a perfectly fine place to meet people. My friend Monica Mahoney married a doctor with an MBA whom she met on the M103 bus, and that wasn’t the only story I knew; however, the man I met turned out to be exactly the type of person one might expect to find on the subway. Though he was good-looking and wore nice clothes, I came to learn that his journalism career consisted of one radio piece for the BBC sometime in the early nineties. Kam didn’t do anything. I assumed (and hoped) he was supporting himself with family money, but I eventually discovered that the Upper East Side apartment where I dropped him off in a cab after our second date was not his. After a couple of weeks of dating, he admitted that he was living with a woman. When I called to tell him I was not interested in seeing him again, his solution was to put me on the phone with her. Before I could protest, there she was telling me that Kam and I had a good thing going and she didn’t want to get in the way.

  When I relayed this bizarre incident to Jen, she was so disturbed that she urged me to come and stay with her and Jeff for a few days in case the guy was dangerous (I stayed home and emerged unscathed). Ginia had given up on my sanity completely. I was due for a period of soul-searching. Up till this point in my life, I had considered myself an adept judge of character; now I wasn’t so sure. The heartbreak of Ethan and whatever that thing was with Mitch had corrupted whatever insight I may have possessed. I was becoming a type I have never been and never wanted to be: a woman who will date anyone just to be dating someone.

  An e-mail from Marcus Caldwell was waiting for me when I arrived at work the morning after our meeting.

  Giulia,

  You left too early last night.

  I would like to take you out and buy you 82 drinks.

  Are you free tonight or tomorrow night?

  Marcus

  And with that, my period of reflection ended. I wanted to go on a date with Marcus. I wanted to go on a date with Marcus that night. It wasn’t the mild concern that accepting for that evening would make me look a bit easy to win that gave me pause, it was more the fact that I wasn’t dressed for a date. Tired from the previous evening’s revels, I had rolled out of bed and, without much thought, had thrown on a simple skirt and T-shirt. Back in my closet in Brooklyn was a brand-new dress I briefly considered wearing before deciding this unremarkable outfit better suited my state of mind. Boy, was I sorry I hadn’t opted for that blue silk jersey sheath with the bamboo pattern!

  After a few phone consultations with the usual suspects, I resolved that a quick trip to Brooklyn and back was not such a big deal. I’d leave work early and take care of some other errands, too. Marcus let me know that he’d be riding down from Harlem on his Vespa. I didn’t disclose the elaborate maneuvers I would be employing to arrive at Blue Ribbon, a SoHo restaurant popular with chefs and bon vivants. Marcus was most definitely the latter, albeit an aging one.

  When I arrived he was standing by the entry, already halfway through a glass of white wine. I was a little put off by how old he looked out of his softball clothes and dressed in a blue button-down shirt and well-worn khakis. Once my eyes adjusted to the white hair and the wrinkles and perhaps aided by my getting a glass of wine of my own, I was able to relax in his company. This took all of five minutes. We brought our glasses to a table near the bar and ordered a dozen oysters, a spécialité de la maison. I listened to the story of Marcus’s recently dissolved family life. He had two children in their twenties, both in New York City. When they were little the whole clan spent a few years in a villa near Lucca, where Marcus painted and his wife gardened; thus the Vespa and Marcus’s penchant for things Italian. His daughter now lived in Queens with her boyfriend; his son was an actor who was also a drummer in a band that was playing nearby that evening. Would I like to go see them? You bet! We settled up and Marcus showed me to his mint green Vespa; he had a matching mint green helmet, and there was a little black companion helmet stowed under the seat for me. I hopped on, gingerly wrapping my arms around Marcus’s waist, a little uncomfortable with the accelerated intimacy enforced by this mode of travel. Marcus’s cotton shirt was soft, his midsection pleasingly taut, and there is a lot to be said for cruising around Greenwich Village on the back of a Vespa on one of the first evenings of summer. I was seduced, which was, no doubt, the intention behind the acquisition. That Vespa took ten years off him.

  Marcus introduced me to his son, who was quite good-looking, even with the Mohawk he was sporting for a role in a student film. At Kenny’s Castaways, we drank Brooklyn Lager and listened to the band. They played some kind of country rock, my least favorite kind. I sat there imagining myself stepmother to this young man who was closer to my age than I was to his father’s. Oddly, the fantasy was not unpleasant; I had come quite a distance in two hours. Thing was, I had a remarkable ability for turning any picture into the picture I wanted to see: me with a husband. My imagination had the flexibility of a thirteen-year-old Chinese gymnast.

  The band finished up around midnight. Marcus and I made one more stop for hamburgers and red wine at Florent, a pioneering restaurant disguised as an old diner in Manhattan’s now too trendy Meatpacking District. Florent (which closed in 2008, breaking many a New Yorker’s heart) was open all night, catering to the city’s clubgoers and transvestites. Though we were neither, it was the only place I could think of that would serve us food at that hour. After our late night repast, Marcus and I sailed over the Brooklyn Bridge on the Vespa, landing in front of my house, where Marcus lingered, showing me photos of his paintings, which he stored in the same compartment where the helmet was. He kept a Zagat guide in there, too, for picking restaurants on the fly. The artwork was okay, but by now I was so determined to like this man that I convinced myself they were more than okay and that, in fact, he was an undiscovered Max Beckmann. We kissed on my stoop, and I went through that initial adjustment again. Pulling away from a kiss and being confronted with so many wrinkles was jarring, sort of like kissing my father. At thirty-seven, I was hardly an ingenue, though, and Marcus seemed so excited about me that I couldn’t help but get a little giddy myself.

  “Missed you while riding home on the FDR Drive last night,” said the next morning’s e-mail.

  Marcus thoughtfully chose a Brooklyn restaurant I raved about on our first date as the location for our second two days later. We met first for a drink on the Lower East Side, a bar he picked that I had never heard of. For someone twenty years older than me, Marcus sure knew his downtown hangouts. After a couple of glasses of red wine, we headed to Brooklyn on the Vespa. As we waited for a stoplight at the exit of the Brooklyn Bridge, people stared at us from their cars admiringly. We must have looked like a pretty neat couple, arty Marcus with his crazy white hair sticking up on his head and me in a light pink cashmere sweater over a shiny bias-cut skirt. I wouldn’t have to cook for Marcus; I was already providing a great service to him by bestowing my youth to his funky-old-man scene. I liked what this liaison did for my image, too. It added a bohemian dimension that had hitherto been lacking from my profile.

  At Locanda Vini & Olii in Fort Greene, we took a table outside. The talk turned to past relationships, a frequent conversational detour in early dates. Marcus was just out of one, with someone, it turned out, I had met. This sort of happenstance is not uncommon in New York City, which is a lot more like Mayberry than you would believe, at least in the circles I travel in. We all know one another, and I would venture to say that the degree of sexual separation between me and everyone I know hovers at around one. Renee Lachaise had been deflowered
by my friend Conrad Peterson a few years before. I knew much more about that ordeal than I wanted to both then and especially now. I started to work out her age in my head, and no matter how many calculations I made, I could not arrive at a comforting total. She had to be at least ten years younger than me. Marcus and Renee had a long affair before he left his wife and exurban homestead to hole up with her in five hundred square feet on the Upper West Side. Now that I knew he’d dated someone even younger than me, the feeling of being the trophy babe on the eccentric artist’s Vespa was gone. The revelation took some of the wind out of my scooter-velocity-blown sails.

  But not so much that I didn’t invite Marcus back to my place for Prosecco. I didn’t say sex, I said Prosecco! “What if I carried you into the bedroom and made love to you?” Marcus said when we were drinking it and fooling around on the sofa. But I refused his Rhett Butler–infused suggestion. I may have ended my moratorium on dating, but I was going to take it slow this time.

  So slow, in fact, that within the hour I had invited him to Connecticut for the upcoming Fourth of July weekend, where he would meet my mother and Aunt Marie and we’d probably end up sharing a bed. The number of men who would agree to such an expedition five days into knowing someone is infinitesimal. But Marcus counted among that tiny minority. In my mind, he exhibited a refreshing lack of neuroses rare in New York City, where everyone overconsiders everything. The typical male of the thirty-something variety, at least, would shy away from such an invitation, fearing it would imply commitment. Yet another selling point for the (much) older man!

  “I’m coming to Connecticut and I’m bringing a man who is closer to your age than to mine,” I told my mother on the telephone the next morning. I knew she wouldn’t mind; whatever would get me to Connecticut for a weekend was all right with her. I could be bringing a recently paroled Charles Manson and her only concern would be whether or not he was still a vegetarian.

  “Good,” she replied without missing a beat. “I always thought you needed someone older.”

  I met Marcus at his Harlem apartment after work; we’d pick up his car and drive to Connecticut from there. Marcus lived in a slummy building in a grim part of town, but I embraced its tattered appeal. There was marble somewhere under the dirt on that lobby floor, and Marcus had a considerable amount of space, not to mention some excellent views of the Hudson River and northern New Jersey. I imagined hosting big parties up here. Marcus told me he had recently thrown one featuring oysters and beer. I didn’t know how to shuck and wondered if this would be a problem.

  The walls of the apartment were covered with Marcus’s paintings, and stacks of them lined the hallways. “We can bring some of these over to your place and hang them there,” he offered. I liked that idea. What I didn’t like was the eight-by-ten photo of him and Renee Lachaise on the wall in his studio, and what I detested was the framed e-mail from Renee Lachaise hanging near his bed. “I love you,” it read. However, I resolutely ignored those displays and concentrated on my oyster- shucking dilemma. I certainly didn’t say anything to Marcus; that would mean acknowledging them to myself. Anyway, lots of people have the ability to move on fast, even faster than it takes to remove relationship ephemera from walls. I was counting on Marcus to be one of those.

  We grabbed some CDs for the drive. I had brought some of my own, too.

  “This is so fresh!” Marcus exclaimed in his emphatic voice whenever I played my music.

  I also brought Super Hits of the Seventies, figuring that would appeal, but Marcus seemed to have missed groups from that period like Supertramp and ELO, the ones I liked. He may have been busy raising his children. Or maybe we just had different tastes.

  My mother and Aunt Marie came out to the front porch to meet Marcus when we drove up in his beat-up car. “Hello, ladies!” he chanted, greeting them with the warmth and ebullience that had worked wonders on me. He’d do fine with my family, I thought as I proudly showed him the house and then the table on the back deck. My mother, who had been getting a little slack with her cooking, pulled off a remarkable dinner in anticipation of what she probably imagined and hoped was a sophisticated older gentleman. Marcus seemed to enchant the matriarchy, and I felt so comfortable that I couldn’t believe we had met only a few days earlier.

  Dinner to Impress an Older Gentleman

  Grilled Marinated Flank Steak

  2 to 3 pounds flank steak

  ¼ cup olive oil

  ¼ cup red wine vinegar

  1 garlic glove, minced

  1 teaspoon dried oregano

  ½ teaspoon salt

  Freshly ground pepper

  Place meat in a bowl or Ziploc bag with remaining ingredients and marinate for 30 minutes on the counter and as much as overnight in the refrigerator.

  Preheat broiler or grill. Cook for 4 to 5 minutes on each side for medium-rare. Slice thinly.

  Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

  Fried Red Potatoes

  1 pound baby red potatoes

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  1 tablespoon butter

  Salt

  Place potatoes in a large pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Cook for about 15 minutes, until almost tender. Drain, let potatoes cool a bit, then cut them into quarters.

  In a large heavy skillet over medium-high heat, add the olive oil and butter. When the butter is bubbling, add the potatoes and cook until browned on each of their skinless sides, about 7 minutes per side.

  Drain on paper towels, sprinkle with salt.

  Serves 4.

  Now that he had met my mother and Aunt Marie, was there a point in hiding anything from Marcus? I had some reasons to be prudent—the fact that we had just met, the lingering Renee Lachaise–iana around his apartment—but I didn’t heed them. He was at my house, I had a brand-new hot pink leopard-print negligee (classier than it sounds) from the same designer who made that blue dress with the bamboo pattern, and it did some nice things for my curves. “Your body is one I’ve always dreamed of but never saw,” Marcus said. His wasn’t too bad, either, better than most of the thirty-year-olds I’ve known. “I worked in a rock quarry every summer when I was a teenager, and it just stayed with me,” he said when I asked him how this was possible. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think he was telling the truth, but at the time, I was brimming with acceptance and appreciation.

  We got up at dawn and went to the beach; it was a revelation to be there so early. Who knew that the sun rises right there on Long Island Sound and people come out to greet it with jumping, yapping dogs? I looked back to the previous Saturday, which I had spent at home alone, watching the women’s finals of the French Open while gloomily eating the grilled salmon with lemon-tarragon butter I used to make for Ethan. At the supermarket, I had run into a friend of Mitch’s, which didn’t help to alleviate all the pain I was feeling over this recent breakup. I would never have predicted that one week later I’d be having an amorous weekend with this kooky guy who was introducing me to pleasures I had never known in a place I had been to countless times. I never noticed how the smell of salt water pervaded our house until Marcus pointed it out to me. We swam at high tide at beaches I had never visited. We found two Adirondack chairs perched in front of one of the McMansions that seemed to be replacing all the cottages along the shore (“Gatsby’s house,” Marcus called it) and made them our own. We’d sit in them for a pre-dinner cocktail of Coronas with lime. Marcus photographed every moment with his digital camera. My mother handled the cooking.

  “This is the best weekend of my life!” Marcus exclaimed over and over. When I was back at the office on Tuesday, he called me first thing to reiterate the sentiment. “Thank you for the best weekend of my life!”

  In retrospect, this was a bit of an insult to his children. Could a weekend with me and my mother and Aunt Marie really be as good as the first weekend at home with a newborn? Granted that must be a stressful time, but there’s got to be some wonder to it that is far grander than discovering my body or Aunt Mar
ie’s waffles.

  An early summer heat wave postponed my cooking for Marcus. Even I have limits and, perhaps tellingly, in those days I had an air conditioner in the bedroom but not out in the living room, where the kitchen was. That doesn’t mean I settled. I went to Dean & DeLuca, the pricey gourmet emporium near my office, and picked up an array of cured meats, cheeses, and a baguette for us to eat for dinner and the best Greek yogurt to eat drizzled with honey for breakfast. We were making our way through a case of white Bordeaux I had purchased earlier in the year. I didn’t care what anything cost. There was no price I could put on the affection I wanted to show Marcus, and if I couldn’t show it to him through my talents in the kitchen, well then, I was just going to have to go overboard in my purchases. Marcus showed me the same generosity when I went to stay with him. Up near Columbia University, where he parked the Vespa, there was a great big wonderful market where Marcus procured a similar bounty: giant strawberries, yogurt from Vermont, organic orange juice, and good coffee. From there, we took the subway two stops up to his place. He didn’t park the Vespa near his apartment because the neighborhood was too sketchy. This was tedious and took away some of the advantage of having a boyfriend with wheels, but I didn’t make a fuss about it.

  Nor did I wait long to ask him to remove Renee Lachaise’s “I love you” from the wall (the eight-by-ten portrait of the two of them that hung in the studio came down of its own accord), and I, inspired by that missive, made the same declaration to Marcus preposterously early. He said he loved me, too.

  My friends, for the most part, had no problem with the fact that Marcus was twenty years my senior. Ginia was predictably enthusiastic, as she tends to be whenever I’m dating someone who has a job. (Though I’m not sure you could call what Marcus did a job. It was hard to know how he made any money. How much could one get for a cartoon in The New Yorker? And his were picked up only sporadically. His fortunes depended on the flow of his ideas and the whims of the cartoon editor that particular week. But Harlem is not too expensive, I suppose.) There was a delay in the introduction, because at the time, Ginia was getting to know the man she would eventually marry and was spending most of her evenings alone with him. When Marcus and I showed up at her apartment one night when she was in the midst of one of her early dates, she was impressed by our easy manner together. I felt smug in my conviction that I had found an unconventional relationship that really seemed to suit me.