I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Read online

  On Sunday nights, the evening before The New Yorker’s weekly meeting between cartoonists and their editor, I would try to help Marcus come up with captions to be placed under the pictures he drew. That’s how he liked to work, image first, then words. I could never come up with anything good, as much as I wanted to help with his cash flow. Marcus took any opportunity to show up at the offices of Harper’s Magazine, where he met many of my colleagues, most of whom remembered him from the game. He came out for drinks with me and Lewis Lapham, the magazine’s editor—even this older mentor of mine seemed to approve.

  Only Jennifer Romanello—a former work colleague turned close friend who serves a more sagelike role in my life on both career and romantic fronts—wasn’t buying it.

  “What are you going to do with him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, love him for the rest of his life? Marry him?”

  She scoffed at the idea with a half laugh, accompanied by a dismissive wave of the hand that bruised my unpractical soul. But what did she know? She got married in her twenties to a professor who had been in love with her from the time they were both in eighth grade. She couldn’t possibly understand how hard love had been for me and how it might be possible that a divorced fifty-seven-year-old could be construed as a good bet in my mind. And I hadn’t even told her about his last girlfriend.

  Marcus and I went nearly every weekend to Connecticut, where neither my mother nor my aunt scoffed, at least not in my earshot. He really dug that place, and I couldn’t quite believe how much fun I was having there with him. Marcus, once a ponytailed hippie, knew how to bake bread and wowed the older women by getting up early and baking biscuits for breakfast. We found a farmer’s market over in the next town I hadn’t known existed. One rare weekend when my mother stayed back in the city, I took charge of dinner. I made lamb burgers accompanied by slices of tomatoes from the farmer’s market drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with fleur de sel along with an orzo salad with feta cheese. We created old- fashioned strawberry shortcakes from the leftover biscuits, slicing them in half and layering them with strawberries and whipped cream. Aunt Marie, a woman who never met a dessert she didn’t like, was sold on Marcus that evening. The three of us had a thoroughly enjoyable meal out on the back deck. It was the best time I ever had with my aunt.

  Lamb Burgers

  1½ pounds ground lamb

  ½ cup minced fresh mint

  2 garlic cloves, pressed

  1 tablespoon paprika

  1 teaspoon salt

  ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

  ¼ teaspoon cinnamon

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  Combine all ingredients, shape into patties, cook on a barbecue, under the broiler, or atop the stove for 5 to 7 minutes on each side. I don’t serve them with bread, I serve them with:

  Orzo Salad with Feta

  (Adapted from Gourmet magazine)

  ½ pound orzo

  Juice and zest of 1 lemon

  ¼ cup olive oil

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  Freshly ground pepper

  ¼ cup pine nuts, toasted

  ¾ cup feta, crumbled

  ½ cup scallions, green parts only, thinly sliced

  Cook the orzo according to the directions for pasta here. Orzo is a quick-cooking pasta, so begin checking it at the 6-minute mark.

  In a medium bowl, whisk the lemon juice, zest, olive oil, salt, and a few grindings of pepper. When the orzo is cooked, add it to the bowl and stir. Let it cool, then add the remaining ingredients. Add salt and pepper to taste.

  Serves 4.

  Marcus’s Strawberry Shortcakes

  I have no idea how he made them. I’d use Bisquick.

  “It looks like he’s not going anywhere,” I said to my mother one day when we were driving to the Stop & Shop in Connecticut, basking in this newfound feeling of security.

  “It looks like you’ll have to be the one to get rid of him,” she said, nothing disparaging in her voice, at least not that I detected. It wasn’t until after the fact that I learned she thought Marcus was full of it from the get-go. At the time, she expressed her reservations only in subtle ways, like cautioning me against going on long drives (to Connecticut, for instance) in Marcus’s car. She wasn’t thrilled about me riding on the back of the Vespa, either. I ignored these small pleas.

  It had been a while since I’d felt that kind of hold on anyone. Marcus called constantly. He wanted to see me all the time. I was so broken by past disappointments that I needed his neediness to feel safe; thus I made myself available all the time. If he called me at work at four p.m. to say he was in the neighborhood, I would drop everything to go meet him. By five p.m., we would be drinking cold white wine in my bed. One rainy evening when the weather had cooled down enough for me to turn on the stove, I made a lovely little pasta for Marcus, spaghetti dressed only in a peignoir of truffle oil, sprinkled with parmigiano. This is a simple yet elegant dish, a luxurious and romantic supper for when all you really want to do is laze about in bed.

  Spaghettini in a White Truffle Oil Peignoir

  Salt

  ½ pound spaghettini (or thin spaghetti)

  3 tablespoons white truffle oil

  Freshly grated parmigiano

  Freshly ground pepper

  Cook spaghettini according to the directions for pasta here. Drain and return to pot, add truffle oil. Divide into two bowls, get back in bed, bring along the cheese and pepper.

  Clothing optional.

  Renee Lachaise came up from time to time, as did Ethan, who was a more apt counterpart to Renee than Mitch, who had left me more flummoxed than heartbroken. And proving that no New Yorker is an absolute stranger to another, Marcus had heard Ethan’s name before he met me. Oddly, Renee had mentioned him to Marcus because a work friend of hers knew Ethan and happened to have a crush on him that she talked about incessantly. There was yet another connection between Marcus and Ethan. Marcus’s son used to date Ethan’s cousin Emily, whom I knew quite well; we even had dinner with her in Florence during her semester abroad. I was so amazed by all these coincidences that I couldn’t resist calling Ethan and sharing them with him. Ethan knew Marcus, too, from his New Yorker days. He may have thought it was a little strange that I was dating someone so old, but he reserved any comment. Ethan, I learned in that conversation, had recently broken up with my successor, so I magnanimously let him know about his secret admirer, who turned out to be not so secret after all, just an old friend of Ethan’s whom he had been spending a lot of time with and who was feeling a little more than he was feeling. Sound familiar?

  Somewhere around week four, things with Marcus began to feel a little different. I first noticed it while sitting with him on a rock near the water at low tide. I realized that good feeling I initially had in his presence was gone and in its place was … boredom. I panicked, albeit silently, and racked my brain, trying to understand what could have possibly changed. I deduced that my affection for Marcus was based on the escapist joy of seeing myself through his eyes, the eyes of someone who had no idea who I was but had instantly concluded that I was da bomb. The charge of that was so strong, it even made Connecticut seem exciting. It had been such a lovely idyll, but there, on that rock, the magic spell seemed to all of a sudden wear off.

  As my feelings changed, so did Marcus’s demeanor. Which came first, I really cannot say. I only know that he was no longer the happy-go-lucky biscuit baker. When my mother—still believing that Marcus’s ardor was immutable—asked him to clean the leaves out of the gutters, he wasn’t exactly whistling while he worked, as he had when he’d cheerfully weeded the flower beds (both in front of the house and behind it) that first weekend, the one that was the best of his life.

  I refused to accept the simple probability that Marcus and I just may not have been right for each other. I wanted a relationship to work out so badly that I continued with this presumed bird in the hand, hoping that if I could just get my head right, things would be the way they were
on the Fourth of July. I didn’t tell anyone what I was feeling, I just let them all continue to believe that I was on cloud nine with Pops. In an attempt to understand why things were all of a sudden not working, I went with my standard explanation: There was something wrong with me. This is always a splendid fallback position, because if that is the case, there is hope that I can fix it. The discomfort will go away if I just try a little harder or make something that tastes really, really good.

  Heat wave be damned, desperate times call for desperate measures—when we got back to my place in Brooklyn, I turned on the oven and put together this parmigiana with eggplants from the Connecticut farmer’s market. It was extraordinary, and Marcus managed to drum up some of that old-time over-the-top zeal, but not enough to salvage our dwindling rapport.

  Ineffectual Eggplant Parmigiana

  3 large eggplants

  ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon olive oil

  1 onion, chopped

  1 teaspoon dried oregano

  1 (28-ounce) can chopped tomatoes (or whole if you feel like pureeing them yourself with a hand blender or in a food processor; I don’t)

  1 tablespoon red wine

  1 large pinch sugar

  1 cup fresh basil leaves

  ¼ cup walnuts, chopped and toasted

  1/3 cup plain bread crumbs

  1 teaspoon olive oil

  ½ cup freshly grated parmigiano

  1 cup grated mozzarella

  Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

  Slice the eggplants crosswise into ½-inch pieces, lay on a baking sheet, and brush both sides with ½ cup olive oil. Bake each side for 15 minutes.

  Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat, add chopped onion, and sauté until the onion is soft (about 5 to 7 minutes). Add oregano and stir, then add tomatoes; bring to a simmer, cover, and reduce the heat to low. Cook for 20 minutes, then add wine, sugar, and basil.

  While the sauce is cooking, chop walnuts and toast them in a small skillet over low heat, then add them to bread crumbs and mix them together with 1 teaspoon olive oil.

  When the eggplants are browned on both sides, remove them from the oven and reduce heat to 375 degrees.

  Add a little of the sauce to the bottom of a 9 by 9-inch baking dish (or whatever baking dish you have that will accommodate the eggplant and most of the sauce), then sprinkle a little parmigiano on top. Add a layer of eggplant followed by sauce, a sprinking of mozzarella, a sprinkling of parmigiano, and continue until all the eggplant is used up. Cover the top with the bread crumb–walnut mixture and bake until browned and bubbling, about 35 to 40 minutes.

  Serves the 2 of you, plus the 3 other people you wish were there to help keep the conversation going.

  The next weekend, we stayed in the city. Those two days stretched before me like an aeon. How would I make it through? Friday night we went with his son to see the Jicks play in Prospect Park. The rain was pouring down, and we shielded ourselves from it with newspapers we found in the trash, though we should have just left since neither father nor son knew who Stephen Malkmus was. Saturday was a stunning day, but I felt trapped, not that it occurred to me to try to get away. I didn’t want to hurt Marcus’s feelings, and I didn’t know what I would do by myself anyway. It was not the first or, sadly, the last time I have found myself stricken with Stockholm syndrome.

  We went to Central Park and ate ice-cream bars; that took about two hours. Then it was one-thirty, a long time until dinner. I was living from meal to meal; at least at mealtime there was something to do, and better yet, something to drink. We took the long way back to Brooklyn on the Vespa, going over the 59th Street Bridge, cruising through Long Island City, Williamsburg, and Fort Greene; then I suggested we go for a spin around Red Hook and take in some of the extraordinary views of the harbor and Statue of Liberty. This was a good idea except for the fact that that’s where the Vespa ran over something that gave it a flat tire. Now I was stuck with Marcus walking the Vespa through the middle of nowhere, looking for a place to get it repaired. We weren’t far from my brother Matthew’s apartment, so we went there and Matthew helped Marcus park the scooter. We were stuck, Vespa-less in Brooklyn, with two long hours until dinner.

  While we were sitting around my brother’s apartment waiting for a reasonable dining hour to arrive, Matthew mentioned that one of our Italian cousins had written looking for a place some friends of hers could stay when they visited New York. I wasn’t inclined to give up my apartment, but Marcus insisted I stay with him and let them have my place for the week. What a kind and generous soul. I should have been happy with him. Why wasn’t I?

  Marcus took charge of the entertainment committee when Sonia and Andrea arrived. He was thrilled to hang out with real Italians and for his daughter to polish her rusty language skills. He took them to a New Yorker softball game in Central Park, he arranged dinners at ethnic restaurants in pockets of New York far from the tourist beat. His efforts did prop up my mood a little bit. Sonia and Andrea were superimpressed. They thought we were a fantastic couple, and through their eyes I could once again see us that way, too.

  When they left, Marcus became somewhat elusive. He no longer called to announce his every move; now he was AWOL for long stretches of time. His carefree middle-aged artist-about-town attitude was all but gone. A parking ticket, which he would have shrugged off in our early days, sent him into a lather. We were still going to Connecticut every weekend, but Marcus no longer wanted to hear my music, once so fresh, on the drive up there. Instead, we listened to his bluesy backroom bar mixes. The sort of stuff my sister Carla’s bad-boy boyfriends used to listen to in the seventies when they came over and hung out in our rec room and used my doll carriage as an ashtray. I didn’t like those guys, and I didn’t like their music. The memory did not do much for my endeavor to resuscitate an attraction to Marcus.

  One night when we were in bed at his apartment, the buzzer on the intercom rang. Marcus ignored it. It rang and rang. Then there was a knock on the apartment door. Marcus went to it, then came back and told me it was some crackhead woman looking for a guy named Paco.

  “I told her Paco didn’t live here.”

  The next morning, I got up well before Marcus and went to the kitchen to make coffee. Gone was the nice French roast he used to buy; in its place was some cheap Café Bustelo, the kind of coffee you get in a bodega. I used to drink it back in my starving publishing assistant days. I set up Marcus’s espresso pot, but something went wrong and wet coffee grinds ricocheted all over the kitchen. I was frantically trying to wipe down the kitchen with a moldy sponge, dying for coffee, and wondering why Marcus, who used to spring out of bed at the crack of dawn, wasn’t yet awake. There was no coffee, no orange juice, and nothing to eat. When Marcus finally emerged and I left for work, he didn’t wait with me for the elevator as he usually did; he just left me standing there alone.

  Then he announced that he would be spending the next week at his family’s lake house up in Canada for his annual vacation with his children and ex-wife. “I would invite you, but …” I understood. In any case, I had no desire to go on vacation with him and his ex-wife and children. Marcus wanted to leave the Vespa parked in the small yard in front of my house while he was away. On the Friday before he left for his trip, we had tickets to see the Brooklyn Cyclones, a local minor league baseball team that he really wanted to see. I had not heard from him all day. I spent the afternoon with Kit at a tag sale, waiting for Marcus to call, and while Kit was helping me lug home a painting, we found him on my stoop, waiting. The painting, a Watteau reproduction, inspired one more burst of faux mensch from Marcus, who offered to paint over some of the spots on the canvas that were chipped. He was tough to read; he looked sullen on the stoop, but then he morphed into the good guy, always willing to help, especially with art.

  But as we rode out to Coney Island on the Vespa, my hands felt wrong wrapped around Marcus’s waist, and he wasn’t saying much. Alarmed by the prices at the concession stand, h
e got us one beer and one popcorn to share. Not long after we took our seats in the bleachers, I noticed that the beer had moved from its initial spot between us to Marcus’s right, where I couldn’t get at it. He wasn’t concerned with my need for alcohol or the players on the field. Not even the man dressed as a giant baseball, who danced around the aisles in between innings, could evoke any sort of reaction from him. At the seventh-inning stretch, there was a fireworks display on the beach. Marcus didn’t even look. “This is kind of boring,” he said, and with that we left.

  Marcus parked the Vespa in front of my house and took the subway home. He was off to Canada the next morning.

  “I’ll call you when I get there,” he said as he left. “I guess I’ll have to since you never call me.”

  What was that about? I couldn’t understand what it was or where it came from, but I could also no longer deny that something was very wrong. I had been having doubts about Marcus for weeks, but surely that was just me putting up roadblocks where there weren’t any. I didn’t have any hard evidence to explain my lack of satisfaction besides maybe an unwillingness to clean gutters here or phoning a few hours late there. I was a pro at ignoring those and working on my own thing. I was going to get better, then he’d get better and we would be happy again, just as we were for that first five or so minutes of what should merely have been a fun, inappropriate summer fling.