I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Read online

  I couldn’t bear another story gone wrong, no matter how wrong that story was. I spent Saturday sick with worry over what could have happened. Marcus’s original demeanor was a memory, but he never behaved with hostility the way he had that previous evening. And though he wasn’t making me happy, I didn’t want to lose him. My family knew him and (as far as I could tell) liked him, Ginia was rooting for us, and most of my work friends and colleagues had witnessed our meeting, and those who hadn’t had met him when I paraded him around the office on his many visits.

  The weekend was cloudy, and I was trapped in that mental prison known as waiting-for-the-phone-to-ring. I checked my cell phone every two minutes. Saturday night, I called him. He had groused about my never calling, after all. I got only his voice mail. Sunday morning, I went to Mass to try to get some peace, but nothing worked. I scratched and scratched at a mosquito bite I probably got at that silly game.

  I spent Monday in a state of extreme stress. I dined with my brother Matthew and his wife, Elizabeth, on Tuesday, and they brushed off my worries. They adored Marcus and were convinced that some logical explanation of his silence would emerge when he did.

  On Wednesday at lunch, I went to a lingerie sample sale, even though I thought that might be bad luck in light of what was going on. Still, I bought some lacy underpinnings. Not long after I returned to work, an e-mail arrived from Marcus.

  G.

  Two things:

  You’ve obviously been talking to someone a lot about me.

  I’ve run off with Renee Lachaise. I’m as madly in love with her as I was the night we met.

  M.

  My heart was palpitating. I grabbed the phone and called Marcus, but there was no answer on his home phone or cell. (As if someone that cowardly would answer his phone, but I wasn’t thinking straight.) “You can’t break up with me like that,” I said in my messages. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. You’ve obviously been talking to someone a lot about me.

  Not only was this nonsensical, it was angry, and there was nothing between us to warrant that. Good that he was gone, but was the kick in the face really necessary?

  For whatever reason, I needed to make some sense out of that e-mail. Okay, he “ran off with Renee Lachaise,” that was clear. But the “talking about” him was sheer lunacy, and yet, I must speak lunatic because I was able to trace the meaning of it with a call to Ethan. Barring that, I could at least find a way to blame myself for what happened.

  “Did you tell Erin O’Brien that I was dating Marcus Caldwell?” Erin was that friend of Renee’s who had the crush on Ethan, and he had every right to tell her if he wanted to, that wasn’t the issue, it’s just that if Ethan had told Erin, then my lunatic dictionary could translate the missive into something like “If you hadn’t told Ethan, it wouldn’t have gotten back to Renee.” The whole thing was madness, and I should have been thanking the Lord that psychopath was out of my life, but instead I actually spent a couple of days regretting that I had ever said anything to Ethan.

  “He’s fifty-seven years old, he should get some balls,” said John Mallon, an old friend I’d always had a little crush on whom I happened to have drinks scheduled with that evening. His funny comments about the episode had me roaring, and the Bellinis we were drinking brought out the two specks of flirt left in me. I ended up dragging him back to my apartment just to put a better spin on a horrible day. To borrow from the Sex and the City episode in which Carrie gets arrested for smoking pot the day Berger breaks up with her on a Post-it note: I wanted to turn it into the day I made out with John Mallon rather than the day I got dumped by an AARP member with a psychotic e-mail. It helped to have John with me when I got home to find the Vespa gone and the same demented text on a handwritten note slipped under my door.

  “Even his language dates him!” said my wise friend Jennifer, mercifully sparing me any “I told you so’s” when I told her about the note. “Who says they’ve ‘run off’ with someone in this day and age?”

  “You’ll hear from him again,” said Ginia. “Not before Columbus Day and not after Christmas.” She was right about hearing from him again, but wrong about the timing. His attempt to woo me back commenced a few days shy of Columbus Day and continued until Christmas.

  He called, he sent notes, he had cupcakes delivered to my office. They were pretty; one was yellow with a little bee on it, the other was white with pink flowers drawn in icing. But even I wouldn’t eat them. Not wanting to waste food, even from him, I tried to pawn them off on my colleagues at Harper’s,but they, in solidarity, wouldn’t eat them, either. They ended up in the garbage. I ignored all of his attempts. I had as much interest in seeing Marcus again as I would in hanging out with Jeffrey Dahmer.

  The nice-guy shtick must have taken tremendous energy for Marcus to keep up, especially at his age. That exertion must have been what kept him so trim and not surreptitious hours spent at the gym every day while I was at work, as I originally suspected.

  I exorcised him from my life by making some cupcakes of my own.

  Fuck-You Cakes

  For the cupcakes (yellow cake, of course):

  Cupcake liners

  2 cups cake flour

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 stick (½ cup) butter, softened

  1 cup sugar

  3 large eggs, room temperature

  1½ teaspoons vanilla

  ¾ cup whole milk

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

  Insert liners into muffin tins. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside. Cream butter and sugar with a hand mixer (or a standing mixer fitted with a paddle) at medium speed until fluffy; add eggs one at time, then the vanilla, and beat until smooth. Reduce mixer speed to low and add the sifted ingredients to the butter mixture a little at a time, alternating with the milk until fully incorporated. Do not overmix, as this will make for tough cupcakes and you’ve suffered enough.

  Spoon batter into muffin tins, filling each one a third of the way. Bake until tops are golden and springy, 20 to 25 minutes.

  Yield: About 12.

  Chocolate Bourbon Frosting

  (Because you need a drink)

  ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa

  2 to 3 tablespoons bourbon (depending on how bad it was)

  4 tablespoons milk

  1 stick unsalted butter, very soft

  1 box confectioners’ sugar

  1 to 2 tablespoons milk

  In a small bowl, whisk the cocoa, bourbon, and 2 tablespoons milk. Cream the butter with a hand mixer or stand-up mixer at medium speed until smooth, then add the sugar 1 cup at a time until fully incorporated. Add the bourbon mixture and continue beating until the color is uniform, then the additional milk a little at a time until the frosting is fluffy and spreadable.

  Don’t be so angry with yourself that you eat more than one or two cupcakes. Be angry with him! Bring whatever is left to work. Your colleagues will eat these and you’ll feel lighter for having shed him and not OD’ing on cupcakes.

  From Sex

  and the City

  to Nun

  The Marcus episode scarred me. In fact, with all due respect to Saint Francis, I felt as though I had been marked with the stigmata of bad experiences. I was embarrassed at the office because everyone knew about Marcus, and now (through my own reportage) everyone knew he was gone. Certainly no one cared one way or the other, but we can’t help believing that people are way more focused on our lives than they actually are. I winced at the memory of parading him around the office, so proud of the wrinkly-scaled catch I had brought home from the softball game, and how the whole thing played itself out before everyone’s eyes.

  I didn’t have to impose a moratorium on dating this time: I was left with post-traumatic stress disorder and was much too damaged to consider it. Even the men who were my friends bothered me. My solution was to seek attention just from those I knew were truly off-limits: “The only men I want to be
friends with are gay men, married men, or priests,” I declared to Ginia. The jokes were too easy—she refrained from making any. And she agreed that there were a lot of ex-boyfriends and boys whose connection to me was ambiguous hanging around: Kit was living down the block with a woman he would eventually marry and divorce; Henry, the author I had once kissed and who had fixed me up with Mitch, lived around the corner and would come over every Saturday morning for coffee and toast; even Ethan’s familiar address would appear at the top of my e-mail in-box from time to time. All these men who couldn’t or wouldn’t give me what I was looking for were taking up space in my life. Following tenets more New Age than Christian, I got rid of them all in order to free that space for new things.

  So I turned to the church I had discovered just before Marcus knocked me off track, and I dated Father Joel, albeit in an utterly chaste and Vatican-sanctioned way.

  Joel is a priest who was, at that time, in his early thirties. He studied at Oxford and is proficient in Latin and ancient Greek, not that that would affect my dialogue with him in any way, but it pleases me to know people who are accomplished. Joel wears little round silver glasses, and he looks as if he stepped out of Brideshead Revisited(the PBS miniseries, not the film). I met him at a new members dinner, where I confessed to him that I had not gone to confession for twenty-eight years. I joked that I was tempted to give the sacrament another go, but only if cocktails were involved. Joel promised Manhattans if I told him my sins, and he kept his word—only we imbibed them not in the confessional, but at a nearby bar, where we smoked and drank and got a little too tipsy. From then on we stuck to red wine, which we drank regularly at Bacchus, a bistro equidistant from my apartment and the church, whose French owners had a lax attitude about the city’s smoking laws. Joel and I sat for hours after dinner, drinking coffee, smoking, and talking. Joel fantasized about doing missionary work at the restaurant, bringing the French staff back into the faith. “Ah, France, the first daughter of the church,” he’d say with a sigh. He would convert them one espresso at a time.

  I always wanted to be friends with a priest. The vocation, to me, seems more alternative than anything the modern world can come up with. There’s nothing quite as out there as giving it all up (or most of it) for God.

  As you may have surmised, the church I go to isn’t the dreary parish that many, including me, associate with Catholic churches. It is tastefully decorated, the choir is world class, and Sunday Masses are packed with people who aren’t just making grocery lists in their heads or killing time before the big game. There are four priests, each one terribly attractive in his own way: Joel, with his dry wit and sharp intellect; Mark, a handsome Australian in his early fifties, who is more heartfelt; Dennis, whose style is a little pop psyche, which I’m all for; and Anthony, who just entered the priesthood and is full of earnest goodwill and insight. Every Sunday, one of them offers an illuminating perspective on the faith, and most times it manages to coincide with whatever is on my mind that week. It’s a great respite from city life. On the best days, I can get lost in meditation (rare, but it does happen). I’ve been in and out of church all my life, but when I found this place, I knew I was staying. To anyone who would listen, I berated myself for not finding it sooner. “You found us when you were ready to find us,” was Joel’s reassuring reply. Maybe. Maybe I’ll find that other thing when I’m ready, too. Maybe I’m not as ready as I think I am. Still, I was having my most satisfying love affair in recent memory with that church. I couldn’t stop talking about it. I told every Catholic I knew who went to church (a small number) and tried to reinvigorate a few who fell away.

  Besides Sister Mary Virginia, who once locked me in a closet in second grade and told me she was going to leave me there all weekend, my memories of Catholic school are good. From first to eighth grade, I was educated by cloistered nuns who wore habits. Sister Aimee, my first-grade teacher, was a classic example of what the life of the spirit can do for you, best-case scenario. She was smiling, beatific, wise. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, but let’s not hang that on celibacy; with all my sexual freedom, I too am an incurable nail biter. My high school nuns were more worldly; they wore civilian clothes and were passionately political—their main concern was the situation in Nicaragua; they played guitar and sang songs in praise of the Sandinistas. We fasted for Oxfam, then spent the evening in the monastery making soup and baking bread. The school offered classes in existentialism; we read Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus.

  The church gave me a progressive education, as it banished the occasional loneliness of my childhood. That’s why I keep going back, even though I am a slave to carnality and probably have no right to be there.

  Fed up with just about every man except Jesus (and even he confounded me), and without any seriousness of intent, I imagined becoming a nun. Usually, though, my daydreams tended to view this calling as a temporary position: I would enter a convent and write a memoir entitled From Sex and the City to Nun, and it would be a huge best seller. Naturally, it would end with me falling in love with a handsome young priest and both of us shaking off our holy orders. No, I just couldn’t give up hope of finding forever love. Call it faith, if you will, I just can’t lose it.

  Still, I was in no way at peace with my lot. I couldn’t conceive of why God would bless me with such well-honed domestic skills, then deny me a family to share them with. I was in my late thirties, I wanted to have a real home with a real kitchen where my husband and I would host my brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, for holidays. I was stuck, living in the same apartment I’d moved into with Kit almost fifteen years earlier, with the same tiny kitchen. Then, like a good Catholic, I said, “Fuck it. I’ll accept my life as it is.” I would host Easter in the apartment I had, however imperfect the setting or situation. If this is what God gave me, I would operate within His parameters.

  Lent was a breeze. I abstained from sex. Which was a joke because even if Catholics were permitted to have sex on any day of the year before marriage, there was not a soul on God’s earth who wanted to have sex with me. But that was okay; the enlightened nuns who educated me always said it was better to do something good for others than give up some silly thing like chocolate for Lent, which didn’t do anything to make the world a better place. I would cook Easter dinner for my family, I would be cheerful about my life, and my positive spirit would reverberate clear to the Middle East.

  Kit came over and helped me move my farmhouse table from its little niche to the center of the living room after I apologized for being out of touch. (He’s used to me being a freak—in fact, “freak” is practically his nickname for me—and he always forgives.) I bought an additional table from the Salvation Army and put them together to make one long table that transformed the bulk of my living space into a giant dining room. I spent weeks planning the menu, settling on a first course of homemade gnocchi with a simple sauce of tomato and butter, followed by the requisite leg of lamb. I made the gnocchi the weekend before and froze them, then spent every evening of Holy Week transporting supplies to my apartment. I loved opening the freezer and looking at the gnocchi tucked away in Ziploc bags; their shape, formed with a fork and my thumb, was absolutely perfect. I attended services for Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Saturday I bought lilies and tulips and daffodils. I couldn’t help but feel the joy that reflecting upon Jesus’s death and resurrection is supposed to make you feel, which you may have to be educated by nuns to fathom.

  No Nookie Gnocchi

  For the gnocchi:

  2 russet potatoes

  1 egg

  1 teaspoon salt

  Pinch freshly grated nutmeg

  1 heaping cup flour, plus extra flour for dusting

  Salt

  Freshly grated parmigiano

  Freshly grated pepper

  Put the potatoes in a pot with enough water to cover, bring to a boil, and cook, partially covered, until they are just tender, 35 to 40 minutes. Remove the potatoes to a cutting boa
rd and peel with a paring knife as soon as you can stand to touch them, then run them through a potato ricer or food mill, spreading them out on a cutting board to cool completely.

  Mix the egg, salt, and nutmeg. Form the cooled potatoes into a mound and pour the egg mixture into it. Begin kneading the potato and egg mixture with your hands, adding the flour a little at a time, being careful not to overwork the dough.

  When the flour is evenly combined with the potato and the dough is only a little sticky, divide it into 4 pieces. Roll each piece into a long, narrow tube like a garden snake and slice it crosswise into soft little pillows, each ½ inch wide. Rest each pillow on the tip of your thumb and impress it with the tines of a fork lightly dusted with flour, creating a ribbed surface for the sauce to cling to. Keep a bowl of flour nearby to dip the fork into, as it will become tacky—or better yet, keep some extra forks nearby.

  Add the gnocchi about 10 at a time to a pot of salted boiling water. When they rise to the top, they’re done. Remove them to a serving bowl with a slotted spoon or spider and continue to cook in batches. Toss with the sauce and serve with grated parmigiano and freshly grated pepper.

  Yield: About 6 dozen.

  For the sauce:

  (Adapted from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking)

  1 (28-ounce) can whole tomatoes

  ½ cup (1 stick) butter

  1 medium onion, peeled and cut in half

  1 tablespoon sugar

  ¼ cup red wine

  1 teaspoon salt

  Put all ingredients in a large saucepan over medium heat, bring to a simmer, then lower heat and cook for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove onion before tossing sauce with the gnocchi.

  Over this period of celibacy, I became a cooking slut; I would do it wherever and whenever anyone would let me. I volunteered to be the chef for parish council meetings and member get- togethers at church. When my friends Lucinda and John had their first baby, I went over to their house and made spaghetti and meatballs for the exhausted new parents.