I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Read online

  Yield: 8 puddings.

  It rained on New Year’s Eve and then again on New Year’s Day, two of the dreariest days of my entire life. Ginia gave a dinner party, and at midnight I did not receive a kiss from my date. I told myself that maybe in Europe people don’t kiss their girlfriend, or friend, or career manager, or whatever the heck I was, to ring in the New Year. I went out on the terrace to smoke a cigarette and tore my new skirt while climbing over the windowsill to get out there. I focused my vexation on that for the rest of the night.

  The next morning, we awoke to more rain. I could barely drag myself out of bed, let alone to the party I planned to attend (hosted by more friends who couldn’t wait to meet Lachlan). Ginia was supposed to go, but she backed out. Anne was wavering. I didn’t want to go to the party, but I sure didn’t want to spend the day at home alone with Lachlan. I was paralyzed under the covers with my phone, trying to cajole someone into coming along.

  Anne reluctantly agreed to join us, and while Lachlan was consumed with charming some obese lady, she and I stuffed our faces with Rice Krispies treats painted green and shaped like wreaths. That’s when I finally came clean to her about what was going on at my house. When you’re stuck in a situation like the one I was in, you don’t want to tell your friends because that means admitting to yourself that it’s really happening—but once you do, it becomes so much more bearable. The melted marshmallow and unburdening made me feel a little less alone. On the way home, now that I was thinking myself slightly less doomed, Lachlan, Anne, and I talked about resolutions for the coming year. You know what Lachlan’s was. Anne and I talked about writing our own books, something we had been talking about for a few months, though neither of us had any idea what we would write about; we just had the nagging sense that we should be writing something. “You’re such an amazing cook, you should write a cookery book,” Lachlan said. That idea wasn’t “daft,” as Lachlan might say, if only I could come up with a cookery book idea. I had no clue how one would come to me, but on that dark day, I felt a glimmer of hope that I could. Then I forgot about it for a while.

  While I drowned in rain and agony, Lachlan and I continued doing everything together. We visited museums, ate dinner, went to the movies. Watching The Last King of Scotland was like seeing a twist on my own predicament; I felt as if I were being hung by my skin, only not by Idi Amin, but by the cute Scotsman. At the Guggenheim on a Friday evening (when it’s free), Lachlan kept his arm around me as we ascended and descended the curving ramp. He bought me a postcard of a painting I liked of monks eating dinner and propped it up on my bedside in front of one of an Annunciation he had bought me in happier times at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  Lachlan used a variety of terms to refer to himself in regard to me. Sometimes he was my “boyfriend,” sometimes he was my “friend.” When he became “the guy living in your apartment,” I had to make inquiries.

  “Could you please explain our relationship?” I asked one Saturday morning after the Hibs game.

  We sat on the settee in the foyer, where he put his arms around me and said, “We have a very warm friendship.”

  I pushed him away. What did I need with a warm friendship? I had more friends than I knew what to do with, and I certainly didn’t handle their careers.

  I cried every day after that conversation. We talked about him finding someplace else to live for his last few weeks, but I couldn’t bear the thought of him leaving. Either way I was going to be miserable, so why inconvenience Lachlan, too? It was Stockholm syndrome all over again, no cure on the horizon, no plans for a benefit.

  Even though the ecstatic promise of our union was short-lived (for me, at least; there was plenty of promise left in it for him), I continued to think that we had a true connection and that Lachlan had shut himself off from allowing it to blossom. “What is love if not what we have?” I pleaded with him. “We like all the same things, we’re happy eating together, living together, watching TV together.” I just couldn’t let go of the joy I felt in our first few days together and the sentiments enclosed in the hundreds of notes we batted back and forth across the ocean. How did he lose all desire for me? Was I too nervous, as he had suggested? Should I have let him cook, acted a little more helpless? But then, how helpless can the person orchestrating your literary career pretend to be?

  “The only thing wrong with you is that you think something is wrong with you,” Lachlan said, which is plenty perceptive, but served only to make me hate myself more for thinking there was something wrong with me and wondering if Lachlan would love me if I could stop thinking that.

  Lachlan, on the other hand, thought there was absolutely nothing wrong with him, an admirable quality indeed. “This is me, this is the way I am,” he declared. “I’ve never been able to commit to a woman, and I’m happy that way.” And the itinerant life? He was happy with that, too.

  “I’m still me, I’m still Lachlan,” he said, not understanding why I didn’t want to talk to him. I holed up in my bedroom, reading Patricia Marx, an author Lachlan discovered one day at the local bookstore. Flipping through her novel Him Her Him Again the End of Him, he thought he had found his literary soul mate. I got jealous when he told me this and immediately procured a copy for myself (know thy rivals). This funny novel about an intelligent woman who over many years will not be dissuaded of her love for a heinous cad served as a good escape in those days. Lachlan, on the other hand, found his interest waning as he read further. It was comforting to learn that I wasn’t the only woman he quickly lost excitement for.

  As I took to hiding in my bedroom and going out to dinner without him, Lachlan began to play the injured. “I feel like I’ve lost a friend,” he said when I came home from an evening out with Anne. “I’ve waited for you for ice cream, have you had dessert?” I loosened up a little eating Häagen-Dazs banana split and watching the Fleetwood Mac Behind the Music on VH-1. Then Christine McVie singing “Songbird” had me weeping all over again.

  Perhaps it was my hysteria that emboldened Lachlan to venture out of the house one afternoon without alerting me or showing up at my office as he always did, even now that things were just awful, which he always pretended wasn’t the case. I was calling the house to tell him something or other, but there was no answer. I never thought for a moment that he had walked out—he wouldn’t do that anyway, he had nowhere to go. I jumped to the only possible conclusion: He was dead—his bile tube detonated or that faulty electric charge in his heart had claimed him once and for all. He was asleep when I left for work—at this point in our relationship, I was happy when he missed breakfast, giving me the chance to sneak a cigarette and blow smoke out the living room window—I didn’t think to check if he was still breathing.

  When I finally heard from him, just when I was about to go home to collect his remains, I was livid. “Just make us something for dinner!” I barked (odd that that’s what I would come up with as a punishment).

  When I came home, he served me this delicious farfalle with zucchini and eggs. “It’s a natural combination,” he told me. I sure hadn’t thought of it, but it is indeed delectable. The eggs give the dish a wonderful creaminess. It is another Lachlan creation that I continue to re-create.

  Lachlan’s Farfalle with Zucchini and Egg

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  ½ medium onion, chopped

  2 medium zucchini squash (1 green, 1 yellow)

  1 teaspoon salt

  ½ pound farfalle

  2 eggs

  2 heaping tablespoons freshly grated parmigiano, plus extra for passing at table

  Freshly ground pepper

  ¼ cup chopped parsley

  In a medium sauté pan, warm olive oil over medium heat, then add the chopped onion and cook until opaque, 3 to 4 minutes. Slice zucchini into ½-inch rounds, then each round into quarters; add zucchini and salt to the onions and cook until soft, 15 to 20 minutes.

  Meanwhile, cook the farfalle according to the directions for pasta here. Beat the eggs
and add parmigiano; set aside. When pasta is cooked, drain and add to zucchini mixture. Remove from heat, add the eggs, and allow them to cook on the hot pasta. Serve in warmed bowls garnished with freshly ground pepper and chopped parsley. Pass extra cheese at table.

  Serves 2, with leftovers.

  A few weeks before Lachlan’s departure, THE AGENT finally let me know that she was going to take on his book. It was all bittersweet to me, though I feigned great excitement, and in some ways I was excited that I had succeeded brilliantly at my fool’s errand. I handed Lachlan a situation any writer would kill for, and I was the one being killed for it. I made him take me out for a “celebratory” dinner at a local Italian restaurant I had been raving to him about, a newfangled mom-and-pop place like the one we’d talked about opening in sunnier days. Lachlan wasn’t impressed with his tortelloni or his tagliata. “Your food is so much better,” he said. Of course it is—mine’s free.

  THE AGENT arranged a round of meetings for Lachlan with a handful of interested publishers. She guessed that she could get $50,000 for the book, a number Lachlan and I had been imagining all along. I intended to see the book through and to see him onto his plane—after all, I had a lot of my own blood, sweat, and tears invested in the project. Yes, I even considered driving him to the airport, going so far as to make arrangements with my mother to borrow her car. “Do you think it looks funny?” asked my mother, who now was sickened by the sight of Lachlan, when I told her I wouldn’t need to use it after all. I think her question explains a lot about why I am as nuts as I am.

  The night before Lachlan left, I was full of righteous anger. I walked to Dean & DeLuca to pick up food for his last meal, muttering to myself about how sick and tired of him I was and how happy that I wasn’t going to have to make his damn dinner anymore, all the while wondering what I would make. I decided on the teriyaki pork I had gotten there before. They sell it already marinated so you just have to put it in the oven. I wasn’t hungry when I got home; I sat on the couch and just stared at the opposite wall, where there happened to be a mirror, in which I watched Lachlan put his arm around me.

  “What are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, “I’m just sick of you.”

  When he asked me to get his rucksack out of my storage bin in the basement, I was more than delighted to do it.

  Lachlan’s Last Supper

  Teriyaki Pork Loin

  ½ cup teriyaki sauce

  1 clove garlic, minced

  1 tablespoon minced ginger

  2 scallions sliced, green parts only

  1 pound pork tenderloin

  Combine all ingredients in a Ziploc bag. Marinate on the kitchen counter for 30 minutes or up to 8 hours in the refrigerator.

  Roast in a 425-degree oven until pork is cooked to your liking, 20 to 25 minutes. It’s a trying time, but this pork is tender!

  Yield: 2 servings.

  Cilantro Rice

  (Adapted from Gourmet magazine)

  ¾ cup rice

  1½ tablespoons olive oil

  1 clove garlic, minced

  1 cup chopped cilantro

  1½ cups water

  2 tablespoons pine nuts, toasted

  Salt, to taste

  Cook rice as you would pasta, in lightly salted boiling water. Check for softness after 10 minutes; it could take up to 15 minutes. Drain and toss gently with oil, garlic, cilantro, and pine nuts. Taste for salt.

  Serves 2.

  Bok Choy with Garlic

  (Adapted from Bon Appétit magazine)

  1 clove garlic, minced

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  4 baby bok choy

  ¾ cup chicken broth

  Salt and pepper to taste

  In a medium skillet over medium heat, sauté garlic and olive oil for 1 minute. Add bok choy and broth, bring to a simmer, and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, turning occasionally. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  Serves 2.

  Three publishers were set to make offers on Lachlan’s book the day of his flight back to Italy, where he would freeload some more until he figured out his next step. THE AGENT instructed everyone to have bids in by noon. That morning, I had to go to the funeral of my uncle. We weren’t very close, so it wasn’t a devastating event; still, it added some more emotion to the biblical flood I was already feeling. Lachlan was packing when I returned.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Random House offered a hundred and ten thousand dollars,” he said.

  Now added to the loss of a love, and a relative, was a sense of having been swindled of everything I ever owned. I sat on the floor at the threshold to my bedroom, where Lachlan was fussing with his clothes and books, and smoked cigarette after cigarette while I tried to find out once and for all why he didn’t love me. Goddamn it! If I could get him $110,000 for a book about a rhinoceros, he was going to give me an answer!

  “That’s grown-up money, are you going to grow up now?”

  “Maybe I’ll use it to go on living like a child,” he said petulantly.

  “I did that so that you and I could have a life together.”

  “I don’t love you,” he said.

  At those words I moved to the bed, where I flopped around like a just caught fish. “There’s no one in the world I would have done that for. I wouldn’t have done it for myself!”

  “You didn’t do everything,” he said, “it’s not like I didn’t spend ten years writing the book.”

  A person who could stay in one place could have easily written that book in a year—was all I could think.

  “Who would you love? What were the people you loved like? Did you love Sasha [the Australian artist]?”

  “I think I did.” (That was a reinterpretation of history as originally told to me.)

  “Why?”

  “Because she had a pet kangaroo,” Lachlan joked, “because she had an Australian accent.”

  “Did you ever love me?”

  “I was excited about you,” he replied.

  Which sounded like nothing other than: “I was excited about what you could do for me.”

  ____

  Lachlan wanted to take me out to lunch, but I had no appetite (he couldn’t believe it), so he went about reheating the previous night’s dinner. I sat with him and I ate and that did make me feel a wee bit better. We sat on the couch together the last few moments.

  “You never even apologized,” I said.

  “You haven’t given me any space to.”

  It was time for him to leave. I was sobbing hysterically. There were tears in Lachlan’s eyes, too, as we hugged and he walked out my door for the last time.

  I called my mother, still crying hysterically. She cried, too.

  Then I called Anne, who was warm and sensible.

  Then I called Ginia, who was on a deadline, but I saw her later.

  Then I smoked six more cigarettes.

  Then I took a nap.

  The next day, I started writing my book.

  “What do you want to know?” it opened. “How much money he got for the book or how much he broke my heart?” I imagined an entire book about Lachlan, ending with the line “Reader, they overpaid.”

  But then I thought, Why let him alone have all the glory? even though that experience, the first to leave me feeling both heartbroken and used, certainly was the grated cheese atop the bowl of spaghetti. I wrote about all of them, and I kept on cooking.

  ____

  I was preparing a Sunday afternoon dinner for Larisa and her family. While cutting potatoes with my new Wüsthof chef’s knife (I was buying a lot of things for my apartment after Lachlan left, trying to make it look a little less like the place where he lived—I did keep Scoopy, but he has to stay in his drawer unless he’s working), I cut a gash through my thumb and ended up spending five hours in the emergency room getting seven stitches. I reluctantly canceled my dinner party (I actually thought I might be able to get sewn up and home in time to finish cooking), and my
frantic mother came over to cook the food that I left strewn about my kitchen. Before she arrived I sent Nick, who had taken me to the hospital, back to my place to wipe the blood off the walls. Matthew stayed with me while I was getting sewn up.

  As I was lying there waiting to be mended, I thought about how much I had suffered for the love of cooking and love itself, those two interchangeable passions. My body was marked by wounds that represented both of them—my arms were scarred from burns, my thumb was severed, my heart was broken. There had to be something for food to give me. And there was.

  I went back to the book. I never doubted it would turn out okay.

  I look forward to the day I can say that about love… but that’s the next book.

  Baci e abbracci a…

  Ginia Bellafante, who dreams for me even when I’m not dreaming for myself. Her friendship and influence over these many years has enriched my life in countless ways.

  Jennifer Warren, who has been listening to me and encouraging me ever since our fairly innocent college days; her generosity of heart is infinite.

  Anne Magruder, who was a font of warmth, daily inspiration, and laughter throughout the writing of this book and for many years beforehand.

  Frank Bruni, who explained my idea better than I could and brought it to…

  Lisa Bankoff, who shared my joy in this project, handled it with the utmost care, and is, best of all, a terrific girlfriend.

  Caryn Karmatz Rudy, whose enthusiasm for this book has been unwavering and who lent understanding and deep intelligence to its every page.

  Jennifer Romanello, a friend I met through work who became like family and was there through many of these stories, laughing at them when they were funny and helping me to shake them off when they no longer were. How fortunate that this book ended up in her sage hands!