I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Read online

  The difficult economy of the early nineties was taking its toll on my career. Meanwhile, Kit was thriving at Rolling Stone,where his responsibilities included babysitting his idol, Hunter S. Thompson, the magazine’s national affairs editor, whenever he came to town. That job entailed ordering pitchers of Bloody Marys for “King Gonzo” to drink while he had his bath at the Carlyle Hotel or picking up a cocaine supply from his dealer. Kit was in heaven; he talked about Hunter incessantly, mostly to my acute boredom. I got another publicity job at another publisher, where my work consisted of promoting authors as lofty as Edna O’Brien and as lowbrow as Joan Collins, neither of whom ever asked me to get them drugs—though once Joan Collins tried to get me to cancel one of her book signings at a Costco because there were “fat people” there.

  The spring after Kit and I started dating, my mother sold the house in Bay Ridge, moved into a nearby apartment, and bought another house on the Long Island Sound in Connecticut—a house where her sister, my aunt Marie, who never married and worked in Greenwich, could live full-time and all of us could gather on holidays. I never really liked the Connecticut house all that much; it could never compare with the one we had. Losing that place truly finalized the loss of my father. Kit was there with me as I took in the sight of those empty halls, their parquet floors clouded with the dust from magnificent old carpets that were taken away and put into storage. He knew exactly how I was feeling and helped me carry some of the weight of it.

  Still, since our apartments were a little depressing, Kit and I spent many weekends in Connecticut. He never showed up without a bouquet of flowers for my mother, who worshipped him from the moment she heard his voice from her bedroom that first night he came to see me. He clinched his hold on her affections by showing endless enthusiasm for her favorite card game, May I?

  Kit and I drove all over Fairfield County, exploring.

  One of our greatest finds was a shack of a restaurant even Kit was crazy about called Tacos or What? It was run by a middle-aged hippie and staffed by cute hippie teenage girls; the place always felt slightly unsavory to me, but the burritos were savory enough for me to let it slide. We never did find the house where Scott Fitzgerald (Kit’s favorite writer) and his wife, Zelda, lived for a summer on Compo Road in Westport, though we drove up and down that street dozens of times looking for it.

  Besides tacos with a special yellow hot sauce only regulars knew about (“the yellow death”), there was one other food that could delight Kit almost as much as gin-soaked olives: bacon. On those weekends, my mother and my aunt and I collaborated on big breakfasts. Aunt Marie made scrambled eggs with perfect curds and just the right hue, and my mother baked blueberry muffins dipped in melted butter and dusted with sugar, a recipe of her mother’s. Kit took care of the bacon preparation, while I assisted.

  Nana’s Blueberry Muffins

  Butter, softened, for greasing muffin tins

  1¾ cups self-rising flour

  ¼ cup sugar

  ¼ cup milk

  6 tablespoons melted butter

  1 egg

  1 cup blueberries

  1 tablespoon butter (optional)

  ¼ cup sugar (optional)

  Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Butter muffin tins.

  Mix flour and sugar, stir in the wet ingredients, then add the blueberries. Spoon batter into muffin tins, filling each cup about three-quarters full. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then remove to a cooling rack.

  While the muffins are still a little warm, melt 1 tablespoon butter and pour it onto a saucer. Place ¼ cup sugar on another saucer. Dip the muffins in the butter, then the sugar. This step is optional, but I highly recommend it.

  Yield: 9 muffins; recipe can be doubled.

  The Lower East Side we inhabited was a far cry from what it is today. To get from my apartment on Avenue A to Kit’s on Avenue B, we had to walk through Tompkins Square Park, then a “tent city” inhabited by the homeless. My block was a drug thoroughfare, which, ironically, kept it safe. (The drug dealers saw to it that no muggings occurred, thus keeping police attention away from their territory.) Kit’s block was so remote that even the drug dealers stayed away; he was mugged a few times. One day while riding the subway together and grumbling about our living situations, out of the blue I suggested we find a place together in Brooklyn. He agreed with instant and effusive eagerness. With Kit, the big things were easy. We began our apartment search.

  “I want to live here with you. I want to make you stews,” said Kit in the most adorable voice as we were driving around Boerum Hill, the Brooklyn neighborhood where we hoped to find a place to rent. He was a little tanked. The only time he ever cooked for me was after the first night I slept over at his place. That morning, he fried up bacon and scrambled eggs in the fat left behind. I cleaned my plate, then griped about how full I was and how fat I felt. When I later reminded Kit about the stews he promised, he told me that he would never cook for me again because the one time he tried all I did was complain. I don’t know any woman who would have felt differently after those eggs, but maybe I could have hidden it better. Still, I may have been a bit of a battle-ax in the first blushes of our love, but I deserved forgiveness—and maybe even a little stew.

  That was probably the only jerky thing Kit ever said to me, and he said it stone-cold sober; Kit was an absolute sweetheart when he was drunk. Which left me confused about the extent of his problem. Don’t alcoholics yell and slap you around when they’ve had a few too many? Kit wasn’t like that at all. He would tell me I was beautiful (he did that even without alcohol). He’d say he wanted to crawl into the little scar above my right eyebrow and live there for the rest of his life.

  Instead, we moved into the second floor of a one- hundred-year-old brownstone on one of the prettiest blocks in Brooklyn. The place was positively cheery, with big windows that looked out on trees and let in an abundance of light. It had two marble fireplaces (one even worked), the floors were dark wood, and the walls retained their original carvings and cornices. The enormous bathroom had a pedestal sink, an old-fashioned claw-footed tub, and wood wainscoting. Alas, the only thing that wasn’t wonderful about that apartment was the kitchen. It consisted of a few slapdash cabinets, a small electric stove, and a noisy refrigerator placed in a corner of the living room.

  With little money to spend, we outfitted that sorry space with bottom-of-the-line pieces from Ikea. A set of “camping cookware” set us back $10, but it had everything I needed: a big pot to boil pasta, a small skillet to make sauce, and two saucepans, one big and one smaller. A six-piece knife set with a block cost twelve bucks. I was, in effect, cooking with toys, but I managed to conjure up fantastic meals on my crap stove. I learned that you do not need fancy cookware and a restaurant-grade range to make delicious food; the only true essentials to good cooking are fine ingredients and a sense of how to use them. This you get from cooking on your own, watching others, and eating as many different types of food and preparations as you can. Other than that, the only absolute necessity is a heat source and something heatproof to put your ingredients in: nothing much more sophisticated than what our ancestors came up with in their caves.

  Even with just twelve inches of counter space, living together—to me—meant a serious commitment to making dinner. I called Kit every afternoon to get his thoughts on what we might have. He could not have been less interested in these discussions. Kit’s mother, Dolores, met the same resistance I did in getting her son to care about food. Every month she mailed him a box of homemade rhubarb sticky buns or chocolate-chip cookies. He never touched them—so I did, unable to bear the thought of that woman’s efforts going to waste. Kit arrived in New York with a potato masher and a little spiral notebook filled with his mother’s recipes written in her perfect cursive. He liked when I made her meat loaf, though I was a bit skeptical at first. The ingredients Dolores listed did not alarm me—my own mother used onion soup mix in her meat loaf—but I was put off by her direction to “frost
” it with ketchup and mustard. I tried to eliminate that step, but Kit insisted I make it exactly the way “Mama Fraser” had written it. I gave in, and the mixture made a thick coating that I had to admit was kind of tasty.

  Dolores Fraser’s Meat Loaf

  2 pounds ground beef

  1 envelope onion soup mix

  ¾ cup bread crumbs

  ¾ cup water

  1/3 cup ketchup

  Oil or butter for greasing

  2 tablespoons ketchup

  2 tablespoons mustard

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

  Combine the first five ingredients in a medium bowl and mix well with your hands. Form into a loaf and bake in a 13 by 9-inch baking or roasting pan greased with some oil or butter. Frost with 2 tablespoons ketchup mixed with 2 tablespoons mustard.

  Bake for 1 hour. Don’t be alarmed by the fact that the meat loaf will be red when you take it out of the oven: That’s only the frosting; it’s done.

  Serves 4 to 6.

  Confident that I could cook for two, I was ready to up the numbers. Kit and I invited new friends from work and old friends from school to dinner parties. Though our expandable Ikea table was a far cry from my mother’s dining room set, I took the same care she did setting the table. I had one of her many sets of silver, this one mysteriously devoid of soup spoons, which was fine at the time; I wasn’t ready to make soups. There were eight place settings of china my grandmother, long dead, had won years before at a benefit luncheon for a charity she was involved in that helped struggling Italian immigrants (as if there were any of those by 1970). The downside of these otherwise delightful dinner gatherings was my increasing awareness of Kit’s ability to seemingly drink as much as our other guests—combined. He was a gracious host, a witty toastmaster, and a burgeoning master mixologist—or, as I interpreted these things, an alcoholic. I confronted Kit; I was concerned for him, and for us. Kit denied that he was anything other than a guy who liked to have a good time, but it was becoming abundantly clear that his relationship with alcohol—and subsequently me—was anything but good.

  Living together magnified our differences. I was ready to settle into a domestic routine. Kit had other things he wanted to do with his life, primarily having to do with drinking. Just about every weekend he had a bar crawl planned with Joe, John, or some guy known simply as Clam. These typically lasted until the early morning. If I wanted to go out on a Friday or Saturday, I had to make my own plans. One Friday evening in spring, I went to the market and picked up fresh asparagus to sauté in white wine and garlic and serve over angel-hair pasta. I made the sauce, put the water up to boil, and waited; Kit never came home. Eventually I ate the pasta alone. Kit had decided to join a poker game at the office, after which the players toured the bars of Midtown; then Kit came home with a Budweiser tall boy to drink before going to bed at four a.m.

  Angel-Hair Pasta with Asparagus

  1 pound asparagus (the thinnest kind available)

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  Pinch of hot red pepper flakes

  1 clove garlic, sliced thinly

  1 teaspoon salt

  ½ cup white wine

  ½ pound angel-hair pasta

  Freshly grated parmigiano or pecorino

  Freshly ground pepper

  Wash asparagus and use only the tenderest parts. You can determine which those are by breaking each stalk with your hands. The tough fibers will separate at exactly the right place all on their own. Cut the remains diagonally into 1-inch pieces.

  Warm the olive oil over medium heat, then add the red pepper flakes and garlic. Sauté until the garlic is golden, then add the asparagus and coat with the olive oil. Add salt, cook for 5 minutes, then add the wine and cook for another 10 minutes or until the asparagus has softened to your liking.

  Cook the pasta according to the directions here, stirring often; angel hair is particularly vulnerable to knots. When the pasta is done, drain it in a colander and add it to the skillet with the asparagus. Stir and cook over a low heat for about 20 seconds, then serve in warmed bowls. Sprinkle with cheese and freshly ground pepper, if desired.

  Serves 2 but will be eaten alone.

  Fed up with eating at home by myself, I enrolled in a free culinary education funded by the seemingly unlimited expense account of my friend and former colleague Deborah Kwan. Deborah was the daughter of Chinese immigrants who owned a restaurant in San Francisco; her interest in and love of food was deep, like mine, and tied to family. Deborah worked at a publishing house that seemed to throw the money around, and we went somewhere fabulous nearly every night on the company dime—we enjoyed simple bistro cooking at the Odeon or savored complex and delicate flavors at Bouley. We ate at new places, old places, culinary shrines, and tourist traps. We held the line for ages to get a coveted reservation and waited at the bar forever at any first-come-first-served establishment we deemed worthy. Deborah left publishing to pursue a career in the kitchen, and from there the gravy train only got richer. After a short course at Peter Kump’s, she became a pastry chef at 44, the restaurant at the Royalton Hotel, famous at the time for being the ad hoc cafeteria for all the big magazine editors: Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter, and Tina Brown lunched at the prime booths every afternoon. Deborah fell in love with the sous chef (whom she eventually married), and when she wasn’t on duty we would eat at the restaurant. We didn’t have to order a thing; we just sat back while Erik sent up plate after plate of brilliant food, for which we would be charged next to nothing. A Kump’s classmate of Deborah’s went to work in the pastry kitchen of Le Cirque, and we ended up there one night with a bottle of champagne and an array of sixteen stunningly beautiful desserts before us, including a chocolate stove with a marzipan skillet full of strawberry sauce atop it (the waiter sang a little song before he dumped that skillet’s contents over the stove), Grand Marnier soufflé, chocolate pots de crème, and a tower of tiny ice-cream cones, each a different flavor. These excursions served as finishing school for me—they educated my palate, informed my understanding of food, and made me a better cook.

  No matter how many sorbets, gelées, or beignets I was presented with on a given night, my expeditions never went on as long as Kit’s. In the early days of our cohabitation, I waited up, worried about him traveling on the subway to our “emerging neighborhood” at four, five, even seven in the morning. Even the neighborhood watch patrol of local residents who walked up the block in reflective shells had called it quits by then. Eventually, as Kit’s nights on the town became more and more frequent, I stopped worrying and just went to bed. Eventually, instead of relief, I felt annoyance when he finally came in the door. One night I was awakened by the sound of Kit making dinner after a night of drinking. Here is his recipe.

  Kit’s Drunken Soup

  Open can of Progresso chicken noodle soup. Put in saucepan over medium heat. Pass out on couch. Cook until girlfriend hears strange crackling sounds and gets out of bed to see what’s going on and turns off burner to deal with the mess in the morning.

  Time: Usually about 4 hours.

  Serves: no one.

  I was angry with Kit a lot of the time during the four years we were together, and not only because of his drinking. Whatever it was that kept me away from men for so long continued to linger and do its thing to prevent me from getting too close to Kit. Kit’s nocturnal escapades seemed to perform a similar function for him. Still, I was never fully convinced that Kit’s drinking was as big a problem as it actually was. I always allowed that I might be blowing his indulgence out of proportion in order to create another barrier. There I was wrong. Though my perception of Kit throughout the four years we were together remained as distorted as it was the day after our first date, when it came to putting distance between us, he met me halfway.

  One night while we were both in bed asleep, we were startled by a terrifying crash from the other room. When we ran out to see what had happened, we found that the kitchen cabinets had fallen off the wall. Our collection of
dishes—some from Kit’s mother, some from my mother, and several from my grandmother—were in pieces all over the floor. The symbolism here escaped neither of us. Not long after that, Kit moved out.

  While I never managed to get Kit to value the delicious subtlety of a creamy, perfectly cooked grain of arborio rice, his intellectual fascinations did rub off on me. Together, we grew to be adults, and the things I learned from him—like how Sara Murphy, best friend of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and inspiration for Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night, always wore her pearls when she sunbathed on the French Riviera—enhance my cocktail party repertoire to this day. Kit credits me with teaching him how to hail a taxi—essential knowledge for the burgeoning New Yorker—and for introducing him to his all-time favorite band: the Jesus and Mary Chain. Kit has since quit drinking, and he is one of my dearest friends.

  My Father

  My father was an otorhinolaryngologist, a word I still like to say, even though everyone else goes with the shorter ENT. As a child, I was proud of the fact that my father was a physician and the status it connoted on our family in the days before the invention of HMOs and hedge funds. In first grade, when we were learning the alphabet and I was called on to come up with a word for the letter V, I said “vein,” which I thought was an awfully smart word to know. In second grade, for show-and-tell, I presented a mounted thirty-two-by-twenty-six-inch diagram of the inner ear borrowed from the wall of my father’s office.