I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Read online

  I dated a Rhode Island WASP who never ate when we went out. “I like to keep my edge,” he explained. Less concerned with being dull than with being hungry, I would eat before seeing him, since we usually met well after dinnertime anyway. He resembled a J.Crew model and had slept with half the women in publishing. One morning when I woke up at his apartment, the phone rang; when he finished the conversation, he told me I had to leave because some woman—whom “I could meet someday but not today”—had no hot water and needed to come over to take a shower. I decided that today—not someday—would be the end of us.

  There was a summer romance with a much younger neocon who at twenty-one was writing op-ed pieces for The Wall Street Journal. He took a lot of drugs for a conservative, but he was frightfully intelligent. He’d FedEx twenty-page love letters from his downtown office to my uptown office. I wish I had kept them, but I didn’t because they were sort of creepy. In them he reported his dreams of me, one of which had me clicking my heels three times and getting swept away in ecstasy. I broke up with him when he had to go back to the University of Chicago for one more semester, a fact he had neglected to mention while we were seeing each other. He wrote a last note about an injured deer he saw on the side of the road. He and his friends stopped and tried to help it, but it had to be put down. He compared that violence with the required action he needed to take with his love for me.

  I became convinced I would marry a satirical writer from a wealthy family—who resembled the teenage David Helfgott, the mentally ill piano prodigy, or at least the actor who played him (not Geoffrey Rush, but the younger one) in the movie Shine—from the moment our blind date was scheduled, a month before we were to meet. I became so obsessed with this man and with getting everything right on the date that I actually had a telephone consultation with one of the authors of The Rules, the phenomenally successful dating guide based on fifties-era wisdom. I got this privilege for free from a friend who was the publicist for the book. Then the night I met him, I broke the cardinal rule. I slept with him, and it played out just the way those yentas predicted it would.

  I went on a few dates with a guy whose last name I never caught, who after the third date left me a message announcing that he was going out of town forever. This seemed like an unnecessary nicety.

  Though my cooking had slowed down outside of relationships and domesticity, I was keeping up with my eating. There is one treat in particular that evokes for me the more upbeat moments of those years. It’s something I call the Victory Breakfast.

  Even if I wanted to make it for myself, I wouldn’t be able to: I’m much too hung over. No, the Victory Breakfast is best prepared at a New York deli or coffee shop; it is the bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll that many urbanites have every morning. I allow myself such a decadent treat only rarely. In those years of delayed adolescence, it was what I ate the morning after a fun night out, followed by a make-out session with a sexy but unavailable guy, preferably accompanied by one hundred cigarettes.

  The Victory Breakfast is just the thing to settle the stomach after such a night. The name came to my mind while I was waiting on the preparation of one the morning after a long night spent with a dashing war reporter whose novel I was promoting. Ian and I met for drinks to talk about business one August evening. He lived around the corner from me, so we met at the bar down the street, an old Victorian wood-paneled room with lots of long mirrors and carved wood. I wore a similarly gothic Cynthia Rowley skirt, a yellow damask mini, with a white tank top and matching cardigan slung around my neck.

  Ian was holding a bar stool for me when I showed up for our seven o’clock meeting promptly at 7:05. We ordered two pints of Brooklyn Lager. Ian smoked like a madman, and at the time, I smoked like a madwoman whenever I was sitting at a bar with a guy who smoked. Ian told hilarious stories of his stepmother, who had been promoted from nurse to wife after his mother’s death but continued to call her husband “boss.” He had a strange fascination with the details of Mussolini’s execution; and he had seen war and suffering and had taken risks. As we drank beer after beer after beer, I went through the few cigarettes I had on me, then moved to his manly Winstons. Until two in the morning we glided away on nicotine, hops, and conversation. I hadn’t eaten a crumb, neither had Ian, and seeing as there was nowhere to get dinner at that hour, I invited him to my apartment for, what do you think?

  I hadn’t lost touch with myself so much that my pantry didn’t contain a few cans of Italian tomatoes and boxes of pasta, various brands: De Cecco, purchased on days I felt flush; Barilla, purchased on the days I felt broke; even one or two boxes of Ronzoni that must have been on some big sale. I always had a hunk of parmigiano in the refrigerator and a few bottles of wine on a rack over the sink. I pulled out a red and poured Ian and myself a glass (as if we really needed to drink more).

  We ate the pasta in the little dining nook I had created in a niche in my apartment. Ian had seconds. Did he know those strands had strings attached? Back on the sofa, I made my move: “It’s four in the morning and you’re on my couch, when are we going to make out?” I asked.

  Ian was a gentleman, so he complied a bit, but he had a girlfriend, he told me, and he promised her he wouldn’t cheat. (I don’t know if I would trust a guy who promised he wouldn’t cheat, but that wasn’t my problem.) Ian didn’t cheat, he managed me and my expectations with grace, somehow leaving intact the brazen confidence that inspired such a bold remark from me.

  It wasn’t the first time—or, sadly, the last—I was to use such an aggressive come-on. Before Kit, I remained unkissed at the end of nearly every evening I spent with a man who interested me, and in college my friends got tired of hearing me gripe about getting nowhere with every guy I liked. When I found myself alone with Elliot Goldkind, a budding composer and one of the few great-looking straight guys on campus, I couldn’t let the opportunity pass without trying something. We had stolen a bottle of wine from a college-sponsored cocktail party and went back to his dorm room, where we talked and laughed about our shared deviance for hours. I was sitting on his bed, and he was sitting at his desk chair, and I just couldn’t leave his room without having more to report. “My friends are going to kill me if I don’t make out with you,” I said somewhere around four in the morning. Elliot didn’t take that line with as much sportsmanship as Ian had a similar one so many years later. He told me I had ruined the fun night we were having.

  When kinder, gentler Ian left, I dealt with the dishes and got to bed at around five-thirty in the morning. Soon enough, it was time to get up and get dressed for work. I didn’t feel tired at all; I was too excited about my night. As I waited in line for my sandwich at the Honey Bee deli across the street from my office, the name came to me: the Victory Breakfast, a tasty reward for a battle hard won. Not long after I consumed that sandwich, I called Ginia to tell her about my night. She was as impressed with my brashness as I was. Right after I hung up with her, Ian called to say he had a great time. I wondered if he even remembered the kissing part.

  I was on a streak. When another writer came over for a dinner party at my house and then stayed after all the guests had left, I figured he wasn’t hanging around to help with the dishes, so I recycled the “It’s four in the morning” line. Henry didn’t have a girlfriend, so it worked better this time, but he wasn’t really interested in me, he just knew (from me) that I had kissed Ian and felt he wasn’t getting the full complement of publicist services. I didn’t care; I couldn’t get over the fact that men were interested in my body back then. I had had enough of their interest in my mind, which left me unsatisfied 100 percent of the time. But that all came to an end when I finally got together with Ethan.

  The Ethan

  Binder School

  of Cooking

  I knew quite a bit about Ethan before we started dating. I possessed sufficient information to drive a sensible girl away, but it only propelled me in his direction, which also happened to be where the kitchen was.

  There was the fa
ct that it took me nine months and about twenty-seven meals to win him, and then there was his history with Anne, a good friend of mine who dated him for seven years; during four of them they lived together. They had been broken up for three years by the time we met.

  I became friends with Anne in the summer of 1997 when we were both part of a group that shared a summerhouse on Shelter Island. Anne wasn’t working at the time, so she’d stay at the house all week, and when we arrived on Friday she’d leave little vases of fresh-picked flowers beside every bed. We became instant friends. She is one of the funniest people I know because she isn’t afraid to talk about anything. She also happens to be an incredibly imaginative cook. She will play with ingredients I would never have thought of putting together, like black beans with ginger and curry as a dip for tortilla chips, something she calls Jaipur nachos.

  Anne was still hung up on Ethan that summer, and he hadn’t quite let go of her, either. One of Ethan’s friends, Stacey, was also in our house, and Anne would grill her about Ethan from time to time. Since gossip was a sport even more popular than swimming and tennis with this group, everyone listened in and offered theories about Ethan, who was now dating a significantly younger woman. I, too, listened in on these conversations, not one to refrain from participation in the amateur psychoanalyzing of a difficult man, even one I didn’t know.

  I never expected to fall for Ethan. I didn’t even expect to meet him, but the following January, after an afternoon of sofa shopping, Anne and I stopped off for an early evening drink at a West Village café and there he was, sitting at the bar with his friend Perry. So this was Ethan, object of fixation to my dear friend. Why was it that he looked exactly like the man I had been looking for, ever since I started looking for a man?

  I trace my penchant for smart Jewish guys to the age of twelve, when I found myself fantasizing about Jeff Goldblum, who at the time was costar of a short-lived detective series called Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. I wasn’t sure where my attraction to his particular look came from, though I suspect it had something to do with an image of repression he radiated.Repressed people draw me like a bubbling tray of lasagna just pulled from the oven—maybe because they give no clues as to what they are thinking, allowing me to project whatever I want on them, sort of like a Rorschach. They also tend to be quite hilarious.

  Ethan is the most brilliantly witty man I have ever known. He pinpointed everything that was amusing about people, and we happened to know a lot of the same ones, so we fell into an easy banter when I finally got to talk to him that evening, after putting in twenty minutes or so with Perry pretending to care about the plot of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a film his documentary club, which was currently concentrating on the work of Werner Herzog, had just seen.

  Ethan had green eyes the size and shape of almonds that blinked behind narrow glasses. Beneath them was a substantial nose housing formidable nostrils. It may not sound like it from these details, but he was incredibly good-looking. The package worked, even if this description doesn’t exactly capture that. My attraction to him manifested itself as rambunctiousness. I verbally assassinated this magazine editor or that television writer in our shared circle. I made Ethan laugh with the ridiculous things that came out of my mouth. I couldn’t resist singing “Detroit Rock City,” a Kiss song, any time he referenced his hometown. Inspired by my silliness, Ethan allowed his piercing wit and intelligence to peek out from behind his placid exterior. He had been an editor at The New Yorker and a writer for Rolling Stone; at the time, he was producing and writing a show for MTV. Most young men in New York City would think these credentials made them the hottest thing to come down the pike, but because Ethan took his achievements in stride, he actually was.

  Ethan was looking at me, not past me the way most of the men of my set did. He seemed interested in what I had to say and not just in his own reflected glory. He had made his way around the New York media orbit, but Ethan was more interested in other subjects, history mainly; he read Barbara Tuchman and Pat Barker. He was passionate about music. He played guitar and had been in several bands in his twenties, then gave up his rock star ambitions to become a writer. I never applied myself to the piano or guitar lessons I took as a child, but I’m a decent singer with excellent pitch and an encyclopedic knowledge of the lyrics to just about every rock and roll song written between 1968 and 1990. Ethan still played for fun with a group of friends every now and then. I knew from Anne where his musical tastes lay; they were the same as hers, which were the same as mine. Without a drop of irony, we listened to 1970s bands like ELO and Chicago, and we liked much from the current scene, postmodern bands like Pavement and Teenage Fanclub.

  I also already knew Ethan was into food. After that short meeting I concluded, not incorrectly, that he was the love of my life.

  I saw him again just a few weeks later at a dinner party hosted by Stacey from the summerhouse. Stacey is an heiress and definitely not a cook, so she had the meal catered by the Second Avenue Deli. The menu featured brisket and kugel and cheese blintzes; Ethan was seated next to me and told me he was impressed that I knew my way around this spread. I adored these foods and had grown up with them as much as I had the foods of my own tradition. My mother was raised in a Jewish neighborhood and has always had a thing for Jewish ethnic fare. She would often venture back to her old turf to buy layer cakes at Stern’s for our birthdays. She’d go to Weinstein’s on Avenue U for our annual New Year’s Day get-up-late-and-hang-around-all-day-in-your-pajamas larder. There’d be smoked salmon and bagels for breakfast and kosher hot dogs with knishes to eat for the rest of the day, along with the traditional Italian lentils my mother would insist we have “at least a spoonful” of for good luck in the coming year. Our pantry contained nearly as many Manischewitz products as it did Progresso, and it was not unusual for her to make us potato latkes or matzo-ball soup.

  I felt really comfortable sitting next to Ethan that evening. He was as enthusiastic a diner as I was and an even funnier dinner partner. We laughed at Stacey’s German boyfriend, a film producer of dubious promise who dismissed the meal in a thick German accent, explaining that the couple really preferred to eat “small, healthy dishes.” I wanted to be Ethan’s Jewish wife and feed him these large, fattening dishes on a regular basis. I got the feeling that Stacey thought we’d be a good match, too. “Do you know that he got a perfect score on his LSAT but decided not to go to law school?” she told me when we were alone together with the dishes. As if I needed any further reason to want Ethan.

  But there was something deeper that attracted me to Ethan. Something in him that cried out “Take care of me” in a voice tempered with wariness. He presented a challenge that was tailor-made for me: There was Ethan’s wall and my determination to bust through it—a perfect pairing.

  Our first date was Valentine’s Day. I asked him out, selling it as an “anti–Valentine’s Day date,” though for me that couldn’t have been further from the truth. The idea came to me at work one morning (where sheer boredom allowed me to get inventive with my personal life). Anne, who had just started dating a Buddhist poet she was pretty into (whom Ginia later dated to the same counternirvana result), bestowed her blessings upon my idea. A few hours later, I was out to lunch with Kit of all people; as we were crossing Sixth Avenue, bingo, we ran into Ethan. I took this as a sign that God too endorsed my plan, so I came right out with it.

  “Ethan! So weird running into you, I was just thinking about you,” I squealed.

  “Really, what were you thinking?” he replied cautiously.

  “Well, Saturday is Valentine’s Day and you don’t have a girlfriend and I don’t have a boyfriend and all our friends do. We should go out together so we don’t end up at home alone like big losers.”

  “I’ll consider that,” Ethan said. “I’ll give you a call.”

  Over sushi, Kit gave it to me straight: To his male eye, Ethan could not have appeared less interested. I later discovered that Ethan had a gift for allowing others to int
erpret his moods and reactions rather than actively making them known. Kit saw what he was inclined to see, and so did I; I protested that Ethan had been delighted by my invitation. My reading turned out to be accurate: Ethan called the next morning to say he did indeed want to have dinner with me on Saturday.

  We decided to go to the Red Rose, an old-school Italian restaurant, one of the last vestiges of the Italian-American working class that were being priced out of our neighborhood. Walking down chronically run-down Smith Street, where a recently opened French bistro and handbag boutique sparked hope of renewal in the hearts of the locals, Ethan sneered: “A restaurant and a bag store does not make a revival.” I found his cynicism amusing, but frankly, I was excited about the French bistro and bag store. I made us stop to look in Patois, which was packed with couples eating a better meal than we were going to get at the Red Rose. When we got there and took our seats, I was embarrassed, and not just because the waiter offered us a bottle of red wine with pink hearts on the label. Now that I had Ethan where I wanted him, my confidence left me. I couldn’t think of anything remotely enthralling to say, or even anything bland, for that matter; this wasn’t the first time I’d found myself tongue-tied on a date.

  Throughout high school, I’d harbored an obsessive infatuation with Doug Olivieri, the brother of my sister Carla’s boyfriend. Doug was four years older than me and went to New York University. I would show up uninvited at his dorm or call him to talk about the U2 concert I had just seen and keep him on the phone for hours (this was in the early days of the band, mind you; they were pretty cool then). Doug was the first love interest I ever cooked for; I would grill him up a hamburger from the package of frozen patties my mother always kept in the freezer, chatting all the while. Doug was terribly fond of those hamburgers, but he wasn’t really interested in me. (Though, come to think about it, there is no other way to explain why he was always coming over; those hamburgers weren’t all thatgood.) When I asked him to take me to my senior prom, he agreed. I could barely believe I would have the opportunity to show my classmates that the guy I had been talking about incessantly for the past four years actually existed. In the weeks leading up to the day, I performed regular dress rehearsals, standing in front of my bedroom mirror in my pink vintage dress with sequined bodice and lavender Christian Dior underwear. But when I saw Doug approaching my front door, corsage box in hand, I froze. When he took my hand at the pre-prom cocktail party in Denise’s backyard, I was speechless for the first time in my life. There was nothing I wanted more in the world than to be there with him, but once I was I felt ashamed for wanting it so much. This left me in a rare taciturn moment.