I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Read online

  I decided to lay off the subject for a few months.

  ____

  On New Year’s Eve, we opted for a quiet dinner at home. I found a recipe for a salad with mâche, a tiny, nutty leaf Ethan favored. After a long day of food shopping with no break for lunch, I finally got to the vegetable market; because they carried a pretty sophisticated selection of greens, it never occurred to me they wouldn’t have what I was looking for.

  “If you had called me earlier in the week, I could have ordered it for you,” the proprietor told me.

  I wanted to kick myself. How could I have neglected to call ahead for a rare green that was essential to my menu? I tried another store, and another, but nobody had mâche. I considered getting on the subway and heading to Manhattan, where I certainly would have found it, but I didn’t have the energy to go that far. Famished and bushed, I settled for some boring Boston lettuce torn into tiny pieces. Ethan didn’t know the difference, but I was miserable the entire evening. My dinner wasn’t perfect, and I wanted every dinner to be perfect, especially this one.

  A Salad That Failed to Make a Perfect New Year’s Eve

  Mâche, Pomegranate, and Pecan Salad

  (Adapted from Gourmet magazine)

  1 pomegranate

  ½ teaspoon sugar

  ½ teaspoon red wine vinegar

  1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

  1 cup mâche (widely available these days, to my chagrin)

  2 tablespoons chopped pecans, toasted

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Cut the pomegranate in half crosswise and remove seeds from one half; juice the other with a citrus juicer or reamer as you would an orange. In a small saucepan, simmer juice, sugar, and vinegar until it reduces to about 1 tablespoon, then cool to room temperature. Divide dressing between two salad plates and drizzle with oil. Divide mâche, pecans, and reserved seeds between plates and season with salt and pepper.

  Serves 2.

  In the end, no quantity of mâche was going to make Ethan Binder marry me. After three years I decided it was hopeless. I took a final stand by delivering my ultimatum: I refused to go on the next Binder family expedition—a trip to Detroit to celebrate Ethan’s father’s seventieth birthday, which fell on the same day as my thirty-fifth birthday—unless we were engaged. Surely that would do it—his family loved me, and he had a much better time with them when I was around.

  Ethan went without me.

  Mitch Smith

  Licked the

  Plate

  Our first date was blind for me but not for him. Mitch had seen me before at Henry’s book party three years earlier when I had just started dating Ethan. He liked the fact that I was looking all over the place, taking everything in, he later told me. If that was indeed my mission at this party, I failed, as I hadn’t even noticed him. I hadn’t a clue whom Henry was referring to when he called me the next day to say that his friend Mitch had a crush on me.

  “Are things still working out with you and Shiny?” asked Henry, using a nickname he’d created for Ethan because he thought he had a shiny forehead. (Ethan despised the moniker—and, for that reason and others, Henry himself.) I told Henry they were. Still, I was curious.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “He’s a writer, he had two novels published; the first one was made into a movie.”

  I wanted to know more, even after hearing the movie went straight to video.

  “I don’t know him that well. I see him at book parties, sometimes we play basketball together, he goes to AA meetings,” said Henry, blithely violating the eponymous principle of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  So Mitch was in recovery with Henry. That didn’t bother me. Alcoholism in the background adds complexity—maybe even complications; I like those. Having lived with and loved an alcoholic in denial, I admire anyone who has recognized and faced his problem. Kit went through too much before he finally did.

  A quick peek at Amazon revealed that I could find Mitch’s books a few yards from where I was sitting. They were published by Simon & Schuster, my employer at the time. I went down the hall to the book room where old backlist titles were stored and scanned the shelves, found a copy of his first novel, and took it to my office. I closed the door. I checked out the author photo and read the flap copy. The novel was about a fifteen-year-old girl who really wants to have sex with some guy in a band. Mitch was kind of a punk rock Judy Blume. I felt a twinge of remorse about missing out on him.

  I spent a summer mourning for Ethan. When it was over, I thought of Mitch. I called Henry.

  “Hey, remember that guy you told me about who liked me at your book party three years ago?” I said to him on the phone.

  “Mitch Smith, yeah.”

  “Do you think he’d want to go out with me now?” I asked.

  “Let me find out.”

  Mitch called the next day.

  ____

  “Good old Henry,” Mitch said, his voice sounding craggy and vaguely Irish on the phone.

  We agreed to meet the following Tuesday for coffee at a place not far from my office, the Coffee Pot. He chose it. Because of his sobriety, Mitch did most of his dating in coffee bars; he seemed to know every café in Manhattan and most of the ones in Brooklyn. Mitch worked at home, writing in his Williamsburg apartment, a Brooklyn neighborhood not easily accessible to my own.

  This was just after September 11, 2001. In those weeks, I did as the president advised: I bought stuff. Work was quiet, since most author tours and publicity had been canceled. The novel I was pushing about a madcap graphic design professor at a state college in western Pennsylvania in the early 1980s could by no means be reinterpreted to fit the moment. Bored at my desk, I regularly snuck out of the office in the middle of the day and wandered the stores of Rockefeller Center, checking out the plentiful sale racks, buying outfits, doing my part to stimulate the economy. I also succumbed to the lure of cable television, after priding myself on being one of the last holdouts. Without the signal cast from the top of the World Trade Center, there was no more free television in Brooklyn. Those were strange and lonely days. You needed TV. Even more than that, I needed a new boyfriend. The Sopranos could effectively distract me from the world’s problems, but it was going to take more than Carmela’s incorrect but terribly familiar pronunciation of “sfogliatelle,” my favorite Neopolitan pastry, to help me get over Ethan.

  I was buoyed by the promise of this mystery man who already liked me. In the days between that phone call and our date, I went for long runs and thought about him. I didn’t have much to go on besides some racy prose of his that came up in a Google search, but it was enough to get my blood going as I took the final hill of Prospect Park’s 5K loop. When Tuesday finally came, I put my body—superslim from grief and exercise—into a new knee-length, kick-pleat khaki skirt from H&M, a clingy low-cut black sweater from Banana Republic, and burgundy kitten-heel sling-backs from Saks and made my way over to the Coffee Pot in the cool late October twilight. Though I had only a hazy memory of Mitch’s author photo, I intuited that he was the guy least resembling a person waiting for his date to arrive. He was sitting far from the entrance, staring into the screen of the café’s sole computer. I boldly walked up to him and found I had guessed right. Somehow, maybe from the bits I had read on the Internet, I could just tell this one was going to be tricky. Up close, Mitch appeared harmless. His hair was gray-flecked brown and very short; he wore horn-rimmed glasses, a burgundy Le Tigre shirt, jeans, and Adidas sneakers. He dressed younger than his years, but the look suited him. He carried the clothes of a twenty-something on his forty- something body with elegant ease.

  “I just came back from my baby brother’s wedding,” was one of the first things Mitch said to me, waving a folded five- dollar bill in the air to indicate that our drinks were on him as we waited in line for coffee. I was a bit taken aback that he would mention a wedding so soon into our semiblind date. The Rules, my ill-begotten dating bible, instructs women never to utter the word
wedding or marriage in any context whatsoever on a first date. I didn’t appreciate the double standard. The wedding took place in Portland, Oregon, where Mitch grew up and where his parents still lived. The baby brother was well into his thirties.

  We took our coffee over to a high table in the middle of the room and sat across from each other on stools. Mitch talked about his writing career; he even happened to have with him some photocopies of reviews from his first and second novels, which I pretended to read. After our date he was going to stop by the post office to mail them to an agent he was pursuing. Oh, Lord, another insecure writer, the practical hemisphere of my brain warned, I have enough of those in my work life. But the more powerful hemisphere, the one containing the desperate-to-be-loved-by-impossible-men matter, found this writer cute and curiously captivating. As we talked, I didn’t get the sense that Mitch and I were connecting, though things got a little more intimate when we moved on to the subject of psychotherapy. I was disappointed to learn that he had recently quit seeing a low-cost shrink-in-training at New York University Hospital. Any help is good help, I thought, and though I’d known Mitch for only a few minutes, it was clear he needed some. After all, who doesn’t? But Mitch didn’t think the treatment was getting him anywhere; he was going to try Buddhist meditation instead. I prefer Western solutions to mental unease, even if I wasn’t totally sold on my own psychologist. I had been seeing the same man I began “working with” right before I started dating Ethan. The therapist, like most of my boyfriends, seemed more interested in my recipes than in “my issues.” The subject of food came up often; that was my doing. But did I really need his advice on adding orange rind to cranberry sauce when we were talking about Thanksgiving dinner? Sure, that’s a good tip, but when it came to handy hints about how to get over Ethan—the reason I was seeing him—he had no cherished recipes to pass along. My help would have to come from other sources. I was relying on Mitch, even if love seemed like a long shot during the coffee portion of our date because he was talking a lot and I was talking a little and the points of intersection, as far as dialogue was concerned, seemed few and far between. Things got better when he walked me to the subway.

  “You have beautiful eyes,” Mitch said apropos of nothing as we made our way down Ninth Avenue. Now we were getting somewhere. It had taken two hours, but finally I’d received indication of some attraction on Mitch’s part. Knowing that he liked me at that party so long ago—enough to call me three years later—had added extra pressure to the evening. Up till now, I wondered if he was disappointed with me. Whether I was disappointed in him was not a matter I gave a second’s thought; I needed to be loved again, and soon.

  As we continued walking, Mitch confessed that he had Googled me before our date. He found an old review of a Pulp concert I wrote for Addicted to Noise, a now defunct online music magazine my brother Matthew edited and that everyone in the family (except my mother) and more than a few of our friends wrote for at some point. The review was a billet-doux to Jarvis Cocker, Pulp’s front man at the time, of whom I am a devoted fan. Mitch joked that he considered getting some tinted glasses, Jarvis’s signature accessory, to wear on our date. I didn’t admit that I had Googled Mitch, too.

  “What CD do you have in your CD player right now?” I asked as we walked through Bryant Park. Someone once asked me this question on a first date; I thought it made for a good game. You could get caught with something embarrassing like Olivia Newton-John, if you happened to be in such a mood that day—and if you were honest. Mitch told me he was listening to the Strokes, a New York band that everyone in the world would know in about a week. I made a mental note to get their CD the next day. When we got to Fifth Avenue, Mitch stopped and kissed me on the mouth.

  “You wanna go see a movie on Saturday night?” he asked as we looped around the block to the subway.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me over to an iron grate near the subway entrance, where we kissed some more.

  “Your glasses are fogging up,” I said to Mitch when we stopped to take a breath.

  “Of course they are.”

  I was excited and famished when I got down to the subway. It was nine o’clock, and I had not eaten since lunch. My hunger only made me more wired; my head spun as I tried to process my thoughts about this quirky new man and, of course, what I was going to make myself for dinner. I decided on something simple made from things I already had on my shelves: farfalle with tuna, white wine, capers, and onions. I needed a sturdy dish to bring me back to earth.

  First-Date Butterflies

  Salt

  2 cups (about 4 ounces) farfalle

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  ½ medium onion, chopped

  Pinch red hot pepper flakes

  1 (6-ounce) can tuna packed in olive oil (essential!): Progresso or any brand imported from Italy will do nicely, but I even use Bumble Bee’s version, and it’s fine!

  1 tablespoon capers

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  3 tablespoons dry white wine

  Splash olive oil

  2 tablespoons chopped Italian parsley

  Freshly ground pepper

  Bring a large pot of water to boil over high heat. This sauce is so quick and easy, you can make it while the pasta is cooking. When the water is boiling rapidly, add a large dose of salt and the pasta, then cover the pot until the water is boiling rapidly again. Uncover the pot and give it a few good stirs.

  Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat, add the onion and hot pepper, and sauté until translucent, about 2 minutes. Open the can of tuna and drain as much of the oil as possible (I do this by pressing the disengaged top of the can against the tuna over the sink with as much force as I can muster). Add the tuna to the onions, then the capers, the salt, and the wine. Lower heat and cook until the pasta is ready.

  Drain the pasta and add it to the skillet with the tuna, add a splash of olive oil, the chopped parsley, and a few grindings of black pepper.

  Serves 2, or 1, with enough for lunch the next day.

  I ate the pasta while watching a telethon to raise money for families of 9/11 victims. The theme of this one was a John Lennon tribute. Sean Lennon performed, and Yoko, too. When Kevin Spacey took the stage to do a pretty impressive cover of “Mind Games,” it felt way too appropriate. I couldn’t wait a minute longer to call Ginia and tell her about how it went with Mitch.

  There is no one like Ginia to ratchet up my excitement about a date. She indulges in flights of fancy I wouldn’t dare entertain, which is precisely why I always call her first. By the end of the conversation, she is sure to have me as good as married, with two kids, a steadily growing college fund, and money saved for retirement. This can get me worked up in ways that are detrimental to my better judgment, but tonight I needed the fantasy, and Ginia was there, as always, to provide it. She was happy for me, especially in light of the fact that she’d had a front-row seat to all my sadness that summer.

  We had rented a house on Shelter Island for August, which I wasn’t inclined to do because of all the memories of Ethan there, but Ginia convinced me to do it, and it turned out to be the right thing. She, too, was single at the time. We borrowed my brother Matthew’s old white Volkswagen Beetle, a convertible with leopard-skin seat covers, to drive around the island—where we couldn’t get enough of looking at rich people’s houses and imagining the gracious living going on behind the gorgeous facades—and take to parties in the Hamptons. In between long conversations on the front porch about what in the world Ethan could be thinking and what he might be doing, which always concluded with the revelation that he wasn’t good enough for me anyway, usually followed by a crying jag, we managed to enjoy the summer.

  I needed all the help in the universe to cope with my despair; I even called upon God. On Sunday mornings, I rode my lonely twin Raleigh (now divorced from its partner at Ethan’s) to Our Lady of the Isle Roman Catholic Church on Shelter Island. I cried during
most of the Mass. Sometimes I sang along to songs I remembered from my Catholic school days, led by a geriatric choir accompanied by a Hammond organ. I felt a little hope when I noticed a couple of attractive men who regularly attended Mass alone. The one who wore a madras blazer and drove a Mercedes convertible from the early seventies had to be gay, but another, whom I often ended up sitting next to, probably wasn’t. He had an English accent and drove a silver BMW convertible. How lovely that he maintained his faith, and the Catholic one at that. So exotic for a Brit! During Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, I filled out his story in my head. He was a banker sent over to the New York office of a British firm, Barclays, perhaps. While the choir plodded through a particularly flat rendition of “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” I fantasized about approaching this man, whom Ginia and I had come to call “Nigel,” and inviting him to our house for dinner. But I never mustered the courage to speak to him, apart from saying, “Peace be with you,” when it came to that part of the Mass, so I was free to focus all my dating anxieties on Mitch.

  I figured he would call the day after our date, but he waited until the day after that. By then, the Saturday night movie he’d suggested had been traded for an excursion to Williamsburg with a bunch of his friends to see a band.

  “Sounds fun,” I lied.

  “Okay, I’ll call you Saturday afternoon to shore up plans,” said Mitch.

  I was disappointed, not only because I was looking forward to being alone with Mitch, but also because this meant I would have to come up with Williamsburg-appropriate attire. Williamsburg, the hipster capital of New York City, if not the entire world, was not my scene, even if I might be attracted to the sort of man who lived there. I spent all of Saturday morning shopping for an outfit while waiting for the “shore up” call on my cell phone. The call finally came; the outfit did not. (One doesn’t shop in Boerum Hill boutiques for Williamsburg date wear, I was to learn; one goes to the Salvation Army.) I became more optimistic about our date when Mitch said he would swing by my place to pick me up so we could have dinner in my neighborhood. I pulled a Tocca dress from a few seasons back (homegrown vintage!) from my closet: a scoop-necked, cap-sleeved, purple wool tweed minidress. I wore it with brown leather high-heeled boots.