To buoy my spirits, I spent the little money I had trying to buy a small piece of Paris through its food. While I couldn’t really afford to eat out very much, I could afford to roam Paris’s markets and cafés if I watched my budget. Just a hunk of cheese with good bread and olives were all I needed. Cheese and olives smashed between the flanks of a crisp baguette was the perfect combination of umami and chaatpati in one starchy, crumbly bite. The spicy-sour spike in the various olives I found, from small black oily Greek ones to big chili-drenched Moroccan ones, was the perfect salty counterpoint to the fatty and sharp cheeses of France. I wasted nothing. If the heel of the baguette became a bit dry, I would drizzle drops of the seasoned brine or oil from the olive bags on top to soften the bread.
There were endless varieties of cheese to sample. Week by week I slowly made my way from the mild and familiar to the more sinister, stinkier, runnier sections of the cheese counter. It was in Paris that I first discovered goat cheese, or chèvre, by accident. I had eaten the chived-up cow’s-milk cheese Boursin, which is sold in American supermarkets, and thought that’s what I was buying when I pointed to the creamy mound in the cheese shop. But instead of the cream-cheesy, soft richness of that herby wonder, I discovered the sublime, grassy tang of goat cheese! Before that my only taste of goat cheese had been Greek feta. I was in love with French cheese.
And so I made friends with the large, sweaty cheesemonger in the Bastille street market, who would bray at me with raised fingers on his shiny head for goat’s cheese or pull imaginary teats for a buttery Brie de Meaux. This tall, paunchy man, a doppelgänger for Alfred Hitchcock in a tablecloth-sized white apron spread across his enormous belly, had huge, wide hands with pink sausages for fingers. The broken capillaries on his cheeks and nose bulged as he barked at me to stop loitering and fogging up his glass case. Often a swarming knot of irate French housewives and maids formed behind me while I tried hard to pick just one cheese. There were so many to choose from, and so few francs with which to buy them. Back home, at the Amar Ranch Market, we basically had the choice of mozzarella, American singles, or Wisconsin mild, sharp, and extra-sharp cheddar. For spaghetti we sprinkled Parmesan out of a dark-green Kraft cylinder. If we went to the Stater Bros. supermarket farther out in West Covina, which was slightly more middle-middle-class than the lower-middle-class La Puente, we could score Swiss, provolone, and Muenster. French cheese to us was Laughing Cow. Cheese was either white or orange. But in Paris, in the Bastille, cheese was blue, beige, veiny, creamy white, yellow, deep sunset orange, or even burnt sienna. It came crusted with rose-colored peppercorns, smelling of funk, and swathed in ash and wax.
My love of cheese was liberated. I perused and savored all the milky delights I had never before seen or tasted. As weeks went by, my French improved ever so slightly, and I would stammer questions at the impatient beast of a cheesemonger. To preserve his business from dwindling, he took to pushing me to the side in order to service those who did know what they wanted. Because I was probably pathetic and because he could most likely see the hunger in my eyes, often while cutting a wedge for those sharp-elbowed women, he would throw a razor-thin slice or crumbled edge my way. He never looked at his hands while wielding his knife or sharp violin string of a cheese cutter. And yet the amount was always perfect. He was not kind and he was not chatty, but if I stood there quietly, he would ply me with a steady stream of cheesy samples. “So what wins the prize today?” he would grumble, to indicate he had given me enough.
Some days, if I was especially lucky, he would give me the leftover scraps of cheeses that were too small to sell, even in the bargain basket of four- or five-franc wrapped chunks. I took whatever he threw my way, and eventually relished even the most intense Roquefort or the runniest Camembert, waxy rind and all. I didn’t have more than eight or ten francs to spend on any given meal. One day, the agency’s unhappy accountant called me in to discuss my purchases. After what might have been the first talking-to a model has ever received for eating too much cheese, I slunk out, chastened and worried for my Camembert habit.
Thank goodness, then, for Michael Spingler, from whom I learned the principles of French cooking. He was a French literature professor at Clark, and while I’d never taken a class with him, his wife, Kathy, worked as the costume director for the theater department and had employed me as a costume apprentice. I adored her. Michael happened to be in Paris on sabbatical, working on a book about Molière. He knew I was struggling and had me over for dinner often. Michael showed me a Paris different from the one I’d seen, which was beautiful but cold and full of disappointment. His building was in the 14th Arrondissement, at 139 Rue D’Alésia, if memory serves. The building’s owner, Jean Claude, was a literary critic for Le Monde; its handyman, a German poet. They were all friends with Leo, the owner of a nearby bookstore called Alias. Everyone except Leo lived in the building, for the most part with their doors open. Jean Claude, a tall man with approximately ten hairs left on his head, all white ones; wire-framed spectacles; and a small roster of moth-eaten sweaters, would show up for dinner with a pot of beans and lardons. Michael would make magic with his two-burner stove. It was there I ate my first blanquette de veau (my first veal of any sort, for that matter), the French bistro classic that featured the slowly cooked meat doused in a sauce rich with stock and cream. I ate lamb shank braised in red wine, and nearly everything—steaks, green beans, fish—was finished with plenty of butter. In Michael’s hands, even the simplest food became special. We did not eat mere mashed potatoes. No, we ate purée de pommes de terre. He’d make Jean Claude peel the potatoes. “Jean Claude was in the army,” Michael would say. “He won’t mind.”
To come back from those dispiriting casting calls to the heady aromas of his tiny kitchen, or to Michael and Jean Claude sipping wine beside an ashtray brimming with the butts of unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes, was exactly what I needed. To climb the wide marble staircase to the fifth floor and enter the spacious apartment crowded with tattered furniture, dusty oriental rugs, and miles and miles of dog-eared books to see these two thinkers semi-drunkenly discussing Baudelaire was a much-needed balm for my aching feet and spirit. I’d kick off my high heels, sink into a chair, and receive a glass of red and a warm welcome. “And how was today’s foray into the forest of fashion?” Jean Claude might say in heavily accented English, exaggerating his Fs.
Michael and Jean Claude saw the toll that the fashion business was taking on me and they fought it valiantly, deploying a daily barrage of gentle teasing. When I came in crushed after failing to score a commercial modeling gig, probably a half page in some newspaper insert, they expressed mock disappointment in me. “How terrible you are!” Jean Claude would say. Michael would chime in: “I agree, you’re definitely not good enough to sell Maalox.” They’d poke fun at my self-pity. “One day, your grand moment will come,” said Jean Claude. “You will have your face on the pantyhose package at Monoprix.” I had my own peanut gallery. That is how I survived the parade of rejections inevitable for most wannabe models and the myopia of a young person’s passion. They reminded me that there was more to life than being pretty.
I spent more and more time on Rue D’Alésia as my apartment became bedlam. One day, I came home to find that someone had drunkenly peed in my bed. I was paying for a soiled bed in an apartment I rarely used. I cried when I told Michael. He invited me to move in. This was when my real life in Paris began. Work came in a trickle—a fitting-model gig here, a catalog shoot there—but the occasional job was all I needed to support my modest lifestyle. I certainly wasn’t partying like a model. When my former roommates were out at Les Bains Douches, the French equivalent of Madame Claude, guzzling free champagne with other trucked-in models, I was with my weeknight family—Michael, his friends, and, when they came to visit, Kathy and their two kids—eating coq au vin and drinking pinot noir. When the weekend came, I was off to Milan to see Daniele, or “Monsieur Spaghetti,” as Jean Claude dubbed him. I was living as charmed a life as a
nyone sleeping on a literature professor’s couch could hope to. Michael and Jean Claude used to heckle me as I packed my bag. “Going away for your dirty weekend?” No! “Well, isn’t he your lover?” Ew, stop! As embarrassed as I was, I felt grateful to have these two paternal men in my life who felt protective enough to embarrass me.
I got to know the Friday-night pilots, who would let me sit in the cockpit’s third seat for takeoff and landing on the short flight to Milan. They’d point out the rabbit holes near the runway at Charles de Gaulle, and curse the rabbits for getting caught in the wheels. The airport staff was occasionally invited to hunt them. My pilot friends boasted of the stews they’d make. When I landed back in Paris on Sundays, I’d look out the window for the animals’ eyes, glowing from the reflected lights of the plane.
Daniele’s mom, Gabriella, a big-bosomed, always carefully coiffed woman with a weakness for furs and skinny cigarettes the size of lollipop sticks, opened my eyes to a sort of Italian cooking much different from the spaghetti-and-meatballs version produced by Pompeii Pizzeria, the restaurant run by my friend Pelly Dimopoulos’s family, where I had my first job at fifteen. (In those days, you could get an age waiver at fourteen from the Department of Labor to have a part-time job after school. If your grades were good enough, the school would sign a document and you were exempt from waiting until the legal age of sixteen to work.)
I watched, surprised at first, as Gabriella opted for butter instead of olive oil and often chose béchamel over tomato sauce. I had received my Italian food education at Pompeii Pizzeria and, a year later, at Pelly’s uncle’s pizzeria, Mario’s, where the tips were better. There garlicky tomato sauce reigned. Yet Daniele’s mother mainly cooked the style of food found in northern Italy and Milan in particular, which meant risotto tinted yellow from saffron and rich with marrow, accompanied by osso buco slowly cooked with white wine and stock. Somehow it reminded me more of French food than Italian. When we went out to eat, they would discuss whether to go for food from Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, or Liguria, as my friends and I back home might debate whether to eat Chinese, burgers, or Mexican. I knew Indian food was highly regional, but India was a vast country of close to a billion people. I quickly learned that Italy, though comparatively tiny, had no less regional variation. Daniele’s family was full of voracious eaters. Before I’d taken a third bite of my veal Milanese, incredibly juicy and encased in crispy breading, they were sitting in front of empty plates, watching politely and with evident pride as I savored every buttery moment.
Between Gabriella and Michael, I got a vast education in European cooking. I learned how to make more than just curry and stir-fry, to cook without relying on mountains of chopped onions, garlic, and ginger. Occasionally I’d pitch in to do more than chop onions. In February I came home giddy from the supermarket, because I’d found fresh cilantro. Michael was roasting a lamb shank for dinner, so I made an almost-but-not-quite replica of the cilantro chutney of my childhood, to drizzle onto the meat.
Daniele spoke perfect English, but taught me to speak real Italian, in the way only a boyfriend can. When we met, I spoke enough Spanish to piece together what Italians said to me. Within a few months, though, I could fight with him in rapid Italian. Through our life together and from chatting with cab drivers, I came to understand both the expressive and the banal. “Che cazzo!” a cabbie would yell after getting cut off. “Ce lo mal di stomacho,” Daniele would say right before chugging Maalox.
About once a month, Daniele and I would spend an entire Sunday at the movies—we’d have lunch, catch an afternoon movie, have a snack, then see another film, and after that we would eat dinner before a late show. These weren’t all Roberto Benigni films, of course. For years, I thought Steven Seagal was an amazing actor, because the guy who dubbed him in Italian was a brilliant stage actor who also dubbed De Niro. Daniele lived near the Duomo, the city’s stunning cathedral, and we often walked past it on our way to the movies. There was no ornate cathedral adorned with thousands of centuries-old statues back in La Puente. There were no skyscraping Gothic spires, either. Daniele cultured me in the way a partner often does: in the person you care for, you often see parts of the person you wish you were. In Daniele, I saw a man raised around what I knew cerebrally to be great art, the kind you read about in college. He knew it not as something to be studied but as something to be seen and felt, and not as something rare to be viewed only after a long plane ride but as something beautiful that happened to be right down the street. That proximity to art and culture was part of what I had missed when we moved away from New York. Now I had a chance to live walking distance from Santa Maria Delle Grazie, where The Last Supper hangs. I was a train away from both Michelangelo’s David in Florence and the Colosseum and Pantheon in Rome.
From Daniele, I learned so much about Italian food, in the quotidian way you do when your days and nights together are full of pumpkin ravioli swimming in sage butter. He meticulously planned our movie times and snacking. Pre-movie lunch might be at Pizzeria Gambarotta, then after movie number one, spuntini at the luxe café Cova, its ceiling dripping with chandeliers, for little sandwiches of arugula, goat cheese, and leathery bresaola (cured beef) or some pastel-colored pastries fit for Marie Antoinette. I loved eating in tiny portions, the opposite of my experience in America. Even my Coca-Cola came in a miniature glass bottle. After movie number two, we were off to dinner at Il Rigolo, the Tuscan trattoria we went to every Sunday and possibly the only place in the world to offer lasagna al curry. This cracked me up, and I ordered it often, a béchamel-heavy stack of pasta stained yellow with turmeric. Only occasionally did I look for these reminders of home in my food. For the most part, I embraced the new and unfamiliar, in the way you do when you’re young and captivated by a life different from the one you’ve known. I did, however, order my pasta arrabbiata as angry as they could make it—for an Indian girl, their “spicy” was never quite enough. Somehow our favorite lunch in Milan during movie days was at the nearby McDonald’s—ah, Italy, where modernity and antiquity exist side by side—where I’d lay into un Big Mac and a side of patatine fritte. Somehow even McDonald’s was better in Italy.
Besides treating his money-strapped girlfriend to fine food, Daniele also upped my sartorial game. Textiles were his family’s business and he had his own operation, making and selling printed fabric. He did “research” constantly, by which I mean he shopped. I’d tag along for his sessions, where he’d buy whatever inspired him and send it to the fabric factory for a few days to be studied and some aspect of it replicated. He’d always buy whatever it was in my size, so after he was done with it, I’d get to wear it. He had great taste. I had my own style, a hodgepodge of vintage bargains and a few splurges from Contempo Casuals and Express, but he gently challenged my choices. He taught me the subtle and not-so-subtle precepts of fashion, the unspoken rules that no one had ever codified for me. A very short skirt and heels were overkill. If I liked a sweater or pants, he’d politely check the tag to identify the fabric. This isn’t good quality, he’d explain, or this won’t keep you warm. Daniele made sure I had the staples. Just as a good home cook needs to have high-quality olive oil, nice vinegar, and a heavy sauté pan, a girl needs a dress coat, real leather boots, and a nice watch. And just as it’s impossible to go back to cheap balsamic after tasting the good stuff, it’s hard to slip on rayon once you’ve worn cashmere.
Three months into our relationship, he took me for the weekend to the Swiss ski resort St. Moritz, where his family had a house. Our first night there, he hired a horse and sleigh to drive us across the frozen lake. With snow-capped Alpine peaks in the background, he proposed to me. As romantic a gesture as this seemed to be, and as doe-eyed as I was, I had no problem saying no. I was naïve, not stupid. I cared for him, but I was too young to marry anyone, especially someone—and goodness knows I see the comedy in this now—seventeen years older than me. In fact, marriage didn’t figure into my girlish fantasies. From my mom’s three marriages, I inherited a
skepticism toward the institution, with its “till death do us part” commitment. I promised to marry him one day, adding “if all goes well” so I had plenty of wiggle room. That’s how I said no. And so the relationship sailed on, ultimately for six years, as if nothing had happened. I was in love and just happy in the way you are when you’re young. The future felt far, far away. Commitment is easy before a relationship requires compromise and obligation. I felt wise then, proud of my man and his sophistication, the complete opposite of my mother’s latest choice in a mate. Somewhere inside, I knew it wouldn’t last. The relationship was one, ultimately, of contented convenience. We stayed together because we were reasonably happy and because there was no good reason to split up.
A year had passed since I arrived in Europe and not much had changed. I was making ends meet, with the huge help of having no rent to pay when in Milan, but the work had become increasingly tiresome. I was no stranger to rejection by this point. There were several explanations for this: I wasn’t a particularly gifted model. The waif phenomenon was in full swing, and I was a (relatively) voluptuous 34-24-34. Yet I couldn’t help but see all those nos (or, more accurately, the lack of any response at all) as a referendum on my scar. I was bored of the shame I felt, of people’s furtive downward glances when I went sleeveless, of the inevitable questions the scar invited. I was tired of the requisite disclosures when I went on castings: “Before we begin, let me show you my hideous scar.” I saw an obvious ceiling to my achievement.
Love, Loss, and What We Ate Page 16
