by David Leite
“I do.” I looked at him in disbelief. “I do, I really do!” He said he understood that although he needs to be loved forever and I need to be loved entirely, we were committed to each other in our own way. Cut! End of scene.
Deflated that he didn’t see divine intervention at work, the historic synchronicity of that moment, I brushed past him and dropped onto our futon in the maid’s room and pouted.
I tried again on our last afternoon.
As we ambled along the Left Bank munching on crêpes (he jambon et fromage, I Nutella), I pointed toward the river. “Let’s walk down there.” The Seine on a dreary, cold day in January wasn’t the beach in November, but at least he’d be near water. The minute we made our way down the stone steps, I regretted it. Lapping at the edge of the embankment was a raft of garbage—plastic bags, cups, cigarette butts, condoms.
“Gross.”
“Ignore that,” I said, “it’s our last day in romantic Paris. Let’s enjoy it!” Chipper didn’t come naturally to me. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve complained about the flotsam, the overcast skies, the cold, but I had a plan, and dammit if it wasn’t going to unfold exactly as I had envisioned it the moment Alan had surprised me with news of our trip.
I’d been bursting to tell him I loved him since Thanksgiving. But considering my history of cranking through boyfriends in fewer than three months, I figured it’d be prudent to wait until that milestone had passed. All I had to do was hold out until January fifth, today, and then I could say it—unless he said it to me first, which he had chosen not to do while Céline sang her heart out.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
“What?”
Ahead of us was a riverboat disgorging its contents. Tourists, mostly Americans, were swarming the embankment, trying to shoulder their way through the collected crowd waiting to board.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.
“Fine.” I turned toward him. “I love you, all right? That’s what’s wrong with me.”
“I love you, too.”
“But this isn’t how it was supposed to happen.” I explained it was supposed to be sunny, and there wasn’t supposed to be a herd of lowing Americans making it sound like we were back home, and there certainly wasn’t supposed to be trash, especially condoms, all around us.
He stopped and turned me toward him. “Did you hear what I said?”
Deep breath. Let it go. “I did. And I love you, too.”
“I know,” he said. “You just told me.”
We both grinned a goofy smile. I knew him well enough after three months and one day to know he was a deeply private person, and recoiled from any kind of public affection. There would be no swell of music, no grand embrace where he bent me backward and kissed me, prompting the American cattle to start cheering. No free ride on the riverboat, with us at the prow arm in arm, waving to the Parisians lining the banks above. Maybe there was no such thing as a movie moment, the kind Becca and I devoured every Love Day. And maybe that was okay, because I would always have his words.
When we returned home, we started looking for a place together. I called off the search after a month, because we argued something fierce. Out of the blue, this man who I loved and thought was perfect suddenly had opinions and ideas about living spaces that I didn’t particularly agree with, and he wasn’t willing to reel them in. We tried a few more times that winter and spring, and each time we stormed off in opposite directions, lobbing a few choice word grenades before parting. Exhausted by the whole proposition, Alan finally said, “Why don’t we just find you a place near me; that way you can have exactly what you want.”
“Oh, that’s rich. So you can once again lure a boyfriend out of Brooklyn so you’re not inconvenienced?” I asked. I reminded him that when we’d met he had made a point of saying that we’d spend equal time in Brooklyn and the Upper West Side, because he had rarely visited his previous boyfriend’s place and felt bad about that. Not so bad, though, that he hadn’t gotten the poor guy to move uptown, a few blocks away from him.
“Fine!”
“FINE!”
With a moratorium in place, I forgot about cohabitation. One afternoon in August, Alan called me at the ad agency and told me to meet him at his apartment. He explained that he’d found a place that he thought was right for us, and that he had been searching since April on his own to avoid more fallout.
“Just do me a favor,” he said, “and say nothing. Don’t get excited if you like it.”
“I promise.”
The minute Norma, the landlady, opened the door, my mouth dropped, which, unfortunately, she noticed. And she knew how to play me. It was like watching an old-timey stripper revealing her goods, slowly, piece by piece. The apartment was a triplex in a brownstone on West Seventy-Seventh Street. She teased me by walking us through the first floor, pointing out the balcony, wood-burning fireplace, and dishwasher.
Boom, chicka, boom.
Up half a level was a full bath with a separate commode. Another half-level up was the bedroom—actually, two smaller bedrooms combined into one, giving it an L-shape, so half could be used as a TV room.
Chicka boom.
“Tired yet?” she asked.
“Not me,” I said.
Another half-level higher was the largest landing I’d ever seen in New York. “This is going to be my office!” I squeaked with excitement. She just smiled as Alan mouthed, Stop it! behind her back.
On the top level, she said, “And up here is—”
“Is this for real, Norma?” She’d been slowly building to this, pulling on the anticipation, until I was face-to-face with the sweet spot of the apartment—the pasties and G-string of it all. We stood on a landing almost as large as the one below, looking out a sliding glass door that opened onto a wraparound roof terrace.
Chicka boom, boom, boom!
I didn’t smoke, but I felt like I needed a cigarette.
“Well, I guess there’s no point in trying to negotiate the price, is there?” Alan said to Norma as he pointed at me.
The day we moved in, a heaviness descended. I was crossing Broadway with a friend of Alan’s, and I could feel the street telescoping. As he talked about his new gift store in Rhinebeck, New York, his voice grew distorted. It was like I was in a diver’s suit—all I could pay attention to was my breathing and heartbeat. The whole day, on and off, I felt dizzy and had the worst headache. A sense of dread kept eating away at the edges of what was supposed to be the happiest day of my life—back then, the gay equivalent of a wedding. Several times I sat down on the stairs.
“Are you okay?” Alan asked.
“Sure. I’m just winded. All these freaking steps.”
As soon as we were finished and settled in, boxes broken down, friends gone, the anxiety started to swell. I was sitting in the wingback chair, Alan on the couch.
“I think I made a mistake,” I mumbled.
“What?”
I could feel the old need to run, to flee, rising. “I think we rushed moving in together.”
“No, let’s be clear here,” he said. “You pushed for this. I just let go of a rent-controlled apartment I had for thirteen years that I loved.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” I said, ducking my head as if he were going to hit me.
Standing up in the middle of the room, he turned to me. “So what do we do now?”
“I don’t know. Let’s just get through the night and see how I feel tomorrow.”
I slept very soundly, which was surprising: Sleep was evasive when I was anxious. This felt different, though. It was pinioned to something, like a butterfly to a board. It was causal. Despite my proclamations of wanting to set up home, something I had been panting after for years, I discovered I was mortified of it all.
“Fear of intimacy,” David Lindsey said when I told him, later that week. “Fear of commitment. Fear of being seen. Take your pick.”
“I just feel so bad that I told him. Now he’s hurt
and paranoid.”
“That’s understandable. What’s important now is you don’t say or do anything else that you’re going to regret until we talk through this.”
“When will I finally stop sticking my head up my ass?”
“When you get tired of smelling your own farts.” Oddly, it made me feel better.
30
PROUST WASN’T DELUSIONAL
I decided to become a therapist.
After six years in advertising, I was tired. Of the insane hours and stupid clients. Of being greeted in the morning by projectiles of vomit from my art director, who would stay out all night drinking and snorting coke with other creatives in the agency. Of saying to those same creatives the night before, “No, taking me to a strip joint and buying me a lap dance isn’t fun; it’s actually harassment.” I felt I’d be happier in the supportive world of feelings, rather than one filled with bodily fluids and naked women. So the month after Alan and I had moved in together, I enrolled in Hunter College and took an undergraduate night class.
One Saturday, I was lying on the couch with my Psychology of Personal Adjustment textbook propped up on my chest. Alan stood behind the wide expanse of counter that divided our raspberry-red kitchen from the living room with exposed brick. Spread out in front of him were index cards he had plucked from a metal recipe box.
“I’m going to bake a pineapple upside-down cake,” he announced over the classical music curling from the radio.
“Knock yourself out.”
“Wanna help?”
I flopped the book onto my chest and gave him a look. Even though I’d begun eating most everything again, cooking still pretty much fell to him. In the year we’d been together, I’d gained only five pounds. My clothes still fit, and that wasn’t changing.
“Suit yourself,” he said.
Baking was Alan’s comfort. Because his stepfather had refused to go to work and would lie on the couch all day watching TV, his mother had to make ends meet by baking desserts and decorating cakes after work and on weekends. He’d grown up with naked Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, and Easter Bunny cakes cooling on wire racks; with piping bags that had wriggles of rainbow-colored frosting spilling from their tips; with the scent of vanilla extract and melting chocolate wafting through the house. By the time I met Virginia, those days were long gone. She was hunched over—a tiny, bony comma—her trembling hands reaching for her pack of Viceroy cigarettes. If Alan wanted to taste his childhood, he’d have to bake it.
He pulled out a mustard-yellow hand mixer and began beating something. The stuttering of the metal against the big Fiesta bowl drilled into my head. It was hard to concentrate.
“My grandmother’s!” he shouted over the noise and music, waggling a beat-up silver spoon in the air, its edge worn so thin it curled over itself.
“Of course it is.”
“The cake’ll never come out if I don’t use it.”
“That’s wonderful, love,” I said from behind my book. He scraped the batter into the pan with the spoon and slid it into the oven.
“You want to lick the bowl?” Because of his incessant interruptions, I’d read the same section about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs over and over; I just gave up.
“Fine,” I said, exasperated. I swiped my finger around the inside of the bowl and licked it. Something murmured inside of me. I took another swipe. This was familiar. The flavor hovered over some memory, looking for a place to land. The harder I chased it, the faster it evaporated. I picked up the bowl and held it to my face, sniffing.
“I know this taste,” I said. “This smell.”
“From what?”
“I . . . don’t know.” But the homey scent of vanilla, the egginess, even how the batter dripped down like long exclamation points with big, fat drops beneath, were connected to some memory. But what?
Still haunted by that taste, I called my mother a few days later. “Ma banse.”
“God bless you,” she answered.
“Ma, did you ever bake cakes?” I knew the answer. With the exception of occasional Pepperidge Farm frozen turnovers or slice-and-bake cookies, she never made desserts.
She tsked her tongue. “Banana, you know better than that.”
“Did Dina or Vo?” The only sweet I recalled my godmother making was chocolate pudding.
“Not Dina so much, but Vovo did.”
“She did?”
“Don’t you remember? You’d stand on the chair next to her at the stove.”
The chair.
The scrapping sound as she dragged it across the floor. My grandfather’s enormous red-plaid shirt she put on me backward. Resting my hand on her breast as she rolled up the sleeves. The stove, white. She had to light it with a match. The clock in the middle of the back panel; it didn’t work. The stand mixer that looked like a rocket; I think she’d borrowed it from Dina. Cream-colored, with pale green glass bowls. The electric smell of the motor when it warmed up. I think it was a cake mix she used to make. A blue-and-white box. Jiffy. It was Jiffy.
For almost thirty years I’d forgotten that I used to cook and bake with my grandmother. In my attempt to disown my heritage, I’d disowned her memory. I suddenly ached for her and for the foods she’d made me. But Vovo was gone; she had passed two years earlier, in 1992. She’d had a stroke and eventually died of old age at eighty-nine. She’d stopped cooking years before, although she’d kept one eye on the stove for as long as her health permitted, rattling lids and my mother. When she died, so did some of her specialties. My mother had her versions of Vo’s classics, but they were merely that. No one could match her sopa de galinha (chicken soup) or sausage stuffing, which we ate like a side dish; they were always the highlights of Sunday dinner.
“Ma, do you still have your green cookbook?” When my parents had married, my mother had taken an old three-ring telephone binder and typed up my grandmother’s recipes. Behind the “B” tab, the only tab in the book, are the recipes—ingredients in red, the method in black—for Portuguese baked beans, baked codfish with tomatoes and potatoes, octopus, Portuguese fava beans, her chicken soup and stuffing. All the foods I’d refused when I was a kid.
“Yes, I do.” she said. “And why?”
“Can I have it?”
My mother paused. She sensed something. Then, softly: “Of course, sweetheart.”
Proust wasn’t delusional, after all. That one lick of cake batter crowbarred open more than just the past. The more memories flooded me, the more I surrendered. It was similar to what I had felt when Alan made me roast pork and apples the first time, but more urgent, more primal. A tendril coiled around me and tugged me toward my grandmother, and toward the joy of being with her, of being fed, being loved. My fear of food and cooking and eating had betrayed her.
I slowly began taking a deep and serious interest in baking. I elbowed Alan out of the way, too preoccupied to see his hurt and disappointment as he quietly put aside his family recipes for the ones that I was mining on the computer through something called the World Wide Web. I’d sit for hours, hunched over the blue glow of my laptop, trolling for fancy pies, extravagant cakes, and delicate pastries.
Both of us were recovering churchgoers; still, on Sunday mornings in Barryville, we engaged in our own particular kind of worship. We’d wake up early and flick on the old portable TV with the manual dial that chunked into place. We got two, maybe three stations up there in the woods. First we’d watch Bob Vila on This Old House. I’d become keenly preoccupied with Alan’s weekend place. I bought armloads of DIY books and started all kinds of projects, abandoning many of them. Bemused, he’d lie on the deck, his body turning clockwise from morning to midafternoon to follow the light, lounging like a sun-starved Newfoundlander. Me, I was on the roof cleaning gutters, painting bedrooms, throwing up a dust storm in the kitchen as I sanded and refinished cabinets, furiously scrubbing at permanent rust stains in the toilet bowl from the iron in the water. I had boundless energy that needed an outlet, and the Barryville hous
e, with all its dings and dents, was one enormous project.
After Bob Vila came the main attraction: Martha Stewart. We’d lie there watching. Alan was slack-jawed at the perfection pouring from the screen as I frantically scribbled down recipes, kitchen tips, gardening dos and don’ts. “We need to get her magazine,” he finally said. And thus began the great onslaught: Martha Stewart Living, Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Saveur, Cook’s Illustrated. Over the next year, cookbooks crowded out novels and biographies on our shelves. I rooted through boxes of kitchen utensils from his mother and grandmother, and scoured flea markets for what we didn’t have. Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Bridge Kitchenware cluttered our credit-card bills as I bought doubles of everything: two sets of cake pans in every size, two food processors, two stand mixers, two sets of knives. One for the city, the other for the country.
We began entertaining and cooking elaborate, over-the-top meals. On Saturday mornings, we’d rummage through Oelkers General Store. I’d paw through produce in the walk-in cooler while he’d scour the grocery aisles. Once I forgot myself, excited over some find, and called out through the open door, “Alan, look what I found, sweetheart!” A woman who was considering a head of lettuce gave me a curious look, to which I added, “Ellen, sweetheart? Did you hear me?” as I walked out of the cooler. Most weekends we’d drive miles into Pennsylvania for what Oelkers didn’t carry.
We rarely cooked the same dish twice, which infuriated me, but Alan’s philosophy was “Why make the same thing again and again when there’s so much to experience?” But now that I had returned home to the kitchen for good, I wanted to learn, to master, to earn the right to stand there. That meant repetition and failure. Flirting with the unfamiliar until I could bend it to my will, until I could turn out a flawless dish without glancing at a recipe. Just a few was all I wanted, so I could feel accomplished. That’s when I began taking classes in culinary basics at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School.
