by David Leite
I wasn’t too keen on the new house: It looked like the love child of Tara from Gone with the Wind and the suburban Colonial from Leave It to Beaver. Four spindly columns stood guard in front of a white shingled façade with small midcentury windows.
The moment we entered, an oppressive energy emanated like a foul odor. That was when most intelligent buyers would’ve hightailed it to the next property. But not Alan. Just like those fools in horror movies who trip over the hacked-up body of the head cheerleader and decide to press on, we stayed. Being exquisitely attuned to my own melancholy, I’d become sort of a high-fidelity depression detector, and I sensed a profound sadness that penetrated every stud, every floor slat, every doorframe.
Our broker whispered that the owner, Audrey, had lost her husband just before moving in. Then I understood. Living here, trying to honor her dead husband, Audrey had been trapped in grief like an insect in amber. That explained the neglect, the family room whose wood planks and window frames had been chewed by their dog, and the horrible condition of the yard, its gardens overtaken by thorn-bushes, and trees nearly strangled to death by vines thick as forearms.
Undeterred, Alan bought the place. (After leaving advertising and refusing to make a pathetic eighty grand as a shrink, I’d decided to turn to food writing full-time, in which, in my best year, I pulled in a whopping thirty thousand. All I could afford was a good attitude.)
I wanted to respect Audrey’s loss, but the last thing I needed was to suck up her sadness like an emotional wet/dry vac. So a week after we closed, we threw a demolition party. As we refreshed glasses of prosecco and tried to assure our friends that the bloodred bedroom was not a portal to hell, we also passed out pencils. We instructed them to write well wishes to us all over the walls before they were painted over. We wanted a happy home, we said, and we couldn’t think of a better way to achieve that than to imbue it with their love.
Everyone scattered and took to the walls. Some scrawled their well wishes in huge block letters a foot high; others scribbled hopes for us so small, you had to lean in to read them. Later that afternoon, as Alan and I walked through the house picking up empty paper plates and plastic cups, we stopped every so often, heads tilted like a pair of hard-of-hearing cocker spaniels, to read the wishes and wisecracks. The kitchen was festooned with messages that foretold many fine meals. In what would be my writing studio were various wishes for a lifetime of creativity, joy in my work, and pots and pots of money. (Alan had written that last one.) In our bedroom, witty and smutty suggestions, not to mention a few somewhat explicit—and flatteringly out-of-proportion—illustrations, covered the walls.
To combat the lack of light, Alan came up with the idea of exploding open the outside walls with huge French doors and rows of big windows. So now I write in a studio that looks out onto almost four manicured acres of parklike land, and is flooded with light from sunup to sunset—which, if my psychopharmacologist is to be believed, is restorative and healthy for manic depression. Something about vitamin D.
Post-renovation, the kitchen houses three James Beard awards and acts as the setting for my food writing as well as for my blog, The David Blahg. The title was meant as a gentle reminder of the accent I had all those years ago back in Fall River. But most people seem to think I meant it to sound erudite, upper-crusty, British even. You just can’t win.
For a year and a half, the kitchen was also where I developed recipes for my cookbook, The New Portuguese Table. After our trip to the Azores and my father’s childhood home, Alan and I spent more time in Lisbon and traveled to the Ribatejo, Alentejo, and Algarve—three of the eleven historical regions in Portugal, the rest of which I visited over the next several years. The book was meant to honor the food of my heritage by recounting some of the stories and dishes that came out of that small, cramped kitchen on an island in the middle of nowhere, and to re-create some of the lost recipes of Vo Costa. (I succeeded, with the exception of her pink chicken soup. She’s probably looking down and chuckling every time I try to make it.)
Most important, what the house became for me was an asylum. And like all nuthouses worth their monthly payments, it had 1.) gorgeous grounds for strolling and for sitting under a tree with a book; 2.) therapeutic activities—in my case, writing, cooking, and crafts; and 3.) quietude.
As I wrote my cookbook, I began spending more time in Roxbury. The book was a ruse, really. “The kitchen here is so much better,” I’d say to Alan, as an excuse to stay an extra few days or the whole week. Eventually, I moved there permanently. Our almost twenty-year routine of riding up and back to the country, two hours each way, which Alan and I used as a way to decompress and reconnect, was over. I saw him from Friday afternoon until Monday morning. While the move brought great peace to me, it caused incredible disruption to us. We fought more than ever. Everything became a flash point.
After a dinner of frango na púcara—a boozy dish from my cookbook of chicken cooked in wine, brandy, and Port—on one snowy Saturday in February, we began talking finances. I bristled. I always bristled when we discussed money. When I’d blindly launched headfirst into a writing career, I’d naturally assumed I would succeed, and that meant financially, too. No one had told me I would have years of making less than ten thousand dollars. After my savings, CDs, and IRA evaporated, Alan supported me.
“It’s just until I make it,” I kept telling him.
On this night, the conversation again snaked around to my piss-poor income.
“Look,” I said, “it’s getting better, right?” I was referring to my advance for my cookbook. “It’s just until I make it.”
I’m not proud of it, but I can bully Alan, making it hard for him to speak up, and it allows me to slip out of uncomfortable situations. But this wasn’t one of those nights.
“David, you have made it,” he said, barely controlling himself. “You’ve won awards. You’ve written a cookbook. You’ve been in all the magazines. This is as good as it’s going to get.” The same line Bercoli had used a decade earlier.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said, picking up plates and throwing them into the sink.
“You never want to talk about it,” he said, following me lockstep into the kitchen. He was never this insistent, this dogged. “This is not what I signed up for.”
That was it. I spun around to him, screaming: “Do you think being a fucking lunatic is what I signed up for?” And to drive home my point, I added, “I have an illness!”
“Yes, you do, but what’s worse is you have an attitude about your illness. You feel that since you’re manic-depressive, you’re entitled to annihilate anyone within a fifty-foot radius. Do you have any idea how exhausting it is to be on the opposite end of this?” He raised his hand and pointed at me. “Your moods and rages? Do you know how hard I have to work not to upset you? Or rattle you? Or trigger you? I walk on eggshells every day in our own house. You’re not the only one affected by this.”
I grabbed the All-Clad skillet that was on the stove and slammed it down on the countertop three times. “Stop it! Stop it!! STOP IT!!” The granite shattered, and two dents traversed the bottom of the skillet. The conversation whiplashed from sixty to zero.
We had had only one rule from day one: Violence = The End of the Relationship. I had broken it. I held my palms up, a sign of surrender, and said, “I’ll take the car to my parents’ tonight, and when you go to the city on Monday, I’ll come back and move my stuff out.”
As I brushed past him, he grabbed my arm and stopped me. “Let’s talk.”
I wrenched away. “I don’t see what good it’ll do.” I didn’t mean it. I said it to strike back, to punish him.
“David?” He led me into the family room, and we sat on the couch looking at each other. He seemed almost relieved, as if goading me into shattering the safety that defined us (and a very expensive granite countertop, in the process) had been the only way he could speak up for himself. For years, I had been the heart and voice of our relationship,
he the head and hands. I felt and talked for us; he reasoned and acted. We each needed to do all of it—feel, talk, reason, act—for ourselves if we were to survive as a couple.
The blowup uncovered a bunker of unexpressed feelings that had festered longer than either of us had the balls to admit. For hours, we sifted through the debris of his resentment over my lack of money, his frustration about always having to put my illness first, even before him. I confessed my exhaustion and confusion, how my life had drifted off course, one degree at a time, until I felt marooned by my choices and my solitude. He countered with how wounded and alone he felt with me being up here all the time. It was as if there had been a death, he said, and he was in mourning.
How could we solve this? Staying in the country meant risking my relationship. Returning to the city meant risking my mental health. For years, living in New York had been a thrill. The energy and excitement of being in the greatest city in the world—I am here!—would pulsate through me, careening me from place to place, from day to day. Since my diagnosis, though, the city rankles. I feel jangled, sharp, and irritable when I’m there. I can’t shut out the world around me, and I can’t turn off how it makes me feel. My asylum was becoming a prison, where I was trapped by my illness.
I wish I could say there had been a deus ex machina denouement, in which the heavens opened and some benevolent (and rich) God laid her hand upon our troubled hearts and empty wallets and made it better. But that’s not what happened. The solution is still ongoing, and it’s inelegant at best. What’s good is that I haven’t thrown up my hands and fallen through my own asshole, as David Lindsey loves to say. Or left Alan, or, worse, had him leave me. Or sunk so low into depression, I can’t writhe my way out of it. Some weeks, I spend a day or two in the city; other weeks he stays on in the country. I tried to get him to use Skype or FaceTime, so we could have virtual dinner time together and I could see that beloved face, but he’s still figuring out texting. Technology isn’t in his blood.
It’s tempting to say food saved us, but that would be grand and blustery—and in our food-fetishistic society, a cliché. We don’t play golf or tennis, or belong to bowling leagues, or take macramé classes, like some folks. Food and cooking are our one shared passion and a big part of our bond. And at times it has brought us together; at other times it has melted the knots that threatened to choke our relationship—from that lick of cake batter so many years ago to dinner last night. But I’ve learned it’s not just food, but what we say and do at the table, how we use that precious time, that matters most.
I’ve kept the dented skillet, as a reminder of everything I have to lose.
40
THE LAST SUPPER
March 1, 2014. A blisteringly cold, clear day. Snow still covered the yard, and in places was piled waistdeep. The early-morning light was just beginning its tour across the room; in just a few hours it would splash on the table in the family room—set up in a giant T-shaped configuration to accommodate fourteen graciously. Burlap runners with three red stripes on both sides raced down the middle of the tables. Vases of tulips, a hope for an end to the endless winter, were set everywhere. At each place setting, silverware was tied with raffia and fanned out on the plate. Draped over the back of the chairs were champagne-colored napkins with a woodcut print of a duck. On the wall above where I was to sit later that day—in the glorious, swirling center of it all—was a giant vintage poster of the jolliest, most contented fat man at a table, on each shoulder an enormous goose.
Looking at the room, I couldn’t help thinking of my parents. How they’d transform our kitchen or, if the guest list was large enough, our garage or backyard with long rows of mismatched tables. Chairs pulled from every room in the house, and sometimes borrowed from my godparents. Jugs of my father’s homemade wine never more than an arm’s length away from anyone. Towers of white paper napkins held in place by bowls of olives—green, never black. My mother joking with my father, “We’ve got enough food to choke a horse, Manny Brown!” To which he always added, “Here’s to you, Mrs. Leite.” It was always the same, whether we were celebrating a birthday, an anniversary, a graduation, or just Sunday supper.
This table was for our annual cassoulet party. It started as the brainchild of our good friends Cindi Kruth and her husband, Martin Goldberg. After several years, Alan and I took over as hosts, with me cooking and him, as usual, working his magic with the lighting, table, music, and ambience.
This year, though, was going to be different.
I’d been feeling upbeat for five months—not manic, hypomanic, or grandiose. Nor expansive, cocky, or delusional. None of the moods medication was created to bitch-slap into submission. Just good. Truly well. I’d decided that this time I wanted to do everything myself—invitations, shopping, cooking, decorating, entertaining, and hosting. I wanted this dinner to be an expression of me entirely—and I wanted Alan to be my special guest. It was to be a private gift to him, a show of thanks for putting up with so much for too long. So with the help of my friend Annie, I planned in secret. We scoured Pinterest and tore out piles of pages from magazines for ideas. Went shopping together and then pissed off sales clerks by returning most of what we’d bought—none of it had the right feel. I was going for classic, comfortable, relaxed; not these over-the-top, hyperstylized, Martha-Stewart-on-crack decorations every home blogger under thirty seemed to love. I didn’t feel like copying, and I was tired of competing. Instead, I did something I hadn’t done since I was a kid. I whipped out a pair of scissors, and some iron-on transfer paper, ribbon, cardboard, and ink, and created.
“Oh, you’ll see” was my standard retort whenever Alan asked how things were going. “You’ll see.”
On a Friday a few weeks before the dinner, a truckload of boxes from D’Artagnan had arrived. I hauled out two huge stockpots from the basement and set them on the stove. I let the twenty-five pounds of duck necks defrost, then slicked them lightly with olive oil and roasted them until they were the color of rosewood. Half went into each pot, along with carrots, onions, smashed garlic, handfuls of fresh thyme, and a slug of tomato paste. Covered with water, the necks simmered for six redolent hours until they fell apart. I strained the stock and let it rest in the fridge until needed.
Rory, our cat, sat patiently, softly lifting first his left paw, then his right. Left, right, left, right, in a procession that went nowhere. It was his way of saying, I want. I picked some of the meat from the bones, now just a heap of vertebrae, because all the marvelous, slick collagen from the connective tissue that had held them together had melted into the glistening, gelatinous stock.
It was one in the morning, and Alan was upstairs, dead to the world. He has a strict no-cat-on-the-table policy. Eh, he’ll never know. I picked up Rory and put him on our red Formica kitchen table, and I saw it for the first time: Our table, which we had bought earlier that year, was just like the ones from my childhood—Dina’s, Vovo’s, my mother’s. I’d inadvertently re-created Brownell Street. Rory, oblivious to this, hunched over his bowl of meat, and I sat there petting him, the black windows steamed over. Peace.
A few days later, I laid the duck legs on sheet pans and massaged them with a mixture of crumbled bay leaf, dried thyme, ground coriander, minced garlic, allspice, nutmeg, ginger, and plenty of salt and freshly ground pepper. The smell was heady, rich, like spice cake, but with the unmistakable bite of garlic and the calming stroke of bay leaves. After a day in the refrigerator, they were ready to be confited.
Into our largest enamel pot, I scooped quarts of white duck fat. I watched as it started to puddle, becoming transparent. I thought of icebergs melting and of global warming. Morose. I thought then of the pleasure of carrying casserole dishes filled with shredded duck confit, pork and duck sausages, and Tarbais beans cooked and soaked in my elixir-like duck stock, and I smiled. I slipped the cold duck legs into the warm fat, and the edges of the skin began to curl, just slightly. I covered the pot and let it burble slowly until the duck was meltingly te
nder and had no use for a bone anymore. Once cooled, the pot was covered and slipped into the refrigerator for two weeks, to allow the flavors to meld and the meat to continue to break down and tenderize.
That’s the thing about cassoulet. It’s an enormous undertaking if done from scratch—and it should be, because that’s where the satisfaction comes from. But when this behemoth is stretched out over several weeks, and broken down into its smallest constituents—simmer, chop, rub, burble, chill, simmer again—the work isn’t rushed, and the pleasure isn’t lost. To make cassoulet is an act of faith. You believe that what you do today will shake hands with what you’ll do next week, and the week after that, and in the end, the result will nourish and sustain and delight.
It was a lesson I was learning to apply to my life, post-diagnosis.
The night before the party.
“Close your eyes,” I said to Alan.
“You know I don’t like surprises,” he warned.
“Yeah, well, tough,” I said, doing my best imitation of my mother. “Get over it.”
“Oh, Mamma Lee’s in da house.” That was his nickname for her.
I led him into the family room, coaching him up the step and positioning him so the whole room, cast warm by the dim lights overhead and the flicker from the fireplace, was in view. “Okay, you can open.”
He gasped. His look was incredulous. Annie, who was standing off to the side, smiled at me.
“Do you like it?”
“I think it’s amazing.” He walked around, picking up the name cards, with their red satin ribbons looped through a hole in the top. He ran his fingers along the edges of the plates, the runner. I began crying because I had made this man happy. This dear, sweet, kind man, who had put up with every single thing my illness, my often-unchecked narcissism, and my Portuguese veneta could throw at him.
