Dinner with Edward

by Isabel Vincent

  “Astoria,” I said.

  Returning to Manhattan on the tram, a fellow rider mistook her for a tourist and asked where she was from.

  “Manhattan,” she deadpanned.

  We had rented an apartment in a sprawling housing complex right past the Good Shepherd Church and the Roosevelt Island Garden Club, with its odd, labyrinthine plots, crowded in summer with a lush tangle of tomato vines, all manner of flowering shrubs, and a jumble of dusty lawn ornaments.

  But where my husband at least at first saw paradise, I began to focus on something entirely different, and I started to pine for the bustling, vibrant streets of Manhattan. There was something about Roosevelt Island that seemed to mirror my own sadness. A legless beggar on a hospital gurney regularly greeted commuters with a tin can when they emerged from the subway station. I was soon to discover that he was part of the community of amputees who were residents of the two rehabilitation hospitals that were somber reminders of the island’s grim past.

  We lived in The Octagon, the site of the former New York City Lunatic Asylum. The apartments were massive, with stunning views of the Manhattan skyline. The building had a tennis court, an outdoor pool, an art gallery, and even a little shuttle bus that ferried residents to the subway and tram stations. In 2006, a Manhattan developer had transformed The Octagon into a luxury rental building, unusual for the island, complete with marble countertops, high ceilings, and designer fixtures in “the dramatic setting of an urban waterfront park.”

  But the brochures said nothing about 888 Main Street’s dark history as one of the most notorious institutions in nineteenth-­century New York—a place that even Charles Dickens found too creepy to spend much time at. “Everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful,” Dickens writes in American Notes for General Circulation, after a truncated tour in 1842. “The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.”

  More than forty years later, the New York Times reported on thirty-­five-­year-­old Ellen Drum, a patient who suffered from “melancholia” and had been at the lunatic asylum for nearly two years. She had left the asylum dressed in “only a calico dress and undergarments and stockings” and was presumed drowned in the river. Her body was never found. There was something chilling about the eerie silences that descended on The Octagon at night. In retrospect, it was probably the most appropriate place in New York City for a breakdown, which I was soon to have. “I feel a deep emptiness—like nothing I have ever known,” I wrote in my journal, shortly after arriving at the island. “I have to do something drastic to end this.”

  The sadness stemmed from loneliness. Despite our moving to Roosevelt Island at his request, my husband still hated New York so much that every school holiday and summer vacation became excuses to leave town with Hannah. Sometimes he didn’t even need the excuse and left on his own. When his mother became ill in Canada, I tried to be sympathetic but he was gone for increasingly long periods. We had spent most of our savings moving to New York; my husband didn’t have a green card, so I had no choice but to work to support all of us. In the mornings, I took the subway to my midtown office, and came home late at night to a cold, too-­big apartment, overlooking the lights of Manhattan.

  I began to count on dinner with Edward as a much-­needed respite. His apartment became a sanctuary. One day, as I walked off the elevator on Edward’s floor, I immediately inhaled cinnamon, sugar, and baked apples and I felt a rush of happiness. Edward had made his famous apple galette. I zeroed in on it as soon as I walked into his kitchen, where it sat cooling on a piece of oven-­browned parchment.

  Before meeting Edward, I had baked apple pies only with Crisco crusts or strudels made with sheets of frozen filo dough that were too fussy to work with. His galette was wonderfully rustic—a hearty-­looking apple tart, the pastry roughly folded over at the sides like an envelope, the buttery apple slices flecked with cinnamon and oozing caramelized fruit, generously dusted with confectioners’ sugar.

  Edward topped it with a dollop of cream or vanilla ice cream, so that the tartness of the apple was bathed in a melting sweet, white puddle on the plate. It was so good that I could barely remember what else we had for dinner on the night I first tried it. I believe it was some kind of fish, maybe scrod in a delicate sauce of plump San Marzano tomatoes—the only kind he ever used—and a salad with long pieces of orange zest in a light vinaigrette. Whatever we ate clearly paled in my memory.

  “You need to send me the recipe!” I said.

  Edward demurred and poured me the rest of the pinot grigio. He went to the refrigerator to retrieve another bottle of wine and when he returned he said he would try to put something together for me. He had never written it down, he said. But a few days after that first bite, I received handwritten instructions on a white piece of paper, labeled simply “Pastry.” It included the following directions:

  3 ice cubes—crushed in heavy plastic bag with mallet

  2 tbs frozen lard (optional but excellent addition)

  There were copious notes about the importance of keeping the butter, the lard, and even the mixing bowl as cold as possible. It was imperative that I put everything—the mixing bowl, the flour, and any baking tools I was planning to use—in the freezer before proceeding with the recipe. He also insisted that I use a cheese grater to grate a frozen stick of butter into the flour mixture.

  I could deal with the grated butter and the frozen bowl, but later, when I tried to duplicate Edward’s pastry, I would find it almost impossible to work the crushed ice into the pastry dough. The ice simply wouldn’t hold the flour and butter together. Maybe it needed to be turned into slush? After several attempts, I despaired. I didn’t own a food processor (“How can you live without one, darling?” asked Edward), so I used my hands. Half the dough seemed to stick to my fingers, and the rest was too stiff and powdery to work with. Why couldn’t he just use ice water? It was good enough for Julia Child, after all.

  But Edward was adamant that the secret to the perfect galette pastry was crushed ice. And, of course, the apples. Edward preferred a Cortland or a Macoun over a Macintosh for a galette. The Cortland had a firmer texture, he said, so it wouldn’t dissolve into mush when you sautéed it in butter, lemon juice, and sugar and then baked it in a hot oven. The Macintosh was too porous, absorbed too much water, and usually fell apart, he said.

  Indeed, the apples in Edward’s galettes were always firm and tart with just the right hint of sweetness. He bought the apples at the Mennonite farmers’ market under the Roosevelt Island Bridge underpass on Saturday mornings, and always baked galettes for Thanksgiving dinner, which he still celebrated with his friends who lived just up Main Street.

  THE TRUTH IS I didn’t tackle Edward’s galette until much, much later. At this time I was so lonely that I often didn’t feel like cooking, especially when my husband and daughter were away. Cooking for myself in our huge kitchen, with its showroom stainless steel appliances and cold, sleek countertops, seemed daunting. My worn pots looked threadbare against this backdrop of sterile opulence, so I rarely ate anything I had to spend any time preparing. And because I stopped going grocery shopping when my family was away, there was often no food in the refrigerator anyway. On Friday nights, after working late, I often sat in front of the TV watching a documentary on, say, the Holocaust and eating from a can of sardines.

  “Oh, will you stop with the pity party,” Melissa often said, when I described to her my typical Friday evening. But it wasn’t exactly a pity party. The sardines were always the best I could find—in olive oil, wild-caught from the cold waters off the coast of Galicia in Spain. Melissa encouraged me to order in or go out to eat. But going out for dinner by myself seemed unlikely. Shortly after moving to Manhattan, my husband and I had passed a smar
tly dressed young woman in a restaurant, sitting at a table set for one, reading a book and sipping a glass of white wine.

  “That’s the problem with women here; they’re all lonely,” said my husband. “I don’t want my daughter turning into that.”

  But although I nodded my agreement, I secretly admired the diner’s cozy solitude—she was sitting, reading, savoring the wine and her own company. Years later, I read the extraordinary food writer M. F. K. Fisher’s own experiences of dining as a single woman in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

  “More often than not people who see me on trains and in ships, or in restaurants, feel a kind of resentment of me since I taught myself to enjoy being alone,” she wrote in 1938. After the death of her husband, Fisher confessed to her readers that “sometimes I would go to the best restaurant I knew about, and order dishes and good wines as if I were a guest of myself, to be treated with infinite courtesy.”

  I longed to be a guest of myself, but I was far from articulating that desire and I had not yet discovered M. F. K. Fisher, or Julia Child for that matter. When I finally read Fisher’s essays about her life and food in The Gastronomical Me, I came to understand that sense of peace that eluded me and that I had so admired in the Manhattan tableau of the woman at the restaurant table set for one. This was surely part of what Edward was talking about when he spoke about the “resting place of the soul.”

  I, on the other hand, still suffered from an agonized soul, and on Roosevelt Island, the ghosts of the asylum haunted me. I was not at peace, and the specter of disrupting my daughter or spending the rest of my life alone stifled my will to fight. I set about trying to placate everyone around me, pondering how to make others happy. I realize now it was wrongheaded and simply added to my own misery. On the day after my birthday—February 5, 2011—all I wrote in my journal was, “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three in the morning, day after day.” It was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line about depression, and I felt it keenly.

  At night, I lay awake ruminating. How could I fix life in New York for my unhappy spouse so that he would spend more time in the city with me? Perhaps we could move somewhere else, to a house in Queens with a garage? Long Island? What about marriage counseling? Didn’t we owe it to our daughter to try to make this work? But what could I do about the other things he complained about—the car horns, the people who walked too fast, the rush-­hour subway crowds?

  I knew that it wasn’t so much New York that he hated. New York was just an excuse, an external manifestation of his chronic restlessness. In our nine years together, we had moved from an apartment in Toronto, to a house in Miami, back to Toronto and a grand Victorian house that we renovated. But as soon as that renovation project was completed, he sought out another one, and we moved again, and then again. After the third renovation, we were off again, this time to Rio de Janeiro, where we spent three years, the longest we had ever spent in one place. I worked on a book project in Rio, and he took mournful black-­and-­white pictures of Carnival. I suspect the stark images of these pre-­Lenten revelers in their feathers and glitter and disguises were metaphors for his own sense of displacement.

  Once we were installed on Roosevelt Island, he began to complain that I worked too much, that I wasn’t home to cook, I didn’t clean up properly. He even presented me with a time sheet showing me how many hours he had spent looking after our daughter, the implication being that I was not doing my fair share. His complaints grew increasingly shrill, which is when I knew that it was me that he was trying to escape during all the years we had been together. And I began to plot my own departure.

  But sleep-deprived and on edge, I felt there was nowhere to go. I began to imagine that I was incarcerated, and then one morning right before dawn I glanced outside at the maze-­like inner courtyard of The Octagon and I panicked. I threw jeans and a sweatshirt over my pajamas and walked to the deserted lighthouse overlooking the churning waters known as Hell Gate, a treacherous spot for boats and the scene of epic wrecks.

  I sat facing the looming towers of Harlem and the Bronx, knowing I was emotionally marooned on this sliver of land surrounded on all sides by dark water.

  4

  Herb-­Roasted Chicken in a Paper Bag

  Roasted Vegetables

  Fennel Rémoulade over Lettuce

  Popover Flambé

  Martinis, Pinot Blanc

  I arrived at Edward’s apartment just as the first of the winter’s nor’easters was beginning to rage. I had walked the few blocks from my own apartment, along the East River promenade, toward the Queensboro Bridge, its majesty little diminished, even as it was pelted by the storm—fierce exclamation marks of snow.

  When I took a seat in Edward’s living room, snow obscured my view of the buildings lining the river on the Upper East Side as Manhattan seemed to grow silent, its twinkling lights barely reflected on the choppy waters. Wrapped up in the storm, I was startled when Edward suddenly called from the kitchen.

  “We need to work on your feminine enhancement.”

  I was too shocked to say much of anything and, instead, took it as my signal to come to the table. Sitting down, I snuck a taste of fennel rémoulade, which was already dished out onto small salad plates. It was meant as a second course, but I was impatient. Edward made his rémoulade in the Louisiana style, with cayenne pepper and mayonnaise, whipping it until the mixture turned a light rose. The creamy, piquant rémoulade enveloped the slightly sweet, firm pieces of steamed fennel. I found it hard to stop eating. Luckily, Edward arrived, clutching a platter of bronzed chicken on a bed of roasted carrots and celery topped with fresh sprigs of thyme and rosemary. He had brined the chicken for two days in apple cider and salt, before rubbing the entire bird with thyme, rosemary, and butter. He chopped carrots, onions, and celery for a mirepoix, which he spooned onto parchment, and set the chicken on top. Then he wrapped everything in a paper bag and braised the chicken in the oven for hours.

  Edward set down the platter on the table, steadied himself, and took his seat. He poured wine for both of us and brandished his carving knife and fork with a slight flourish. He carefully cut into the succulent white flesh, hoisting a slice of breast meat onto my plate. When he had broken off a leg for himself, he buttered a piece of baguette and winked at me.

  “Bon appétit,” he said with an exaggerated French accent.

  After tasting Edward’s paper-­bag chicken, I never roasted chicken any other way again. The paper bag never burned in a hot oven, and the chicken never dried out. Just before removing it from the oven, he ratcheted up the heat to 500 degrees and removed the bag so that the skin was slightly charred and crispy.

  “This is fantastic,” I told him after my first bite, crunching through the skin to the tender meat.

  Edward happily agreed, but he had other things on his mind and now returned to his views on my femininity.

  I knew that he didn’t mean to be unkind; Edward felt he was simply stating facts. He said it with the authority of age, with the certainty that he didn’t have time to waste, and since he was imparting to me the ultimate truth, he didn’t need to mince words. The thought that he might hurt my feelings never crossed his mind. By now I was used to these life lessons from Edward that were direct and with no preamble. He told me I needed to set a strong example for Hannah, and that he sensed that I was “in a ditch, going in circles” in my marriage.

  At a previous dinner, when for the first time I really told him some of the details of my faltering marriage, and how I was too afraid to take any definitive steps for fear of traumatizing my young daughter, Edward was silent. A few days later, I received a letter that I still take out to read when I am feeling besieged. He noted, in part, “You are a fine and talented woman, whose potential is yet to be realized given the love and support and luck we all need. Where you lost the will to fight for what is yours, where you gave away control of your life, is the mystery you are now unraveling. When you get it all back, hold on to it.”

  At nine
ty-­three, Edward is almost twice my age. Born in Nashville, he likes his bourbon on the rocks, uses words like “moxie” in conversation, but he can also curse like a New Yorker. He doesn’t own a cell phone or a computer; he writes in longhand, and he never watches television.

  “We live in the age of communications but nobody knows how to communicate anymore,” he once said to me. “It’s just e-­mailing and texting, not communicating,” Edward went on. “Nobody’s dealing with reality. It’s a shame.”

  Edward occasionally reads the New York Times at the Roosevelt Island branch of the New York Public Library across the street from his apartment building. And whenever I have a story in the Post, he heads out to the deli on Main Street next to his building to buy the newspaper. He has a subscription to the New York Review of Books that he received as a Christmas present. He includes a photocopy of the Times review tucked into the inside flap of any book he reads. If it was given as a gift, he insists upon an inscription on the title page from the person who presented him with the book. He has no formal degree beyond high school, but he is one of the most educated people I know. His letters are on embossed stationery, and he sends me his handwritten poetry that sometimes makes me cry.

  And he always tells me the truth, sometimes in the gentlest ways, but as I have said he can also be harsh. In many ways, he has forced me to confront traits about myself that I would much rather have remained suppressed. Edward’s insights into my own life often gave me pause, but it was his generosity that moved me to tears. I knew a great deal of thought must have preceded his comments on my appearance, but I was not prepared for what he said next.