Dinner with Edward

by Isabel Vincent

  “When I met Paula, I didn’t know any limitations about what I could accomplish,” he told me now, after he served our coffee. “I was full of myself about my facility. I wasn’t above grabbing the sheets off the bed and washing them by hand. When Paula saw me she said, ‘Nobody does that.’ ” Before Edward, Paula had only met men who were “big talkers”—the kind of intellectuals who sat at Blenheim’s cafeteria at Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street chain smoking and drinking cup after cup of coffee, talking about all the things they would do, but getting nothing done. Edward wasn’t like that. He could build furniture, grow vegetables, tailor a suit.

  And, as I had come to realize, Edward was still a man for whom nothing was impossible.

  11

  Shrimp and Corn Chowder

  Mussels Rémoulade

  Chocolate Cake, Buttercream Frosting

  Muscadet

  I told them the truth: I was ninety-­three, and I hadn’t done this in twenty years,” said Edward.

  We were sitting at Edward’s dining room table where he had set out two large bowls of creamy shrimp and corn chowder and thick slices of crispy baguette. Edward poured us each a glass of exquisitely dry muscadet, and immediately launched into his big news.

  A while back Edward had taken on what appeared to be an impossible task. He had agreed to re-­upholster his neighbors’ antique sofa. Perhaps he feared that his plan was half-­cocked but, as he put it to me when I pressed him on why he would want to embark on such a huge task, he said, “Voltaire’s prescription for avoiding suicide was work.”

  They had been reluctant even to ask, and it was Edward who had convinced Steve and Lenore to let him have a go at the sofa: “I told them I would try, and if I were successful they would save $3,000.” He accompanied them to Zarin Fabrics on the Lower East Side, and together they sorted through bolts of rich brocades and silks. On days when his hands were swollen from arthritis and he could barely grip the shears to cut through the thick fabric, he slowed down. He took a day off. Or two. Sometimes three. But he never despaired.

  As it was, I was having my own sofa problems. They occurred on the day I was moving out of the Roosevelt Island apartment and renting a tiny pre-­war one-­bedroom on Central Park South. I had reluctantly gone to see the apartment at the insistence of a friend who lived in the building. I feared that it would be too small for Hannah and me. The apartment, which overlooked the park, had been occupied by an artist for more than thirty years. She was relocating to the Midwest and needed to find someone to sublet it. Would I be interested?

  I took it on the spot and couldn’t wait to move in. The artist had used the tiny bedroom as a studio after her own daughter had left home. She stored her paintings and watercolors—some of them enormous twelve-foot-high canvases—in a sliding shelf she had fashioned in the larger room. The floor-to-ceiling shelf divided the space so that she had a private sleeping area, a desk, and a living room with a small dining table. The kitchen was miniscule and featured Formica counters and the original whitewashed cupboards.

  “Living here will be good for you,” said the painter, who was in her eighties, soon after I met her and agreed to help her pack up decades’ worth of watercolors, dusty books, and antique silverware. It turned out we had a lot in common. She had moved into the apartment with her young daughter following her own divorce. She had derived much strength at the time from an elderly woman she had met while living in France and had gone on to write a memoir about the whole experience. When I blurted out some of the details of my own recent separation and friendship with Edward, she smiled and said confidently, “There are no coincidences.”

  I was starting a fresh life, and it was somehow appropriate that when I tried to cram the vestiges of my old one into my new apartment, they literally wouldn’t fit. My sofa was large and what interior designers might call an “important piece.” It was inspired by the Earl of Chesterfield, or that was the story the antique store owner spun when I admired the grand, carved mahogany armrests.

  The sofa had been our first furniture purchase when I was still part of a couple, and we’d proceeded to replace the sofa’s blue and white chintz upholstery with Hermes orange chenille and creamy ultra suede and goose down pillows. Restored to its former grandeur, it graced our homes in three cities, but by the time we separated, it had become an albatross around my neck. It was too big and too bulky to fit through the door of my new place.

  When I moved I was separated but still enmeshed in a bitter legal battle, fighting what the clerks at the New York State Civil Supreme Court euphemistically called “contested matrimonial.” It would be another year until I was officially divorced. My friends were stunned when I told them that I had landed an apartment across the street from Central Park in the grand art deco building that was Lois Lane’s residence in the 1978 film Superman. In the movie, the superhero picks up the Daily Planet reporter from her rooftop terrace and takes her for a nighttime flight over the Statue of Liberty.

  The building, a New York landmark, had also been home to the French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-­Exupéry, who lived there between 1941 and 1942 while he worked on The Little Prince. According to one of his biographers, Saint-­Exupéry spent many hours on the rooftop terrace, dreaming of returning to his life as a pilot and launching paper planes into the park. I longed to do the same, daydreaming of paper airplanes flying from the rooftop over the taxis that sped along Central Park South and the green expanse that lay before me.

  For hours, a crew of beefy men stacked cardboard boxes filled with books, dishes, shoes—all my worldly possessions—in the freshly painted living room of my new lodgings. They saved the sofa for last. It required four men to remove it from the freight elevator down the hallway. Straining and sweating under the weight of the large and unwieldy piece of furniture, they tried to angle the sofa several different ways to negotiate the threshold. But it would not fit, even after they removed the door from its hinges. Building superintendents were called in to oversee the delicate operation. The building manager came to give her advice. A small swarm assembled outside my door, and neighbors walking their dogs or returning from shopping were drawn to the crowd. There was talk of hoisting the sofa up through a window, but the windows were not large enough to accommodate the monster couch.

  One of the building’s handymen wanted to saw through the couch and disassemble it. But the sofa was so old that the foreman of the moving crew decided against it; if he allowed it to be taken apart, he might not manage to put it back together. This being New York, he was no doubt worried about potential liability involved in butchering an expensive antique.

  I was losing patience and ready to junk the sofa, but my friend Zaba, who was helping me move and had watched the entire episode, was convinced it was too valuable to part with and suggested storage. So the moving crew lugged the piece back onto the freight elevator, packed it back into their truck, and drove it to a dusty warehouse facility in the Bronx, where it remains to this day.

  After the sofa drama, everyone dispersed and I was left alone in my new apartment. In the stillness of that late summer afternoon, as the light poured into my apartment from the back window overlooking West Fifty-­Eighth Street, I sat on the floor surrounded by piles of boxes. I felt very much alone and, I’m not ashamed to say, a little scared.

  So I called Edward, who regaled me with the story of how he had spent the day tacking fabric onto his neighbors’ couch. I can’t remember if I unpacked my cooking utensils after I got off the phone with Edward. But I do know that the first room that I set out to organize was my sliver of a kitchen, with its window rattling from the churning industrial air conditioners one floor below. As pigeons alighted on the ledge, I started to cook.

  I cooked that summer and into the fall. I stained my fingers purple peeling the beets that I turned into cold borscht. I chopped cucumbers and heirloom toma­toes that I bought at farmers’ markets for gazpacho. When the air turned cooler I made stews with tiny green French lenti
ls, fragrant with fresh thyme and bay leaves, which I served with seared merguez, crusty baguette, and a rich Argentine Malbec. I braised chicken in paper bags, à la Edward, I baked my mother’s pound cake with sour cream and lemon zest, and I rolled buttery pastry dough between two sheets of parchment for Edward’s fruit tarts. Sometimes, when I had leftovers, I took food into work.

  “You’re becoming my grandmother,” Melissa said. “Stop pushing the food.”

  Shortly after I moved to my new apartment, Hurricane Irene hit New York City. The wind howled outside my window and the rain came down in sheets, but I slept through most of the excitement. The next morning, decked out in rubber boots and raincoat, I went in search of coffee. Everything was shuttered except the nearby Essex House Hotel, where scattered guests milled around the lobby staring at the rain.

  I decided to survey the damage and sought out Zaba, one of my few Manhattan friends who owned a car. Zaba is a Polish-­Argentine writer and former actress who had a stunning resemblance to Jeanne Moreau in her youth. She has lived most of her adult life in Manhattan, in a grand apartment filled with old family photos and the assorted bric-­a-­brac of her adventures around the world. A bird’s nest she found in Central Park has pride of place on her artfully cluttered coffee table that also features seashells and a framed letter from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to her father, congratulating him on a fine interview. Zaba’s father was one of Poland’s greatest foreign correspondents and became the United Nations correspondent for an Argentine daily when the family moved to New York.

  I spent many happy evenings listening to mournful Italian songs in front of a roaring fire, making space on Zaba’s coffee table for the thin slices of serrano ham and manchego cheese that she loved to serve. She was usually game for anything. We once ended up the only women at a Yemenite restaurant in Brooklyn where we ate lamb that had been cooked underground in a terra cotta pot. If anyone would be up for driving through Manhattan in a hurricane it would be Zaba.

  The next morning we drove through a surreal Manhattan, where sandbags lined the entrance to the Russian Tea Room on West Fifty-­Eighth Street and skyscraper windows bore masking tape crosses. In Little Italy, hipsters waded through flooded streets. In Zaba’s battered beige sedan, the passenger side-­view mirror affixed with cellophane tape, we felt like an urban and slightly more bedraggled Thelma and Louise—windows open, our hair flying in the high winds, singing along to a scratchy Edith Piaf cassette: “Non, rien de rien / Non, je ne regrette rien!”

  I reveled in a new sense of freedom, which now extended to taking my own liberties with Edward’s recipes. When I made his scrambled eggs à la St. John, I added pieces of salty feta. Sometimes I’d stir in a tablespoon of red wine vinegar instead of milk or cream. But no matter what I added to the eggs, I never cooked them all at once. I did it in two steps, sometimes three, and they were always fluffy and perfect.

  As I walked Manhattan and Queens in search of ingredients, I became quite particular, perhaps even more so than Edward. I argued with the staff at the small cheese boutique in the East Village—I needed the prosciutto di Parma to be parchment thin when they sliced it. I was even willing to leave the store if they refused to cut it to my specifications. You can’t serve thick prosciutto; it defeats the point!

  Had Edward created a monster?

  I found merguez at Epicerie Boulud, the eponymous food store owned by French chef Daniel Boulud near Columbus Circle. The merguez was sublime, but I launched a mini revolution when they started to charge me tax on the sausage. I even wrote a story for the Post when they refused to comply with the New York State tax code that prohibits taxing raw food items. Despite the story and two visits from state tax authorities, who bought sausage undercover after my story appeared, Boulud wouldn’t budge, insisting I was wrong. He later relented, admitted his folly, and called me to apologize for the tax on the merguez.

  And I began to organize dinners for my friends. We crowded around the white “tulip” table that I had ordered on Amazon, laden with feasts inspired by Edward—chicken paillard, baked fennel sprinkled with pecorino, shrimp and corn chowder, apricot soufflé.

  Although my new space was small in comparison to my old apartment, I realized that my life had grown much larger. I invited friends over for dinner on a regular basis. During my exile on Roosevelt Island, we almost never entertained. There was always an excuse—the apartment was never clean enough or my cooking was never up to the standards of the Serbian wives on the island, who prepared feasts of cabbage rolls and sweet crepes filled with preserves and topped with fine dustings of confectioners’ sugar.

  But I no longer compared myself to the hausfraus on Roosevelt Island. If I made mistakes, I didn’t care. I was happy to cook and to entertain, and I now did so a few times a week. My apartment was open to everyone: my neighbors, my lovelorn single friends who came over to sip wine, and my daughter’s school friends who, taking their cue from my newfound passion, cooked me a surprise birthday lunch of pasta with pesto and an arugula salad, complete with French vinaigrette and a glass of red wine.

  One of my friends even proposed to his girlfriend on his way to my New Year’s Eve soiree. Bob and Karen arrived beaming. Karen showed off her new diamond ring, and Bob sliced the loaf of bread he had baked for our dinner. We ate from a huge tray of salted cod and new potatoes—Hannah taking plates of food to her room to share with a friend who had come to see her Christmas presents. Bob and Karen had first met in high school in South Carolina, and had met up again in their sixties after both of their marriages failed.

  Karen was a Manhattan art dealer who lived in an exquisite, art-­filled apartment on Park Avenue. Bob, an engineer, had built his own house in a forest on the Pacific coast; he wove beautiful scarves and blankets on a loom; he made his own wine. When I first met him, he gave me a shawl he had woven for me and a dried butterfly—a symbol for the soul, he said. That same week, when I visited the Butterfly Conservatory at the American Natural History Museum, I was delighted when a butterfly landed on my shoulder. At that moment I felt blessed.

  We toasted to Karen and Bob’s engagement with the Veuve Clicquot that another friend had salvaged from a fashion shoot, and later we all headed up to the roof to watch fireworks exploding over Central Park. We hardly minded the cold winds that whipped against our faces as we gazed at the spectacular bursts of color lighting up the sky on the Upper West Side.

  “I’ll never forget this night as long as I live,” said Karen. “It’s magical.”

  Months later, on a summer night, tipsy on Albariño and munching on radishes topped with butter and salt, a group of us launched our own paper airplanes from the roof. We cheered them on, these lopsided and flimsy gliders that we had embedded with naughty messages. Some of them immediately nosedived onto the busy sidewalk below, but a few caught a breeze and were momentarily swept up before landing in traffic. None of them made it to the park, but we were undaunted, determined to practice folding sheets of paper until we made a plane that was so aerodynamically sleek that it would make it all the way into the park.

  What would Saint-­Exupéry have made of our rooftop efforts? No doubt he would have approved. As he wrote in The Little Prince, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

  BUT ALL THAT WAS months in the future. Now, in his apartment, Edward poured more muscadet and we both finished our respective sofa stories.

  Edward had successfully upholstered his neighbors’ sofa. They were ecstatic and wanted to reward his kindness. He brushed them off, suggesting a bottle of single malt Scotch was payment enough. “I told them that if I was looking for gratitude it was under g in the dictionary,” said Edward. “And if I were looking for validation, it was under v.”

  I picked at the last crumbs of chocolate cake on my dessert plate. Edward had made one of the lightest cakes I had ever tasted. He told me that he used egg whites beaten into soft meringue peaks to create the airy effect. Just the
n he strained to get up from his chair, even though the piece of cake that he had cut for himself lay untouched on his plate. No doubt he was preparing to kick me out. It was eight o’clock, after all, and he probably wanted to go to sleep.

  But he surprised me. He went to the living room and brought out a black-­and-­white picture of Paula that I had never seen before. It was a portrait of his wife in her twenties, young, beautiful, self-­assured, her shoulder-­length chestnut hair coiffed like Hedy Lamarr’s in Algiers. He’d captured the image with a $4 box camera shortly after their marriage. The faded photograph shows the much younger version of the woman with the raised chin in the color prints he has taped to the walls of his living and dining rooms.

  “Paula had something; she had lure,” Edward once told me. I immediately understood the significance of that word and that Edward had deliberately taken it from Cole Porter’s “All of You,” one of Paula’s favorite songs, the one that she sang to him the day before she died. I saw that lure in this photograph. Edward had been wanting to frame it but had put it off. For months after her death, the picture lay among the stacks of letters, bills, and recipes that he wrote out in longhand on his little desk. When he had come upon the picture the week before, it didn’t make him as sad as usual; he was finally inspired to frame it. He had taken it to a Staples across the river in Manhattan to buy matting. Now he told me what happened.

  “Can I help you?” The clerk must have been in her twenties—tall, lithe, with thick brown hair framing fine features, smooth alabaster skin. Edward showed her the photograph of Paula and asked her to help him choose a mat.

  “She’s so beautiful!” said the young woman, staring at the portrait of Paula.