The Juice

by Jay McInerney

  Food was an important part of our bond, almost as important as wine, though we didn’t always agree on what, or how, to eat. Lora believes in simplicity of preparation and presentation. She loves to grill over an open fire and has often told me that our most memorable meal was an asado, a cookout of virtually every part of a recently living cow, washed down with some now forgotten Malbec, on the slopes of the Andes in Argentina. And indeed, as soon as she reminded me, I remembered eating beef liver on a stick, looking up at the snowcapped Andes after a vigorous horseback ride in the foothills, wondering how it was that the most romantic moments of my life seemed to be shared with my prickly lesbian friend.

  Our quasi marriage had a surrogate daughter named Bessie, Lora’s high-strung fox terrier, who usually traveled with us and barked incessantly at everyone she encountered along the way. I’d visited the new puppy the day Lora brought her home, and she subsequently greeted me with hysterical displays of affection, but she didn’t seem to have much use for most other humans. Grateful as I was to be singled out, I was also frequently embarrassed by the way she treated the rest of my species, and more than a few hangovers were exacerbated by that high-pitched bark echoing through the confines of a wine cellar. One winemaker expressed a wish, sotto voce, to toss her into a bubbling fermentation tank.

  Bessie was happiest when it was just the three of us, on the road, or in a French restaurant where she could lie under the table and collect scraps. When it comes to restaurants, Bessie is definitely a Francophile. Lora also likes French cuisine, up to a point: she believes that some of the best restaurants in France have no Michelin stars, that these are the places most likely to serve honest, regional food, whereas I also love the haute cuisine and drama of the two- and even three-star establishments. We were always struggling and clashing on this front. As she told a friend recently, “Jay believed in treating himself well, very well. We might have had four hours of wine tasting along with eating the food that gracious vintners always offer, but Jay had to end the day with a two-star meal. Often Jay ended up eating alone or inviting a stranger to join him, even if that stranger spoke a language he didn’t in a country we knew little about.”

  One night we agreed to go to a famous two-star restaurant in Avignon, and though as I recall it was initially her idea, in the end it was hard to know whom she was madder at—me or the chef. “This food’s so phony,” she said, loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear. “It has no soul. It has no sense of place.” She was right about that one, though she grudgingly came to admire Alain Ducasse’s three-star restaurant in Paris, one of my favorites, even as I came to see the point of her no-star crusade. One of the best meals we ever had was a lunch at a place she somehow knew about, Elisabeth Bourgeois’s starless restaurant in Provence, sitting out in the courtyard surrounded by birdcages and trees laden with cherries. We started out with the best tomato soup I’ve ever had, accompanied by a local Viognier, and later, after one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life, we drove a few miles up the road to visit the man who’d made the Viognier and taste more of his wine.

  Our split on the Michelin issue might have partly reflected the fact that she was the keeper of the expense account, the one who had to go back to New York and try to justify the $900 meal at Taillevent. In a way we both became prisoners of our roles, me playing the part of the spoiled epicure, Lora taking the part of the disciplinarian, although we were sometimes able to see the humor in the clash. Not infrequently we would drop the roles and collaborate, for example when we saw a particularly amazing bottle of wine on a list, calculating how much Condé Nast would be willing to bear and how much we would thereafter chip in together to get what we wanted. Such was the case when we were dining at Beaugravière in the Rhône Valley, which is famous for its wine list and for its way with black truffles in season, when, naturally, we arranged to arrive. (Or I should say, Lora arranged to arrive, since I was incapable of this kind of forward planning.) We knew that the 1989 Château Rayas on the list was a relative bargain at around $200, knew also the magazine would never spring for that and the truffles, so we asked the proprietor to divide the bill, half for House & Garden and a quarter for each of its trusted employees.

  Memorably, there was no argument about the bill or about anything else when in 1999 we shared Easter lunch at La Tour d’Argent, looking out the window at Notre Dame and listening to the bells. The venue was her idea, even though at the time it had two Michelin stars. I wasn’t even annoyed when Lora told me I didn’t know what it was like to be raised a Christian. I had to remind her that Catholics were Christians, since she’d been raised in a strict, born-again household, a source of much guilt and torment for her later in life. I told her that I was feeling guilty myself for not having attended Easter Mass, although not so bad that I was unable to enjoy our lunch about as much as I’ve ever enjoyed a meal, guilt perhaps giving an edge to my appetite. The duck à la presse—served in a sauce made in part from its own blood and marrow—wasn’t necessarily the greatest dish we’d ever eaten together, but we agreed it was absolutely superb that day, washed down with a bottle of 1990 d’Angerville Volnay Clos des Ducs—and then, for good measure, a 1989 Beaucastel, which lasted us through the cheese course—but it had been absolutely essential that we order it, the restaurant’s signature dish.

  As with so many other foods, Lora had introduced me to black truffles and decided that we should make a pilgrimage to the source, Périgord, also noted for its gut-busting cuisine, much of which involves ducks, geese, and their livers. Lora had somehow befriended the Pebeyre family, black truffle dealers extraordinaire, and we had an exquisite dinner at their home in Périgueux during which we stood beside the stove with Babeth Pebeyre and learned seventeen uses for black truffles while drinking copious amounts of Cahors, the inky Malbec of the region.

  I’d discovered white truffles on my own, more or less by accident, when I was on a date shortly after I arrived in Manhattan and a waiter offered to shave some onto our pasta, and nearly had a heart attack when the bill arrived. But I craved them from that day forth—a passion Lora shared with me. We discovered Piedmont, the homeland of tartufi, together, and it became our favorite region. About the Langhe and its down-home cuisine we were in total agreement, and we both remember the Carne Cruda all’Albese at Da Cesare in Albaretto—the signature veal tartare dish, very delicately rendered here with some nice herbs, lemon, and olive oil. It was our first experience of this dish, and our first visit with the motormouth Angelo Gaja, the baron of Barbaresco, who terrified us with his driving on the way to the restaurant and with whom we would share many meals. Gaja taught us how to cut tagliatelle—or tajarin, in the local dialect—in the kitchen of a restaurant next to his winery in Barbaresco. We had the same dish at the Trattoria Della Posta in Monforte, a nineteenth-century restaurant overlooking some of the best vineyards in Barolo, with Luca Currado of Vietti. The menu wherever we went in Piedmont was reassuringly familiar after our first few visits—inevitably including Agnolotti del Plin, a little envelope stuffed with whatever, in this case, rabbit and veal. At Guido da Costigliole in Santo Stefano Belbo, at another dinner with Angelo Gaja, the agnolotti were served with a meat sauce and also plain, to be eaten by hand, preceded by a wonderful vitello tonnato, another Piedmontese standard, rendered more wonderful by the 2000 Gaja Sauvignon Blanc, an incredibly crisp and pure white made in tiny quantities. Neither one of us can remember the name of the restaurant where we first enjoyed the ultimate Piedmontese dish, but we’ll never forget the taste of the almost transparent shavings from that huge, pink-hued white truffle showered over a sunny-side-up egg.

  Typically, somewhere around the fifth or sixth day of travel, after we’d eaten two big meals and consumed a bottle and a half each a day, Lora’s liver would give out, and she’d have a meltdown, screaming at me, threatening to go home, threatening to quit her job. Sometimes it happened when I failed in my navigational duties and we found ourselves stranded on a dirt road in Tuscany with no c
lue as to our whereabouts. Sometimes it was a disagreement about a particular wine. Sometimes it was the matter of the hotel room. She was convinced that sexism was at work whenever I got a better room than she did. A simpler explanation, possibly, was that I had a day job and my novels happened to be very popular in France and Italy, our most frequent destinations. But when I tried to suggest this to Lora, she told me I was being self-important. Her conflicted feeling about my books was one of the more curious aspects of our relationship. At times she would brag on me, and at other times she seemed convinced it was impossible that anyone had ever heard of them. In Milan, on our way to the Piedmont, I once made the mistake of pointing out one of my books on display in the window of a bookstore. She turned away and stalked up the street without a word, and I had to run to catch up with her. I think it’s possible she was jealous of this other career, the one in which she wasn’t my partner.

  Lora was a witness to the slow disintegration of my marriage; and when I finally sold the four-bedroom apartment uptown that I’d shared with my wife and kids, she found me an apartment in her own building, the London Terrace in west Chelsea. I never really bothered to decorate my own place, and I loved being in hers, which was paradoxically exquisite and homey, with its beautifully curated collection of important photography, its antique cooking implements, vintage fabrics and light fixtures, and the fireplace that seemed always to be blazing. It was like the lair of an art director/homebody. Lora had a better eye than most set designers and had a bit of a second career as a designer for wealthy friends like Julianne Moore, her art tending to the illusion of artlessness. Whenever I got lonely, I hung out with Lora and Bessie downstairs. We liked being neighbors, although she came to regret that I was directly upstairs; she claimed to be able to distinguish various mating cries she heard and insisted that even when I was alone, I thumped and stomped on her ceiling. At least once or twice a week I would go downstairs with a bottle of good wine, and she would cook for me, a ritual we repeated on September 11, 2001. She ran upstairs to wake me, but I was already up, earlier than usual, and I’d seen the first plane hit while I was standing on a chair in front of the window trying to fix the chain on my blackout shade. And then, with a growing sense of shock and horror, we watched the towers fall from my picture window.

  That night she cooked a pot-au-feu, and we opened the best stuff we had handy, a bottle of 1982 Lynch Bages from my stash, a bottle of 1990 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle from hers. We figured we’d better seize the day, the future suddenly being entirely uncertain. It’s a principle I have tried to continue to observe ever since. In the following weeks, when I worked at a soup kitchen near Ground Zero, Lora helped me connect with sources for food donations.

  That spring, on a trip to Alsace, we had lunch with the winemaker Olivier Humbrecht and his beautiful English wife, drinking old wines and eating the first white asparagus of the season. I think we were both pretty hot on Olivier’s wife. We had some of the best white asparagus I have ever had, washed down with a spectacular 1990 Zind Humbrecht Muscat. That afternoon, at Lora’s insistence, we drove two hours south to visit Bernard Antony, an acclaimed affineur. I had no idea what an affineur was, or does, but it turned out to be a man, or possibly a woman, who “raised” cheese to its proper state of maturity after it has left its maker. Alain Ducasse apparently discovered Antony, who in addition to provisioning the great restaurants of Paris served all-cheese dinners at his home in rural France for perhaps a dozen guests a few nights a week, and Lora was determined to be one of them, distance be damned. We had a hell of a time finding the unmarked house in the little town of Vieux-Ferrette but eventually found Antony, who took us on a tour of the caves under his house and later served us some forty or fifty cheeses and a great deal of wine. Antony kept opening special bottles for us once he learned that we were wine buffs. I remember him serving a perfect farmhouse Muenster with a Riesling from Boxler, and a soft, creamy Brie de Meaux with a Trimbach Pinot Noir. After a three-hour cheese bacchanal Lora once again insisted on driving us back to Strasbourg. For once she considered letting me drive but then judged me to be too intoxicated. An hour later we were pulled over at a roadblock, and the cops had no choice but to arrest Lora when they got a rough blood-alcohol reading from her Breathalyzer test.

  “What about your husband?” asked one of the cops hopefully. “Maybe he can drive.” The last thing they wanted was the headache of dealing with foreigners, of processing our arrest. Unfortunately, my blood alcohol was even higher than Lora’s. So we spent the next few hours at the police station, talking with the cops and periodically blowing a new test. We spent our first hour in adjacent cells, but eventually they deemed us harmless and let us hang around the office. None of them seemed to speak English, and we both have pretty poor French, but I recall a lively and intricate conversation with the gendarmes that night. (One of the things that I always admired about Lora, even sober, was that she was never afraid to blunder forth en français and somehow managed to get her point across.) Lora kept saying I was a very famous writer, which seemed to impress them, France being one of the few countries in the world where writers rank high on the social ladder. Finally, close to dawn, they dropped us off near our car and told us to get out of their jurisdiction. I promised I’d get my French publisher to send them some books, but somehow I never got around to it.

  Every year one of us would threaten to quit the magazine after suffering some slight at the hand of the other. I once missed a flight to Paris, where Lora was waiting to help me with a column about wine stores, because the fax the magazine’s travel department had sent me had been blurry and I read six thirty as eight thirty. When I arrived at JFK at six thirty-five, having just missed the flight, I found that the cheap ticket they’d bought me wouldn’t get me out on any other flight. Of course, no one, especially Lora, seemed to believe me. I couldn’t reach her that night, and she went absolutely ballistic when I got her on the phone the next morning. Indignant at this lack of trust, I threatened to quit. When she finally returned, Dominique prescribed—no, insisted on—couples counseling for the two of us and got the magazine to pay for it (presumably a first in Condé Nast history). We did three or four sessions, and they helped me to understand Lora, and to realize what a difficult childhood she’d experienced, though we still had one or two breakdowns to go.

  In October 2007, I was staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel when I got an e-mail from Lora with an alarming subject line. When I reached her, she told me Dominique had called the staff in to her office that morning to convey the news that House & Garden had been shut down. We’d been hearing the rumors for years and were almost inured to them. Almost from the moment Dominique resurrected the magazine, her rivals had been predicting its failure, but she’d lasted for twelve years, as had I, which, when I thought about it, surprised me. Doing a wine column seemed like a lark, and I certainly hadn’t intended to stretch it out this long. I didn’t know until long after it was over that it had been one of the great adventures of my life.

  I was fortunate in having a parallel career, but I worried about my colleagues and Lora in particular. Eventually, she found a job with the L.A. Times as a food editor, which included commissioning wine pieces and complaining to me about the quality of the writing. I saw her a couple of times on trips to Los Angeles, where we went to the opening of Thomas Keller’s Bouchon, but it only served to make us nostalgic for the feasts we’d enjoyed at the French Laundry in Napa. I’d made the mistake of inviting a group of high-strung and neurotic individuals—not that hard to do in L.A., actually—and no one really seemed to click. Lora seemed to be in a bad mood; she eventually told me the newspaper was bankrupt, hemorrhaging cash, and that her salary had been cut in half. In 2010 she moved back to New York to work part-time for her old friend Annie Leibovitz as a personal chef while she figured out her next move. I’m still using the Tuscan grill she gave me for my forty-fifth birthday to cook steaks and chops in my fireplace. She’s been working hard at creating the perfec
t loaf of sourdough bread, and judging by samples she dropped off at my house in the Hamptons, I’d say she’s getting close. We talk about doing a project together, and in fact a director who was at the dinner at Bouchon later expressed an interest in developing a screenplay about our travels together, but that idea seems to have gone the way of most Hollywood pitches.

  Now, when I visit a wine region, I manage my own itinerary; there are no fights about driving, or choosing a restaurant, or expenses, no jealousy about rooms or waitresses. I still love discovering new wines and meeting the people who make them, eating meals with them, and walking their vineyards, although now and then on these journeys I feel something—or rather someone—is missing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to raise a glass to Eben Shapiro, Emily Gitter, John Edwards, and Monika Anderson at The Wall Street Journal for their gentle and enlightened assistance.

  One last time, hearty thanks to Dominique Browning, Lora Zarubin, and Elizabeth Pochoda for their friendship and support during my tenure at House & Garden, where some of these pieces were first published. Thanks also to James Truman, who lorded over all as Condé Nast’s editorial director, and who in a later incarnation commissioned several of these pieces for The Ritz-Carlton Magazine.