by Gael Greene
When the University of Michigan dropout dropped back in, that lamb risotto trick worked very well for me. With the dean of women’s permission, I lived off campus in Ann Arbor, in a basement flat with a small kitchen, and I could feed any number of friends for a dollar or two. That meant lamb bones, meaty but gristly, too. Still, I was quite popular to a wide range of suitors and loyal pals. No one else cooked. I guess I was quite a package on a basically conservative campus: free-range, no curfew, sensuous and choosy, but bedable. The bonny young Brit who slipped in the window at 2:00 AM, so eager for intimacy that he wore no underwear inside his rough corduroy pants, struck me as irresistibly gallant. I’m not sure how much his gift of chocolates figured in my warmth. They were imported. Sex and food, inextricably linked. (His charm served him well, because the next time we met, twenty-five years later, he was a member of Parliament.)
One evening just before my senior year, picnicking in front of a warming fire on a fluff of Greek flokati, all this vague gastronomic fumbling suddenly took on meaning over a casserole of baked ham layered with cheddar, green peppers, and canned tomato sauce. I’d gone off for a week in the autumn wilds on an island in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a married man. I seemed to have developed a weakness for married men, possibly because they had a weakness for me. Not to be flip. In fact, I was mad about this man who sat next to me on the rewrite desk at the Detroit Free Press during the summer break of 1954. He seemed to me vulnerable and needy. But maybe that was me, vulnerable and needy. Perhaps it was just transient lust. Stolen sex was incredibly hot.
About that Rorschach test: The therapist reported that he’d never tested a subject who’d found more sexual content than I in those standard ink blots. What did this mean? Who could predict? Obviously, I had potential yet to explore. The referring physician shaded the therapist’s report a bit to shield my parents. They were already concerned about my moping and unexplained tears, and probably about what Mom caught me doing one night in the dark on the carpet in the library, a scene that caused her to retreat silently back up the stairs in her nightgown. That’s how the therapist got summoned. I think I told him—or maybe he told me—married men were a pleasant procrastination, a way to avoid commitment while one was growing up and figuring out who one might become. Clearly, I was borderline sane, not so neurotic after all.
And this is the food part. My borrowed guy and I were off the radar that chilling early-fall day, far from reality in a borrowed cabin on an isolated wind-whipped lake. I’d brought four recipes clipped from Ladies’ Home Journal—pork chops baked in buttermilk, hamburger in a biscuit wrap, cherry crisp, and that revelatory baked ham casserole.
Time has mercifully misted the taste memories. But I do know that everything I cooked was brilliant and extravagantly appreciated. Another point in favor of married men. No matter how pitiful your effort, it’s more dazzling than Hers. This man who looked a little like a blond Dick Tracy . . . of course he broke my heart. He went back to Her, who didn’t know how to layer ham and cheddar and green peppers, much less stuff canned cherries into Bisquick dough. (It was long before America fell in love with eating, but I suspect he would have said good-bye to me anyway.)
On Drummond Island, love and food became inextricably linked for me. It became a mantra: A woman does well to be beautiful, mysterious, haunting, witty, rich, and exotic in bed . . . but it never hurts to cook good. As in finger-lickin’ good. I became a cook, graduating eventually from tuna casserole to Craig Claiborne’s coq au vin and Julia’s apple charlotte. This passion for cooking as well as eating would turn out to be a powerful edge for me when I went public as New York magazine’s amateur restaurant critic.
Almost Like Mom’s Macaroni and Cheese
This is a recipe food-writer friends have been passing around—I got it from Arthur Schwartz (a passionate New Yorker), who got it from Suzanne Hamlin (an ultimate southerner). I am using it because it’s close to my memory of my Detroit-born mom’s baked macaroni. The goal is crisp, not creamy. Use half-and-half instead of milk if you like it creamier.
Olive oil spray or 1 1/2 tbsp. mild-flavored olive oil, plus 1 tbsp. for tossing later.
1/2 lb. small elbow macaroni
1 tbsp. salt
2 1/2 cups shredded or chopped firm cheese (Needless to say, my mother used Velveeta, but I make this with sharp cheddar and Emmentaler, half and half. Once I threw in some leftover Brie, a triple crème from France, and a half cup of crème fraîche and the result was celestial.)
Optional: 1/2 cup chopped baked ham or snipped crisp bacon
1 cup whole milk
11/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. freshly ground pepper
4 tbsp. fine dry bread crumbs
1/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
Preheat oven to 350° F.
Spray the bottom and sides of a shallow 6-cup metal baking dish with olive oil spray. Bring several quarts of water to a rolling boil. Add tablespoon salt. Boil macaroni until just tender. Drain well. Immediately turn the macaroni into the baking dish (a flat baking pan gives more crispiness than a loaf pan). Use a pan that can go under the broiler later. Toss macaroni with tablespoon of olive oil. Then add cheese, optional ham or bacon, milk, salt, and freshly ground pepper and mix well.
Bake in the oven for 10 minutes, then remove from oven, close oven door, and stir. Taste for seasoning. Sprinkle fresh bread crumbs and grated Parmigiano on top. Bake another 15 minutes. If there is still some milk in the bottom, return to the oven for another 5 to 10 minutes. If topping has not browned and crisped like Mom’s used to, stick it under the broiler (three or four inches away from heat) and brown, watching so it doesn’t burn.
Serves 2 as a main course, 4 as a side dish.
3
ABOUT SEX AND ME
THE BEST LOVER TURNS INTO A PIZZA AT 3:00 AM. WHO SAID THAT? WAS it Woody Allen? For me, the best pizza would turn into a lover. I have read restaurant critics who claimed to have tasted chocolate ice cream that was better than sex. I have never eaten anything that was better than sex; almost as good as great sex perhaps, but never better. Though I am sure I was born hungry, I am less certain I began life as a sensualist. Really, who knows? I was allergic to wool. That may mean something.
I can’t remember exactly when it began, how I got in touch with my sexual self. I do remember the terror and joy of discovering masturbation. I shared a bedroom with my sister after my brother, Jim, was born. Our room was beautiful, with matching bleached-wood dressers, quilted and flowered peach bedspreads my mother had had custom-made, and tuffets at the end of each bed with our names embroidered on them. The design effort did not lessen my annoyance at the loss of privacy.
At night after lights-out, I would get my sister to sing along with me so she wouldn’t hear the sound of the bed creaking as my body rubbed against my wadded-up pajama bottoms. I did my heartrending Judy Garland vibrato as we sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and then segued into a popular wartime anthem, “The White Cliffs of Dover,” and its reassuring images of bluebirds flying free in a near tomorrow. Till, exhausted and satisfied, I fell asleep.
My parents were readers. I read, too, with a flashlight under the covers. At eight and nine, I read Forever Amber; The Vixens by Frank Yerby; and Gone With the Wind—again and again the sexy parts, skipping the war and politics. I used my mom’s library card to defy the symbol that meant “not for anyone under eighteen” and to check out The Razor’s Edge and The Bad Seed. I’m not sure how much I understood, but I read Hemingway and wanted to go to France as soon as I was old enough and sit in a café and feel the earth move.
Having breasts at ten, when every other girl in class was ironing board flat, didn’t help. At ten and a half, I needed a bra. The boy at the desk in front of me seemed fascinated by this early budding and shoved a pile of books into me—to see if my bosom would bounce, I suppose. For quite a while, I felt my breasts as foreign objects, unwelcome intruders camping out on my chest, drawing everyone’s stares. At the age
of eleven, I was five seven. Truck drivers and sailors whistled. I thought how stupid they would feel if they knew I was just eleven. I had beautiful blue gabardine jumper pants with an empire midriff embroidered just like the pants Katharine Hepburn wore in The Philadelphia Story. By the time a few other girls got cute little perky breasts at last, mine were huge. I refused to get undressed for swimming in high school gym class, so my mother got a note from the doctor, saying that I was allergic to dust. To this day, I cannot swim, but I love sailing and I always sit as close as possible to the life preservers.
I was determined to be a virgin when I got married. As a freshman, I was deeply committed to preserving my virginity. I knew that nice girls did not go all the way. As a fifteen-year-old, my hormones were raging and I made out like crazy with the lifeguard at the Fontainebleau during Christmas vacation in Miami Beach, my best friend’s hometown ex in Bay City, Michigan, and the twenty-one-year-old college boy next door. Both of us were naked in my mom’s car behind the high school when the cops found us with their flashlights. Even the cops were embarrassed by the size of my tits. It’s not that I didn’t study, make good grades, write sensitive essays, work for the high school newspaper. I was not a full-fledged juvenile delinquent. In between hormonal flashes and frenzied “everything but,” I tied for first in my high school graduation class with straight A’s, and delivered my valedictorian address in free verse.
Though I was not yet sixteen when I moved into Stockwell Hall at the University of Michigan, I was sure, with my height and wardrobe, no one would guess. In its roommate-matching wisdom, the dean of women’s office had paired me with a freshman from the South whose father was also in the women’s retail clothing business. Our wardrobes devoured every inch of the tiny room. I was choking on her crinolines. My high school pals headed for the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. No one I knew drifted into the College of Architecture and Design. Well, I did have arty notions. I’d always taken life-drawing classes and studied painting. But I was also counting on no term papers to write and little homework, leaving more time for men. My mother had promised boys would be taller once I got to Ann Arbor.
I was curiouser and curiouser. And I guess I knew that nice girls probably didn’t do what I was doing—on the floor of the darkroom at the Michigan Daily. I marvel at how many obsessed and aroused young men spared the thin sliver of membrane that kept me officially a virgin in the skilled acrobatics of everything but. Then, in early fall of my sophomore year, I managed to put my virginity into an indefensible position in the backseat of a Studebaker in the woods one rainy night—pleading, begging, crying. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was furious and indignant, storming into the dorm just as the lights blinked curfew. I stewed and fumed in the shower. Then I climbed under the crinolines and got into bed. Well, that’s that, I thought. I’m not going to be a virgin when I get married. I’ll just have fun from now on. And I never looked back.
It may not sound like it in this condensed version, but actually I was very choosy. Perhaps my self-devised sexual etiquette was a bit eccentric, but even at seventeen and a half, during that liberating year abroad, I had my rules. I would never pick up a man at a bar, but somehow the handsome actor wearing his jacket on his shoulders Italian-style seemed safe in the mail line at the American Express office in Rome.
“Are you following me?” I asked.
“I thought you might be following me,” he said.
That led to a wildly romantic three days of hitchhiking and walking to Positano and the fierce intensity of the long-delayed bedding.
And I am sure I was drawn to the architect in his unheated room on the rue de Fleurus, who warmed my underwear under his ass each morning, because he lived in the same building as Alice B. Toklas. I’d read that the owner of a major Left Bank art gallery had come by her collection of Modiglianis because she was the artist’s mistress. Just my luck that the next artist to cross my path was not quite Modigliani. He was not getting enough to eat. He was so thin, his bony pelvis bruised mine. I accepted a painting, a self-portrait, and parked it in my folks’ cellar, where mildew from a small flood actually improved it.
4
SLOW DEATH BY MAYONNAISE
AS CLAY FELKER HAD SUSPECTED AND CONFIRMED WITH HIS INSPIRED gift for casting in the fall of 1968, I was a foodie, a full-blown gourmand, long before New York and America fell in love with dining out . . . obsessed ahead of the times. Indeed, foodie wasn’t even in the dictionary yet. When I did truly fall in love and he wasn’t married, only elusive and uncertain for a while, I found a game dining coconspirator across the rewrite desk at the New York Post.
Don Forst had grown up in Brooklyn and his attorney father invested in restaurants. Don could handle the gruff maître d’ at Lindy’s, near Broadway, where we had strawberry shortcake after seeing Robert Preston and Barbara Cook in The Music Man. Don knew how to score three helpings of shrimp in pink Louis sauce at Mamma Leone’s (where Lots was the motto and we prepped at eating Italian). He was trained by his folks at how to scope out a table about to be vacated in vast, raucous Lundy’s, the seafood gymnasium in Sheepshead Bay. Easy. You found people eating dessert and stood close, boring hate rays into the back of their necks, till they couldn’t sit still another minute and decided to skip coffee. Then you elbowed all claimants away and swiftly ordered two shore dinners, double coleslaw, and blueberry pie à la mode. This was New York City–honed sophistication that meshed perfectly with my Paris veneer.
Don worked nights and I worked days on the Post rewrite desk at the tail end of the fifties. He’d prepped at the Houston Press and the Newark Star-Ledger. I had been determined to escape Detroit the minute I could, but no news outlet in New York would hire me fresh out of college. I was stuck. When my United Press job in Detroit gave me weekdays off, I would fly to New York with scrapbooks and clippings, scrounging for an opening. Then a Post editor, barely looking up from his typewriter, offered me a one-week tryout during the summer. (That was how the Post filled out the city room during summer vacations.) But my boss in Detroit wouldn’t give me a week off—I hadn’t worked long enough to earn it. So I quit. The one-week tryout led to two, led to a month, finally led to a job.
A reporter I was dating introduced Don and me as we passed in the morning at breakfast in the Post luncheonette. Don was engaged to a Danish woman, he confided, a brunette with the most amazing full lips. Did he have to mention those lips? (Now that I think of it, “being engaged” was close enough to being married that I could feel safe.) I don’t remember if he told me this before or after we moved from sunbathing on my terrace to my bedroom, both of us warmed and scented with that sweet smell of sun on skin, in a tangle of fierce and uninhibited lovemaking. I was already falling in love with his profile, his straight, thin nose and dark, sad eyes, the slight boyish body with one very muscular arm from playing squash. (Squash? In Detroit, we didn’t eat squash, much less play squash, in my crowd.) I found him pleasingly urbane, funny and smart, endlessly profane. All the men at the Post used the F word at least once in each sentence as noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. He was also brashly cynical, like all romantics.
Don took me to dinner at his favorite place for impressing first dates (he later confessed), the Little Old Mansion, a southern restaurant in midtown with the cranky grande dame owner southern restaurants seemed to demand. On the way to dinner, he bought me a bikini—shocking pink on one side, reversing to black on the other. It was a tribute, I felt, to how juicy I’d looked on my terrace in a pink-and-white-checked gingham bikini. The slight qualms I felt, being an inch or two taller than he in heels, were quickly melting. On the banquette beside me, he sat tall. I had the lobster with black walnuts in a saffron rice ring.
Rather quickly, it began to feel like love to me. Before Don, there had been many men—wild crushes, consuming dalliances, fleeting affairs, one-night stands and one-week stands. But this was love at another level, not just lust and an electric sexual connection but also a joy in the am
azing intimacy we shared and the way his need freed me to reveal my own.
It’s easy to see now that all that traffic in and out of my bed before Don was due not just to my uninhibited appetite for sex but a way to get close and make somebody love me. I was rarely cool. I thought getting a man was like getting the story. You had to be smart and aggressive, tie up the phone, park on the doorstep, and shove interlopers out of the way when necessary.
I was a wreck when Don went off to Denmark to see why his fiancée, the brunette with the bee-stung lips, had not yet come back to New York. He didn’t tell me all the details on his return, only that it was finished. I determined to show him how lucky he was—what a perfect mate he had in me. Collagen injections didn’t exist then, so I couldn’t do much to fatten my lips beyond cheating with lipstick beyond my lip line and pouting a lot. I comforted him with matzo ball soup and chocolate mousse.
It took a year to convince him that we should live together. His dark ground-floor studio, shades pulled to keep out the stares of passersby, was too tiny and grim. But there was a small one-bedroom walk-up with dormer ceilings and funny little windows on the top floor we could rent for very little money. Before he could change his mind, he had signed the lease. And we dragged our stuff upstairs and moved in. Of course, when my folks came to New York, we flipped the bell plate around so it said Greene and not Forst/Greene. That way, my parents could pretend they didn’t know we were living together. We took them for dinner at the American Pavilion during the 1964 World’s Fair, where Don, with great bravura, ordered a Richebourg, one of the greatest red Burgundies, expensive even then, and my mom threw in two ice cubes to chill it. I loved that he never held that against me.
