Insatiable

by Gael Greene

  “Perhaps I have a faintly unrealistic attachment to bed. Some of us are bed nesters. Eros tangles our love lives with Oh-God-the-birds-are-awake-what-am-I-doing-in-bed mates. I cannot bear to leave the cocoon. He leaps awake to 76 trombones. Who are these anal-compulsives who will not suffer breakfast in bed? Imagine! A man who can start the day without coffee. A New Yorker traumatized by a dab of sour cream. An army of eager achievers, wary of spills, ill at ease in a mountain of pillows, frazzled by a stranger with a bed tray, spooked by a crumb.

  “I am not intolerant. I accept the fact that there are some who prefer to read in a downy club chair and those who work best at a desk. There are romantics who scribble love letters at an escritoire and naturalists who favor breakfast beside the lake and sensationalists who prefer to make love in a bathtub.

  “I’d rather . . . in bed.”

  New York magazine was all about service. I listed nine sources that promised to deliver breakfast. And yes, Don did understand that I needed to wake slowly and would bring me goodies and deep dark espresso with the Times Book Review on the wicker bed tray even till the end. No wonder I was confused. In all the years since, I’ve been waiting for the man who understands my need for breakfast in bed.

  The Morning-After Orange Fruit Soup

  I don’t remember where I got the recipe for this refreshing and delicious fruit soup. If I stole it from you, please forgive me.

  1 1/2 cups water

  2 tbsp. quick-cooking tapioca

  1 tbsp. sugar

  Pinch of salt

  1/2 cup frozen concentrated orange juice

  2 cups fruit (see below)

  Mix the instant tapioca into water in a small saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it comes to a full boil. Remove from heat. Add sugar, salt, and orange juice concentrate. Stir to blend. Let cool for 15 minutes, then stir again. Cover and chill for at least 3 hours.

  Just before serving, fold in fruit. In winter, you can use orange sections with the membrane cut away, sliced bananas, half grapes (seeded), frozen and thawed peach slices, and the best berries you can find. In summer, you can choose a mix of sweet and tart summer fruit—plums, peaches, nectarines, and, most especially, berries. Don’t forget the banana.

  Serve in chilled bowls or balloon goblets.

  Serves 4.

  21

  THE SCENT OF A MAN

  DON HAD AGREED TO JOIN ME IN EARLY SPRING OF 1973 FOR A GOURMAND swing through Italy. I thought of it as the last reconciliation attempt. I believed we both did. He loved Italian food, and most of Italy was unexplored territory for both of us. If handmade pasta did not work a healing magic, what could bring us together? I was counting on getting an ocean between tearful regrets over leaving his twenty-two-year-old HER and the shared joy of spaghetti carbonara.

  I’d written the Reynolds profile. It was in galleys, but there were a few holes here and there. Questions I needed to ask, I told myself as I dialed his Hollywood office. I’d be strictly professional, not even hint at how his silence had hurt.

  “What are you wearing right now?” he began.

  I ignored that and started going through my queries. They all seemed suddenly lame.

  “That husband of yours come back yet?” he asked.

  I told him about the overseas trip Don and I were planning. “One last reconciliation attempt,” I said. We would meet in Nice. Don was directing a Newsday team of investigative reporters documenting the heroin path from North African poppy fields to laboratories in Marseilles to the streets of New York. He would spend a week editing the first half of the series and then we would drive north to Milan, Lake Como, and Turin.

  Burt was on his way to Europe, too, he told me. Paris first and then a publicity tour of Scandinavia. Why not meet him in Paris, he suggested. He gave me the dates when he’d be at the Plaza Athénée.

  “Promise you’ll come,” he said. “Let me persuade you to come to Sweden with me.”

  I don’t know what I was thinking. A night in Paris with Burt Reynolds was not exactly a fruitful way to begin a trip meant to jump-start a stalled marriage. Maybe I was as burned by Don’s yo-yoing as his young friend seemed to be. Perhaps his silences and his sighs and the sadness of his love notes—I kept them all, the farewells, the “love you forever,” the “please forgive me,” and the “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Maybe I knew already these last months were a gathering of strength by both of us to let go.

  I had stopped playing around when Don came back. (I told myself Burt didn’t count because that was out of town.) But sex between us was unbearably self-conscious and infrequent. I persisted in self-delusion. Surely I should have known we were doomed when, during a rare moment of making love, he answered the phone and got into a conversation with Jimmy Breslin. I told myself we’d be two different people in Italy. Yet I would lie in our bed at night remembering the screaming intensity of other beds. I felt that Paris with Burt could only be a lusty parentheses, but I did long to be in bed with that man again. It felt like the difference between being a beautiful, desirable woman and being last year’s rejected hag. I left a week before Don to visit an ailing friend in Venice, allowing a night or two in Paris before we were scheduled to meet in Nice.

  Someone, a studio assistant, I guessed, let me into the star’s vast suite at the Plaza Athénée, where dishes from a late lunch sat congealing on a roll-away table. A couple of men in shiny suits looked at me quickly with a dismissive “just another bimbo” glance, or so I thought. I was not introduced. Burt was dressed and stretched out in bed as if exhausted. I wanted to believe it was jet lag and not the quickie before me.

  He sat up and pulled me over for a hug and a kiss. “Do you think you could go out and buy me some of that French aftershave?” he said into my ear. “I just need half an hour with these guys and then we’re free.” He pulled a bunch of franc notes out of his pocket and tried to stuff them in my hand.

  I shook his hand away. “I have francs.”

  I decided not to make a federal case out of being dismissed like a gofer. And I left. It was a longish walk, but I knew Le Drugstore would be open on the Champs Elysées. And I sure as hell didn’t need to come back too soon and be dismissed again. I sprayed first one and then another men’s cologne on my wrist and sniffed. I smelled Eau Sauvage. Perfect name, I thought, but it wasn’t Burt. I tried Zizanie. My father had liked Zizanie. Not right. And it was too late to get into bed with Daddy. I spritzed a whiff of Paco Rabanne on my elbow. No question. That was how Burt should smell.

  He was alone when I returned. The room was dim, the curtains tightly drawn, with just a crack of light from the street.

  “Come here,” he commanded.

  I unbuttoned and unzipped and ungartered.

  “Give me your arm,” I said.

  “Give me your boobs.”

  “No, arm first.” I spritzed his wrist. “Is that you or isn’t it?” I was proud of my nose. And why not? My professional nose. Without the nose that knows, the palate is nothing much.

  Burt sniffed the air. He sniffed my skin. He pulled me down beside him and he began to make love to me. In the Cosmopolitan profile, I would quote his ex-wife Judy Carne for discretion’s sake, but I could have said it myself: “Burt is a wonderful lover. He’s a very sexy close-to-the-skin man. He’s not a man who makes love to get his rocks off. He’s a giver. And how he gets his rocks off is how much you’re getting off. Do you know what I mean by the difference?”

  Yes. Oh yes, I knew. There are men like that. Men who love women, really love women . . . men who get into a woman’s head and play you like a violin prodigy, sensitive to every nuance of the female response, of one female’s specific response. A man who takes you out of your mind, sends you somewhere you’ve never been, shows you the sexual woman you can be. Usually superlovers are the most ordinary men, short or bald, attractive perhaps but not likely the classic Adonis, certainly not the movie-star sexpot with box-office allure. Or so I would have thought.
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br />   I lay back on the pillow, stunned for a while, then shivering, basking in all the sensations. I caught a glimpse of the clock on the nightstand. “We should be going,” I said. “It’s late, and I reserved for dinner in a place you’ll love.”

  He groaned. “You don’t really want to go out, do you? Let’s just stay here and be lazy and have room service.” He had his hand between my legs. I could see where we were going, and it was not to my favorite bistro, L’Ami Louis.

  We sipped champagne from the minibar and I ate chocolates for dinner. I wasn’t sure if it was morning or night when I got dressed to go back to my hotel. “I want to give you my schedule,” he said. “I am sure you and your husband will be fine, but, just in case, if you need to get away, this is where you’ll find me.” He gave me a list of dates and hotels.

  “Sweden is full of gorgeous blondes with big boobs,” I said.

  “I mean it,” he said. “You’ll be with me.”

  I tucked the piece of paper into my bag. “Will we have lunch in the Tivoli Gardens?” I asked.

  “You’ll come?”

  I spritzed a little Paco Rabanne on my wrist, and sniffed it. “I can’t possibly forget you now.”

  22

  THE YO-YO UNWINDS

  WE DID NOT HAVE LUNCH IN THE TIVOLI GARDENS. I DID NOT GO TO Copenhagen. I did not get to Sweden. Those ten days in Italy with Don was our life in a microcosm—half the time, we were lovingly in delighted cahoots, half the time we were snapping and ripping each other apart. He was exhilarated by the week spent editing the drug series in Nice. He knew it was good. (Though he didn’t know it would win a Pulitzer for Newsday, for himself, and for the investigative team.) Don loved being an editor. He loved newspapers. That positive energy brightened our time together at first.

  In Milan, Signor Buccellati himself and a saleswoman pulled out brooches, rings, a string of pale gray pearls in the jewel-box shop of the great Italian jewelry family. I slipped a wide gold cuff on my wrist. It was a leaf with a raised stem in the middle, etched all over with the finest lines, in the classic Buccellati style, just $330. I had to have it. Don grinned with pleasure and hugged me. I’d made a decision. I had found a bracelet I loved and I didn’t make a big deal about the price. I put it on immediately.

  A disappointing meal at a classic favorite of Milan in the Galleria brought us down. A couple of wonderfully al dente pastas at lunch brought us up. I insisted we walk a mile on tiny backstreets to find an antiques dealer who no one had heard of, and he dented the car trying to park. What did we fight about? I can’t remember. Perhaps it was my pitiful Italian. I could ask directions but I didn’t always understand the answer. We were lost in a net of one-way streets. He expected me to know everything. He slammed out of the car and walked away, leaving it in the middle of a narrow street. I pounded my fist on the windshield.

  He came running back, grabbed my hand, and kissed it. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Look, your sweet little hand is hurt.”

  We drove into Turin, both of us sulking for some reason I cannot remember, except that nothing was working, not even pasta. It was gray. We were gray. By that time, all the hope I’d never stopped clinging to had vanished. Holding the map upside down in a vain effort to figure out what direction we were going, I said left when I meant right. He screamed at me. He said every terrible thing he could think of. That he hated me. That he loved Her. That it was no fun to be with someone who knew everything. That the joy for him was showing the world to someone who didn’t know anything. I did not answer. I did not look at him as we finally checked into the hotel.

  I would leave, I was telling myself. My mind was racing. I would find Burt in Scandinavia. Let Don stew in Turin. Let him find his way back to Milan, to the airport, to New York. I sat on the bed, leafing through a folder, looking for Burt’s itinerary. I sat there staring at the phone number, staring at the phone.

  Don doesn’t speak Italian, I told myself. How will Don manage to get back to Milan without me? He lay beside me in the bed, facing the wall, weeping. “It’s over, isn’t it?” he said.

  “We’ll go home,” I replied.

  We went back to our three therapists—his, mine, and ours—but we both knew now we were just seeking the strength to say good-bye.

  Burt Reynolds didn’t like the piece I wrote for Cosmopolitan. Why would he? In it, I had scolded him for trying to be both a serious actor and a cheap pinup. He didn’t take my calls. I never saw him again.

  “Why were you so tough on him?” my therapist asked years later. “You didn’t treat him as a serious person.”

  “But what I wrote was true,” I protested. “I am a journalist, you know. He had just made Deliverance. He’d shown he could act. And he was sending fans photos of himself half-naked.”

  “So that was your fine journalistic integrity?” she asked. “You could be living with Burt Reynolds.”

  “Oh Mildred,” I said.

  “You didn’t need to tell the truth,” she said. “Not if you cared for him. It was not the Times, after all. It was only Cosmopolitan.”

  23

  IT’S NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER KAUFMAN

  OF COURSE I LONGED ONE DAY TO BELONG TO NEW YORK’S LITERACRACY. But being an eater, later a dancer, and not much of a drinker or lounge lizard, I came to Elaine’s literary nursery late. An unabashedly seedy neighborhood bar at 1703 Second Avenue, near Eighty-eighth Street, it was simply not on my radar in the sixties, when I marched along, blinded by the fog of my Francophilia. At some point in 1963, the door of this simple saloon had yawned open and Nelson Aldrich, then a teacher, later an editor at Harper’s, wandered in and lingered. Next night, he brought a poet friend. A drift of lean Off-Broadway playwrights settled in. A nonstop poker game evolved. And Elaine, the young earth mother, nursed them along, loving nanny, trading gossip, taking confessions. By the seventies, life was sheer gold for Elaine.

  She had already evolved into her complex character (Mother Goose, tempestuous Madame Defarge) by the time I first documented the literary lemming crawl—“It Must Be Calf’s Foot Jelly, Because Cannelloni Don’t Shake Like That”—for New York in 1971. When Women’s Wear found the Elaine’s mix compellingly chic, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, poseurs, and wannabes were forced to notice. It was that defining moment when journalists and writers came to be seen as sexy, Manhattan’s rock stars.

  The playpen of the quality media quickly became an obligatory scene. “The Beautiful people clotted there, light bouncing off perfect capped smiles, making midnight Second Avenue bright as noon,” I wrote. Limos double-parked in the grimy no-man’s-land, spilling superstars—Mastroianni, Clint Eastwood, John Lennon, even Jackie. Lynda Bird with George Hamilton and her Secret Service shadow demanded a prime table, I reported. Elaine stood them at the jukebox.

  “Inevitably came the third-string royalty, and the second-string rich, the politicans and flacks, the sycophants, the voyeurs, the grubs and slugs and drones, the curious, you and me,” I reported. “Blueblood dandies and Dun-and-Bradstreet-adored dudes screamed for see-and-be-seen tables but Elaine kept them iced at the bar—a gorgon, guarding those sexy front stations for her ‘boys,’ the ink-stained regulars.”

  You didn’t need to call your broker, your bookie, or your divorce lawyer to find out how much you were worth. “One had only to stand at Elaine’s bar with a watch, timing the wait for a table, smiling big as if the telltale drag on the minute hand weren’t all that painful. As if a wave to the back room wasn’t really fatal,” I wrote. The front-row flaneurs were thrilled the night Elaine kept Henry Ford and his dazzling Christina cooling at the bar, then exiled them to the Ragu Room, her Siberia. “She’s just a middle-class Italian,” I quoted Elaine.

  Divorces were doubly cruel. Who would get custody of Elaine’s? In a moment of mock tragedy after splitting with Dan Greenburg (“How to Be a Jewish Mother”), Nora Ephron dared to voice the unthinkable. “Do you think Dan gets Elaine’s in the separation agreement?”

  Peopl
e came expecting a floor show. Jason Robards weaving on his chair, denouncing a reporter for writing that he was known to take a drink now and then. Richard Harris lunging at a total stranger in the bar. “People go hoping to see Robert Frost in his cups or Solzhenitsyn decking Kurt Vonnegut or Norman Mailer in a violent Maileresque moment,” I quoted David Halberstam as saying. But the truth was that Elaine’s special pets were not all that recognizable. A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway’s biographer, was an insider’s icon. I certainly could not have picked Bruce Jay Friedman (A Mother’s Kisses) out of the scrimmage or Mario Puzo before The Godfather. Even Elaine didn’t recognize Antonioni. Exiled him out back. Mike Royko was a big deal in Chicago, but how would Elaine know? Royko needed to come back with Jimmy Breslin, Jules Feiffer, and Mayor Lindsay to rate a perch where he could handicap the crowd.

  There weren’t all that many front-row tables along the wall to jockey. Protecting the big “training table” for her boys, bouncing drunks, and shouting down sassers was a full-time job. In fact, it was another variation on the sadistic tables games French restaurateurs played in those days. When Gay and Nan Talese walked in late one night with the actress Teresa Wright, Elaine went up to the two Englishmen she had seated after an interminable wait. “It’s been such an awful night for you, you won’t be surprised if I move you to another table,” she said, shuffling them off toward the rear.