Blue Plate Special (41 page)

BACHELORETTE PUTTANESCA

At the end of a hard, interminable, raw winter day, when it was too late to schlep to the store, in need of a quick hearty feast, I invented an easy, unorthodox cupboard-supper version of puttanesca from whatever I had on hand
.

I opened a 24-ounce can of fire-roasted tomatoes, simmered these with herbs and lots of red pepper flakes, a minced onion, a nice fat dollop of red wine, 2 tins of sardines, an oversized handful each of chopped black olives and chopped marinated artichoke hearts, a pound of chopped spinach, and a chopped bunch of parsley. Meanwhile, I boiled some chicken broth, whisked in some polenta and herbs, added lots of Parmesan cheese and butter, then baked it in the oven for 45 minutes at 350. The spicy, insouciant, brackish sluttiness of the dish cheered me up more than I would have dreamed possible.

The above paragraphs contain not one letter “g,” and I did that on purpose to make a point—I’m fairly sure the omission is unnoticeable. Cooking without gluten is akin to writing without a crucial letter: it’s tricky to do, but if you succeed, no one should notice or feel deprived. It’s a minor trick, and when it works, it’s invisible.

FISH IN BANANA LEAVES

When my friend Janice and I both found ourselves single at the same time, we cooked for each other or went out for dinner at least once a week. She can’t eat gluten, like me, and, to make things even more complicated, she also can’t eat dairy, so our meals were of necessity limited and proscribed. When we went out together, we felt like special-needs, high-maintenance nudniks, interrogating the waiters, deliberating over menus, sometimes even sending things back, but when we cooked for each other, our meals were relaxed and luxurious feeling
.
I loved going over to her top-floor walk-up apartment in the East Village and sitting at her wooden table, drinking wine and talking, while she bustled around. She put on Mexican music and set out bowls of freshly roasted
pepitas
with sea salt, rice crackers with rich goat cheese
, pulpo
in garlic sauce, and red pepper–spiced green olives. While she cooked, we drank the wine I’d brought, and then we opened another bottle to drink with dinner
.

Dinner could have been fish baked in banana leaves, or fish and scallop ceviche, or
pollo pipián
(chicken in pumpkin sauce with green chili). Whatever it was, it was always so perfectly cooked and savory and fresh and interesting that we were temporarily, happily unaware of our irritating dietary restrictions. We dined together like normal people, like people who could eat whatever the hell we wanted
.

For 2 people, buy 1 pound (2 good-sized fillets) of very fresh, firm ocean fish, such as red snapper or grouper.

Peel a head of garlic. Blend the cloves in the blender with enough olive oil, about ¼ cup, to make a thick paste.

Rub this olive oil/garlic mixture into the fish on both sides and then cover the fish with dried leaves of the Mexican herb
hoja santa
(available at Mexican specialty stores).

Wrap each fillet in a banana leaf and tie into a packet with cooking twine. Bake the packets on a cookie sheet in a preheated 350-degree oven until done, about 20 minutes.

Serve with basmati rice with roasted corn, and kale cooked in olive oil with garlic.

For dessert, serve chocolate or coconut goat’s milk ice cream and glasses of a light dessert wine like
vin santo
.

One day in mid-October 2008, two weeks after I left Jon, I sprained my ankle badly. That weekend, my friend Lara, a novelist who lives in Taos, New Mexico, was in town for one night, so I gimped on crutches down to a waiting car service and went off to the West Village to meet her and a group of her friends in a bar. Later in the night, she turned to me and said, “The most beautiful man is about to walk into the bar. He’s a lot younger than you, but don’t let that stop you. He won’t look at any woman under forty.”

“I’m not ready to meet anyone yet,” I said. “I just left my husband!”

Lara was fierce and vehement. “He’s a classical guitarist, Kate, a documentary filmmaker, and a writer,” she said. “He’s on his way from Taos to live in a farmhouse in New Hampshire and write a book of poetry. He just made a documentary about Marines killing a goatherd in remote Texas. Just trust me.”

My instant, private reaction was Taos? Classical guitarist?
Poet?
I expected a ponytail and a leather bracelet.

A while later, in walked a tall, lanky, graceful young man who looked like a cross between a seventeenth-century duke in modern dress and
le petit prince
, all grown up. Lara had been right: I almost laughed out loud.

“Hello,” he said, having seen me looking at him. “I’m Brendan Fitzgerald.” He had glinting blue eyes with thick lashes,
swooping golden hair, and a warm smile. I figured that any young poet must need mentoring; there was nothing else to be done with someone so young. I found myself launching into an anti-M.F.A.-program rant.

“Well, then, maybe I won’t apply to an MFA program,” he said, evidently amused and not at all intimidated.

“Well, good,” I said. “You’re from Taos?”

“I’ve lived there for the past few years.”

“Do you all sit by fire pits with your dream catchers, talking about past lives and drinking chardonnay?”

His eyes glinted at me. “That’s
exactly
what we do there.”

I asked him about his documentary. He asked me about my novels. He was warm, thoughtful, erudite, and funny; he did not seem twenty-seven or however old he was (twenty-six, it later turned out). I could have eaten him for breakfast, but it was much too soon to eat anyone for breakfast, especially a handsome young documentary-making classical guitarist poet who could laugh at himself.

I said good night at 11:30 and gimped out and hailed a cab.

As I left, Lara said to Brendan, “Isn’t she great? You should run after her!”

“She wouldn’t be very hard to catch on those crutches,” he said.

Brendan went up to his farmhouse in the White Mountains of New Hampshire for the next six months to write, and I stayed in Brooklyn all winter and cried over my failed marriage, saw a lot of my women friends, and did not go out with anyone, if only because no one asked me on a proper date. Newly single after fourteen years, I found myself in a strange new world of hookups and sexting and online dating and IM’ing. I was good at none of those things and unwilling to try any of them. Single men my age seemed shy, as I was—or afraid of sticking their necks out, as I was. I felt as if I were at a junior high school dance again, all us single people in our forties looking fearfully
at one another, either never married or just divorced, gun-shy, burned out, traumatized.

In March, I went up to visit Cathi and Dan in Northampton, where they’d moved with their two kids about a decade before. It was the first time since my affair that I’d been there. Maybe because Cathi and I are both fighters who never give up on anything, we found, to our mutual relief, that our friendship was somehow stronger than ever for having been broken. And Dan, who had maintained all during our schism that we were both insane, welcomed me back as if nothing had ever happened, still his same warm, laconic, wry self.

One night, after we’d all gorged ourselves on Cathi’s and my mutual favorite dinner—baked chicken thighs, baked yams, and steamed chard with plenty of red wine for me and plenty of dessert for her—she and Dan and I sat talking after their kids had left the table. They were curious and sympathetic about my midlife dating difficulties and listed all the potential available men they knew, who were all, it seemed, divorced with two kids, all writers of one sort or another.

“They sound great,” I said. “I’d love to be a stepmother. And writers are okay, whatever, I just wish someone would ask me on a damned
date
. Dinner. That would be nice.”

“Describe your ideal man,” said Cathi, who loves a hypothetical discussion as much as I do. “Go ahead, say everything you want.”

“Okay,” I said. “Here goes.” And I listed a set of attributes, laughing the whole time at the sheer unlikelihood of ever finding a man with all of them, let alone enough of them. “Someone totally available, first of all. No jealous, possessive, crazy women anywhere in his life. Someone funny who challenges me—that would be good—and someone I feel totally comfortable with
and
madly attracted to, someone who doesn’t bore me, someone calm and soothing, someone who has a good relationship with his work—he doesn’t have to be rich or successful.
But of course he should be sexy. Also handsome, intelligent, literary, musical, and physically coordinated.” I looked at them and laughed again. “But, really, I’d go out with
any
of the guys you suggested. Seriously.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to specify the age of my ideal man. Evidently, the universe was listening, but it had a sense of humor.

A week after this conversation, Brendan e-mailed me that he was coming to town soon, and would I like to have dinner? As I found out later, Lara had told him that he’d made quite an impression on me, and he wanted to see if it was true; it was. I wrote back to tell him I’d be delighted.

It was the first date I’d been on since leaving Jon; I’d been well and truly single for six months. I got waxed and bought new lingerie, confident that we were going to sleep together—after all, what else could a guy who had just turned twenty-seven want with a forty-six-year-old woman, or any woman for that matter?

When I entered El Quijote, a tapas restaurant on West Twenty-third Street, Brendan was already sitting at the bar. I smiled, walked up to him, and dropped my keys on the floor. He laughed. It put me at ease immediately. I wanted to commandeer our menus, certain that a man in his twenties had no idea how to order anything, let alone tapas, but he took over and ordered for both of us with grace and ease. For the next five hours, we sat close together, turned toward each other on our stools, telling each other about our entirely different yet mysteriously similar lives, families, passions, and experiences. I forgot to eat, I was so interested in our conversation.

When they kicked us out at closing time, we fell into a cab together and hightailed it back to his place. Our clothes came off in a blur; there wasn’t time for me to worry about our age difference. Too charged and euphoric to sleep, at one point we both started laughing together at the shock of unexpected happiness.
But the next morning in the bright light of the shower with him, I freaked out, wondering what I looked like, having been up all night.

However bleary-eyed I might have been, apparently he didn’t mind. At one point, he even asked me to marry him, albeit jokingly.

It turned out the joke was on us. For our second date, I took the train up from New York to Boston. Brendan picked me up and we drove north, high and floating, with loony grins on our faces. After a couple of hours of driving, we turned onto a dirt road that ran by a huge, pristine lake. Wet sunlight shone on bare mountains through charcoal clouds; the lake surface was choppy in a stiff, cold breeze. We turned into a driveway, pulled up to a barn, and walked across frozen grass to a cozy farmhouse.