Dinner with Edward (8 page)

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 lentils, 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.