Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (7 page)

Could I do it? It didn’t seem like it when I got home after this one trip. I was grateful to be back smelling the familiar smells, sleeping in my own bed, and hearing my cat Dexter purr at night. I fell asleep next to Tom as if he were the missing piece I needed to complete the puzzle. But the next morning we began setting up for a party we were having that weekend, and we got into a fight. It was a first-class blowout that ended up with both of us walking off in separate directions.

Suddenly, I didn’t feel very evolved. If anyone were looking for proof that losing weight didn’t make me a know-it-all, though I had sounded like one a few days before giving interviews and signing books, here was proof. Wolfie looked up from his video game as I stormed through the living room.

“What’s going on?” he asked, but then before I could answer he added, “Are you guys okay?”

“We’re having a discussion,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said with raised eyebrows. “It sounded like you were fighting about how to set up the chairs.”

He was right, but I felt like showing my appreciation for his intelligence with a wave of my middle finger. I didn’t.

“Are the chairs that big of a deal?” he asked.

“Don’t start,” I said.

With that, I harrumphed off in another direction. Two things then happened that resolved the strain that permeated our household. First, Tom walked into the kitchen just after I grabbed a large bag of cheddar cheese rice cakes from the pantry. He caught me struggling to break it open. It was one of those bags that resist the most strenuous efforts at breaking the seal, and once he saw what I was doing, I was too embarrassed to rip the bag with my teeth. I would have preferred taking a bite out of Tom instead.

“Oh, really,” he said. “That’s how you’re going to handle this?”

“I’m an emotional eater,” I said. “Right now, I’m very emotional—and I’m trying really hard to eat.”

“But?”

“I can’t open the friggin’ bag,” I said.

With both gallantry and sensitivity, Tom took the rice cakes from my hands and put them back in the pantry. Then we had one of our best and most honest talks ever. And later that night, I got
into bed feeling much more relaxed and at peace, as well as grateful that I had not eaten my way through my anger. Tom slid in a bit later. It took a minute before he noticed the surprise I had for him. He looked under the covers to make sure, then turned to me and said, “Hey, you’re naked.”

Whoever said “if you want to make God laugh, make plans” was right—and as a result, I had a problem.

I had a full calendar of out-of-town book signings ahead of me, all of which had been carefully scheduled and coordinated to coincide with Wolfie’s Van Halen tour dates. I thought it would be fun if we were in the same cities at the same time. But all the planning turned out to be for naught when the band suddenly cancelled dates at the end of February and all through March while Ed dealt with health issues.

The band put out a statement saying he needed to undergo tests and “determine a defined diagnosis.” I didn’t ask Wolfie for any additional details. That only put him in a difficult spot. I didn’t really want to know either. I had seen him through many hard times in the past. I felt badly for him. I knew how important playing with Wolfie on the tour was to him. I also knew from my own
experience that you had to learn to get out of your own way if you wanted to change.

Three weeks later, I was back home between travel dates to celebrate Wolfie’s seventeenth birthday. Ed, looking better than I expected, and Janie, joined Tom and Tony and myself at Il Tiramisu, our favorite neighborhood Italian restaurant. I believed we had gone there for Wolfie’s birthday the past ten years. None of us could remember exactly. However, we did agree that the owner, Ivo, and his son, Peter, made the best pasta fagioli in the vicinity.

The evening was surprisingly relaxed and warm. At home, after remarking on Ed’s fragility, Tom and I recalled our own journeys through tough times. He had struggled through a difficult divorce and I had climbed my way out of the depths of self-punishment. Tom said he always knew that things would work out as long as he followed what he felt in his heart was right and true. I asked how he knew, and he said it was his faith in God.

“I couldn’t have made it without my faith,” he said.

My first reaction was to think, really? I was different. I had needed to find faith in myself before I could think about whether it also involved a Higher Power. Of course, now I found myself thinking about and talking to God all the time. But I remembered the way it had been.

“You know what I did during my darkest days?” I asked. “I ate.”

“What got you to turn things around?” he asked.

“I had to,” I said. “I knew I couldn’t go on any longer the same way. All the proverbial reasons.”

Tom scratched his head.

“Did you think God was helping you?” he asked.

“All I know is that nobody is helping me when I’m running on that damn treadmill,” I said.

“Come on, V. Seriously.”

“Honestly, I wish I knew God the way you do.”

“Well, you like the way I know the Bible,” he said.

“I do.”

“I have head knowledge,” he said. “You have the knowledge in your heart.”

That caused me to pause.

“I’m open, I’m curious,” I said. “I’ve only had a very few times in my life that I would call spiritual, where I’ve felt a connection with a higher power. For whatever reason, though, I don’t have that same thing in me where I can blindly believe.”

“Then how do you know right from wrong? In a way where you answer to a higher authority?”

“I don’t know that I answer to any authority higher than my conscience,” I said.

“How do you know if you’re doing anything wrong?”

“A warning light goes on inside me.”

“Seriously.”

“I’m being serious.”

“When you think of being at peace with yourself and the world, what comes to mind? What are you looking for?”

“How would you answer that?”

“I’m looking for God,” Tom said. “But I asked you.”

I closed my eyes and thought. It was a good question.

“I guess I’m looking for my grandmother’s soup,” I said.

“V”—

“I’m serious,” I said. “
Cappelletti in brodo
. Mmmm. My memory of that soup is as close to a religious experience as I have.”

“You’re serious?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I think everyone has something like that
in their life, something that makes time stop, problems melt away, and everything seem perfect. It’s not soup for everyone. For some people, it might be a hike through the redwoods. For someone else, it could be the ritual of a church service. For me, it was
cappelletti in brodo
. I was only seven or eight when I last ate it, but I can recall every nuance of its taste as if it was yesterday. The broth. The cappelletti. I swear it was sublime. I was in heaven. It was love in a bowl.”

“Where can I get some?” he asked.

“Never mind you,” I said. “Where can
I
get some?”

I flew out of town the following day for a book signing, leaving Tom and the boys at home. I called that night, grumpy and tired. I wished Wolfie had been in town as planned, and I was upset at myself for having told Tom that I would be okay traveling without him. Truth be told, I was lonely. I wasn’t tired and I didn’t want to watch TV, and it was dreary to go from a store full of people telling me how much they liked and admired me to an empty hotel room.

Tom sympathized long enough for his concern to seem genuine. But I could tell by his voice that he was more interested in letting me know that he had taken our new but unreliable Audi to his favorite service station and had confirmed his suspicions that it was a lemon.

We already had known it was a loser car. We had bought the Q7 about a year earlier and had taken it back to the dealer for repairs more times than either of us wanted to talk about. That car was the source of many debates. I accepted the problems as part of the car’s personality. Things went wrong all the time, but so what? I wrote that off as being quirky. I had stayed in a bad marriage
for twenty years. I wasn’t going to bail on a car that was less than a year old.

My attitude frustrated Tom almost as much as the car itself.
Almost
. His attitude toward cars was entirely different. He railed about it being a lemon and cited California state lemon laws, while I refused to engage in such definitive name-calling lest it hurt the Q7’s feelings. He especially loathed the Audi dealership and the manager of the service department, who, he said, refused to “get it.”

“The steering wheel has broken six times in the up position,” he ranted. “It keeps recurring. Why do they seem surprised each time I bring it in? Something is clearly defective with this particular automobile.”

When he used the word “automobile,” I knew he was really annoyed. Secretly, I enjoyed seeing him go on about the car and the service people. I thought he was cute. He reminded me of Pat Harrington in
One Day at a Time
. Tom was my handyman, my Schneider.

But he had a point. Eventually, even I couldn’t deny or debate it. Now that I was out of town, he had gotten a second opinion at the service station where he takes his truck. As Tom told me on the phone that night, the chief mechanic had pronounced it a lemon.

“No question about it,” Tom said, definitively. “It’s so sour it could’ve been the twist in my vodka and soda.”

I believed him and promised that I would go with him when he took the Audi back to the dealer to ask that they give us a replacement. But the diagnosis didn’t really surprise me. In fact, had I been a jealous woman, I would have been worried as soon as I heard Tom say that he took the car to his favorite service station. Was it a coincidence that he had gone there the day I went out of town?

I already knew he had a total “bromance” going with the chief mechanic. Their relationship had begun when he started working on Tom’s truck, which then had 98,000 miles and continues to purr at 160,000-plus. They hit it off immediately, thanks to a similar philosophy about service. Tom referred to service as “maintenance,” and apparently the two of them applied the concept to almost all of life, certainly enough of it for them to talk with each other endlessly. Ergo their male bonding.

But then he brought it home to me. It was akin to his showing up with lipstick from another woman on his shirt collar. Except it was a grease stain and it was all about how Manuel, his buddy at the service station, agreed with him. Personally, I didn’t want to hear about how cool and smart Manny was and how the two of them had used cars to figure out the key to life.

I’m sure my annoyance stemmed from the fact that I didn’t adhere to their… well, you might call it a fundamentalist belief in regular maintenance. My more lackadaisical approach irritates Tom, who regularly tries to lecture me, as he did when I returned home from this most recent trip. He couldn’t help himself. It was like preaching to the unconverted.

“See, Val, I take care of my cars,” he said. “I service them regularly. I don’t wait for the light to go on.”

“But that’s how I and most people know there’s something wrong—or that it’s time to take the car in.”