Heartburn (14 page)

“Arthur isn’t having an affair with Thelma Rice,” I said. “Nobody is having an affair with Thelma Rice.”

“How do you know?” said Betty.

“I just know,” I said.

“Tell me,” said Betty.

“Okay,” I said, “but you can’t tell this to anyone.”

“I promise,” said Betty.

“I saw Thelma at the gynecologist’s, and that’s when I found out.

“What?” said Betty.

“She has this horrible infection,” I said. “You don’t even want to know about it.”

“Oh, God,” said Betty.

“She made me promise not to tell anyone,” I said, “but she almost didn’t have to because it’s so disgusting I almost couldn’t. I’m only telling you because I want you to know it’s not true about her and Arthur.”

“Then why was she having a drink with him?” said Betty.

“That’s part of it,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” said Betty.

“She wanted some legal advice,” I said. “She got the infection in a Vietnamese restaurant in Virginia, and she wants to sue them.”

“She got it from something she ate, or from the toilet seat?” said Betty.

“The toilet seat, I guess,” I said, “although I’m not sure. Maybe from the spring rolls.”

“Oh, God,” said Betty. “Poor Thelma.”

“Poor Thelma?” I said.

“I feel so sorry for her,” said Betty.

“Don’t feel too sorry for her,” I said. “It’s curable. Eventually.”

“Maybe I should have her and Jonathan to dinner,” said Betty.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Why not?” said Betty. “It’s not catching, is it?”

“No,” I said, “it’s just that she’s so depressed, she’s no fun to be around.”

“I think we should have a dance,” said Betty.

“What?” I said.

“The three of us. You, me and Thelma.”

“I hate dances,” I said.

“It’ll be fun, Rachel,” said Betty.

“I can’t dance,” I said.

“Come on,” said Betty. “Where do you think we should do it?”

“The White House,” I said.

“That’s a great idea,” said Betty. “They’re always talking
about opening it up to the public. I’ll call the social secretary.”

“Betty—”

“And let’s have lunch, the three of us, next week. Tuesday.”

“Tuesday I have to be in New York to do a cooking demonstration.”

“Rachel, you really are impossible,” said Betty. “Thelma and I will have lunch on Tuesday. We will plan the dance. It will make Thelma feel better about her infection, and you’ll have something to take your mind off the robbery—”

“My mind isn’t
on
the robbery,” I said.

“Good,” said Betty. “Start making your guest list.”

“Thelma’s going to want to invite the Kissingers,” I said. “Is that the kind of dance you want to have?”

“Goodbye,” said Betty, and hung up.

For Swiss potatoes: Peel 3 large (or 4 small) russet potatoes (or all-purpose if you can’t get russets) and put them in cold water to cover. Start 4 tablespoons butter and 1 tablespoon cooking oil melting in a nice heavy large frying pan. Working quickly, dry the potatoes and grate them on the grating disk of the Cuisinart. Put them into a colander and squeeze out as much water as you can. Then dry them again on paper towels. You will need more paper towels to do this than you ever thought possible. Dump the potatoes into the frying pan, patting them down with a spatula, and cook over medium heat for about 15 minutes, until the bottom of the pancake is brown. Then, while someone is watching, loosen the pancake and, with one incredibly deft motion, flip it over. Salt it generously. Cook 5 minutes more. Serves two.

For potatoes Anna: Peel 3 large (or 4 small) russet potatoes (or Idahos if you can’t get russets) and put them in water. Working quickly, dry each potato and slice into 1/16-inch rounds. Dry them with paper towels, round by round. Put 1 tablespoon clarified butter into a cast-iron skillet and line the skillet with overlapping potatoes. Dribble clarified butter and salt and pepper over them. Repeat twice. Put into a 425° oven for 45 minutes, pressing the potatoes down now and then. Then turn up the oven to 500° and cook 10 more minutes. Flip onto a round platter. Serves two.

The middle (I)

One day the inevitable happens. I go to the potato drawer to make potatoes and discover that the little
brown buggers I bought in a large sack a few weeks earlier have gotten soft and mushy and are sprouting long and quite uninteresting vines. In addition, one of them seems to have developed an odd brown leak, and the odd brown leak appears to be the cause of a terrible odor that in only a few seconds has permeated the entire kitchen. I throw out the potatoes and look in the cupboard for a box of pasta. This is the moment when the beginning ends and the middle begins.

The middle (II)

Sometimes, when a loved one announces that he has decided to go on a low-carbohydrate, low-fat, low-salt diet (thus ruling out the possibility of potatoes, should you have been so inclined), he is signaling that the middle is ending and the end is beginning.

The end

In the end, I always want potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin cold slice of butter to every forkful. The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you’re feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let’s face it: the reason you’re blue is that there
isn’t
anyone to make them for you. As a result, most people do not have nearly
enough mashed potatoes in their lives, and when they do, it’s almost always at the wrong time.

(You can, of course, train children to mash potatoes, but you should know that Richard Nixon spent most of his childhood making mashed potatoes for his mother and was extremely methodical about getting the lumps out. A few lumps make mashed potatoes more authentic, if you ask me, but that’s not the point. The point is that perhaps children should not be trained to mash potatoes.)

For mashed potatoes: Put 1 large (or 2 small) potatoes in a large pot of salted water and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for at least 20 minutes, until tender. Drain and place the potatoes back in the pot and shake over low heat to eliminate excess moisture. Peel. Put through a potato ricer and immediately add 1 tablespoon heavy cream and as much melted butter and salt and pepper as you feel like. Eat immediately. Serves one.

I
don’t want to string this part out. You don’t really need to hear a blow-by-blow account, because it isn’t all that interesting. The first night back I made shrimp curry. (The recipe’s in
Uncle Seymour’s Beef Borscht
if you want it.) The next night chicken stuffed with lemons. (Marcella Hazan.) The next night, takeout from Scott’s Bar-B-Q. Mark and I sat at dinner and made conversation. The word desultory applies. We talked about everything except what had happened. I tried not to cry. I tried hard not to ask where he went in the afternoon. I tried hard not to go into his office and turn it upside down looking for more evidence, but finally I decided what the hell, go take a look, how much worse can it get, and it turned out Mark had locked his office door and I couldn’t get in. At one point over the weekend Mark asked me how I made my vinaigrette, but I wouldn’t tell him. I figured my vinaigrette was the only thing I had that Thelma didn’t (besides a pregnancy), and I could just see him learning it from me and then rushing over to her house with a jar of Grey
Poupon mustard (the essential ingredient) and teaching her the wrist movement and dancing off into a sunset of arugola salads. I must seem to be putting too much emphasis on this vinaigrette of mine, but war is war.

Perhaps you are wondering whether we had sex. Normally I don’t like to get into this area, because it embarrasses me, but since it’s probably crossed your mind I’d better deal with it. We had sex. We always had sex. That’s one of the most perplexing parts of the story; that’s one of the reasons why Mark’s relationship with Thelma had come as such a surprise to me. Now that I look back on it, we hadn’t been doing anything particularly inventive in that department of late, but I have never been big on invention in that department. Why kid around? Every so often I browse through books full of tasteful line drawings of supplementary positions—how to do it standing and in the swimming pool and on the floor—and I’m always mystified. On the floor! Why would anyone want to do it on the floor when a bed was available? I’ll tell you the truth: even sex on a beach seems to me to be going too far.

On Tuesday morning I took the shuttle to New York for my food demonstration in the Macy’s housewares department. I do food demonstrations from time to time, although I do more talking than actual demonstrating. Occasionally, serious food people come to observe, and I can see them sneer as they watch my hopelessly sloppy chopping. Serious food people do not take me seriously, and they’re right not to. I more or less backed into the food writing business, and before anyone in the food establishment could decide what to do with me, there I was, writing articles and doing demonstrations and appearing on television and essentially taking money from their pockets.

What they say about me is I have no real training as a cook, I’m basically a performer, I clip recipes from other people’s cookbooks and pass them off as my own, I don’t have an original point of view, and I am a sellout. (This last accusation always makes me cross, because I would love to be a sellout if only someone would ask.) They used to say that I was wrong about nouvelle cuisine, but I turned out to be right about it, so they don’t say that anymore. My position on nouvelle cuisine is that it’s silly.

What I say about them is they use too many adjectives. I hate adjectives. I also hate similes and metaphors, just can’t do them, never have been able to. Anyone who wants to write about food would do well to stay away from similes and metaphors, because if you’re not careful, expressions like “light as a feather” make their way into your sentences, and then where are you? The problem, though, is how to do without adjectives. If you write about food, you can’t really do without them; but if you do
with
them, you run the risk of writing sentences like “The fish was juicy but the sauce was lumpy,” or “The sauce was creamy but the veal was stringy,” or, to sum up, “The noun was (complimentary adjective) but the other noun was (uncomplimentary adjective).” This is a particular danger for food writers who review restaurants, which I have never done and never will. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Obviously I didn’t start out in life wanting to be a food writer. These days there are probably people who do—just as there are now people who start out wanting to be film critics, God help us—but I started out wanting to be a journalist. Which I became. I was a reporter for the
New York World-Telegram and Sun
and I lived in a junior two-and-a-half, and
whenever I was home alone at night I cooked myself a perfect little dinner. None of your containers of yogurt for me; no, sir. I would pick a recipe from Michael Field or Julia Child and shop on the way home and spend the first part of the evening painstakingly mastering whatever dish I had chosen. Then I would sit down to eat it in front of the television set. At the time I thought this was wildly civilized behavior, but the truth is it was probably somewhat Mamie Eisenhowerish. In any case, I learned to cook. Everyone did—everyone my age, that is. This was the mid-1960s, the height of the first wave of competitive cooking. I’m always interested when people talk about the sixties in the kind of hushed tone that is meant to connote the seriousness of it all, because what I remember about the sixties was that people were constantly looking up from dessert and saying things like: “Whose mousse is this?” Once, I remember, one of my friends called up to say his marriage had ended on account of veal Orloff, and I knew exactly what he meant. It was quite mad, really. I was never completely idiotic—I never once made a quiche, for example—but I held my own, and I’m afraid that I’m still known in certain circles as the originator of a game called If You Had to Have Only One Flavor Soufflé for the Rest of Your Life, Would It Be Chocolate or Grand Marnier?