I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (14 page)

A Salad That Failed to Make a Perfect New Year’s Eve

Mâche, Pomegranate, and Pecan Salad

(Adapted from Gourmet magazine)

1 pomegranate

½ teaspoon sugar

½ teaspoon red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

1 cup mâche (widely available these days, to my chagrin)

2 tablespoons chopped pecans, toasted

Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the pomegranate in half crosswise and remove seeds from one half; juice the other with a citrus juicer or reamer as you
would an orange. In a small saucepan, simmer juice, sugar, and vinegar until it reduces to about 1 tablespoon, then cool to
room temperature. Divide dressing between two salad plates and drizzle with oil. Divide mâche, pecans, and reserved seeds
between plates and season with salt and pepper.

Serves 2.

In the end, no quantity of mâche was going to make Ethan Binder marry me. After three years I decided it was hopeless. I took
a final stand by delivering my ultimatum: I refused to go on the next Binder family expedition—a trip to Detroit to celebrate
Ethan’s father’s seventieth birthday, which fell on the same day as my thirty-fifth birthday—unless we were engaged. Surely
that would do it—his family loved me, and he had a much better time with them when I was around.

Ethan went without me.

O
ur first date was blind for me but not for him. Mitch had seen me before at Henry’s book party three years earlier when I
had just started dating Ethan. He liked the fact that I was looking all over the place, taking everything in, he later told
me. If that was indeed my mission at this party, I failed, as I hadn’t even noticed him. I hadn’t a clue whom Henry was referring
to when he called me the next day to say that his friend Mitch had a crush on me.

“Are things still working out with you and Shiny?” asked Henry, using a nickname he’d created for Ethan because he thought
he had a shiny forehead. (Ethan despised the moniker—and, for that reason and others, Henry himself.) I told Henry they were.
Still, I was curious.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“He’s a writer, he had two novels published; the first one was made into a movie.”

I wanted to know more, even after hearing the movie went straight to video.

“I don’t know him that well. I see him at book parties, sometimes we play basketball together, he goes to AA meetings,” said
Henry, blithely violating the eponymous principle of Alcoholics Anonymous.

So Mitch was in recovery with Henry. That didn’t bother me. Alcoholism in the background adds complexity—maybe even complications;
I like those. Having lived with and loved an alcoholic in denial, I admire anyone who has recognized and faced his problem.
Kit went through too much before he finally did.

A quick peek at Amazon revealed that I could find Mitch’s books a few yards from where I was sitting. They were published
by Simon & Schuster, my employer at the time. I went down the hall to the book room where old backlist titles were stored
and scanned the shelves, found a copy of his first novel, and took it to my office. I closed the door. I checked out the author
photo and read the flap copy. The novel was about a fifteen-year-old girl who really wants to have sex with some guy in a
band. Mitch was kind of a punk rock Judy Blume. I felt a twinge of remorse about missing out on him.

I spent
a summer mourning for Ethan. When it was over, I thought of Mitch. I called Henry.

“Hey, remember that guy you told me about who liked me at your book party three years ago?” I said to him on the phone.

“Mitch Smith, yeah.”

“Do you think he’d want to go out with me now?” I asked.

“Let me find out.”

Mitch called the next day.

____

“Good old Henry,”
Mitch said, his voice sounding craggy and vaguely Irish on the phone.

We agreed to meet the following Tuesday for coffee at a place not far from my office, the Coffee Pot. He chose it. Because
of his sobriety, Mitch did most of his dating in coffee bars; he seemed to know every café in Manhattan and most of the ones
in Brooklyn. Mitch worked at home, writing in his Williamsburg apartment, a Brooklyn neighborhood not easily accessible to
my own.

This was just after September 11, 2001. In those weeks, I did as the president advised: I bought stuff. Work was quiet, since
most author tours and publicity had been canceled. The novel I was pushing about a madcap graphic design professor at a state
college in western Pennsylvania in the early 1980s could by no means be reinterpreted to fit the moment. Bored at my desk,
I regularly snuck out of the office in the middle of the day and wandered the stores of Rockefeller Center, checking out the
plentiful sale racks, buying outfits, doing my part to stimulate the economy. I also succumbed to the lure of cable television,
after priding myself on being one of the last holdouts. Without the signal cast from the top of the World Trade Center, there
was no more free television in Brooklyn. Those were strange and lonely days. You needed TV. Even more than that, I needed
a new boyfriend.
The Sopranos
could effectively distract me from the world’s problems, but it was going to take more than Carmela’s incorrect but terribly
familiar pronunciation of “sfogliatelle,” my favorite Neopolitan pastry, to help me get over Ethan.

I was buoyed by the promise of this mystery man who already liked me. In the days between that phone call and our date, I
went for long runs and thought about him. I didn’t have much to go on besides some racy prose of his that came up in a Google
search, but it was enough to get my blood going as I took the final hill of Prospect Park’s 5K loop. When Tuesday finally
came, I put my body—superslim from grief and exercise—into a new knee-length, kick-pleat khaki skirt from H&M, a clingy low-cut
black sweater from Banana Republic, and burgundy kitten-heel sling-backs from Saks and made my way over to the Coffee Pot
in the cool late October twilight. Though I had only a hazy memory of Mitch’s author photo, I intuited that he was the guy
least resembling a person waiting for his date to arrive. He was sitting far from the entrance, staring into the screen of
the café’s sole computer. I boldly walked up to him and found I had guessed right. Somehow, maybe from the bits I had read
on the Internet, I could just tell this one was going to be tricky. Up close, Mitch appeared harmless. His hair was gray-flecked
brown and very short; he wore horn-rimmed glasses, a burgundy Le Tigre shirt, jeans, and Adidas sneakers. He dressed younger
than his years, but the look suited him. He carried the clothes of a twenty-something on his forty- something body with elegant
ease.

“I just came back from my baby brother’s wedding,” was one of the first things Mitch said to me, waving a folded five- dollar
bill in the air to indicate that our drinks were on him as we waited in line for coffee. I was a bit taken aback that he would
mention a wedding so soon into our semiblind date.
The Rules,
my ill-begotten dating bible, instructs women never to utter the word
wedding
or
marriage
in any context whatsoever on a first date. I didn’t appreciate the double standard. The wedding took place in Portland, Oregon,
where Mitch grew up and where his parents still lived. The baby brother was well into his thirties.

We took our coffee over to a high table in the middle of the room and sat across from each other on stools. Mitch talked about
his writing career; he even happened to have with him some photocopies of reviews from his first and second novels, which
I pretended to read. After our date he was going to stop by the post office to mail them to an agent he was pursuing.
Oh, Lord, another insecure writer,
the practical hemisphere of my brain warned,
I have enough of those in my work life.
But the more powerful hemisphere, the one containing the desperate-to-be-loved-by-impossible-men matter, found this writer
cute and curiously captivating. As we talked, I didn’t get the sense that Mitch and I were connecting, though things got a
little more intimate when we moved on to the subject of psychotherapy. I was disappointed to learn that he had recently quit
seeing a low-cost shrink-in-training at New York University Hospital. Any help is good help, I thought, and though I’d known
Mitch for only a few minutes, it was clear he needed some. After all, who doesn’t? But Mitch didn’t think the treatment was
getting him anywhere; he was going to try Buddhist meditation instead. I prefer Western solutions to mental unease, even if
I wasn’t totally sold on my own psychologist. I had been seeing the same man I began “working with” right before I started
dating Ethan. The therapist, like most of my boyfriends, seemed more interested in my recipes than in “my issues.” The subject
of food came up often; that was my doing. But did I really need his advice on adding orange rind to cranberry sauce when we
were talking about Thanksgiving dinner? Sure, that’s a good tip, but when it came to handy hints about how to get over Ethan—the
reason I was seeing him—he had no cherished recipes to pass along. My help would have to come from other sources. I was relying
on Mitch, even if love seemed like a long shot during the coffee portion of our date because he was talking a lot and I was
talking a little and the points of intersection, as far as dialogue was concerned, seemed few and far between. Things got
better when he walked me to the subway.

“You have beautiful eyes,” Mitch said apropos of nothing as we made our way down Ninth Avenue. Now we were getting somewhere.
It had taken two hours, but finally I’d received indication of some attraction on Mitch’s part. Knowing that he liked me at
that party so long ago—enough to call me three years later—had added extra pressure to the evening. Up till now, I wondered
if he was disappointed with me. Whether I was disappointed in him was not a matter I gave a second’s thought; I needed to
be loved again, and soon.

As we continued walking, Mitch confessed that he had Googled me before our date. He found an old review of a Pulp concert
I wrote for
Addicted to Noise,
a now defunct online music magazine my brother Matthew edited and that everyone in the family (except my mother) and more
than a few of our friends wrote for at some point. The review was a billet-doux to Jarvis Cocker, Pulp’s front man at the
time, of whom I am a devoted fan. Mitch joked that he considered getting some tinted glasses, Jarvis’s signature accessory,
to wear on our date. I didn’t admit that I had Googled Mitch, too.

“What CD do you have in your CD player right now?” I asked as we walked through Bryant Park. Someone once asked me this question
on a first date; I thought it made for a good game. You could get caught with something embarrassing like Olivia Newton-John,
if you happened to be in such a mood that day—and if you were honest. Mitch told me he was listening to the Strokes, a New
York band that everyone in the world would know in about a week. I made a mental note to get their CD the next day. When we
got to Fifth Avenue, Mitch stopped and kissed me on the mouth.

“You wanna go see a movie on Saturday night?” he asked as we looped around the block to the subway.

“Sure,” I said.

Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me over to an iron grate near the subway entrance, where we kissed some more.

“Your glasses are fogging up,” I said to Mitch when we stopped to take a breath.

“Of course they are.”

I was excited and famished when I got down to the subway. It was nine o’clock, and I had not eaten since lunch. My hunger
only made me more wired; my head spun as I tried to process my thoughts about this quirky new man and, of course, what I was
going to make myself for dinner. I decided on something simple made from things I already had on my shelves: farfalle with
tuna, white wine, capers, and onions. I needed a sturdy dish to bring me back to earth.