I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (2 page)

Without particularly wanting to, I remained the good Catholic girl. The only reputation I ever had was for being funny. The
cruel truth that men might prefer to get their yuks in one place and their ya-yas in another was brought home to me in my
thirteenth summer when I discovered that Tony Sirianni, my constant companion at the country club pool, was spending his nights
on the golf course making out with Connie Cambria. Granted, Connie looked a lot better in a bathing suit than I did. At college,
I spent countless late nights talking to boys I had crushes on, but the activities never went past conversation or, that great
tease, listening to music. The sheets and my virtue always remained pristine when we parted in the wee hours. I didn’t know
if I was doing something wrong, giving off some bad vibe, or misreading whatever signal they were throwing. I did know it
had me totally flummoxed, a conclusion I could have drawn without a psychologist’s corroboration.

That was behind me now. A new decade was beginning; my boss and I decided to call it “the decade of love.” Her prediction
concerning the change in my romantic status proved strangely prescient. That very afternoon, a hand-delivered letter arrived
from Kit Fraser. I had met Kit three years earlier when he showed up unexpectedly at my family’s house one summer evening
with Michael Petriano, the brother of my oldest friend, Larisa. She and her family had moved to New Jersey after first grade,
but despite the distance, our friendship continued with regular weekend visits in New Jersey or Brooklyn right through high
school. I enjoyed getting to experience the lures of suburbia—sundaes from Friendly’s and public school (with boys and no
uniforms), to which I would accompany Larisa when I took a day off to see her. Larisa still lives in New Jersey, and we remain
friends thirty-five years later.

Michael was my first crush. When I was ten I would join him on his paper routes, getting up at five in the morning to have
some time alone together, riding Larisa’s borrowed bicycle around the neighborhood. Michael was brilliant and incredibly funny,
and for this he suffered. He had a nervous breakdown the summer after he graduated high school; the week he appeared on my
doorstep with Kit, he had chosen to go off his meds, and in my childhood bedroom he ranted about the bomb he was going to
create to eradicate evil from the earth, which would be controlled by a specially selected group of clerics and rabbis. Then
he went to take a shower.

While Michael was in the bathroom and my mother went about the house hiding sharp objects, Kit watched me unpack my books
from the school year that had just ended. I talked to him about my current intellectual obsession, Dante, and played him an
Aztec Camera record. According to Kit (I don’t remember this), I strung a bunch of tiny seed beads and tied them around his
ankle. The evening stayed in Kit’s mind not just because of our friend’s odd behavior, but because of me. The bracelet stayed
on his ankle until it fell apart, and when it did, he kept the pieces.

Two years later, while waiting for the elevator up to the
Spy
offices after lunch, I noticed a cute preppy guy wearing wire-rimmed glasses and an L.L.Bean hunting jacket waiting there,
too. I wondered where he was going and became even more curious when he got out on my floor. He walked up to the receptionist
and asked: “Is Giulia Melucci in?”

“I’m Giulia Melucci,” I said.

Kit, who later purported to have been infatuated with me from the moment he met me, had forgotten what I looked like when
he came to find me. I, in turn, was unaware that I had spent hours with the guy I had been checking out on the elevator. Kit,
fresh out of Georgetown, was staying with the Petrianos in New Jersey until he could find his own place in New York. When
he landed a job at Atlantic Monthly Press, a small independent publisher whose young, hard-partying editors were often skewered
in the pages of
Spy
, Larisa told him his office
was right next door to mine. Standing next to the reception desk, he invited me to a party with him and Michael that weekend.
I couldn’t go—nor did I want to. I could tell Kit was interested in me, ergo I wanted nothing to do with him. But I did notice
when I didn’t hear from him over the next few months. Then the letter arrived, the day after I moved out of my mother’s house,
the perfect day for such a letter. “New apartment, new boyfriend.” I was ready. I called him right away, and we made a lunch
date for that Thursday.

Bizarre, springlike weather had taken hold of New York City that January, so Kit and I picked up lunch at an upscale takeout
down the street and ate on a bench in Union Square Park, facing our offices. Kit hardly touched his smoked turkey and Brie
on baguette because he talked so much. As he reminisced about college, he made a reference to bongs made out of apples, which
put me off a bit—my drug days, however brief, were behind me. This seemed incongruous; Kit appeared the proper young gentleman
in every other respect, from his Church’s handmade English shoes to his antique cigarette case. I had plenty of time to study
him. I finished my split-pea soup, roll, and cookie, and there he was with most of his lunch still in front of him. It made
me restless just sitting listening to him talk on and on with no food left. (When I eat and talk simultaneously, neither activity
gets neglected.) I was immensely relieved when Kit pulled out a cigarette—finally, something to do with my antsy appendages.
I was also pleased that the man who was going to be my boyfriend was a smoker—especially if he was such a slow eater. Kit
walked me to the lobby of my building, where he bade me call him. “You call
me,
” I said. He called, and we made an evening date for the next week. Kit asked me to meet him at his office; from there we’d
go have drinks at nearby Cedar Tavern.

Not only did Kit seem nervous when I picked him up, but he was wearing a pair of jeans that were just awful. They weren’t
anything so unforgivable as stonewashed—one of the many fashion horrors of the late eighties—but they were a uniform powder
blue, which was almost as bad. This didn’t make sense, since Kit had exhibited a well-honed sense of style in our previous
meetings. The fact that Kit so clearly liked me made him seem vulnerable, and those jeans weren’t helping. But at this point,
I wanted a relationship enough that I rallied myself to rise above it. Kit was a good man, a gentle and kind man. He was undeniably
handsome, he had an excellent build, nice lips, and thick brown hair flecked with blond. He was smart, and he looked it in
his horn-rimmed glasses. Powder blue jeans be damned!

Kit’s fashion faux pas was further redeemed by his ability to talk about the abstract expressionist painters who made Cedar
Tavern their watering hole in the 1950s. I studied art history at college and intended to pursue a higher degree in the discipline,
but then I didn’t bother to study for the GRE; on the two mornings I was scheduled to take the graduate school entrance exam,
I opted to stay in bed instead. It wasn’t a bad decision (or lack thereof); I liked the rhythm of office life and the dependable
paycheck, however pathetic that paycheck was. (At the time, I was making $12,000 annually.) I was working at one of the coolest
places in New York media, which went a long way toward enhancing the terrible wages—a fact my employers were well aware of.
Still, I was delighted that Kit brought some of my stifled scholarly leanings back to my day-to-day, and his riffs on the
canvases of Mark Rothko and Franz Kline were undeniably alluring.

As Kit and I talked, we found we had something even bigger in common: Both our fathers had died, Kit’s just before his high
school graduation and mine just before my college graduation. When you lose a parent at an early age, you have an instant
feeling of kinship with others who’ve had the same experience. There’s no way you can describe that sort of grief to someone
who hasn’t yet known it. You can’t describe it even to yourself. I was seeing the psychologist about that, too.

Kit complimented me for not making a big deal over the fact that he was from North Dakota, as people often did. It wasn’t
that I was so worldly; it’s just that I was from Brooklyn and had spent all my life in New York. North Dakota, to me, was
no different from, say, Ohio—it was just another place that wasn’t New York. Kit knew how to hunt and fish, and his father
had been a taxidermist. The youngest of four, he was the only one in his family ever to venture east. Drug references continued
to pop up in Kit’s conversation—there were his own stories of golfing at night on mushrooms or more historical detours on
Oscar Wilde’s penchant for absinthe. He seemed obsessed with Rimbaud, which I found both romantic and, as I learned more,
worrisome.

I had recently sworn off drugs for good after what amounted to a “lost weekend” spent at a genteel house in East Hampton with
a group of Brits who were friends of a friend from
Spy
. Amid the cabbage rose–patterned chintz, we ate too many mushrooms, overly eager for the effects to begin. From there I descended
into an existential hell, culminating in a bad melodramatic speech on the meaninglessness of it all. I was lost in a dark
wood that no amount of puffy sofas could rescue me from. Had someone recorded my monologue, it could have served as an effective
primary source for drug-prevention seminars.

But this peculiar circumstance of being on a date with a guy who actually wanted to impress me rather than the other way around,
one who peppered his conversation with a plethora of opiate references, was making me want some. Ready to move the evening
along, I asked Kit if he had any back at his apartment. Alas, all he had to offer was snuff—powdered tobacco you snort like
cocaine. It was an anachronism, part of some sort of American aristocrat persona Kit had adopted to balance out his prairie
roots. I pretended that I had always wanted to try snuff. On the way over to Kit’s apartment, we picked up some Pringles potato
chips (my choice, a childhood taste that lingered) and Coca-Cola for dinner.

I have yet to see another apartment quite as grim as Kit’s. It featured a tiny windowless room that was bathroom, kitchen,
living room, and home office all in one. Off to the left was a bigger room with a window that appeared to look out onto something
other than bricks but was off-limits because it was crammed full of stuff that belonged to the guy Kit was subletting from.
There was a minuscule bedroom, not much larger than the size of a twin bed, with a window that looked out onto an air shaft
where pigeons gathered and squawked.

Kit had done his best to cheer up the place. The walls were lined with appealingly haphazard decor—a boomerang, a tear sheet
of an ad from the 1920s depicting an older man and a younger one on bikes: “Father and son on a chummy run.” I tried the snuff,
and later that night I tried some other things I hadn’t tried before.

“My pillow smells like your perfume,” read the hand- delivered note that arrived the next day. No more romantic words have
been written to me before or since. I wondered if there might be something off about Kit. He seemed truly smitten with me,
and that kind of thing just didn’t happen. I can count on my breasts the number of times I have missed a meal, but for several
days after that date I ate next to nothing. Picking at a salad on an emergency date-analysis lunch with my roommate, Jen,
the next day, I tried to describe Kit. By this time I was in full self-sabotage mode, and it had completely colored my memory
of his physical attributes. I found the gooniest- looking guy in the vicinity of the restaurant and pointed to him. “He looks
like that,” I said.

“No, he doesn’t!” Jen, knowing me well, retorted.

“Okay, maybe not so bad, but something like that.”

If my own eyes were not to be trusted, I could have been clued in by other events that there was something unforgettable about
Kit. Apparently, every woman he had ever known remained hung up on him. When I first started staying at his place, nary a
night went by when there wasn’t a call from his college girlfriend. (Turned out they were still dating as far as she was concerned,
but that’s a story for her book.) Even an old high school flame from North Dakota rang in the middle of the night on a weekly
basis.

In spite of my anxieties, we became a couple. Kit, for his part, did nothing to exacerbate them. He left no doubt that he
was serious about me. He always called when he said he would. He carried my bag if it was heavy whenever we walked anywhere.
He was delighted to take the hourlong train ride to my mother’s house in Bay Ridge, even to spend just an hour, if that’s
where I happened to be on a Saturday evening. In the beginning, the only problems were mine. This introduction to love and
sex was frightening to me, so I invented problems to give substance to fears I couldn’t understand. For the first month I
convinced myself I was pregnant, even though I was hypervigilant about birth control and the chances of this were slim. Then
I decided Kit was gay when I lost track of him and his friend Matt at a party. I didn’t even have the sense to keep my worries
to myself. I brought them all to Kit, who put up with my neuroses like a saint.

Another new world, one less wrought with conflict, was opening to me at this time. That one existed in the kitchen of my new
apartment, where a stove and oven of my own brought out a previously unacknowledged desire to cook. The kitchen to which I
had recently bade farewell was strictly my mother’s domain, filled on Sunday mornings with the perfume of meat frying for
the traditional Sunday ragù. As a child I would have a just cooked, perfectly seasoned meatball for breakfast—with bright
green parsley peeking out of juicy meat, it tasted even better than the one I’d have that evening in the finished sauce. On
weeknights, she might make a lamb stew with baby artichokes and fava beans; baked lemon sole covered in fresh bread crumbs;
or—plainer, but no less delicious—roast beef with gravy and mashed potatoes.

My mother, Janet, was first-generation Italian-American born in Brooklyn; my father, Nicola, came from the south of Italy
to the States to establish a medical practice. They settled in Brooklyn and had five children: three girls and two boys, of
whom I am the youngest. Despite clichés about the emotional Italian sensibility, my parents did not fling around the hugs
and the I-love-yous. On the other hand, when they were angry with us, we knew it. Dad worked hard and Mom fed us well; those
were the main avenues in which we could discern their love and commitment to our well-being. When my father wasn’t seeing
patients until late in the evening, elaborate three-course dinners were the rule. At our round kitchen table, topped with
a brightly patterned fabric tablecloth and matching napkins, we always began with a pasta dish, followed by meat or fish and
a vegetable. My mother is Sicilian, which to her means a meal is not complete until you have “something sweet.” She is dogged
in her pursuit of the best desserts and will drive any distance if she hears there’s a good bakery hidden somewhere in the
tristate area. If she wasn’t just back from one such expedition, she’d whip something up: a coconut custard pie, a chocolate
bundt cake, or moist ricotta fritters covered in powdered sugar.