I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (22 page)

Marcus’s Strawberry Shortcakes

I have no idea how he made them. I’d use Bisquick.

“It looks like he’s not going anywhere,” I said to my mother one day when we were driving to the Stop & Shop in Connecticut,
basking in this newfound feeling of security.

“It looks like you’ll have to be the one to get rid of him,” she said, nothing disparaging in her voice, at least not that
I detected. It wasn’t until after the fact that I learned she thought Marcus was full of it from the get-go. At the time,
she expressed her reservations only in subtle ways, like cautioning me against going on long drives (to Connecticut, for instance)
in Marcus’s car. She wasn’t thrilled about me riding on the back of the Vespa, either. I ignored these small pleas.

It had been a while since I’d felt that kind of hold on anyone. Marcus called constantly. He wanted to see me all the time.
I was so broken by past disappointments that I needed his neediness to feel safe; thus I made myself available all the time.
If he called me at work at four p.m. to say he was in the neighborhood, I would drop everything to go meet him. By five p.m.,
we would be drinking cold white wine in my bed. One rainy evening when the weather had cooled down enough for me to turn on
the stove, I made a lovely little pasta for Marcus, spaghetti dressed only in a peignoir of truffle oil, sprinkled with parmigiano.
This is a simple yet elegant dish, a luxurious and romantic supper for when all you really want to do is laze about in bed.

Spaghettini in a White Truffle Oil Peignoir

Salt

½ pound spaghettini (or thin spaghetti)

3 tablespoons white truffle oil

Freshly grated parmigiano

Freshly ground pepper

Cook spaghettini according to the directions for pasta
here
. Drain and return to pot, add truffle oil. Divide into two
bowls, get back in bed, bring along the cheese and pepper.

Clothing optional.

Renee Lachaise came up from time to time, as did Ethan, who was a more apt counterpart to Renee than Mitch, who had left me
more flummoxed than heartbroken. And proving that no New Yorker is an absolute stranger to another, Marcus had heard Ethan’s
name before he met me. Oddly, Renee had mentioned him to Marcus because a work friend of hers knew Ethan and happened to have
a crush on him that she talked about incessantly. There was yet another connection between Marcus and Ethan. Marcus’s son
used to date Ethan’s cousin Emily, whom I knew quite well; we even had dinner with her in Florence during her semester abroad.
I was so amazed by all these coincidences that I couldn’t resist calling Ethan and sharing them with him. Ethan knew Marcus,
too, from his
New Yorker
days. He may have thought it was a little strange that I was dating someone so old, but he reserved any comment. Ethan, I
learned in that conversation, had recently broken up with my successor, so I magnanimously let him know about his secret admirer,
who turned out to be not so secret after all, just an old friend of Ethan’s whom he had been spending a lot of time with and
who was feeling a little more than he was feeling. Sound familiar?

Somewhere around week four, things with Marcus began to feel a little different. I first noticed it while sitting with him
on a rock near the water at low tide. I realized that good feeling I initially had in his presence was gone and in its place
was … boredom. I panicked, albeit silently, and racked my brain, trying to understand what could have possibly changed. I
deduced that my affection for Marcus was based on the escapist joy of seeing myself through his eyes, the eyes of someone
who had no idea who I was but had instantly concluded that I was da bomb. The charge of that was so strong, it even made Connecticut
seem exciting. It had been such a lovely idyll, but there, on that rock, the magic spell seemed to all of a sudden wear off.

As my feelings changed, so did Marcus’s demeanor. Which came first, I really cannot say. I only know that he was no longer
the happy-go-lucky biscuit baker. When my mother—still believing that Marcus’s ardor was immutable—asked him to clean the
leaves out of the gutters, he wasn’t exactly whistling while he worked, as he had when he’d cheerfully weeded the flower beds
(both in front of the house and behind it) that first weekend, the one that was the best of his life.

I refused to accept the simple probability that Marcus and I just may not have been right for each other. I wanted a relationship
to work out so badly that I continued with this presumed bird in the hand, hoping that if I could just get my head right,
things would be the way they were on the Fourth of July. I didn’t tell anyone what I was feeling, I just let them all continue
to believe that I was on cloud nine with Pops. In an attempt to understand why things were all of a sudden not working, I
went with my standard explanation: There was something wrong with me. This is always a splendid fallback position, because
if that is the case, there is hope that I can fix it. The discomfort will go away if I just try a little harder or make something
that tastes really, really good.

Heat wave be damned, desperate times call for desperate measures—when we got back to my place in Brooklyn, I turned on the
oven and put together this parmigiana with eggplants from the Connecticut farmer’s market. It was extraordinary, and Marcus
managed to drum up some of that old-time over-the-top zeal, but not enough to salvage our dwindling rapport.

Ineffectual Eggplant Parmigiana

3 large eggplants

½ cup plus 1 tablespoon olive oil

1 onion, chopped

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 (28-ounce) can chopped tomatoes (or whole if you feel like pureeing them yourself with a hand blender or in a food processor;
I don’t)

1 tablespoon red wine

1 large pinch sugar

1 cup fresh basil leaves

¼ cup walnuts, chopped and toasted

1/3 cup plain bread crumbs

1 teaspoon olive oil

½ cup freshly grated parmigiano

1 cup grated mozzarella

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Slice the eggplants crosswise into ½-inch pieces, lay on a baking sheet, and brush both sides with ½ cup olive oil. Bake
each side for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat, add chopped onion, and sauté until the onion is
soft (about 5 to 7 minutes). Add oregano and stir, then add tomatoes; bring to a simmer, cover, and reduce the heat to low.
Cook for 20 minutes, then add wine, sugar, and basil.

While the sauce is cooking, chop walnuts and toast them in a small skillet over low heat, then add them to bread crumbs and
mix them together with 1 teaspoon olive oil.

When the eggplants are browned on both sides, remove them from the oven and reduce heat to 375 degrees.

Add a little of the sauce to the bottom of a 9 by 9-inch baking dish (or whatever baking dish you have that will accommodate
the eggplant and most of the sauce), then sprinkle a little parmigiano on top. Add a layer of eggplant followed by sauce,
a sprinking of mozzarella, a sprinkling of parmigiano, and continue until all the eggplant is used up. Cover the top with
the bread crumb–walnut mixture and bake until browned and bubbling, about 35 to 40 minutes.

Serves the 2 of you, plus the 3 other people you wish were there to help keep the conversation going.

The next weekend, we stayed in the city. Those two days stretched before me like an aeon. How would I make it through? Friday
night we went with his son to see the Jicks play in Prospect Park. The rain was pouring down, and we shielded ourselves from
it with newspapers we found in the trash, though we should have just left since neither father nor son knew who Stephen Malkmus
was. Saturday was a stunning day, but I felt trapped, not that it occurred to me to try to get away. I didn’t want to hurt
Marcus’s feelings, and I didn’t know what I would do by myself anyway. It was not the first or, sadly, the last time I have
found myself stricken with Stockholm syndrome.

We went to Central Park and ate ice-cream bars; that took about two hours. Then it was one-thirty, a long time until dinner.
I was living from meal to meal; at least at mealtime there was something to do, and better yet, something to drink. We took
the long way back to Brooklyn on the Vespa, going over the 59th Street Bridge, cruising through Long Island City, Williamsburg,
and Fort Greene; then I suggested we go for a spin around Red Hook and take in some of the extraordinary views of the harbor
and Statue of Liberty. This was a good idea except for the fact that that’s where the Vespa ran over something that gave it
a flat tire. Now I was stuck with Marcus walking the Vespa through the middle of nowhere, looking for a place to get it repaired.
We weren’t far from my brother Matthew’s apartment, so we went there and Matthew helped Marcus park the scooter. We were stuck,
Vespa-less in Brooklyn, with two long hours until dinner.

While we were sitting around my brother’s apartment waiting for a reasonable dining hour to arrive, Matthew mentioned that
one of our Italian cousins had written looking for a place some friends of hers could stay when they visited New York. I wasn’t
inclined to give up my apartment, but Marcus insisted I stay with him and let them have my place for the week. What a kind
and generous soul. I should have been happy with him. Why wasn’t I?

Marcus took charge of the entertainment committee when Sonia and Andrea arrived. He was thrilled to hang out with real Italians
and for his daughter to polish her rusty language skills. He took them to a
New Yorker
softball game in Central Park, he arranged dinners at ethnic restaurants in pockets of New York far from the tourist beat.
His efforts did prop up my mood a little bit. Sonia and Andrea were superimpressed. They thought we were a fantastic couple,
and through their eyes I could once again see us that way, too.

When they left, Marcus became somewhat elusive. He no longer called to announce his every move; now he was AWOL for long stretches
of time. His carefree middle-aged artist-about-town attitude was all but gone. A parking ticket, which he would have shrugged
off in our early days, sent him into a lather
.
We were still going to Connecticut every weekend, but Marcus no longer wanted to hear my music, once so fresh, on the drive
up there. Instead, we listened to his bluesy backroom bar mixes. The sort of stuff my sister Carla’s bad-boy boyfriends used
to listen to in the seventies when they came over and hung out in our rec room and used my doll carriage as an ashtray. I
didn’t like those guys, and I didn’t like their music. The memory did not do much for my endeavor to resuscitate an attraction
to Marcus.

One night when we were in bed at his apartment, the buzzer on the intercom rang. Marcus ignored it. It rang and rang. Then
there was a knock on the apartment door. Marcus went to it, then came back and told me it was some crackhead woman looking
for a guy named Paco.

“I told her Paco didn’t live here.”

The next morning, I got up well before Marcus and went to the kitchen to make coffee. Gone was the nice French roast he used
to buy; in its place was some cheap Café Bustelo, the kind of coffee you get in a bodega. I used to drink it back in my starving
publishing assistant days. I set up Marcus’s espresso pot, but something went wrong and wet coffee grinds ricocheted all over
the kitchen. I was frantically trying to wipe down the kitchen with a moldy sponge, dying for coffee, and wondering why Marcus,
who used to spring out of bed at the crack of dawn, wasn’t yet awake. There was no coffee, no orange juice, and nothing to
eat. When Marcus finally emerged and I left for work, he didn’t wait with me for the elevator as he usually did; he just left
me standing there alone.