I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (28 page)

“Come over and take a shower with me.”

Lachlan got his way—however, with my car parked at a meter fed with only enough change to buy us thirty minutes, we had to
move fast. We succeeded in making both love and pasta within the time limit. Lachlan prepared a sauce of tomatoes and eggplant
for a picnic on the beach. We got out of bed and scrambled to prepare rigatoni and make it out of the house before the meter
ran out, but Lachlan was visibly collapsing under the pressure. He dropped a plate that shattered all over the kitchen floor,
and while he was sweeping up the shards of glass, he remembered that he hadn’t fed the dog and the pasta still had to be packed
up. “Can you do this? Can you do this for me?” he said, handing me a plastic container and a ladle. Lachlan did not yet know
that I could outmother him any day of the week.

We made it to the car with a minute to spare, so we spent it at the deli buying M&M’s, Twizzlers, and Coca-Cola for the trip.
My kilt had a sweet tooth. He wanted Häagen-Dazs ice cream, too, but they didn’t have sticky toffee pudding, his preferred
flavor, so we didn’t get any.

At last we were off, racing past the grand Brooklyn Museum and gloriously faded apartment buildings of Eastern Parkway, blasting
AC/DC’s album
Back in Black,
with Lachlan shouting some lyrics from the car window: “Honey, whattaya do for money?”

I know what music to play for my boyfriends, and I know what to feed them; the third thing I pride myself on is an unfailing
sense of direction. I rarely get lost. I can feel my way to just about anywhere, and when I miss the road, I find my way back
to the right one quickly. Not so on this trip. I ended up on the Northern Parkway when I should have been on the Southern,
and the little connecting roads I count on to take me from one to the other were nowhere to be found. I don’t adhere to my
gender in that oft-cited difference between men and women—I
hate
asking for directions and refuse to do it. But as I noticed the sun making its way west ahead of us, I broke down and called
Ginia, who grew up near Jones Beach and could put us on the right path. To get on it, I made some hairpin turns that scared
the bejesus out of Lachlan. I tried to reassure him that he was safe with me. “I’m a great driver, really! I can’t believe
I’m lost, I don’t know why this is happening.” Lachlan, feisty from sugar, ribbed me relentlessly in Italian.

Translated from the original Italian:

“When I saw you at that street corner, you looked like a nice, responsible woman. You were carrying bags of groceries, so
I assumed you were married, possibly with a couple of kids. You gave me a card that read ‘Vice President,’ so I thought you
were a sensible career women. But what are you!? You sleep until eleven, go to work at noon, you don’t know how to drive,
and you don’t know where you’re going!”

He was right about that last part. I hadn’t a clue where I was going.

What I did know was that minutes later I was sitting beside the ocean with delectable Lachlan. I had brought along a bottle
of Chianti I had been saving for a special occasion—carefully packed in ice so that it would maintain cellar temperature—but
I had to drink it by myself. Turned out Lachlan had some health issues that restricted his alcohol intake—a problem with his
“bile tube” a few years back, which led to a lengthy hospitalization in Rome, a consultation with one of the pope’s physicians,
and the discovery of an arrhythmia that he now took a daily pill to regulate. While I sipped, Lachlan sparked up his pot,
an indulgence that apparently didn’t affect his “bile tube” function.

As you can imagine, I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to pasta, so I didn’t have much faith in what Lachlan could churn out
in his borrowed kitchen. My prejudice was misguided; his rigatoni with eggplant was scrumptious, so much so that I have since
duplicated the dish many times, and I can’t say I do it any better than he did.

Lachlan’s Rigatoni with Eggplant

Delicious hot or cold.

3 tablespoons olive oil, plus a bit extra if needed

½ medium yellow onion, chopped

Pinch hot red pepper flakes

I large eggplant, cut into ½-inch cubes

2 teaspoons salt

1 large (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes

¼ cup red wine

1 tablespoon sugar (eggplant is acidic!)

1 pound rigatoni

1 cup basil leaves, torn

Freshly grated parmigiano

Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat; add onion and red pepper and sauté until the onion is almost translucent.
Add the eggplant and 1 teaspoon salt and cook for 20 minutes, allowing the vegetables to get a little brown. Then add the
tomatoes, wine, sugar, and remaining salt and cook for 50 to 60 minutes, until the eggplant is very soft.

Cook the rigatoni according to the directions for pasta
here
. When the pasta is drained, add it to the skillet with
the eggplant if it fits; otherwise return it to the pasta pot and add a few ladlefuls of sauce, a dash of olive oil, and the
torn basil leaves.

Ladle into bowls garnished with a dollop of extra sauce and a few basil leaves. Serve with grated parmigiano.

Serves 4 as a main course, 6 as a first.

Lachlan wanted to
know
me. As we reclined on the beach, he grilled me on my childhood and past relationships, things I wasn’t ready to talk about
with a man I liked so much but knew so briefly. “Could you at least fill me in up to age sixteen?” he pleaded. Since his attentions
were half-consumed with the smoke of a ship he thought he saw far off near the horizon line, I told him about the trip my
family took to Italy on a ship called the
Raffaello
well before my twelfth birthday. Lachlan’s parents had sailed to the United States on the
Queen Elizabeth II
and were coming back next year on the
Queen Mary.
He talked about their travels abroad and a less exotic trip the family recently made to Liverpool for his brother’s wedding.
That event relieved Lachlan of some of the parental pressure on him to settle down, especially now that his sibling had produced
an heir. The ship Lachlan was tracing turned out to be nothing more than a shadow. The focus on this trivial disappointment
was enough to push us on our way to the show.

We traversed a Scotland-size parking lot to get to the theater. Lachlan, now stoned, was amazed by its enormity and that of
the bottom of a middle-aged man in pink Dockers whom he called a blancmange. We felt positively youthful as we followed him
along with a throng of potbellied fifty-somethings making their way to the show. His comments had me in tears, even the ones
directed at me for thinking we could sell our extra ticket to one of these people.

“Giulia, I don’t think ‘
Dan fans
’ show up at a concert looking to buy a ticket. ‘
Dan fans
’ are a little more organized than that!” he teased.

Jones Beach Theater is both giant food court and arena. Lachlan’s munchies were calling once again for Häagen-Dazs ice cream,
but there was only Carvel. I got a sundae of vanilla with hot fudge, which Lachlan, while remarking on its poor quality, ate
most of. Meanwhile, Michael McDonald of Doobie Brothers fame was doing his opening act, banging on keyboards and singing “What
a Fool Believes.” We could see him on the giant screen as we waited in line for coffee at the Starbucks stand. Lachlan decided
that McDonald looked like Kenny Rogers, so for the rest of the night we referred to him as Ken, yelping out his new name when
he came back out on the stage with “the Dan” to sing backup vocals on “Peg.”

Lachlan was amazed that I was able to find the car, now all alone in an empty graph of white lines by the time we got to it.
We didn’t get lost on the way home, either; all the signs pointed to New York, and we followed them. “I’m still amazed when
I see signs for New York, I can’t believe I’m here,” Lachlan said, squeezing my hand. I couldn’t believe it, either.

The next week, Lachlan came to stay with me for the remainder of his trip and I took the rest of the summer off from work.
I called my mother to tell her she wouldn’t be seeing me for a while; I had fallen in love with a Scotsman, a Scotsman who
loved Italy and spoke fluent Italian, and could I keep the car? Up till then, the only vacation I had in mind was a few days
off, during which I wouldn’t go much farther than Prospect Park. I couldn’t afford to travel, having just spent a bundle on
my apartment and things to fill it with. Lachlan fell into my lap, a
scoti ex machina
who made my world as exotic as Dundee (to me; I’ve never seen it) and cozy as a rented cottage on the Outer Hebrides by way
of Capri.

He and his rucksack showed up at my apartment on a sticky, hot Monday afternoon after an arduous journey from Williamsburg,
where my soul mate made a lunch of spaghetti Bolognese for his roommate, Steve, then said good-bye to him and their sublet.
I worked that day, my last until after Labor Day, and rushed home to meet Lachlan, who got off at the wrong subway stop, ended
up on the opposite end of Prospect Park, and arrived at my door sweaty and exhausted from the long trek. I tried to soothe
him with music, playing an album by a new heavy rock band called Wolfmother that Kit had recommended. Lachlan dubbed the effort
“inauthentic” and asked instead if I had his favorite Led Zeppelin album,
Physical Graffiti.
I owned every Led Zeppelin album
except Physical Graffiti,
but
Led Zeppelin II
or
Houses of the Holy
would not suffice. He wanted to hear
Physical Graffiti,
and I wanted to provide it for him. I assumed a click or two on iTunes would have “Custard Pie” coming out of my speakers
in no time, but such simplicity was not to be: iTunes did not carry the Zeppelin catalog (a problem that has since been rectified).
I pondered how I could fulfill his musical request and provide a palatable dinner. The undertaking left no time for a trip
to the store, so I settled on bucatini amatriciana, a dish whose ingredients (onions, pancetta, canned tomatoes, bucatini)
I always have on hand. Fortunately, Lachlan was not a man opposed to eating two pastas in one day.

The
Physical Graffiti
problem was a more stubborn one. I clicked on LimeWire, a free file-sharing program Kit had put onto my computer that I had
never used. I believe in paying for my music, but this bad business decision on the part of Plant and Page left me no choice.
LimeWire wouldn’t open, having died from neglect. I put up a pot of water to boil for pasta, then began to follow the steps
to resuscitate it. This took longer than I remembered it taking for Kit, and soon enough the water was boiling. Amatriciana
is a simple sauce that can be made while the pasta is cooking, but it gets a heck of a lot more complicated if you try to
make it while downloading mp3 file-sharing technology onto your laptop.

Bucatini Amatriciana with MP3 File-Sharing Technology

1 iBook G4

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 slices pancetta

1 small onion

1 Visa card

1 (16-ounce) can choppped tomatoes

Salt

½ pound bucatini

¼ cup freshly grated pecorino

Fill a large pot with water and place over high heat.

Attempt to open LimeWire from the icon on your desktop. Fail.

The Scotsman in the apartment, who is useless with computers but, as we know, is capable of helping with pasta, will retreat
to the bathroom for a shower.

Go to the LimeWire Web site and follow the steps to download the software onto iBook G4. This will take much longer than you
think. Water is now boiling, and you haven’t done a thing for the sauce. Leave installation running, go to kitchen, and start
sauce.

Heat olive oil in skillet over medium heat; chop pancetta, add it to oil, and let it get a little crispy. Meanwhile, chop
the onion and then add it to the pancetta.