I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (31 page)

For the most part, I was enjoying this particular cliff-hanger. “If he comes back and we get married, I will remember this
as the happiest time of my life,” I’d say to Ginia. This was an ideal situation for me—to be alone in my beautiful home, the
prospect of forever love making its way down the Italian peninsula and not through my refrigerator.

It was my first dinner party season in my new place. I entertained nearly every week. One of the most memorable evenings that
fall was a mozzarella competition I thought up with my friend Jesse, a reporter for
The Wall Street Journal.
Jesse and his wife, Nell, who is a writer, lived next door and we often ran into each other at the farmer’s market. We talked
about putting on this challenge for months and finally got it together just in time to pair the cheese with the last tomatoes
of summer.

There is nothing that compares with the tangy flavor of mozzarella made with buffalo milk; the finest examples come from where
my relatives live in the southern Italian region of Campania. That cheese is imported to the States, but by the time it gets
off the plane, it’s already way past its prime. Mozzarella dies under refrigeration. It has to be eaten the day it’s made;
thus, it is better to make do with inferior cow’s-milk mozzarella made locally by hand than waste money on the imported kind.
In the New York neighborhoods that were once Italian-American ghettos, there are plenty of such cheeses to try. Each of my
guests took a section of town—Bensonhurst, Little Italy, Greenwich Village, and Carroll Gardens—and scanned the
latticini
that still thrive with the onslaught of the young, wealthy food enthusiasts who have moved to these enclaves. We did a blind
tasting, picked a winner, then went on to eat more courses. I made
Lachlan’s rigatoni and eggplant
and roasted
loin of pork seasoned with rosemary. We had cannoli from a bakery in Dyker Heights for dessert. Everyone got to take home
some cheese, even after we’d disposed of the losers. I had a freezer full of mozzarella for months. (The frozen cheese is
fine to use for melting in a lasagna, parmigiana, or baked ziti.)

Food Club Pork Roast

6 garlic cloves

¼ cup fresh rosemary

2 teaspoons salt

Freshly ground pepper

1 (4 ½- to 5-pound) rib section center-cut pork loin (have the butcher bone the meat and then reassemble the roast with
string)

1 tablespoon olive oil

½ cup white wine

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mince the garlic and rosemary by hand (or better yet, in a food processor). Mix them in a small bowl with the salt and freshly
ground pepper. Rub the meat with olive oil and then the garlic-rosemary mixture. Let it sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Place pork fat side up on a rack in roasting pan, then pour white wine over it. Roast in center of the oven until a thermometer
registers 140 degrees, about 90 minutes. Remove from oven and let the meat rest on a cutting board, tented with foil, for
about 20 minutes before slicing.

Discard string, separate bones from the loin, and slice meat to desired thickness. You may cut the ribs and serve them, too,
or save them to add them to a tomato sauce. (Pork ribs add richness to sauce.)

Yield: 6 servings.

The lactose onslaught proved too much even for a sturdy constitution like mine. I awoke the next day with stabbing pains in
my stomach, which were exacerbated by an e-mail from Lachlan, whom I hadn’t heard from for two days. He had descended the
mountain and was now in Milan. “Maybe I could live here,” he wrote. I took to my bed. The next day he was in Rome, and a week
after that, he was still in the Eternal City, bristling under the stagnancy of Italian culture, which he found “quite stifling
if I’m to be honest.” I felt positive when he went negative on Italy. As much as I love the land of my ancestors, I didn’t
want my Scotsman there; I wanted him in New York with me.

Lachlan was concentrating on the novel while living on borrowed couches and Internet connections. Meanwhile, I was doing research
on agents at book parties and in phone conversations with editor friends. I couldn’t imagine how Lachlan could get any work
done the way he was living, and even he would admit from time to time that the lifestyle was dragging on him.

“What are you thinking about the future?” he wrote on a day in which he felt particularly lost.

“I’m thinking about a future with you,” I replied, assuming that he was looking for the home I wanted to give him along with
the book deal.

“I can’t think of any kind of future, all I can think of is finishing my novel. Once that’s done I don’t mind if I have to
sleep under a bridge,” he wrote.

Apparently, that bridge was going to connect to a multiplex.

“When is the Borat movie coming out?” Lachlan asked the next morning.

“The Borat movie is coming out in early November.”

“Oh, that sounds like very good timing to me,” he’d reply, and I’d think, Oh, he’s coming back in early November. In retrospect,
I realize he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, but he enjoyed keeping my hopes up until he made “a very beautiful, rational,
and romantic decision,” something he was going to do when he was done with the book.

That took seven weeks plus some additional hours of computer fumbling on Lachlan’s end. A few simple instructions from me
had it on its way, and I stayed up most of the night reading. The novel was polished: less rambling, more funny. Lachlan had
pulled it off!

Finding him an agent wouldn’t be tough, yet it seemed absolutely grueling. This endeavor was above and beyond the call of
duty for any friend; I wouldn’t do such a thing for my mother, and she wasn’t sending me mixed signals from across the Atlantic.
But I was going to do it for our future, the one I thought about while listening to that Zero 7 song on my iPod on the subway
every morning: “Even though we’re miles apart, we are each other’s deeeeeeestinyyyyyyy.”

The first agent I called was a friend of a friend I vaguely knew, a formerly hot agent who was getting back on his feet after
a little, shall we say, health problem. He was all over the novel as I explained it to him on the phone. He professed himself
to be a Scotophile—he had studied in Edinburgh and venerated Sir Walter Scott. “E-mail it over,” he said, “I’ll get back to
you early next week.” I put the finishing touches on the cover letter I worked on for two days and had both Kit and Anne edit,
and off it went.

As early next week became late next week, and then early the week after that turned to two weeks later, I began to lose hope
and added looking for an agent to real estate under the heading of “Things That Are Like Dating.” Really, everything in life
is like dating—if you didn’t get the call, you didn’t get the agent (the apartment, the boyfriend). Lachlan sent his support
from overseas and slept with his rented phone by his bed just in case there was any breaking news overnight. When I finally
screwed up the courage to make the follow-up call, I got the answer I expected. I was bummed, mostly because I didn’t want
to go through it all again, and who knew how many times I would have to. The prospect of this Sisyphean task made me want
to lie down. Instead, I picked up the phone and called the agent I’d had in mind for Lachlan from the very beginning, the
one who I knew for sure would get the book, the one I was afraid to call because she was that formidable.

I had worked on some of her eccentric authors in the energetic early days of my book publicity career, and I had done a damn
good job with them. But she was a woman with much on her plate, and I didn’t expect her to remember me. Her assistant answered,
and I left a rambling message with her recounting my history with her boss, then went to lunch. I despaired over making that
call in the heat of my devastation, not to mention hunger. I was sure I had blown it and would never hear back.

Lachlan wasn’t as crushed by the first rejection as I was, but then, what did he care, he didn’t have to do any of the work.
Plus, it was in his best interest to keep my spirits up and me on the case. I was feeling crushed by the weight of his need,
a load I alone seemed to be carrying while he sent “pillows and downies and the comfiest mattresses over the Atlantic.” I
had to escape for a weekend with Jen and Jeff to their house in the Berkshires, where there were plenty of “pillows and downies,”
but no cell phone signal or wi-fi, just to get a break from him.

Naturally, it was when I was getting a little bloody sick of it all that he started to seriously consider returning.

“I’m reading F. Scott Fitzgerald while staring at a postcard of Park Slope,” he wrote after my retreat. I didn’t reply; he
tried again. “Now, I’m looking at travel sites.”
That
got my attention. The flights were expensive, the only affordable ones connected through Heathrow, and Lachlan wanted to
limit his takeoffs and landings to as few as possible. He still wasn’t sure. Then, “I’m tipping, tipping,” he wrote a few
hours later. But which way? I wondered.

It would have to be a connecting flight, a connecting flight arriving at JFK that very Saturday. But before he entered his
credit card number, he spent a few hours surfing weather sites, interpreting the direction of the winds. “I don’t know about
the red arrows over the Atlantic,” he wrote, describing the seven-day forecast map. By lunchtime he had purchased his ticket.
I was so excited, I called Ginia right away. Ginia was weary of Lachlan, and rightly so, but she didn’t stomp on my dreams.
Right after I hung up with her, THE AGENT called me back. I nervously described the complicated art of Lachlan’s novel for
her and she was interested! She asked me to messenger the manuscript right over. I was ricocheting off the wall. I called
Lachlan immediately, even more excited about having my call returned by THE AGENT than by his imminent return. I couldn’t
get the right degree of worshipfulness from him over what I had made happen. He didn’t know the difference between this agent
or that agent or how capable I was. I didn’t either, but I was starting to get an idea.

Lachlan was on to more pressing issues for the moment, like how much space he would have in my “cupboard” (British for closet).
He had picked up a peacoat and a couple of moldy sweaters while sorting out his things, and they too needed a home. Since
mine came complete with four cupboards, I was willing to clear out a quarter of one for him and an entire drawer; that would
be plenty.

I bounded out of bed that Saturday morning after a text from Lachlan, who had just taken a Xanax and was waiting to board
the plane in Rome, woke me. There were a thousand things to do to prepare for his arrival. I dragged my little rolling shopping
bag to the supermarket, where I loaded up on all his favorite foods. I bought a box of clementines and all the ingredients
for apple muffins. I spent a blissful afternoon baking in my kitchen in anticipation of reuniting with Lachlan. After ten
weeks of wondering, I couldn’t believe he was actually on his way back.

Welcome Back to the Big Apple Apple Muffins

Butter, softened, for greasing muffin pan

2 cups whole-wheat flour (because Lachlan worries about his health!)

½ cup sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon cinnamon

½ cup (1 stick) butter, melted (because Lachlan is too thin!)

1 egg, beaten

1 cup milk

2 medium apples, peeled, cored, and chopped

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease a 12-cup muffin pan with softened butter.

In one large bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients. In another bowl, mix together all the wet ingredients. Add the wet
ingredients to the dry and mix with a spoon by hand until just combined, then fold in the chopped apples.

Spoon batter into muffin cups and bake for 20 minutes; cool in pan for 10 minutes and then let sit on cooling rack. Serve
warm if you don’t have to pick up someone from the airport.