I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (4 page)

Spaghetti Carbonara

3 slices bacon, cut into ½-inch pieces

12 ounces dry spaghetti

3 eggs

¼ cup freshly grated pecorino, plus a little more for passing

¼ cup freshly grated parmigiano, plus a little more for passing

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

Fry the bacon until it is almost crispy, then drain on a plate lined with paper towels.

Cook the pasta according to the directions
here
. Meanwhile, in a large heatproof bowl or serving dish, lightly beat
the eggs and add the cheeses.

When the pasta is cooked, drain it in a colander and add it to the bowl with the eggs in cheese. Toss the pasta with the egg
mixture, letting the eggs cook on the hot pasta (they may not be completely cooked; I like the creaminess of the not-fully-cooked
egg, but if you don’t like that idea, throw it all in a skillet over low heat and let it cook a little), then add the bacon.
Taste and add salt, if needed, and a few grindings of pepper.

Divide the pasta into warmed bowls.

Serves 2, with leftovers.

I was elated every time I made something that turned out well; it seemed to happen so frequently that I was elated a lot!
I was discovering a talent I hadn’t known I possessed. Kit enjoyed what I made, but he couldn’t relate to my excitement. My
boyfriend, a man of infinite curiosities, did not count food among them. He could wake up one morning needing to know everything
there was to know about Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes; the next day it might be the Merz collages of Kurt Schwitters.
I got secondhand enrichment from his ever changing obsessions but was truly disheartened when he told me that, like his father
before him, he wished he could just take a pill for nourishment and be done with it. The news brought home a deep divide between
us. I lived to eat. Kit preferred to take in the majority of his calories through alcohol.

I got my first inkling of the problem when I arrived at his apartment early one evening to find him already most of the way
through an oil can of Foster’s Lager, with another on deck. This seemed like an awful lot of beer, but I didn’t say anything—I
just tucked away the information, where it popped out from time to time for me to worry about.

Kit got his dream job at
Rolling Stone
magazine right around the time I got laid off from
Spy
—he pulled himself away from his own going-away party to rush over to my apartment with ice cream to cheer me up. Though I
didn’t do much at
Spy,
I was proud to have a spot on the magazine’s masthead. I had worked my way up from receptionist (or “publishing assistant”)
to photo researcher and then public relations assistant, and although it was fun to call up gossip columns and place items
about whatever celebrity the magazine was lambasting that month, what I really wanted to be was an editor. But at twenty-four
I believed myself too old to change direction. I immediately got another job in publicity at Kit’s old workplace, Atlantic
Monthly Press. Anton, one of the editors, called me “Super-Duper” or sometimes just “Super,” because when Kit and I first
started dating, he asked Kit how his girlfriend was and Kit said, “Super-duper!” Everyone there thought Kit and I were adorable—but
not so adorable that I didn’t get laid off yet again when Atlantic was sold less than a year into my tenure.

The difficult economy of the early nineties was taking its toll on my career. Meanwhile, Kit was thriving at
Rolling Stone,
where his responsibilities included babysitting his idol, Hunter S. Thompson, the magazine’s national affairs editor, whenever
he came to town. That job entailed ordering pitchers of Bloody Marys for “King Gonzo” to drink while he had his bath at the
Carlyle Hotel or picking up a cocaine supply from his dealer. Kit was in heaven; he talked about Hunter incessantly, mostly
to my acute boredom. I got another publicity job at another publisher, where my work consisted of promoting authors as lofty
as Edna O’Brien and as lowbrow as Joan Collins, neither of whom ever asked me to get them drugs—though once Joan Collins tried
to get me to cancel one of her book signings at a Costco because there were “fat people” there.

The spring after Kit and I started dating, my mother sold the house in Bay Ridge, moved into a nearby apartment, and bought
another house on the Long Island Sound in Connecticut—a house where her sister, my aunt Marie, who never married and worked
in Greenwich, could live full-time and all of us could gather on holidays. I never really liked the Connecticut house all
that much; it could never compare with the one we had. Losing that place truly finalized the loss of my father. Kit was there
with me as I took in the sight of those empty halls, their parquet floors clouded with the dust from magnificent old carpets
that were taken away and put into storage. He knew exactly how I was feeling and helped me carry some of the weight of it.

Still, since our apartments were a little depressing, Kit and I spent many weekends in Connecticut. He never showed up without
a bouquet of flowers for my mother, who worshipped him from the moment she heard his voice from her bedroom that first night
he came to see me. He clinched his hold on her affections by showing endless enthusiasm for her favorite card game, May I?

Kit and I drove all over Fairfield County, exploring.

One of our greatest finds was a shack of a restaurant even Kit was crazy about called Tacos or What? It was run by a middle-aged
hippie and staffed by cute hippie teenage girls; the place always felt slightly unsavory to me, but the burritos were savory
enough for me to let it slide. We never did find the house where Scott Fitzgerald (Kit’s favorite writer) and his wife, Zelda,
lived for a summer on Compo Road in Westport, though we drove up and down that street dozens of times looking for it.

Besides tacos with a special yellow hot sauce only regulars knew about (“the yellow death”), there was one other food that
could delight Kit almost as much as gin-soaked olives: bacon. On those weekends, my mother and my aunt and I collaborated
on big breakfasts. Aunt Marie made scrambled eggs with perfect curds and just the right hue, and my mother baked blueberry
muffins dipped in melted butter and dusted with sugar, a recipe of her mother’s. Kit took care of the bacon preparation, while
I assisted.

Nana’s Blueberry Muffins

Butter, softened, for greasing muffin tins

1¾ cups self-rising flour

¼ cup sugar

¼ cup milk

6 tablespoons melted butter

1 egg

1 cup blueberries

1 tablespoon butter (optional)

¼ cup sugar (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Butter muffin tins.

Mix flour and sugar, stir in the wet ingredients, then add the blueberries. Spoon batter into muffin tins, filling each cup
about three-quarters full. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then remove to a cooling rack.

While the muffins are still a little warm, melt 1 tablespoon butter and pour it onto a saucer. Place ¼ cup sugar on another
saucer. Dip the muffins in the butter, then the sugar. This step is optional, but I highly recommend it.

Yield: 9 muffins; recipe can be doubled.

The Lower East Side we inhabited was a far cry from what it is today. To get from my apartment on Avenue A to Kit’s on Avenue
B, we had to walk through Tompkins Square Park, then a “tent city” inhabited by the homeless. My block was a drug thoroughfare,
which, ironically, kept it safe. (The drug dealers saw to it that no muggings occurred, thus keeping police attention away
from their territory.) Kit’s block was so remote that even the drug dealers stayed away; he was mugged a few times. One day
while riding the subway together and grumbling about our living situations, out of the blue I suggested we find a place together
in Brooklyn. He agreed with instant and effusive eagerness. With Kit, the big things were easy. We began our apartment search.

“I want to live here with you. I want to make you stews,” said Kit in the most adorable voice as we were driving around Boerum
Hill, the Brooklyn neighborhood where we hoped to find a place to rent. He was a little tanked. The only time he ever cooked
for me was after the first night I slept over at his place. That morning, he fried up bacon and scrambled eggs in the fat
left behind. I cleaned my plate, then griped about how full I was and how fat I felt. When I later reminded Kit about the
stews he promised, he told me that he would never cook for me again because the one time he tried all I did was complain.
I don’t know any woman who would have felt differently after those eggs, but maybe I could have hidden it better. Still, I
may have been a bit of a battle-ax in the first blushes of our love, but I deserved forgiveness—and maybe even a little stew.

That was probably the only jerky thing Kit ever said to me, and he said it stone-cold sober; Kit was an absolute sweetheart
when he was drunk. Which left me confused about the extent of his problem. Don’t alcoholics yell and slap you around when
they’ve had a few too many? Kit wasn’t like that at all. He would tell me I was beautiful (he did that even without alcohol).
He’d say he wanted to crawl into the little scar above my right eyebrow and live there for the rest of his life.

Instead, we moved into the second floor of a one- hundred-year-old brownstone on one of the prettiest blocks in Brooklyn.
The place was positively cheery, with big windows that looked out on trees and let in an abundance of light. It had two marble
fireplaces (one even worked), the floors were dark wood, and the walls retained their original carvings and cornices. The
enormous bathroom had a pedestal sink, an old-fashioned claw-footed tub, and wood wainscoting. Alas, the only thing that wasn’t
wonderful about that apartment was the kitchen. It consisted of a few slapdash cabinets, a small electric stove, and a noisy
refrigerator placed in a corner of the living room.

With little money to spend, we outfitted that sorry space with bottom-of-the-line pieces from Ikea. A set of “camping cookware”
set us back $10, but it had everything I needed: a big pot to boil pasta, a small skillet to make sauce, and two saucepans,
one big and one smaller. A six-piece knife set with a block cost twelve bucks. I was, in effect, cooking with toys, but I
managed to conjure up fantastic meals on my crap stove. I learned that you do not need fancy cookware and a restaurant-grade
range to make delicious food; the only true essentials to good cooking are fine ingredients and a sense of how to use them.
This you get from cooking on your own, watching others, and eating as many different types of food and preparations as you
can. Other than that, the only absolute necessity is a heat source and something heatproof to put your ingredients in: nothing
much more sophisticated than what our ancestors came up with in their caves.

Even with just twelve inches of counter space, living together—to me—meant a serious commitment to making dinner. I called
Kit every afternoon to get his thoughts on what we might have. He could not have been less interested in these discussions.
Kit’s mother, Dolores, met the same resistance I did in getting her son to care about food. Every month she mailed him a box
of homemade rhubarb sticky buns or chocolate-chip cookies. He never touched them—so I did, unable to bear the thought of that
woman’s efforts going to waste. Kit arrived in New York with a potato masher and a little spiral notebook filled with his
mother’s recipes written in her perfect cursive. He liked when I made her meat loaf, though I was a bit skeptical at first.
The ingredients Dolores listed did not alarm me—my own mother used onion soup mix in her meat loaf—but I was put off by her
direction to “frost” it with ketchup and mustard. I tried to eliminate that step, but Kit insisted I make it exactly the way
“Mama Fraser” had written it. I gave in, and the mixture made a thick coating that I had to admit was kind of tasty.