I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (7 page)

I
was cocky when I broke up with Kit. For no good reason, I imagined that the long dateless slog I had endured from birth to
the age of twenty-three was well behind me. Kit, on the other hand, was quick to get into a new relationship, though from
what I gathered it had a sort of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
dynamic. It took longer for me to find the George to my Martha. In those lonely years, whenever I felt sad and uninterested
in food, I made myself pastina. Pastina, tiny pasta stars, is Italian baby food, or “baby’s first solid food,” as the Ronzoni
box says. My mother used to make this for me when I was a baby or whenever I was sick as a little girl. I always keep a box
of pastina in the house for whenever I’m not feeling quite right or not up to cooking. It is fast, simple, and terribly comforting.

Pastina

¼ cup pastina

¼ teaspoon salt

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 teaspoon butter

1 tablespoon freshly grated parmigiano

Freshly ground pepper

Bring 1 cup of water to a boil in a small saucepan, add pastina and salt, and cook until most of the water is absorbed, 3
to 4 minutes. Turn off heat and add the egg, letting it cook on the hot pasta, then add the butter, cheese, and a little pepper.

Serves 1.

When you’re single, the highs are high and the lows are low. You have opportunities for more excitement and pleasure than
any person in a committed relationship is ever going to have, and you may as well enjoy them as much as you can because the
rug gets pulled out from under you while you still think you’re riding high. And before all the married people start slamming
this book shut, I will concede that marriage might very well be as much of a blast, I just haven’t had the opportunity to
find out. What I do know is that the vicissitudes of dating get boring, or you get too old to partake of them, as I have,
or both, and you crave the stability of a permanent partnership. I’ve been craving it for a while now; it just hasn’t craved
me.

The four years that came between Kit and my next stable relationship included a lot of false starts—exciting beginnings, uncertain
middles, and crushing ends, all occurring in the span of a week or two. I took the abrupt endings hard, but I adored the initial
rush. I didn’t cook much in those years—on the rare occasions that I did make something for myself, my friends, or a date,
I’d think, Oh, I remember when I used to do this, I’m good at this—but mostly I dined out.

I got sad about Kit on a regular basis.

Ginia bore the brunt of it. She was the friend of a friend of a not-very-close college friend. We got to know each other at
a party in a Brooklyn backyard on a summer night in 1989. Ginia, an aspiring journalist, was working at a now defunct environmental
magazine called
Garbage
at a time when recycling was just a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye. We didn’t bond until a few years later when Ginia was at
Time
magazine writing the “People” page and I was a publicist at Penguin, desperate to get press for a party celebrating the publication
of Robin Leach’s
The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook,
a culinary atrocity featuring recipes by Kenny Rogers and Vanna White that I, by some stroke of bad fortune, had been assigned
to promote. In the days beforehand, my boss and I panicked over how to deal with the arrivals of the recently separated Ivana
and Donald Trump. Our worries were unwarranted, for neither showed up, but getting a
Time
writer there was a feather in my cap. As lovely as the flowing Taittinger champagne was, I couldn’t wait to get out. I grabbed
Ginia and we beat it over to Trader Vic’s, a Polynesian theme bar in the Plaza Hotel, where I imagined prep school boys plied
their dates with sweet drinks in the 1950s and that sadly no longer exists. Amid the tikis and lei-adorned waiters, Ginia
and I drank mai tais and talked for hours. I was still living with Kit, and I opened up to her about his possible alcohol
problem as I drank an impressive quantity of rum punch. She confessed to me her crush on Brad Meyerson, a friend who didn’t
say much—not about his soon-to-be-revealed devotion to her or, for that matter, anything at all.

Since that night, Ginia’s been my best friend. We have a lot in common: Her father was from Italy and was a sharp dresser
like my own. Her mother was born in the States of parents from Sicily, again, just like mine. People even say we look alike.
We can share conversation on the New York media world as well as memories of Christmas cassatas. But most of all, we like
to talk about dating. Ginia’s married now, so she has less to offer on that front. I manage to keep up the flow of stories.
She, too, is a brilliant cook who has served me a plethora of delicious meals while listening to tales of my many romantic
peaks and valleys.

The first one she had to live through was Serge, a Croatian translator I met on a book tour. As I sat in her Park Slope living
room and she served me polenta with mushrooms and Gorgonzola, I explained to her how he was my
passione grande.
I had convinced myself of this. I had to; he started talking about marriage instantly, and those were words I was dying to
hear, especially because Kit never mentioned them. I wanted Kit to want to marry me, even though I was pretty sure marrying
him was a bad idea. But after two months with Serge, I realized I couldn’t bear the sight of him, partially because he found
fault with the mildew on my shower curtain while he himself was squatting in a mouse-infested apartment on the Upper East
Side, but mostly because I was still in love with Kit. I cried most of the time I was with Serge; I cried when we were in
bed, I cried at Barneys when Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” came on while we were shirt shopping (Kit and I used to listen to
that album on drives up to Connecticut). I lost it, ran out of the store, and went home alone.

On the heels of that, I got into a long-distance relationship with a friend of a friend from Chicago. It began with a snappy
phone rapport established while I was still with Kit. When Tim visited New York, we discovered a sexual rapport as good as
the one we had on the phone. I was hesitant to get into a relationship that involved plane travel, but Tim pushed for it,
leaving me phone messages with convincing pleas like “To kiss you again would be my privilege.” That got me, but things went
south as soon as I began to fly west, which I did most of the time, because Tim was afraid of flying.

I dated a Rhode Island WASP who never ate when we went out. “I like to keep my edge,” he explained. Less concerned with being
dull than with being hungry, I would eat before seeing him, since we usually met well after dinnertime anyway. He resembled
a J.Crew model and had slept with half the women in publishing. One morning when I woke up at his apartment, the phone rang;
when he finished the conversation, he told me I had to leave because some woman—whom “I could meet someday but not today”—had
no hot water and needed to come over to take a shower. I decided that today—not someday—would be the end of us.

There was a summer romance with a much younger neocon who at twenty-one was writing op-ed pieces for
The Wall Street Journal.
He took a lot of drugs for a conservative, but he was frightfully intelligent. He’d FedEx twenty-page love letters from his
downtown office to my uptown office. I wish I had kept them, but I didn’t because they were sort of creepy. In them he reported
his dreams of me, one of which had me clicking my heels three times and getting swept away in ecstasy. I broke up with him
when he had to go back to the University of Chicago for one more semester, a fact he had neglected to mention while we were
seeing each other. He wrote a last note about an injured deer he saw on the side of the road. He and his friends stopped and
tried to help it, but it had to be put down. He compared that violence with the required action he needed to take with his
love for me.

I became convinced I would marry a satirical writer from a wealthy family—who resembled the teenage David Helfgott, the mentally
ill piano prodigy, or at least the actor who played him (not Geoffrey Rush, but the younger one) in the movie
Shine
—from the moment our blind date was scheduled, a month before we were to meet. I became so obsessed with this man and with
getting everything right on the date that I actually had a telephone consultation with one of the authors of
The Rules,
the phenomenally successful dating guide based on fifties-era wisdom. I got this privilege for free from a friend who was
the publicist for the book. Then the night I met him, I broke the cardinal rule. I slept with him, and it played out just
the way those yentas predicted it would.

I went on a few dates with a guy whose last name I never caught, who after the third date left me a message announcing that
he was going out of town forever. This seemed like an unnecessary nicety.

Though my cooking had slowed down outside of relationships and domesticity, I was keeping up with my eating. There is one
treat in particular that evokes for me the more upbeat moments of those years. It’s something I call the Victory Breakfast.

Even if I wanted to make it for myself, I wouldn’t be able to: I’m much too hung over. No, the Victory Breakfast is best prepared
at a New York deli or coffee shop; it is the bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll that many urbanites have every morning. I allow
myself such a decadent treat only rarely. In those years of delayed adolescence, it was what I ate the morning after a fun
night out, followed by a make-out session with a sexy but unavailable guy, preferably accompanied by one hundred cigarettes.

The Victory Breakfast is just the thing to settle the stomach after such a night. The name came to my mind while I was waiting
on the preparation of one the morning after a long night spent with a dashing war reporter whose novel I was promoting. Ian
and I met for drinks to talk about business one August evening. He lived around the corner from me, so we met at the bar down
the street, an old Victorian wood-paneled room with lots of long mirrors and carved wood. I wore a similarly gothic Cynthia
Rowley skirt, a yellow damask mini, with a white tank top and matching cardigan slung around my neck.

Ian was holding a bar stool for me when I showed up for our seven o’clock meeting promptly at 7:05. We ordered two pints of
Brooklyn Lager. Ian smoked like a madman, and at the time, I smoked like a madwoman whenever I was sitting at a bar with a
guy who smoked. Ian told hilarious stories of his stepmother, who had been promoted from nurse to wife after his mother’s
death but continued to call her husband “boss.” He had a strange fascination with the details of Mussolini’s execution; and
he had seen war and suffering and had taken risks. As we drank beer after beer after beer, I went through the few cigarettes
I had on me, then moved to his manly Winstons. Until two in the morning we glided away on nicotine, hops, and conversation.
I hadn’t eaten a crumb, neither had Ian, and seeing as there was nowhere to get dinner at that hour, I invited him to my apartment
for, what do you think?

I hadn’t lost touch with myself so much that my pantry didn’t contain a few cans of Italian tomatoes and boxes of pasta, various
brands: De Cecco, purchased on days I felt flush; Barilla, purchased on the days I felt broke; even one or two boxes of Ronzoni
that must have been on some big sale. I always had a hunk of parmigiano in the refrigerator and a few bottles of wine on a
rack over the sink. I pulled out a red and poured Ian and myself a glass (as if we really needed to drink more).

We ate the pasta in the little dining nook I had created in a niche in my apartment. Ian had seconds. Did he know those strands
had strings attached? Back on the sofa, I made my move: “It’s four in the morning and you’re on my couch, when are we going
to make out?” I asked.

Ian was a gentleman, so he complied a bit, but he had a girlfriend, he told me, and he promised her he wouldn’t cheat. (I
don’t know if I would trust a guy who promised he wouldn’t cheat, but that wasn’t my problem.) Ian didn’t cheat, he managed
me and my expectations with grace, somehow leaving intact the brazen confidence that inspired such a bold remark from me.

It wasn’t the first time—or, sadly, the last—I was to use such an aggressive come-on. Before Kit, I remained unkissed at the
end of nearly every evening I spent with a man who interested me, and in college my friends got tired of hearing me gripe
about getting nowhere with every guy I liked. When I found myself alone with Elliot Goldkind, a budding composer and one of
the few great-looking straight guys on campus, I couldn’t let the opportunity pass without trying something. We had stolen
a bottle of wine from a college-sponsored cocktail party and went back to his dorm room, where we talked and laughed about
our shared deviance for hours. I was sitting on his bed, and he was sitting at his desk chair, and I just couldn’t leave his
room without having more to report. “My friends are going to kill me if I don’t make out with you,” I said somewhere around
four in the morning. Elliot didn’t take that line with as much sportsmanship as Ian had a similar one so many years later.
He told me I had ruined the fun night we were having.