Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (2 page)

I was bad at pretending.

Reared by a single mother, who swore it was by choice but was never entirely convincing, I held up my maternal grandparents as my role models in love. James, my grandfather, was the local schoolteacher in their small village and my grandmother Bernadine was a wonderful housekeeper and cook. I visited them for at least two summer months each year as a child and benefited from the warmth they so clearly felt toward me, and each other. Their marriage provided my childhood with a structured, traditional environment so different from the permissive, unpredictable upbringing I had with my bohemian artist mother, Niamh. The long summer days spent with my grandparents were taken up entirely with simple household chores. James tending to his vegetable garden; Bernadine baking bread and allowing me to dust her kitchen in flour. My grandparents were not physically demonstrative, but their love was obvious in all the little things they did for each other.

Bernadine and James were married for fifty years, and I remember as a teenager wondering at the miracle of love that would keep two people together for almost three of my lifetimes. My grandmother outlived my grandfather by eight years. The legacy they left in my heart was an ambition to find a man with whom to have a relationship like theirs. A romance so strong that it could last out half a century.

I always knew that I wanted to be married. I dated losers and bastards and nice-but-not-right guys, but marriage was too important a stake to compromise on. I knew that much. Once or twice I fell in love and had to pull myself back from the brink of a big mistake. Although, looking back now, I realize that in love it is always better to follow your heart than your head.

In the end I married one of the nice-but-not-right ones because my head told my heart that this could be my last chance. Biology and opportunity conspired and conned me into a feeling like love. With Dan, it was never “The Real Thing,” and it needs to be. Fake love won’t last the course. It’s naïve to believe you can make it otherwise by wishing it so.

I was having one of those indulgent afternoons that you can have when you live alone. And I don’t mean the pampering “home spa” type that you see in the magazines. I mean the phone-off-the-hook, feeling-sorry-for-yourself kind. It didn’t happen very often, but maybe once a year (often around my birthday), I’d take the day off work and stay in bed feeling miserable. It was nothing as serious as depression—just my twisted version of “me” time. Other girls did meditation and yoga. I took to my bed with a quart of Jack Daniel’s and a six-pack of chocolate muffins. After twenty-four hours of watching off-peak TV, I would always emerge longing to see my friends and generally more content with my lot in life.

Being self-employed meant that sometimes I could indulge myself this way, without a boss to worry about. After a lucky break early on, I had worked my way up the food-magazine ladder: from kitchen assistant to recipe tester and food stylist’s assistant to senior food writer and stylist. Somewhere around five years ago, I became tired with the politics of publishing: the suits and the schmoozing and the drill of having to go into an office every day. I took a chance that I would get freelance work and on my thirty-third birthday resigned my post as senior food editor at America’s top food magazine. Within days I was approached by an agent and have since published three moderately successful cookbooks. I also design and test recipes for food manufacturers and enjoy a peculiar but nonetheless lucrative sideline as a kitchen design consultant for wealthy housewives. Tressa Nolan has always had a good reputation in the food industry, and there’s even been some interest in me from the Food Network.

So I was the archetypal child of the baby-boomer generation. Brilliant career, brimful of confidence, loads to offer—love life an unmitigated disaster. My decision to hibernate the day I met Dan had been triggered by the tail end of a hurt perpetrated by yet another jerk. After fifteen years as a food writer, you would think I might have learned about “up-and-coming chefs and photographers syndrome.” Those men whose delicate egos lead them to want to reveal any female colleague as flawed and weak. The only comfort to be had from being shit upon by male food “talent” was that there were so damn many of them they weren’t as unique or individual as they believed. Oh—and very few of them had talent. Except at getting unmarried thirtysomething women into bed, which, in my own sullied experience, took little more than two vodka martinis and less charm than I could ever admit to.

However, it is sobering for a woman to realize she is old enough and powerful enough to be career-climbed. Sobering enough, in any case, to justify a day off work getting drunk.

Ronan the chef was a classic nonromance. We had sex, I thought he would call, and he didn’t. He turned up two weeks later at a restaurant opening with a model on his arm. I tried to be cynical, but when you get to your late thirties, bitter looks too ugly so you have to absorb the hurt. It had been a petty puncture, but I was feeling deflated and sad when Dan walked into my life.

“Fire drill, ma’am...”

Our building supers changed every couple of years, largely because their allocated apartment was a dingy, windowless hole in the basement. Dan had been on the job only a week, and I had yet to meet him.

“Ma’am, I am going to have to ask you to participate in our fire drill.”

I hate to be called “Ma’am.” It makes me feel old and cranky.

“Ma’am, it is for your own safety.”

So I become old and cranky.

And in this case, also drunk.

I flung open the door, swayed for a moment, and said, “Can’t you see I am
busy?”
Then I waved my pajama-clad arms and closed the door on him.

As I was doing so, it hit me in a vast swell that our new super was incredibly handsome. Not just those acceptable looks that combined with personality can turn an average man into a real prospect. No, he had those ludicrous, chiselled, shaving-cream ad looks. The kind of looks you sweat over as a teenage girl, then grow out of as soon as you realize that male models are way out of your league.

Of course, an intelligent woman in her mid-thirties knows that looks are not important. Especially as she brushes the crumbs of her fourth chocolate muffin from the ridges of her Target flannel nightgown. It is what’s on the inside that counts, which, in my case, was apparently a lot of bourbon.

I must have seen something in Dan’s eyes during our few-seconds exchange, some germ of desire because—for no apparent reason—I decided to clean myself up a little. Not a full leg shave or anything as extreme as that, but through the drunken haze a bit of tooth and hair brushing went on and the nightgown got exchanged for something sexier, which, let’s face it, didn’t have to be much more than a clean pair of sweats.

Dan came back an hour later when the drill was over, and while I was not surprised at him calling back, I remember being shocked that he really was as handsome as I had first thought. More shocking still was the way that these melting hazel eyes were gazing at me with some undisguised lust/admiration combo. Like I was the most beautiful woman on earth. Nobody had ever looked at me like that before—well, because I am not a conventional beauty—and it made me feel like laughing. I invited him in and he hesitated by the door, like household staff at a duchess’s cocktail party.

Seducing Dan was the easiest thing I have ever done. Normally I sit back and wait to be asked. I don’t take much persuading, but I had never taken the lead before. This guy looked so nervous, so smitten, that it made me feel certain of myself. Confident.

The sex was fantastic; I won’t go into the details but he loved every inch of my body in a way that astonished me. He was heart-breakingly handsome, and there was something comforting and safe about being with him right from the start. I was deeply flattered, but I knew, deep down in my gut, that Dan was not my type.

I am attracted to intellects, not bodies, and we had nothing in common.

When I look back on it now I worry that I seduced Dan for no other reason than I felt dirty and drunk and lonely. Oh, and of course—because I could. A toxic combination that was eventually legitimized by our marriage.

Hardly grounds for a happy one.

That first afternoon of sex with Dan somehow extended itself into the comfort of a convenient relationship. It was good news or bad news, depending on how you looked at it. In the short term, Dan patched me up and made me feel better. But my feelings for him were always sullied by the bad guy before him. Even if the chef was a jerk there had been some chemistry between us, albeit the poisonous kind. Dan didn’t have that power over me. Although I knew he would never do anything to hurt me, sometimes I wished he would. Because surely it is better to feel hurt than to feel nothing at all.

Perhaps I am making things sounds worse than they were. I did have feelings for Dan—of course I did. When I married him, I thought I loved him.

Dan made me feel good. He was great in bed; I had confidence in my body around him. He thought I was gorgeous. He desired me and, I’ll be honest, that was something different for me. I love to cook and I love to eat, so I am on the heavy side. Not in a bad way—at least I don’t think so. But Dan was the first guy who I felt I didn’t have to hide from. He was always telling me how sexy, how smart I was; what a great cook I was, what a hot body I had. Right from the start, from that first afternoon, Dan Mullins was stone-mad crazy in love with me. He was so sure about marrying me, so clear and certain that he could make me happy, that I believed him.

After just three months he said, “Marry me.”

Not “Will you?” or “I think it would be a good idea if we got married.”

Just “Marry me. I know I can make you happy.”

No one had ever asked me before and part of me knew that no one would again. I was thirty-eight and I wanted to believe in something: in happy ever after, in him. So I said “yes.”

I allowed myself to get caught up in the arrangements even though I knew that they were not the point. The dress, the cake, the venue, the canapés: Getting married was the biggest, most glamorous photographic shoot I was ever going to organize. If I was using details as distractions, at least I had that in common with every other bride-to-be. It was such a big deal. Such an
event.
Everyone wanted a piece of me.

Doreen, my best friend the fashion editor, had her whole fashion team on me and they went into meltdown.

“A European bride—I mean, it’ll
be so
this season.”

“She’s Irish. It doesn’t count.”

“Why? Ireland’s in Europe? Isn’t it?”

“Physically, yes. Style-wise? It’s Canada.”

“Oh.”

“Get on to Swarovski; I’m thinking crystal choker to distract from that size ten ass.”

“And the rest!”

“We’ll have to get her down to an eight if she wants to wear white...”

I enjoyed playing the princess, all the fuss and frivolity. And it turned out to be just like in the magazines: the happiest day of my life.

Part of that was due to the bonding I experienced that day with my mother. Niamh flew into J.F.K. from London to be there. I had always wanted a conventional cookie-baking mother and she had always wanted a friend rather than a daughter. We didn’t clash; we just inhabited parallel worlds. Niamh and I had little in common. I was pragmatic and conventional, an inverted rebellion against her chaotic, promiscuous nature. She had followed her lecturer boyfriend to London five years earlier, where he took up a position at Oxford University and she played the part of his eccentric partner: all hippy clothes and dyed-purple hair, hoping to shock the unshockable English. I was hurt she had left me behind so easily—that there seemed to be no place in her life for a single, soon-to-be-middle-age daughter, and there was a minor estrangement. We spoke every couple of months on the phone, but I never had the urge to go and visit her and she always had an excuse not to come home on vacation. Five years had managed to pass without us having seen each other.

I had almost considered not inviting her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Niamh there; it was just that I guess, underneath the bravado of seeming not to care about her, I was afraid that if I invited her, she might not turn up. My mother stridently disapproved of marriage on principle and that she came at all was a revelation in itself. The night before the wedding, she met Dan, and after he had departed to his apartment my mother and I stayed up drinking in my suite in the Plaza.

“I like him,” she said once we were both tipsy enough to be honest, but not so drunk that we wouldn’t remember. “Although I know it’s not important what I think.”

I argued briefly before she said, “Bernadine would have approved.”

I wondered if she was right or if she was just saying it because she sensed some uncertainty.

“He seems solid,” she added.

It was a cop-out understatement. The wrong thing to say and the wrong time to say it. While I knew Niamh meant well in that moment, I longed with a fresh grief for my grandmother. It had been ten years since she had died, but my love and need for her still felt so alive. I wanted her to be there, not just so that I could get her approval of Dan but also because it did not feel right for me to be taking this big step without her.

Niamh seemed to sense that and said, “I miss her, too.”

Her eyes drowsy with drink, my mother reached across and took my hand.

“She still loves you,” she said, “and so do I.”

Niamh was into this afterlife stuff, which I had always believed was nonsense. But the soft tone of her voice led me to do something that I can remember doing only rarely as a child. I lay my head on my mother’s chest and waited there until the strange smell of her perfume and the unfamiliar touch of her blouse on my cheek faded, until everything dissolved but the comfort of being held by her. As Niamh stroked my face, I felt the instinctive care of generations of mothers before her seep through her hands. For a moment, I believed the strong arms of Bernadine were embracing me again.