Author tells tales of love, loss and good food

In “I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti,” Giulia Melucci shares her stories of searching for Mr. Right, and shares the soulful Italian-American recipes that got her through many Mr. Wrongs. An excerpt.

I got a late start on the whole dating thing.

Kit Fraser was my first real boyfriend. He entered my life in January 1990, the day after I moved into my first New York apartment: an East Village sublet I shared with Jennifer Warren, a close friend from college. For the first eighteen months after graduation, I lived with my mother in the house where I grew up in Brooklyn. This was not exactly my ideal post college habitat; the transition to a place of my own had been delayed by my father’s death, which occurred simultaneously with the end of school. I was loath to leave my mother alone in that big gray stucco house, but I was also fed up with my two brothers using the basement for band practice while their girlfriends sat in the kitchen helping themselves to the provisions as if they owned the place. It was loud and it was uncomfortable. I had to get out.

That Monday morning, Lucy, my boss at Spy magazine, the legendary satirical monthly where I was employed as a picture researcher, said to me: “Now that you have a new apartment, you’ll probably get a new boyfriend.” What new boyfriend? I thought. There had never been an old one. Well, at least not for any significant amount of time.

Up until then, the only man I could honestly have called a boyfriend was Steve Sullivan, a local boy four years my senior whom I dated for about four weeks around the time of my sixteenth birthday. I remember this because Steve took me on a real grown-up date to a restaurant to celebrate and gave me a bracelet made of jade beads for a present. He wore a coat and tie — and I, a dress from Bergdorf Goodman. My mother played it free and easy with her stash of department store-specific charge cards in those days, sending me into the city,” as we called it, for shopping and haircuts at Bergdorf’s, the quintessence of elegance, on a regular basis. I would also have on my person a note in her scrawl explaining that I had permission to use the card, just in case anyone questioned me (they never did).

            ****

One evening on the piano bench, Steve declared that he was going to give it a go with the woman he had always wanted, Bernadette Corrigan. She was a big girl, a basketball player; her father owned a tugboat company, and their family had money. My father was a golfing buddy of Bernadette’s father and helped him get into the country club. (And this was the thanks we got!) Two months later, Bernadette was on the Sullivan stoop showing off the gifts Steve got her for her birthday — those Russian dolls that open up to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside, with the last doll containing a Claddagh ring (the Irish wedding band, though they weren’t engaged). I came up with imaginative reasons why this scene wasn’t an excruciatingly painful one for me to watch.

The year before I got together with Kit, I had been seeing a psychologist — a strict Freudian who resembled Cher — to get to the bottom of why, at twenty-three, I had never had a boyfriend for any significant amount of time and had not yet had sex. I was haunted by my lack of experience and convinced I would die a virgin. I felt alienated from my friends (late starters all, but I was the latest), who had been let in on some cosmic secret that remained a mystery to me. The odds were against me for more reasons than just my neuroses: I had gone to all-girls schools until college, and then to Sarah Lawrence, where the female-to-male ratio was four to one — really more like eight to one,  considering that the majority of the “ones” were gay. Every boy who wanted a girlfriend at Sarah Lawrence already had one or even two. It was survival of the fittest, and I was neither physically (I was a little plump) nor mentally (I was terrified) fit enough to compete with the willowy bohemian heiresses who surrounded me.

Without particularly wanting to, I remained the good Catholic girl. The only reputation I ever had was for being funny. The cruel truth that men might prefer to get their yuks in one place and their ya-yas in another was brought home to me in my thirteenth summer when I discovered that Tony Sirianni, my constant companion at the country club pool, was spending his nights on the golf course making out with Connie Cambria. Granted, Connie looked a lot better in a bathing suit than I did. At college, I spent countless late nights talking to boys I had crushes on, but the activities never went past conversation or, that great tease, listening to music. The sheets and my virtue always remained pristine when we parted in the wee hours. I didn’t know if I was doing something wrong, giving off some bad vibe, or misreading  whatever signal they were throwing.  I did know it had me totally flummoxed, a conclusion I could have drawn without a psychologist’s corroboration.

That was behind me now. A new decade was beginning; my boss and I decided to call it “the decade of love.” Her prediction concerning the change in my romantic status proved strangely prescient. That very afternoon, a hand-delivered letter arrived from Kit Fraser. I had met Kit three years earlier when he showed up unexpectedly at my family’s house one summer evening with Michael Petriano, the brother of my oldest friend, Larisa. She and her family had moved to New Jersey after first grade, but despite the distance, our friendship continued with regular weekend visits in New Jersey or Brooklyn right through high school. I enjoyed getting to experience the lures of suburbia — sundaes from Friendly’s and public school (with boys and no uniforms), to which I would accompany Larisa when I took a day off to see her. Larisa still lives in New Jersey, and we remain friends thirty-five years later. Michael was my first crush. When I was ten I would join him on his paper routes, getting up at five in the morning to have some time alone together, riding Larisa’s borrowed bicycle around the neighborhood. Michael was brilliant and incredibly funny, and for this he suffered. He had a nervous breakdown the summer after he graduated high school; the week he appeared on my doorstep with Kit, he had chosen to go off his meds, and in my childhood bedroom he ranted about the bomb he was going to create to eradicate evil from the earth, which would be controlled by a specially selected group of clerics and rabbis. Then he went to take a shower.

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While Michael was in the bathroom and my mother went about the house hiding sharp objects, Kit watched me unpack my books from the school year that had just ended. I talked to him about my current intellectual obsession, Dante, and played him an Aztec Camera record. According to Kit (I don’t remember this), I strung a bunch of tiny seed beads and tied them around his ankle. The evening stayed in Kit’s mind not just because of our friend’s odd behavior, but because of me. The bracelet stayed on his ankle until it fell apart, and when it did, he kept the pieces.

Two years later, while waiting for the elevator up to the Spy offices after lunch, I noticed a cute preppy guy wearing wire-rimmed glasses and an L.L. Bean hunting jacket waiting there, too. I wondered where he was going and became even more curious when he got out on my floor. He walked up to the receptionist and asked: “Is Giulia Melucci in?”

“I’m Giulia Melucci,” I said.

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