Author tells tales of love, loss and good food

Kit, who later purported to have been infatuated with me from the moment he met me, had forgotten what I looked like when he came to find me. I, in turn, was unaware that I had spent hours with the guy I had been checking out on the elevator. Kit, fresh out of Georgetown, was staying with the Petrianos in New Jersey until he could find his own place in New York. When he landed a job at Atlantic Monthly Press, a small independent publisher whose young, hard-partying editors were often skewered in the pages of Spy, Larisa told him his office was right next door to mine. Standing next to the reception desk, he invited me to a party with him and Michael that weekend. I couldn’t go — nor did I want to. I could tell Kit was interested in me, ergo I wanted nothing to do with him. But I did notice when I didn’t hear from him over the next few months. Then the letter arrived, the day after I moved out of my mother’s house, the perfect day for such a letter. “New apartment, new boyfriend.” I was ready. I called him right away, and we made a lunch date for that Thursday.

  ****

I have yet to see another apartment quite as grim as Kit’s. It featured a tiny windowless room that was bathroom, kitchen, living room, and home office all in one. Off to the left was a bigger room with a window that appeared to look out onto something other than bricks but was off-limits because it was crammed full of stuff that belonged to the guy Kit was subletting from. There was a minuscule bedroom, not much larger than the size of a twin bed, with a window that looked out onto an air shaft where pigeons gathered and squawked.

Kit had done his best to cheer up the place. The walls were lined with appealingly haphazard decor — a boomerang, a tear sheet of an ad from the 1920s depicting an older man and a younger one on bikes: “Father and son on a chummy run.” I tried the snuff, and later that night I tried some other things I hadn’t tried before.

“My pillow smells like your perfume,” read the hand delivered note that arrived the next day. No more romantic words have been written to me before or since. I wondered if there might be something off about Kit. He seemed truly smitten with me, and that kind of thing just didn’t happen. I can count on my breasts the number of times I have missed a meal, but for several days after that date I ate next to nothing. Picking at a salad on an emergency date-analysis lunch with my roommate, Jen, the next day, I tried to describe Kit. By this time I was in full self-sabotage mode, and it had completely colored my memory of his physical attributes. I found the gooniest looking guy in the vicinity of the restaurant and pointed to him. “He looks like that,” I said.

“No, he doesn’t!” Jen, knowing me well, retorted.

“Okay, maybe not so bad, but something like that.”

If my own eyes were not to be trusted, I could have been clued in by other events that there was something unforgettable about Kit. Apparently, every woman he had ever known remained hung up on him. When I first started staying at his place, nary a night went by when there wasn’t a call from his college girlfriend. (Turned out they were still dating as far as she was concerned, but that’s a story for her book.) Even an old high school flame from North Dakota rang in the middle of the night on a weekly basis.

In spite of my anxieties, we became a couple. Kit, for his part, did nothing to exacerbate them. He left no doubt that he was serious about me. He always called when he said he would. He carried my bag if it was heavy whenever we walked anywhere. He was delighted to take the hour-long train ride to my mother’s house in Bay Ridge, even to spend just an hour, if that’s where I happened to be on a Saturday evening. In the beginning, the only problems were mine. This introduction to love and sex was frightening to me, so I invented problems to give substance to fears I couldn’t understand. For the first month I convinced myself I was pregnant, even though I was hyper vigilant about birth control and the chances of this were slim. Then I decided Kit was gay when I lost track of him and his friend Matt at a party. I didn’t even have the sense to keep my worries to myself. I brought them all to Kit, who put up with my neuroses like a saint.

Another new world, one less wrought with conflict, was opening to me at this time. That one existed in the kitchen of my new apartment, where a stove and oven of my own brought out a previously unacknowledged desire to cook. The kitchen to which I had recently bade farewell was strictly my mother’s domain, filled on Sunday mornings with the perfume of meat frying for the traditional Sunday ragù. As a child I would have a just cooked, perfectly seasoned meatball for breakfast — with bright green parsley peeking out of juicy meat, it tasted even better than the one I’d have that evening in the finished sauce. On weeknights, she might make a lamb stew with baby artichokes and fava beans; baked lemon sole covered in fresh bread crumbs; or — plainer, but no less delicious — roast beef with gravy and mashed potatoes.

My mother, Janet, was first-generation Italian-American born in Brooklyn; my father, Nicola, came from the south of Italy to the States to establish a medical practice. They settled in Brooklyn and had five children: three girls and two boys, of whom I am the youngest. Despite clichés about the emotional Italian sensibility, my parents did not fling around the hugs and the I-love-yous. On the other hand, when they were angry with us, we knew it. Dad worked hard and Mom fed us well; those were the main avenues in which we could discern their love and commitment to our well-being. When my father wasn’t seeing patients until late in the evening, elaborate three-course dinners were the rule. At our round kitchen table, topped with a brightly patterned fabric tablecloth and matching napkins, we always began with a pasta dish, followed by meat or fish and a vegetable. My mother is Sicilian, which to her means a meal is not complete until you have “something sweet.” She is dogged in her pursuit of the best desserts and will drive any distance if she hears there’s a good bakery hidden somewhere in the tristate area. If she wasn’t just back from one such expedition, she’d whip something up: a coconut custard pie, a chocolate bundt cake, or moist ricotta fritters covered in powdered sugar.

Having a home to me has always meant food in the refrigerator. My roommate, Jen, and I were on the same page about that. Jen, who is Jewish and grew up in Westchester, loves to eat as much as I do (in fact, I wouldn’t be friends with anyone who doesn’t), and she can testify to my mother’s talents. She still rhapsodizes about the many weekends she spent at my house when we were in college and my father was still alive and my mother cooked phenomenal meals. If we missed dinner because we had been out for a night of drinking or dancing at some Manhattan club, we knew we could count on a cache of leftovers waiting in the refrigerator when we returned. I knew of no other family who ate the way ours did. One night we arrived to find my brother Nick and his friend John already well into the raid.

“What are you having?” I asked them, a little worried that there would be nothing left for us.

“I’m having the swordfish, and Nick’s having the chocolate cheesecake,” said John, his voice filled with wonderment. He felt he’d discovered gold — I knew it was just what you might find at our house on any given night.

The first evening in our new apartment, after settling our things, Jen and I went out and shopped for groceries at the overpriced “gourmet” store up the street. When we returned, I dropped a bag containing a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil we could scarcely afford. The glass shattered and the oil spilled all over the kitchen floor. Jen grabbed a mop; I called my mother immediately because I knew she would sympathize with this tragedy. It was the first of many calls I would be making to my mother to announce a culinary mishap. Over the years, I have sought her advice on substituting self-rising flour for all-purpose flour (the remedy is on the package); I’ve asked her how to save homemade gnocchi I removed from the water too soon (they can’t be saved) and what to do if the roast needs another hour and my guests have already been sitting around for an hour eating olives and cheese (just keep pouring drinks). My mother would also be receiving more than a few calls about my romantic failures, but she has fewer clear answers to these.

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