A Homemade Life (16 page)

I
've never liked the word
blog.
It's kind of weird and lumpy. When you say it, it tumbles out of your mouth with an unbecoming thud. Plus, the whole concept is a little weird: a Web site where a person can write about whatever they want to, inviting comments and feedback from the whole world. At their best, blogs are smart, funny, and informative. At their worst, they're blush-worthy rants written at 2:00 a.m. after a bad breakup.

I tried to steer mine somewhere in between. I write about food and cooking, and in that sense, I aim to be informative, but I write about my life some, too, since it intersects with food roughly three times a day. I don't think many of us are terribly interested in recipes that have no stories or real-life context. For me, the two are inseparable. One is pale and boring without the other.

But still, having a blog is strange. I never know whether to be proud (
I'm young and hip! I'm
with it!
I have a blog!
) or sheepish (
So, uh, yeah, I have, uh, a blog? I take pictures of my dinner. But enough about me! Let's talk about
you.). It's a classic love-hate relationship. And like the human-to-human kind, the human-to-blog kind is oddly addictive. It's hard to beat the rush that comes when you press “Publish,” sending your words out into the ether, or the satisfaction that stems from someone leaving a comment on your site. There's always a twinge of fear—
Will anyone read this? Will I alienate all my friends?
—but so long as it's only a twinge, it's tolerable. Delicious, even.

I guess you could say that having a blog is a little like the windows of a house I used to live in during my sophomore year of college. I loved opening them wide during the day, so that the smell of the eucalyptus trees outside could drift in and sweep out the rooms. But occasionally I would come home and find a squirrel on my desk. A live squirrel. He would have climbed up the tree outside and jumped in through the window, and now here he was, rifling with his tiny, scratchy claws through whatever he found, tearing up every paper and scrap. Blogging is a little like that. It's an incredible pleasure to open the window, to put yourself out in the world that way. It's even better than the scent of eucalyptus. But occasionally you come home and find a squirrel on the desk, so to speak: a nasty comment, maybe, or even worse, something you wrote yourself, probably late at night, when you should have been sleeping, something that makes your cheeks hot.

I didn't know what to expect when I started Orangette. But I certainly didn't expect the e-mail that flew in through the window on April 3, 2005.

Well. This was certainly something new. I wasn't sure how to feel. He could be anyone. For all I knew, he could be twenty-two and an underwear model, or he could be eighty-two, with sweaters that smell like mothballs. Even worse, he could be some sort of Internet serial killer, stalking his prey among the food blogosphere, following the scent of banana bread and Ed Fretwell soup.

But I was strangely intrigued.

He's a musician,
I thought. I like music!

He's a composer.
He must be smart!

He mentioned Balthazar. How bad could he be?
I'd had a terrific meal there once, cold seafood and a beet salad, on a trip to visit my sister. It was big and bustling, French to the core, all polished wood and tile and café tables.

I had no idea who this person was, and the mention of this Meredith girl made me suspicious—was she his girlfriend, or what?—but still, I was intrigued. I decided to write back. I'd write a little low-key letter, just to say thank you, and maybe ask about his music. That's all.

See that bit about the symphony? Total lie. I don't know what got into me. I didn't know whether to pat myself on the back—
go get 'em, girl!
—or to punch myself in the eye. In the end, I did neither. I sat by the computer all day, waiting for his name to appear in my inbox. And that night, it did.

Oh my. This was very interesting. This was very good. Ladurée? Pierre Hermé? And Crêperie Suzette? That place was a ten-minute walk from my old apartment. I used to pass it almost every day. Sometimes, especially in the winter, I would stop at the to-go window for a hot crêpe smeared with apricot
confiture.
It came folded in a thin paper sleeve, and I would eat it as I walked, holding it in one hand and my soggy umbrella in the other. I had forgotten how much I loved that.

I kind of liked this guy.

So I sent another letter, and he, for his part, replied. Then there was another, and another. Soon he knew that my mother was an identical twin, that she had once owned a brown faux-fur dress and wore it to a Christmas party where she danced with the man who would become my father, and that I was conceived in Marin County, California. He knew that I used to have a T-shirt from Marin Brewing Company, a brewery near the town where my parents did the deed, that said BREWED IN MARIN across the back, and that I loved it, because I was. Soon I knew that his parents were former hippies and that he had been a vegetarian since birth; that he had been in a serious long-term relationship that had
ended about a year before, in Paris; and that he was conceived in Allendale, New Jersey.

“Every time we passed a particular house, my mom would say, ‘Did you know you were conceived there? Right in that little white house?' This was before I even knew what it meant to be conceived.”

I really liked this guy.

One day, he happened to mention that he'd been on Friendster, the major social networking site at the time, and that, oh, what a small world, one of his friends was So-and-So, who was friends with another So-and-So, who was a friend of mine. I was never a big fan of Friendster, but I certainly did love it that day, when I logged onto my account and clicked through, friend to friend to friend, to Brandon's profile, where he'd posted two photographs of himself.

In the first, he was halfway out of the frame, smiling and seemingly laughing. He had hazel eyes and brown hair that fell in loose curls to his earlobes. There was a good-sized freckle on his left cheek, next to a dimple—he had dimples! on both sides!—and he had nice white teeth. (My mother always told me to look at the teeth.) The second shot was in black and white. He was looking squarely at the camera, mouth relaxed and lips slightly parted, and wearing what appeared to be lightly tinted, John Lennonesque glasses and that same, lovely, messy hair. I could forgive him for the glasses, I decided, because of that hair. He was adorable. He was handsome. He was hot. I wrote him another letter.

But I was starting to get nervous. I still hadn't heard his voice, and for all I knew, he could be some frisky teenager, setting up a very elaborate ruse. I really didn't think so, but still. Also, I had noticed in his Friendster profile that under “Hobbies and Interests,” the first item listed was “dinner parties.” I'd never heard a straight man say such a thing. I was worried. Then again, he also listed as interests “hot sauce,” “beer,” “bread,” “bourbon,” “anything with the consistency of salsa,” and “thinking too much.” I decided to give him my phone number.

The next night, he sent me a text message that read, simply, “Baby steps…” I was a goner. Using the number in my cell phone memory, I
called him the next afternoon, and we talked for three and a half hours. Three days later, he called to tell me that he was coming to Seattle. He'd been out in New Jersey, he said, visiting his parents, and his father happened to mention that he was taking a business trip to Seattle in a week or so, and would Brandon like to come along? He could get a companion fare. It would be easy.

So it was that on April 25, barely three weeks after that first e-mail, I walked into the lobby of the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle, where his father had booked a room, and met Brandon. He was about 5'10'', wearing a leather jacket the color of dark chocolate and a pair of old jeans. His smile was bigger, giddier, than in the photograph, and his hair was wild and curly, just brushing his shoulders. He was still wearing those weird glasses, but
the hair,
people,
the hair.
I wore my favorite jeans and my purplish leather ankle boots with the pointed toes, the ones I call my Peter Pan Boots. We eyed each other shyly, grinning, as I walked toward him through the revolving doors. I was so nervous that I could hardly see straight. He discretely looked me up and down (a move he still denies, though we both know he did it) and wrapped me in an enormous hug. He is a very good hugger.

Then I realized that I'd forgotten to put money in the parking meter. I told him to hold on, that I would be right back, and I ran, my boots slap-slapping the pavement, down the block to the car. It occurred to me only as I was walking back to the hotel, trying to catch my breath and checking to make sure that I hadn't sweat through my shirt, that he might think I'd fled the scene.

If he did, he didn't say a word. He was waiting, smiling, on a bench in the lobby, with a shoulder bag at his feet. We walked out onto the street, yelling over the noise of the monorail above, and I pointed us toward the new downtown library. It had opened not long before, and it was impressive, a massive, misshapen Rubik's Cube on a hill amidst the skyscrapers. Talking all the while, we absentmindedly took it in, the mezzanine with its curving red hallways, the chartreuse escalators. On the top floor, under the sloping windows, we sat in foam chairs that looked like Lego bricks and talked about home
towns and secrets. He told me that as a kid, he used to shoplift candy bars and eat them in the bathroom, because his mother wouldn't let him have them. In high school, he confessed, he sang in a rock band called “Um….” I admitted that I'd been a debutante in the Oklahoma City Beaux Arts Ball. I am not really debutante material, but the chair of the selection committee that year was the mother of my senior prom date Billy, and I think she had something to do with it. My invitation was nearly revoked when I showed up for bow practice the day before with my nose pierced, but on the night of, no one said a word, and I got to come out, my arm looped over my father's, in my big white dress. My mother occasionally still runs into people who remember me as The Girl Who Got Away with a Nose Piercing at the Beaux Arts Ball. As far as secrets go, my debutante days lie at the dark end of the spectrum, but Brandon didn't flinch. We bought cups of gelato and sat on the Harbor Steps, facing the water, and talked some more. Then we went to Pike Place Market to buy ingredients for dinner.