Apron Anxiety (22 page)

T
here’s a bittersweet moment when I tell Shelley that I will be relocating to the El Royale at the end of the week and staying there for a few months until the middle of October. She’s sad that I’m upgrading from her living room earlier than planned, but happy that I’m staying longer in Los Angeles. I refuse to endorse any melodrama about my moving ten minutes away, and she’s over it by the time we finish the beef kabobs with pineapple that I improvise for our dinner.

My family swallows any disappointment over me missing the Jewish high holidays in New York and encourages me to stay in California for as long as I need. My father asks if I’ve been balancing my checkbook (the same question he’s asked, and I’ve lied about, since high school). My mother says she’ll mail me her favorite Rosh Hashanah recipes—honey cake, noodle kugel, and brisket—even though she still can’t believe that I’m seriously cooking. It kills me that I’ve been tooling around in the kitchen for over a year but haven’t had a chance to cook for them yet! They had planned to visit me in Washington, where I was going to wow them with some meals, but then things got bad with Chef … and that trip went down the drain.

I finally get Chef on the line to tell him everything that’s
going on (besides our self-imposed ban on talking, his cell was confiscated while filming the reality show). I first tell him about the
New York
magazine assignment, and then that I’m staying an extra two months. It’s not the most copacetic conversation, and he reiterates the fact that he never wanted this break and still doesn’t like it, but the news doesn’t detonate like I would have thought. He might have reacted differently had his next two months not entailed nonstop work and travel. We both know that even if I came home, he’d be gone most of the time. Returning in the middle of such a frantic schedule would be setting us up for failure.

After I assure him I didn’t sleep with Christopher Wagner to score the apartment, he concedes that I sound happy, which makes him happy. And he’s right. Not only do I have the Emmys coming up, but also a few more exciting assignments have surfaced. I’m covering
Food & Wine’s
Taste of Beverly Hills festival for one publication and researching the popularity of pupusas for another. They’re small assignments, but compared to the nothingness that was D.C., all the action has me generally euphoric. If I’m a West Hollywood cliché in my racerback tank tops and baggy, frayed jean shorts, drinking soy lattes and reading Patti Smith, so be it. Even though I’ve left behind Chef and our home, I feel closer to complete in California.

Shelley drives me to the El Royale the moment Christopher leaves for New York. The place is waiting for me in the most pristine condition—other than half a vanilla cupcake perfectly sanctioned on the kitchen counter. It must be his way of welcoming me to his kitchen.
This is his gift to help me find myself through cooking
. Shelley eats it and makes herself comfortable on a long, leather daybed, while I scour the kitchen. He has all the best basics—Tuscan olive oils, upscale dry pasta, jars of uncooked cannellini beans, homemade chicken stock in the
freezer, slow-roasted tomatoes in the fridge, and Valrhona dark chocolate staring into my soul. I don’t remember him having so many things in his pantry, and I wonder if he’s stocked his shelves just for me.

I’m dying to cook something, so I have Shelley drop me off at the supermarket down the street on her way back home. I pick up a whole chicken, some lemons, onions, and fresh herbs. Roast chicken, with some steamed summer asparagus, will be the perfect first meal at his apartment. Because I’ll have to walk a few long blocks home, I try to limit my purchases, but I can’t just breeze past the peaches and plums. It’s summertime in California, after all. I throw in some Greek yogurt, smoked almonds, a vat of Red Vines, a six-pack of beer, and some sparkling Pellegrino. This is an inventory well worth the back break.

In the long checkout line, a pang of sadness hits me, one that sneaks up on me every few hours since leaving Chef. It’s a fast and ugly earthquake that carries so much psychological weight: Chef and I have fallen apart; my career is a joke; my life is nothing; I am totally, pathetically, horrifically, atrociously, and unbearably alone.
Roast chicken for fucking one
.

A tear runs down my cheek and someone taps me on the shoulder. I am startled. A young Latino guy wearing construction clothes is standing there, extending a package of Keebler Fudge Stripes my way. I tell him, “I haven’t had one of those since I was a little girl!” He answers, “For you, miss.” We wait in the line together, smiling and eating cookies, until my eyes have dried and it’s my turn at the cash register. Licking the chocolate off my fingertips, I pay for my groceries and begin to walk away. But I stop and turn around to give the stranger a quick hug first. When things like that happen, you have to believe everything is going to be okay.

Later at home, I don’t make the roast chicken. It’s the first
time since landing in Los Angeles three weeks ago that I’ve had dinner alone, with no one watching, no one worrying, and I just want to sit in front of the TV with a Swiss cheese sandwich. So I cut a lime, crack open a Corona, and do just that.

Emmy weekend comes and I work my ass off. I hit all the major parties and interview television’s biggest stars. There’s a whole new level of access when you work for a magazine with such a good reputation, and I revel in the champagne toasts, swag bags, and Cinderella moments. I see so many actors from the shows that Chef and I would obsess over. If he were with me, we would have been literally holding each other up.

After a few days of around-the-clock red carpets, my feet are blistered, my head is exploding, and
New York
magazine is pleased with my reporting. They assign me more work immediately.
I’m in
. But first, I crawl into Paul-the-actor’s bathrobe, order in Chinese food, and crash. My body is bone tired, my brain is burnt, and my heart is in purgatory. Let there be pupu platters.

For seventy-two hours straight, I hibernate—catching up on sleep, sodium, laundry, and basic life skills like flossing my teeth and paying my phone bill. When I’m ready to resurface, I call “Auntie Lizzie,” my only family member living in Los Angeles, and I invite her over. My mother’s first cousin, she’s a real Temkin in her good-heartedness. When she moved to L.A. twenty years ago to become an actress, conquering California in a red Mustang convertible, I thought she was the coolest person on the planet. When she’d have cameos on
General Hospital
and
ER
, Rachel and I would make popcorn and scream, rewinding the VCR over and over again. Even though her acting career never reached superstardom, she’s forever my idol. She is the consummate “liver of life,” and I know she’ll understand the nature of an overly emotional couple like Chef and me.

Auntie Lizzie also
loves
food. She signs every e-mail, “Death by Chocolate, Lizzie.” So I go straight from bed to baking, determined to make something every bit as vibrant as she is. There’s a huge bag of cherries in the fridge, so I find myself a gorgeous-looking pie recipe in an Amish cookbook on a bookshelf. The proverbial cherry pie, I smirk to myself. She’ll love it. (She has a dirty mind like me!) The clock is ticking and I contemplate buying the crust … who’s going to know? But Auntie Lizzie is worthy of more than Sara Lee.

Alas, the homemade piecrust doesn’t come out quite right. Either I’ve overworked or underworked the dough, but there’s definitely not enough to cover the top. So I layer the bottom crust, cover it with the fruit filling, and then sprinkle whatever doughy scraps I can manage to find over the entire thing, hoping it will magically create a top crust and that my cherry pie will be less scantily clad. When it comes out of the oven, it looks amateur and sloppy. There’re random patches of top crust, but the fruit is oozing all over it. Calling it “rustic” would be extremely generous. So I think fast, work with what I’ve got, and turn my cherry pie into a cherry crumble by taking a spoon and gently mixing all the gooey fruit and cooked dough (from the top and bottom crust) together.
Crumble
. I have to laugh.

I dash out for some fresh peonies, and when I return to the apartment, I realize how amazing the place smells. I open the windows and French doors and play some James Taylor. The natural light is so stunning that it feels like a religious experience. This is the perfect scene for my Auntie Lizzie. When she walks in the door, I jump into her magnificently big boobs and warm embrace. I make coffee and serve us heaping plates of the still-hot crumble, topped with scoops of vanilla ice cream.
She digs in vigorously, only pausing to call my mom: “She can really bake, Lulu. I’m tellin’ ya!”

Because she’s family, Auntie Lizzie is the only person in L.A. I feel totally comfortable opening up to about my uncertain future with Chef. I explain to her that I have no strand of doubt that I genuinely love him, but that he hurt me tremendously by choosing work over the relationship and the wedding, and putting me through those many months of neglect toward the end.

Never short on words, she doesn’t have the answer. Does anyone? But she helps me release some mental toxins, and because of her visit I even learned how to turn a lousy pie into a luminous crumble. Hours of conversation later, I walk her to the door. We hug each other long and tight.