Blue Plate Special (36 page)

Every day, I packed myself a lunch—a sandwich of sardines and mustard on rye, roasted nuts and dried fruit, a Styrofoam container of instant black-bean or lentil soup to which I later added hot water from the coffeemaker’s carafe—and walked the mile and a half from our loft in Williamsburg over to Greenpoint, along the waterfront’s angled, industrial streets with astoundingly beautiful views of Manhattan and the sky above it. In my workroom, I sat at my grandfather’s old desk—an old door on two heavy wooden filing cabinets. It was there that I began writing what would become my third novel,
The Epicure’s Lament
.

That winter, it was too cold to write in my unheated north-facing room, so I moved my desk into a smaller room at the front of the house that was filled with warm sunlight on clear days. Just outside my new window was a huge old chestnut tree whose bare branches were inhabited by a plump-chested, medium-sized brown bird. There only seemed to be one of him; if he had a mate, or any friends, they were nowhere around. He would cock his head and stare back at me through the window that separated us, which made me feel that he was as aware of me as I was of him.

One day, the tree and the bird found their way into the novel I was writing and became a sort of fulcrum between the fictional, imagined world of the novel and my real life, a symbolic hinge that joined the two together. I named the bird Erasmus, since he seemed to have a philosophically stalwart cast of mind. All winter long, he watched me write while I watched him going about his birdly business.

The Epicure’s Lament
is narrated by a forty-year-old hermit and failed writer, Hugo Whittier, who’s simultaneously smoking himself to death in his ancestral mansion on the Hudson River and cooking a lot of old-fashioned, comforting, hearty food for the very people he professes to want to get away from. I found that, for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time, writing about the things Hugo chose to make—ham with holiday sauce and spaghetti puttanesca—eased my terrible, gnawing depression. So did cooking and eating them myself. After the day’s work was done, I went home and made dinners that were inspired by Hugo’s culinary repertoire.

When I was about halfway through the novel, my bad state of mind worsened, and I couldn’t write anymore. I stopped going to my room at Nancy’s, stopped working on the novel, stopped doing much of anything. Soon, I found I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t stop crying.

T
o pull myself out of this depression, I decided to run the New York City Marathon. For many years, I had stood on the sidelines cheering the marathoners on, and I always found myself in tears at the grit and camaraderie of the runners thronging the streets. Now, I wanted to join them instead of watching from the curb.

Although I had never run before, or rather, I hadn’t run since I’d been on the track team in junior high, I was sure I could do it. That summer, it was unusually hot, so I started training on the treadmill at the air-conditioned gym up near Kellogg’s Diner on Metropolitan Avenue. My gym was .65 mile from my house; the jog there and back counted toward my daily quota (training for a marathon involves doing more math on a daily basis than I had ever expected). I had decided that I wanted to finish the marathon in less than four hours, and was following an intermediate training schedule I’d found online. The beginning one didn’t seem ambitious or dreadful enough. This foolish decision landed me in the emergency room with hyponatremia, a dangerous and often fatal sodium deficiency. As soon as I was released from my weekend at Beth Israel, I resumed training right where I’d left off, only now I drank Gatorade instead of water.

In August 2002, Jon and I took a trip to Glacier National Park for my fortieth birthday. We stayed in a motel near the lodge and hiked during the day. Every night, after our long hikes, we went to the lodge for dinner and drank wine or tequila cocktails and ate bison burgers, venison steaks, or roast wild game birds.

Glacier National Park is full of trails through fields of wild-flowers to aquamarine glacial lakes and up mountainsides to windswept glaciers and peaks, but I wasn’t thinking about the
stupendously beautiful scenery, or rather, I wasn’t concentrating on it. I was counting the miles, timing our walking speed, pushing us to go as fast as we could so that I could count these hikes as part of my daily training mileage. I was determined not to fall behind; it was almost autumn already, and I was in the thick of it.

Maybe at least partially because of my unswerving, single-minded drive, Jon pulled his ankle on our third hike and was down for the count. Instead of taking the next day off and keeping him company in our cabin, as any thoughtful spouse would do, I assembled a lunch for us both from whatever I could find at the general store attached to the motel, made sure he was supplied with ice and whatever else he needed, filled my water bottles, and stuffed a sweater into my day pack.

“I’ll be back in less than five hours,” I said. “Promise me you won’t worry till then.”

“I can’t promise that,” he said with his usual stubborn solicitousness.

And so I set off for a 13-mile round-trip hike up to the Continental Divide and back. I was glad to be able to do it alone. I’d been anxious all summer, trying to run my daily miles, that I’d never be able to do 26.2 of them, all at one go. This hike was my test.

For the first few miles, I wound over streams, through lush meadows, blooming and bright. Eventually, the trail turned vertical, running on a narrow cutout up the mountainside. I charged up it, passing two people on horseback admiring the view, not bothering to look at it myself.

Up and up I climbed, my muscles working well, my breathing even and steady. I was walking, not running, but my pace was extremely fast, and I wasn’t winded. This hike was half the length of the marathon; New York City is pretty flat. If I could keep up this pace, I told myself, I’d do all right on November 3.
I had already run the Staten Island half marathon in well under two hours, after all.

Feeling cocky, I left the vegetation behind and scurried across a bare, rubbled mountain face and continued up and up, winding through a gravelly moonscape. The wind had picked up, but I wasn’t cold, I was sweating and exhilarated. For miles, I had the place to myself, until a park ranger appeared coming down the trail toward me.

“Hello!” he said. “You’re the first person I’ve seen in a while. Be careful around Devil’s Elbow, there’s a hailstorm going on up there.”

He tipped his hat and continued down. Not surprisingly, Devil’s Elbow turned out to be a narrow section of the rocky path that jutted out and around a cliff face. Down below, the green valley looked very far away. I was getting pelted by hail and the wind was trying to blow me off the mountainside, as if I were a bug. For the first time, I was really spooked. I caught a glimpse of the mountain range I was in, stretching away, dizzyingly far. I was up very high.

After Devil’s Elbow, the trail started climbing steeply again. The higher I went, the colder and windier and more desolate it became. I passed the glacier field near the top and stopped to add my own rock to a hikers’ cairn, and then there I was, on the roof of the world. I crouched in the howling wind, shivering in my sweater, and ate my lunch as fast as I could, shoving it into my mouth with both hands—two hummus sandwiches, an apple, two carrots, and a chocolate bar. I drank all my water. I was still hungry and thirsty, but that was all I’d brought. A black storm was boiling up on the other side of the mountain. Two weather systems were about to collide right where I sat.

In a hurry to get back down now, I almost ran past the glacier, across Devil’s Elbow, and down the mountainside. An
hour later, I realized that I was exhausted. My feet were heavy, my back was sore, my teeth were clenched, my breathing was shallow, my foot was cramping, and I couldn’t stop shaking. I wasn’t even into the valley yet. I had miles left to go.

I thought of Jon waiting for me in the motel room, trying to keep his mind on his book, with only a radio for company. I knew if I were one minute late, he would feel compelled to come and find me, and he was in no condition to do that. I kept going, faster than I thought I could, but my mind was in charge now, not my body. I forced myself to forget I had a body at all, much less a depleted one. I came to the verdant valley. It was filled with hikers in the late afternoon sun, groups of schoolchildren and couples out for a little adventure. I stomped past them, as single-mindedly set on my goal as ever. The valley was shockingly gorgeous, but I had no time for it.

Then, with two miles to go, beyond hunger and thirst, I experienced a strange, unexpected thing: I recharged. Out of the blue, I was given a surge of energy, as if my body had held it back to spur me at the end, to reward my persistence. My feet were light again. My muscles worked again. I charged along, amazed and grateful.

When I flew into our motel room, Jon looked up from his book with a furrowed brow and a relieved smile. “In five minutes I was going to go out there and find you,” he said.

I helped him gimp into the lodge to dinner. There, we ordered venison steaks with extra potatoes, and drank all the red wine we wanted while I looked out at the lake and surrounding mountains, replaying in my memory all the views I’d missed that day.

I discovered that I was gluten intolerant in 2003, the summer after I ran the marathon, reluctantly, with the help of a naturopath and an elimination diet. It was simple. When I stopped eating gluten, my symptoms went away. If I ate just one crumb of bread or strand of spaghetti, they came back.

I hadn’t known it yet, but I had been extremely gluten intolerant while I trained for, and ran, the marathon. I had managed to run the marathon in just under four hours, albeit with tremendous difficulty in the final six miles, but the doubt has always stayed with me—what if I’d trained without gluten? I was eating a lot of carbohydrates, which meant pasta and bread, far more than I normally would have.

All that wheat had intensified my symptoms which, to make matters worse, were all the things my training had been intended to eradicate: an ongoing crushing sense of doom; hotheaded irascibility; bloat (especially depressing when you’re exercising constantly—I gained ten pounds of water weight in my stomach and hips and had permanent water bags under my eyes); fizzing insomnia; fast, fluttering pulse; and cloudy, foggy brain.

For many years, in fact, I had accepted the fact that I was a depressive, an agoraphobic, a hothead, and a space cadet, but now I finally learned that these mental problems all had the same actual, preventable cause. Still, I was embarrassed
by my own condition. I had always been impervious to any food-related weakness; I was a culinary Viking, a swashbuckling food adventurer. Eating in restaurants with Jon had been a grand pastime for me. I ate everything with gluttonous enthusiasm, as irrationally proud of my ironclad stomach as I was of my high tolerance for booze, my open-minded willingness to indulge myself in anything high or low, be it White Castle jalapeño sliders made of questionable meat, fresh Costa Rican turtle, ethnic food made with the hottest chilies or spices, raw oysters and steak tartare, or raw clams on the Coney Island boardwalk.

Of course, now I knew what true food-related danger was, and it was not fun at all. But back then, in those old, carefree days, I’d smugly, secretly believed that anyone with a food-related restriction of any kind, self-imposed or otherwise, was a wimp: vegetarians were limp-wristed and self-righteous, vegans loony and sickly, the eating-disordered crazy and pathetic, and the allergic a bunch of hypochondriacal hothouse flowers.

I had so far to fall. Now I was hobbled by a constant obsessive-compulsive fear that mimicked an eating disorder, even if it didn’t precisely constitute one. The things I couldn’t have were legion, insidious, and ubiquitous. Forget pizza, pasta, and bread, they were child’s play. I also had to keep a constant eye out for malt, barley, rye, oats, spelt, couscous, bulgur, and sprouted wheat. I had to avoid any food fried in oil used to fry wheat-containing food, most sauces, corn tortillas or chips with hidden wheat in them, certain ice creams, canned chicken broths, and anything containing added gluten or modified food starch, which is to say, almost all processed foods. Maybe the worst blow of all was that almost every brand of soy sauce contains wheat; and because of this, most Asian restaurants, which should be a haven for the gluten intolerant, were now death traps.

I began to dread being handed an unfamiliar restaurant
menu in a place where they didn’t know me, and I was suddenly timid and full of mistrust in the restaurants where they did. “I’m severely allergic to wheat and gluten,” I now found myself saying, with an edge of apologetic desperation, to the waiter or waitress the instant he or she appeared with pad in hand. I looked them dead in the eye to underscore the importance of this, to make sure they’d heard me and would take action on my behalf. Maybe I imagined the look of jaded forbearance on many waiters’ faces when they realized that I’d need special attention—back in those days, gluten wasn’t on many restaurant workers’ radars yet; no one had heard of celiac, let alone gluten intolerance. But I soon had sufficient experience with not being assertive enough—not, for example, asking the waiter to double-check with the chef about the ingredients of a particular dish, no matter how sure he was that it was gluten-free—to know that it was better to be demanding and annoying than to inadvertently eat hidden gluten, which I began to call “getting wheated.” Almost instantly, I would become horribly bloated, in a black mood for the rest of the night; and then I would lie awake, thirsty and insomniacal, with a rapidly pounding heart and a percolating brain, cursing to myself. The next day, I was short-tempered and depressed. It took about twenty-four hours to return to normal after one crumb of gluten; I got more and more insistent on avoiding it.