Blue Plate Special (42 page)

Inside, Brendan opened a bottle of chilled Orvieto, pulled out a
peperonata
he’d made, wrapped cantaloupe slices in prosciutto, and assembled a
caprese
. We fell on this cold feast, eating with our hands, standing by the counter. It was still winter, but to us, it was torrid tropical spring. We drank the first bottle with the food, talking and talking in a state of intoxicated, jibbering mania, and then we drank another, sitting by the fire—and here the Victorian curtain goes down.

Whenever Brendan and I stayed at my Monitor Street apartment in Greenpoint, we cooked in my old-fashioned kitchen with its pantry, the refrigerator in the hall, the 1940s cupboards, the view of the Koscuiszko Bridge. Sometimes we went out to a little French place in Williamsburg where I had almost no history. Walking through the streets of north Brooklyn with Brendan felt surreal. There was no scarlet
A
anymore: my marriage was over, and I was free to do whatever I wanted now. But the memory of that feeling, the sense of wrongdoing, persisted. I felt as if I were doing something illegal. I even skulked. When people I knew saw us together, I had an instant flash of guilt even though I knew it was irrational. I couldn’t believe that no one had the power to stop me from being with him. On warm nights, we sat up in the roof garden of Juliette at a little table among total strangers and ate raw oysters and steaks with salads and drank glasses of cold Provençal rosé. Afterward, we smoked cigarettes, luxuriantly letting the smoke curl skyward. I hadn’t smoked in years, but I felt that nothing could hurt me.

I had finally, for the first time in my life, found my true soul mate. It felt like a cosmic joke that he’d turned out to be almost twenty years younger than I was. Age didn’t matter at all. I hadn’t known this before. The most important things, at least to me, were a shared temperament and desires, a sense
of effortless, joyful, almost mystical connectedness that went beyond the superficial facts of our circumstances.

However, along with our delirious, manic joy, we both felt anxious and wary. Brendan had recently been shaken by a couple of flings with unstable, needy women who were much older than he was. They had objectified him and treated him as if he weren’t a serious prospect because of his youth, and he was leery of its happening again.

But I could relate to their fears. Still grieving and raw from the end of my marriage, I sometimes wondered, in a panic, if I could expect to be happier with someone so young. Even though he was ambitious and hardworking and brilliant, Brendan had no real career yet, no money. Even though he had traveled all his life, had had plenty of adventures and relationships, I still had twenty years more of life experience, during twelve of which I had been married. I was worried that I was too traumatized by the fallout from my marriage to be able to give myself fully to him, so soon after it had ended. I wondered whether I could make him happy ultimately.

Much of our talking in our first six months was about these fears. We challenged each other, tested each other, put each other through the wringer, even as we offered each other reassurance and love. We were both blown over by how quickly, fully, and precipitously we had fallen in love. Of course, we were terrified of being hurt and disappointed, of making a mistake. It was very clear from the start that this was no halfway thing, no light romance or short-lived fling. It was all or nothing with us from our first date. We’d put ourselves in each other’s hands, exposed ourselves completely and absorbed each other, and so we had to be very careful. We were splayed out, completely headlong.

O
ne night in late September, we went out to dinner with my mother’s ex-husband Ben. It was about a week before Brendan and I were supposed to fly to Italy for three months to live in his grandmother’s villa in Tuscany; it was being sold and therefore sat empty, waiting for a couple of mad writers in love to haunt it. After a bland meal and a couple of martinis, Ben announced that he had decided that Brendan and I could never work as a couple; it was impossible. He told us that my “whole family” was concerned that Brendan wasn’t strong enough for me (my mother and Susan later scoffed at this claim). He added that, based on his own experience and knowledge of men (meaning himself), Brendan would inevitably cheat on me. And he’d leave me eventually, as soon as I got old and wrinkled; it was only a matter of time. “No man can resist young flesh,” he said. Or Brendan would be too intimidated by my relative success to stick around. Either way, we were doomed.

On the way home that night, I was terror struck. Ben had hit a nerve and articulated all my worst fears. Marching along the sidewalk in a tipsy fog of defensive self-protection, I said, “Ben was right. I’m too old for you.”

“I’m not Ben,” said Brendan. “I will never cheat on you, I don’t give a damn about ‘young flesh,’ and I’m not intimidated by you, and I never will be.”

“How can you know that?” I said. “You can’t. Things change.”

“I won’t change,” he said. “In fact, I’ll love you even more when you’re wrinkled and old.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “Also, it’s too soon after my marriage ended. We have to end it now.”

“I can’t force you to change your mind,” he said. “I wish I could.”

I felt nothing but relief.

The next morning, we called the airline and canceled our tickets to Italy.

The relief I’d felt the night before intensified. We had to go our separate ways. My stepfather was right: this could never work.

During the next hour or so, we began disentangling our psyches, bodies, belongings. Brendan packed his things—his clothes, guitar, and books—to head back up to New Hampshire alone. I looked around at my apartment and imagined being single again for a while, free to meet a man my own age when I was ready, when I’d recovered from the end of my marriage.

Then it occurred to me that my stepfather had always had a drastic track record with women. When he was younger, he was a narcissistic charmer and serial seducer; and in his later years, after my mother left him, he was constantly getting involved with women my age or younger, affairs that always ended painfully for him when his girlfriend of the moment left him for a man her own age. He might have been projecting his own fears onto me and his own former caddish behavior onto Brendan.

The truth was that Brendan and I were ideally well suited to each other, no matter how old or young we were. We wanted and loved and valued the same things in life. He had never wanted kids, had always felt much older than his age; I was a late bloomer, young for mine. He was extremely calm, easygoing, even tempered. In fact, he was exactly the person I’d described at Cathi’s: he had every single quality I’d listed, and more. If we parted ways now, I knew that this would be over, that there wouldn’t be a way back in for either one of us. It hit me that if he left now, this would be the end for real.

I looked at him. Here he was—too young, too soon, too intensely, too complicatedly. But nothing was ever perfect.
If I let him leave now, I would never know what might have happened between us. This thought was more untenable, far sharper and scarier, than any of the fears Ben had named.

Cautiously, apologetically, I told Brendan that I’d made a mistake. I asked him to stop packing, to stay. I explained: Ben had been projecting his own fears onto us, I knew that he had no authority to doom us. It took a while, but finally Brendan was persuaded. He called the airlines and managed through force of will to convince the person on the other end to reinstate our tickets, free of charge.

For most of three months, from early autumn into early winter, we lived in the large stone villa where Brendan’s aunt and mother had lived as schoolgirls, a former convent up in the Florentine hills. We watched the dawn on our first morning, standing out on the bedroom terrace, listening to roosters yelling all over the valley while the sky over the wooded hills turned neon pink and orange.

The place had its own vineyard and olive grove, as well as persimmon trees, rosemary and sage bushes, potted lemon trees, a few scraggly chickens, and a vegetable garden. It was olive season. The air was smoky from the olive branches burning everywhere. Nets lay under the olive trees, and men stood on ladders reaching into the branches all day. When it was time to press the olives, we went with Fabio, the villa caretaker, to the Cooperativa agricole. The huge truckload of olives was dumped onto a conveyer belt that took them into the washer and sorter; they embarked on a long, intricate journey of pressing and turning until finally, two hours later, streams of fresh golden oil poured from a spout to fill eight or nine enormous, stoppered vats. It was bitter and rich and tasted like nothing else on earth.

The wine from the villa’s vineyard was thin and light and very subtle, almost like liquid Valium. Fabio filled wine bottles
for us from the demijohn in the toolshed and corked them with a manual press. We drank legendary quantities of it.

Renting the apartment attached to the villa was a Botoxed, boob-jobbed, trout-lipped So-Cal fortysomething divorcée named Jennifer, who might have seen
Under the Tuscan Sun
one too many times. She held spiritual meetings for her expat friends and didn’t speak any Italian although she’d been there for two years. Her lonely little son was obviously yearning to be back in L.A. with his friends. She wore a shawl and twitched it self-consciously. I was fascinated by what I took to be her hilariously cartoonlike personality.

Near the end of our time there, Jennifer invited us over for dinner. She turned out to be funny, vulnerable, and self-deprecating, impossible to dislike. I had probably looked askance at her because I was also a fortysomething divorcée. Her situation reminded me too sharply of what I’d just been through. All I wanted to do in Italy was escape.

That winter under the Tuscan rain turned out to be exactly what I needed. Living so far away from everyone and everything I knew, and my recent past, gave me perspective and clarity and a respite from this absurdly intense hothouse of emotion I’d been stuck in. Brendan and I became true friends there, engaged in a solitary, productive life in our hermitage in that beautiful but freezing-cold place that cost a small fortune to heat. We were like wacky children together, laughing and singing and babbling in various accents, wandering around in our bathrobes, cooking meals, playing Scrabble by the fireplace.

We set up small worktables in the two deep dormer windows of our bedroom, side by side against the wall opposite the big bed, separated by a trunk and an armchair. We spent our days and nights in this room, writing, listening to music, sleeping, watching movies on our computers with the heat on. We cooked meals in a huge kitchen down the stone staircase through a long tiled hallway at the other end of the house.

Safe in Italy, in the throes of new love, far from my old house and neighborhood, I began work on my sixth novel,
The Astral
. The narrator of the novel is a man in late middle age, cast out of his home like an old Adam banished by his Eve from a comfortable, domestic Eden, falsely accused by his jealous wife of having an affair with his female best friend. I shaped the book around the idea of secular paradise lost, Harry alone, humbled and brought low. His need to understand the past is intense and urgent; he’s a falsely accused man hell-bent on proving his own innocence and discovering the actual perpetrator of the crime. The book was inspired in about equal parts by Joyce Cary’s
The Horse’s Mouth
and the convention of detective noir, in which the accused becomes the crime-solver by default, to clear his own name, and goes around interviewing anyone who can help him figure it out.

During the time I spent writing the novel, my life felt as if it were zooming simultaneously ahead toward the future and back to the past—like dual time travel. Harry took me around the neighborhood where I’d lived for the greater part of twenty years, most of my adult life, the neighborhood I had just left behind forever. While I went on with my life, he stayed in north Brooklyn for me, faced it all, grappled and wrestled with the insoluble mystery of the death of love.