Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (34 page)

I went to see him in Athens about two weeks after that. From that point forward we managed a visit about every three weeks, usually in Rome or Athens, sometimes in some other European city where we both wanted to spend a long weekend. After about four months of these visits and of nightly phone calls, he decided, with my encouragement, to put in for a leave of absence from work and, as soon as that took effect, move in with me in Rome. Before we’d known each other for even a year, we were living together.

If the Italian attitude toward food was one big reason I didn’t regain weight in Italy, Louis was the other. My relationship with him was completely unlike my relationship with Greg, whom I had come to take for granted. My
attitude
was different: more grateful and more fearful. Maybe because Louis followed so many years of nothingness, maybe because he wasn’t given to sweeping declarations of ardor, I worried all the time: that he’d wake up one morning and decide he’d made a mistake; that the inevitably fading intensity of our physical interactions would leave us with too little too soon; that I’d gain five pounds and tip the scales against me. I treaded lightly around Louis, and that meant eating sensibly and supplementing my time on the treadmill at La Roman with runs through the Villa Borghese park and along the Tiber river; along the Arno if work took me to Florence; along the Seine or Danube when Louis and I traveled. I was motivated by more than just holding on to him. I was motivated by how I wanted to feel when we were holding each other, by my determination to enjoy that and my desire for only a third of my brain, as opposed to all of it, to be conscious of what he might notice—too much flab, too much softness.

I was motivated by my movements through the world beyond Louis, too. During the Washington years and even during some previous periods, my thoughts before meeting someone for the first time, whether in a social or professional setting, whirled around the questions of how heavy they’d deem me, what they would read into that, how much it might lower their estimation of me, whether it would make me seem coarse or sloppy or just plain sad. As I fretted over whether I was saying the right things or asking the right questions, I would fret even more over how I looked. Now it was different. I could concentrate better on something other than my physical shape.

I wasn’t yet pleased with it, and guessed I’d never be. In Rome I wore size 36 pants that were somewhat loose and size 35 jeans that were somewhat tight, and I could feel myself moving up and down within perhaps a five-pound range. At one point I even got on a scale. Of course I didn’t own one, but I spotted one on the bathroom floor of a hotel room I was staying in. Curiosity got the better of me, especially because the scale was in kilograms and I knew that would mean a lower number.

The scale said 92. My weight was 92! I went to my laptop, went online, found the conversion. It equaled just under 203 pounds. That was still more than I should be, more than I wanted to be. But 203 was 65 pounds less than the last time I’d known what I weighed.

It was a weight I could live with and sometimes even forget about, which was the main thing, the best thing. I felt lighter in spirit, and I preferred life this way, enough to stop myself before I rounded up too much food when shopping for groceries and to catch myself when I was about to order the biggest dessert on the menu.

 

 

 

 

I
was having an adventure. I was having a blast. One week I’d find myself plying the canals of Venice in a floating police cruiser for a story about a crackdown on boaters breaking the maritime speed limit;a another week I’d find myself on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius interviewing stubborn residents who refused to relocate somewhere beyond the threat of lava.

I spent weeks in Turkey monitoring its government’s response to the American invasion of Iraq, and even traveled close to the border between Iraq and Turkey, to watch for any signs that Turkish troops were taking advantage of the war to move into Kurdish strongholds on the other side. I spent weeks in Israel pitching in with reporting there at times when Israeli-Palestinian tensions spiked even higher than usual.

Wherever Pope John Paul II went, I went: to Guatemala, Croatia, Poland. Poland was something else. As a gesture of respect for the Pope, any city or town he visited there went dry, at least officially, for the duration of his stay. But veterans in the Vatican press corps found ways around this temporary prohibition. They packed their own flasks of whiskey and vodka, and if you were nice enough to them, they shared. Or they sweet-talked waiters into serving them alcoholic drinks that didn’t look like alcoholic drinks. On a papal trip to Poland, the screwdriver suddenly became every reporter’s cocktail of choice. To the naked eye, at least, it was just a glass of orange juice.

And in every country, in every city, I sized up the food. The logical coda to a long day of reporting—and a good way to get acquainted with a new place—was to go out and find something special to eat. So I tracked down the juiciest lamb in Diyarbakir, Turkey; the fluffiest falafel in Hebron and Jerusalem; the richest veal-stuffed
agnolotti
in Turin; the most vibrant pumpkin-stuffed ravioli in Parma. But it wasn’t food as a compulsion; it was food as an investigation, an education, a discovery. I found I could enjoy it without overdoing it. In fact I could enjoy it more, because it wasn’t tinged with anticipatory guilt or incipient panic over how much tighter my pants might feel the next day.

At home in Rome, Louis would be waiting, in our rambling, oddly situated apartment. It was on the top floor of a six-story building in which the first five floors belonged to a middlebrow hotel, with which it shared an entrance and elevator. The hotel desk clerks were our de facto doormen, cranky Donatella and affable Stefano and gorgeous Giacomo, who always flirted, simply because he enjoyed the effect. If I ran out of coffee and was too lazy to go out for it in the morning, he let me walk downstairs to the breakfast room in the basement and pretend I was one of the hotel guests. He winked at me as I went.

Like Greg, Louis cooked, but he didn’t cook like Greg. He cooked more like Grandma, in a frenzy of motion, pots clanging, crumbs scattering, liquid splattering. The kitchen was the smallest, saddest room in our otherwise spacious, light-filled apartment; within minutes of the beginning of a meal’s preparation, Louis would have every square inch of it covered in excess syrup, fugitive grease, discarded peelings and spilled powder. I’d look in on him and think how I should get a drop cloth, put it under him, maybe even line all the cabinet faces and countertops with plastic.

And I’d wait and wait for the results, as the hour grew late even for dinner in Europe.

“Forty-five minutes out!” Louis would shout at about nine fifteen, the first of a series of curiously timed progress reports.

At ten he’d announce: “We’re only a half hour out!” He made it sound like a positive update. Like a happy surprise.

At ten twenty-five: “Just twenty more minutes, sweetie! Is the table set?” The table had been set since eight forty-five.

And at ten forty-five: “About seven minutes, maybe eight!” That meant fifteen, so I’d wait another ten to light the candles.

Cleanup was a nightmare, but I felt obliged to do at least half of it, since he was doing the cooking, and since he’d done all the shopping. With his days free, he scoured Rome for ingredients, and it took him forever, because he wanted to make and eat food at home that we couldn’t easily find in Rome’s restaurants and that wasn’t typically stocked in Rome’s stores—Thai food, Indian food, that sort of thing. He was going through this whole Asian phase.

We ate out as often as we ate in, and made a vigorous tour of Roman restaurants, finding unheralded ones, developing favorites. For its lavish antipasti spread, delivered to each table as soon as the diners sat down at it, we loved Santopadre, just a half block from our apartment, where the mistress of the house, Dina, would greet us with kisses and wonder why we hadn’t stopped by in so long, even if we’d been there just a week earlier. She reminded me of Grandma.

For its savory Parmesan and Gorgonzola and zucchini-flavored custards we loved Trattoria Monti, about two miles from our place, where the female chef’s two handsome sons, Enrico and Daniele, recited the entire menu in perfectly enunciated Italian, punctuating the mention of each dish with the phrase
e poi abbiamo,
which meant “and then we have,” before naming the next option. We would order several courses, always concluding with the pistachio
semifreddo
in bittersweet chocolate sauce. Then Enrico or Daniele would put bottles of
amaro
,
limoncello
and
grappa
on the table, so we could help ourselves, free of charge, to however much of whichever we wanted. That was the way Italian restaurants treated cherished regulars, which we’d become. We often left Trattoria Monti more than three hours after we had arrived, and were usually the last customers to go.

Before long Italian friends who had lived in Rome much longer than I had were asking
me
where to eat. Somehow, I’d segued from restaurant enthusiast to restaurant savant, and without gaining any appreciable weight.

Y ou’re not going to believe this,” I told Louis when I walked into our apartment one night in January 2004.

He had to turn off the food processor, in which he was whipping up some Asian concoction. He had to turn Ydown the volume on Mary J. Blige.

“I got a call today,” I said, then filled him in on a chain of events to which I hadn’t attributed much meaning before then.

Weeks earlier Barbara Graustark, an editor at the
Times
whose purview included the Dining section, had sent out an e-mail to the staff announcing that the current restaurant critic, William Grimes, was leaving the job. I knew Barbara a little—I’d written some stories unrelated to food for her in the past—so I took the opportunity of her e-mail to write back and say a chatty hello.

“I hope you’ve got a lot of extra space on your desk,” I said in my e-mail, “because you’re about to be deluged with résumés and appeals.”

She replied: “Will one of them be yours?”

I didn’t take the question seriously. “It would be a dream job,” I wrote back, and on a conscious level, at least, I meant that literally. It was a job I’d have, and be able to do, in my dreams, in some fantasy realm where my suitability and aptitude didn’t matter, and where I didn’t have my warped history with food.

But she didn’t interpret my response that way. She sensed, maybe correctly, some curiosity on my part. Now she was circling back to tell me that in the meetings of editors mulling the question of who should be the newspaper’s next restaurant critic, my name had come up. And she had told those editors that I might just be interested.

On the phone she explained that editors at the
Times
were looking at the situation two ways. They had drawn up a list of food mavens who had already written extensively about dining out, but they were also considering writers newer to the subject matter, with potentially fresher perspectives. Apparently I fell into the latter category.

To the thinking of Barbara and several editors above her, I had plunged into political reporting without considerable buildup or past experience. The same went for foreign reporting. So why not restaurant criticism? Especially when I was a known restaurant fan? Many of the paper’s senior editors were aware of that because they’d eaten with me. They also knew that years earlier I’d been a movie critic for the
Free Press
, so criticism wasn’t alien to me.

I assumed the chances of being chosen were slim, but it was harmless fun to contemplate it. So I told Barbara that if
Times
editors were willing to consider it, I was, too. In a few weeks, I thought, this diversion would end with the appointment of someone else.

I didn’t hesitate to share all of this with Louis, who was hardly bound to Rome or invested in my continuation as the newspaper’s correspondent there. His leave of absence from work was finite and he had already begun wondering aloud about what we were going to do and how we were going to stay together, given the lack of any work for him in Italy. So I expected him to be intrigued by the prospect—no matter how fantastic—of my returning to New York, a much easier city for him to navigate professionally.

I also expected him to find the idea of my becoming a restaurant critic absurd.

To my surprise, he didn’t.

He noted that almost nothing pleased me more than a great meal—it was why he loved cooking for me—and that almost nothing disappointed me more than a bad one. He reminded me that in Rome, in Athens, in so many other European cities and in Vietnam, where we’d taken a long trip together just weeks earlier, I was always on the prowl for interesting restaurants and I always put dining at the top of my agenda.

“You’ve eaten in more countries than most other people,” he said. “You’ve eaten in more kinds of restaurants.”

It was true, I supposed. For some reason I’d never before thought of my travels as eating expeditions, though many of them had turned into precisely that.

Did I actually have some legitimate qualifications for this job? Could I take a credible stab at it? Possibly. What I didn’t know I could make a point of learning. I was capable of that sort of diligence. I’d bring energy to the task, given the newness and challenge of it. I was opinionated: no problem there. And to the extent that I wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool foodie, well, what fraction of a restaurant review’s readers were? Maybe I’d be a better proxy for consumers than someone more deeply immersed in the world of restaurants would be.

Then again, maybe not, and I didn’t want to sign on to being a hack. I didn’t want an assignment, especially one that meant as much as this one did to many readers, that I was bound to fumble. And I didn’t want to be plagued day in and day out by the worry that I was out of my depth.