Comfort Food (3 page)

The Ireland trip had been her last vacation with Christopher, a romantic trip without the girls and filled with night after night in which they turned in early, eager to be alone. They’d laughed as they steered awkwardly around the jaw-droppingly beautiful coast, neither of them quite comfortable drivinga stick shift on the other side of the road. But they’d managed it just fine, thank you very much. This made the accident all the more incomprehensible:Christopher had driven the Hutchison Parkway every day. Every single day. And then he made a mistake. That’s what happened when you let your guard down.

Gus Simpson kept a vigilant watch: she knew that every moment, every detail mattered. Even the table setting.

The just-polished silver had gleamed as it lay on the linen tablecloth; the sixteen settings had been her great-grandmother’s. Every clan has its own version of mythmaking—the hard winter everyone barely survived, the long and impossible transatlantic voyage from the Old World—and Gus’s family had their own, of course. It was The Quest for Fine Things. And so the silver service (much more ornate than current fashion) had been purchased,at great sacrifice, as a setting a year from Tiffany & Co. and used only for the big three—Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving—in later generations.Sometimes, the story went, a spoon was all that could be afforded, the knives and forks left waiting for a fatter year. And so the set had made its way—though not without causing tension within the family—from mother to oldest daughter to daughter’s daughter and finally to Gus, where the flatwarehad been put to more cutting and eating than ever before. No doubt her grandmothers would have thought it frivolous the way Gus delighted in her good plates and knives, and frowned upon their frequent use. Save, save, save it for later. That had been their motto. Tuck away the good to use only when you really need it. The thing was, Gus always felt as if she really needed it.

Though the night Alan Holt came to dinner, surely, even her grandmotherswould have approved Gus setting such a grand table, all ready for the gorgeous meal simmering and roasting away in the kitchen. Cream of asparagus soup. Rack of lamb with herb jus. Gently roasted baby potatoes. Fresh, crusty bread she’d made from scratch, using a wet brick in her oven to generate steam (thanks to the advice of Julia Child in a well-worn copy of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 2
). All followed by a rich, buttery financière with homemade raspberry sorbet.

She’d wanted the meal to be delicious. Homey. Welcoming. After all, it wasn’t every day that the president of the CookingChannel came over for Sunday dinner and the prospect of a different future hovered.

“Mom? The table?” her daughter had said.

Ah, yes, the table. Sabrina’s display had been the one element of discord in a perfectly arranged tableau: it was clearly unacceptable.

Gus had opened her mouth to tell Sabrina to clean up the mess she’d created. To go upstairs, change out of the clothes she was wearing and put on something decent. To go find her sister and tell her to get ready.

The words had been all ready to tumble out. Even without seeing herselfshe could feel the frown, her furrowed brow. How many times had Gus criticized Sabrina and Aimee? Change your clothes, turn down that music, tidy up your room, don’t leave wet towels on the floor. She, like all mothers of teenagers, had keenly felt her transformation into a walking cliché, as so many of the little issues that had seemed trivial and fuddy-duddy when she was young had stretched to matters of tremendous importance. A widow with two daughters, no less. Turning lights out when she left a room. Wearinga sweater instead of turning up the heat. Using a coaster on the coffee table. Eating leftovers. It was paying the bills that did it. Changed her perspective.Suddenly everything had mattered.

Every
thing
mattered. Even the table setting. She knew it had to be fixed.

But then she had caught the look of anticipation on her youngest daughter’s face. The wide eyes, the mouth slightly open, just enough to catch the glimmer of her metal braces. Her heart caught in her throat: Gus had assumed the sad little decoration on her table was a way for Sabrina to make clear how little she cared about Gus’s career. But could her daughter have been trying to help? she’d wondered.

At precisely that moment, Aimee had slouched into the room, alerted, no doubt, by the radar all kids have when they sense—hope—their sibling is about to get in trouble. What is it about family that makes them close ranks to outsiders but attack one another with impunity in private? Thinnerand two inches taller than Sabrina, her light brown bangs dyed pink from Kool-Aid, fifteen-year-old Aimee grinned slyly as she saw her mother frowning at the table.

“Nice!” Aimee said, catching her sister’s eye, gesturing toward the stone-feathercombo. “Mom’s totally going to throw that away. It’s not perfect. And Gus Simpson doesn’t do anything that’s not perfect. Right, Mom?” Then Aimee shifted all her weight to one hip, as though standing up straight would take too much effort. She waited.

Sabrina waited.

Gus hesitated as her mom side duked it out with her career side.

“I think Sabrina’s arrangement is lovely,” Gus declared. “It’s very modern,very sleek. It stays on the table.”

Aimee rolled her eyes.

“Shut up, Aimee, it’s a very karma design,” shouted Sabrina.

“I think you mean Zen, dear.” Gus smiled, recalling Sabrina’s huge ear-to-ear smile, the silver braces gleaming on her teeth, her sweet blue eyes wide and shining. It was the right choice, even though she’d felt a twist in her stomach when Mr. Holt, the CookingChannel president, had looked questioningly at the table as he sat down. But Gus had made no apologies, aware of Sabrina hanging on her every word, and in fact praised her daughter’s creativity.

“Part of being a good host is to let everyone feel they’ve played a part,” she’d told him with confidence that spring day long ago.

Mr. Holt, a divorced father, had nodded thoughtfully. “You’re just the type of person I’m looking for,” he announced. And by the end of cake, Gus Simpson—an unknown gourmet-shop owner without a cookbook to her name—had been asked to host a few episodes on the fledging cable channel.

Sabrina’s display, it turned out, had been karma after all.

And voilà! A few years on TV’s CookingChannel and she became an overnight sensation. That was the thing with all that “overnight” business: it typically took a lot of work beforehand.

And now here she was in 2006, the very heart of food television, The Luncheonette long since sold away. She lived in a stunning manor house in Rye, New York, precisely the style of house that Christopher would have loved: a three-story structure, white with black shutters, with a large formal dining room to the left of the foyer, a conservatory, a small parlor that Gus had converted to her private den, a wood-paneled library, a glassed-in breakfastroom, and a cozy sitting room off the kitchen. Plus all the requisite space for her camera crews. There was a spacious patio immediately through the French doors from the kitchen, and a lush back lawn, edged in flowers, that was crowned with a decorative pond and waterfall that gurgled soothingly when she was out among the rosebushes.

There were far too many bedrooms in the manor house for a single woman—her children had been practically packing for college when she signed the deed but she forged ahead anyway—and there were definitely not enough bathrooms for a modern home. It was her plan to update the upper floors, though she’d been too busy over the years to do that just yet.

The house was the proof of her professional success. It appealed to her not only because of its magnificence but also because of its imperfections. It had a history that left it a little worn in places.

And so Gus had purchased the home when she was developing her most popular program,
Cooking with Gusto!
It was her third program for the networkand the most well reviewed. Every week she hosted a brilliant chef in the manor house’s amazing kitchen (renovated twice since the program had started), and she and her guest drank good wine and chatted as together they prepared an incredible meal, discussing amusing stories from the world of professional restaurant kitchens and doing their sincere best to convince the viewer at home that she, too, could make the scrumptious dishes they were preparing.

Gus Simpson had always been a good home cook. But she was no chef and she knew it: she’d been a photography major at Wellesley and possessed a great eye for visuals, and she’d had an idea ripe for its moment with The Luncheonette.Still, her gift—and it was a gift—had always been about creating an amazing experience. She was a true entertainer: Gus made her guests feel alive—even when her guests were on the other side of a TV screen—and her
joie de vivre
made every mouthful look and taste refreshing. Gus’s main product was Gus, and she sold herself well: she was mother, daughter, best friend, life of the party. And she was good-looking to boot. Not so gorgeous that a viewer simply couldn’t stand her, but undeniably attractive with her big brown eyes and her wide, toothy smile.

Gus Simpson was eminently watchable. Her viewers—and therefore her producers—loved her.

Her friends, her daughters, her colleagues: everyone wanted to be around Gus. And Gus, in turn, had been enchanted by the idea of looking after all of them.

Yet now it felt as though the spell was lifting.

So, okay, she didn’t want to plan her own party. Who said she had to have one? Gus began pacing about the kitchen, ticking off a list on her fingersof all the people who would be disappointed if she didn’t put something together, her frustration rising with every step. She was always doing, doing, doing.

Maybe turning fifty simply meant it was time to shake things up.

"Knock knock? ” Shuffling open the white French door from her garden patio was Hannah Levine, her dear friend and neighbor. The two of them had shared an easy intimacy over the seven years they’d been friends. It hadn’t been quite that way when they first met, on the very Sunday Gus moved into the manor house during the summer of ’99. Gus had walked over to each of her neighbors’ homes and presented a freshly baked raspberry pie, expressinghow thrilled she was to be in the neighborhood. It was a brilliant touch, of course—pure Gus—and reciprocated by several dinner invitations and the beginning of many warm acquaintanceships. And then there had been Hannah, who lived immediately adjacent in a crisply painted white cottage,converted from what had once been the carriage house to Gus’s stately home. Hannah had come to the door in faded gray pajamas, her medium-lengthred hair pulled back into a low ponytail. Her skin was pale and free of makeup, and she eyed Gus suspiciously through thick black glasses.

“What kind is it?” Hannah had asked, gesturing toward the pie, her body partially hidden by her wide mahogany door. She was even thinner back then, all sharp clavicle and bony wrist. And nervous, tremendously nervous. Of course, Gus was immediately smitten: she simply had to add Hannah to her collection of darlings. To the ones she wanted to nurture and nourish. Her girls, their pals, her coworkers: everyone was clay that Gus was eager to mold. She made a pest of herself that summer, dropping over next door with all manner of muffins and cookie bars, her resolve to befriend her neighboronly heightened by the fact that no one else seemed to visit the gentle, wary woman in pajamas. Certainly Hannah, already in her thirties then, was far too old to be a surrogate daughter; Gus imagined she would become like a little sister. But what happened instead was far more welcome: the two women found they had much in common—a shared love of gardening, an unconventional work schedule, a devotion to finding the perfect chocolatechip cookie, and a love of rising early—from which a true friendship sprang.

When the body wakes up before dawn, as Gus’s typically did, there can be several hours when it seems as though there is no one else in the world. A peaceful time for some. Not Gus: she found these early moments, the house dark, the girls’ rooms empty, the cats snoozing in far corners, to be tremendouslylonely.

Fortunately, Hannah was quite likely to be on her way over by 7 AM, crossing the unfenced property line between their two homes. Because once it became clear that Gus was going to be persistent, Hannah accepted her friendship as the most natural thing. From early on, she had the peculiar habit of never tapping on the door when she came by, always calling out and making her way inside. With anyone else Gus would have found such a gesture intrusive; with Hannah it seemed perfectly normal. The two of them spent many an early morning sitting in Gus’s bay window, on those overstuffed chairs, dipping biscotti into their cappuccino and having the very same conversation they’d had the day before. That was the thing about their friendship: it was all about the being together, never about doing anything.As such it made few demands. Theirs was an easy intimacy.

It was also precious: Hannah was the first real friend Gus had made after becoming well known. There was no handbook for becoming semi-famous. (Or at least nothing that had been handed to Gus by the CookingChannel.) In a society thirsting for celebrity, it didn’t take much for people to elevate a widowed mother with a knack for entertaining into a culinary guru. And so even by the late nineties, Gus had developed quite a following, with the requisite cookbooks and calendars, too. It was great; it put Sabrina and Aimee through some good schools. But her sort-of-but-not-quite fame also made it a hurdle to connect—people already “knew” her from TV and therefore it could be a tremendous disappointment to them if Gus turned out, for example, to be even slightly different than they envisioned. To be plain, it had been difficult to make friends. Oh, easy enough to meet people who wanted to say they were chummy with the host of
Cooking with Gusto!
More challenging to get to know individuals who wanted to know Gus.

Hannah Levine had been entirely different.

For one thing, she didn’t watch television. Well, not exactly. Hannah watched multiple channels nonstop: CNN, MSNBC, and CourtTV. But dramas, comedies, home decor or cooking shows? Hannah didn’t watch any of it. Instead, she holed up in her home office—with its built-in bookcases and large television—and wrote article after article for women’s magazines. Sometimes in jeans but most typically in pajamas, with fuzzy slippers on her feet, and a bowl of M&M’s nearby. Hannah was a busy freelance journalist,and her area of expertise was health, which pushed her slightly in the direction of obsessing over whatever she’d written about most recently. But she obsessed in a rather benign, almost kindly variety, as concerned for a stranger’s odd throat clearing—could it be whooping cough?—as for her own potential ailments. Having the Internet as her main companion all day merely encouraged her cyberchondria.