Cooking as Fast as I Can (32 page)

We then proceeded to spend many hours and thousands of dollars in the office of the world's most patient couples' counselor, hashing out this single issue. I talked until my throat was as raw as my nerves.

“When the kids are a little bit older you can do this. Just wait a couple years. Hot yoga will still be there!”

Her response? To go home and shave her head.

Actually, that's not quite how it went. I was traveling—again—and she called to tell me that while she understood she was going to be forced to delay her dreams even as I got to live out mine every single day, she wanted to make a change, to do something to feel lighter and freer.

“Go for it,” I said. At this point, I was well aware I had to pick my battles. If any woman could pull off the bald look, it was Jennifer. She has a beautiful face and head shape, high supermodel cheekbones. She said she wanted to be free from her hair. I said fine, be free.

Not everyone was so sanguine. A few years earlier I'd hired a manager, William. Right about the time Jennifer shaved her head,
O, The Oprah Magazine
called and said they wanted to do a Cat Cora and family photo spread. They wanted to send a crew to shoot at the house.

“How in the hell are we going to do that when Jennifer just shaved her head and she looks like a cancer patient?” William said. “Do you think she'd wear a wig?”

I laughed until the tears were running down my cheeks. “William, that is a phone call you're going to make. I am not touching that one. You want to call her and invite her to wear a wig for an
Oprah
photo shoot, you go right ahead.”

Indeed we appeared in the pages of the magazine as a family in an article entitled
The Family That Eats Together.
Jennifer did not wear a wig.

We limped along for several months, something we could do because when we were at home together there was always someone who needed changing, feeding, rocking, bathing, singing to, playing with. During the few rare moments of inactivity, Jennifer would go to yoga and I would crack open a bottle of wine and get caught up on work. This became our habit. Our connection had withered to the point where the only things we had in common were the kids and the same house key.

Did I blame myself? Yes indeed. I'd known it would be tough, being responsible for the care of four very active, very little boys day in, day out, but I'd tried to make it up to her. I'd gotten a gig doing cooking demos aboard a high-end cruise ship that would enable us to travel. In 2007 we'd traveled, as a family, to Egypt, Jordan, and Mumbai. The next year we went to Easter Island. We spent every Halloween at the Disney Resort in Orlando. One thing I was missing, of course,
was that Jennifer had to have her own life, had to accomplish something for herself. My bestowing another glorious vacation upon her did nothing to address the issue. She had to find something that was just for her.

I did everything I could think of to try to hang on to my marriage. Tapped into my spiritual base. Got a lot of therapy, with Jennifer and without. Prayed my head off day and night; tried to be more open, less judgmental. Cried. A lot. Talked to my mom. A lot. Did yoga (not hot yoga). Meditated. Exercised. Drank more wine than I should have.

My urge to drink every night bothered me a lot. I wasn't blacking out or getting smashed, but I did seem to require a few glasses of wine or a cocktail or two before dinner, then a glass of wine or two with dinner, every night, or every other night.

I began attending a twelve-step program not far from my house, a 5:00 p.m. meeting that attracted everyone from polished businessmen and businesswomen in their five-hundred-dollar shoes to homeless folks who hadn't seen a shower in many days. The diversity appealed to me. We were part of a community, and we were all there to get to a truth of some kind, whether it was to hear a story you could relate to or one that scared you straight. For some people, the coffee and pastries were their only meal of the day.

I was still drinking while going to meetings. I know this sounds contradictory, but I wasn't alone. Most of the group was sober, but some were like me, desperate to replace the urge to drink and self-medicate with enlightenment while not ready to commit to the twelve steps. I kept coming back, hoping it would help me slow down, or help me go from three or four glasses of wine to one nice glass with dinner. I hoped it would help me learn how to drink occasionally without having to think about it.

The meetings did help to a degree. But my marriage wasn't suddenly repaired because I passed up a glass of pinot.

During those desperate days I also tried to find some healing and strength by spending time enjoying my boys. But I was their anchor, not the other way around.

I tried everything. If someone had told me to go to the beach nude and play bongos while praying to the ocean god, I would have done it.

I
did
do it, sort of.

A yogi friend, Rachel, suggested a visit to her father might be in order. He was a medical doctor in town, also a shaman who practiced some form of African divination that involved “bone readings” in a yurt in his yard. It was legit, insofar as these things are; a tribe in Nigeria that practiced this particular form of healing had ordained him.

I crawled inside the yurt and sat cross-legged in front of a low table. He fetched a velvet bag and withdrew a handful of bones, which he tossed across the table, then gazed at, drumming his chin. He murmured that he saw an intruder. “There is someone or something in your life who is a danger to you. Something disrupting your marriage and your life.”

I nodded, wondered how crazy he thought I would be if I said I knew exactly what he meant: hot yoga.

In 2011, I opened a new restaurant, Cat Cora's Kitchen, at the San Francisco International Airport. I'd flown eight hundred million miles over the past fifteen years, and every time I marched through the terminal in some far-flung airport I always thought the same thing: why does airport food have to be so god-awful? It's not as if an airport is the international
space station and transporting good meat and produce required the brightest minds at NASA.

I'd spent so many frantic, excited, depressed, sad, joyful moments in airports, so I understood in my bones that people in transit needed a reprieve, a rest from the lunatic demands of air travel. My idea was to offer upscale comfort food in a restful environment. I put lobster mac 'n' cheese, classic American grilled cheese and tomato soup, and flank steak tacos with charred pineapple salsa on the menu, and an ouzotini on the drinks list. I made sure the bartenders poured real drinks, and had the designers install outlets under the bar, so people could charge up their electronics.

That fall, Jennifer and I had decided we should go to Jackson for Christmas. Earlier in the year my dad had been diagnosed with bladder cancer. He survived his surgery and treatment and had been declared cancer free, but it was clear his best years were behind him, and there was every possibility this would be his last winter holiday.

As Christmas approached, Jennifer said she just didn't want to leave her yoga practice. The argument that ensued was not our worst, in part because the moment I was about to start throwing things, Thatcher toddled out, complaining of a sore throat. The next day the doctor diagnosed strep. Most likely we could have found a way to make the trip, but by then Jennifer had worn me down. Two days before Christmas I called my parents to break the news that we couldn't make it. They were crushed. My mom, steely, practical, and always understanding, cried. It was, indeed, my dad's last Christmas. Even now I prefer not to dwell upon that, for fear of unearthing the resentment I know is buried there.

twenty-one

M
y dad was the world's best retiree. After thirty-five years devoted to teaching world history to tenth graders in the Jackson, Mississippi, school system, he said, “No more.” They must have given him a plaque and a send-off dinner, but if so I never heard about it. He was the classic Man Who Never Looked Back.

In retirement he would get up at 9:00 a.m. and drink a cup of coffee, eat a toasted bagel heavy with cream cheese, and read the paper. Next: shit, shower, shave. That took two hours. Then he would meet a friend for lunch. One of his students grew up to become principal of the high school, and they'd often go to Scottie's restaurant, now no longer in business. He developed a routine with the waitress. She'd say, “How were those chicken and dumplings?” And he'd say, “Real good. But next time trip the chicken so some meat falls off.”

He'd mosey home, settle into his recliner, and read his book. Heat up the leftover coffee from the morning's pot and wait for dinner, wondering in particular what was for dessert. As he got on in years, he developed type 2 diabetes, and my mom begged him to watch his calories and exercise. I had a few come-to-Jesus conversations with him about cutting out the hand pies, but he just smiled, indulging me. “I've already outlived all the men in my family,” he said.

After he recovered sufficiently from his bout with bladder cancer, my parents made the long trip from Swan Lake Drive to Santa Barbara to visit their grandchildren for Easter, a compensation for missing Christmas. We were relieved and grateful to learn that his oncologist in Jackson had declared Dad cancer free, but a week into their stay, a golf-ball-size tumor popped up on his neck. Jen and I took him to our doctor, who diagnosed the mass in his lymph nodes as malignant. Whether it was a new cancer or a metastasis was unknown, but we were devastated.

Had this happened today, I'd like to think I would be capable of being present with my grief, but instead I went into full-throttle we-are-going-to-make-the-most-of-every-moment mode.

My dad seemed happiest when he had two grandsons on each knee. He loved them more than anything. And regardless of how tense things were between Jen and me, and how I felt that no matter how hard I was working, I should be working harder, longer, and faster, our boys were a constant source of joy for me as well, affectionate and entertaining and wonderful to behold.

Zoran, our oldest, is a Renaissance guy. He plays chess and the piano. He also surfs. He's a good student and a little soccer star. Of the four boys, in terms of looks and personality, he's Jennifer's mini me, sensitive and passionate. He likes people, and during the many plane flights he's already taken, often strikes up a conversation with his seatmate. Perhaps because he was our first and only child for a few years, Zoran and I have a special, unspoken bond; also, because he and Jennifer are so much alike they squabble, and I'm often the peacekeeper.

Caje, the second oldest, is a smaller guy with a huge personality,
like the proverbial big dog in a small dog's body. He entertains the rest of us by walking around the house reciting movie lines. It wouldn't surprise us if he wound up becoming a famous actor. Or a Supreme Court judge. He's the law-and-justice man in the family. If Caje sees what
he
perceives as an injustice, he'll start raising Cain about it. If one of his brothers is getting disciplined and Caje believes it to be unfair, he will stand up for him to the point of getting his
own
time-out.