I Feel Bad About My Neck (11 page)

So I write a novel. I change my first husband’s cats into hamsters, and I change the British ambassador into an undersecretary of state, and I give my second husband a beard.

One of the saddest things about divorce

My sister Delia says this, and it’s true. When we were growing up, we used to love to hear the story of how our parents met and fell in love and eloped one summer when they were both camp counselors. It was so much a part of our lives, a song sung again and again, and no matter what happened, no matter how awful things became between the two of them, we always knew that our parents had once been madly in love.

But in a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing.

And then, after a while, you can’t even remember whether you were.

A man and a woman live in a house on a deserted peninsula

Alice Arlen and I have written a script for the movie
Silkwood.
It’s based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, who worked at a plutonium plant in Oklahoma; she died in a mysterious automobile accident while on her way to meet a
New York Times
reporter to talk about conditions in the plant. Mike Nichols is going to direct it; he was supposed to direct a Broadway musical instead, but it all fell through because he was betrayed by a close friend who was involved with the show. We will call the close friend Jane Doe for the purposes of this story.

So we all start to work together on the next draft of the script, and Mike keeps suggesting scenes for the movie that involve Karen Silkwood’s being betrayed by a close woman friend. He has a million ideas along these lines, none of which really bear any resemblance to what happened to Karen Silkwood but all of which bear a resemblance to what happened between Mike and his friend Jane. I finally say, “Mike, Jane Doe did not kill Karen Silkwood.”

“Yes,” Mike says, “I see what you’re saying. It’s the peninsula story.”

And he tells us the peninsula story:

A man and a woman live in a house on a deserted peninsula. The man’s mother comes to stay with them, and the man goes off on a business trip. The woman takes the ferry to the mainland and goes to see her lover. They make love. When they finish, she realizes it’s late, and she gets up, dresses, and rushes to catch the last ferry home. But she misses the boat. She pleads with the ferryboat captain. He tells her he will take her back to the peninsula if she gives him six times the normal fare. But she doesn’t have the money. So she’s forced to walk home, and on the way, she’s raped and killed by a stranger.

And the question is: Who is responsible for her death, and in what order—the woman, the man, the mother, the ferryboat captain, the lover, or the rapist?

The question is a Rorschach, Mike says, and if you ask your friends to answer it, they will all answer differently.

Another lightbulb moment.

This one marks the end of my love affair with journalism and the beginning of my understanding that just about everything is a story.

Or, as E. L. Doctorow once wrote, far more succinctly

“I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.”

From my script for When Harry Met Sally

HARRY

Why don’t you tell me the story of your life?

SALLY

The story of my life?

HARRY

We’ve got eighteen hours to kill before we hit New York.

SALLY

The story of my life isn’t even going to get us out of Chicago. I mean, nothing’s happened to me yet. That’s why I’m going to New York.

HARRY

So something can happen to you?

SALLY

Yes.

HARRY

Like what?

SALLY

Like I’m going to go to journalism school to become a reporter.

HARRY

So you can write about things that happen to other people.

SALLY

That’s one way to look at it.

HARRY

Suppose nothing happens to you? Suppose you live there your whole life and nothing happens. You never meet anyone, you never become anything, and finally you die one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway?

A guy walks into a restaurant

I’m having dinner at a restaurant with friends. A man I know comes over to the table. He’s a famously nice guy. His marriage broke up at about the same time mine did. He says, “How can I find you?”

We can’t do everything

I’m sitting in a small screening room waiting for a movie to begin. The room fills up. There aren’t enough seats. People are bunching up in the aisles and looking around helplessly. I’m next to my friend Bob Gottlieb, watching all this. The director of the movie decides to solve the problem by asking all the children at the screening to share seats. I watch in mounting frustration. Finally, I say to Bob, “It’s really very simple. Someone should go get some folding chairs and set them up in the aisles.”

Bob looks at me. “Nora,” he says, “we can’t do everything.”

My brain clears in an amazing way.

Nora. We can’t do everything.

I have been given the secret of life.

Although it’s probably a little late.

And by the way

The other day I bought a red coat, on sale. But I haven’t worn it yet.

The Lost Strudel or
Le Strudel Perdu

Food vanishes.

I don’t mean food as habit, food as memory, food as biography, food as metaphor, food as regret, food as love, or food as in those famous madeleines people like me are constantly referring to as if they’ve read Proust, which in most cases they haven’t. I mean food as food. Food vanishes.

I’m talking about cabbage strudel, which vanished from Manhattan in about 1982 and which I’ve been searching for these last twenty-three years.

Cabbage strudel is on a long list of things I loved to eat that used to be here and then weren’t, starting with frozen custard; this delectable treat vanished when I was five years old, when my family moved to California, and my life has been a series of little heartbreaks ever since.

The cabbage strudel I’m writing about was sold at an extremely modest Hungarian bakery on Third Avenue called Mrs. Herbst’s. I initially tasted it in 1968, and I don’t want to be sentimental about it except to say that it’s almost the only thing I remember about my first marriage. Cabbage strudel looks like apple strudel but it’s not a dessert; it’s more like a
pirozhok,
the meat-stuffed puff pastry that was a specialty of the Russian Tea Room, which also vanished. It’s served with soup, or with a main course like pot roast or roast pheasant (not that I’ve ever made roast pheasant, but no question cabbage strudel would be delicious with it). It has a buttery, flaky, crispy strudel crust made of phyllo (the art of which I plan to master in my next life, when I will also read Proust past the first chapter), with a moist filling of sautéed cabbage that’s simultaneously sweet, savory, and completely unexpected, like all good things. Once upon a time I ate quite a lot of cabbage strudel, and then I sort of forgot about it for a while. I think of that period as my own personal
temps perdu,
and I feel bad about it for many reasons, not the least of which is that it never crossed my mind that my beloved cabbage strudel would not be waiting for me when I was ready to remember it again.

This is New York, of course. The city throws curves. Rents go up. People get old and their children no longer want to run the store. So you find yourself on the East Side looking for Mrs. Herbst’s Hungarian bakery, which was there, has always been there, is a landmark for God’s sake, a fixture of the neighborhood, practically a defining moment of New York life, and it’s vanished and no one even bothered to tell you. It’s sad. Not as sad as things that are truly sad, I’ll grant you that, but sad nonetheless. On the other hand, the full blow is mitigated somewhat by the possibility that somewhere, somehow, you’ll find the lost strudel, or be able to replicate it. And so, at first, you hope. And then, you hope against hope. And then finally, you lose hope. And there you have it: the three stages of grief when it comes to lost food.

The strudel was not to be found. I spent hours on the Internet looking for a recipe, but nothing seemed like the exact cabbage strudel I’d lost. At a cocktail party, I lunged pathetically at a man named Peter Herbst, a magazine editor who my husband had led me to believe was a relative of the Herbst strudel dynasty, but he turned out not to be. I spoke to George Lang, the famous Hungarian restaurateur, who was kind enough to send me a recipe for cabbage strudel, but I tried making it and it just wasn’t the same. (The truth is, most of the genuinely tragic episodes of lost food are things that are somewhat outside the reach of the home cook, even a home cook like me who has been known to overreach from time to time.)

About two years ago, when I had landed in what I thought was the slough of despond where cabbage strudel was concerned and could not possibly sink lower, my heart was broken once again: the food writer Ed Levine told me that the strudel I was looking for was available, by special order only, at a Hungarian bakery named Andre’s in Rego Park, Queens. Ed hadn’t actually sampled it himself, but he assured me that all I had to do was call Andre and he’d make it for me. I couldn’t believe it. I immediately called Andre. I dropped Ed Levine’s name so hard you could hear it in New Jersey. I said that Ed had told me Andre would make cabbage strudel if I ordered it, so I was calling to order it. I was prepared to order a gross of cabbage strudels if necessary. Guess what? Andre didn’t care about Ed Levine or me. He refused to make it. He said he was way too busy making other kinds of strudel. So that was that.

But it wasn’t.

This week, I heard from Ed Levine again. He e-mailed to say that Andre’s Hungarian bakery had opened a branch in Manhattan, on Second Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street. It was selling cabbage strudel over the counter. You didn’t even have to order it, it was sitting right there in the bakery case. Ed Levine had eaten a piece of it. “Now I understand why you’ve been raving about cabbage strudel all this time,” he wrote.

The next day my husband and I walked over to Andre’s. It was a beautiful winter day in New York—or my idea of a beautiful winter day, in that you barely needed a coat. We found the bakery, which is also a café, went inside and ordered the cabbage strudel, heated up. It arrived. I lifted a forkful to my lips and tasted it.

Now I’m not going to tell you that (like Proust tasting the madeleine) I shuddered; nor am I going to report that “the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.” That would take way more than cabbage strudel. But Andre’s cabbage strudel was divine—crisp but moist, savory but sweet, buttery beyond imagining. It wasn’t completely identical to Mrs. Herbst’s, but it was absolutely as delicious, if not more so. Tasting it again was like being able to turn back the clock, like having the consequences of a mistake erased; it was better than getting a blouse back that the dry cleaners had lost, or a cell phone returned that had been left in a taxi; it was a validation of never-giving-up and of hope-springing-eternal; it was many things, it was all things, it was nothing at all; but mostly, it was cabbage strudel.

On Rapture

I’ve just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture—with a book. I loved this book. I loved every second of it. I was transported into its world. I was reminded of all sorts of things in my own life. I was in anguish over the fate of its characters. I felt alive, and engaged, and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I’ve loved. I composed a dozen imaginary letters to the author, letters I’ll never write, much less send. I wrote letters of praise. I wrote letters relating entirely inappropriate personal information about my own experiences with the author’s subject matter. I even wrote a letter of recrimination when one of the characters died and I was grief-stricken. But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn’t happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I’m truly beside myself.