I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti
Read I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Online
Authors: Giulia Melucci
Copyright © 2009 by Giulia Melucci
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
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permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: April 2009
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ISBN: 978-0-446-55094-9
Contents
Kit Fraser Would Prefer a Drink
The Ethan Binder School of Cooking
Lachlan Martyn Was Passionate… About Food
For my mother, who taught me how to cook and how to love
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Most of the names and some of the identifying details have been changed to protect the innocent and less so.
W
henever I start dating someone new, I just can’t hold back. No matter how often my girlfriends warn me, “Take it slow, let
him win you over, don’t give it away so quickly,” I just can’t resist—I have to cook for him.
For me, a new boyfriend is a tantalizing opportunity to show off the thing I’m most confident about: my cooking. I assess
the gastronomic inclinations of the man in question at first sight, and my guesses are usually right. I’ve made every kind
of food from simple pastas to slow-cooking stews and moist, beautifully seasoned roasts accompanied by perfectly browned potatoes
and bright, crisp vegetables. I’ve made chocolate cakes, cheesecakes, and cakes filled with seasonal fruits. And I’ve dated
every sort of man: artist, lawyer, banker, and writer, kind and unkind, ready to commit and as amenable to commitment as I
am to eating at the Olive Garden.
In each of my relationships, I have honed my skills and developed my own style and assurance in the kitchen. The men who have
passed through my life have all been culinary inspirations, and if I haven’t figured out anything about love, at the very
least I have learned how to cook with the greatest simplicity, delivering the maximum flavor, because when you’re in love
you want time for other things besides food. But good food is the best complement I can think of to the many pleasures love
offers. It can also be the greatest comfort for the pain it can sometimes cause. I am not talking about obvious remedies,
like pints of ice cream! That has never been my style. No, the best balm for a broken heart is nourishing food you make in
your kitchen (or better yet, food cooked for you by a dear friend; I am fortunate to have many who are great cooks). Food
that tells your heart and mind that you are taking care of yourself, at least for now, until the next man comes along, as
he always does, and you’re happily cooking for two again.
Would Prefer
a Drink
I
got a late start on the whole dating thing.
Kit Fraser was my first real boyfriend. He entered my life in January 1990, the day after I moved into my first New York apartment:
an East Village sublet I shared with Jennifer Warren, a close friend from college. For the first eighteen months after graduation,
I lived with my mother in the house where I grew up in Brooklyn. This was not exactly my ideal postcollege habitat; the transition
to a place of my own had been delayed by my father’s death, which occurred simultaneously with the end of school. I was loath
to leave my mother alone in that big gray stucco house, but I was also fed up with my two brothers using the basement for
band practice while their girlfriends sat in the kitchen helping themselves to the provisions as if they owned the place.
It was loud and it was uncomfortable. I had to get out.
That Monday morning, Lucy, my boss at
Spy
magazine, the legendary satirical monthly where I was employed as a picture researcher, said to me: “Now that you have a
new apartment, you’ll probably get a new boyfriend.” What new boyfriend? I thought. There had never been an old one. Well,
at least not for any significant amount of time.
Up until then, the only man I could honestly have called a boyfriend was Steve Sullivan, a local boy four years my senior
whom I dated for about four weeks around the time of my sixteenth birthday. I remember this because Steve took me on a real
grown-up date to a restaurant to celebrate and gave me a bracelet made of jade beads for a present. He wore a coat and tie—and
I, a dress from Bergdorf Goodman. My mother played it free and easy with her stash of department-store-specific charge cards
in those days, sending me into “the city,” as we called it, for shopping and haircuts at Bergdorf’s, the quintessence of elegance,
on a regular basis. I would also have on my person a note in her scrawl explaining that I had permission to use the card,
just in case anyone questioned me (they never did).
I considered myself a punk rocker back then, and the dress was a Bergdorf Goodman take on punk: The top half of it was made
of aqua T-shirt fabric cut off sloppily at the neck and sleeves, while the bottom was white cotton, gathered and painted by
hand. I thought it was just the right level of sophistication for Steve, who was in college but lived at home and liked to
hang out with his sister Lizzie’s friends, among whose number I counted myself, if only marginally.
I grew up in Bay Ridge, a neighborhood that—tragically—is best known for being the setting of
Saturday Night Fever,
a movie that did about as much for Italian-Americans as the Gotti family. Although the film may have contained some truths,
we liked to believe they were Bensonhurst’s truths. The neighborhood I knew had Irish families as well as Italian. My friends
had real problems: divorced parents, parents who were alcoholics, or both; siblings who were addicted to drugs. But they didn’t
turn to the disco floor to get a sense of mastery over their troubles; they made jokes. Any time there was a homeless-looking
man walking down the street, my best friend in high school, Denise O’Dea, would wail pathetically: “Daddyyyyyyyyy! Daddy,
come hoooooooooome!” I still think this is funny.
Denise and I would go to the Sullivans’ every day after school. There Lizzie held court over a throng of her former classmates
from Our Lady of Angels, a parish school that stood directly across the street from her house. I was somewhat in awe of the
girls who went there, as they played basketball and attended classes with boys. My primary education at Visitation Academy,
an all-girls school run by cloistered nuns situated behind big stone walls that wrapped around an entire city block, was a
bit more precious and left me with no inclination whatsoever to dribble.
Still, it was a fun group to hang out with, so hang out we did. Steve got a kick out of us while he himself maintained an
air of superiority: He went to Fordham University and attended the ballet; he would argue with my father about the war in
the Falklands. After he railed against British “self- determination” (being Irish, he was against it), we would go make out
on a piano bench—the only seat that accommodated two in the enclosed front porch of my family’s house. While listening to
Billy Joel’s “She’s Got a Way” on the record player in my basement, I thought to myself, This must be exactly what he feels
about me. I, however, wasn’t so sure about him. I got a little queasy thinking about him when he wasn’t around, though when
I was with him it was fun. I liked kissing him, but I had no interest in going any further. “You can touch me if you want
to,” he cooed once during a make-out session. Why ever would I want to do a thing like that? I thought.
One evening on the piano bench, Steve declared that he was going to give it a go with the woman he had always wanted, Bernadette
Corrigan. She was a big girl, a basketball player; her father owned a tugboat company, and their family had money. My father
was a golfing buddy of Bernadette’s father and helped him get into the country club. (And this was the thanks we got!) Two
months later, Bernadette was on the Sullivan stoop showing off the gifts Steve got her for her birthday—those Russian dolls
that open up to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside, with the last doll containing a Claddagh ring (the Irish wedding
band, though they weren’t engaged). I came up with imaginative reasons why this scene wasn’t an excruciatingly painful one
for me to watch.
The year before I got together with Kit, I had been seeing a psychologist—a strict Freudian who resembled Cher—to get to the
bottom of why, at twenty-three, I had never had a boyfriend for any significant amount of time and had not yet had sex. I
was haunted by my lack of experience and convinced I would die a virgin. I felt alienated from my friends (late starters all,
but I was the latest), who had been let in on some cosmic secret that remained a mystery to me. The odds were against me for
more reasons than just my neuroses: I had gone to all-girls schools until college, and then to Sarah Lawrence, where the female-to-male
ratio was four to one—really more like eight to one, considering that the majority of the “ones” were gay. Every boy who wanted
a girlfriend at Sarah Lawrence already had one or even two. It was survival of the fittest, and I was neither physically (I
was a little plump) nor mentally (I was terrified) fit enough to compete with the willowy bohemian heiresses who surrounded
me.
