I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (10 page)

Remove to serving plate and sprinkle with freshly ground pepper and remaining mint.

Serves 6.

I didn’t have to urge Ethan to come out to the house with me early on Friday afternoons, he always suggested it. I was able
to get a jump on dinner thanks to publishing’s traditional summer hours. Ethan, being a writer, was free to accompany me,
and accompany me he did. He’d join me on my shopping rounds, hang out in the kitchen while I prepped and cooked, then sit
with me on the couch and drink wine while we waited for the others to arrive. Conversation never lacked for a moment, whether
I was trying to convince him to like me (which I couldn’t help doing after a glass or two of wine) or my favorite band, Pulp.
The latter he could not abide, and as for the former, well, he never managed to come up with a convincing argument for either
side of the issue.

Ethan had warmed up to me enough that a hand or other limb of his would find its way to some unthreatening part of my body
whenever we were sitting together. Once, not entirely as the result of my own movements, I found myself so close to him that
a kiss was practically unavoidable. Ethan didn’t fight me off, nor did he respond with much passion. Then the phone rang and
it was time to collect our friends at the ferry. Alone in the house again the following Friday, I tried to pick up where we’d
left off while waiting for a pot of water to boil for linguine that I would dress with a sauce of shrimps, scallops, and white
wine. That old smile of Ethan’s returned as he reiterated his friendly intentions toward me. I was saved from whatever hopeless
explanation he was about to offer by the eruption of bubbles bursting through the lid of the stockpot.

“As much as I care about you, what concerns me most is getting dinner ready,” I warbled as I fled to the kitchen, taking on
a cloak of false cheerfulness as I attended to:

Linguine with Friendly Little Fish

(Adapted from Jennifer Romanello)

2 tablespoons olive oil, plus extra for taste

1 clove garlic, minced

Pinch hot red pepper flakes

½ pound shrimp (buy them already cleaned, if available, and remove tails)

½ pound scallops, sea or bay (if sea, cut into quarters)

½ cup dry white wine

1 pound linguine

½ cup chopped parsley

This is a quick and easy sauce that can be made while the pasta is cooking; you don’t want to cook the fish too long or it
will dry out.

In a medium sauté pan, heat the olive oil and then add the garlic and red pepper. Sauté for 2 to 3 minutes until golden, then
add the fish and white wine. Cook until shrimp are pink and scallops are solid white.

Meanwhile, cook linguine according to the directions
here
. Drain well and add to the fish, stirring gently. Add a splash
of olive oil and the chopped parsley, then divide into warmed bowls. You do not serve fish pasta with cheese. (My mother does,
but it’s a bad habit.)

Serves 4 as a main course, 6 as a first.

Minor disappointments and crushing blows abounded, yet Ethan and I did grow close that summer. In addition to eating, we were
both into biking, for which the conditions on Shelter Island are ideal. Together we explored every corner of that island,
riding for hours while gabbing about our eternally amusing housemates and their precarious relationships. Midway through the
summer, Robert dropped Astrid for a younger woman he met in Poland. She looked like a model, but she had all the energy of
a dying swan. He was back with Astrid by summer’s end; no amount of beauty and youth could compare with that woman’s cooking.
And what was up with Stacey’s boyfriend, Hank? He’d arrive at the house with a rolling suitcase full of work and yet was involved
in no projects as far as we knew. Stacey’s father had similar questions about his authenticity and had gotten a private investigator
on the case, Ethan told me. Ethan was concerned for his friend, but he wanted to like Hank. I did, too, especially since Hank’s
desire to get Ethan and me together rivaled my own. He acted as our couples counselor, trying harder than I ever did to extract
information from Ethan about his reluctance to get involved. He’d grill him at dinner, over drinks on the porch, during swims
in the lake, on jogs, and on walks. I seconded his every inquiry.

“What will we do when summer’s over?” Ethan asked when we dismounted at Shell Beach, a jetty that sticks out half a mile into
the bay, where we always took a break from our weekly ride. I didn’t know why he was so concerned, since we were just friends
and all, but I wanted to help.

“I’ll invite you to dinner parties,” I replied, hoping I could win him in the cooler months with my talent as a hostess. On
the way back we’d pass Crescent Beach, which faces west, just as the sun was setting. Our housemates wondered what we were
up to on those long rides. I wondered why the long rides were all we were up to.

When the fall came we went on double dates with Stacey and Hank, though only one of the couples was dating. One evening over
margaritas in TriBeCa, Hank got to grilling Ethan about us and wouldn’t let up. I sat there thoroughly amused. Ethan, usually
so reticent, wasn’t uncomfortable; in fact, he seemed to be enjoying the attention as much as I was. Hank convinced him to
go home with me that night. When we arrived at my apartment, we found my brother Nick there; he was in town with no place
to stay, so he had let himself in for the night. It was impossible to explain what Ethan and I were in the middle of, though
it was far more innocent than whatever my older brother must have conjured. No, we weren’t there for a night of wild passion,
we were enrolled in a remedial dating course, and we were going to give simple kissing a go.

“We can go to my place,” Ethan said, but I wanted to be on my turf, so I quickly dispatched Nick to his friend Al’s apartment
in Sheepshead Bay.

When we were alone, Ethan made the truly grand admission that he had discussed me with his therapist, but he didn’t tell me
what he said. Evidently, Ethan was struggling with his feelings for me; I just couldn’t understand why it was such a struggle.
We did kiss, though, with Stevie Wonder’s
Fulfillingness’ First Finale
playing in the background. “There’re brighter days ahead,” went the first song
.
We kissed through the entire album, and when it was done Ethan went home.

____

Our relationship
continued to focus on music. Ethan invited me to come and sing with his band. I had never really sung in front of anyone
except along to the radio or CDs in the car, and here I was supposed to belt one out in front of Ethan’s friends, whom I had
just met. A bottle of Budweiser from the six-pack we picked up beforehand helped relieve the tension, and my performance improved
as the evening wore on. I took the mike and delivered brash statements with great timidity. I sang Madonna’s “Burning Up”
(incredibly appropriate) and AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” (less so). Ethan’s agility with the opening guitar line
of the Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing,” an incredibly complicated riff, was pretty hot. When we got tired of playing, we’d
repair to some nearby pub for hamburgers and more beer. It was a successful enough pairing that we repeated the experience
many times, always beginning with a beer and moving through our repertoire of rock and pop classics. The band seemed like
a constructive solution to all my unrequited feelings. I had given up on there being anything more between us.

But that may be because I somehow intuited that Ethan was about to come around.

“You look nice for your date,” he told me in the elevator to the practice room. I had informed him that I wouldn’t be making
it to our regular postmusic burgers that evening, and I could tell from Ethan’s voice that he wasn’t exactly thrilled about
my assignation. Nor should I have been: Daniel Eisenberg, the guy I had been seeing, was to dump me over dinner that night,
using a Liz Phair line to explain himself. “I’m a complicated communicator,” he told me. I wished he had simply communicated
on the phone his wish to not see me anymore so I could have hung out with my band mates, rather than dragging me out for a
meal I couldn’t enjoy eating while he explained to me the ways in which we “didn’t click.”

I took that one way harder than I needed to, since Daniel and I had been out only a few times. But the combination of that
marginal disappointment in the shadow of the Ethan situation just made me feel hopeless. Here was a man I had everything in
common with, a man in whose company I was most at ease and happy and who gave me no indication that he felt any differently,
and yet he wouldn’t or couldn’t be with me for some mysterious reason.

It was laughable, really. And so I laughed myself into a day off from work and an extra therapy session. I laughingly made
Ginia come over for breakfast to console me on Saturday morning, and then, with laughter, I accepted my lot. Love just wasn’t
going to happen for me. I decided I was fine with it. It was Halloween. I put on the costume of acquiescence; my four-year-old
nephew, Max, dressed as a Hoover vacuum cleaner. We went trick-or-treating, and then I called Ethan to confirm plans for later
that evening. We were going together to a dinner party.

“Helloooo, pumpkin!” I chirped when I called him. The greeting was authentic. I didn’t resent him, this was my life; it was
okay. Before dinner, I met him at his apartment. I had never visited him there before. Interestingly, on top of the stereo
was a pile of brand-new Stevie Wonder CDs. Could this have had anything to do with the fact that I had played him Stevie Wonder
the last time he’d come over? He hadn’t confessed to liking him before. He threw them in his five-CD changer and hit the shuffle
button. He explained that that was his way of taking in new music. I liked the idea, but I wouldn’t be able to execute it,
working, at the time, with just a Sony Discman hooked up to components I’d had since high school.

It was looking more and more like something was up with Ethan when he followed me to a party after dinner. It was already
eleven-thirty, and he usually liked to be tucked in by midnight. We ended up sitting on the radiator in front of the window,
talking to no one but each other, telling our stories of “the first time.” After that, Ethan, who usually just dropped me
off on the corner, walked me to my door. There he spoke the most romantic words a man has ever said to a woman: “Can I come
up to your apartment? I have to pee.” He lived only a few blocks away; that’s when I knew for sure that Ethan was looking
for more than just the use of my porcelain.

We spent half an hour looking at a book of Yiddish expressions I kept on the coffee table, a gift from my author Henry, who
knew I was a Yiddish enthusiast. Ethan especially liked all the ones having to do with the
tuches.
I had to reach past the book to kiss him, but he did not resist. After we kissed for a song or two (
Fulfillingness’ First Finale
again, brighter days, increasingly imminent), Ethan stopped and held me for a very long time. His surrender was palpable.
Even when we got into my bed together, I wasn’t convinced anything would happen, and now even I wasn’t inclined to force it.
I put on a nightgown, albeit a conservatively sexy one. It didn’t stay on.

“Unprecedented,” is how Ethan labeled what took place over the next four hours. I later looked up the word to try to extract
further meaning from it. I did that with the word
auspicious,
too. That’s the one he assigned to Drovers Tap Room, which was where we met.

Those words were bandied about over a breakfast of pumpkin-walnut bread that I happened to have left over from the consolation
call Ginia had paid the previous morning when I was mourning the complicated communicator. How everything had changed in just
twenty-four hours!

Morning After Pumpkin Bread

(Adapted from Vern Bertagna, Bon Appétit)

½ cup (1 stick) butter, softened