I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (26 page)

I renounced my vow of celibacy for nothing. Joel once told me that one can regain her canonical virginity after three years.
I didn’t want that; it took me long enough to lose my regular one in the first place.

Then, in classic New York style, I found just the thing to take my mind off all of it: real estate. I had been waiting for
a man to swoop in and take me into our new home and life, but he never came and there were things I wanted to do, like cook
in a real kitchen and entertain like a grown-up. I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to go it alone, and in order to do that,
I needed a better apartment. What did I discover? Real estate affords a girl just as much heartbreak as dating. This I took
to be both disturbing and refreshing. It was nice to know there were other things in the world that had the same power over
me that men had.

Was it the bridal magazines strewn about the place, whispering,
If you buy this apartment, this will happen to you, too?
that made me fall so hard for the first apartment I ever looked at? It was a condo on an up-and-coming strip of Brooklyn
waterfront. Good move on the owner’s part. But it was more than that. Mainly it was the kitchen with its brand-new de rigueur
stainless-steel appliances: the Viking stove, the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the Bosch dishwasher. These things were even more
my birthright than the white dresses in those magazines.

I lost three nights of sleep trying to figure out a formula to determine what I should offer. I jumped out of bed hourly and
ran to my computer, typing in numbers: square footage, times the number of burners on the stove, divided by the prime rate,
minus the balance of my savings account, divided by the number of shelves in the refrigerator. I had no idea how to figure
it out, so I came up with some number that was bigger than the one they were asking for and faxed in the paperwork. Then I
roasted a chicken and thought about what a better experience that would be in my new kitchen.

Real Estate Roast Chicken

1 (3- to 4-pound) chicken

2 tablespoons soft butter

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

1 lemon

3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Rub the chicken with butter, season generously with salt and pepper, squeeze the juice of the lemon over it, and stuff the
cavity with the lemon rinds and garlic. Place on a rack breast side down in a roasting pan; roast for 30 minutes, then turn
breast side up, baste with pan juices, and roast for another 20 to 30 minutes, until the breast is golden and the juices that
run from a pierced thigh are clear.

Yield: 2 servings.

Getting the call from the listing agent telling me that my bid didn’t cut it felt just like getting dumped. I had rebuilt
my life around this apartment, and then one miscalculation, and one phone call, and it was gone.

After that first taste, I got addicted to the hunt. Every Saturday I would scan
The New York Times
real estate pages and Internet to set my course for Sunday afternoon open houses. For eight months, I never saw a thing to
compare with that first place. After eight months, I decided I was never going to find an apartment, so I started fixing up
the one I had. I was cruising through my savings buying furniture and cookware while halfheartedly stopping by the occasional
open house.

Of course, that “when you give up on it you find it” dictum was going to work for me somewhere. Unfortunately, it happened
to be with real estate.

On a Saturday in February, I spotted an apartment that looked pretty nice on the Internet, but big deal, that had happened
a million times. Still, I decided to go to the open house that had been scheduled for the following day.

That day coincided with a massive blizzard. I called my brother Nick, who doubled as my real estate coach.

“There can’t possibly be any open houses today.”

“But that’s exactly when you have to go, you’ll have an edge.”

I called the Realtor. Were they still having an open house on Lincoln Place?

Yes, they were.

It continued to snow, hard. I called the Realtor again.

Yes, the open house was still on.

I trudged the mile and a half from my apartment in a foot of snow. Nick and his wife, Yuki, met me there. The Realtor was
taking off her boots when we arrived. We lined ours up beside hers and entered. Immediately I sensed it—something felt right
about this place; it wasn’t perfect, but it had everything I wanted. I’d heard this was how you’re supposed to feel about
the man you marry, but lacking that, I’d take the apartment. Once inside, I found a nice big central foyer, which connected
all the rooms. The art deco bathroom was tiled in black and white with toile de Jouy wallpaper, the large living room had
French doors and ample room for dining and lounging, the bedroom had windows that looked onto a pretty courtyard. The pièce
de résistance was the kitchen, which, though not enormous, was beautifully done. After a year of looking, those stainless-steel
appliances, which I liked so much at first, began to seem soulless once I noticed them in every newly built condo or recently
renovated co-op in New York. This kitchen had the top-of-the-line stuff, but here it was interpreted in a traditional style.
There were white wooden cabinets with carved details against a backsplash of white tile with an impressed floral molding.
The cabinetry continued on the doors of the refrigerator and dishwasher. There were big drawers and sliding shelves to conveniently
store cookware, a microwave oven concealed behind a sliding door, a shelf for cookbooks over the sink. The woman who lived
here (who was selling it because she was getting married to a German she met on
Match.com
) had painstakingly restored every inch of that apartment and overseen the kitchen renovation, thinking through every detail.
And this single woman would be the one to enjoy it. I told the Realtor I would make an offer. I was pretty sure no one besides
me would be showing up today and it would be mine.

“More people may come,” she said. “I got two calls asking about the open house.”

“They were both from me,” I said, laughing.

I got the apartment. The roast chicken I made in my new oven was divine.

I
used any excuse to stay home from work in the first few months after moving. Furniture deliveries, the cable guy, the dishwasher
repairman—all were reasons to take off an entire day. I was in love with my apartment, which only exacerbated my conflict
about having a man around. Now it wasn’t just my sanity that needed protecting, I had a home to guard—a feminine paradise
complete with a crystal chandelier in the foyer (a relic from the house I grew up in) and a mirrored vanity table in the bedroom
(a new purchase)—that didn’t need mucking up with guy stuff like guitars and electronics. I distracted myself from any inklings
of loneliness I might have felt by dedicating myself to adorning the place with art and eclectic furnishings. When there’s
something to buy, there is nothing bad to feel, and thanks to the Internet, I was buying at all hours. Packages arrived in
the mail or on trucks every day. I collected paintings and photographs from flea markets or friends and spared no expense
in framing them—this also had something to do with the fact that I had a crush on my framer, which was about as much of a
relationship as I wanted at the time.

It was the anticipation of pain that kept me home from work the day I met Lachlan. There would be a needle full of Novocain,
extensive drilling, and an hour in the chair. But when it was all over, I felt fine, and since it was a cloudless, not too
warm August day, I opted for the long walk from the dentist in my old neighborhood to my new neighborhood, stopping off at
Sahadi, a Brooklyn food importer, to pick up some staples along the way.

My grocery bags and I were crossing Smith Street when we were approached by a diminutive man dressed in wrinkled brown pants
and a navy blue T-shirt with Picasso’s signature emblazoned across the front. The shirt’s a bit of a cliché; you’ve seen it
before. That stated, Lachlan looked good; I looked like God-knows-what, not being one to doll up for Dr. DiLeonibus. I was
wearing a yellow corduroy skirt with purple elephant appliqués on it, Jack Rogers sandals, and a white T-shirt; preppy ironic,
you could call it, if you were in the mood to be kind. My hair was most likely unclean, and I was trying to hide the whole
package behind black sunglasses. Lachlan wore sunglasses with tiny oval lenses trimmed in blue. His hair was short with long
sideburns; the gray may have been premature. I quickly assessed his age to be somewhere between thirty-eight and forty-eight.
He was walking a dog.

“Can you tell me where I could find
Time Out
?” he asked in an accent that sounded Scottish, referring to the city arts and culture weekly, a spin-off of a magazine that
originated in London.

Because I liked the way he looked, and I’m not immune to the accent, I was exceptionally helpful and talkative. I had a lot
of information to impart. Finding
Time Out
in that particular corner of Brooklyn was complicated business. Lachlan was fortunate that he chose me to ask. In hindsight,
it was probably the single best move he ever made.

“You have two options,” I told him. “Both are equidistant from here. There’s Barnes and Noble over there”—I pointed in a northwesterly
direction—“or Book Court, over there”—I pointed in a southwesterly direction. Then I concluded: “Book Court is probably your
best bet with the dog, because they keep the magazines right up front by the door; you could grab one and pay for it with
one hand and hold the leash and the dog outside with the other. Where are you from?”

“Scotland.”

“Really? All my favorite bands are from Scotland.”

I blurted that out to keep the conversation going, but it also happened to be true.

“I like American bands,” he said. “Last week I went to see Kansas.”

That was a bold admission. For me to say I liked Kansas wasn’t too much of a stretch. My brother Nick was obsessed with them
when he was a teenager, and I guess you could say they rubbed off on me. I know all the lyrics to “Point of Know Return” and
“Carry On Wayward Son,” as well as to some of their lesser-known songs and B-sides. A man who would go see Kansas at B. B.
King’s House of Blues by himself was one I wanted to know. The action spoke of a sincere lack of interest in being cool, and
yet Lachlan seemed pretty cool. At least he did to me. How often do two people with an appreciation for the prog rock artistry
of Kansas find each other on a street corner?

“Thursday, I’m going to see Steely Dan at Jones Beach.”

Now I didn’t want just to know him, I wanted to go to that concert with him. I had to keep talking.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m a writer,” he told me. “I had a novel published ten years ago that sold eighty-two copies in America. I’m here working
on my second and third novels.”