I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (33 page)

When I called my mother the next day to ask what she thought of Lachlan, she was enthusiastic. “He’s a person you feel instantly
comfortable with,” she said. It was true. The discomfort, I was about to learn, comes later.

Anne met Lachlan over leftover lasagna the following Saturday, and the two hit it off instantly. Ginia, who had met him over
the summer, reconnected with him at a dinner party our friend Meredith gave in honor of his return, but she made herself a
little harder to win, not that Lachlan noticed. I showed him off at parties thrown by my
Harper’s
colleagues and even dragged him to lunch with the priests. I was hoping that soon Father Joel, whom Lachlan called a “wee
soul,” could pull off some kind of interfaith ceremony. Apparently, a nod from the bishop was all that was needed to have
me married to a Presbyterian.

All the while, we were waiting to hear back from THE AGENT. I had checked in with her a week after Lachlan arrived, the time
she’d said it would take her to read the manuscript. She got on the phone with me immediately, bubbling over with praise for
the novel: “I just started reading it and I’m pretty positive I’m going to love it, but I haven’t finished,” she told me.
“Don’t show it to anyone else, I’ll finish in a week.” Lachlan made me go over that conversation with him again and again.
“Now tell me one more time,” he’d say as that week became many more. “Did she say she would call you in a week or that she
would finish reading in a week?” I’d make another go at re-creating the conversation as best I could and even refer to the
notes I’d made in anticipation of just this sort of hounding.

“What would you want to do if you weren’t working in publishing?” Lachlan asked me over dinner at Il Gattopardo in Midtown
before a classical music concert at Carnegie Hall (he was an authority on analog music, too). I told him my secret, that I
dreamed of being a writer, something I was embarrassed to say, especially since I hadn’t written a word since college. Still,
that was what I always felt I should be doing, though I was afraid of trying. Lachlan dismissed my aspiration with typical
writerly snobbery: “Why would anyone want to be a writer?” he snorted, as if the vocation were a sentence he alone was stuck
with for the crime of his brilliance.

Lachlan kept in touch with his parents, calling them every so often to report on the progress of the book. I suppose he liked
letting them know that things were happening with his career, and also that he had some kind of girlfriend, because while
they were chatting, he asked me by way of hand gestures if I wanted to have a word with his mother. It was the oddest request,
but, deciding it connoted commitment I by no means wanted to discourage, I took the phone and spoke with Harriet in Edinburgh,
who seemed as uncomfortable as I.

“I see you’ve discovered the way to Lachlan’s heart,” she said, having listened to him brag about my cooking for the part
of the conversation when he wasn’t talking about THE AGENT (from whom we still had no news). How I wished it were so simple.
I had gotten to Lachlan’s stomach for sure, but I still did not know the anatomical path to his heart, if there even was one.

The route to other parts of his body was difficult to ascertain as well. When the ersatz cancer fear had dissipated, Lachlan
had run out of excuses for avoiding sex, so he dug around for some of my ailments. “What do you worry about?” he asked when
we got into bed one night. At the time, I was mostly perturbed about the dishwasher—it wasn’t draining properly. Lachlan had
dealt with the repairman that afternoon while I was at work, but when I opened it that evening, I was confronted with a pool
of white stinky water and unclean dishes.

“Everything,” I replied to his question, acknowledging that my need to have a home in precise working order is a neurotic
balm for a plethora of shortfalls I perceive in my own self.

“I don’t know why you worry, you’re so intelligent, you’re such a wonderful person,” Lachlan said—a response that was both
truth and overstatement. He construed some of my appliance angst to be about him, which wasn’t fair because I didn’t know
as much as he did about what was going on at that point. If he was right, that little machine had a lot of weight on its racks;
there was no service I could call to come and fix Lachlan.

It wasn’t all “sand dunes and salty air” the next night when Lachlan embarked on something beyond the usual cuddling in bed,
but for all intents and purposes, he appeared to be in the game. Suddenly he stopped. “I’m not excited,” he said, “you’re
anxious, and it’s not sexy.”

Not the most encouraging pillow talk. “Let’s not blow this out of proportion,” Lachlan said as I did just that. What is the
correct proportion of anguish one should exhibit after being told she is not sexy by the man she loves? Apparently Lachlan
knew the ratio.

“I like you full stop,” he said as I begged him the next morning to explain to me what was wrong. “All relationships have
periods when they’re not sexual.” Yes, they do, but first shouldn’t they go through the one where they are?

Holding hands and cuddling at night continued for a time, but our sex life was officially over. We did, however, continue
to sleep together in my bed. Lachlan was apologetic about his frigidity at first; he would embrace me in the kitchen while
I was making us dinner and say, “Sorry I’m so weird.” He brought me lilies, which “symbolize virginity”—an inappropriate message,
though they were pretty and filled the apartment with a glorious scent—he brought me a nice bottle of Nebbiolo, one of my
favorite grapes. But louder than the fragrances and fine tastes were the words
you’re not sexy.
My senses were overloaded with the sound of that phrase.

The burning question in my mind, whether the problem was with him or me, should have easily been answered by the fact that
Lachlan was developing an unnatural affection for an ice-cream scoop—a purple plastic object shaped like a little man with
a round head that scoops ice cream and a pear-shaped body for a handle. Lachlan christened him “Scoopy” and insisted he be
liberated from his drawer and stand on his cloven foot on the kitchen countertop. One Friday evening, Lachlan brought him
out to the living room to watch
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
with us and for the next few days changed the lyrics to one of the songs from the movie in homage: “Someone to care for,
to be there for; we have Scoopy,” he’d sing. He referred to Scoopy constantly as our child, the third person in our home.
He even did this in front of my mother!

“Scoopy was very upset!” Lachlan exclaimed to me in private after she’d laughed off his peculiarity. I was enchanted by the
Scoopy thing and even sang along to his anthems, though life with Lachlan was becoming wretched.

The other thing Lachlan loved that was not me was coffee. Not that it kept him awake, but he adored drinking it, and he was
an authority on making it. He devoted himself to the study of techniques for maximizing the beverage’s flavor potential and
had many well-researched ideas on the matter. I learned from Lachlan that you should never clean a coffeemaker (or teapot,
while we’re at it) with soap—it should be rinsed simply with water and only water. A new espresso maker must be seasoned before
use; to do this, you brew a mock pot of coffee from used grinds. (I suppose if you’re not thrifty, you could brew a pot from
new grinds and throw out the first batch. But then, why not just drink it and grin and bear a first, imperfect cup of coffee?)
Lachlan insisted on the fine grind, no matter the filter, the better to wrench every last bit of flavor out of the bean. He
treated coffee with an Old Testament sort of reverence; it was veneration mingled with fear. He saw dangers inherent in adding
fire to ground beans and water under pressure. To make a cup of espresso was to flirt with death. If the pot was left boiling
on the stove one moment longer than necessary, it might explode and shoot boiling water and grinds all over the kitchen. We
could be killed! Lachlan kept constant vigil over espresso as it brewed, making sure to remove the pot from the heat at just
the right moment, to keep us safe.

I don’t follow any of his dictums. Do you actually think I would take coffee-making advice from someone who sleeps all the
time?

As I got more and more fed up, my generosity waned. I begrudged Lachlan the littlest things—like the pricey can of Italian
tuna fish he helped himself to for lunch every day. That was a habit I could break, knowing full well how Lachlan obsessed
about his health. Apparently, he was not aware of the dangerously high mercury content in tuna fish. I felt it was my duty
to let him know that it wasn’t a good idea to eat it every day. Instantly, he was on to more economical lunch options, like
beans and toast.

Lachlan’s lack of concern for the needs of my body, a body that was shouldering the burden of procuring for him a big-deal
New York agent, was doing me in. One rainy Monday morning when I was going to have to phone her for the fifth time, I woke
up crying and I couldn’t stop. I tried to explain to Lachlan how the pressure was getting to me; how much energy it took to
make those calls. He sent me off with good wishes and a pursed-lipped kiss, as he did every day.

My discontent reverberated onto my entertaining, usually so free of incident. During the Scottish occupation, a fire broke
out at two separate dinner parties. The first time Jen and Jeff were over for my mother’s trusty baked sole, a fish that proved
trickier than it needed to be because when I pulled the baking sheets from the oven to see how they were doing, they slid
to the back, spilling grease onto the oven floor and causing flames to shoot out wildly. Lachlan was in the living room yukking
it up with the guests while my eyelashes and hair were getting singed in the kitchen. Jeff finally heard my cries and ran
in to put out the fire. It was then I realized that the previous owner of my apartment had inserted the racks backward. That
discovery put an end to some of the near death experiences, but not all of them.

Incendiary Sole

¼ cup (½ stick) butter, melted

1/3 cup olive oil

1 heaping cup bread crumbs

¾ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon chopped parsley

Freshly ground pepper

2 pounds sole or flounder

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Combine butter and oil in a wide, shallow bowl; season the bread crumbs with salt, parsley, and pepper and spread on a plate.
Dip the fish in the butter and oil, covering thoroughly, then dredge through the bread crumbs. Place on a baking sheet and
bake for about 15 minutes, until the crumb topping is lightly browned. (Don’t worry, I’ve adjusted the recipe so there is
no extraneous fat that might cause an oven fire.)

Serves 4 to 6.

I took off the Friday before Christmas to get a tree with Lachlan. I had never had my own Christmas tree before because my
previous living room would not accommodate one. Unfortunately, the heartwarming scene of dragging a fresh Vermont fir through
the Brooklyn streets that danced in my head when I had envisioned Christmas with Lachlan a month earlier did not play according
to script. Besides the fact that it was raining, yet again, dragging such an exultant symbol down sidewalks with a man whom
you want to love you more than anything else in the world, who doesn’t and won’t no matter how many pretty decorations you
come up with, filled me with gloom.

It rained on Christmas Day, too. For my present, Lachlan gave me a cutting board designed for slicing bread with slats for
the crumbs to drop through, making an altogether neater bread-cutting experience. A gift as sexy as our relationship, you
might say, but that’s what I asked for when he asked me what I wanted. I was shocked that he was planning on getting me anything,
but Lachlan believed in presents. I got him a beautifully designed edition of the chapter on greatness from Baldassare Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier,
a book I loved back in my innocent college days, which my current situation recalled to me.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, I gave a dinner party for out-of-town friends who were in New York for the
holiday. They had been hearing about Lachlan by e-mail and were looking forward to meeting him. Too bad that by that time
our relationship was as deflated as cooled Yorkshire pudding. Which is what I happened to be making that evening, along with
roast beef, for the traditional British Sunday dinner (even though it was Wednesday). My puddings looked and tasted perfect
when I pulled them from the oven after extinguishing a fire caused by the fat that bubbled over in the pan. This time, Lachlan
got wind of the crisis and ran in with a broom (?) to put it out. The handle hit the overhead light, causing glass to shatter
all over the floor, so once we had the flames under control we were sweeping up this other mess. Besides that, the meat was
tough. I didn’t have a good time at that dinner, but that was par for the course, and this was no St. Andrews Links.