Insatiable (14 page)

Skeptics, those less sexually driven than I, might like to read that at some point in the week, perhaps between blond chicken livers at Alain Chapel in Mionnay and the baby lamb with herbs de Provence at Baumanière, the crazed sex cooled and Murray and I could talk of other things. But for all those who want to believe sex that hot can’t possibly last, I have to note that, in fact, the sexual intensity only grew. Murray in bed was full of surprises: songs and commands and silences. I felt free to be as wanton, as demanding, as raw and perverse and out-of-control as I had never guessed I could be.

But, of course, there were the in-betweens and the autoroute and the hours at table. Murray was a big talker, a raconteur, a debater, full of confessions and questions and demands for opinions I didn’t always want to think about. Sometimes as we drove, I would pretend to be asleep just to escape.

“Isn’t it time for a chocolate?” he would ask, his voice waking me. Like people who convince themselves they aren’t truly alcoholic because they don’t drink before 5:00
PM
, we agreed we would not have the first chocolate of the day before 4:00
PM
, when a little caffeine really helped.

So we talked. I learned about Murray growing up the son of a missionary in China, what he read, how he was perceived at school, what food was like at home, and how he’d come to discover great wines—in his crowd, he was the tastemaker. “This chocolate is good, but it’s not as good as a Frango.” A Frango was a Chicago icon, a deathless chocolate mint. He would send me some, he promised.

Murray had edited the
Playboy
interview each month, since it was conceived as a way to add intellectual heft between the girlie stuff. He had discovered Alex Haley’s writing, assigned him to interview Malcolm X, and was helping Haley with
Roots
. He was wild about Shel Silverstein’s writing and had brought a couple of his essays from
Playboy
in his briefcase. He read them aloud to me . . . before and after making love, before and after chocolate.

“Do you have a plot for the novel you’re writing?” he asked me one day as I sat pressed close to him in the car. I took my hand off his thigh. I had talked so many years and so vaguely about the novel I would write that I never thought much about what the novel would be, or when—that is to say, if. I remembered being really annoyed and a little deflated when Françoise Sagan’s
Bonjour Tristesse
made such a splash. It was already too late, even then, for me to be a prodigy.

“Well, my heroine is a successful writer.” I began inventing. “A film writer. She has a wonderful marriage and a husband she adores, who lets her be whatever she wants to be . . . and he loves her success.”

“And then?” He sounded like my crotchety high school Latin teacher: impatient, relentless. “Yes, and then? She meets another man,” he prompted. “She is instantly attracted. His wife has left him for her tennis instructor.”

I laughed. “We’re disguising the characters here to protect the innocent, are we?” I thought for a moment. “And then they escape together to France, where she is rewriting a film for a director who treats her rudely because she’s a woman. They drive through France, eating in all the best places, making love. And her husband doesn’t know. Or maybe somehow her husband finds out.”

“What are you waiting for?” Murray asked. “You’re almost forty years old. Time doesn’t go backward, kiddo, so if you’re going to write a novel . . . write it.”

He was such an editor. Editors think it’s so easy to write. “Just write,” Don would say. “If you don’t know how to begin, begin in the middle.” But Don was always so gentle. Murray was a drill sergeant.

“You’re right, of course, Murray. I will write it.”

“When are you going to write it? This fall? This winter? You’ll need to take a leave from
New York
.” He had a way of holding his head at an odd angle, with his nose in the air, as he drove. Suddenly, he was not attractive at all. He looked like a turtle. “If you’re not writing it, maybe you should stop talking about it.” I looked at him. Smug smile. Smart-ass. I wanted to slap that silly superior grin off his face. But I’ve never been a slapper.

I was silent.

“I didn’t hear what you said.”

His voice was mean. I was itching and my stomach ached. Why was he ruining everything?

“Darling, let’s not discuss exactly what will happen when I get home. I owe
New York
a certain number of reviews a year. I want to write the Troisgros story, and
New York
is paying my way home on the
France,
so I owe that column, too. I like your plot. . . . Your ideas are fabulous. I’m really excited about the plot. I feel . . . inspired. I will write the book. I can’t wait to sit down and do it. I will do it. Please. For now, let’s just be here.”

18

H
AUTE
A
FLOAT

M
Y LIFE IN SEARCH OF THE BEST TO EAT, NEVER MIND THE PRICE, WAS
a total contradiction of all the heroic counterculture movements of our time. A Woodstock friend had sworn to eat only organic. She picked Jerusalem artichokes from alongside the river, made her own yogurt, and had forsaken éclairs for unsulfered prunes. Other women were discarding bras and forsaking alimony in the name of liberation. All about me, husbands and wives seemed to be destroying one another in the name of honesty. Incensed by gas-guzzling imports, patriots were riding bicycles. Well, I figured I had been a feminist before
The Feminine Mystique,
so I didn’t feel a need to woman the barricades. I’d signed the abortion statement that ran in the first issue of
Ms.
magazine and I hoped that Gloria Steinem would remember and count me among her founding Valkyries.

Long before PETA came along to divide furistas from antifuristas, there was John Hess’s graphic report with photographs in the
Times
on the force-feeding of geese to fatten their livers. Foie gras was becoming available year-round in Paris restaurants in 1972 and impoverished goose herders were getting rich.
GEESE ARE TOO SMART TO OVEREAT, BUT SCIENCE IS FIXING THAT
read the headline. That was an end to foie gras innocence and denial. I did feel lingering pangs of guilt for those poor birds, but not enough to give up foie gras as long as the farmwives of France were willing to do the dirty work.

In my consuming passions, I was hopelessly out of sync. I’d always longed to experience the luxury of a transatlantic crossing on the S.S.
France.
Craig Claiborne’s transatlantic diary in the
Times
had called it “the greatest restaurant in the world.” Was it really all that exclusive? Where else could a middle-class salaried American live like a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt for a mere $180 a day, tips and port tax included? I’d read the
France
would be doomed to dry dock one day soon. That seemed reason enough to persuade Clay Felker to finance my float of unashamed decadence.

I thought it would be a serene coda to our escape from reality before Murray and I had to part—he returning to Chicago to provide socially redeeming value between the Playmate pinups, and I to yet another marriage-counseling attempt to glue Don and me contentedly together. Don had called to say he would be waiting for me at the pier in New York. He did have a way of falling in love with me all over again when I was out of town long enough, I realized. I wasn’t sure how I felt.

Stifled by the steamship’s predictably geriatric crowd, Murray and I struggled against the ennui of an ocean voyage. Well, yes, there was squash, swimming, shuffleboard, stock market classes, sunning, pinball machines, a small seizure of teenagers in the discotheque, predictable nightclub acts, and French movies without subtitles. But eating seemed to be the primary sport.

We made the rounds of heaving decks, endlessly trying to burn the calories of nonstop feedings with only sex and Ping-Pong to keep us alive. The fresh orange juice wasn’t fresh, but cheese was served in six-ounce wedges. If you asked for apricot jam at breakfast, it came to your room in a quart jar. Croissants traveled only by the dozen.

Alas, in the years since Craig’s exuberant endorsement, the kitchen had clearly faded. Up close, the boat itself was tacky, 1940 motel moderne, the dining room too bright, the stemless wineglasses too small, the cheese cold as marble. Craig had written that the kitchen would honor special orders—anything whim or gluttony might command. “That’s true,” our waiter, Michel, confirmed. He suggested we order a quiche for lunch. A quiche? Hardly an exercise to dazzle the gastronomic saints, but all right.

“Is it possible there is no extra charge for these special-order demands?” I asked. “If I ask for duck tongues and quail eggs, won’t there be a bill?”

“
Absolument non.
No extras,” Michel promised, seemingly quite pleased to be involved in stirring up the kitchen.

I gave the chefs every challenge I could muster. And someone out there picked up the gauntlet and threw it back. Astounding architecture and sculpture in ice and sugar emerged from the steamy caverns below. Sugar matadors, fruit baskets, windmills. The branch of a tree in spun sugar, with four candy birds perched above sweet frivolities. A simple request for grapefruit sorbet provoked a perfect globe of fruit in a spun sugar hairnet with green pulled-sugar leaves—off came the top and inside was a heart of silky grapefruit sorbet.

Ancienne cuisine
ruled. A simple
canard au vinaigre
? The chef had never heard of it. So his bejeweled bird was Elizabeth Taylor dressed for a Venetian ball—fluted lemons and truffle rounds strung on a silver skewer, and a necklace alternating delicate chicken dumplings and little ovals of foie gras mousse, plus a few pastry puffs filled with apple.

We were winning, but we were losing.

At times, Murray and I had to drag ourselves up the stairs for our brisk deck walks, and we hogged the Ping-Pong table for killer games (mostly me running to pick up the ball slammed by Murray in an effort to be athletic). It was almost like being married the night neither of us was up to the effort of arousing the other after dinner.

“Making love is aerobic,” I said.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he moaned.

“Nobody said we had to finish everything on the plate.”

“I have to clean my plate,” said Murray. “It’s like a religion. Don’t forget, I grew up in China.”

Before we’d been overstuffed ourselves, I’d had fantasies of a tour de force for the final evening and had challenged the kitchen to do a pot-au-feu in the style of Dodin-Bouffant, the sensualist Brillat-Savarin-like hero of a novel by Marcel Rouff,
The Passionate Epicure.

Halfway across the ocean, Michel reported sadly that the pot-au-feu of Dodin-Bouffant could not be found in any cookbook in the ship’s vast collection. Every day I asked and every day he grew gloomier. But at lunch before our last day at sea, he announced the recipe had been found. They had cabled Paris, I figured. I was thrilled. The only challenge was making a dent in the stunning platter that arrived.

An excess of pot-au-feu was not the only reason I slept so badly that night, waking once from a threatening dream. I clung to Murray, and in the morning after a quick, hot wake-up fuck and a long, slow, languid, sensuous tango of love, I wept. And he held me a long time. The ship was already docked at the Forty-fourth Street pier. We had put our big bags outside the night before and now baggage handlers waited in the corridors to help the last first-class passengers disembark.

We agreed Murray would leave first and I would wait a few minutes, collecting myself to meet Don. And if we saw each other on the dock, we would not speak.

The customs inspector sniffed my herbs de Provence. Well, it did look like marijuana. “What exactly is in here?” he asked.

“Parsley, lots of parsley,” I said, hoping to hit a familiar note. “And herbs like tarragon, sage.” He was distracted by a tin of wild boar pâté.

“Boar. That’s pork. Pork’s not allowed.”

“Unless it’s in a can,” I said.

In the distance, I saw Murray striding by Don, heading out into the street to find a taxi. Don was watching me parry with the customs officer. He waved and walked toward me. He grabbed my carry-on and caught me in a hug. I felt him shaking with tears. I was crying, too.

I was remembering a favorite line from a friend who’d fallen for a Don Juan: “Killers always cry.” What had she meant? Poor Don. Poor baby. I could feel his terrible sadness. I could scarcely breathe feeling his pain.

It seems he was in love with one of his reporters. He finally found the courage to tell me a few days later. He hadn’t meant it to happen. I recalled his favorite cynical romantic’s motto: Fucking Leads to Kissing. It was true. She was twenty-two years old. A brunette, of course. I didn’t ask about the fullness of her lips. Enough torture already. He needed to be with her. And yet he couldn’t bear to leave me. Poor baby.

“Well, go then,” I said. “You’re impossible to live with like this.”

“Just for the summer,” he promised.

Good grief, I thought. He’s taking a summer vacation. I had a whole summer to taste what life would be like without Don. As I might have guessed. It was fun. And it was unbearable.