Insatiable (24 page)

Writing is lonely. And I was living alone. I needed the tumult and mayhem of the restaurant world and the magazine’s constant deadlines. I liked inviting friends and strangers to dinner. The book would take years, and then maybe no one would like it. I was addicted to instant gratification. In fact, that was one reason I cooked—the triumph and applause invariably came before coffee.

Scallops with Salsa Cruda and Gremolata

D
on’t make this dish unless you have great summer tomatoes. It also works with really fresh swordfish cut into 1-inch cubes.

Sauce:

4 great large beefsteak tomatoes

1/4 cup minced shallots

1 tbsp. olive oil (to cook shallots)

2 tsp. minced cilantro or parsley

1 tbsp. olive oil (to flavor tomato mix)

1 tsp. lemon juice

1/4 tsp. coarse salt (or to taste)

Freshly ground pepper, to taste

Scallops:

12 large sea scallops

1/2 cup very fine fresh bread crumbs

1/4 tsp. salt

Freshly ground pepper, to taste

3 tbsp. butter

Gremolata garnish:

2 cloves garlic, minced

Optional: 1 tsp. olive oil

4 tbsp. minced parsley

Zest of 1 lemon, grated

To make the sauce:

Peel and seed tomatoes; squeeze out juice (reserve for another use). Chop; drain on sideboard.

Sauté shallots in olive oil until soft but do not let color. Stir into chopped tomatoes. Stir in cilantro or parsley. Season to taste with good olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

To prepare the scallops:

Shake scallops in brown paper bag with bread crumbs, salt, and pepper. Sauté in hot butter very quickly on both sides and edges till they are golden, warm, and still rare inside.

To prepare the garnish:

Mix together garlic, parsley, and lemon peel. Garlic may be sautéed lightly in a little olive oil if raw garlic frightens you.

33

L
IFE IS A
C
ABERNET

O
NCE UPON A TIME IN THE DIM DAWN OF ORAL HISTORY, THERE WAS NO
Williams-Sonoma international bazaar of kitchen and tableware in every mall, no De Gustibus famous chefs cooking classes at Macy’s, no Food Network, no chefs hotter than rock stars. James Beard taught a few classes on television in the fifties. You could buy springform pans and madeleine molds at a few high-end kitchen shops or from snarly Fred Bridge’s professional cookware hideaway. There were cooking classes, of course, Dione Lucas, Grace Chu, and Helen Worth, whose method was to teach one student at a time, standing over you like a benevolent mother-in-law and saying, “Rinse the spoon—cold water, please. Now hang it back in its place next to the whisk.” Then in the late sixties and early seventies, the newly food-obsessed fought to get into overbooked cooking classes.

The city was straining to get out of the financial doldrums. Yet no one stopped eating or stopped aspiring to a mastery of the kitchen. Food was a comfort most of us could afford. The rest of New York seemed to be latching onto obsessions once confined to us early foodies.

For those with leisure and money, “we blessed souls who live to love and love to eat and eat to love and love to delicious excess,” as I described us, the dream escape was a great chef’s cooking class far away. “True, gastronomic cravings are as varied as the libido’s yearnings,” I wrote. “Some long for Mother’s cooking, for soul food, for the prepubescent banana split. Others yearn for the simplicity of a perfect raspberry. To be immersed in pasta. To be assaulted by chocolate. To dive into a tin of caviar. To be attacked by a running Brie. But surely a universal food-world longing is to apprentice in the kitchen with a French chef of the vaunted three-star tradition.” All it took was a transfusion of money.

That fall, the fantasy came to life in all its wine-stained, butter-oozing reality in the Napa Valley. Roger Vergé, the brilliant chef-proprietor of the Moulin de Mougins, north of Cannes, had been enticed to make his debut into gastronomic showbiz. He would teach a weeklong cooking course at High Tree, a luxurious Victorian house nestled among the vineyards of Napa. I had been hired to costar as critic and raconteur by the school’s impresario, Michael James, because, to be brutally frank, he thought only I could persuade Vergé to come.

As a young Romance languages major, Michael’s fixation on languages had led right to the table, and to classes in France with Simone Beck (the legendary Simca of the Julia Child
Mastering the Art
consortium). At twenty-six, Michael was beautiful in a silkily turn-of-the-century way (dark eyes, trim mustache). He looked as if he might take off and jeté across the floor at any moment. But inside, ambition simmered, and buttressed by the business sense of his earthbound partner, Billy Cross, he had concocted the Wine Country Cooking Course, first with Simca at the stove and later Jacques Pépin and Marcella Hazan—all sellout successes.

Vergé and his lively red-haired wife, Denise, liked the idea, as I explained it to him, of being paid to discover the Napa Valley, with only a few hours in the teaching kitchen as the price.

Billy had negotiated to have twenty pounds of the best butter flown in from Wisconsin. I was to bring sixteen pounds of crème fraîche packed in dry ice on my flight from New York. Vergé would shop in San Francisco the morning before the students arrived, poking the fish himself to verify its freshness, and admiring a prime rib in the city’s grandest supermarket as if it were a Brancusi. Vergé had never seen a supermarket quite so sprawling or grand before. He picked out two plastic-bound chunks of bright orange cheese
“pour les sandwiches.”

“I’ll do bacon, avocado, and cheddar on toast,” he said. No one dared tell him he had just invented what was already a California luncheon classic.

Students flew in private jets for the privilege of sharing Vergé’s secrets. We strolled toward the house that first afternoon on a path covered with overripe figs fallen from dozens of trees, making an organic squish that thrilled those of us used to nothing but pavement. It was an amazing haunting smell, as if the whole world were nothing but Fig Newtons.

Actually, my French was severely limited. I was not the ideal translator for Vergé, who did not speak much English then. Indeed, I often mistranslated. That seemed to amuse and disarm the class. And several took pleasure in correcting me. “Monsieur Vergé said ‘never,’” they would cry good-naturedly, “not ‘always.’”

Most of us, even those, like me, who often cooked by instinct without recipes, felt threatened as Vergé simply began to cook, grabbing pots, chopping, slathering, sloshing wine, pulling pans off raging flames, never saying how much, how long, how hot, why or when, and with no written recipes to follow. Bemused by the class panic, Vergé, surprisingly shy, eventually paused to explain. The duck stock, how to do it, the browned bones, the chicken wings, the clarified butter, how and why. Reduction . . . the beginnings of his demiglace. Bring to the simmer. Reduce. Reduce. Reduce. The last-minute blob of cold butter he would swirl in to make the sauce shine. Michael James bobbed and danced a running interpretation.

Vergé peppered.

“How much?”

“That much.”

He nutmegged.

“How much?”

“A bump and four grinds.”

Vergé lopped a half-pound lump off a five-pound block of fancy butter into the saucepan.

“Oh no,” a student cried. “All that butter.”

“What about cholesterol?” asked the slender blond actress with a shudder.

“It’s not the butter that’s bad for you,” Roger replied. “It’s butter blended with flour that can hurt you.” It was a tenet of the nouvelle cuisine faith. The actress stared, eyes wide, wanting to believe. Oh, if only . . . we all strained to believe.

Champagne was poured. From humble kitchen peons, we became royalty at the dinner table. There were candles everywhere and an extravagance of bright flowers, fragile crystal, someone’s inherited china. Billy Cross wore black tie, and the waiters were spiffy in their gold-braided officers’ mess uniforms. A parade of Napa wines was presented to taste, and the fruit of Vergé’s mystifying legerdemain: sublime crayfish in a delicate buttery bath, duck tender and rare in a sherry-tinged sauce.

And so it went. An academic exercise quickly blossomed into a house party, escalating finally into a sensory blitz. Buttery croissants at breakfast. Sublime local and imported cheeses at lunch. Vergé’s
tarte tatin
made with High Tree’s own walnuts. We—well, some of us, myself for one—were actually learning the technique of the chef’s fragile vegetable timbales and the simple sorcery of bass fillets in a vermouth-spiked cream.

“If they poke us with a fork, we’ll spurt butter like chicken Kiev,” lamented an architect’s wife.

When we weren’t actually cooking or eating, our students were thronging the local cheese shop or invading the Court of Two Sisters, a Yountville bakery that posted a stern warning: “No smoking please. Butter, cream and fine pastry at stake.”

The exaggerated stylishness of High Tree was reflected at the table. One evening we arrived to find one hundred votive candles flickering. At lunch, a flock of ceramic ducks celebrated the duck barbecue. That night, dozens of candles in paper bags lined the walks, the mantels, and the sideboards. The staff all wore Moroccan caftans, or French sailors’ blue-and-white-striped jerseys, or naval uniforms. One night, I found a daisy lying on my pillow. One afternoon, an exuberant pink begonia was floating in my bath.

I loved living in this fairy tale. I imagined this was how I would live if I were Grace Kelly; clean sheets every day, damp towels spirited away by invisible servants and returned smelling of Ivory Snow. Great chefs somehow fathoming exactly my mood for dinner. I had to admit I’d come a long way from the Velveeta cocoon.

At dinner each night, there were heated philosophical debates, a litany of the en masse folly of gourmands that we were. . . . We discussed which was the best dumpling house in San Francisco and whether truffles, the dark tubers that could not be cultivated, might be found on Catalina. One evening, an incredibly handsome guest took my hand, gazed meaningfully into my eyes, and said, “Have I got a chocolate cake for you.”

Even the
New York Times
crossword puzzle seemed in sync. The clue one day read “Home on the Range.” And the answer, “Julia Child.”

Life at High Tree was pure fantasy, dangerously rich. Still, my life at home as a restaurant critic and cheerleader for indulgence was rich enough, beyond anything I could have imagined for myself. So reentry was only a slight shock, but soft—like landing on down pillows.

34

A
M
I B
LUE?

I
STOOD IN FRONT OF THE OLD BRENTANO’S ON FIFTH AVENUE AT A TABLE
piled high with copies of
Blue Skies, No Candy
. Wouldn’t anyone stop and buy? Where were the Insatiable Critic’s fans? Eating brunch, I supposed. It was an autumn Sunday at the 1976 New York Is Book Country street fair. I noticed him at once—first that jaunty stroll, his “I’m not rushing anywhere” walk, then the tousle of shiny black ringlets, the faded jeans and dark plaid shirt, opened just one button too low. He smiled. I smiled. He looked familiar. Of course, an actor.

I recognized him from my porn-film excursions with Andrew, the accountant. It was before VCRs, home video, and porn-on-demand television. Andrew’s affection for porn took us to shabby movie houses, where he always worried someone would recognize him.

“Walk out backward,” I once suggested. Andrew would pull up the collar of his raincoat and slip on dark glasses as we emerged from some Eighth Avenue sleaze center into the rain like ill-fated lovers from a Hemingway novel. He wasn’t even liberated by a bleep of porno chic when adventurous couples braved the semen-sticky seats and lurking masturbators on the aisle to check out
Deep Throat
at Forty-ninth Street’s New Mature World Theater. Just before the summer we met in East Hampton, the FBI had arrested Harry Reems on an obscenity charge. Could we be caught up in an FBI sweep? Never mind. Porn turned Andrew on. And seeing porn with me alongside made him even hotter. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain from Andrew’s stoked-up BTUs.

So yes, I had recognized that face, the shiny curls, the off-duty bad boy from porn movies.

“You’re that actor,” I said, “from those movies.”

He smiled. He was young and shy and even better looking in person.

“You know my movies.” He seemed surprised and pleased.

I struggled to remember which film. Oh yes. I flushed. “You were wonderful in
Misty Beethoven,
” I said, suddenly recalling the boots, the black leather, and the riding crop.

“That was fun to make,” he said. “I liked the woman in that one.”

“And what do you do when you don’t like the woman?” I asked, feeling warm and strangely nervous.

“I just get myself in the mood,” he said, looking me straight in the eye.

What a concept. My mind flashed to memories of men who were too tired, too tense, too busy watching the Knicks. I liked that: a man who was willing, and able, to get himself in the mood. He gazed out into the passing crowd as if he was looking for someone. Then he picked up a book from my pile of unsold
Blue Skies
and started to read. He laughed. I was pleased. I meant the book to be funny. “What made you laugh?”

“The hero has my name,” he said. “Jamie. I know you. You write about food in
New York
magazine.”

“Give me your phone number and I’ll take you along on a reviewing dinner,” I said.

He found a piece of paper in his pocket and tore it in half. He wrote the name Jamey in a childish scrawl and a telephone number. So he was Jamie in the movies, but for some reason, he considered himself to be Jamey.

“I met the actor from
Misty Beethoven,
” I told Andrew later that night after dinner and after his complaint that he was too stuffed to make love, followed fifteen minutes later by our usual amazing, brain-numbing, sense-stirring sex. He was catching his breath, blowing gently on my skin to dry our mingled sweat.

“You should call him one of these days,” said Andrew. “He probably knows the kind of woman who would have sex with us.” Andrew longed to share a bed with two women, and sometimes he crankily blamed me for not making it happen. I realized not only that I’d led him to believe I was game—yes, I was game—but that I had only to approach a lusty friend and he would be wrapped in multiples of silken thighs.

What really occupied my mind when I wasn’t distracted by writing and eating—the mystery, as I described it to my beloved shrink—was why Andrew couldn’t see that two people as in love with sex as we were made for each other. Here I was, single during the full blossoming of the sexual revolution, making the best of it. But I panicked if the phone didn’t ring, if I didn’t have a plan for the evening.

“Sex is great,” I would tell my shrink, as if she didn’t know, “but I want love. I’d trade it for less sex.” She made a gesture of disbelief.

“No, really.”

I was only scared when I stopped to think about it. I wouldn’t feel secure and fulfilled until I found love again. But mostly, I tried not to think about it, not to get enmeshed in recriminations about having done something wrong to let Don fall out of love with me.

Sexual adventure was the way to Andrew’s heart, I decided. I’d already amazed and amused him weeks earlier, arriving at his apartment just before midnight in only stockings and a garter belt under my fur cape. The cape had slits to the elbow and required two hands holding it together not to stupefy the cabbie or the doorman.

“Oh, I’m sure this guy from
Misty Beethoven
knows a few porn stars we could share,” I said, shamelessly dangling a lure he couldn’t resist.

I put the scrawled “Jamey” paper on top of a pile of business cards on my desk and replayed his film in my head. The same old endless in and out of most X-rated movies left me cold, but there was almost always at least one scene that made me hot. By 1976, X-rated movies were becoming increasingly ambitious, having set designers, romantic kissing, teasing foreplay, humor, and plots that might not compute but at least tried. What I had liked about
The Opening of Misty Beethoven,
a porno
Pygmalion
with Jamie Gillis as a whip-snapping Professor Higgins, was that Misty was beautiful even in close-ups, her skin flawless. There were luscious dominant women, teasing threesomes, female twosomes who didn’t seem to be feigning enthusiasm, and Jamie’s character alternating between S&M, first the dominator, then the slave. One could certainly admire such flexibility.

I dialed the number he’d given me. It was his service. I left a message, but he didn’t call back.

My writer friend Audrey had just broken off with her steady guy. The two of us survived the holidays, dancing, flirting, and going to movies, as well as planning a big party that would launch us to a fresh start in 1977. We would ask all our single women friends to invite wonderful men they were willing to recycle, and we’d also include a significant balance of couples so that our scheme wouldn’t seem too obvious. We called it “Whip the Januaries” and asked everyone to bring their worst Christmas gift to trade for something better. My occasional boyfriend, Le Cirque’s
chef de cuisine,
Jean-Louis, said nothing was happening that week in the party room. He would prepare us a feast for ten dollars a person.

That made me nervous. What’s the point of turning down a few glasses of champagne offered by restaurateurs before dinner if you accept a party at Le Cirque for practically nothing? “Jean-Louis,” I protested. “It’s bad enough everyone in the food world thinks they know something about us. I certainly can’t accept a free party.”

“It is not free.” He was indignant. “I give you everything cheap, cheap, cheap,” he promised, pronouncing it
chip, chip, chip.
He would do mussels vinaigrette to start. “Mussels cost me ten cents a pound.” I wanted the house’s famous pasta primavera. “Vegetables, spaghetti—that costs nothing, and I give you kiwi tarts for dessert.” (The kiwi had just been discovered and was not yet a joke fruit.) We could save money, too, by bringing our own wine, he agreed. I was in so deep already with Jean-Louis (insisting, and believing, that not even a little hanky-panky could blur my critical faculties) that it was a cinch to convince myself that ten dollars per person was totally reasonable for mussels and noodles, and not perhaps the most unethical thing I’d done to date.

New York
’s wine writer, Alex Bespaloff, agreed to take me to a Sommelier Society wine tasting to find drinkable wines within our budget, and, to my amazement, there he was, Jamie Gillis, with a goblet of red in his hand.

He’d come with a friend. He had been out of town doing a movie. He’d decided it was probably too late to return my call. Pretending not to notice his friend, I invited him to the party at Le Cirque. He wrote the address and time on yet another mangy scrap of paper. I didn’t really expect him to come.

It doesn’t matter who you are, major culture hero, boldface name, social scion, in New York, as anywhere else, people tend to stay glued to people they know at parties. But given the challenge to wander the party room at Le Cirque, trying to trade a hunk of trash for a treasure, strangers were instantly caught up in provocative dialogue. Someone who hated a Tiffany pottery platter for strawberries and cream was thrilled to trade it for paisley pajamas with someone who loved pottery and strawberries. One of my personal candidates for recycling brought his gift in a plain brown paper wrap. Convinced from the shape of the box and the swapper’s innuendos that it was a vibrator, an actress friend eagerly traded a burgundy cashmere scarf, then laughed on discovering she’d gained a curling iron.

I was surprised when Jamie walked in, wearing a gray velvet suit and that same plaid shirt unbuttoned at the collar. I admired the air of confidence he wrapped himself in. It was as if he had a wonderful secret.

“You didn’t bring your worst gift,” I said, sitting down beside him and making sure he had grated Parmesan for his pasta.

“I have two tickets to the burlesque to trade.” He patted his pocket.

“I didn’t realized burlesque still existed,” I said.

“Oh yes. For an extra five dollars, one of the girls will sit on your lap.”

“Maybe you’ll take me one day,” I said.

He smiled.

Liz Smith’s beribboned toilet-bowl cleaner was voted the worst gift, and she won the prize, a ride home in a horse-drawn carriage we had hired that was parked outside. Everyone danced. It was like the prom I should have had. Instead of the bored boyfriend I had borrowed from an older friend so I could go to my high school prom, I now had a succession of partners.

As the room began to clear, I took stock of my options, my dancing partners, the seductive whispers. It seemed that I had a choice of three men to go home with: The dauphin of a wealthy upper-crust family, who was between wives. The unabashedly promiscuous Jean-Louis. Or the porn actor I’d met at the book fair. I thought about my mother. Yes, I did. I thought how Saralee would love the rich man’s son, smart, talented, dashing, a suitable age.

But Mom knew me better than that.

Jean-Louis was waiting. “It was a dream party. Thank you, and please thank Sirio, too,” I told him. “I’ll see you soon.” His mouth dropped open in surprise. The charming scion, waiting for me near the door with his coat over his shoulders, seemed dazed, as if too drunk to rise in protest as I kissed him good-bye.

Jamie Gillis took in the small drama and seemed bemused. I took him home and had my way with him on the living room floor. He let me have his lips. He let me force his lips open with my tongue. He let me loosen his belt and unbutton his shirt. He was there. He’d gotten himself in the mood, as advertised. He was the most passive man I’d ever met. The total opposite of his cinema persona. How odd. What a challenge. Quickly, I was hooked.