L'America (33 page)

The cookbook sold, did relatively well, and led Beth to a friend of Hunter's—a bond trader, a bear of a man called Bear. Though his name was Henry, he'd become Bear because he liked a bear market. He liked as well to make big bets and big dares. He dared Beth to come to Wall Street, told her if she gave him eighteen months he would turn her into a bond trader. "Anyone can do it," he said, then asked if she had ever studied calculus. "Calculus?" she asked, horrified. Nothing sounded more dreadful to her than eighteen months on Wall Street. It was the subway, too, the idea of riding it every single day all the way down there. But secretly, somewhere, there was something intriguing about making so much money. She thought of Henry James's description of the American scale of gain, one that stopped at nothing, would sacrifice anything, for so much money that it would all be worthwhile. Beth had scrabbled so hard and for so long that the notion of making more money than she could possibly spend had a certain appeal to it. How lovely it would be to be like Cosella, a triumph on her own terms with a life perpetually cushioned by money and all that it could buy. Bear and his wife were a bit like that. Bear made five million dollars a year. His wife made a million. "It pays for the babysitter," he'd say with his jolly smile, his big belly jiggling, and his red hair seemingly on fire. For Bear, the bets never stopped and the projects never ended: the things he wanted to fund and finance and back kept growing. Beth became one of his projects. She liked being his project. Since he was a young boy he had wanted to be a cook. His apartment had a state-of-the-art kitchen, including a Wolf Range cooktop with six burners and a griddle, and a Sub-Zero refrigerator. A temperature-controlled cabinet of glass, twelve feet high, stood in the center of this kitchen, filled with premium wines—nothing under seventy dollars a bottle. A ladder, twelve feet high, slid around the cabinet on wheels. Bear's goose fat was flown in from France, along with his foie gras; his olive oil and parmigiano were flown in from Italy; his chocolate from Belgium, and so on and so forth. He had a woman whose only job was to keep the copper pots and pans sparkling clean, which wasn't hard because the kitchen was rarely used. He had no time and his wife hated to cook. Even if she had wanted to, she had no time, either, since she was an internet stock analyst.

He loved Beth's book and decided to invest in her restaurant so that he could live vicariously. He gave her the money that allowed her to turn a ramshackle storefront on Avenue A into a trendy, well-reviewed hot spot where people could taste the fresh simplicity of northern Italian food. A glass wall divided the kitchen from the dining area so that the guests could watch the grand opera occurring before all the chrome of the stoves and ovens. The chef (who had been a sous-chef when she hired him away from Cosella) and the kitchen staff worked busily in their white hats and aprons.

Bear held court at the mahogany bar, imported from Italy, and ate his dinners—
Tonnarelli con la Belga e la Pancetta Affumicata, Risotto con Carciofi, Filetto di Bue alla Moda di Como
and the like—with his Wall Street pals during their late night schmoozing sessions. He brought them all here. Bear would offer Beth suggestions in front of his friends to show them just how involved he was, ideas concerning the lighting, the seasoning in certain dishes, the wine list, and even ridiculous suggestions like importing fruit from Rome. She'd smile indulgently and pat him on the shoulder, give him a kiss, telling him in this way that she was the one in charge. Even so, "I made it happen," Bear would shout above the din of all the happy diners.

This was as close as he would ever get to his own restaurant. He had two children, would have two more, the wife, high overhead with his multimillion-dollar apartment, his kitchen, his wines, tuitions, college, retirement—funny how fast six million a year will go. He couldn't take the risk himself. Instead, he traded mortgage bonds high up in the North Tower where eventually he would die, with Beth—an act more intimate, when done with someone else, than making love.

 

In the summer of 1996, after two years of dating, thanks to Bea, the matchmaker, who understood perfectly the entire situation, Beth married Hunter—easy all-knowing Hunter standing right in front of her on the vast lawn at Claire. Beth wore her mother's wedding gown, a big white dress with one hundred buttons running down the back to meet a bustle. It was silk satin with a full organza slip. The silk had turned cream-colored with age, even so, the dress remained beautiful with its puffy capped sleeves and lace about the bodice, and it fit Beth perfectly. She was exactly her mother's size. Wearing the dress, Beth felt close to her mother in a way she had never experienced before, as if Claire were standing there with her, a real woman—not an abstraction or a dream or a farm. Her mother had been ten years younger than Beth when she wore the dress before two hundred people in New York City (at the Pierre), with Grammy secretly apologizing to her friends for the obesity of her son-in-law's mother. Beth thought as well about her grandmother, how she had helped Claire select the dress at Bergdorf Goodman's, insisting on formal and traditional as if the dress alone could have changed Claire's choice of groom.

Beth wished her grandmother had lived to see her marry Hunter because Grammy had approved of him: he was charming, he came from the right family (crazy as they were), he earned a fabulous living, and he had quietly paid her bills so she could have the best medical care as she got old, even arranging for a maid to care for the details of her life that she could no longer handle (when Beth discovered the checks she felt a little more of her heart give way to him). "He comes from good stock," Grammy was fond of saying. "Don't let this one slip through your fingers." She said that the day before she died. Standing in her mother's dress Beth imagined she would have become Claire for Grammy, starting out anew all over again. The dress had remained vacuum-packed and stored in a gold-colored box on a high shelf in a deep closet in the grandmother's rent-controlled apartment. The box had a clear plastic window so that a portion of the dress could be admired, which of course Beth had done many times—first at her grandmother's instigation and then on her own, as if she were admiring some part of her mother, peering in at her through the small plastic window, watching her change shade and character with time. After the wedding Beth returned the dress to the gold box to save it for the daughter she knew she would have someday.

Life rolled on swiftly, moving like the river that it is. Hunter would never be the love that Cesare had been, the desperate, suffocating, addictive, gorgeous, impossible love—a torrential love that stopped time. Rather, it was a quiet love that flowed steadily, growing with and through time like morning glories or some other beautiful unstoppable vine. Nothing fragile about it, as solid as that sky.

The hedge fund Hunter worked for collapsed when a disgruntled employee told stories that got the SEC involved and the company lost 80 percent of their investors. The man whose company it was, once worth billions, was left with (relatively) little, and Hunter was let go. Instead of finding a new job he decided to help Beth with her second cookbook, another memoir, this one all about Claire (her mother and the farm) with recipes like ornaments, from India and Iran and all over the world (including one for camel stew, ingredients: one large camel; ten medium lambs; thirty medium chickens; etc); some of the recipes were Preveena's or Nasim's or her own, others were left behind by the various residents of Claire. This book did better than the first and helped fund (along with Bear) the initial investment for Matera, Beth's southern Italian answer to Como, inspired by a photograph she had seen of Matera's
Sassi,
the rock-cut settlement sculpted out of the tufa hills upon which the town lies. Her design now would be the same as it had been with Como: find the chef, start the restaurant—she preferred being a businesswoman (a nice Cosella) rather than a chef—and once successful, sell it. She planned to sell Como too now.

The year after Beth and Hunter married, Valeria was born, named for a woman of strength whose face captured the essence and passion of life in its fine mixture of exquisite pain and her desire to steal time, grab it from the sky. Valeria's newborn eyes were ferocious in their passion, claiming Beth immediately and entirely, infusing her with love that swelled to enormous proportions, that obliterated all other love for a while and in so doing infused her with more than a bit of fear. "I am yours," the eyes said, "I am yours for life," staking claim to Beth's heart as no man ever could. Looking at Valeria, perfect in her newborn beauty, Beth knew that every choice she had made that had led her to this moment had been the right choice.

By the summer of 2001 Beth was working on the business plan for her third restaurant—Preveena—trying to persuade Bear, who was not as fond of Indian food, to help her once again. There was more risk involved now. Though the first two restaurants had been very well received and well reviewed and even won a prize or two, they had sadly not been financial successes and Beth had not been able to sell them. A third restaurant, Indian-inspired no less, and started by an American, a woman no less, was not an easy venture to embrace. But Beth did not care. She wanted to open Preveena. She believed in Preveena, the menu, the food, its ability to be popular; she envisioned a salon of sorts in a townhouse where people could come to a grand bar and eat whatever was being served that evening. She was determined. She was all will. No one was going to stop her. Bear
would,
help her. (This was when, all these years later, she imagined Georgia Lazar, the woman who sublet Beth her first apartment, clinging to her piece of New York, hands fisted, face fierce and angular, pushing through the crowds.) On a six-week trip to Italy planned by Hunter (Beth had not been there since 1992), they spent a week in the south of France to help persuade Bear, following him and his family to the small town of Saint Rimy where he had a chateau in the hills of Les Alpilles, not far from Les Baux, in the weird and wild desert landscape of Provence, so scrappy and beautiful in its nakedness. Beneath a sky of shooting stars (2001 was a good year for them in Provence), sipping cool whites from Bellet, from Mas de Daumas, Gassac, the children running around in their noisy way, Beth would seduce Bear with her plans for Preveena. It would happen. The desire gripped her; it went beyond the idea. It was a need. She was hungry with ambition. She was determined and fierce and bold. She wanted more: another restaurant, another book, a food store, another baby. It didn't matter that the other two restaurants had not been financially successful. This one would be. She knew it, like you just know some things. She was potential. She was possibility with the ability to reinvent, become something, something better. She was more. She was gain on an American scale. She was America.

The accordion nature of time—it bellows. The present pushes up against history to kiss it and all that is in between lies flattened. The air rushes out so that all that is now meets memory, undiluted by the clutter of the intervening years. A friend of Beth's from Claire, a Seattle fireman who came to live there for a year or so, once told her of being on a navy ship during the Vietnam War. The ship ported in Japan and he got off and took a bus back to the air force base he had lived on as a child. It was dark as the bus made its way to the base, a black that revealed nothing, but even so the fireman knew exactly where he was; he knew each turn, each bend, each curve, each bump, each straight stretch of road. He was a seven-year-old boy again riding the familiar route at the end of which stood his dead parents, waiting for him to return. He was trying to grab something back, hanging on to escape the undertow.

 

She always knew that she would see him again. She knew the moment would come when she expected it least. For a long while she imagined the moment, on an exotic trip somewhere, riding camels in the hot desert of Jaisalmer, riding elephants on a beach in Puket, imagined what they would say to each other, imagined nothing would have changed: whether they were in their thirties, forties, fifties, or sixties even, they would fall into the familiar embrace. She would dream of that embrace—see it vividly in a flash, an instant, a nanosecond. He sitting there, somewhere, holding her. She could not see his head or hers. She could not see his legs or hers. Simply, she saw her torso inclining to meet his, felt his arms wrap around her, a study in surrender and in power, out of time and space and body, in perpetuity. The image would shoot across her dreams like a slide out of sequence, flash by as she recognized it, then disappear. Awake again, she would feel hope. She would not tell Hunter, of course. She loved him too much, but it was a different love: a practical love, an arranged love, solid and steady and capable of duration, void of fizz and passion. Other times, she imagined she would see Cesare and they would simply talk and in that moment all the explanations for why they were not together would finally make sense, defining how a love not finished can even thus be over.

She saw him again in Provence in the hot summer of 2001. She saw him sitting in a cast iron chair at a table beneath a canopy of plane trees reading a newspaper and drinking an espresso. She saw him sitting there by himself. On the table in front of him rested a green notebook, which she imagined was a journal, and she imagined he had started to write again and that made her happy. He was wearing khaki military shorts, the kind that she and Bea bought in the markets in Milan, where there were stacks and stacks and stacks of them, cast away by boys whose service had been completed. (Beth remembered being surprised that there was a man so small that his shorts fit her.) He wore a white T-shirt and docksiders and his black hair was just as black, receding just as faintly at his temples. A summer tan gilded him with an aura of health. He had not changed. So powerful was the jolt, knifelike, it caused her to flee his line of vision, darting into the dark hotel lobby. She had been walking back from the pool across the vast lawn of the hotel, carrying her daughter's doll. The limp doll had a smile on its cloth face that seemed to represent all that was now. He, sitting over there beneath the shade of the canopy, a chorus of crickets humming white noise, was all that had been. Time flattened. She needed to breathe. This was not as she had ever imagined it.