Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (12 page)

At times like that, I would believe that perhaps loving James as a father was as good as loving him as a man.

I was on a creative buzz with my new kitchen.

I had designed and built kitchens for myself, for magazines, for friends, and for very rich people who wanted to pretend that they were going to cook in them. Kitchen companies employed me as a consultant; Tressa Nolan was—without wishing to sound egotistical about it—the living embodiment of the modern American kitchen. But the kitchen in Longville Avenue had taken my idea of the perfect cooking space to a new level.

It all started when I was flicking through some brochures trying to find the perfect Shaker look.

Dan had looked over my shoulder and said, “They look expensive.”

I told him that all the companies would give me a deal and he said “Oh, right—it’s just I thought you wanted to fix up this old stuff. There’s this carpenter guy I know...”

As he trailed off, I looked around at all the broken-down stuff we had been living with for the past few weeks. There was the fifties larder unit with the tin work-top, a broken-down sideboard we had been keeping the kettle on, a small square table with turned legs and a devastated peeling veneer top. All this scruffy old junk we had been living with since we had moved in which, despite my craving for a pared-down Shaker-style kitchen, I had grown quite fond of. Did I want to throw it all on the scrap heap and replace it with brand-new stuff?

“Is he good?” I asked.

“Oh—he’s good,” Dan said.

Dan knew that our kitchen was not only the most important room in the house, but also a really important part of my working life. Still, I was not sure about going eclectic. But I told myself that if it all went wrong, I could always call in the heavy guns. In my line of work, kitchens were frighteningly disposable.

So Dan made a call to a guy, who made a call to another guy, who got his tattooed biker buddy to come over.

I took one look at him and my skepticism level soared.

“We don’t need to save money on this, Dan, really,” I said, which was code for “Get this saw-wielding Charles Manson look-alike freak out of my house!”

“Trust me, baby, Gerry won’t save you money, but he’s good. I know what you wanted from this kitchen and he’s the best.”

He’s going to cost us money? My husband has a mother who buys her ribs frozen, and on sale—sure, he knows about kitchens. But I felt I had to give his friend Gerry a chance because—well, he was in my house and was, unbelievably, carrying a suitcase.

*

Two weeks on and it turned out this Gerry guy was a genius.

Gerry had waist-length gray hair and four teeth. He had come to America on a holiday visa from Ireland thirty years before and had been working for cash ever since. He slept on the job or on friends’ sofa beds and spent his money on bikes and dope and—I don’t know—tattoos? He certainly didn’t spend it on clothes or dentistry, but I didn’t care because together, with Dan, we were building a unique kitchen more perfect than money could buy. Every shelf, every door was different—hand finished in a style fitting its job. The spice rack had ten pine shelves, each a different width to fit my higgledy-piggledy collection of jars. We restored the original fifties cupboard and replaced the old tinwork top. I found original tin containers marked “Flour” and “Sugar” to place on it. His brief for the dresser was “Nineteen-thirties Ireland.” “Got that,” he said. Then he went to the garage and came back five days later with, I swear, a replica of my grandparents’ one in Faliochtar. I painted it buttermilk and pistachio and already it looked as if it had been there forever. There was nothing “finished” or even describable about my kitchen. I knew it would look like a place that had been created by and cooked in by three generations of women.

I had thought that having a stranger around the place was going to be a living hell, but in a way it turned out to be good for us. All the awkward tension lying beneath the surface of our life since our honeymoon had completely gone. It was like Dan was showing me off to his single buddy, and I found myself falling in with his game, as if Gerry was our audience and we were playing our roles of happily married husband and wife in front of him. I found it safer to be physically affectionate toward Dan in front of other people, and as a result he was doing more than his usual amount of waist hugging and neck nuzzling. We bickered in a playful way to amuse Gerry; Dan called me his “ball and chain” and I mocked myself by pretending to boss him around. Ironically, I found an intimacy in behaving like a text-book wife; in acting like I was completely at ease with Dan, I actually became more at ease with him. And myself.

The atmosphere in the house was resolutely male; I was allowed to do light work such as painting and polishing and, of course, providing refreshments without having a working oven. One day I made a dozen fairy cakes in the microwave oven, with Dan and Gerry gawking at me open-mouthed as if I had just performed a miracle. I split the buns and stuffed them with butter icing and white chocolate buttons for the pure amusement of turning two grown men into prepubescent schoolboys. As a joke, I gave Gerry the spatula and Dan the bowl to lick. They both regarded me with an adoring lust that made me laugh and feel like playmate of the month at the same time.

“Jesus, man,” Gerry said to Dan, raising his eyebrows and shaking his head as he wrapped himself around a fairy cake and a homemade cappuccino.

“I know,” Dan said, glowing with pride. “This was what it’s all about, right?”

Mother, master chef, sex goddess, all rolled into one. Nobody ever made me feel quite that good before.

We took the rest of that afternoon off and Gerry cracked open a lethal bottle of tequila he had been carrying around. The three of us held an air-guitar contest. Gerry went hardcore with Black Sabbath, Dan went for the middle-American vote with Springsteen, but in the end, they let me win with Thin Lizzy’s “Whiskey in the Jar.” My trophy was the tequila bottle and Gerry presented it to me with great ceremony, while my inebriated husband grabbed his stomach with drunken mirth.

Gerry decided that we needed a little smoke to finish the party off properly and went off to score some. He was the kind of guy you knew you might not see again for a week and the second he was gone, Dan grabbed me with an uncharacteristic, “C’mere you.”

We made love like casual, lazy lovers right there on the sofa, and it was nice. I didn’t have to work at it or tell myself stories to get through it. It was like it had been in the beginning, except it was different; less exciting because I knew what to expect. For once, that didn’t feel like a problem. It was easy. Maybe it was the tequila, but easy felt good.

At five
A.M
. the next morning, I woke up to an empty bed. I found Dan in the kitchen, hand-sanding some skirting board.

“I have to work today, so I wanted to get these ready for you to paint,” he said.

I put on some coffee, and while it brewed, I watched him running the sander up and down the board. His face was set in concentration, although the job he was doing was pure manual, his arm muscles contracting and relaxing.

Without thinking I said, “Thanks for building me this kitchen, Dan.”

Without stopping he said, “It’s our kitchen, baby. This was as much for me as you.”

For once I didn’t balk at the “we” reference. We were doing this together, and I didn’t mind. I liked it.

My happiness was as caught up with building my dream kitchen as it was with my husband—but it’s still happiness, right? It still counts?

Enter Angelo and Jan Orlandi. Old friends, organic food impresarios and officially New York state’s most fabulous couple.

When I say that the Orlandis are “officially” America’s most fabulous couple, it’s not a figure of speech. It’s the gospel according to
Vanity Fair
magazine.

An outline of their lives: Jan and Angelo met in college, married young, developed a mutual commitment to food out of which they built successful careers as a food editor and chef, respectively. They bought a huge house in Irvington before it became chic to do so and started up a small organic garden and wholesale sauces business. Now they own many thousands of acres of prime California farmland, supply all the big supermarket chains, and have a dozen cafés and restaurants to their name as well as a beachfront boutique hotel in the Caribbean. Add to that two beautiful children, a house worth featuring in
Vogue,
and the fact that they are still grounded enough to want to hang with an old friend, even though they couldn’t make her wedding—and the happiness goal posts start to shift. Put it like this. You’d want to be pretty secure in yourself to do a weekend in Irvington chez Orlandi.

I considered them good friends but they hadn’t met Dan yet. They had another long-standing arrangement the weekend of our wedding and couldn’t come, although they sent a generous gift. Jan and Angelo had always been my benchmark for a successful modern marriage.

That weekend was not just a test for Dan. It was a test for me. Things had been going so well, but I still needed to be sure that marrying Dan was the right thing for me. When we got the Or-landis’ invitation, I realized that I had changed. I now wanted my marriage to work and hoped that a weekend in Irvington would prove to me, once and for all, that it was worth the effort.

Perhaps the darkest secret I ever kept was also the most innocent. Deep in my heart, I longed for a son. Perhaps because I imagined it would be a different kind of love from any I had felt before. Perhaps I would have called him Michael and poured all my dreams into him.

I will never know.

Month after month I waited, convinced that I had controlled my own destiny before by conceiving on demand and certain that I would do so again. As the months turned into a year, and one year into two, my despair deepened. Each time the bleeding started, I felt my disappointment as a cold crater in the pit of my body, as if the child I did not conceive had been scooped out and taken from me. With each month came the shock of theft, the anger of betrayal, the pain of loss.

Gradually, it dawned on me that I had never been in charge of my own body in the way I had thought. I did not “give” Niamh to James. God did. Now that I wanted a child for myself, He was denying me. I was being punished.

So I prayed and I prayed. I said Novenas, memorare to the Virgin Mary, went to Mass on the first Friday of every month, and begged. I became obsessed. Neglectful of Niamh and James, even my own appearance. Lovemaking became a frantic ordeal—for both of us, I am sure. James was worried for me, although he never judged. Once he tried to reassure me by saying that Niamh and I were enough for him. I bit his head off, screaming that he didn’t understand, that he was an insensitive fool.

Such is the intimacy of marriage. The irony of its familiar, relentless kind of love was that whenever I felt sad or afraid or alone, the first person I always blamed was James. He was the most faultless, most attentive, most caring person I could have had to carry me through such a hardship, and yet he became the focus of my anger. I was too afraid to blame God, so I blamed my husband. His age, his body, his indifference. James knew that I was suffering, so he ignored me when he had to, and forgave because he loved me. A man, when pushed to the limits of his patience, will usually show himself to be either stoic or violent. You will only discover which kind of man you have if you relentlessly prod and push, push, push. I was lucky; James was stoic. Still, if he had been hurt or disappointed about our not having another child, I wouldn’t have noticed.

Eventually I lost my faith entirely. And as happens when a sadness is too deep to bear, it must find another, more familiar pain to distract from it.

*

I thought I saw Michael on the pier at Enniscrone.

The summer Niamh turned five, we took a taxi to the seaside village in Sligo and booked into a guesthouse on the main street for two weeks. James thought that the sea air would lift my spirits and Niamh was recovering from a spring fraught with childhood diseases: measles, mumps, and chicken pox in immediate succession. Our fat little girl had turned slim and frail, and needed the hot salty air to burn some color into her cheeks. James and I needed to escape. Our bed was polluted by our failures, we felt defeated, and my grief had turned our home into a prison. Although it was never said, I understood that this holiday was James drawing a line under my wish for another child. It was time to give up: go away, get over it, and come back as I had been before.

For those of us who lived inland, the sea was a miraculous, incredible spectacle. James would disappear early to fish, and as Ni-amh collected shells, I would sit on a blanket on the dunes and allow myself to become hypnotized by the sea. A glimmering mass of glass, the flat horizon turning into a gliding, moving hill until it lurched towards the land and dissolved clumsily into a sniggering mess in the sand. I’d imagine that there was nothing beyond the sea: no boats to carry off our neighbors, our families to England and America. To take the boy I loved and place him on the other side of the Atlantic.

I would look at the sun splash the sky with gold and a hundred shades of purple; gray rain clouds hovering over Killala on the other side of the bay while we briefly enjoyed the gift of sunshine. Steps and smooth rock seats etched into the land where children could search for dead crabs and shells and other seaside treasure. And I would think,
God has created all this yet he won’t give me another child.
Sometimes I would succumb to my tears, let them mingle with the sea spray and allow myself the relief of weeping alongside nature. As the days went past, I felt the injustice of my not conceiving diminish, and my thoughts instead began to circle around an old grievance with new eyes.

Romance.

The gap in me where my imaginary son lived was the same place that was harboring my yearning for passionate love. I could feel the sea breeze whisper across my neck, the hem of my cotton skirt flicker on my knee, but I could no longer feel the touch of my husband, nor hear his voice, nor really see him. He had become an object, like furniture or bread. So my longing for a child was replaced by my longing for the thrill of that first forbidden kiss.