Some civil servants are just like my loved ones, they work so hard and they try to be strong

At just after 10 this morning, I said goodbye to Brendan and Dingo at Departures drop-off and went inside to the United check-in kiosks to learn that my flight had been canceled, or postponed, they weren’t sure which, due to a mechanical error. The anti-skid device had to be replaced; they were working on it. I waited in a long, shuffling line, was rebooked with a long layover and change of planes in D.C. by an unusually patient airline employee, who clucked and shook her head at my misfortune and did what little she could to help me. My new arrival time in Sacramento was now 6 ½ hours later than scheduled, long past my bedtime.

I got through security with a rare minimum of personal humiliation and discomfort and found an aggressively nondescript airport restaurant. I ordered coffee and a Caesar salad with grilled shrimp and no croutons. The waitress, a plump, tall girl in her mid-20s with a dyed black bob and blue eye shadow, kept breezily calling me “my dear,” which gave me some inward amusement. I ate my plateful of limp, browning (and unwashed, I feared) chopped Romaine, gloppy dressing, and half-grilled shrimp with no joy, to the accompaniment of crashingly histrionic electro-pop.

It’s January. My body and brain and soul are in deep hibernation. I want to stay home in comfortable clothes for the rest of the winter and write, walk, cook, drink wine, watch “Star Trek: Voyager” reruns, and talk to Brendan, who is likewise in hibernation. Last summer, though, I was invited to come to the Sacramento Waldorf School to give a talk and a reading, teach a workshop, and address the high school morning assembly about the writer’s life and my own experiences as a Waldorf student. I accepted; it sounded like fun, and they offered to pay me. But as the day approached, I began to worry that my brain was boiled-turnip winter mush, that I’d get up in front of these various audiences and lose my train of thought, babble, forget what I’d planned to say. This fear wasn’t entirely unfounded — last night I couldn’t remember the words “dental floss,” cycling instead through “thingie thing,” “mouth stuff,” “tooth string,” and “lip gloss.” I am fairly certain I don’t have Alzheimer’s. My brain is in seasonal deep freeze.

Having my flight plan disrupted knocked me sideways, I hoped in a helpful way. Instead of boarding my scheduled flight like a mute, tender, blinking vole just emerged from underground, to arrive on schedule, get a good night’s sleep, and, as rested and clear-headed as possible, deliver my planned talk to the school assembly, I found myself stalled at Logan, thinking about how to explain what the writer’s life is really like, honestly, without either wishful hyperbole or unintentional cynicism. The best idea was no doubt to be as circumspect and positive, within reason, as I’d originally intended to be; no need to delve into the bouts of itchy self-doubt, the social weirdness that can result from day upon day of deep interiority, or the wrenching shock an introvert feels before talking to an audience, especially in January.

Also adding to my concern about my fitness to speak cogently was the fact that I was up all night last night with bad insomnia, remembering with spiky retrospective dread the times in my life, or some of the many, when I let people down or betrayed them, behaved in terrible ways. When I was much younger, I used to lie in bed seething with rage at the humiliations and wrongs that had been perpetrated on me. That was truly nightmarish; I’d infinitely rather feel like an active villain than an aggrieved victim. This way, my debts are many, but no one owes me anything — I’m free from grudges, from passing judgment. This gives me an odd kind of happiness, or maybe it’s evidence of it.

For some reason this preference reminds me of eating briny, plump, raw oysters, the weirdly sexy feeling of something half-alive in the mouth, cold and wet and slippery and potentially dangerous, something risky that should be disgusting, but is pure sensual pleasure. Anthony Bourdain wrote, “The body isn’t a temple. It’s an amusement park.” People who really love food — by which I mean people who love it without being kitchen Nazis, puritanical crackpots, trend-followers, or snobs — tend to be adventurous and free-thinking – predators, not prey. They’re my tribe.

Thinking about oysters lulled me back to sleep, and I awoke with a craving for oyster stew – specifically, for M.F.K. Fisher’s recipe for oyster stew as laid out in her masterpiece, “Consider the Oyster.” It’s the simplest thing imaginable: hot milk, oysters, black pepper and salt, a lump of butter, with homemade oyster crackers floating on top. No doubt I’ve forgotten an ingredient or two, paprika maybe – I’ve never made or eaten it, but, as I sat laboring over my grim Caesar salad, the craving for it resurfaced, stronger than ever. I imagined it as savory and buttery and subtle.

Just as the check arrived, I got a message from someone I knew in college, at Reed, all those decades ago. In it was a recipe for oyster soup.

I went to my new gate to await my much-later flight, only to see that my original flight was just finishing boarding at the next gate. On a sudden whim, I asked the woman at the desk whether I could still get on it. It turned out that I could, which meant I’d fly straight to California instead of detouring to Dulles, thus saving hours.

I boarded the plane, found a row by myself, and, when we were airborne, bought from the food cart a package of “tapas.” Ignoring the crackers, I slowly ate the hummus, olives, red pepper spread, Rondele cheese, and almonds, still dreaming of oysters in hot broth.

Beau’s Bongo-Bongo

Beau wrote: “This soup is about as easy as the day is long to execute and it’s sublime. It’s from the original Trader Vic’s, which had the original Tiki bar. I guess the name is meant to sound Polynesian, though I can’t imagine there’s anything Polynesian about this. It’s our favorite thing around here, now, though. I went oystering in 30 degree weather a couple days ago so we could make it. Kate, this is partial payment for Francis Lam’s scallion ginger sauce, which I made and which is as stellar as billed.”

Put a cup of shucked oysters and a cup of oyster liquor in a pan on medium, bring just to a simmer, poach gently maybe 2 minutes, until they plump up a little and their edges start to curl. Puree in a blender with a cup of chopped steamed spinach.

Bring 2 ½ cups half-and-half just to a simmer over low heat, add puree along with 2 tablespoons of butter, a minced garlic clove, ¾ teaspoon salt, ¼ teaspoon pepper, 1 ½ teaspoons A-1 steak sauce, and a pinch of cayenne. Return just to a simmer.

Mix 2 teaspoons of cornstarch with 2 teaspoons of cold water and stir (gently) to combine, stir into soup, simmer 2 min. more, then pour into four oven-ready soup bowls and set these in a baking dish.

Whip 2/3 cup heavy cream to soft peaks and spread a thickish layer of it on top of each bowl of soup. The cream wants to slide around: put a big dollop in the middle and spread outwards, dragging two large spoons or whatever toward opposite sides.

Broil 5” from heat for about 3 minutes, until tops are browned. Watch carefully: they go from browned with maybe a nice little black spot or two to wicked black really fast.

When the day is short and the nights are long, it’s a different world

The drive from the farmhouse in New Hampshire to the center of Montreal takes exactly four hours. The other day, we loaded Dingo and some bags into our Subaru Outback, the official, mandatory automobile of northeastern New England, and set off, northwest on the Kankamagus Highway through the White Mountains into Vermont’s ludicrously picturesque landscape, over the windy, lonely border (we had to talk Dingo’s way into the country, since the tourist bureau lady I spoke to neglected to tell me we needed papers for him). We rolled along the flat bare reaches of southern Canada, past wind farms, alongside miles of enormous electrical wires. We crossed a long bridge spanning a huge bend in the St Lawrence River, and there we were.

It’s shockingly, astoundingly cold in Montreal this time of year. The city sits atop Lake Champlain and is typically buried in snow and scoured by icy winds from October until May; the wind comes straight off the polar icecaps with nothing to stop it. Although the city didn’t really remind me of anywhere else, in a superficial, visual sense, I had the impression of a colder, bleaker, less crowded south Brooklyn, the streets all around Prospect Park. But this is apparently erroneous, because during the other five months of the year, according to Brendan, the city explodes into colorful, decadent, exuberant life, festivals abound and the streets are packed with people, the parks alive with musicians, fire throwers, and dancing, drunk revelers spilling from bars onto the sidewalk.

We had come to Montreal to meet our friend Rosie. For an essay on the great bars of the northeast, she was researching one of her favorites, a bar in the Plateau called Else’s – which also happened to be Brendan’s old haunt when he was a music student at McGill. We arrived at Else’s and hunkered down around a little table with red wine and hard cider. Rosie emerged from a cab outside the plate-glass window and swashbuckled into the crowded room in an elegant, hand-knitted poncho, looking foxy and puckish. She ordered herself a Guinness and a Jameson’s, neat, and we got down to helping her with her research. After a few preliminary rounds at Else’s, we went for dinner at l’Express to keep up our stamina – oysters all around and then steak frites for them and steak tartare for me — and concluded our night’s work with a nightcap back at Else’s — actually, two; we broke Rosie’s 1-nightcap rule and ordered another round while she was out having a smoke.

The next morning, Rosie went back to New York on the train. Without her ebullience to shore us up, we fell freely into the fugue state that had been awaiting us since we’d got here. All afternoon, we walked with Dingo through the thick snow around the city, past the conservatory where Brendan had spent most of his waking hours for four years, past a burger joint called Mama’s, where we looked in through the window at the TV screen on which he’d watched the Twin Towers fall, past the balcony of the apartment where he’d once spied his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend making out with another guy across the street, past all the places he’d lived, old familiar cafes and bars, the Anglican church where he’d sung every Sunday in the choir, hung over and pale.

Brendan was abstracted, flooded with memories on every corner; it was the first time he’d been back in 8 years. I was likewise abstracted and taken up with the past, but only from writing about it so much recently, totally unconnected to anything there. The only thing connected to my own history was hearing French spoken again, but the Canadian accent is to the French as Scottish is to English. I could barely understand it, and when I spoke in French, I got looks that said clearly, “We don’t care for your Parisian pidgin around here.”

It was a relief for me to forget my current preoccupation with my own past. Intermittently, Brendan talked; I listened and asked questions. He was, unsurprisingly, wildly depressed  most of his time in Montreal. He drank beer all the time, smoked too much, didn’t eat enough. He wasn’t cut out to be a classical guitarist, or rather, it was not his passion, and by his junior year, he knew it; he got his music performance degree anyway and did his writing in bars and cafes, outside of school. He had one strange, lonely relationship after another. Most of the school year, it was winter – I could feel viscerally what it must have been like. If it hadn’t been for his best friend, Richard, he told me, he might have left.

That night, after Dingo had been fed and walked and left to sneak up on our bed again as soon as we were gone, we went to eat Basque food a block up from Else’s. When we got there at 6, they were just opening. We sat at a table in the window and ordered a bottle of rioja and the degustation menu – 3 pinxtos and a main course each.

The food emerged from the kitchen over the course of the night in a warm, savory blur. We were hungry from walking all day in the cold. We ate everything: torchons de foie gras, shot glasses of creamy pureed cauliflower soup, hot figs stuffed with warm Serrano ham and mahon cheese, cassoulet of duck, chorizo, black pudding, and white beans, and braised beef cheeks, so soft they were almost melting, over mashed potatoes.

Finally, after that long day of near-silence, navigating banks of snow and slush with a city full of other people doing the same thing, all of our heads ducked into our hats and scarves against the frigid wind, not making eye contact, we thawed out and talked. After dinner, somehow still hungry, and still talking, we ordered a plate of mild, nutty Spanish cheeses and more wine. When we found ourselves outside on the sidewalk again after almost five hours, we didn’t feel the cold at all anymore.

My mother’s vegan cupboard soup

During his junior year, Brendan lived with three macrobiotic Canadians in the Outremont neighborhood of Montreal. They lived on barely steamed vegetables with brown rice and seaweed and the bread one of their roommates brought home from the bakery where she worked. Brendan wasn’t thrilled with this diet; he supplemented it with Canadian cigarettes, all the beer he could drink, and the occasional, gluttonous cheeseburger and smoked meat poutine rampage.

My mother recently went (voluntarily) on an all-vegan diet, purely for health reasons, but she found it agrees with her; when I got home from Montreal, she had emailed me the following cheery, good-sounding recipe:

“I just made an amazing soup. Truly amazing. It’s what I had on hand: I browned 5 onions, then covered them and let steam in 1/8 cup water for 1/2 hour till all soft and creamy. I cooked up 1/3 cup of arborio rice in 3 cups of veggie broth for 12 minutes, then added a whole bunch plus 1/3 of a bunch of chopped celery, and the onions, plus 2 cups more broth, and cooked that till the celery was just barely soft, 10 or so minutes. I added only salt and pureed the whole thing – a very thick creamy absolutely delicious tasting soup! Now eating it with slices of Tuscan peasant bread filled with chopped olives, covered with a tiny bit of almond butter. I’ve made this before with mustard greens instead of the celery, also v good. This vegan diet ROCKS!”

When we were together, everything was so grand

I was a short-order cook for a few months through the winter of 1986 and into the early summer of 1987, at Roxy Hearts World Diner in Portland, Oregon, a silver-chrome-and-red-Naughahyde, vintage-movie-poster-decorated little place on Burnside, in the Pearl District, the rough part of town where the bums lived, near the seedy gay bars, the seedy straight bars. My friend James and I worked the night shift, so we handled the rush when the bars closed between 3 and 4 in the morning and the entire male gay population of Portland showed up drunk, spangled, howling, cruising, and hungry for omelets, burgers, sandwiches, and French toast. James and I threw garnishes at each other mid-rush, singing operatically, laughing, cursing, punchy.

James was a willowy, dark-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned English boy by way of the San Fernando Valley, funny and sensitive, arch, with a charming mean streak. Back then, at twenty-one, he was just coming out; now, he’s an AIDS activist and lawyer in D.C.  We’d been close friends as students, and we’d both stuck around Portland the year after graduation, feeling a bit lost, two lovelorn sensitive plants nostalgic for Reed and wondering what to do next with our lives.

We were both pining for hot, unavailable younger boys who were still in college. When we weren’t at our low-paying demeaning post-college jobs, we decked ourselves out and headed over to campus to cruise around the S.U. steps, the Café, the library, and the Great Lawn, hoping to “run into” one or both of them. We had nothing better to do. I was struggling to pay my rent ($165 a month for a dingy little studio apartment on SE Division) working fifteen hours a week at the Waldenbooks in the mall downtown, augmenting my tiny minimum-wage paychecks with government cheese and food stamps and an occasional babysitting job for my former thesis advisor.

Compared to me, James made pretty good money cooking at Roxy Hearts. He also worked much harder, twelve-hour shifts, but he always had money to go out drinking, and he was generous with it. When the other night cook quit, or was fired, I don’t remember which, James recommended me to take his place, probably so I could afford to buy my own damn cocktails. By that point, I was getting the bad feeling that that if I had to unbox and shelve one more load of slippery, glitzy romance paperbacks or help one more smarmy yuppie find a self-help book, I very well might kill someone, probably myself. I was ecstatic to get the job at Roxy Hearts.

We only once missed a shift. On what was supposed to have been a day trip to the Oregon coast, on the way back to Portland for our shift, James’s van skidded and slid into the guardrail and James broke his hand, gripping the steering wheel so hard the bones were crushed. The van was towed by AAA to a local mechanic’s. There was no public transportation that late in the day back to Portland from wherever we were, and we couldn’t rent a car, because I had no license and James was on painkillers and couldn’t drive with a broken hand. We had no way to get there, short of beaming ourselves via teleportation.

So we had to call Keith, the gay, tough, black day cook, and tell him we weren’t going to make it to work that night. He was a clean-and-sober ex-alcoholic ex-junkie who later died of AIDS (as did our favorite waiter, the tiny, doe-eyed Joey, who batted his Bambi lashes at James and swanned around the place as if he were an heiress on a cruise ship instead of a waiter schlepping heavy plates of food). Keith had tattoos from when he was in the Navy, he was covered in scars, his nose had been broken in fights, he was a battered guy who’d seen it all, and we were whining about a fucked-up transmission and a broken hand. Because of our ineptitude, he now had to work the kitchen all night alone after working there all day. He very understandably sighed and acted put-upon, but he didn’t fire us, and he didn’t get mad. He was a saint about it, and we felt like, and were, bratty little pussies.

After the van was towed away, we spent a few hours in the nearby hospital. Afterwards, James’s hand in a cast, we walked along the highway from the hospital to a convenience store and a liquor store. We holed up for the night in a motel room, eating Doritos and smoking and drinking cheap vodka with orange juice and watching TV movies. We stayed up all night; we felt too guilty about missing our shift to sleep. We called Keith at six in the morning, after we knew the rush was over and the place was empty and he was sitting around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, and told him (our voices slurred, on the verge of alcohol-inspired tears) that we loved him. He told us to shut the fuck up and get our asses back to town, now.

We got the first bus back to Portland and went straight to Roxy Hearts, contrite and pale. We told Keith to go home, we’d finish his shift. James’s hand was broken, of course, so I did most of the cooking and let him do the set-ups and garnishes. We worked the rest of that day and all night. After we hosed down the grease-covered rubber mats, bagged and took out the trash, prepped for Keith’s shift, scrubbed the countertops and de-greased the grills, we said a bleary hello to Keith and went out into the drizzling grey early morning and walked to Pioneer Square and got a bus back to Southeast Portland.

We were feeling too sad, broken-hearted, and co-dependent to sleep by ourselves in our own apartments, so we both went to James’s, where he loaned me a pair of pajamas and a clean toothbrush. After we took showers, James pulled down his Murphy bed and made up a comfy foam pad for me on the floor. We slept all day, a whole eight-hour stretch, then woke up feeling groggy and seasick and took the bus back to Roxy Hearts to eat a big breakfast and drink as much coffee as we could before our shift.

At the end of that summer, in late August of 1987, the heretofore elusive boy I was in love with (who had just graduated, and who no doubt saw me as the perfect means to postpone having to figure out what to do with his life) and I bought a VW hatchback and put all our things in it and moved to Iowa City together.

James stayed on in Portland for a while, cooking at Roxy Hearts. He was still there when Keith and Joey died.

Meanwhile, I started my first year at the Writers’ Workshop. My boyfriend lasted until winter, and then he got fed up with me, his crappy job, the weather, and the town. He dumped me, moved back to Palo Alto, got a great job renovating someone’s house, and stole his best friend’s blonde, nineteen-year-old girlfriend. Devastated, in need of immediate distraction, I moved on to the next self-annihilating heartbreak.

 

Roxy Hearts Cajun omelet

Crack 3 eggs into a bowl with a dollop of cream and beat till frothy. In an omelet pan, melt a wad of butter and throw in a handful each of minced onion, red Bell pepper, and celery — sauté till soft. Sprinkle well with the Cajun seasoning you mixed earlier and threw into a shaker – paprika, dried powdered garlic, oregano, cayenne, salt, and pepper. Toss in a handful of chopped cooked shrimp and another of chopped Andouille sausage and stir and let sit on the flame another minute. Pour the beaten eggs into the pan. When they’re almost set, throw a handful of grated cheddar on top and run under a salamander to finish until brown and puffy. Plate with a spatula scoop of home fries, a sprig of parsley, and 2 pieces of buttered sourdough toast.

Goodbye, old Paint, I’m leavin’ Cheyenne

My father grew up in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. When he was in his mid-20s, he got his girlfriend pregnant. She was, literally, the girl next door – her family lived just down the lake from his family. Because they were proper Midwesterners, it was agreed that they should get married, so they did. My father’s first wife gave birth to twin girls in May of 1951. A year later, my father ditched his little family and headed out to Berkeley where, about a decade later, he met my mother and had three more daughters with her. More than anything in the world, my father wanted a son. When his fifth daughter was born, my sister Emily, he walked out of the room without a word to my mother.

After he abandoned his one-year-old daughters in Lake Elmo, my father never contacted or saw them; they grew up with no memory of him. My mother knew about them and told us they existed, so I always knew that I had two half-sisters who were 11 years older than I was. Through the years, I liked knowing they were out there. I had a strong feeling we’d find each other some day when we were grown up.

My father abandoned us, too, of course. It happened in 1972, four years after he and my mother had gotten divorced – the cops had a role in this disappearance; I was the one who called them. After they led him off in handcuffs for beating up my mother (he’d driven to Tempe from Oakland, possibly for this express purpose), she didn’t press charges, and he disappeared.

We didn’t see him again until I was 16, when my mother and sisters and I took a road trip to San Francisco to drop my sister Susan off at the ballet school for the summer and looked him up – we had a strange, intense, unfulfilling lunch with him, hippie food at a restaurant called (I am not making this up) the Edible Complex. Five years later, my sisters and I found him again when were in the Bay Area. We had another weird, charged lunch with him. He was living like an ascetic Boy Scout in his bare-bones law office, sleeping on his desk. From a pot on a hot plate, he served us bowls of something he called “Lebanese pea soup.” He seemed proud of this concoction, but I think he might have just opened some cans.

Later, when I was in my 30s and married, and the Internet had been invented, my husband urged me to find my sisters. We searched for Thea because I couldn’t remember Caddie’s name. We found her living in St. Paul; she was married, but she’d kept her maiden name. It had to be her. I wrote her a letter and sent it off with a mild, hopeful nervousness: maybe she wouldn’t want to know me, maybe she’d ignore my letter. And I was used to being the oldest sister. Being a little sister was a whole new identity I wasn’t sure I was prepared for.

Caddie happened to be visiting Thea when my letter arrived, so they read it together. Thea wrote back that she was planning to visit Caddie, who lived in Vermont, and they invited me to come up and meet them while she was back East. Her handwriting looked like a combination of Susan’s and Emily’s.

We drove up to Woodstock, Vermont on a bitterly cold winter day in 1998.  We checked into our hotel when we arrived – it was very late, almost midnight. My sisters had left a sausage and mushroom pizza, flowers, and a bottle of wine in our room.  Caddie had written a note welcoming us; her handwriting looked like mine.

The next day I woke up so nervous I couldn’t eat breakfast. We drove to Caddie’s house and knocked on the door. It opened, and there were my sisters. We all stared at each other. It was like looking into my own eyes in the mirror.

“Oh my God,” I said, “we look alike.”

We gave each other fierce hugs. During that day and night of nonstop talking, I had the surreal feeling that I had always known them, that we belonged together as much as my other sisters and I did. We were birds of a feather, all of us singers, readers, our voices similar, our characters shaped the same way, and they were, it turned out, passionate cooks and eaters. Caddie’s house felt familiar, too.  Their husbands got along with mine; we had all married great guys.

That day, Caddie and Thea taught me to cross-country ski. I loved how bossy they were and how they seemed to assume the roles of my older sisters naturally, without any discussion. After dinner, an Italian feast of eggplant parmesan and roast chicken made by Caddie’s husband, Vin, we sat by the fire and drank poire and they showed me photos of themselves as children, teenagers, college students, young women. Thea’s husband, Pop, a singing cowboy, played the guitar; we all sang.

At almost midnight, I realized how late it was and suddenly felt awkward and shy, as if I had overstayed. For the first time in my life, I felt like a pesky little sister wanting to stay up late with her cool older ones. In that moment, my sense of who I was in my family shifted, rearranged itself, and became, in a deep way, complete.

Delicata squash with pepitas and goat cheese

Thea, who is an amazing cook, taught me about pumpkin seeds, among other things – how to roast them, how to add them to things and cook with them. I recently made a loaf of bread with finely-ground pumpkin seeds, which was excellent, and last fall, after a trip to the farmstand, I made the following lunch:

Cut one large delicata squash into 4 pieces and scoop out the seeds. On an oiled baking sheet, bake the squash quarters till soft, about 40 minutes at 375 degrees. Put two pieces face up on each plate. Into each squash cavity, pour a splash of balsamic vinaigrette. Add a tablespoon of goat cheese and top with plenty of toasted pumpkin seeds.

 

Goodbye my friend, it’s hard to die, when all the birds are singing in the sky

In the months after the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, I started the novel that would be The Epicure’s Lament. I was writing it to cheer myself up; I was undergoing a kind of internal, shell-shocked, nerve-wracked breakdown, and I was not, by a long shot, the only New Yorker in this state.

I worked in a rented room in a falling-down 19th century house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, down by the river. My landlady, Nancy, was Italian, born and raised in Bensonhurst. Her dad had been a mobster, and so had her dead husband. A Mafia princess and mob wife turned Realtor, Nancy was frank, smart, a born raconteur, with a round, impish face and a hoarse smoker’s chuckle that always made me laugh, too. Her house was a sort of SRO for sad-sack men who lived on public assistance and sat all day in their shirtsleeves, smoking and waiting for their Meals on Wheels to arrive.

She lived in the cozy, renovated basement apartment and rented the two or three empty, uninhabited upstairs rooms, cheap, to writers and artists– first to my friend Anna, a poet, who recommended me to Nancy when I needed a studio, and then, on my recommendation, to a photographer friend named Hal, who almost got kicked out for having a nude model in his studio who hung out the front window, smoking. He frantically explained to Nancy that there was nothing pornographic going on – this was art. She grudgingly, good-heartedly went against her own better judgment and accepted this explanation and let him stay. Soon she was his greatest fan.

I paid $200 a month for the large room on the top floor at the back of the house. My two windows faced north and looked out over flat tarpaper roofs, old brick warehouses, backyards and treetops, all the way to the green, shining Citicorp tower in Queens. The room had a linoleum floor, a boarded-up fireplace, and a falling-down plaster ceiling; the roof leaked, there was no heat, and I shared the place with a noticeable but not intolerable population of mice. I warmed the room up with plants, my husband’s paintings, and a large old rose-colored flower-patterned wool rug. I brought a small coffee maker and a radio. In the cold months, I worked in my hat, scarf and coat.

Every day, I packed myself a lunch – a sandwich of sardines and mustard on rye, roasted nuts and dried fruit, a Styrofoam container of instant black-bean or lentil soup to which I later added hot water from the coffee maker’s carafe – and walked the mile and a half from the loft I shared with my husband in Williamsburg over to Greenpoint, along the waterfront’s angled, industrial streets with astoundingly beautiful views of Manhattan and the sky above it. In my workroom, I sat at my grandfather’s old desk – an old door on two heavy wooden filing cabinets.

That winter, it was too cold to write in my north-facing room, so I moved my desk into a smaller room at the front of the house that was filled with warm sunlight on clear days. Just outside my new window was a huge old chestnut tree whose bare branches were inhabited by a plump-chested, medium-sized brown bird. There only seemed to be one of him; if he had a mate, or any friends, they were nowhere around that winter. I had the feeling that he was as aware of me as I was of him. He cocked his head and stared back at me through the window that separated us.

One day, the tree and the bird found their way into the novel I was writing and became a sort of fulcrum between the fictional, imagined world I was living in that winter and my real life, a symbolic hinge that joined the two together. I named the bird Erasmus, since he seemed to have a philosophically stalwart cast of mind. All winter long, he watched me write while I watched him going about his birdly business.

The Epicure’s Lament is narrated by a 40-year-old hermit and failed writer, Hugo Whittier, who’s simultaneously smoking himself to death in his ancestral mansion on the Hudson River and cooking a lot of old-fashioned, comforting, hearty food for the very people he professes to want to get away from. I found that, for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time, writing about the things Hugo chose to make, shrimp Newburg and spaghetti puttanesca, eased my terrible, gnawing depression. So did cooking and eating them myself. After the day’s work was done, I went home and made dinners that were inspired by Hugo’s culinary repertoire. Food was the other hinge between this novel and real life, between Hugo and me.

When I was about halfway through the novel, my bad state of mind worsened, and I couldn’t write anymore. I stopped going to my room at Nancy’s, stopped work on the novel, stopped doing much of anything. Soon, I found I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t stop crying. To pull myself out of this depression, I spent three months during the summer I turned 40 training for the 2002 New York City marathon. After ending up in the hospital with hyponatremia and then overcoming severe IT-band pain, I ran the marathon in 3 hours and 52 minutes. Afterwards, I moved my desk back into my workroom, got back to work, and finished the novel.

Years later, after my husband and I had bought and renovated an old row house just up the street from Nancy’s, after I’d moved out of my workroom and begun to write in my study at home, after my marriage had disintegrated and finally come apart for good, after I’d moved out of our house to an apartment way up on Monitor Street, near McGolrick Park, lightning struck the tree in front of Nancy’s house and killed it. Walking Dingo one day down my old street, I saw that it was gone. I stood there for a long time, looking at the charred stump that was all that was left of Erasmus’s chestnut tree.

Hugo’s Shepherd’s Pie

Hugo doesn’t actually cook shepherd’s pie in The Epicure’s Lament, but he could have. In fact, I am certain that he made it with some regularity outside the book, and so did I, during that cold winter of 2001-2002. This ground beef and mashed potato casserole is one of the most comforting, cheery dishes I know of.

Peel, cut in half, and boil 4 large potatoes till they’re soft. Drain them and mash them with 4 tablespoons of butter, a cup of grated Gruyere, salt, pepper, and half a minced onion.

While the potatoes are boiling, melt 4 tablespoons of butter in a large skillet. Saute a large chopped onion and 2 chopped, peeled carrots until the vegetables are soft. Add a cup of frozen peas, 1 ½ pounds of ground beef, ½ cup beef broth, a large dash of Worcestershire sauce, a dollop of ketchup, and stir till the meat is cooked.

Put the meat and vegetable mixture into a glass baking dish. Spoon the mashed potatoes on top to make a thick peaks-and-valleys layer. Grate another handful of gruyere and sprinkle on top. Bake for half an hour in a 400 degree oven till bubbling and brown.

Serves 1 hermit and three tedious interlopers.

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