I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti (21 page)

Dinner to Impress an Older Gentleman

Grilled Marinated Flank Steak

2 to 3 pounds flank steak

¼ cup olive oil

¼ cup red wine vinegar

1 garlic glove, minced

1 teaspoon dried oregano

½ teaspoon salt

Freshly ground pepper

Place meat in a bowl or Ziploc bag with remaining ingredients and marinate for 30 minutes on the counter and as much as overnight
in the refrigerator.

Preheat broiler or grill. Cook for 4 to 5 minutes on each side for medium-rare. Slice thinly.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

Fried Red Potatoes

1 pound baby red potatoes

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

Salt

Place potatoes in a large pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Cook for about 15 minutes, until almost tender. Drain,
let potatoes cool a bit, then cut them into quarters.

In a large heavy skillet over medium-high heat, add the olive oil and butter. When the butter is bubbling, add the potatoes
and cook until browned on each of their skinless sides, about 7 minutes per side.

Drain on paper towels, sprinkle with salt.

Serves 4.

Now that he had met my mother and Aunt Marie, was there a point in hiding anything from Marcus? I had some reasons to be prudent—the
fact that we had just met, the lingering Renee Lachaise–iana around his apartment—but I didn’t heed them. He was at my house,
I had a brand-new hot pink leopard-print negligee (classier than it sounds) from the same designer who made that blue dress
with the bamboo pattern, and it did some nice things for my curves. “Your body is one I’ve always dreamed of but never saw,”
Marcus said. His wasn’t too bad, either, better than most of the thirty-year-olds I’ve known. “I worked in a rock quarry every
summer when I was a teenager, and it just stayed with me,” he said when I asked him how this was possible. Knowing what I
know now, I don’t think he was telling the truth, but at the time, I was brimming with acceptance and appreciation.

We got up at dawn and went to the beach; it was a revelation to be there so early. Who knew that the sun rises right there
on Long Island Sound and people come out to greet it with jumping, yapping dogs? I looked back to the previous Saturday, which
I had spent at home alone, watching the women’s finals of the French Open while gloomily eating the grilled salmon with lemon-tarragon
butter I used to make for Ethan. At the supermarket, I had run into a friend of Mitch’s, which didn’t help to alleviate all
the pain I was feeling over this recent breakup. I would never have predicted that one week later I’d be having an amorous
weekend with this kooky guy who was introducing me to pleasures I had never known in a place I had been to countless times.
I never noticed how the smell of salt water pervaded our house until Marcus pointed it out to me. We swam at high tide at
beaches I had never visited. We found two Adirondack chairs perched in front of one of the McMansions that seemed to be replacing
all the cottages along the shore (“Gatsby’s house,” Marcus called it) and made them our own. We’d sit in them for a pre-dinner
cocktail of Coronas with lime. Marcus photographed every moment with his digital camera. My mother handled the cooking.

“This is the best weekend of my life!” Marcus exclaimed over and over. When I was back at the office on Tuesday, he called
me first thing to reiterate the sentiment. “Thank you for the best weekend of my life!”

In retrospect, this was a bit of an insult to his children. Could a weekend with me and my mother and Aunt Marie really be
as good as the first weekend at home with a newborn? Granted that must be a stressful time, but there’s got to be some wonder
to it that is far grander than discovering my body or Aunt Marie’s waffles.

An early summer heat wave postponed my cooking for Marcus. Even I have limits and, perhaps tellingly, in those days I had
an air conditioner in the bedroom but not out in the living room, where the kitchen was. That doesn’t mean I settled. I went
to Dean & DeLuca, the pricey gourmet emporium near my office, and picked up an array of cured meats, cheeses, and a baguette
for us to eat for dinner and the best Greek yogurt to eat drizzled with honey for breakfast. We were making our way through
a case of white Bordeaux I had purchased earlier in the year. I didn’t care what anything cost. There was no price I could
put on the affection I wanted to show Marcus, and if I couldn’t show it to him through my talents in the kitchen, well then,
I was just going to have to go overboard in my purchases. Marcus showed me the same generosity when I went to stay with him.
Up near Columbia University, where he parked the Vespa, there was a great big wonderful market where Marcus procured a similar
bounty: giant strawberries, yogurt from Vermont, organic orange juice, and good coffee. From there, we took the subway two
stops up to his place. He didn’t park the Vespa near his apartment because the neighborhood was too sketchy. This was tedious
and took away some of the advantage of having a boyfriend with wheels, but I didn’t make a fuss about it.

Nor did I wait long to ask him to remove Renee Lachaise’s “I love you” from the wall (the eight-by-ten portrait of the two
of them that hung in the studio came down of its own accord), and I, inspired by that missive, made the same declaration to
Marcus preposterously early. He said he loved me, too.

My friends, for the most part, had no problem with the fact that Marcus was twenty years my senior. Ginia was predictably
enthusiastic, as she tends to be whenever I’m dating someone who has a job. (Though I’m not sure you could call what Marcus
did a job. It was hard to know how he made any money. How much could one get for a cartoon in
The New Yorker
? And his were picked up only sporadically. His fortunes depended on the flow of his ideas and the whims of the cartoon editor
that particular week. But Harlem is not too expensive, I suppose.) There was a delay in the introduction, because at the time,
Ginia was getting to know the man she would eventually marry and was spending most of her evenings alone with him. When Marcus
and I showed up at her apartment one night when she was in the midst of one of her early dates, she was impressed by our easy
manner together. I felt smug in my conviction that I had found an unconventional relationship that really seemed to suit me.

On Sunday nights, the evening before
The New Yorker
’s weekly meeting between cartoonists and their editor, I would try to help Marcus come up with captions to be placed under
the pictures he drew. That’s how he liked to work, image first, then words. I could never come up with anything good, as much
as I wanted to help with his cash flow. Marcus took any opportunity to show up at the offices of
Harper’s Magazine,
where he met many of my colleagues, most of whom remembered him from the game. He came out for drinks with me and Lewis Lapham,
the magazine’s editor—even this older mentor of mine seemed to approve.

Only Jennifer Romanello—a former work colleague turned close friend who serves a more sagelike role in my life on both career
and romantic fronts—wasn’t buying it.

“What are you going to do with
him
?” she asked.

“I don’t know, love him for the rest of his life? Marry him?”

She scoffed at the idea with a half laugh, accompanied by a dismissive wave of the hand that bruised my unpractical soul.
But what did she know? She got married in her twenties to a professor who had been in love with her from the time they were
both in eighth grade. She couldn’t possibly understand how hard love had been for me and how it might be possible that a divorced
fifty-seven-year-old could be construed as a good bet in my mind. And I hadn’t even told her about his last girlfriend.

Marcus and I went nearly every weekend to Connecticut, where neither my mother nor my aunt scoffed, at least not in my earshot.
He really dug that place, and I couldn’t quite believe how much fun I was having there with him. Marcus, once a ponytailed
hippie, knew how to bake bread and wowed the older women by getting up early and baking biscuits for breakfast. We found a
farmer’s market over in the next town I hadn’t known existed. One rare weekend when my mother stayed back in the city, I took
charge of dinner. I made lamb burgers accompanied by slices of tomatoes from the farmer’s market drizzled with olive oil and
sprinkled with fleur de sel along with an orzo salad with feta cheese. We created old- fashioned strawberry shortcakes from
the leftover biscuits, slicing them in half and layering them with strawberries and whipped cream. Aunt Marie, a woman who
never met a dessert she didn’t like, was sold on Marcus that evening. The three of us had a thoroughly enjoyable meal out
on the back deck. It was the best time I ever had with my aunt.

Lamb Burgers

1½ pounds ground lamb

½ cup minced fresh mint

2 garlic cloves, pressed

1 tablespoon paprika

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

¼ teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon olive oil

Combine all ingredients, shape into patties, cook on a barbecue, under the broiler, or atop the stove for 5 to 7 minutes on
each side. I don’t serve them with bread, I serve them with:

Orzo Salad with Feta

(Adapted from Gourmet magazine)

½ pound orzo

Juice and zest of 1 lemon

¼ cup olive oil

¼ teaspoon salt

Freshly ground pepper

¼ cup pine nuts, toasted

¾ cup feta, crumbled

½ cup scallions, green parts only, thinly sliced

Cook the orzo according to the directions for pasta
here
. Orzo is a quick-cooking pasta, so begin checking it at the
6-minute mark.

In a medium bowl, whisk the lemon juice, zest, olive oil, salt, and a few grindings of pepper. When the orzo is cooked, add
it to the bowl and stir. Let it cool, then add the remaining ingredients. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serves 4.