G
US
A
NDRES
: Gold star! Excellent question! Well, let’s see: It was always such a thrill when Jackie O came, as much to see what she was wearing as anything else. But I will tell you, one of the most charming memories I have is when Madeleine L’Engle arrived at the restaurant with her handsome husband, Hugh Franklin. They were both such tall people. She had a rather imperious way about her, softened by her eyes, which had the innocence of a child. They came for dinner one night shortly after the restaurant had opened. I’d be surprised if she were 30. She stood ramrod straight at the host station. I came up to her chest, mind you, which put me right at the eyes of her black fur stole. The eyes on the stole were almond shaped, seemingly alive, and then they blinked! I admit, I let out a little shriek of fright. And Madeleine stroked her stole and said, “Oh, Touché, I thought you were a better actor than that!” It turned out Touché was her poodle, draped around her shoulder to look like a wrap, a trick that Madeleine employed when she needed to take the dog on the subway.
Of course I let her bring the dog to the table. I just decided then and there that the health inspector was not going to walk through the door that night. Madeleine said Touché could stay wrapped around her shoulder the whole evening—that the dog truly was a trained actor—but I said, “No, no, let her curl up beneath the table.” We were a favorite of the Franklins after that, though they moved a year or two later to some falling-down place out in the country.
V
ANITIES
M
AGAZINE
: Many people have called Café Andres the Elaine’s of its day.
G
US
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NDRES
: I have heard that comparison made, but it is utterly spurious. For starters, Elaine’s is not known for its food, and we are. But more importantly, back when it was a celebrity haunt Café Andres was a secret place for people who knew how to have a good time. It was
not
a place to see and be seen. In fact, it was the opposite of that. There were no cameramen lurking outside to take one’s picture, like at the Stork Club. Anytime I got wind that a restaurant reviewer was on the premises I bribed him not to make his review too prominent. We were very selective about who we wanted dining there—though it had nothing to do with one’s level of fame. Not like at Elaine’s, not at all. At Café Andres a charming imp from the Village could get as good a seat as Diana Vreeland. The café was not a place to do business, not a place to social climb. It was a place to while away a few hours in the company of interesting, entertaining people.
V
ANITIES
M
AGAZINE
: Well, that certainly sounds lovely.
G
US
A
NDRES
: It was. It was a precious, precious time. A time I yearn for still.
January 1, 1982
Dear Meemaw,
It is a new year, and life is changing fast. I am apprenticing to become a chef, and I have an apartment—a studio—about which Mike gives me all kinds of hell (sorry, heck) because I don’t have to put up with a roommate like he does. I tell him that it’s a dump, that the only thing good about it is that it’s near the café, but the truth is it has an incredible kitchen, unheard of for an apartment its size.
The studio is not the sort of place I would have found on my own. It’s not the sort of place you find without a connection. Gus Andres, my boss, found it for me. His friend Randy knew someone who knew someone who was moving out, and I was able to slide into the unit without any change in rent. It’s a little tricky, because I never actually signed a lease. The super, who lives in the basement, knows
I am here, so I don’t have to sneak around or anything, but I do try to fix any small things that need repair, so as to not make unnecessary demands on him. Makes me grateful that Daddy taught me that stuff, actually. Makes me grateful that I know my way around a toolbox.
Speaking of Daddy: He has started phoning me, every few weeks. We speak very briefly. Mostly he just tells me what is happening with Hunter and Troy and Mama. In a nutshell, Troy is doing great (he’s engaged), Hunter is doing fine (he’s in “real estate development,” whatever that means), and Mama is being Mama as always. Apparently she has become even more involved with Lacy Lovehart’s Save Our Sons campaign. I told Daddy that I really didn’t want to hear about any of that, and he was actually pretty respectful and switched topics, telling me instead about the Mississippi mud cake that Mama made for his birthday. “Lot of candles on that cake,” Daddy joked, and I pretended to laugh, but it made me sad. Daddy offered to fly me home for Thanksgiving, but I told him I couldn’t get off work. That was a lie, Meemaw, a flat-out lie. Gus is closing the café for a week over the Thanksgiving holiday, and he’ll shut down for two weeks over Christmas. It’s crazy the schedule he keeps. He says he has a “gypsy” soul and can’t be tied down for too long. I told him I could run the place while he went away, but he said no, he believes the café needs a rest just like the rest of us, that “the fields should lie fallow.” He and Randy are going to Morocco over Christmas and suggested I come along. Honestly I think they just want me to carry their luggage. They’re both really old, though both quite spry. Maybe it was dumb, but I turned him down. Thought I’d just stay in the city over the holidays.
Back to my apartment. It’s a fifth-floor walk-up on East 58th between First and Second, right by the entrance to the Queensboro Bridge. The apartment faces the street, meaning traffic roars past my window day and night, which is one of the reasons why the rent
is so cheap. That and the landlord hasn’t done anything to improve the place in twenty years. Utilities are included in the rent, but the landlord is stingy as Scrooge when it comes to heating the place. (I have never felt as cold in my life as I have this winter.) The first really cold night I spent here my breath condensed into white chilly puffs, even though I was inside, but then I had the bright idea to cook something, and of course that warmed everything right up.
Because that’s the thing about this place, the bizarre, wonderful, weird thing: It has a fabulous kitchen, which is, frankly, unheard of for a studio apartment in a run-down old building. In the building’s better days, back in the 50s, a family was renting the two-bedroom apartment adjacent to my little studio. According to Gus, the woman living in the two-bedroom started giving cooking lessons out of her own kitchen and this aggravated her husband, who hated coming home from work with a bunch of strange ladies crowding his home, sipping cocktails and making idle chatter. But his wife was a really good cook and a really good teacher and did not want to give up the gig. So as a compromise they rented the neighboring apartment—my studio—and made it into her “cooking school.” Now from what I gather, the cooking school was nothing more than a chance for Upper East Side ladies to giggle and gossip while a meal was prepared in front of them. And then they would eat their crepes or their chicken Kiev or whatever and go home drunk and happy. Gus jokes that what those ladies learned besides the lubricating nature of alcohol he will never know, but the end result is that I have a six-burner Wolf oven in my tiny studio.
Also bizarre is
why
the woman left the stove when she moved out and why the landlord allowed her to do so, as it makes the apartment
all
stove, that plus a wooden counter long enough to fit a twin mattress on top of. (Which I swear I considered doing when I first moved in!) But I resisted the urge to sleep in the kitchen, instead using the thin twin mattress already in the sleeping loft, reached by
a ladder. Other than that, there’s a doll-sized bathroom whose sink has separate faucets for hot and cold—meaning it’s a real pain to wash my face—and a shower so tiny I have to squeeze to fit in it.
Were she at all inclined to visit, I believe that Mama would be proud that the kitchen is the absolute center of the apartment. The kitchen was certainly the center of our Decatur home. And just as Mama did—probably still does—I cook pretty much every meal I eat, unless I eat at the café. I don’t mind cooking all my meals, but even if I did, there’s really not another option. I’m not
as
broke as I was when I first moved to the city, but each month my bank balance gets awfully close to zero. Not that I don’t treat myself to a Papaya King hotdog sometimes, or maybe a falafel sandwich from a street vendor. And occasionally Gus will take me somewhere nice to “develop my palate,” but that’s rare. Though I can’t afford anything sold at them, I do love wandering through the fancy gourmet markets, especially the one at Bloomingdale’s. That place is so amazing, Meemaw. You have never seen so much good stuff in one place. I looked for Schrafft’s when I first got here—wanting to eat a butterscotch sundae like the one you told me about—but I think they’ve all shut down. Mostly I shop at this really cheap grocery store I found in Spanish Harlem. They sell cheap cuts of meat—oxtail, trotters, and pigs’ ears—as well as all varieties of offal. (I always think of you, Meemaw, when eating livers, think of you eating them every Sunday after church at The Colonnade.) I like to poke around the Asian markets, too, bringing home gingerroot, lemongrass, fish sauce, dehydrated shrimp, wonton wrappers, dozens of different chilies, and soft little candies wrapped in rice paper that dissolves in your mouth. As a special treat I go to the green market in Union Square on the weekends—which is a farmer’s market smack-dab in the middle of downtown. Even though I really can’t afford the produce, I’ll often splurge anyway, arriving home with one or two perfect things—carrots the
color of rubies with bright springy tops, or a little bag of fingerling potatoes, their skins delicate and golden.
And here is where life gets really interesting, Meemaw. There’s one woman I kept noticing at the green market. I didn’t notice her
only
because she’s black, though that certainly had something to do with it. It’s funny, every time I see a black person up here I tend to smile too much, act too familiar, because I assume the person is also from the South and is also a fellow expat, as Gus calls us. But it wasn’t solely this woman’s blackness that drew me to her. It was her dignity. I swear, she carried herself like a queen, and she was always wrapped in the most beautiful scarves, her white hair pulled back into an elegant bun. And the concentration she applied in choosing her vegetables! It was as if she could understand the whole world in one little stalk of cauliflower, the way she would hold it up and then turn it slowly in her hand, studying its curds, its few yellowed spots, the tight leaves around its base.
The vendors all recognized her, and it seemed they all had stashed away something special, just for her.
“Gotcha some fresh eggs today, Alice, with nice orange yolks like those country eggs you grew up with.”
“Here are some persimmons, good and ripe, like you was looking for last week.”
“These are the best of the fingerlings I grow. I know you like a good potato.”
She would reward each vendor with a brief but radiant smile, her teeth as white as her skin was dark. And then the smile was gone, replaced by a somber look, as if her smiles had to be carefully rationed.
I began thinking of her as the African Queen of the Green, and I made it a point to look for her every Saturday during my early-morning comb of the place. One morning I spotted her there with a tall white woman, who was neatly dressed in khaki slacks and a button-down
navy shirt printed with little white anchors, tucked in at the waist. Around her neck was a bright red scarf, tied rather jauntily. To be honest, she reminded me of Mama, only less done up, less “painted.” She wore her straight hair parted down the middle, the tips brushing her shoulders—a girl’s haircut, except for the streaks of gray. She had freckles across her cheeks, and if she wore any makeup at all it was just a touch of pink lipstick and perhaps a little mascara.
I liked her right away. She looked sensible and no-nonsense—but kind. I know it sounds pitiful, but I followed those two around like a puppy as they went stall to stall collecting various fruits, vegetables, and herbs. I noticed that neither of them spoke much outside of commenting on produce and they kept a measured distance. And yet there was a real affection between them. Like how they hovered together excitedly over what looked to me like pieces of gingerroot, only yellower and more knobby.
“Mother used to shave these raw into chicken salad,” said the black woman. “Tasted almost as if there was a truffle in there.”
“How delightful! I believe Jack once made a creamed soup of these, though he nearly sliced off a finger trying to peel them all.”
“Mother would just soak them in bowls of hot water to remove the clay and the silt. She’d get them so clean we could eat them with the skins on.”
Though I had overlooked the strange roots earlier, suddenly I wanted nothing more than a bag of them, to shave into chicken salad and puree into soup.
The black woman carefully selected a few choice ones, placing them into a brown paper bag she had retrieved from her purse. “I’ll make chicken salad and put these in it, just for nostalgia,” she said. “We can eat it on our picnic tomorrow.”
Oh, Meemaw, I felt like a little boy with his nose pressed against the candy store window. I wanted to go on a picnic with those two!
I wanted to have chicken salad enhanced with shaved roots that taste like truffles! Instead, I waited until they moved onto the next vendor before selecting my own little bag of knobby fingers. “Sunchokes,” said the farmer when I asked what they were.
At home in my apartment, I tried soaking the sunchokes in hot water but found that after each bath they still had orange streaks on their flesh, as if they had grown in red clay. I wondered why we had never eaten a sunchoke grown in Georgia, since the red clay looked like it could have come straight from your backyard. (I admit, Meemaw, I had an urge to suck on the root and see if I could taste the land in which it grew. I remember how you used to suck on little bits of clay sometimes, brought to you by an old friend from Alabama. You said you grew up doing that and were teased something awful for being a “dirt eater,” but you couldn’t help it, sometimes you needed to taste your roots. I remember I tried a little of your Alabama clay, sucking on it like it was a Popsicle. At first it was sort of awful, and then, strangely, not so bad. Comforting almost.)