How to Cook a Moose (4 page)

In the fall of 2008, I moved out of our house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, into a nearby sublet, then when that ended, I rented my own apartment in the neighborhood. That winter, I became thin and weak from too much wine and grief and stress and not enough food, sleep, exercise, or fresh air. Lying in my bed alone on cold gray mornings listening to garbage trucks grinding and roaring, inhaling smoke from neighbors' cigarettes, I felt myself planning to leave New York, pulling away, the same way I had left my marriage, with that same resigned sadness. Even New York's food no longer held the same excitement for me. I didn't feel hungry anymore; I felt bilious and exhausted. I longed for a new life, somewhere else, somewhere clean and quiet.

Someone must have been listening, or else I just got lucky, because that spring, I went on a date with a native New Englander. Brendan and I had met briefly in New York two weeks after I left my marriage, in October of 2008, but no matter how strong the spark was between us, it was much too soon then for me to think about falling in love again or even having a fling. We kept in touch sporadically by e-mail throughout the winter, while I lived alone in my apartment in Brooklyn, and Brendan, a poet, filmmaker, and musician, lived alone in his family's farmhouse in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, writing poetry.

Then, in late March of 2009, we had dinner at El Quijote on W. 23rd Street in Manhattan. We sat at the bar for five hours, drinking sangria and eating tapas, turned toward each other on our stools, talking until the restaurant closed. I hadn't expected anything much to come of this date, my first since my marriage had ended seven months earlier. After all, he was so young (he had just turned 27, and I was 46),
and he lived so far away. But nonetheless, here he was: my own true love. And from that night on, we have been inseparable, despite the fact that I was, and always will be, almost twenty years older than him.

For our second date, he invited me up to his farmhouse in the White Mountains, a couple of miles from the Maine border. He had been born and raised there; it was mostly empty now, because his family lived out West. Once I arrived, I never wanted to leave. We lived in an idyllic bubble that spring, a couple of mad writers in swooning love. I rediscovered my passion for New England, remembered why I'd loved it when I'd visited James in Rhode Island all those years ago. I could not believe that I'd found such an amazing man who'd been born here and belonged here and had a place here and was excited to share it with me.

Brendan and I have been together for almost six years as of this writing. We own a house together, we're deeply committed to each other. We're planning to get officially married when we get around to it, but we've been married in the truly authentic sense of the word for a very long time. Brendan doesn't worry, on the whole, that I'm ahead of him, career-wise; he has plenty of time to catch up, and he's working as hard as he possibly can to fulfill his own ambitions. What's more, he doesn't want kids, and never has; that's a relief to me, since at my age, it's pretty much moot. Our age difference is, if anything, a source of strength for us. It keeps things interesting. Never mind that we're sometimes in danger of going broke, never mind that I have twenty years' more life experience, including a whole marriage. The externals don't matter to either of us.

I've never felt lonely with Brendan. One of the things I love most about him is that we can have any conversation, anytime, anywhere: driving home from a memorial service; at three o'clock in the morning in bed; sitting in a restaurant; or walking our dog. Even if I say something oblique and out of the blue, he takes a leap of willing and
curious comprehension toward me, and I do the same for him. When I'm angry, I say so. When I want something, I ask for it. When I'm overwhelmed with adoration of him, which happens a lot, he reciprocates unhesitatingly, and he's often overwhelmed, himself. I'm humbly grateful to be able to love another person so fully and wholly, without being blocked or stymied, without having to suppress any part of myself.

This is all so basic and simple, I can't believe it's so rare. But it is, and it feels so precious to me and so hard-won, that as soon as I understood who Brendan was and what we had together, I held on to him and could not let go.

Pasta with Pea Sauce

This is the pasta equivalent of chicken soup. It's a traditional, typically Roman sauce, the base for osso bucco and many other dishes. Brendan makes it on raw late-autumn nights, or after a long car trip, or when I'm feeling under the weather. A big, rich, savory-sweet bowl of it never fails to warm my heart and bones. To me, it tastes like love.

Make a soffritto: Mince 2 peeled carrots, 2 celery ribs, and 1 large white or yellow onion.

Heat olive oil in a heavy saucepan and add the vegetables. Sauté them on low heat until they're tender, about 15 minutes.

Turn up the heat, add half a 10 oz. bag of frozen peas, and 1/4 cup vegetable broth. Cook 5 minutes until peas are tender.

Add 1 1/2 cups Pomi chopped tomatoes, salt and pepper, and crushed red pepper. (It should be smelling deeply good by now.)

Let it simmer on medium-low heat for 15 more minutes, until it's thick.

Toss with 1 lb. freshly cooked hot pasta (fettuccine or penne is best) and serve with Parmesan cheese.

Serves 2 with leftovers; cures everything.

By the fall of 2011, the facts suggested that I had left New York for good: For the past two and a half years, I'd been traveling a lot and otherwise living with Brendan in New Hampshire. Leaving New York had been a protracted, bittersweet process, and there were still times, even though I was deliriously happy up here, when I missed New York—dinner parties, late nights in good old bars. Most of my friends lived down there.

But I didn't want to go back. I loved our life up here. I loved how isolated and wild it felt, not seeing any lights at night. I loved how pristine it was, the wild animals, the nearby lake. We drove our trash to the dump ourselves, and that was just fine with me, because I didn't miss the early morning din of garbage trucks. It felt strange in the best way to live in such quiet. By the time I left New York and moved up here, my entire being felt as if it had shaped itself around the familiarity of urban life, so completely I'd hardly noticed any of it anymore—traffic noises, sidewalks full of crowds, strong smells, twenty-four-hour lights, the crash and squeal of the subways, the constant sense of millions of people around me. Now I felt all my internal muscles relaxing with relief; I hadn't even realized they'd been so tense and clutched.

But after two decades in New York, it did take a while for me to become accustomed to this region's ways and mores. Needless to say,
the White Mountains are an entirely different country from New York City. The landscape was foreign to me at first, even exotic: wild, open vistas, thick woods full of spirits, farm stands, inns, and ski slopes bald in the summertime on nearby mountains. The people are English, Irish, Scots-Irish, Acadian—noses are sharp, hair blond, as often as not. English is spoken here, as it is in New York, but it's not Yiddish-inflected, it's not undergirded with the three most urgent questions of New York parlance: How much rent do you pay? What do you do? Who do you know? In New York, I spoke a rapid shorthand patois. After I moved up here, I slowly learned the local dialect: wry, understated, with a quick, merry fatalism that feels nineteenth-century. The questions undergirding conversations here seem to be: How do you heat your house? Who's your family? Working hard, or hardly working? (This last is apparently a hilarious local joke that never gets old.)

In New York, I was a writer among my own kind, a pigeon competing for bread crumbs, perched on windowsills with the other pigeons united in a throaty, guttural, communal recitative about editors, advances, bad reviews. In New Hampshire, the people I first met—I couldn't call them friends because I hadn't been here long enough to have made real friends; that takes years—were doctors, woodworkers, lawyers, and what used to be called “landed gentry,” as well as a few painters and musicians.

Besides Brendan, I knew only one other writer, a playwright who came for vacations and sabbaticals. In the White Mountains, we few writers seemed to be treated as a slightly dangerous exotic species. Several times, I heard half-jokes about not telling me anything, or it might end up in a book. People here struck me as fiercely private; they minded their own business and trusted that you would do the same, which was a soothing relief after the relentless gossip of the city.

Sometimes, staying in the isolated farmhouse with my true love, I caught myself feeling as if I were living inside a children's book—a
happy one. The view from the table where we sat working together all day was wondrous: long, wild meadows surrounded by stone walls, stretching down in two directions to dense old shaggy woods, a lake, a beaver pond, and mountains stretching back to the sky.

Out on the porch one spring morning, I saw a robin redbreast in the crab-apple tree over by the lilac bushes. It was hard to believe the things I well knew were happening all over the world, hard to reconcile this pristine, preserved, seemingly unchanged place with the terrible things going on “out there”—the massive-scale insanity of hydraulic fracturing and Tar Sands oil, the plastic and trash deposit in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas and growing, Manhattan-sized chunks of ice falling and melting into oceans at the poles, so many animals endangered and extinct.

Then, as I was thinking about fracking and ocean trash, the sunlight slipped through the clouds and lit the grass and gilded the trees. The crickets were humming. The clouds cast shadows on the mountains' furry green blanket of trees.

Chicken à la Ding

When I moved up here, I brought my dog with me. His name is Dingo. He's a midsize, now-elderly former Brooklyn street mutt, a handsome, bat-eared, extremely well-mannered gentleman. He'll go anywhere I go; as far as I can tell, there are very few things in the world that Dingo loves more than he loves me. (And by “loves,” I mean, “expresses enthusiasm for”; who can know what lurks in the heart of a dog?) One of these things—now that I think about it, maybe the only thing—is chicken. In fact, it has occurred to me that if I could magically turn into a chicken, Dingo's life would be complete. Given that this is not going to happen, or so I hope, he'll have to be content with the second-best thing: I invented a chicken
stew to add to his kibble. He doesn't get it all the time, although I don't think he could ever get tired of it.

The first time I made it, one night in the farmhouse, he somehow knew it was for him. While it simmered, he sat by the stove, his entire attention laser-focused on the pot. When everything was cooked and soft, I turned off the flame. While it cooled, I went back to work, sitting at the table. He hovered by my knees, resting his chin on them in a way that had nothing to do with affection; every now and then, his chin tapped my knees to inform me that he wanted that stew. I tried to explain that it was too hot, but he couldn't grasp that concept. By the time his dinner hour rolled around, he was in a hair-trigger state of monomaniacal jonesing.