Insatiable (16 page)

At the risk of seeming shallow, I have admitted to a certain compulsive bedability. But in defense of my highly selective promiscuity, I want to note that I turned Helen down when she asked me to interview Robert Redford, because I didn’t think he was sexy. It was my theory, and hers, too, that if I found the subject hot, the reader would, too. Someone else was dispatched to profile Redford. At Helen’s request, I met Marcello Mastroianni in the bar at the Pierre to talk about the possibility of a profile for
Cosmopolitan.
He scowled, looking weary, wrinkled, and defensive. Suspicious of being misunderstood by the
Cosmo
Girl reader. “I am not a sex symbol,” Mastroianni kept saying. “I am not sexy at all. I am a tired, boring actor.” I thought he was probably right and told Helen I’d pass.

20

T
RAIN
G
AMES

B
URT DID NOT CALL. FUNNY, ISN’T IT. YOU THINK YOU CAN HOP IN AND
out of bed casually like a man, and then twenty-four hours later, you’re a woman wondering why the bastard hasn’t called. I told myself Burt was too busy to call. Getting battered on the set every day. A pileup of appointments back in Hollywood or a horse stampede in Florida or . . . I couldn’t imagine. Rather, I
could
imagine. He was Burt Reynolds and he’d have to beat his way through a pack of babes vying to get into his pants just to reach a telephone.

Murray called from Chicago now and then, but that felt like a dead end, too. He was very uppity and businesslike on the phone. Pushy, or, I suppose one could say, encouraging, about my novel but not about any future for us. His wife had come home from Aspen and he was determined to revive their marriage.

Not that I had time to pine anyway. There were restaurants to explore, reviews to write. Don was home again after the summer’s trial separation. He’d missed me so much, he said. We’d found yet another marriage counselor. I could see that Don was filled with anger, deep, barely contained anger, but it didn’t seem to be about me. How could it be me? He had left me to live with his twenty-two-year-old for a summer and had come back. Didn’t that prove neither of us could live without the other?

There was some experimental cancer treatment in trials at Sloan-Kettering. I got my sister into the program. She had taken a wine-tasting course and fallen in love with the instructor. They were going to open a wine shop together. I was amazed and moved by her courage.

Don and I had survived Christmas in Woodstock together and were doing well, I thought, laughing again without immediately breaking into tears. For Christmas, he bought me antique diamond earrings with baroque pearl drops. The new marriage counselor had a train game he wanted us to play. We each controlled a train. One of us had to back up to avoid a collision. I backed up.

He made us do it again and again. Each time, I backed up just as the trains were about to collide.

“Why do you always back up?” the therapist asked.

“Because I have to save Don from crashing. There is no alternative.”

“But there is,” he said. And he showed us a simple deviation to the side track.

We stared at each other in silence.

“I can’t believe I didn’t see that,” I said.

“Well, I didn’t see it, either,” said Don.

We laughed.

None of this turmoil invaded the writing of
New York
’s Insatiable Critic. For the first couple of years, I had not let the reader know my gender. It was still a time where being male or female made a difference, with less respect for the opinions of women. And I did get mail addressed to Mr. Gael Greene. Even after I came out of the closet, I still had secrets. I wanted the reader to think of great eating as unadulterated joy, to aspire to my truffled highs as I had once aspired to Craig Claiborne’s. I might hint at erotic playfulness but would never confide too discomfiting a reality—like a few unexpected pounds the morning after an excessive weekend or a straying husband. From the mail I got and the people I met—“Are you
that
Gael Greene?”—I imagined a following of novitiates, eager to convert to my faith.

“The Decadent Delights of Breakfast in Bed,” an ode to unabashed indolence, appeared in 1973, during that troubled spring. It really was about us, the gamekeeper who came home from summer with his twenty-two-year-old inamorata and brought me sacred offerings on a tray. “Breakfast in bed is one of those unnatural acts that can be supremely delicious when performed by two consenting adults,” I wrote. “I should have been a pampered courtesan . . . muse to some mad creative genius, a woman of modest intellect, great wit and fine consuming passions. But given the mean and ascetic boundaries of democracy, I struggle and contrive. I play geisha to his prince, slipping softly away to bring fresh-squeezed orange juice and homemade bread and smart, smelly Reblochon or runaway Brie . . . left on the counter overnight to mellow. And sometimes he is the weekend gamekeeper; splitting logs while I sleep the last precious hour, then coming into the bedroom dark with Hostess Twinkies, fresh bitter espresso, purple and green grapes in an old Shaker basket and the
Times Book Review
in the pocket of a squat-legged wicker tray scavenged from the Woodstock Library Fair for $3.

“Perhaps I have a faintly unrealistic attachment to bed. Some of us are bed nesters. Eros tangles our love lives with Oh-God-the-birds-are-awake-what-am-I-doing-in-bed mates. I cannot bear to leave the cocoon. He leaps awake to 76 trombones. Who are these anal-compulsives who will not suffer breakfast in bed? Imagine! A man who can start the day without coffee. A New Yorker traumatized by a dab of sour cream. An army of eager achievers, wary of spills, ill at ease in a mountain of pillows, frazzled by a stranger with a bed tray, spooked by a crumb.

“I am not intolerant. I accept the fact that there are some who prefer to read in a downy club chair and those who work best at a desk. There are romantics who scribble love letters at an escritoire and naturalists who favor breakfast beside the lake and sensationalists who prefer to make love in a bathtub.

“I’d rather . . . in bed.”

New York
magazine was all about service. I listed nine sources that promised to deliver breakfast. And yes, Don did understand that I needed to wake slowly and would bring me goodies and deep dark espresso with the
Times Book Review
on the wicker bed tray even till the end. No wonder I was confused. In all the years since, I’ve been waiting for the man who understands my need for breakfast in bed.

The Morning-After Orange Fruit Soup

I
don’t remember where I got the recipe for this refreshing and delicious fruit soup. If I stole it from you, please forgive me.

1 1/2 cups water

2 tbsp. quick-cooking tapioca

1 tbsp. sugar

Pinch of salt

1/2 cup frozen concentrated orange juice

2 cups fruit (see below)

Mix the instant tapioca into water in a small saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it comes to a full boil. Remove from heat. Add sugar, salt, and orange juice concentrate. Stir to blend. Let cool for 15 minutes, then stir again. Cover and chill for at least 3 hours.

Just before serving, fold in fruit. In winter, you can use orange sections with the membrane cut away, sliced bananas, half grapes (seeded), frozen and thawed peach slices, and the best berries you can find. In summer, you can choose a mix of sweet and tart summer fruit—plums, peaches, nectarines, and, most especially, berries. Don’t forget the banana.

Serve in chilled bowls or balloon goblets.

Serves 4.

21

T
HE
S
CENT OF A
M
AN

D
ON HAD AGREED TO JOIN ME IN EARLY SPRING OF 1973 FOR A GOURMAND
swing through Italy. I thought of it as the last reconciliation attempt. I believed we both did. He loved Italian food, and most of Italy was unexplored territory for both of us. If handmade pasta did not work a healing magic, what could bring us together? I was counting on getting an ocean between tearful regrets over leaving his twenty-two-year-old HER and the shared joy of spaghetti carbonara.

I’d written the Reynolds profile. It was in galleys, but there were a few holes here and there. Questions I needed to ask, I told myself as I dialed his Hollywood office. I’d be strictly professional, not even hint at how his silence had hurt.

“What are you wearing right now?” he began.

I ignored that and started going through my queries. They all seemed suddenly lame.

“That husband of yours come back yet?” he asked.

I told him about the overseas trip Don and I were planning. “One last reconciliation attempt,” I said. We would meet in Nice. Don was directing a
Newsday
team of investigative reporters documenting the heroin path from North African poppy fields to laboratories in Marseilles to the streets of New York. He would spend a week editing the first half of the series and then we would drive north to Milan, Lake Como, and Turin.

Burt was on his way to Europe, too, he told me. Paris first and then a publicity tour of Scandinavia. Why not meet him in Paris, he suggested. He gave me the dates when he’d be at the Plaza Athénée.

“Promise you’ll come,” he said. “Let me persuade you to come to Sweden with me.”

I don’t know what I was thinking. A night in Paris with Burt Reynolds was not exactly a fruitful way to begin a trip meant to jump-start a stalled marriage. Maybe I was as burned by Don’s yo-yoing as his young friend seemed to be. Perhaps his silences and his sighs and the sadness of his love notes—I kept them all, the farewells, the “love you forever,” the “please forgive me,” and the “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Maybe I knew already these last months were a gathering of strength by both of us to let go.

I had stopped playing around when Don came back. (I told myself Burt didn’t count because that was out of town.) But sex between us was unbearably self-conscious and infrequent. I persisted in self-delusion. Surely I should have known we were doomed when, during a rare moment of making love, he answered the phone and got into a conversation with Jimmy Breslin. I told myself we’d be two different people in Italy. Yet I would lie in our bed at night remembering the screaming intensity of other beds. I felt that Paris with Burt could only be a lusty parentheses, but I did long to be in bed with that man again. It felt like the difference between being a beautiful, desirable woman and being last year’s rejected hag. I left a week before Don to visit an ailing friend in Venice, allowing a night or two in Paris before we were scheduled to meet in Nice.

Someone, a studio assistant, I guessed, let me into the star’s vast suite at the Plaza Athénée, where dishes from a late lunch sat congealing on a roll-away table. A couple of men in shiny suits looked at me quickly with a dismissive “just another bimbo” glance, or so I thought. I was not introduced. Burt was dressed and stretched out in bed as if exhausted. I wanted to believe it was jet lag and not the quickie before me.

He sat up and pulled me over for a hug and a kiss. “Do you think you could go out and buy me some of that French aftershave?” he said into my ear. “I just need half an hour with these guys and then we’re free.” He pulled a bunch of franc notes out of his pocket and tried to stuff them in my hand.

I shook his hand away. “I have francs.”

I decided not to make a federal case out of being dismissed like a gofer. And I left. It was a longish walk, but I knew Le Drugstore would be open on the Champs Elysées. And I sure as hell didn’t need to come back too soon and be dismissed again. I sprayed first one and then another men’s cologne on my wrist and sniffed. I smelled Eau Sauvage. Perfect name, I thought, but it wasn’t Burt. I tried Zizanie. My father had liked Zizanie. Not right. And it was too late to get into bed with Daddy. I spritzed a whiff of Paco Rabanne on my elbow. No question. That was how Burt should smell.

He was alone when I returned. The room was dim, the curtains tightly drawn, with just a crack of light from the street.

“Come here,” he commanded.

I unbuttoned and unzipped and ungartered.

“Give me your arm,” I said.

“Give me your boobs.”

“No, arm first.” I spritzed his wrist. “Is that you or isn’t it?” I was proud of my nose. And why not? My professional nose. Without the nose that knows, the palate is nothing much.

Burt sniffed the air. He sniffed my skin. He pulled me down beside him and he began to make love to me. In the
Cosmopolitan
profile, I would quote his ex-wife Judy Carne for discretion’s sake, but I could have said it myself: “Burt is a wonderful lover. He’s a very sexy close-to-the-skin man. He’s not a man who makes love to get his rocks off. He’s a giver. And how he gets his rocks off is how much you’re getting off. Do you know what I mean by the difference?”

Yes. Oh yes, I knew. There are men like that. Men who love women, really love women . . . men who get into a woman’s head and play you like a violin prodigy, sensitive to every nuance of the female response, of one female’s specific response. A man who takes you out of your mind, sends you somewhere you’ve never been, shows you the sexual woman you can be. Usually superlovers are the most ordinary men, short or bald, attractive perhaps but not likely the classic Adonis, certainly not the movie-star sexpot with box-office allure. Or so I would have thought.

I lay back on the pillow, stunned for a while, then shivering, basking in all the sensations. I caught a glimpse of the clock on the nightstand. “We should be going,” I said. “It’s late, and I reserved for dinner in a place you’ll love.”

He groaned. “You don’t really want to go out, do you? Let’s just stay here and be lazy and have room service.” He had his hand between my legs. I could see where we were going, and it was not to my favorite bistro, L’Ami Louis.

We sipped champagne from the minibar and I ate chocolates for dinner. I wasn’t sure if it was morning or night when I got dressed to go back to my hotel. “I want to give you my schedule,” he said. “I am sure you and your husband will be fine, but, just in case, if you need to get away, this is where you’ll find me.” He gave me a list of dates and hotels.

“Sweden is full of gorgeous blondes with big boobs,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said. “You’ll be with me.”

I tucked the piece of paper into my bag. “Will we have lunch in the Tivoli Gardens?” I asked.

“You’ll come?”

I spritzed a little Paco Rabanne on my wrist, and sniffed it. “I can’t possibly forget you now.”