Insatiable (19 page)

“Don’t eat too much,” the chef cried long after we had all eaten too much. “Now comes lunch.” Lunch? Wasn’t that lunch?

The restaurant itself glowed in soft, filtered daylight. Half a dozen chickens were roasting before a blazing fire—poor little bruised birds. On closer viewing, I realized the bruises were giant disks of black truffles slipped under their skin. To be sure we all fully appreciated the first course, the chef tossed live crawfish on the table . . . but, happily, no live chickens.

Bocuse merely smiled when Yanou warned that we had to run or our plane would be late for the farewell dinner at Michel Guérard’s in Paris. He opened yet another bottle of costly Richebourg to go with the cheese. We submitted to a blitz of desserts.

Al sighed. “Do you know anyone at
Gourmet
? I’ve decided to quit
Screw
.”

Bocuse wouldn’t let us board our jet without a giant wicker basket of country bread, sausage of Lyon, wine, cheese, and every leftover chocolate in sight. “In case you get hungry on the plane. Eat. Eat. Who knows if you will get much tonight chez Guérard,” he warned.

That night, at Le Pot au Feu, my hunger was raging again. With our two flying squads united, plus a few luminaries from Moët and a sprinkling of Yanou’s celebrity chums, we filled the tiny restaurant. Guérard spoke haltingly, head down, as innocent as a schoolboy: “I ask myself what can I feed you after all the great chefs of France.” He made a gesture of helplessness. “Something supremely simple is what I decide. A simple fish. Some pigeons raised by a country woman in a most admirable manner.”

The Spartan fish arrived naked on a bed of seaweed in the black iron cocotte it had steamed in. Seaweed—that was a breakthrough for France, I noted. And then—what a revelation—the acid of a shredded raw tomato sauce was the perfect foil for the sweetness of this ascetic
loup de mer.
I sat there as the plates disappeared, savoring the taste of the sea that lingered in my mouth.

There was a
feuilletée
of course, Guérard’s supernaturally gossamer puff pastry filled with lobster and sweetbreads in a bordelaise sauce. A waiter passed with a basket of rolls. I waved him by, but then I sensed I would need bread as a kind of anchor to survive yet another bout of excess.

“I smell liver,” I cried.

“It’s probably your own,” said travel writer Horace Sutton, who had joined our group for the finale.

Well, I would not have been surprised if a few of us needed to be carried home on stretchers. But there was indeed liver in the sauce of the pigeon, which was arranged on the plate with the geometry of an Aztec emblem: precise angles of fork-tender breast, a triangle of toast coated with liver puree, the head of the bird split precisely in two in case one wished to eat the brain. At the tail, a mound of onion marmalade (a first for me of what would become a nouvelle cuisine standard) with its hint of aged vinegar made a cunning counterpoint to the dense richness of the bird.

The roll was hot. I broke it open. Inside, a black truffle big as a golf ball had been baked into the roll, its juices permeating the bread. Guérard grinned, pleased with his witty triumph. I sat there, the intoxicating bread pressed against my nose, inhaling deeply, totally wowed. “My bread is spoiled,” I heard someone say. Poor innocent, I thought. Guérard, in the unspoken competition’s most daunting position, had met the challenge. And, amazingly, so had our motley crew.

25

G
ETTING TO
K
NOW
C
RAIG

I
HAD ACTUALLY WRITTEN ONE HUNDRED PAGES OF A NOVEL, THE ONE
Murray Fisher challenged me to write during our stolen time in France. I had hidden away at the MacDowell Colony for five weeks the winter of 1974, and what I’d written was good enough for me to be offered a contract from William Morrow. I was calling it
Skin Flick.
Now there was a real deadline, with money I would have to return if I didn’t get serious. I would take the summer off to write the next one hundred pages. It was crucial to escape from the distractions of Manhattan.

As a child growing up in Detroit, summer, to me, had always meant a cottage at the beach. For most of my childhood, our entire extended family—aunts and uncles and cousins—moved en masse to a funky cottage colony on Lake Huron. My cousins and I simmered in the sun. Our mothers played mah-jongg. And the fathers drove out on weekends to play gin rummy and drink Moscow Mules in copper mugs.

My first summer in New York, I’d discovered Fire Island, where I rented a no-frills cottage with friends from college. Don never shared my feelings for the beach. He preferred rolling hills and woods. When we decided to buy a house, he convinced me the country was more practical than Fire Island, where a hurricane could wash our property away overnight. As much as I came to love our little church outside Woodstock, I had always missed summers beside the sea.

My city existence had become complicated and emotionally draining—the lure of new restaurants opening, the boy toys I used to prove how hot I was, my lingering attachment to Don. I had said the word
divorce
one morning not long after we returned from Turin, and Don had quickly pointed this out. “You said it, not me. You said it.” And so it was agreed that he would move out sooner rather than later.

I’d balanced for three years on an emotional seesaw, waiting for Don to realize I was the one. I’d absorbed dozens of bracing and ego-shellacking sessions with Mildred, my charismatic therapist, and endured thorough behavior battering and restoration attempts from not one but two relationship counselors (one yin, one yang). “He’s not leaving you. You are leaving him,” Mildred had kept telling me. “
You
are leaving him because you don’t want to live with a man who wants eighteen-year-old bodies.”

“Right.
I
am leaving
him
.”

Still, there were many mornings when I curled up in the curtained darkness of my/our balcony bedroom, wanting to be invisible, unable to drag myself out of bed. How ironic that just when life had become so delicious and writing so rewarding, I was being abandoned. What cruel irony. I had once written an article for
Cosmopolitan,
“How Not To Get Dumped on His Way Up. ” Now I was being dumped on my way up.

Every time I opened the top drawer of the Italian commode in our living room and saw the fragments of the ceramic angel from our wedding cake that he had shattered against the wall, I hated him. But I couldn’t bring myself to throw the pieces away. And I knew I would love him always once I stopped remembering the explosions. It would help, I thought, if I got the cherub fixed.

Since Don had walked away from West End Avenue, leaving everything in the apartment behind, it seemed only right that we use some of our savings to furnish his new walk-up in the Village. Still, I couldn’t help feeling annoyed that we were buying Early American antiques and folk art. His living room was becoming a small museum. The home wrecker, as I liked to think of Her, had refused to see him till he had the divorce papers in hand. He would make a quick trip to a divorce mill in the Caribbean in September. We made love on his new bed, and the sex was easier and hotter than it had been in years. As if life weren’t confusing enough.

Don and I flew to Detroit together in June for the marriage of my sister, Margie, to Walter, the wine merchant, the new love of her life. She clearly adored him. They were both dressed in yellow. She had never been so thin. She looked fragile and glamorous in a sunshine voile garden hat and sheer yellow shirtdress. The dress bloused to hide the back brace that she wore because the cancer that would kill her ten months later had already eaten into her spine. A guitarist played the Kris Kristofferson song, “You Make Me Feel Brand New.” A woman sang. Margie and Walter looked into each other’s eyes as if they had forever. I wept. I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t stop. I wept so loudly, people stared. Don held me tightly. Yes, I wept.

So it was summer and chance put me practically next door to Craig Claiborne. Our paths had crossed now and then as competing critics. But even though I’d grown more confident after six years of professional eating, the envy of the town’s growing ranks of foodies wishing they could be me—or at least eat with me—I still felt like an imposter next to Craig. I was a lapdog to Craig’s Saint Bernard. Once, Craig had complained that the most unlikely people suddenly became food writers or cookbook authors after he’d written about them for the
Times.
“Like that Boy Scout I interviewed,” he had muttered dourly. “Now he has a cookbook contract.”

I was sure he thought I used my
Look
profile of him to get my job. When anyone asked, I was properly modest. By profession a journalist, I’m just an amateur, I’d say, in the true sense of that word. I figured it would be best for me to say it before they did. Dan and Rita Wynn’s weathered gray cedar house in the Springs, a few doors down the beach from Craig’s, was mine for the summer. Dan was the food world’s favorite photographer by preference, particularly his own. Many of the photos we see now that evoke the last years of James Beard are Dan’s. I treasure the shot he took that summer—with me standing between Pierre Franey and Craig, Craig’s hand under my blouse, reaching inside my bra, a huge grin on his face. That was the summer I got to know Craig, his joy and his aloneness.

“I tried having sex with a woman,” Craig confided one night over his peppery fried chicken, just the two of us at dinner in his house. “It was awful.” He screwed up his face. “Yech.” That didn’t mean Craig wasn’t sexy. After a drink or two, he could be naughty. Breasts and crotches, it didn’t seem to matter. He would grin and grab. People either loved him or pretended not to mind. He was warm and funny, generous and vulnerable, the ringmaster of glorious, celebrity-riddled parties and gourmandisiacal larks—and, admittedly, much too important to offend. So most of us ignored his roving fingers or brushed his hand away.

After a couple of vodka martinis and a stinger or two, Craig reminisced. “If you only knew how many heterosexual men I’ve had sex with, you’d be astonished,” he told me. “Right there. In that steam bath.” He refused to name names, though I swore never to tell. So I don’t know and can’t say. But a parade of luminaries danced through my brain, sloshed and amiable, possible objects of Craig’s advances.

I imagined the lineup: food-world cronies, Hamptons’ pals, chefs and restaurateurs grateful for his write-ups, loose enough after several drinks to let Craig give them a blow job in the steam bath. He was so sweet, after all, and the instigator of much delicious excess. As for hypermacho Paul Bocuse: Paul’s eyes were crinkling with fun as he French-kissed Craig’s ear in the photo Craig had hanging in his guest bathroom.

Weekdays, when most of my friends were in the city, I sat at my portable typewriter. I felt isolated in the gray house, a slave to the antiquated keyboard of my Royal. I needed people to talk to at the end of a writing day. Craig was often alone, too. One evening, he invited me to meet him at Casa Albona, his favorite Italian spot on the highway, where they knew how he liked his martinis. He was fond of the linguine with clams.

“You and I have a lot in common,” he announced a martini and a half into the wind. “We both love men. But you don’t need to worry about competition from me. I like older men. You should see some of the hunky high school boys who try to pick me up. But I’m not interested.” He wrinkled his nose and flashed that sweet smile of his. “And unlike you, I’m not interested in love. I think love is icky. When I have sex, I can’t wait for the guy to get up and go home.”

“Love is the best thing,” I said. “I wish it for you.” I often felt like cracked crockery—a ghost of myself. I imagined Don in his new life, our apartment empty. I’d begged him to use the Woodstock house weekends. He had started to cook. Don, who never cooked. I imagined him cooking for someone, maybe even Her, my recipes being prepared in my black iron skillets. It was impossible to erase the images. I saw him entertaining our friends, making my risotto in my yellow Creuset casserole. I saw him burning the pot. At least he will know not to use Brillo to clean it, I thought, consoling myself. Was I crazy?

“If you ever fall in love, Craig, you’ll understand what I’m talking about,” I said.

“I’m a Virgo,” Craig said, telling the waiter to bring us two stingers. “Virgos like sex, not love.”

“I don’t drink after dinner, Craig,” I said, begging off, looking for the waiter to cancel one stinger. “I can’t drink and drive.” He couldn’t either, but that didn’t stop him (until the town finally took his license away).

“I hate puritans,” he said, closing his eyes and wrinkling his nose in distaste. “It’s mostly white crème de menthe anyway. It’s not going to hurt you.”

God forbid anyone might mistake me for a puritan. I sipped my stinger. It warmed the brain, blurred anxiety, and tasted a lot like melted mint chocolate chip ice cream. “Oh Craig,” I moaned. “I love this drink. I’m high already. Did I tell you I’m a Capricorn? Capricorns like to be in control,” I said.

In spite of his avowed aversion for lovers who linger, Craig was, in fact, endearingly romantic. On my first week in the Wynns’ cedar house, I had met a man. “He’s not your type,” my friend Naomi said, telling me her accountant would call, “but he’s smart, he’s divorced, he’s out in East Hampton for the month, with his sons part of the time, and maybe he would be fun for dinner.” He was fun and funny at dinner, but I had decided to become more cautious now that I was single. I promised myself I would get to know a man before leaping into bed. I would wait till the second date. So I fought the powerful attraction I felt to Andrew,
*
the accountant, that first evening and shoved him out the door after an hour of play that left me aching and him in need of a quick dunk under the cold-water faucet so he could drive home.

I felt like a teenager again, burning hot, blood pounding, rediscovering the aphrodisiacal power of foreplay. The next day, we lay side by side on the beach, touching, kissing, confessing past amorous diversons. By the time we got back to the house and jumped into the shower together, we were wired to explode. Would we flood the bathroom? Would he drown on his knees in the shower? He was a volcano in bed. In the next few days, before his sons arrived for Daddy’s two-week July custody, I had to force myself to get out of bed and move to the typewriter for half an hour between torrid interludes in the blue bedroom. Gray beach light filtered through sheer white cotton curtains on bodies damp and sticky, wondrously exhausted by what seemed to be a match dreamed up by some Aphrodite overdosed on Prozac. No wonder the sex scenes in my novel (ultimately to be called
Blue Skies, No Candy
) seemed unbearably charged and vivid. I fucked. I typed. I fucked. I typed.

One evening, I called Craig to ask if Andrew and I could have a swim in the pool before dinner. “I’m going out,” he said, “but no problem. Come. Just swim. I’ll be getting dressed.” The two of us were naked at the far end of the pool, testing whether you could do it underwater, when Craig came out of the house.

“I’m not looking,” he said, setting a bottle of Dom Pérignon in a bucket of ice at the edge of the pool, along with two crystal flutes. “Stay as long as you like.”

Some years later, Craig announced he was in love. No apologies. No song and dance. No revisionist jive. He seemed to have forgotten Virgos never fall in love. He had spotted the man one evening walking near the Plaza Hotel—a wonderfully handsome man, straight, he said proudly, with five children, but of course his wife didn’t know yet. They’d met half a dozen times since. The loved one lived somewhere outside Boston and had many family obligations, but he promised to visit as often as he could. The two of them exchanged Hallmark greeting cards all the time. Craig showed me a card with a flowery poem. “Corny, isn’t it?” he said, clearly quite pleased with the sentiment. Later, as we were sitting down for dinner, the phone rang. “It’s him,” he cried. “Wait, ” he told his caller, and he raced to put on the stereo. “I’m playing our song.”

About Pierre . . . as so many wondered. Given the speculation about him and Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey may have felt pressed to prove how heterosexual he could be, but I prefer to believe he was simply very French and very hot. I like to think he was romantic, sexy, and full of hormones, like so many of the food people I knew, and that he was enjoying one or any number of the dark-eyed ladies who clung to him possessively when his wife, Betty, wasn’t around.