Insatiable (42 page)

Citymeals-on-Wheels still consumes much time and energy. But our longtime executive director, Marcia Stein, is as obsessed and dedicated as I, so it no longer feels I am carrying it all. The staff brings in sleeping bags when special events dictate late-nighters. The board is more activist than ever. In our twenty-fourth year, we would deliver more than two million meals to seventeen thousand homebound New Yorkers. Feeding invisible neighbors who might otherwise go without has been richly rewarding to me. I don’t often stop to think of it that way, but I do feel it in my soul. For those who thought writing about food for rich people to eat was too frivolous, it gives my work meaning. Many food-world professionals and New Yorkers I’ll never meet like the idea of feeding frail and needy neighbors. Restaurateurs who used to think I was a bitch, or a diva, now seem to see me as a near saint.

Some restaurants and chefs still treat me as a power. I am amazed and I wallow in it. I remember what Julia said: We must enjoy it now, because who knows how long it will last. As soon as I finish this memoir, I will go back to writing a novel. I feel my children’s book just needs a rewrite. I’ve not yet been to Africa or South America or the Antarctic, which seems to be melting faster than my favorite birthday cake with pralines and cream from Baskin-Robbins.

I suppose I will always be carrying inside me that little girl who wasn’t pretty enough and would have to be a star one day to astonish her daddy. I try as determinedly as I am able not to be the controlling woman, the aggressive arranger scheming to make life work for my man so he can’t imagine life without me and will never abandon me. (Another delusion. They did live without me.) But Steven is stubborn and resists my meddling. That may be what saves us.

I miss the extravagant love notes, the demented poems, the endearingly worshipful boy toys, the unexpected breakfasts in bed, champagne and peanut butter sandwiches in the park. I miss dancing all night and not needing to diet. I miss falling in love, being obsessed with sex. I miss fucking into oblivion and coming back. I was going through letters I saved that had been stashed upstate in a warehouse after I finally sold the little church on the hill. I found one written in impressive calligraphy from a rough-cut Romeo I’d known in the seventies who had moved away.

“I miss your happiness,” he wrote. That line stopped me, and for a moment I was indeed sad.

I did have that happiness. It was that gift of living in the moment. So many moments in the mouth trade were ecstatic. Even the pain of not getting what you wanted could be ecstatic, though the withdrawal of love was shattering. In wanting to give directions to the joy—recipes for sensuous adventure—I don’t think I ever let sadness or doubt creep into my column. I still feel flashes, even hours of that kind of happiness when I catch myself in the middle of intense pleasure. But mostly what I have now is calm, purpose, a certain predictability, and, in Steven, a loving, protective companion.

I can’t wait to taste the food of the third generation of great American chefs. I can’t wait to see what new madness young rebels are cooking up in Spain. I’m ready to explore the rustic backlash in France. I fully expect to go on eating and critiquing forever and that on my deathbed my last words will echo those of Brillat-Savarin’s sister, who cried, “Bring on dessert. I’m about to die.”