Apron Anxiety (8 page)

“Go on a date with me,” he interrupts.

“Why should I?!” I say teasingly, wanting to kiss him, seduce him, marry him.

“Just be my girl,” he says, with a naïveté I have never seen in a man. “I won’t hurt you.”

I tell him I’ll consider it, and we share an excellent piece of lemon cake, taking turns with one fork. It’s tangy and light, with a generous rich glaze, the perfect way to end an early summer night. I’m hungry and I hog it because I barely touched my chicken curry, which looked like bad news in school-bus yellow. “Who orders chicken curry from a little French bistro?” he jokes, as we walk away from the restaurant, nudging me playfully on my side. Without a moment of self-consciousness, I confess that I know
nothing
about food. He doesn’t so much as flinch. He just wants to know when he can see me again. “Let me think about it.” I wink, waving down a cab.

He kisses me good-bye, on the cheek again, but more affectionately this time, brushing back my hair. We play it cool for about two days or two hours. I can’t remember. But I do remember not being able to sleep or stop smiling. I also refuse to acknowledge that this is his last week in New York. He is moving to Washington, D.C., to open a casual neighborhood restaurant in Capitol Hill with a few partners. Caught up in the
fervor of it all, this strikes me as a minor detail, as if D.C. is just down the street, somewhere in between Westchester and love-comes-first. He seems to share my geographical haze.

We text every few hours, figuring out our next plans, and the following night he calls just to see how I’m doing. Midconversation, I fess up about the bachelor issue hoax: “You really think I’d share you?” I tease, hoping it doesn’t come across as too forward. He had totally forgotten about that which predicated our entire interaction, the actual “interview,” and replies that he doesn’t want to be shared anyway. “You’re the one for me,” he says without any pretense. I have no idea how to respond, so I say, “Thank you.”

There is something so innocent, so coltlike, about him. He still has an old, cracked flip phone; he doesn’t have a Facebook account. His favorite restaurants are diners and his dream vacation is fishing on a lake with rolling papers, a transistor radio, and a few cans of cold Coca-Cola. When I tell him a long-winded story about Winona Ryder, which he follows carefully, he says at the end, “I love that. But who is she?” He’s a simple guy, who works really hard, rewarding himself by putting his toes in the sand and his hands on a woman, and I’m mesmerized by the authenticity of it all.

Not long after he moves to D.C., Chef takes a train back to New York for a proper first date. He finds his way to DUMBO, where I am counting down the seconds. It’s a hot, humid night in late June and just as he rings the bell downstairs in my parents’ lobby, a summer thunderstorm hits hard. I take a deep breath, check my outfit, smooth down my frizz, and head to the lobby. My heart pounds as I spot him waiting outside in the rain with ripped jeans and amber eyes. Before I can ask if he wants Italian or Thai, he kisses my lips, wraps his tender arms around my waist, and walks us down the cobblestone street, under the
Manhattan Bridge and the splitting skies. Our bodies are sticky; our hair is wild. We don’t care where we’re going. It is the love affair I never want to end, the perfect storm.

After that night, which rocked both my body and mind, Chef starts buying me train tickets to visit him every weekend in D.C. He’s renting a three-bedroom house with “the Boys,” his tireless and tattooed sous-chefs. I like the Boys a lot; they’re real teddy bears, but the house is situated in a dangerous neighborhood, and ironically, their kitchen is infested with bugs and beyond. In the morning, before he heads to the restaurant, Chef always manages to make me strong coffee and cheese toast, which is basically cheese melted on bread in the toaster oven, but constructed with such confidence and so perfectly crispy. I eat with my feet elevated, petrified of any critters that may whiz by.

It breaks my heart that in building and launching the restaurant all summer, Chef and his roommates haven’t had any time to clean up this run-down Capitol Hill clunker. It also breaks my back—Chef essentially sleeps on a cot. So the first present I ever buy him is a nice and comfortable “W Hotel” mattress, which I purchase with my press discount. It’s the least I can do—for both of us. He beams over the bed, saying it’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for him.

We like all things hotel-related. After making such a splash on
Top Chef
, my guy is now invited to do a lot of cooking events around the country. He includes me in everything, as if we’re a package deal, and I am tickled pink to tag along. I sit in the audience as he does his food demos, oblivious to his knife skills but obsessed with his aura. When it’s time for the Q&A portion of the event, I wait for some smitten soccer mom to ask if he’s single, and for him to blush and brag about me. “Actually, that’s my girl over there.… She’s the best writer in the world.…” I
swoon when he says this, especially because all he’s read are my love letters to him.

When we go to a celebrity poker tournament at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, we skip most of the festivities and stay in our suite, with the room-service menu and
The Hangover
on demand. No one wins bigger than we do that night.

For a corporate event in Philadelphia, he is paid to make an appetizer and meet some fans. Bored by the crowd, and enamored with each other, we sneak off a little early. Arm in arm, feeling very much like the untucked artist and his slinky muse, we duck away, and I walk right into a glass door. Face first. Bloody nose. He dies laughing. I die laughing even harder.

We have so much fun traveling in our pack of two, checking into hotels, hiding out, watching movie marathons, and tying and untying our terry-cloth robes. He
always
orders a couple club sandwiches for us to share throughout the night. Chef is a club sandwich aficionado. It personifies his style—simple without being bland, layered without being complicated, and ever so slightly retro. The sandwich has two things I’ve always abhorred, mayonnaise and bacon, but I quickly get over that and fall in love with everything about our toasted, toothpicked ritual, the first of many.

He never has much time to enjoy New York with me now that his restaurant is officially open, but when he comes in for meetings, he tries to make a full day of it. I find us cool things to do, like abstract one-act plays and raunchy underground comedy clubs. Since he’s been living behind a stove for most of his life, he’s self-admittedly clueless when it comes to most things nonkitchen. We see an outdoor production of
Hair
, just like I did when I was little, and have such a wild time it’s as if
we’re
the ones hallucinating. Despite his first-class cooking pedigree, fine dining isn’t really our thing. After a movie or concert, if we end
up somewhere fancy, he does the ordering and I enthusiastically oblige. But normally, we have picnics in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and eat at laid-back bistros. We could both exist on cheese and bread, though he’d definitely prefer prosciutto with his.

One day we visit Jill and Beth, at Alison Brod Public Relations, the glammed-out PR firm where they both now work. The girls shower Chef in swag from their clients—Sephora skincare, Godiva chocolates, Havaianas flip-flops. He’s floored by my friends’ warmth and generosity, walking out with five bags of freebies, and hugs and kisses from a dozen blushing girls. “Um, your new boyfriend is really hot … and has really big feet,” Beth, who married her first boyfriend, giggles into the phone later that night. “You’re great together, Lys.”

On a muggy Tuesday morning, I’m in my office pricing out train tickets for the weekend when Chef calls and says, “Coffee break?” What a surprise!
He’s in New York?
I run downstairs, where he’s holding a cappuccino from my favorite local bakery, and an important-looking envelope.

“What are you doing next week, and the week after that?”

“Working, visiting you, the usual. Why?”

“Because remember how I said my dream was to take the love of my life to Greece?”

“Yeah?” I squint, slowly slipping into shock.

“Well, Lyssie, that’s you. Will you come with me to Greece?”

He has arranged and paid for the whole thing. It’s the end of August, our three-month anniversary, and he’s taking me to the villa he shares with his family, for fifteen days. I am speechless. We’re going to have it all to ourselves. He took the train in just to see my reaction.

When I tell Liz, my boss, that I’ll be using up all my vacation days and darting off to Europe to be with my new chef boyfriend, she immediately gives her full approval. Liz loves
hearing about my life, and because she grew up in the seventies with five sisters in San Francisco, there’s nothing she hasn’t seen or heard. “Keeping up with the Kardashians is easier than keeping up with me, right?” I say, twirling out of her office.

My family is also thrilled for me. They’ve treasured Chef ever since they met him, when he told them a hysterical story about waking up in a hospital room with his frowning mother, a disturbed nurse, and a mysterious case of loud, uncontrollable flatulence. That night at their loft, my mother made everyone extra well done steaks burned down to hockey pucks, and Chef, bless his heart, asked for seconds.

Getting to Greece is a saga of its own. Chef is as disorganized as he is romantic, and there’s mayhem involving all things customs, passports, and visas. But after seventy-two hours of smoked almonds, Bourne identities, and broken sleep, we arrive at the port of a village, where a beady-eyed taxi driver takes us to the house. The orange sun is just coming up.

Perched on a cliff at the end of a narrow road and framed in exotic flowers, olive branches, hummingbirds, and clotheslines, the villa is more like a pretty little beach house than a sprawling ancient estate. We find the hidden key nestled in the outdoor wood-burning oven and let ourselves into our private haven. The inside of the house is lovely and understated, and already, I never want to leave. We haven’t slept in about two days, but before we crash, Chef finds the keys to the blue truck sitting in the driveway, leads me outside, and buckles me into the passenger seat. Delirious, I don’t ask where we’re going.

Driving down the steep roads of this gorgeous seaside village, I stare at the views layered in lemon trees, mountaintops, and an aquamarine ocean, while Chef stops at the market down the street that’s just opening for its morning business. Then he drives us down the coast. It’s astounding that a guy who can’t
remember to close the front door, and sometimes isn’t sure of the month or year, can find his way through these rocky roads like he’s never lived anywhere else. He hasn’t been back to Greece in years, but he is in his element; he is by the sea.

Chef parks the car at a private cove, and we walk, holding hands, down to the beach. I sit at the edge, where the waves meet the sand, as Chef rolls up his pants and opens his market bag. He takes out a hardened baguette, perhaps a day or two old, breaks it in half, and sprinkles salt water all over the insides. Using his bent knee as his cutting board, he slices some very ripe tomatoes and takes apart a huge hunk of feta. Sitting in the rocks and shells, barefoot, jet-lagged, and awestruck, I realize that he’s making me reginatta, the dish he described in his interview. We eat, kiss, and cry. It’s almost too much to process that we’re both experiencing the phenomenon of a dream coming true. I wanted to be with him before we even met, and he wanted to be on this beach before he knew with whom.
Unbelievable
.

We sleep away the rest of the day and resurface the next morning feeling fresh, swiftly falling into our daily ritual. For the next two weeks, I wake up first and make us a pot of coffee, a vital activity I have cultivated over the past few years. He wakes up two hours later, first calling me back to bed, then boiling eggs to go with toast and homemade apricot marmalade (brought over by a nice, nosy Greek neighbor). Over breakfast on the porch, with bed heads and pajamas, we decide which beach or covelike “crevice of love,” as he likes to call them, to explore. I pack our CDs for the car ride, books for me, and diving gear for him, and we get in our bathing suits and go.

Lunch is an ice cream, or a couple of Mythos beers, and when we get too sunburned, hungry, or horny, we head back
to the villa by way of the market. The thing about Chef and cooking is that when he’s not in his restaurant, he really can’t be bothered. This doesn’t disappoint me one bit. Our meals are low-key wherever we are, but I’m still careful not to cross the line between adorably foodie-illiterate and downright stupid.

At the tented, outdoor markets, we shop for the glorious food basics I grew up with—fruit, cheese, yogurt, bread, and cakes—with a few delicious diversions. I can’t say no to baklava and he’s a lamb gyro junkie. One après-beach afternoon, Chef waits in the car while I run outside to buy a few bags of succulent peaches and plums for the house. My selection looks outstanding, but when I feed him a rock-hard peach, he scrunches his face and tells me it’s totally not ripe! I’m not sure where I got the idea, but I had always assumed
all
fruit should be hard and crunchy like apples. He delights in calling me out on that one (and I still prefer nectarines hard as tennis balls).

For dinner, we eat casually and compatibly, popping into the local trattoria for Greek salads, a shared order of pasticcio, and maybe a few bites of sweet, giant baked beans. While eating gelato or ice-cream sandwiches, we walk home, watching for shooting stars.

On our last night in Greece, we have to pack up our things and close down the house for the season. I can’t seem to fit all my sarongs and straw hats into my suitcase with all the evil-eye charms and jars of honey I’ve bought for my family. Chef nonchalantly suggests that I leave my beachwear here. “You’re going to need everything next year, aren’t you?” he says, with no clue how much his suggestion means to me.

Flying home, we review our upcoming schedules, with me in New York and him in D.C., and suddenly the long-distance just seems insane. It takes a two-minute conversation to decide
that we should move in together in Washington, and by the time the plane lands, I’ve already e-mailed my boss, Liz, that we need to talk.