Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (43 page)

Ah, yes: the fretting over, and plotting of, my
Ambling
author photograph.

This fretting and plotting felt entirely different.

For the shoot,
Men’s Vogue
sent a coordinator, a photographer, his assistant and a stylist. The stylist was in charge of a rack of at least four dozen articles of clothing, mostly sweatpants, shorts and designer T-shirts in about six different colors. He also helped with such matters as taping the insides of the dark blue shorts I ended up wearing to my thighs, so the material didn’t ride up on me as I did the bridge exercise and other ones.

Whenever I took a break, the stylist rushed at me with a blow-dryer and went to work on the darkening patches of my dark blue Calvin Klein T-shirt.

“He’s sweating
a lot
,” the stylist said to the photographer.

“I’m
exercising
,” I pointed out.

“We may have to swap out the shirt, get a new one,” the stylist announced, speaking once again as if I weren’t present—as if I were just an object, a prop.

Wasn’t this the way models were treated?

Excellent!

“When we’re done here,” I asked the stylist, “do I get to keep the T-shirt?” Sweaty or not, it fit me better than my usual nondesigner T-shirts, and it was a memento of the improved me.

The stylist rolled his eyes. “Sure.”

“What about the wristwatch?” I ventured, testing my luck. Although I never wore a watch and couldn’t see what a watch had to do with working out, the
Men’s Vogue
crew had decided to accessorize my dark blue shorts and dark blue T-shirt with a black high-tech digital one. I got the sense that photo shoots were governed—and stylists’ salaries justified—by a “when in doubt, accessorize” philosophy.

The stylist didn’t respond. Maybe he hadn’t heard me?

 

 

 

 

I usually managed to make my way to Harry’s house outside L.A. every nine months or so, and was lucky enough to have one four-day stay coincide with a big party he was throwing. He loved to play host. More so than Mark, Adelle or me, he’d inherited the Bruni entertaining gene, the impulse to generous excess when it came to food and, in his case, wine.

For this party he rented a small outdoor tent so that, in the rare event it rained, he’d be able to cook on his gargantuan outdoor grill. And he needed the gargantuan grill because he was making paella for forty. He had bought the biggest paella pan I’d ever seen and more than one huge lobster tail per person, along with sausage, chicken legs, shrimp and more. He manned that pan for hours, stirring and watching, watching and stirring, and when the paella was finally done, he served it with Spanish reds from an actual wine cellar below the kitchen of his rambling house with views of the Pacific.

Harry was the sibling who surprised me the most—the way he’d turned out. Over time Mark had never really changed much. He’d taken on more serious responsibilities, but every stage of his life had been marked by the same talent for getting people to like him, the same unflashy competence, the same self-fulfilling confidence that everything would turn out okay. He’d never even toyed much with the scenery around him. Amherst hadn’t looked all that different from Loomis, and from his freshman year at Amherst onward, he never lived anywhere but Massachusetts. He was living now in a house and a suburb almost interchangeable with those from our family’s Connecticut years. In adulthood Mark had largely reconstituted his childhood, only with himself in Dad’s role.

And Adelle’s traits as a young working mother were pretty much those that she’d had as a little girl and then a teenager and then a college student: the wit that caught people off guard and threw them off balance; the intelligence that snuck up on them, because she veiled it in a consciously silly manner; the bawdy streak that had prompted her, back as a teenager, to pump me for sexual advice.

But Harry—Harry hadn’t stood still. He’d evolved first from an introverted dreamer with a taste for gadgetry and science fiction into a high school student as social as any other, and less focused on schoolwork than my parents harangued him to be. Then, toward the end of college, he’d developed into a driven striver with his eye on a big career and income in investment banking. He’d achieved both, in part because he’d learned to be the smoothest of operators: better read and more cultured than many of his financial-wizard peers, a slick dresser, contagious in his enthusiasms. Looking at him, I’d know that Grandma’s pithy adage—
Born round, you don’t die square
—wasn’t really right. A person
could
leave behind some or much of who he was. He could take on a new shape.

On the day before and then on the day after Harry’s paella party, he and I went running together. Both times we drove to a beachfront parking lot near his house and did the same route: a stretch of hard-packed sand right on the Pacific, then a longer stretch of concrete bicycle path parallel to the shoreline, then a series of streets leading back to where we’d started. It was about a 3.5-mile run, and at the 3-mile mark, there was a choice, a fork. Veering to the left meant adding an extra mile, including a long and crazily steep hill that was debilitating just to look at. Twice I chose the hill—
made
myself choose it—while Harry, with a grunt and a wave, headed right. We met back at his car.

“Who won?” asked my niece Leslie, the oldest of Harry’s four kids, when we returned from the second of these runs, as her sister Erica, two years younger and something of a hug machine, rushed to welcome me back with an embrace. As soon as Erica’s fingertips made contact with the soggy back of my T-shirt, she recoiled.

“Sweaty!” she yelped. “Ewww.”

“That’s the hope,” I said. “That’s the goal.”

“Daddy, too,” she said, correctly, pointing to the dark, wet patches on Harry’s T-shirt.

I told Leslie, “No one won. We weren’t racing.”

“But who was faster?” Leslie had watched many a family Oh, Hell game, and had even started playing in a few of them. She’d absorbed and adopted the family’s competitive ethos.

“Your Uncle Frank was faster,” Harry told her. “Your Uncle Frank
is
faster. He’s better about staying in shape than your daddy is.” That statement probably didn’t sound odd to Leslie and Erica, the way it did to me—their memories didn’t go back to my midthirties and to who I’d been then. They saw me as a different person.

My siblings, it turned out, had come to see me as a different person, too. During our annual week in Hilton Head, they no longer watched me when I assembled my plate in the rental house’s kitchen. What I assembled usually wasn’t much different from what anyone else did. Even if it was, nothing about how I looked suggested that I was being reckless if I decided on a big meal, that I was digging a perilously deep hole for myself.

I ate less than Harry, who was now slightly chunky, mainly because the double demands of a career and fatherhood left him limited time or energy for exercise. I still ate more than Mark, whose continued commitment to his mincing bites, even on vacation, had turned him into the only one of the four of us who remained downright svelte year after year.

And I ate more than Adelle, who had slimmed down considerably in her late twenties and thirties, even while she was having her two children.
Especially
while she was having her two children. During each of her pregnancies she had realized that she was in a situation that encouraged abandon around food, and she pushed back with more restraint and discipline than she’d usually been capable of. She gained an average of only twenty pounds and was thinner a month after childbirth than she’d been before conception.

The threat of extreme and sudden weight gain scared her skinny, or at least slimmer than before. That wasn’t entirely unlike what agreeing to eat for a living seemed to be doing for me.

This was the regimen, which wasn’t a regimen at all:

Maybe I’d eat breakfast. Maybe not. It depended on hunger, not on any foreordained, inevitably doomed script. I listened to hunger and responded to it, because I knew from the past what could happen if I let myself get too famished or feel too deprived. And in the job I was doing now, going off the rails would be too costly.

But I didn’t get caught up in hunger, because on any given day there was significant eating ahead. I didn’t want to go into a job-related dinner worrying about how much I’d consumed already. And if there was a dish or two that I particularly liked, I wanted to be able to allow myself more than a few extra bites without having to fear that I was being reckless.

My apartment building was in the middle of the block, and on one end was a bakery with small, individual-size baguettes I adored. After a few mugs of coffee at home, I’d often head there for one of those baguettes, about eight inches long and cut lengthwise, with butter and raspberry jam spread in the crease. It was surely more than 450 calories, but I figured 450 calories I genuinely enjoyed were better than 275 that felt merely like sustenance—or, worse, like some kind of atonement—and left me hankering for a reward later on.

The impulsive eater in me lived on in the way I tended to tackle one of these baguettes. Five steps out of the bakery, I’d pull the crunchy bread from its brown paper bag and begin making my way through it in big, rapid bites. It would usually be three-quarters gone by the time I got to my front door, a trek of no more than ninety seconds. And whatever T-shirt or sweatshirt I’d thrown on would have red smudges on its front. Jam tended to seep from the baguette’s crease, and I tended to slip into such a contented baguette-induced fugue state that I didn’t notice the sticky red blobs dangling and then dropping onto me. I ruined some clothing that way. But I considered it a worthy sacrifice.

On the other end of my block—around the corner, actually—was a deli. Sometimes I’d go there instead. I’d get a toasted sesame bagel with a few slices of Swiss cheese and tomato: again, not diet food, but nothing out of control, and something that left me happier than a cup of yogurt with fruit would have and gave me enough fuel for exercise. It was the bagel with Swiss cheese and tomato I typically got if I was eating breakfast en route to the gym. I considered it a better package of vitamins and better mix of protein and carbohydrate than the baguette. But I didn’t really get all that scientific in my thinking. My “scientific” thinking about eating hadn’t served me so well in the past.

Review-related lunches were rare, but I usually ate lunch nonetheless, to keep going and keep intense hunger at bay. It might be something as incidental as a hard-boiled egg and a few chunks of cheese, or it might be a broad, tall, densely stuffed chicken-salad sandwich from the deli or the office cafeteria, though never with chips on the side or a cookie after. I usually tailored the size of lunch to whether—or how much—I was exercising that day, but I didn’t get into precise measurements. That sort of fixation hadn’t done much for me, either.

At dinner I not only contained my portions on most nights but also edited out what I could. The dessert list at many restaurants was only four or five items long, so I could work through the selections, with the help of dining companions, in one or two visits, and skip desserts after that.

But none of these dinners could be a truly light meal, given my reason for eating them, the responsibility attached to them and the aggregate amount of what I had to sample. And at many dinners I didn’t want to hold back, because there was so much pleasure to be had: in the pâtés and terrines at Bar Boulud, which leaned harder on heavily salted, glorious animal fat than Starbucks did on coffee beans; in Convivio’s handmade pastas, including fusilli—how I loved fusilli!—sauced with crumbled pork shoulder and melted
caciocavallo
, a mild, milky Italian cheese.

The certainty of my eating in the evenings dictated and set the terms for everything else: the times and sizes of the day’s other meals; the week’s tally of workouts (five on average, two with trainers and three on my own). My reviewing life gave me a firm, clear structure, which was precisely what diets were supposed to do. But diets had framed all eating in terms of what I couldn’t or shouldn’t have. They might wrap permissive-sounding verbiage around their prescriptions, but I still experienced them as exercises in prohibition. Who didn’t? The structure I had now was based on indulgence, on what I
must
have, and that made all the difference. I was celebrating instead of abusing food. In so many previous chapters of my life I’d seen food as the enemy; now it was more a friend.

Every two to three weeks, though, I let myself abuse it a little again. I busted loose. Sometimes it was in a restaurant, where I went ahead and ate twice as much as any of my companions, because the urge reared itself and felt stronger and harder to ignore than on other nights, when I could beat it back. Other times I busted loose at home, an hour after I’d returned from dinner, around eleven thirty p.m., when I’d hunker down in front of the television set with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s just purchased from a nearby bodega or a whole roasted chicken, plucked from a shelf at the Fairway supermarket just before it closed. As if back in my cramped upstairs room in Georgetown, I’d eat the whole of the pint or the bird.

There had always been something in me that sparked to the sheer act of shoveling food into my mouth until my stomach was full to bursting: I got a high from it, like the rush of a drug. And my brain hadn’t been rewired by the better habits I’d honed. But what had changed was my reaction to a binge. I accepted it as a quirk of that wiring—of my nature—and I recognized that one night of bingeing could do only so much harm. There wasn’t a flood of guilt and shame afterward. And there wasn’t an anxious vow of penance that gave way, that same night or the next, to more bingeing before the penance began.

I didn’t keep much food in my apartment, which was where I did most of my daytime reporting and writing, because I knew my tendency toward rote, absentminded eating and didn’t want to facilitate it. There were no pretzels or cookies in my cupboard. There was no ice cream in my freezer. A snapshot of my refrigerator on a typical day might have shown: a small jar of mayonnaise, used for a tuna sandwich weeks earlier; a half bottle of low-cal vinaigrette, used for a salad made only slightly more recently; a half dozen bottles of white wine, because a few glasses of that was what I most often permitted myself if I felt the need for a treat late at night, before bed; a pound and a half of ground coffee, which I drank black and in great quantities; and a jar of eye pads moistened with cucumber juice, because the pads supposedly reduced puffiness. I was a sucker for promises like that, and I liked the theatricality of putting the pads on and lying down on the couch for ten minutes before heading out to the restaurant of the night. Adelle wasn’t the only ham in the family.