Dinner with Edward (11 page)

When he was well enough to cook again, Edward began to invite me to dinner. But those evenings lacked the same magic. He no longer sang along to Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald. In fact, there was no music in the apartment. He wasn't up for the walks to his butcher and fishmonger across the Roosevelt Island Bridge to Astoria, so we ate whatever was easy. He rarely went into Manhattan. Often, there was no dessert. And when he did serve sweets, they were the over-­the-­top pastries Laura bought at Maison Kayser on the Upper East Side.

He tried to rally in celebration of his ninety-­third birthday. We had planned a big dinner at Balthazar, one of his favorite restaurants in Manhattan, but in the end he said he didn't have the strength to leave the island. So, we stayed in and had a simple meal—linguine with tomato sauce and prune cupcakes for dessert.

“Edward's turning ninety-­three? I thought he was already ninety-­three,” I said to Laura a week before the dinner.

“He tells everyone that he is ninety-­three, and when he actually turns ninety-­three, he will be telling everyone that he is in his ninety-­fourth year,” said Laura.

On the eve of a particularly bad nor'easter, Edward called me to cancel our dinner plans. He was worried that I wouldn't be able to make it to Roosevelt Island during the storm, even though he lived just a quick subway ride away from my midtown office. But later that afternoon, when the storm proved milder than the weather reports had predicted, he called to reschedule. But by the end of the day I received a third phone call at my office. Dinner was indeed cancelled.

Edward apologized profusely for the confusion. “I no longer have control of my life,” he confessed to me over the phone in a rare outpouring of fear. “I feel shaky. I'm frightened so easily now. I'm losing control. I'm aware that I'm losing control of my life.”

By the third phone call, I became determined to visit him anyway, and see for myself how he was doing. “No need to prepare dinner,” I said. “We can just have a drink.”

I let myself into the apartment, where I found Laura fussing in the kitchen. Edward had made flounder, and there was acorn squash dusted with brown sugar in the oven. Things seemed to have returned to normal, but when Edward appeared outside his bedroom door dressed in a frayed, white terrycloth robe, he announced that he was going to bed even though it wasn't quite six o'clock. Laura and I would have to amuse ourselves, he said.

Neither of us felt like eating. We sat in the living room for a long time, drinking Scotch. Laura's husband had recently died. They had returned to New York from Greece when he became ill and Laura had nursed him here. Now newly widowed, she frequently dined at her father's apartment. Laura had spent the last several months taking care of Edward and had borne the brunt of his anger and frustration. She cried when she started to speak.

“I just don't want to spend the rest of my life looking after sick people,” she said as the tears streamed down her face. “You don't know what it's like until you have to do it.”

Laura's husband, only a few years younger than Edward, had been her art teacher in Piraeus, where she went to study as a young, aspiring artist. The walls of Edward's apartment are crowded with Laura's work—chalky pastels of blues and yellows, evoking the idea of the soft lingering afternoon light on the Greek port city where she and her husband had lived for years.

I went home that night feeling low, worried about Edward, worried about Laura, too. I longed for our dinners à deux.

And then, finally, Edward was feeling better, behaving more like, well, Edward. One night he invited me to dinner. Laura was there as well. As I was preparing to take my leave, Edward escorted me to the elevator. We lingered as he authoritatively lifted his cane to prevent the elevator from descending until he was finished speaking.

“I miss the dinners we used to have—just you and me,” he said, as if reading my mind.

That night, I left his apartment feeling relieved, but also as though I had lost something. Edward must have noticed that things were not right because the next morning, before I woke up, I had the following message on my phone: “I just wanted to call and tell you how much I enjoyed you being here last night, your coming, your being here made it very special,” he said. “I'm sorry that it wasn't just a dinner between you and me, but we'll have those dinners again sometime in the future, I hope.”

And then, as if to convince himself, he added, “We'll have them and enjoy them again. Good night, baby.”

15

Canapes of Sun-­Dried Tomato and Chèvre

Cream of Cauliflower Soup with Truffle Oil and Dried, Reconstituted Porcini Mushrooms

Prime Rib

New Potatoes, Haricots Verts

Grand Marnier Soufflé with Fresh Cream

Turkish Coffee

Cabernet Sauvignon

I
t was to be a triumphant feast—the dinner Edward would prepare to signal that he was back, and he was going to do it in grand style.

He took the bus to his Queens butcher to pick up the prime rib he had ordered the week before and was absorbed with the preparations for a dinner that was to include neighbors and friends who had seen him through his long illness. He would invite the aging Czech artist and his beautiful wife, the Albanian refugee couple who had fled persecution in Montenegro, and the dentist and his wife. Laura would also be there and, as usual, he asked me to be his sous chef.

I was looking forward to seeing Edward in his element again, but a few days before the big event, I was rearranging the furniture in my apartment and pushed one of my bulky bookcases. I didn't think much of the slight pain I felt in my back. The next day, though, I could barely get out of bed. The pain was so excruciating that putting on a pair of socks became a twenty-­minute ordeal. At the doctor's office I couldn't even sit in the waiting room, so I stood rigidly against a counter at reception, barely able to support myself upright until a nurse came out to fetch me.

The pain was particularly intense when I sneezed or coughed. Laughing was also unbearable, and I stayed in bed in various positions of discomfort. After several days of swallowing painkillers and affixing sticky pain patches to the inflamed spot on my back, I was feeling only slightly better. I called Edward to tell him the bad news: I was going to miss his big comeback dinner.

“I'm so sorry you won't be able to make it, darling,” he said.

I asked him what he was cooking.

Prime rib with steamed haricots verts and potatoes au jus would be the spectacular main course. He was also serving martinis and goat cheese canapés with sun-dried tomatoes before the meal and a sublime Grand Marnier soufflé with hints of orange zest and topped with fresh cream for dessert. But Edward was particularly excited about the soup course he was planning.

“I was so looking forward to having you try my cauli­flower soup,” he told me on the phone.

Cauliflower soup?

“Yes, with truffle oil and reconstituted dried mushrooms.”

The idea of cauliflower soup with truffle oil sounded simply too delicious and I asked Edward to give me the recipe right there and then.

“Well, first, you sweat the onions. You add some good chicken stock, and then you stir in the cauliflower pieces,” he said by way of explanation. “You cook them down, and then you use an inversion blender to mix everything together.” The truffle oil and the reconstituted mushrooms are added as garnishes at the end, he said.

I don't know why I felt compelled to make that soup, but after I wrote down Edward's instructions, I put on my clothes with great difficulty, popped a few painkillers, and headed to the nearest Fairway to buy the ingredients. I spent an inordinate amount of time weighing the differences between white and black truffle oil. I knew nothing about truffle oil, so I finally opted for the black—an unfortunate choice I learned back home when I called Edward.

“What were you thinking, kid?” he asked, both incredulous and amused that I would make such an egregious error in culinary judgment. He prefers the white, which he says is stronger and mustier than the black and has less of a garlicky flavor. Edward and I had unwittingly landed in the middle of a flap that had been heating up among some of the world's greatest chefs about the legitimacy of truffle oil. Most truffle oils are nothing more than a chemical compound, comprised of olive oil and “flavoring.” Edward checked the label of his bottle, which denoted that it had been made with infused truffles. He had the good stuff. I peered at the label on my bottle. Mine was indeed the fake. A wave of anger swept over me as I read, “olive oil, flavoring.” So now my wrong-­color oil wasn't even the real thing.

I was in too much pain to return to Fairway but still determined to make the soup. I spent the evening cutting up onions and cauliflower and slowly cooking the mixture. Like Edward, I now had to grip the counters when I moved. I stood carefully on the step stool I used to fish ingredients and cooking implements out of cupboards that were beyond my reach. I puréed the cooked cauliflower and onions in the blender and the result was a velvety potage. I soaked dried porcini mushrooms, chopped them, and lightly fried them in olive oil.

I ladled out the soup, topped it with the mushrooms, swirled my fake black truffle oil over the top, and served bowls of soup to my daughter and her friend. I stood at the kitchen counter to eat. Maybe it was the medication finally kicking in, but as we ate I felt no pain. The soup, with the musky richness of the truffle oil and the porcini, made me feel better immediately.

“The inspiration can kill a lot of troubles,” Rita once said when we were talking about making some of Edward's specialties. For Rita, it was Edward's soufflé that took her through some of the rough periods in her life. For me, it became the cauliflower soup. I like to think that Edward had a hand in making us all feel better.

Truthfully, after a momentary reprieve from the soup, I was not completely healed. That would take a few more weeks and during that time I became acutely aware that I had no one to count on in a time of crisis. Clearly I could no longer call on my husband to help me move furniture or hang pictures in my apartment. These were small things, to be sure, but shortly after moving to Central Park South I realized I barely knew how to handle a screwdriver. A girlfriend offered to loan me a power drill, but I demurred because I had no idea what to do with it and I didn't want to hurt myself.

Worse, though, there was really no one to help me through my convalescence. Who would apply the Lido­caine patches to my lower back to ease the pain? Who would be there for me in the way that Paula and Edward had taken care of each other, in the way that my father had monitored my mother's blood sugar and administered her insulin? I could barely get myself into a sitting position, let alone do laundry or make a cup of tea. How would I ever be able to walk up and down stairs? Who would support me if I could no longer work?

“I know how limited I am in many activities I once did earlier in my life, easily without thought,” Edward had written to me during his own illness. “And it leaves me feeling defenseless.”

I was also feeling defenseless, and his words flew through my mind in my worst moments. I thought of Edward who had to face the pain of aging alone. It was all a part of what he liked to call a normal life.

“People are too obsessed with seeking experience and feel that if they are not living on the razor's edge, they are not alive,” Edward had once told me. “It's because they can't deal with normal life. They need to climb Mount Everest instead.”

I had been one of those people whom Edward was talking about. I had lived on the razor's edge. I had voluntarily traveled to extreme places, to cover war in Africa and drug traffickers in South America. And I thought the experience was more valid than the daily grind. I had always lived with the notion that paradise was somewhere else. But Edward knew better. He knew that paradise was not a place, but the people in your life. How many times had he repeated to me, “Paradise was me and Paula”?

When I was finally feeling better, I called Edward and let him know about the miracle of the soup cure. He wasn't at all surprised. His dinner party had gone off well, he said, and he had missed me. He also told me that we had a special connection because we had come together when we were both vulnerable. When Paula died, he had suddenly felt he was old for the first time in his life.

“When you come for dinners with me, we talk hungrily about those matters and problems we each face,” he later wrote in a letter to me.

That night, I sat down to write my own letter to Edward. I told him that I had never been incapacitated like this, and how I was suddenly feeling middle-­aged and alone. I told him that he had saved my life and that he would be with me forever.

The response was swift. Edward called me right after he read my letter.

“You saved your own life,” he said. “You think about this in time and you will come to see the truth of what I'm saying. You were giving as well as receiving.” And then his voice caught, and he said he needed to go. “You touched an old man's heart.”