Insatiable (4 page)

4

S
LOW
D
EATH BY
M
AYONNAISE

A
S CLAY FELKER HAD SUSPECTED AND CONFIRMED WITH HIS INSPIRED
gift for casting in the fall of 1968, I was a foodie, a full-blown gourmand, long before New York and America fell in love with dining out . . . obsessed ahead of the times. Indeed,
foodie
wasn’t even in the dictionary yet. When I did truly fall in love and he wasn’t married, only elusive and uncertain for a while, I found a game dining coconspirator across the rewrite desk at the
New York Post.

Don Forst had grown up in Brooklyn and his attorney father invested in restaurants. Don could handle the gruff maître d’ at Lindy’s, near Broadway, where we had strawberry shortcake after seeing Robert Preston and Barbara Cook in
The Music Man.
Don knew how to score three helpings of shrimp in pink Louis sauce at Mamma Leone’s (where Lots was the motto and we prepped at eating Italian). He was trained by his folks at how to scope out a table about to be vacated in vast, raucous Lundy’s, the seafood gymnasium in Sheepshead Bay. Easy. You found people eating dessert and stood close, boring hate rays into the back of their necks, till they couldn’t sit still another minute and decided to skip coffee. Then you elbowed all claimants away and swiftly ordered two shore dinners, double coleslaw, and blueberry pie à la mode. This was New York City–honed sophistication that meshed perfectly with my Paris veneer.

Don worked nights and I worked days on the
Post
rewrite desk at the tail end of the fifties. He’d prepped at the
Houston Press
and the Newark
Star-Ledger.
I had been determined to escape Detroit the minute I could, but no news outlet in New York would hire me fresh out of college. I was stuck. When my United Press job in Detroit gave me weekdays off, I would fly to New York with scrapbooks and clippings, scrounging for an opening. Then a
Post
editor, barely looking up from his typewriter, offered me a one-week tryout during the summer. (That was how the
Post
filled out the city room during summer vacations.) But my boss in Detroit wouldn’t give me a week off—I hadn’t worked long enough to earn it. So I quit. The one-week tryout led to two, led to a month, finally led to a job.

A reporter I was dating introduced Don and me as we passed in the morning at breakfast in the
Post
luncheonette. Don was engaged to a Danish woman, he confided, a brunette with the most amazing full lips. Did he have to mention those lips? (Now that I think of it, “being engaged” was close enough to being married that I could feel safe.) I don’t remember if he told me this before or after we moved from sunbathing on my terrace to my bedroom, both of us warmed and scented with that sweet smell of sun on skin, in a tangle of fierce and uninhibited lovemaking. I was already falling in love with his profile, his straight, thin nose and dark, sad eyes, the slight boyish body with one very muscular arm from playing squash. (Squash? In Detroit, we didn’t eat squash, much less play squash, in my crowd.) I found him pleasingly urbane, funny and smart, endlessly profane. All the men at the
Post
used the
F
word at least once in each sentence as noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. He was also brashly cynical, like all romantics.

Don took me to dinner at his favorite place for impressing first dates (he later confessed), the Little Old Mansion, a southern restaurant in midtown with the cranky grande dame owner southern restaurants seemed to demand. On the way to dinner, he bought me a bikini—shocking pink on one side, reversing to black on the other. It was a tribute, I felt, to how juicy I’d looked on my terrace in a pink-and-white-checked gingham bikini. The slight qualms I felt, being an inch or two taller than he in heels, were quickly melting. On the banquette beside me, he sat tall. I had the lobster with black walnuts in a saffron rice ring.

Rather quickly, it began to feel like love to me. Before Don, there had been many men—wild crushes, consuming dalliances, fleeting affairs, one-night stands and one-week stands. But this was love at another level, not just lust and an electric sexual connection but also a joy in the amazing intimacy we shared and the way his need freed me to reveal my own.

It’s easy to see now that all that traffic in and out of my bed before Don was due not just to my uninhibited appetite for sex but a way to get close and make somebody love me. I was rarely cool. I thought getting a man was like getting the story. You had to be smart and aggressive, tie up the phone, park on the doorstep, and shove interlopers out of the way when necessary.

I was a wreck when Don went off to Denmark to see why his fiancée, the brunette with the bee-stung lips, had not yet come back to New York. He didn’t tell me all the details on his return, only that it was finished. I determined to show him how lucky he was—what a perfect mate he had in me. Collagen injections didn’t exist then, so I couldn’t do much to fatten my lips beyond cheating with lipstick beyond my lip line and pouting a lot. I comforted him with matzo ball soup and chocolate mousse.

It took a year to convince him that we should live together. His dark ground-floor studio, shades pulled to keep out the stares of passersby, was too tiny and grim. But there was a small one-bedroom walk-up with dormer ceilings and funny little windows on the top floor we could rent for very little money. Before he could change his mind, he had signed the lease. And we dragged our stuff upstairs and moved in. Of course, when my folks came to New York, we flipped the bell plate around so it said Greene and not Forst/Greene. That way, my parents could pretend they didn’t know we were living together. We took them for dinner at the American Pavilion during the 1964 World’s Fair, where Don, with great bravura, ordered a Richebourg, one of the greatest red Burgundies, expensive even then, and my mom threw in two ice cubes to chill it. I loved that he never held that against me.

Soon we were pooling our savings to explore all the great restaurants, Craig’s favorites, whatever Silas Spitzer recommended in
Holiday
magazine, and
Gourmet
’s monthly picks.

Once I was with Don, other men became simply male humans, not possible conquests. I didn’t see them as men I needed to seduce. I didn’t have to prove anything anymore, because Don seemed to adore me. He was smart and funny and brooding, with a deep melancholy streak. Sometimes he would be telling a story so sad that he would cry. I was moved by his tears, his deep sadness. I would be his woman, his mistress, his muse, his good mother.

Don and I would lie in bed after making love, trading bedroom stories, tales of a thousand and one nights. He’d slept with hundreds of women. And it didn’t matter how many men I’d been with. “Whatever you’ve done is what makes you what you are,” he said. “And that’s the you I love.”

Blueberry Pie with Orange-Nut Crust

I
believe this came from the
Times
in the sixties, and I made it into my own summer pie. The vintage recipe called for shortening, but I’ve substituted butter for twenty-first-century tastes.

Crust:

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp. salt

2 tsp. sugar

8 oz. unsalted butter

2 tsp. grated orange rind

1/3 cup finely chopped almonds or pecans

5 tbsp. ice water (approximately)

Filling:

4 cups blueberries

1/2 cup sugar

2 tbsp. cornstarch

Preheat oven to 375° F. If you have a pizza stone, place it on the bottom rack.

Mix flour, salt, and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer. Cut butter into eight pieces. Using the paddle attachment, add one piece at a time. Continue processing until pieces of butter are no larger than a pea. Add orange rind and nuts and process briefly. Remove bowl from mixer.

Sprinkle 3 tablespoons of the water over the mixture and mix in with a fork. Pinch the dough together. If it holds and doesn’t feel dry, you do not need to add the remaining water. If it’s dry and does not hold, add remaining water, 1 tablespoon at a time, as needed, to make the dough come together. Roll into two balls, flatten, and wrap separately in plastic. Refrigerate for approximately one hour.

Remove one pastry disk from the refrigerator 20 minutes before rolling. Roll the pastry and line a nine-inch pie plate with it. Refrigerate the pastry-lined plate and remove remaining disk from fridge while preparing the berries.

Pick over the berries, then gently toss with granulated sugar and cornstarch. Pour into pastry-lined pie plate.

Roll out remaining pastry. If you have a lattice-top form to punch out a checkerboard top, use it. Otherwise, cut 3 to 4 slits in the top layer of pastry once you have laid it over the blueberries. Moisten the edges and crimp to seal.

Place on the bottom rack of the oven, ideally on the pizza stone. Bake for 20 minutes. Reduce temperature to 350° and move the pie to the middle rack and bake for another 20 minutes. The pie is done when the juices start to bubble and the crust is nicely browned on the edges.

Serves 8.

5

S
OMETHING
B
ORROWED
, S
OMETHING
B
LUE

A
GING HIPPIES LIKE TO SAY, “IF YOU REMEMBER THE SIXTIES, YOU WEREN’T
there.” I remember the sixties because food and sex were drugs that did not destroy memory cells. I still had a hangover of fifties’ sensibility. I was curious about LSD, but it was supposed to bring out the real you from within. Forget about that. I could see from my friends who loved smoking marijuana that it was an escape from reality and brought on the munchies, a symptom I couldn’t afford in my trade. Caught up in work, paying bills . . . and playing house, I still wore my panty girdle and white gloves. The counterculture was a sideshow. I covered it for the
New York Post
and for
Ladies’ Home Journal.
Unlike Al Aronowitz, a middle-class New Jersey boy who went beat covering the Beats for the
Post
and claimed to have given the Beatles their first grass, I liked shoes and bags that matched, and clean sheets, preferably ironed. The chocolate velvet cake at the Four Seasons was about as druggy as I cared to go.

Looking back from the media-saturated world of today, where I suppose even prepubescents know what Bill Clinton did to flavor his cigar, it is difficult to believe how innocent we were. My article “Are You Man Enough to Take a Mistress?” must have seemed a provocative challenge to readers of
Nugget
when the men’s monthly ran it in December 1962.
Mistress
still had a slightly back-street connotation.
Mistress
had an aura of glamorous wickedness, so unlike today’s everyday, socially acknowledged
live-in companion
or
domestic partner.

Probably I’d sold the story before Don and I surprised ourselves by getting married on Labor Day weekend in 1961. I liked the idea of being his mistress (although, in fact, we shared the bills). We had watched our friends pairing off, having babies, moving to the suburbs because it was better for the children. Neither of us was eager to marry. I had actually convinced myself marriage was too big a commitment, since Don made it clear marriage was not his immediate goal. Don was not my dream man. His deep melancholy sometimes felt like more than I could carry.

“We’ll just live together as long as it’s wonderful,” I said. He agreed. And it was wonderful.

When I traveled for a
Post
story, I never felt the smallest flicker of lust for anyone. I thrived on that as evidence of how much I loved Don, how much I felt loved. Most of my out-of-town assignments for the
Post
were brief, but an investigation of illegal baby adoptions involving New York couples took me to Las Vegas and Los Angeles for almost a month. Back in New York, I found Don gloomy and annoyed by the long separation.

“I want to get married,” he said. “If you don’t want to marry, then we should end this and one of us should move out.”

I was caught by surprise. He had convinced me he would never marry, and I was cozy and comfortable just as we were, no legal tie. “But darling, we don’t need to be married,” I said. “We’re great together. . . . We’re better than being married. What made you suddenly decide you want to do this?”

“I think we should do it for your parents,” he said.

That stopped me for a minute or two. I didn’t laugh. “Are you sure?” I asked. “You’re upset about my parents?”

“I hate the subterfuge . . . the pretense.” He was lying facedown on the hated gold coverlet of our bed, bought to match the twenty-five-dollar gold-and-red cotton fake Persian rug from the Salvation Army that I also hated—all my least favorite colors, but I believed everything should match.

I got someone to recommend a crisis therapist. I went four times and I heard myself talk. “I’m too tall. He’s too short. I can’t live without him. Marriage should be forever. I don’t ever want a divorce. How do I know if he’s really the one? He gets depressed and he hates his mother. That’s not a good sign. But I love how emotional he is. . . . I love that he cries. I don’t think I want to live without him.”

What did the therapist say? I’m sure he had something to say. Crisis therapists, unlike strict Freudians, are allowed to, expected to, talk. But I listened to myself and decided I would marry Don, invoking the same mantra that had protected me so far—for as long as it was wonderful. What a relief! I wasn’t signing on forever. It was in the back of my mind, unspoken, freeing me to marry. Once I said yes, I was really excited and committed. I was going to be married. How amazing. And my parents would be happy, too. They were convinced I’d never find a man who would marry anyone who’d slept around as much as I had (and they didn’t know the half of it).

“Who would buy a cow if you’ve already got the milk?” Daddy had said. Well, now we would have crème fraîche and mountains of whipped cream.

We went to Detroit to get married.

My mom’s friends gave me a shower. “You must have a shower,” Mother said, “because I’ve been buying shower gifts for everyone else’s daughters and nieces for twenty-five years and now it’s my turn.” Her canasta pals brought me nightgowns, very sexy nighties, red satin with spaghetti straps, black with a see-through lace midriff, off-the-shoulder baby-doll pajamas. Did they know?

Daddy gave us the choice of a fancy wedding or five thousand dollars. I negotiated a small wedding in my sister’s backyard, facing a ragtag forest, and four thousand dollars. Mom’s friend the florist had promised me a Gothic arch or Corinthian columns. My heart dropped and I found myself snarling when I saw the four stumpy poles stuck in the dirt. “What are those cigarette butts?” I cried.

“They are not Greek columns?” my mother asked.

“I should have known no one in Detroit could produce a Gothic arch.” I stormed around in my shorts and rubber curlers, trying not to cry and destroy my eyes.

Don looked terror-stricken but handsome, deeply tanned (working nights will do that) in a dark gray pinstripe suit from Brooks Brothers, his first new suit since his high school graduation. I had no ring for him. I was very sensitive about wedding rings for men. I had seen too many men slipping their wedding bands in their pockets or flipping them on the dresser before jumping into bed with me. I didn’t want to imagine Don ever taking off our wedding ring for a few hours.

Probably we should have taken the whole five thousand dollars Daddy offered, but I wanted Detroit to know I wasn’t making it up—I really was getting married. I felt disoriented: The cigarette-butt debacle. Anxiety about Don meeting my eccentric family in one fell swoop. His mother as sweet as treacle (of course we had to invite her). It was all so unnerving that afterward, when we arrived in our honeymoon suite at the St. Clair Inn just for the night—we’d take a real honeymoon in Italy later that fall—we immediately called room service and ordered six desserts, all of them bordering on inedible, and ate every one.

This was just a small hiccup before the glorious food revolution that was coming.