Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (17 page)

My years in Europe shaped me as a woman. I don’t really think any of us are women right when we turn eighteen, or even twenty-one for that matter. You have to live a little. I certainly tried to do that. It was amazing just to walk the streets in those cities. There is so much history in the buildings alone. In Paris, I studied how French women dressed, so casual yet put together and nonchalantly sexy, so individual and idiosyncratic somehow, even if they all shopped at the same stores. I studied the way Italian women walked, so feminine and playful, to some indecipherable beat that gave them both poise and sex appeal at once. I was fascinated by the culture all around me.

And I explored those two cities through my fork as well. In Milan, the brioche and other pastry in the mornings, always with cappuccino, suddenly made me a sweet-eater. The pastas and meat dishes you could get at trattorias for a modest sum were simple in their preparation but deliciously complex in the mouth. I learned the regional differences between north and south and savored all the glorious seafood of Liguria. I never ate any fish until I got to Italy. Fish was the last frontier for my newfound carnivorousness to conquer. The first couple of years in Milan and Paris were surreal. I was in my early twenties, far from home in a new and exciting atmosphere with the freedom to really look at who I was and who I wanted to be. I had grown up in a pretty conservative environment in my mother’s home. My stepdad wouldn’t even let a boy talk to me on our front lawn in
broad daylight. I was not a rebellious teenager in high school and was too worried about how much college was costing us to even risk jeopardizing my place thereafter. In Europe I was alone, without my parents or family, so I made my own decisions, and for the first time in my whole life money was not a constant issue. I wasn’t making that much in that first year or two as a model, but compared with what my parents and I had to live on, I barely needed to work a couple of days to meet my month’s expenses. It was an unbelievable turn of events in the history of my short life.

I
joined a new agency that sent
me to Paris to build my book after just one month of being in Milan. The apartment I lived in, on Rue du Chemin Vert in the Bastille neighborhood, was no better than the one I’d left behind in Milan. I shared two rooms with four other girls, all models, all wretched, in debt to our agency for rent and the pittance they advanced us for living expenses, and on a seemingly impossible hustle for work to pay it off. I went on endless castings and “go-sees” (where you’d go to see an editor or photographer in the hope that they’d take a shine to you), clutching my modeling book as I waited in line with two hundred other girls, only to have the kingmaker in question flip through my book without so much as looking me in the eye. I’d race from one go-see and casting to the next. At my low level, sometimes you’d get a job because you were the first hireable girl to arrive.

But at least I was in Paris. At least after I left castings dejected I could walk through the Place Vendôme or Jardin des Tuileries, admiring the city even if I didn’t feel a part of it. The endless castings forced me to experience Paris by Metro and by foot, to wend my way through immigrant neighborhoods, past slivers of restaurants selling goat curry, down alleys
packed with Chinese shops selling tea, ginger, and fresh cilantro, even in February. I’d scurry by butcher shops, averting my eyes and wishing I could unsee the skinned rabbits and lambs hanging in the windows, eyes still in their sockets, or the pigs’ heads, each wearing a strange smirk. I had only just started eating meat a few years prior, and, as far as I was concerned then, it should only come nestled in Styrofoam trays and wrapped in plastic.

To buoy my spirits, I spent the little money I had trying to buy a small piece of Paris through its food. While I couldn’t really afford to eat out very much, I could afford to roam Paris’s markets and cafés if I watched my budget. Just a hunk of cheese with good bread and olives were all I needed. Cheese and olives smashed between the flanks of a crisp baguette was the perfect combination of umami and
chaatpati
in one starchy, crumbly bite. The spicy-sour spike in the various olives I found, from small black oily Greek ones to big chili-drenched Moroccan ones, was the perfect salty counterpoint to the fatty and sharp cheeses of France. I wasted nothing. If the heel of the baguette became a bit dry, I would drizzle drops of the seasoned brine or oil from the olive bags on top to soften the bread.

There were endless varieties of cheese to sample. Week by week I slowly made my way from the mild and familiar to the more sinister, stinkier, runnier sections of the cheese counter. It was in Paris that I first discovered goat cheese, or chèvre, by accident. I had eaten the chived-up cow’s-milk cheese Boursin, which is sold in American supermarkets, and thought that’s what I was buying when I pointed to the creamy mound in the cheese shop. But instead of the cream-cheesy, soft richness of that herby wonder, I discovered the sublime, grassy tang of goat cheese! Before that my only taste of goat cheese had been Greek feta. I was in love with French cheese.

And so I made friends with the large, sweaty cheesemonger in the Bastille street market, who would bray at me with raised fingers on his
shiny head for goat’s cheese or pull imaginary teats for a buttery Brie de Meaux. This tall, paunchy man, a doppelgänger for Alfred Hitchcock in a tablecloth-sized white apron spread across his enormous belly, had huge, wide hands with pink sausages for fingers. The broken capillaries on his cheeks and nose bulged as he barked at me to stop loitering and fogging up his glass case. Often a swarming knot of irate French housewives and maids formed behind me while I tried hard to pick just one cheese. There were so many to choose from, and so few francs with which to buy them. Back home, at the Amar Ranch Market, we basically had the choice of mozzarella, American singles, or Wisconsin mild, sharp, and extra-sharp cheddar. For spaghetti we sprinkled Parmesan out of a dark-green Kraft cylinder. If we went to the Stater Bros. supermarket farther out in West Covina, which was slightly more middle-middle-class than the lower-middle-class La Puente, we could score Swiss, provolone, and Muenster. French cheese to us was Laughing Cow. Cheese was either white or orange. But in Paris, in the Bastille, cheese was blue, beige, veiny, creamy white, yellow, deep sunset orange, or even burnt sienna. It came crusted with rose-colored peppercorns, smelling of funk, and swathed in ash and wax.

My love of cheese was liberated. I perused and savored all the milky delights I had never before seen or tasted. As weeks went by, my French improved ever so slightly, and I would stammer questions at the impatient beast of a cheesemonger. To preserve his business from dwindling, he took to pushing me to the side in order to service those who
did
know what they wanted. Because I was probably pathetic and because he could most likely see the hunger in my eyes, often while cutting a wedge for those sharp-elbowed women, he would throw a razor-thin slice or crumbled edge my way. He never looked at his hands while wielding his knife or sharp violin string of a cheese cutter. And yet the amount was always perfect. He was not kind and he was not chatty, but if I stood there quietly, he would
ply me with a steady stream of cheesy samples. “So what wins the prize today?” he would grumble, to indicate he had given me enough.

Some days, if I was especially lucky, he would give me the leftover scraps of cheeses that were too small to sell, even in the bargain basket of four- or five-franc wrapped chunks. I took whatever he threw my way, and eventually relished even the most intense Roquefort or the runniest Camembert, waxy rind and all. I didn’t have more than eight or ten francs to spend on any given meal. One day, the agency’s unhappy accountant called me in to discuss my purchases. After what might have been the first talking-to a model has ever received for eating too much cheese, I slunk out, chastened and worried for my Camembert habit.

Thank goodness, then, for Michael Spingler, from whom I learned the principles of French cooking. He was a French literature professor at Clark, and while I’d never taken a class with him, his wife, Kathy, worked as the costume director for the theater department and had employed me as a costume apprentice. I adored her. Michael happened to be in Paris on sabbatical, working on a book about Molière. He knew I was struggling and had me over for dinner often. Michael showed me a Paris different from the one I’d seen, which was beautiful but cold and full of disappointment. His building was in the 14th Arrondissement, at 139 Rue D’Alésia, if memory serves. The building’s owner, Jean Claude, was a literary critic for
Le Monde;
its handyman, a German poet. They were all friends with Leo, the owner of a nearby bookstore called Alias. Everyone except Leo lived in the building, for the most part with their doors open. Jean Claude, a tall man with approximately ten hairs left on his head, all white ones; wire-framed spectacles; and a small roster of moth-eaten sweaters, would show up for dinner with a pot of beans and lardons. Michael would make magic with his two-burner stove. It was there I ate my first
blanquette de veau
(my first veal of any sort, for that matter), the French bistro classic that featured the slowly cooked meat doused in a sauce rich with stock and cream. I
ate lamb shank braised in red wine, and nearly everything—steaks, green beans, fish—was finished with plenty of butter. In Michael’s hands, even the simplest food became special. We did not eat mere mashed potatoes. No, we ate
purée de pommes de terre.
He’d make Jean Claude peel the potatoes. “Jean Claude was in the army,” Michael would say. “He won’t mind.”

To come back from those dispiriting casting calls to the heady aromas of his tiny kitchen, or to Michael and Jean Claude sipping wine beside an ashtray brimming with the butts of unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes, was exactly what I needed. To climb the wide marble staircase to the fifth floor and enter the spacious apartment crowded with tattered furniture, dusty oriental rugs, and miles and miles of dog-eared books to see these two thinkers semi-drunkenly discussing Baudelaire was a much-needed balm for my aching feet and spirit. I’d kick off my high heels, sink into a chair, and receive a glass of red and a warm welcome. “And how was today’s foray into the forest of fashion?” Jean Claude might say in heavily accented English, exaggerating his Fs.

Michael and Jean Claude saw the toll that the fashion business was taking on me and they fought it valiantly, deploying a daily barrage of gentle teasing. When I came in crushed after failing to score a commercial modeling gig, probably a half page in some newspaper insert, they expressed mock disappointment in me. “How terrible you are!” Jean Claude would say. Michael would chime in: “I agree, you’re definitely not good enough to sell Maalox.” They’d poke fun at my self-pity. “One day, your grand moment will come,” said Jean Claude. “You
will
have your face on the pantyhose package at Monoprix.” I had my own peanut gallery. That is how I survived the parade of rejections inevitable for most wannabe models and the myopia of a young person’s passion. They reminded me that there was more to life than being pretty.

I spent more and more time on Rue D’Alésia as my apartment became bedlam. One day, I came home to find that someone had drunkenly peed
in my bed. I was paying for a soiled bed in an apartment I rarely used. I cried when I told Michael. He invited me to move in. This was when my real life in Paris began. Work came in a trickle—a fitting-model gig here, a catalog shoot there—but the occasional job was all I needed to support my modest lifestyle. I certainly wasn’t partying like a model. When my former roommates were out at Les Bains Douches, the French equivalent of Madame Claude, guzzling free champagne with other trucked-in models, I was with my weeknight family—Michael, his friends, and, when they came to visit, Kathy and their two kids—eating coq au vin and drinking pinot noir. When the weekend came, I was off to Milan to see Daniele, or “Monsieur Spaghetti,” as Jean Claude dubbed him. I was living as charmed a life as anyone sleeping on a literature professor’s couch could hope to. Michael and Jean Claude used to heckle me as I packed my bag. “Going away for your dirty weekend?”
No!
“Well, isn’t he your lover?”
Ew, stop!
As embarrassed as I was, I felt grateful to have these two paternal men in my life who felt protective enough to embarrass me.

I got to know the Friday-night pilots, who would let me sit in the cockpit’s third seat for takeoff and landing on the short flight to Milan. They’d point out the rabbit holes near the runway at Charles de Gaulle, and curse the rabbits for getting caught in the wheels. The airport staff was occasionally invited to hunt them. My pilot friends boasted of the stews they’d make. When I landed back in Paris on Sundays, I’d look out the window for the animals’ eyes, glowing from the reflected lights of the plane.

Daniele’s mom, Gabriella, a big-bosomed, always carefully coiffed woman with a weakness for furs and skinny cigarettes the size of lollipop sticks, opened my eyes to a sort of Italian cooking much different from the spaghetti-and-meatballs version produced by Pompeii Pizzeria, the restaurant run by my friend Pelly Dimopoulos’s family, where I had my first job at fifteen. (In those days, you could get an age waiver at fourteen from the Department of Labor to have a part-time job after school.
If your grades were good enough, the school would sign a document and you were exempt from waiting until the legal age of sixteen to work.)

I watched, surprised at first, as Gabriella opted for butter instead of olive oil and often chose béchamel over tomato sauce. I had received my Italian food education at Pompeii Pizzeria and, a year later, at Pelly’s uncle’s pizzeria, Mario’s, where the tips were better. There garlicky tomato sauce reigned. Yet Daniele’s mother mainly cooked the style of food found in northern Italy and Milan in particular, which meant risotto tinted yellow from saffron and rich with marrow, accompanied by osso buco slowly cooked with white wine and stock. Somehow it reminded me more of French food than Italian. When we went out to eat, they would discuss whether to go for food from Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, or Liguria, as my friends and I back home might debate whether to eat Chinese, burgers, or Mexican. I knew Indian food was highly regional, but India was a vast country of close to a billion people. I quickly learned that Italy, though comparatively tiny, had no less regional variation. Daniele’s family was full of voracious eaters. Before I’d taken a third bite of my veal Milanese, incredibly juicy and encased in crispy breading, they were sitting in front of empty plates, watching politely and with evident pride as I savored every buttery moment.

Between Gabriella and Michael, I got a vast education in European cooking. I learned how to make more than just curry and stir-fry, to cook without relying on mountains of chopped onions, garlic, and ginger. Occasionally I’d pitch in to do more than chop onions. In February I came home giddy from the supermarket, because I’d found fresh cilantro. Michael was roasting a lamb shank for dinner, so I made an almost-but-not-quite replica of the cilantro chutney of my childhood, to drizzle onto the meat.

Daniele spoke perfect English, but taught me to speak real Italian, in the way only a boyfriend can. When we met, I spoke enough Spanish to
piece together what Italians said to me. Within a few months, though, I could fight with him in rapid Italian. Through our life together and from chatting with cab drivers, I came to understand both the expressive and the banal. “
Che cazzo!
” a cabbie would yell after getting cut off. “
Ce lo mal di stomacho,
” Daniele would say right before chugging Maalox.

About once a month, Daniele and I would spend an entire Sunday at the movies—we’d have lunch, catch an afternoon movie, have a snack, then see another film, and after that we would eat dinner before a late show. These weren’t all Roberto Benigni films, of course. For years, I thought Steven Seagal was an amazing actor, because the guy who dubbed him in Italian was a brilliant stage actor who also dubbed De Niro. Daniele lived near the Duomo, the city’s stunning cathedral, and we often walked past it on our way to the movies. There was no ornate cathedral adorned with thousands of centuries-old statues back in La Puente. There were no skyscraping Gothic spires, either. Daniele cultured me in the way a partner often does: in the person you care for, you often see parts of the person you wish you were. In Daniele, I saw a man raised around what I knew cerebrally to be great art, the kind you read about in college. He knew it not as something to be studied but as something to be seen and felt, and not as something rare to be viewed only after a long plane ride but as something beautiful that happened to be right down the street. That proximity to art and culture was part of what I had missed when we moved away from New York. Now I had a chance to live walking distance from Santa Maria Delle Grazie, where
The
Last Supper
hangs. I was a train away from both Michelangelo’s
David
in Florence and the Colosseum and Pantheon in Rome.