Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (23 page)

Adam was about as different from Teddy, or Salman for that matter, as you can imagine. He was, for a start, my age. I hadn’t been with someone my age since college. Adam was fun, liked Led Zeppelin and spicy food, and felt to me like the prom date I never had. He ignited a certain playfulness in me. I didn’t know much about Adam, and I didn’t really investigate
because I felt I had enough on my plate as it was. Over the course of my book tour we kept in touch via occasional text. I didn’t see him again until the following month in L.A., when I went to do an appearance on the
Ellen
show. Then I saw him once more a month after that, in mid-January, on his birthday. I had just returned from a New Year’s holiday with Teddy. To commemorate my new life as a divorcée, Teddy had charmingly rented a beautiful boat named the
New Vida.
I was looking forward to the year ahead, hopeful and expectant.

So I kept seeing both men. My relationship with Adam illustrated to Teddy that I meant business about dating other people. But after a couple of weeks with Adam, I would miss Teddy terribly. I missed the verbal jousting, the wit, the all-consuming roller coaster that being with this charismatic man entailed. The whole thing was deeply unfair to Adam, because he never really stood a chance. No matter how easygoing and amenable he was to anything I threw his way, no matter how charming or thoughtful or fun, the fact was, my heart already belonged to Teddy, whether I wanted to admit it or not.

I would spend the better part of 2008 feeling that while it was exciting to have two such different men court me, I probably wouldn’t wind up with either of them. I had very different experiences with each man. I rationalized that since I had been clear with both men about not wanting a serious relationship, and that I told them both I was dating other people, this made everything all right. That it was perfectly acceptable to date them both, even though I knew they both wanted more. I disregarded what I knew were serious feelings on both their parts. But beyond my own self-absorption, and my total lack of concern for whether I was hurting either Teddy or Adam, my feminist and willful side had kicked in. Why couldn’t I date more than one man? Men did it all the time without compunction. While I had a right to my own freedom, I did not look too far into the future to consider the consequences of my actions. The heart
wants what it wants, and it hears only what it wants to hear. Neither of the relationships I was juggling felt as casual to these men as I was treating them. And if I had stopped to investigate my own heart honestly, I would have seen that while I was utterly taken with Teddy, or occupied with Adam, I still sorely missed Salman. I didn’t want to go back to my marriage, but the truth is that I wasn’t over my ex-husband. I was rudderless and should have made myself be alone.

T
hat same desire to take ownership
of and forge a new life for myself, on my terms, had also been driving me to find a home I could call my own—a home
I
owned, a place that belonged solely to
me
, that wasn’t contingent on a husband or a landlord. Freshly divorced, I had experienced a wound of displacement and homelessness moving into the Surrey that had just started to truly heal. I did not want to reopen it, ever. On a snowy day in January 2008, I unlocked the door to a home of my own, my first. The cute two-bedroom Alphabet City apartment on the fifth floor of an old brick tenement was a far cry from the Park Avenue townhouse I had spent the last few years in, but the place was all mine. I loved every inch of it.

The neighborhood was a vast change from the historically landmarked street on which my marital home stood. At that time, Alphabet City still had a lot of rats scurrying around car tires in the night. The sidewalk outside my building often gave off the faint stench of stale urine and vomit splattered there by the nightly young bar hoppers. But I loved the neighborhood’s gothic weeping willows and scrappy communal gardens with their metal sculptures rusting under the heavy snow. And my little oasis
was the quintessential image of what outsiders think a downtown New York apartment should look like. It had an open-plan kitchen with wooden cabinets I ripped the doors off and painted Moroccan red. The spare room had a load-bearing wall with two arches in the middle of it, but I made it work because I turned one half into my writing room and the other half into my dressing room. I made it as girly and feminine as humanly possible. My “ancient Egyptian” costumes from
The Ten Commandments,
along with various gowns and baubles I had been gifted over years of modeling, hung everywhere. It was wonderful just to have all my books and pictures back around me. Six months of being a gypsy and living in hotels and guest rooms had begun to wear me thin and jangle my nerves. I relished having my own space again, and the best part: I was finally in my own kitchen once more.

The first thing I did was unpack the pots and pans and cooking utensils. I wasn’t really sure what to do with the half set of Tiffany’s wedding china. But I was so giddy about being able to cook in my own kitchen again that I lost any of the rancor I’d had about the inevitable division of goods that is part and parcel of a marital breakup. I thoroughly savored going to Kalustyan’s, my old standby gourmet ethnic store, and buying all my pantry ingredients. I lingered lovingly in their spice aisles like a bookworm in the stacks of an old library. I filled my basket with
ras el hanout,
baharat,
urfa
chili and sumac, green mango powder and
zaatar,
bottles of obscure hot sauces,
yuzu
and rose jam. I was in heaven. I went to Artisanal’s cheese cave and splurged on everything that Chantal, my crusty French cheesemonger with a gravelly voice and perpetually smudged cobalt-blue eyeliner, made me taste: small putty-like wheels of goat cheese soaked in eau-de-vie and wrapped in grape leaves; a fluorescent wedge of mimolette, cracked and pungent and briny; and an oozing, stinky round of Camembert. I spent endless hours perusing the shelves of Pearl River Mart, picking out all manner of bowls, from large to tiny, from which I
slurped everything from noodles to pasta to ice cream. I went to Patel Brothers supermarket in Jackson Heights, loading up on white turmeric and green mangoes and tindora, a small Asian squash that is my favorite vegetable. I replaced the many jars of oily Indian pickles I had had to leave behind when I became a hotel vagabond. I was reunited with the sublime mouthfeel of cold salted yogurt and rice spiced with crunchy fried mustard seeds, a dollop of various beloved pickles nestled into each bite.

I cannot remember the first complete meal I cooked in that kitchen in the East Village, although I know for a fact it must have contained a lot of aromatic
sambar
curry powder, because it was this taste, this remnant of home cooking, I longed for most in those last nomadic six months of misery. Teddy had been very generous with his living quarters. Upon coming home one afternoon and discovering me in his kitchen, he encouraged me to cook there whenever I wanted. He said no one other than his housekeeper had cooked him a midday meal in years, and the sight of me in an apron moved him almost as much as the indigestion he suffered later from the spicy lunch itself. After that I was careful not to pollute his tony Fifth Avenue penthouse with the odors of the subcontinent, even though his kids loved Indian food since they’d eaten it in South Africa.

But now I was home. In
my
home,
home
home, once and for all. I had had various apartments before in quite a few cities over the course of my life, but this was the first one I owned, and it felt good. A roof over my head and a place to be private, to cry, to laugh, to gorge, to hope, to dream, to wallow, and to pray for things was a salve to my soul. And cooking was indeed my salvation.

I made the staple chutneys and condiments I used regularly, like thick, pasty cranberry chutney with cayenne and fenugreek. I boiled carcasses in a heap of vegetables and aromatics for stock I could freeze. I spent whole weekends in the dead of winter filling tall canisters with lentils and pulses of every color. I bought black rice, red rice, brown rice, and of course bas
mati rice by the heavy jute sackful. I replenished my cupboards with all those rare and funky things I had discovered over my years of travel: dried black Omani limes and Szechwan peppercorns, kokum fruit skins and tins of glittering pieces of orange glacé. Some friends tried to remind me I was living alone and surely would not need all this. But they didn’t get it. It comforted me to have all these twigs and leaves stuffed into my larder. On those new red shelves, I sought to replicate my grandmother’s storeroom. I never wanted to leave the house again.

By my thirty-eighth birthday that September, I finally began to feel like I was getting my life fully back on track. I had settled into my new apartment. The show was doing really well. We had been nominated for an Emmy every single season since I had started, and though I in no way felt significantly responsible for this, it set me at ease about whether or not I truly belonged there. I had renegotiated a much better contract with the network, too, and I was beginning to take on other business ventures. I hadn’t felt comfortable or confident about money since the height of my modeling days. And back then it had troubled me that my material security was based on my looks, which I neither had earned nor could count on in perpetuity. Now I made a living from my knowledge and skills and my efforts. I was self-reliant, and this feeling, this sense that I would indeed make it on my own, was crucial to restoring my faith in myself.

Somewhere in the middle of all the back-and-forth between
Top Chef
and Teddy and Adam that year, I had started to worry that I wouldn’t get my act together in time to bear children. Despite my endometriosis, I hadn’t given up on becoming a mother. And I now had enough money in the bank to splurge on freezing my eggs, something Dr. Seckin also vehemently encouraged me to do. But in order to do so, I was required to first undergo a battery of (expensive) hormone tests.

Seckin referred me to a fertility specialist, and as 2008 came to a close, I made the appointment. Early that winter, I dutifully took the tests. I was confident, or at least hopeful, while I awaited the results. When the fertility doctor called with my test results, I was making breakfast. I had just scrambled some eggs and delivered them to a crisp slice of sourdough, and drizzled the whole yummy thing with Tapatío Hot Sauce.

I sat on my couch, the plate perched on my knees, as the doctor leveled with me. The stress of my disease had taken a toll on my body. My ovaries, he told me with a typical medical professional’s tact, were effectively even older than I was. Aging is hard enough on a superficial level. Your favorite features begin to wilt, like cilantro left out too long. The last thing you want to hear when you’re staring down the barrel of forty is the discourteous surprise that your insides are even older. Still worse, he told me that it was highly unlikely I could conceive naturally—“the old-fashioned way,” in his phrasing.

Fine, to hell with the old-fashioned way, what about in vitro fertilization? Even if we harvested my eggs, he said—after daily injections meant to pump my system into egg-laying overdrive before my ovaries officially threw in the towel—my chances were just 10 to 15 percent. By the time I hung up the phone, my scrambled eggs were cold. I picked up my breakfast and tried to take a bite. The toast, now damp, had lost its will under the pile of curds. The bread gave way, sending egg onto my sweatpants. The bits of curd looked like vomit, the hot sauce and egg and toast seeping their moisture into my sweatpants and the velvet couch. And vomiting was just what I felt like doing. I had squandered the best years of my life following Salman around the globe, going to amazing parties and grand literary dinners where he held court, but I had not tended to those parts of my womanhood that needed the most care. I knew something had been wrong and I had just pushed it away repeatedly while time marched on. I imagined my insides like those eggs; what I had once
thought of as so healthy, full of vitality and life, now seemed to be a useless, deflated mess.

My desire to be a mother had played a significant part in the excruciating decision to end my marriage. I couldn’t imagine introducing a child into our volatile relationship, so I had to end it and move on. Now I wondered: Had I left a man who, despite all his faults, truly loved me, just to chase a fantasy? Would I end up both childless
and
alone? The fact that I had two men in my life but had trouble fully committing to either one of them did not help matters. I had just come back from a Christmas trip to India with Adam and decided that while our holiday had been enjoyable, we didn’t have enough between us to sustain the relationship. I just wasn’t engaged enough mentally or emotionally.

I called Seckin to tell him what the fertility specialist said. I began to choke on my own cursing words as big, fat, rolling drops of salty water tumbled down from my eyes. I felt so stupid for not getting to the bottom of what I knew was wrong all those years. I couldn’t help it. Had I not valued myself enough to investigate all of the signs month after month, year after year? Rage and self-pity swirled in my stomach at the thought of being barren.

I thought about how, during my first surgery with Dr. Seckin in 2006, he had made the grim discovery that I was missing part of an ovary. It had been removed by a previous doctor who, I suppose, had decided to keep the news of the collateral damage to himself. When I had come to after my fourth (or was it my fifth?) surgery just that past May of 2008, Dr. Seckin told me gently that he’d had to remove my right fallopian tube. He had prepared me for this possibility. Still, it stung. I was thirty-seven, with half of my equipment gone. Had I found Seckin earlier, I could have saved my left ovary, I could have kept my right fallopian tube, and I may have even been able to salvage my marriage.

Several weeks later, during a brutal New York winter, I walked to yet
another doctor’s office, past leafless trees that sent their spindly branches toward the sky. This meeting was to set a plan in preparation for harvesting eggs once my body was primed. In the early spring, after three months of vitamin supplements, hormones injections, and blood tests, and many thousands of dollars in bills, the doctor harvested three eggs. Today, I still think about them, frozen, occupying space in Midtown Manhattan, in a room behind one of those thousands of windows you think nothing of as you walk past.

I froze my eggs, something every woman who has the means to should do by thirty if she hasn’t had children and has the faintest interest in being a parent. Just as insurance. I wished someone had told
me
that a decade earlier. I got three little eggs. But a few years earlier I might have gotten much more with the same effort.

My gratitude for finding Seckin remained, but I began to be angry that I hadn’t had treatment earlier. I was outraged that in spite of all the best health insurance and access to medical care on both U.S. coasts as well as in London, I had been undiagnosed and misdiagnosed until well into my mid-thirties. And now, with half my left ovary missing and a right fallopian tube gone, I started to confront the fact that all this could have been avoided. Neela’s daughter, my young cousin Akshara, always creative and articulate and brash, began to have problems with her periods. On trips to India, I saw her suffer, and her whole mood would change. I remembered being rushed to Mount Sinai and having gastric surgery to treat the symptoms when I should have been there to treat the cause. If I had known at eighteen, at twenty-two, or twenty-six, or even thirty, what was going on, I could have much more easily ensured my ability to have children; I could have had a hand in my own destiny, rather than expect it to miraculously be what the world told me it should. We take so much for granted, most of all ourselves.

In my mother’s generation, if things got really bad, they’d just give
you a hysterectomy. In fact, endometriosis is the number one reason women get hysterectomies. But now we have the technology and research to treat the illness. While there is no cure, there is ample treatment. And now that I was on the other side of that pain, I could see how much the disease had stained the very fabric of my life. I had missed a week out of every month because of pain that drove me to my bed, with painkillers and heating pads. I had effectively forfeited 25 percent of my life to this malaise! I was so angry that I would never get all that time back, all those missed opportunities, all the events of my life I had to sit out of, barred by my own body.

I did not want the next generation of women to go through what I, and millions of women, went through every month. I could see how significantly my life would have been different if I had had treatment in my early twenties, instead of at thirty-six. I thought of Akshara and her sister just beginning their adult lives. I had not been saved from the dread of my period those twenty-three years, but perhaps if I warned these young girls, they could be saved from what I went through. If we could get the word out, maybe this generation of mothers would not tell their daughters what ours told us, what they had been told by their mothers. This is not our lot in life. It doesn’t have to be. There are so many things in this world that aren’t treatable, but this disease certainly is. Pain, after all, is your body’s way of telling you something is wrong.