Insatiable (12 page)

Over the years, the Yanou documentary collection grew, obscuring the walls. There she was with Danny Kaye. I introduced her to Danny (I’d met him through his daughter Dena, a writer friend who lived across the street from me in New York). Danny seemed quite smitten with Yanou. Of course, he was a certified food nut, too, and a food lover’s life with Yanou pulling the strings was addictively delicious.

I also introduced her to Craig Claiborne. Now that I think of it, that was worth a few of the hundred phone calls she made for me. Entrée to the
New York Times
. What a coup. Yanou took Craig on the fast train to Lyon to meet and interview Paul Bocuse. Escorted by Yanou, Craig was first to write about Alain Ducasse, newly installed at the Louis XV in Monte Carlo’s Hôtel de Paris, where he would gather three Michelin stars faster than any chef ever had.

Craig was putty in Yanou’s hands. He was in love with Yanou, too. A friend who played host to Yanou many Augusts in East Hampton recalls Craig almost falling into the pool the first time Yanou leaped up from her chaise to greet him topless. Topless sunning was rare in the Hamptons then, but on Yanou, petite and slim, already bronzed, topless looked fresh, rather like the demure nudes cavorting on the walls at George Lang’s Café des Artistes. Even though Craig’s sexual yen was for men, he seemed to have a special fondness for women’s breasts. I suppose it could have had something to do with southern fried chicken,
poulet de Bresse,
his mammy, or even his mother, but I won’t even try to guess.

“I think that if I could have been happy with any woman,” he once told me, “it would have been Yanou.”

One evening, Yanou and I were descending a restaurant staircase after having dinner together, when I recognized Omar Sharif surrendering his coat to the cloakroom attendant below.

“Oh, Yanou,” he cried. I stood there, my heart pounding at the sight of his beauty—he was even handsomer in three dimensions—as he caught her up in his arms and kissed her on the mouth. I walked ahead, the soul of discretion, as they gabbled away in French. Then she came up beside me, smiling and aglow.

“I can check into a hotel for the night,” I offered. “No problem, honest.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I would never be unfaithful to . . . you know.”

My prime position in Yanou’s bulging Rolodex brought one sybaritic revel after another. She included me, and Craig, too, among a handful of journalists invited in the winter of 1977 to join a gaggle of two- and three-star Michelin chefs from France, Belgium, and Germany to tour India and discover the genius of Indian cooking, courtesy of the Taj Hotels. What a glorious boondoggle. The Taj people created whole villages with dozens of artisans and hunting camps with waiters dressed as gun bearers to amuse us. In Bombay, we mingled with movie stars, politicians, and bejeweled gentry at a faux Parsi wedding feast minus the bride and groom. In Jaipur, elephants waited to carry us to the Taj Rambagh Palace as young boys in exotic dress and on horseback heralded our arrival with drums and horns, and sari-wrapped beauties danced on the front steps, waiting to drape us in jasmine and carnation leis.

That night, we found sequined chiffon saris in our rooms and a call to join Jaipur society at the maharajah’s palace for dinner. The maharajah (“Bubbles” to his intimates) signaled everyone to join him cross-legged on the floor along the edge of a vast brightly colored rug, a thousand and one nights of weaving and big enough so the entire cast of a hundred or so could sit, knees grazing, while servants distributed dinner—mysterious stews, fiery pickles, and puffy breads—on individual round silver trays.

As always, Yanou was a star, trailing scarlet chiffon, rising gracefully at the end of that dinner when the maharajah said something in Hindi as well as in English and a dozen young women, all in yellow saris, got up to dance. Gamely, Yanou imitated each step and gesture of the lithe beauties as the locals rolled their eyes and giggled. “It is the dance of the virgins, you know,” my neighbor confided, “the virgins’ salute to spring.” I like to think no one spoiled that moment by telling her. Yanou was bigger than spring. She was bigger than life.

16

C
AN THIS BE
L
OVE, OR IS IT AN
I
NTOXICATION OF
B
UTTER?

C
OMBUSTIBLE LUST WAS NOT ALL THAT MOTIVATED MY SEXUAL BRAVADO
in the early seventies. I was finally driven to begin scouting another mate. I still loved Don. I could not imagine not loving him. I had told myself we would be together as long as it was good, and I’d come to count on this perfect “we” as the foundation of everything I did, my strength, my security. But clearly something was wrong. We handed over our psyches, each to our own therapist, and together we saw a marriage counselor. But I felt his deep unhappiness eating into my energy, bringing me down.

For me it was like winning a key to the city when
Times
managing editor Arthur Gelb nominated Don to be culture editor. As kultur maven, Don rated second-night tickets to every Broadway show that opened, gallery invitations, house seats at the ballet, and dozens of new records every week (the Doors, the Tramps, the Beatles, Ray Charles—cellophane-wrapped, free). But Don, who had thrived at the
Trib
in its most creative period under Jim Bellows, was really a tabloid kind of guy. “It’s like working at an insurance company,” he had complained. But he was proud to have opened a window and swept out a little fustiness. He fought for theater critic Clive Barnes’s use of the word
cunnilingus
in a review of
The Beard,
a play that featured exactly that—onstage.

“Isn’t there a scientific word we can use?” Arthur Gelb had asked.

“Yes, that’s it,” Don told him. “
Cunnilingus.
”

The decision went all the way up to Sulzberger, and
cunnilingus
it was. But from what Don told me, there were not many triumphs that came close to that one.

In Detroit, my sister, diagnosed with breast cancer, had refused a mastectomy, standard treatment at that time, and found a hospital to excise just the tumor. But her disease was unusually virulent and she’d had a recurrence. After a childhood of intense competition, Margie and I had become close, by telephone mostly, only in the previous few years, when, after years of sexual prudery, she discovered extramarital adventure and turned to me as the expert.

Terrified and threatened—devastated to lose the breast and the lovely cleavage she had displayed in deep décolletage for some years—she had decided to leave her husband and live as passionately as she could in the time she had. Her three young children were in a panic. First cancer, then divorce. I flew to Detroit to see her and be there for my anguished mother.

Suddenly, it seemed that life had no reward for procrastination. What was I waiting for?

I never suspected Don had actually been unfaithful. Even while I was flitting around like a happily deranged hummingbird in a field of lilies, I never dreamed he was playing around, too. If I’d known, I might have made a strong move sooner. I was sure I had convinced him he was incapable of lying. “Your pupils dilate when you try to lie,” I told him. “I can always tell.”

And he would agree: “I can never lie to you.”

One Monday, he called from the
Times
to say he’d be home late, not to bother with dinner, because he wanted to see
Joe Egg
—a Broadway show I’d already seen and raved about.

“Oh great,” I said. “You’ll love it.”

I felt vaguely uncomfortable. Something was not right. I looked at the newspaper. Of course, the theaters were closed on Monday.

“How did you like
Joe Egg
?” I asked as he came in the door and tossed a
Joe Egg Playbill
on the table. Good grief. Even a
Playbill.
No trick at all for the culture editor of the
Times.

“Great. Wonderful. So sad.”

“The theater is closed on Monday,” I said.

He fell into his chair and covered his face with his hands.

“So where were you?”

There was this young woman in his department. With a crush on him. So vulnerable. So troubled. So needy. He’d agreed to have dinner at her place.

“Did you have sex?”

“Of course not.”

I looked at his eyes. His pupils were very small.

“Did you kiss?”

“Nothing. A kiss.”

“What did you eat?”

“Lamb chops.”

“That’s it? Just lamb chops? Not even a vegetable? Nothing green?”

He stared at me. “Pumpkin. Darling.” And he pulled me into his arms.

Even though I was blind to what should have been obvious, with all the wise therapists and know-it-all-marriage counselors tending our psyches, I was forced to see a certain corrosion. I’d been playing around all this time without his guessing, but still I thought I knew him too well not to know. Since I had so much emotional stock invested in this “we,” I needed to believe there was another man for me somewhere just around the corner, perfect for me as Don had been so perfect, and he wouldn’t be haunted by eighteen-year-old bodies as Don confessed he was. For a long time, I thought that man was Murray Fisher. What is it about editors? He was a brilliant one. Maybe writers just need editors.

We met in Chicago, where I was promoting my book
Bite: A New York Restaurant Strategy
in 1972.
Bite
was ahead of its time, too—unbridled foodiness was not yet the epidemic that it would become, and pitifully few copies were sold. But serious restaurant criticism, which barely existed when I took my first bite for Clay Felker, was growing more common.

Producers of a local television news show had asked me to review three Chicago restaurants and report my findings on the air—a nice little chance to boost my book. I wanted company for my reviewing meals—to taste more dishes—and I didn’t know many people in Chicago. I decided to invite the editor of
Playboy
to lunch.
New York
’s impact was so powerful even this far into the hinterlands that I felt I could invite anyone I didn’t know to lunch and they might be curious enough to accept.
Playboy
top gun Arthur Kretchmer demurred, didn’t have a jacket in the office that day, or so he said, and he suggested I take Murray Fisher instead. Murray Fisher. Not an auspicious name. He would look like an accountant or a copy editor, as if he never saw daylight. I didn’t expect anyone that handsome, very tall and slim, with the mane of a lion. Fisher—a brilliant editor, as he told me himself in our first fifteen minutes of breathing the same air—loved food and always had a jacket. That day it was sky blue.

All I remember about that lunch at the top of some Chicago skyscraper is that it was the sexiest and most intimate conversation I’d ever had . . . sexier and more intimate than a lot of the sex I’d had.

Fisher was full of himself, cocky and funny, and challenging and smart, and, yes, married, to a young and beautiful wife. Oh well, I was married, too. That needn’t stand between two lusty adults and a bed, I believed. Murray had strong opinions about everything and he wasn’t one to dillydally long with small talk. One spoonful of gazpacho and we were talking about . . . sex and love and infidelity. In response to his cutting probe, I was spilling my deepest anxieties. I admitted I was feeling more and more abandoned by Don and thought that I should be looking for a real connection in case my marriage was finished. Murray was in love with his wife and didn’t believe in playing around, he said. He was a missionary’s son and was perfumed with an air of righteousness. He held my hand as he said it and electric shocks went up my arm.

We were talking about skin and breasts, and whether I had ever eaten Chinese chicken salad, and if it was good to trade sexual fantasies in bed. I felt myself blushing all over. I was hot. Was he that cool? I wondered. Fortunately for my TV commitment, I found a few scribblings on the lunch in my notebook, because otherwise I would not have remembered even eating. I didn’t want him to go. It was almost four o’clock. Did he really have to go? What about dinner? Yes, he really had to go.

Don seemed much happier now that he had left the
Times
for an executive niche at
Newsday
—“the tabloid in a tutu,” they called it. Not even the draining daily commute to Garden City, Long Island, diluted his enthusiasm. We settled into our warped little domesticity, weekends in Woodstock, weeknights dining with friends on my reviewing rounds. Our circle of tasters loved the free meals but were grumpy when I insisted they order what I needed to taste, and if the meal was a bomb, someone might say, “Now you owe us a really good one.” Don was a contender for a top job at
Newsday
and he often worked late. I played games with my once-a-week wine merchant lover. He wrote crazed and highly original poems and mailed them to me, and between bouts of quite enjoyable sex, he did a nonstop monologue on the wine business. So I could say I was sharpening my grasp of wine marketing. Thus our affair was not simply deliciously high-risk, aerobic, and fun in the late afternoons but also good for my taste memory in my palate’s formative years. An unshakable Francophile, I was sure I’d never taste an Italian wine beautiful enough to make me weep. That all changed the evening he brought a Gaja Barbaresco of dignified age to go with the carryout pizza we planned to share in front of a fire in his country chalet. A swirl of the glass (of course, he brought those, too, a pair of balloon goblets) threw the scent of berries and truffles into the air. The first sip was bombastic, three baritones in simultaneous assault, but after a bite of pepperoni and cheese, and a few minutes in the glass, the deeply regal red warmed and softened, complex as a poem in a foreign language, like satin on the tongue. And I wept.

Nixon went to China. Clifford Irving admitted his Howard Hughes book was a hoax. Mrs. Aristotle Onassis sued photographer Ron Galella to keep his distance. “Honor Thy Pasta,” my survey of northern Italian restaurants—Romeo Salta, Nanni’s, Aperitivo, Giambelli 50th, Trattoria da Alfredo, San Marino, the Italian Pavilion, Giovanni’s, Nick & Guido’s, Ballato, and more—inspired a cover with naked New Yorkers swimming in a giant bowl of fettuccine. Don came along on the pasta binge—after all, it was for him I’d begged Marcella Hazan to share her technique of making fresh pasta by giving me a private lesson. But my onetime partner in delicious excess seemed less enthralled with the endless quest for the new and the sense-reeling. He needed to watch his weight, he insisted. He begged off my next eating swing through France. He couldn’t afford three weeks away from
Newsday,
he said, so I should find someone to go with me. A pal of ours from the
Post
said he would pay his own way just to share my dinners.

One early spring afternoon, Murray Fisher called out of the blue. I felt the blood rushing to my face. I stammered. Everyone from Chicago was in town for some Playboy Club event, he said. I suggested we meet at the Flower Drum, one of the more ambitious Chinese restaurants in town. Maybe they would do Chinese chicken salad. He had said he loved Chinese chicken salad. It seemed to be a West Coast fusion. He insisted on sitting next to me on the banquette. I ordered, but I can’t remember what or if we ate. Knowing me, I probably did. Murray was depressed and angry. Indeed, he was indignant. His wife had left him for her ski instructor in Aspen, he said.

“What does that mean?” I asked. Surely the snow would melt and she’d come back again. He went over all the things he’d done for her and how she’d misinterpreted every caring word and move as obsessively controlling. Ungrateful bitch, I thought. Lucky me.

“Well, you need to get away,” I said. “You should comfort yourself with truffles. Come to France and do this incredible trip with me. All you need is a plane ticket. The magazine pays for meals and hotels and our car. We’ll start in Paris, do Bocuse, Père Bise on Lake Annecy. Oh, you can’t imagine how beautiful it is. Then Troisgros. And we can stop in Les Baux—once, it was the medieval court of love. Oh, it will be magical.”

“We just ran a story on the Troisgros brothers in
Playboy,
” he said. “I edited it. Did you read it? The title was ‘Is This the Greatest Restaurant in the World?’”

“Well then, you’ll make the reservation at Troisgros,” I said. “Then I can be anonymous and we can be lionized anyway.”

He was making love to my hand again.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “My plane leaves in a few hours. Can you come to my hotel?”

I was supposed to meet Don at some
Newsday
gathering. “Let me call Don and tell him I won’t be there.”

I stepped into the phone booth. Don had already left for the party. For some insane reason, I was convinced I
had
to meet him. I can’t imagine why now. Murray and I kissed and rubbed against each other like teenagers. Amazingly, the phone booth didn’t melt. I pulled my clothes together, grabbed a cab, and left him panting on the curb.

In the seventies, sex was so carefree, so up-front, so ever-present, at least for me both before and after Don, it was easy to just leap off cliffs. At least it seemed so to me in the years since I’d started being unfaithful. Foreplay did not get much respect. Not that men hadn’t become more sensitive lovers. During the almost ten years that I had been faithful to just one man, the women’s movement had not only freed women to realize their sexuality; it had freed men, too. A lot of men suddenly got the drift of female anatomy. They seemed to know what it was and how to find it and what to do when they got there. Indeed, for me the two greatest discoveries of the twentieth century were the Cuisinart and the clitoris.