Insatiable (30 page)

While we sailed along in the kitchen—with Jean sprinkling flour on everything, including a few irreverent students, and improvising a new dish using the basket of figs that had just arrived—Billy’s serving crew created new fantasies at the table. Why were they all so good-looking? I marveled. He had selected them, male starlets, surfers, and runway models, as if he were casting a beach flick. One noon, the table held hundreds of shiny red peppers. That night, branches of orchids bisected the crossed tables as local VIPs joined us. Another day, roses and tulips bloomed in a hundred tiny Asian vases, one to a vase. Or sweeping branches of fruit blossoms in tall weighted glass bricks might stand dipping low to the corners of the table. Live crayfish in laboratory beakers provoked manic delight and outrage. (By evening they were dead, having given their ultimate gift to Jean’s
cassolette de queues d’écrevisse
.) And always candlelight. Nothing but candlelight. The Mondavi dining room’s famous glass ceiling above was cranked open to let in the sun at lunch and to reveal the full moon at dinner.

One of the women brought a copy of
Blue Skies, No Candy
along for me to sign. “Would you read aloud to the group after lunch?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” several others chimed in. “Read to us.”

I leafed through the book, looking for a section that would stand on its own . . . something funny perhaps, something food-related. I looked out at their smiling faces, at what I guessed to be a rather conservative posse, the upper-crust blondes and a few blue-haired ladies. I needed to find a scene that didn’t take place in bed, that didn’t rely on my heroine’s graphic stream of conscience and all those four-letter words. Funny, isn’t it? I found it easy enough to write them, hard to read them out loud.

I started to read. I was pleased at a laugh and then another. But my eye, darting ahead, could see on the next page, just a few paragraphs away, the word
pussy
. . . oh dear. What could I do? I lightly slipped it right into my reading. They gasped. I went on. Oh dear. One woman held her head in her hands. Another giggled nervously. I felt myself flush. Thank heaven I was almost finished. I saw the chapter ending just ahead. I closed the book and looked up with a silly grin on my face. They cheered. And the bluest of the blue-haired ladies toasted me with the dregs of her Chardonnay.

I was actually grateful that Jean’s English was limited. He smiled and toasted, too. That evening, one of the staff brought in a trunk of Moroccan jewelry for sale. Everyone gathered around. Naomi Linden found a necklace she loved. I tried on a silver necklace with coral beads set around a medallion.

“C’est un cadeau pour toi,” said Jean. “A gift for you.”

I was touched by his sweetness, the romantic gesture. By that time, I guess anyone who cared enough to notice knew something was going on. Indeed, the Mondavi winery was full of unresolved romantic intrigue that fall. Margrit Biever, Mondavi’s gracious Belgian public-relations woman, had apparently not yet left her husband. I remember meeting him at one of our dinners. But not long after, she would become Mrs. Robert Mondavi.

I don’t think I articulated it at the time even in my own thoughts, but what drew me to Jean was that he was a man, a grown-up man. He was the manliest man I’d known—straight, basic, seemingly uncomplicated. He cooked. He loved to cook. He loved that Michelin admired the Troisgros cooking. He played between meals. The other men in my life, wonderful, maddening men, had been overgrown boys, babies, neurotic, wounded, driven, uncertain. Not Jean. Not the Jean he showed to me.

When his son Georges married a daughter of the Poujol restaurant family in New York, Jean’s American friends were invited to the wedding, but I was not. His Roanne woman, officially now his fiancée, had asked him not to invite me.

“But how can he give in to her?” I wailed to Naomi. “And the least he could do is call and tell me himself,” I said. “I would forgive him if he called.”

“But he can’t call,” Naomi said. “He wouldn’t know what to say to you. He’s a simple person. He can’t do it any other way.”

I knew Naomi was right. He wouldn’t know what to say. And he couldn’t handle my tears. It was easier just to pretend everything was all right. But I was hurt. I never saw Jean again. I did not visit Roanne in the years before he died from a heart attack on the tennis court at just fifty-six.

I think of him often, that playful athletic man, dead so young. Whenever I read something about the tradition of the Troisgros restaurant that neglects to mention him, deliberately I believe, as if he never existed, I am furious, and then sad. It seems as if the surviving brother, Pierre, or his wife, Olympe, fear that to credit Jean might dilute the triumph of their son Michel, who, on his own now, has kept the family’s three stars.

Sometimes I try to re-create the fig dish Jean invented in the Mondavi kitchen. He squeezed the juice of grapefruits, oranges, and lemons into a pot, added cabernet—reduced, reduced, reduced—spilled in some sugar, and cooked the figs just a little. Spooning the tart syrup over the fruit, he ladled it into a big tureen. “These are figs Candy Blue,” he said.

Jean Troisgros’s Figs Candy Blue

2 medium-size lemons

1/2 bottle full-bodied red wine (Jean used a Mondavi cabernet sauvignon; I use a Côtes du Rhone)

3/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice

Scant 1/2 cup sugar

8 or 10 cloves tied in cheesecloth

1/4 tsp. cinnamon, plus an extra pinch

3/4 cup (100% fruit) apricot preserves

12-16 fresh figs (3 or 4 per person, depending on fig size)

Remove and julienne the peel from the lemons. Cut away the white skin, then cut lemons into thin slices, discarding any seeds.

Combine wine, orange juice, sugar, cloves, and cinnamon in a nonreactive pan, bring to a gentle boil, uncovered, and continue to simmer till volume is reduced to half (about 30 minutes). After the first 15 minutes, add half the julienned peel and apricot preserves. Stir well and continue gentle boiling.

Remove pan from stove and let contents cool for 5 minutes. Add rest of peel.

Place the figs in a wide, shallow pan that will hold fruit in one layer and then place pan on burner. Pour cooled syrup over figs until figs are three-quarters covered. Roll the figs to coat them with syrup. Add sliced lemon. Simmer 5 to 6 minutes uncovered, till figs are just cooked. Add a few drops of balsamic vinegar if the sauce seems too sweet.

Spoon figs and lemon slices into small compote dishes and spoon sauce on top.

Serves 4.

Store any extra syrup in the refrigerator to use another day on sliced raw peaches or nectarines.

39

I
T’S
N
OT
E
ASY
B
EING
G
REENE

I
T WAS THE FALL OF 1977. I WAS LIVING MY LIFE OF SUBLIME EXCESS, DATING
a new man for a while and then another, sleeping with old faithfuls, dining out with friends, straining to find new metaphors for the same old adjectives in my reviews. “I saw your name written on the wall of a john in a ladies’ room at a restaurant,” my editor told me. “It said, ‘Gael Greene uses a thesaurus.’” She insisted the story was not a joke.

I devoted summer at the beach to jump-start the new novel. William Morrow, fired up by their score on
Blue Skies, No Candy
, leaped to buy my new book at a celebration lunch at Le Cirque. All I had was a title,
Doctor Love,
and a two-sentence description. “It’s about a man, a doctor of emergency medicine, who is a wonderful lover but has never been in love. A sudden serious illness inspires him to revisit all the women who’ve ever loved him.” I smiled. My agent nodded sagely. Morrow’s boss shook his head, as if to say, Whatever. Whatever. We drank a warming, complex, expense-be-damned Lafite and clinked glasses all around.

My life bubbled with pleasures. I’d finally made it. I had become a B-list celebrity. I got quoted. My recipes made entertainment roundups in what insiders called “the bungalow magazines.” I got invited everywhere—to first nights, screenings, restaurant and club openings—and since I went only to discos where I was known, I was greeted with the quick dropping of velvet ropes. New Yorkers were deeply into food. Our readers wanted to know where to go, to be the first . . . to discover greatness. And they looked to me to tell them. Indeed, food-world professionals read
New York
to find out what they were up to. I was busy exploring exotic tastes from the city’s newest immigrants, discovering the renaissance of Columbus Avenue, heralding chefs with potential, damning supersonic cuisine aboard the new
Concorde.
When I didn’t stop to think about what was missing—love, loving, being loved—I was too busy to miss it. A life of the senses was pleasantly distracting.

And then Jamey was back. It was like a blur. It happened so fast. What could I have been thinking? I must have felt I was so emotionally together, I could take him or leave him. He was shocked that his “real girlfriend,” Andrea, was not at the pier to meet his boat. But there I was, trim in a tight blue denim jumpsuit. And then I was washing the dishes that had been moldering in the sink as he threw down his suitcase and unpacked. “Don’t you look cute?” he said, pinching my cheek, grabbing me from behind in a hug.

“I’m just clearing the sink and that’s it,” I said. “I’ll send my houseman over to do something with this kitchen, if you promise not to fuck him or sign him up to make dirty movies.” Bernard, my house cleaner, was the loving and sensitive son of a mother who had insisted he learn how to clean while his brothers became, respectively, a doctor and a lawyer. Well, that was his story. People were always propositioning him on the subway, he said, and giving him things—most recently, a piano. He was going to take lessons, and he could use the extra money.

I convinced myself I could play with Jamey, enjoy him in small doses, liberated from the desperation that had clouded my mind in Paris, the perversity of wanting what I couldn’t have. He was broke and needed help getting back on track toward the career he now insisted he really wanted. And I knew he was too passive to do it without me. One day, he announced he would do a Sylvester Stallone with our book: produce it, direct it, star in it.

“I better finish it soon and sell it, or you’ll be too old to play yourself,” I said.

He must have thought he could handle me, too. He was loving and affectionate. And charming. His enthusiasm for whatever was happening at that moment was disarming. He was welcomed back by restaurateurs, who found his joy in eating endearing, by friends who were bemused by us as a couple. Sex clubs flourished all over town, and ordinary people with libidos juiced up by the new sexual openness were curious. Everyday middle-class civilians and the celebrated might be spotted dancing fully dressed among the towel-wrapped players at Plato’s Retreat, which fate planted in the former gay baths below the Ansonia apartment house, steps from my door.

I paid Jamey fifty dollars a week to keep taping his diary for our book. Conversation never dragged at our reviewing dinners à deux, since nothing interested him more than himself. I found his memories of childhood neglect touching and his tales of porn life fascinating. His needs were bizarre, the rationale simply weird. It was not that I bought into his delusions; I just accepted that they were part of the package. He was affectionate and relaxed. If the foreplay tended to be solipsistic, I was definitely there when it got to fucking. I loved it. In just a few months, I’d become addicted to contending for his company again, the alternating torture and triumph.

Nearly broke, he threw himself back into the porn-film life and the sex-world parties. “Why can’t I go?” I asked.

“You won’t like what happens.”

“But I’m your Boswell.”

He was right. Though his X-rated comrades were friendly and he agreed I looked “pretty hot” in a shiny black satin tunic, an elastic mini, and high-heeled suede boots with chains, I felt awkward and out of my element at a party for
Cherry
magazine.

I suggested he call the agent, lie to her, tell her he’d stayed in Sweden for a couple of small movie jobs and that now he was back, eager to work. He stared at me as if I were a creature from another world (as I suppose I was). I had forgotten how proud he was that he never lied.

“Maybe I don’t really want to work,” he said. “My father never worked. I’m more sophisticated and aware, but in many ways, I’m like him. Maybe you and I should buy a Kentucky Colonel franchise in Stockholm. I only need to have a young girl once a day, and we could be happy.”

I sent him yellow roses for his birthday, April 20—Hitler’s birthday, as he pointed out.

When I came by to pick him up the next day, the roses were dying.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said. “I put them in the window to get the sun.”

He hadn’t realized cut flowers need water, not sun.

When the agent didn’t return his calls and the Actors Studio auditions she’d pushed him to pursue were already overbooked, he grew angry with me. “There’s no point in running after the Actors Studio. I already did acting school. I’m an actor. I’m not in the mood for disappointments these days.” He couldn’t handle rejection. He’d told me that clearly. I refused to listen. He was sliding back, taking even the sleaziest sex-reel jobs to pay the rent.

I nagged and tugged and cajoled. Why wouldn’t anyone just accept him the way he was? he cried. What could I say? I did it for you, Jamey? I did it for me. I was trying to make him into the man who would be right for me. Surely he could never leave me—the string-puller of his fame, the godmother of the sweet life.

The tapes, which I had once thought would help me keep my perspective, seemed to get me more involved. He’d met a stunning Vassar girl, he confided to his journal. She invited him to spend the night in her dorm. He’d canceled a dinner with me to go, he said on tape. I suddenly wasn’t so cool anymore. I was angry and hurt.

I backed off, but I couldn’t let go. When I called with a dinner I thought he couldn’t refuse, he offered me Clarissa, the Vassar girl.

“We’ll all go to dinner and spend the night at my place.”

Clarissa was taller than I, taller than Jamey, with thick dark hair in a boy cut and a classic Mediterranean face. I tried to imagine what she could possibly be thinking as she silently pulled off her sweater and stood there in a copper silk teddy.

“Come to bed,” Jamey said.

Clarissa made love to me. She was a wonderful lover. She knew everything she needed to know. I lay there, wrapped in the sensation, heightened by the idea that it was a woman, the fantasy I’d wanted for a long time. Just as I felt myself going over the edge, I remembered the etiquette (all those porn-film threesomes I’d seen were ménage à trois for dummies). I wasn’t supposed to just lie there reveling in her skilled lovemaking. So I roused myself and kissed her small, high breasts. Her eighteen-year-old skin was magical, her body long and tight and rounded. No wonder they all love young girls.

Jamey seemed barely engaged, though he fucked us both in turn.

“I thought you’d be wildly hot and more into it,” I said a few nights later. “What was wrong?” I wondered if we’d made him feel redundant.

“I didn’t expect it to be so much flesh,” he admitted. “The two of you. So much woman.”

There were no bidders for
The Prince of Porn Is a Happy Man
as nonfiction. Editors told my agent I should write the story as a novel. Everyone wanted the next novel by the best-selling author of
Blue Skies,
it seemed. Except William Morrow, that is, the eager publisher-to-be of
Doctor Love
. After accepting the first hundred pages, they’d read the second big chunk of the manuscript and then told me, “We could not be happy publishing this book.” I was frantic. I had two-thirds of a novel and no publisher.

Don Congdon, my wonderful old-world agent, with his gracious ways and wild Pucci ties, sent the rejected
Doctor Love
manuscript out for auction. Richard Marek and Joyce Engelson, who had their own imprint at St. Martin’s Press, bid almost three times what Morrow had committed to pay and submitted a proposal for major promotion. I promised Jamey our life as a novel would be my next project, once
Doctor Love
was finished.

Jamey was frantic, falling in love every other week. He was wild about Annabelle—she was the sound technician on a film set. He loved her integrity, her contempt, that she had no respect for his work.

“Are you kidding?” I asked. “As compared to whose . . . my contempt isn’t good enough?” He could see only Annabelle, till her contempt got overwhelming.

Jamey was depressed. He hadn’t known how much he wanted a straight acting life till I convinced him. He hadn’t seen how meager his life was, what a prisoner he’d become, till I made him see it. He seemed furious, bitter that I had misled him into imagining it would all be so easy. He was losing faith that we would ever sell his book—or our book, or whatever it might be—or that he would ever make the impossible jump to stage or screen. Hopes for an adult-films crossover, which had looked so imminent—that a major director would use real sex in a conventional film—faded. “Even in
Last Tango in Paris,
it isn’t actual sex,” Jamey complained. “And Brando doesn’t undress.”

He was away for work, and then so was I. But we got together for an evening with friends from Paris, people Jamey liked. The two of them were kissing, nuzzling, happy together. I was wildly jealous. Jamey read my mind. We didn’t say much. He took my hand as we wandered back toward his place. He settled into his new Barcalounger, my Christmas gift—maybe the ugliest thing I ever did for love.

I stood there thinking, Why am I standing here?

It wasn’t fun anymore. I had found a man who was as happy as a pig in shit and then turned him into an unhappy pig in shit.

“We shouldn’t see each other for a while,” I said. “We’re both unhappy.” It was the best I could come up with. “We’ll go to the Four Seasons wine tasting together and that’s it.”

“Is there someone else?” he asked. For a minute, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Should I lie and say yes? I wondered. I hinted there might be someone special. All those guides to romance that say you should play hard to get . . . I was above all that. But Mom and Helen Gurley Brown were right. The sex was particularly intense; it felt like he was fucking
me
that night and not his fantasy behind tight-shut eyelids.

Jackhammers outside woke us both the next morning. I whispered, “Bye-bye, Jamey.” He put his arm around me, silent, not letting me get up. “You have to make me your duck with figs. You promised. And you said we would go to the Barolo tasting.”

“There will always be Barolo tastings,” I said.

He was silent.

I dressed, walked to the door, turned the knob.

“Gael.”

I turned to him.

“I love you,” he said.

I went back to the edge of the bed. He kissed me. I was pleased by the stale cigarette taste of his mouth. Reality: He was human.

A friend called to tell me that Jamey was living with the porn actress Serena. I remembered her from the movies: alabaster skin, a platinum blonde, very Marilyn Monroe, very beautiful.

Jamey called, complaining that he couldn’t find his shoes because Serena had rearranged everything. And she’d had the audacity to refuse to have sex with a couple he’d invited home. Who did she think she was to refuse? he demanded.

“It would help if you don’t call me anymore, Jamey,” I said.

How quickly he had healed. I was hoping to do the same.