Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (22 page)

Surprise, surprise, Teddy was an older, more accomplished man. In other words, prime Padma bait—a worm to a fish, a fish to a bear, a mango to an Indian girl. This time, however, I wasn’t biting, or so I thought. The recent failure that was my divorce had convinced me that I needed to change my patterns. So unlike Salman’s, Teddy’s early calls went unanswered. Goodness knows he was persistent. He was used to getting his way. He’d call my office every twenty minutes if he couldn’t reach me on my cell phone. He’d insist that my assistant slip me a note or pull me out of a meeting. At first, I gave in out of pure fascination with the man. We were so different. I had gone to PS 158; he went to Andover. I like boxing; he liked golf. I’m a bleeding-heart liberal. He was quite the conservative.

We started to spend more time with each other over the second half of that summer, in 2007, once I had moved into the Surrey. Ours was not a perfect love story. It was an improbable one. When I first met Teddy I could not imagine ever being involved with someone like him. Not only because of his age, but also because he was so utterly different from me in every way. He was a Republican, a staunch one, who displayed in his home framed photos of himself with both George Bush Senior
and
Junior. I am a Democrat, one whose libido was curtailed by having to look at such pictures, and I told him so. He removed them. He was also a faithful, churchgoing Catholic, and when I say churchgoing, I mean he never,
not ever,
missed a Sunday Mass; not when we were sailing in the Caribbean and not when we went to Mumbai. In fact, even when he was in the Hamptons, he would arrange his return to the city based on whether he intended to attend church on Long Island or in Manhattan. Because his helicopter couldn’t land in Southampton after sunset to pick him up, he’d have to plan on leaving in time to make Mass in the city. This meant missing a considerable part of his Sunday at the beach. But he did it and without grumbling. I, by contrast, was a pretty secular Hindu, going to my local temple in Queens mostly on major holidays. Though after the temple installed a canteen in the basement, my family noticed a considerable spike in my piousness (they serve the best masala
dosas
this side of Chennai).

Teddy was from another time, chivalrous to a fault. He was very mindful of respecting boundaries and never strayed from the principles he lived by. In the beginning, after that trip to L.A. on his plane, we didn’t really
date.
We had dinner a few times, often with his sons, and he always picked me up and dropped me off at my hotel’s front door. My husband had never picked me up; we always met at the restaurant or event. The only time we arrived somewhere together was when we had left the house together and shared the taxi, which I usually hailed for us on our corner.

But even beyond politics and religion there was a comically large list of differences between us. Teddy was not adventurous with food by any means. He hated spicy food, preferred fried chicken to chicken curry, enjoyed steak and pot de crème, not tacos and falafel. He liked country music. He was very athletic, playing golf with Vijay Singh and tennis with the Bryan brothers regularly. I only became sporty at thirty, when my vanity kicked in and I took up boxing to stay fit.

But Teddy and I connected emotionally, to both of our surprise. “I know what it’s like to be on the outside looking in, Junior,” he said once. He had always felt like a loner, and excelled at compartmentalizing the disparate elements of his life. He had traveled so far spiritually from his early
life in Connecticut, and all he had been through in the intervening years—more time than I’d been alive—gave him empathy for where I was now. He was the most confident man I had ever met, and yet he confessed that there had been times when, before a big gamble, he’d been as afraid as a little boy.

Teddy was old-fashioned in almost every way. Even though I had sought out a divorce months before we’d met, that first summer, when I’d visit him at his home in the Hamptons, he’d insist on accommodating me in a guest room. This charmed me to no end.
Finally,
I thought,
a man who gives me some space!
But his adherence to decorum could also perplex me. Just before I moved into the Surrey, Dr. Seckin performed another endo-related surgery on me. Teddy was considerably worried for my well-being, laid up as I was, alone again in that big house. He sent a bushel of flowers but refused to come visit me because, he said, “It isn’t right to enter another man’s house, even if we’re only friends. I know what my intentions are in my heart. And I don’t belong there.”

I had never met a man like him before.

Teddy was so well read, though wore it lightly and by the end of summer had devoured several tomes on Churchill and Gandhi, the history of India and its independence. He was a history buff, and he relished spouting obscure facts about Indian history at the dinner table both to check my own knowledge and to irk me. But deep down, this seduced me, too. I was touched that someone as busy as he was would voluntarily take serious free time to learn about my culture. Even with all his responsibilities at work (which included managing four companies, not only IMG), and his dedication to his boys, he somehow made ample time to woo me and make me feel he was always there for me. I didn’t know where he got his energy. But while I was unbelievably lucky to have the full beam of his love shine on my life, I was also intimidated and overwhelmed by it. I had just come from a situation where I felt I wasn’t meeting someone’s expecta
tions of me, and I knew agreeing to be the partner or girlfriend of a man like Teddy came with similar requirements. In spite of all the wooing, I was strangely despondent. I wasn’t ready for Teddy. I couldn’t understand why such a person, or any person, could be that kind, that patient, without wanting anything in return from me except my happiness.

So whenever we began to get too close, I came up with a reason to back off. He was too old for me, too unlike me, too pushy. But every time I’d tell him I couldn’t see him anymore, I found myself missing his counsel, his knowledge, his wicked sense of humor. I missed his presence. I had to exert effort not to call him. For a time, my practical side won out. Fortunately, he was Teddy and he found ways to get his message across. He’d call my girlfriends and pull
them
out of meetings. His gumption makes me laugh now.

I was, in my way, seeking mentorship from Teddy, too, pumping him for advice while I started my jewelry business and began to build Easy Exotic spices and teas. Even though I was unsure I could be with him long-term, I thought that through our friendship he would impart to me a practical kind of entrepreneurial wisdom. But I was so naïve there, too. What Teddy wound up schooling me in was not business acumen, although he did indulge my every question and help me develop that aspect of myself. Teddy taught me about kindness, about love that is unconditional; a sentiment not dependent on acceptance, approval, or the expectation of something in return. It was the first time I would ever feel this from a man who wasn’t my grandfather. And I didn’t know what to do with it at all. If only I’d embraced our differences sooner. I didn’t know it then, but we had so little time left.

H
e called me “Junior.”
Occasionally, he
called me “Madam” when he wanted to make me the bad cop—as in “I’d be happy to join you at the Red Sox game, but Madam will never go for that.” But he used “Junior” the most, his way of poking fun not just at our vast age difference, but also at my fixation on it. I called him “Duke.”

We came up with his nickname on a trip we took to India in the spring of 2008. Teddy had never been to India. Four times before we met, he had planned to travel there on business, had even received the requisite immunizations, only to cancel his plans at the last minute. India seemed a world away to him and I could tell the whole idea made him tired. But I also knew the country and its history fascinated him. He felt that to fully realize his goals of expanding his company’s interests, he would surely need to confront India at some point. Having me in tow to be a guide of sorts made the trip more surmountable. A few of his employees even took bets on whether he’d make it there. (Tom Ritz lost money, but was pleased for us.)

We were going to be staying in Jaipur, Rajasthan, at the Taj Rambagh
Palace, once the residence of the maharajah of Jaipur, which his family now operated as a lavish hotel. Before Teddy made the reservation, I had told him to not give them my real name. I often used an alias to check into hotels, to avoid unwanted attention. To keep the ruse simple, I always used the same name, which was—as a nod to my family, who might need to find me—my uncle’s surname, Nathan. My full alias was “Dr. P. Nathan.” Teddy thought this was hilarious. “What, you’re a Jewish orthopedist now?” he joked the first time he heard it, then gleefully set out to come up with his own nom de hotel.

I rejected out of hand his first suggestion, Pee Wee Reese, the name of one of his favorite baseball players. “A real star,” he said, smirking, “in the forties and fifties.” (Again, because he knew it bugged me, he took great pleasure in underscoring his age.) The point, I reminded him, was to be
inconspicuous.
“Pee Wee Reese” was anything but. So he chose the name of another player, Duke Snider, a name recognizable to fans, maybe, but sufficiently unobtrusive for our jaunt in South Asia.

On our last night at the hotel, we returned to our room to a letter bearing the royal seal. Teddy opened it. It was from the grandson of the maharajah, who ran the hotel. His grandfather, he wrote, had been a Brooklyn Dodgers fanatic and would have been honored to know Duke Snider was staying at his residence. Teddy loved this letter. When we got home, he had it framed and hung it in his office next to Mandela’s tin plate.

And so, we were Duke and Junior. We made an odd pair. As I said, we didn’t pray to the same god or like the same foods. Let me tell you, though, of the two, our Hindu-Catholic union was nowhere near as troublesome for me as our gastronomic mismatch. For such a worldly man, his tastes were shockingly pedestrian. When we were together in India, he subsisted almost exclusively on scrambled eggs, toast, and club sandwiches with ketchup. In fact, everywhere we went, he ate club sandwiches. I teased him that he was single-handedly responsible for the club sandwich’s omnipres
ence on room-service menus throughout the world. He loved steak and Italian food, especially when we were eating at stalwart Manhattan restaurants like Sistina, Elio’s, and Il Mulino, where the waiters wore ties, the customers were important, and the portions were large.

What made his culinary limitations even more fascinating to me was that they existed despite his ability to eat anything anywhere he damn well pleased. Someone of his means could fly to Tokyo on a Monday just to eat
uni
and
o-toro
at Sukiyabashi Jiro. He could lunch the next day at L’Arpège in Paris, then pop over to Catalonia to grab a late dinner at elBulli. But for Teddy, the height of culinary achievement was a dry-aged rib eye. While I’ve been known to ramble on about “succulent” this and “glistening” that, the highest compliment he could pay any food was “Now, that’s a good-looking steak.”

At first, his stubbornness frustrated me. I wanted to share my love of food, my conviction that food could be—no,
was
—an adventure, with him. But I grew to love that about him. He made no pretense about his food preferences. And when you hang around ramen obsessives and fried chicken fanatics, as I happily do, someone who has no great interest in food can actually be a refreshing presence, a reminder of how much else there is to experience. As he’d gently chide me, “I know Picasso, you know pasta.”

Part of the fun we had was catering to each other’s desires, though he was both a better caterer and a better sport. Sure, I didn’t gripe when Teddy flew in for dinner while I was filming
Top Chef
Chicago and insisted on dining at Gibsons, even though I was already gorged and distended. The steakhouse seemed to specialize in Flintstones-sized portions. His rib eye looked like it clocked in at just under five pounds. Even my Caesar salad came in what appeared to be a small rowboat.

Teddy, however, did a lot more than “not gripe” when I got an itch to try somewhere or something new. In the fall of 2009, for no particu
lar reason at all—not my birthday, not Valentine’s Day—he told me he wanted to take me on a fantasy food tour. You choose the restaurants, he said, I’ll get you there. I named the two most exciting places in the world. He told me to pack my bags. Our first stop was to be elBulli. A week or two before the meal, Ferran Adrià, the chef of elBulli, very kindly e-mailed to ask if we had any allergies. Thank you for asking, I wrote, before I began my lengthy catalog of Teddy’s aversions: olives, oysters, chilies . . .

Destination number two was Noma, the legendary Copenhagen restaurant. The food at Noma was Teddy’s worst nightmare, whereas I couldn’t have been more excited to try René Redzepi’s pioneering neo-Nordic cuisine. I’d read all about the young phenom’s fetish for foraging, for resurrecting ingredients once eaten but long forgotten, like tree bark, moss, and ants. Redzepi was famous for using almost exclusively products found or produced in the Nordic region: sea buckthorn, cloudberries, wild sorrel. His dishes reveal the arbitrary nature of our food system. We eat such a small portion of what’s edible. Most of us pay dearly for prewashed arugula, even as we trample (edible, delicious) dandelions on the way home. To eat at Noma is to be transported to a very particular place, away from the world in which food travels thousands of miles before it reaches you, the world in which, no matter your location, you always have access to tomatoes, lemons, and cumin. Each dish at Noma disorients, gloriously: the ingredients provide a window into the past, while the presentation and techniques abut the future. To Teddy, the restaurant was nonsense.

His proof came with the first course. Seated at our blond wood table, adorned with the usual stemware, plates, and a vase filled with a few red flowers, we watched as our waiter arrived empty-handed. With a smile, he told us that our first course had already arrived. “Where?” we said as we stared down at the empty plates in front of us. “Right here,” he said, gesturing at the vase. The flowers in it were nasturtiums, delicate and sweet with a nose-tickling radish-like bite. And tucked inside each one was a sur
prise: an edible snail. What I had thought were decorative sticks were actually malt bread.

I thrilled at the playful trick. In such a beautiful restaurant, I felt the desire to fully experience it, to revel in every moment, every sight and sound. Now I was told that I could experience a small part of this beauty through the most intimate act: eating it. Teddy’s response was classic Teddy: “The best restaurant in the world and they’re serving me a flower? I have hydrangeas in my garden that look more delicious than this.” Not only was I asking him to eat a flower and a slug, but he was also paying through the nose for the pleasure.

When the next course arrived, Teddy looked down at the ice-filled mason jar set in front of us. It held two shrimp, each one about the size of my pinkie. “Okay, Junior, what are we eating?” he asked. I told him what the waiter had told me: we were supposed to dip the shrimp in the emulsified brown butter provided, then pop them whole into our mouths. Oh, and did I mention the shrimp were still alive?

“No way I’m eating mine,” he said, “he’s too cute,” disguising his disgust with empathy. I grabbed one. As I contemplated my task, it was complicated by the shrimp, which had started to move. Teddy picked up one of his, and soon it was moving, too. I had finally summoned the courage to eat mine when he decided that in their writhing, the two little guys resembled tennis players swinging tiny imaginary rackets. When he dubbed them Rafael and Roger, I put mine down for good.

I couldn’t have had a better companion for this meal than Teddy—not despite his teasing, but because of it. Meals like this are part cooking, part performance art. They toe the line between the sublime and the absurd, between decadence and debauchery. On which side of that line they ultimately fall depends on the chef, but also on the diner. Teddy kept me grounded. He reminded me that while this was swoon-worthy food that bordered on art, it was still just food.

Exaggerated derision figured prominently in our repartee. It was the way we coped with our differences. During the first hour of an afternoon spent watching golf, I’d groan, “How can you like this, Duke? It’s just men in funny pants walking.” Or I would gripe at the frequency with which he ate steak: “Well, I guess someone has to keep the cattle growers happy.” But even as he made fun of my love for dishes featuring chickweed and white currants and bleak roe, he indulged it. He took great pleasure in seeing me happy. Never had I been courted so thoughtfully, thoroughly, and with such imagination.

To see Teddy at Basement Bhangra was to understand the extent of his devotion. Basement Bhangra is a once-a-month dance party at a club in Manhattan (back then it was at S.O.B.’s) that at the time drew hordes of Punjabi grad students and other subcontinentally inclined dancers who grooved to North Indian music fused with hip-hop. The effect was a sort of cross between a high school dance and a disco hoedown. This was my happy place. To Teddy, who preferred Fleetwood Mac and Mozart and despised dancing, it was a hellscape. But nonetheless he came. And in the sea of young brown sweaty bodies, Teddy stood out like, well, like a sixty-eight-year-old white guy.

Because practically everyone in attendance at Basement Bhangra was Indian, I went resigned to being recognized. There were some stares and the occasional awkward conversation, each party straining to be heard above the bass. But the time I brought Teddy was different. People would approach me, and I’d prepare my cheery “Yes, I am Padma Lakshmi. Nice to meet you!” smile. “Is that who I think it is?” they’d ask, motioning toward my companion. “Is that really Teddy Forstmann?” These were MBA students, after all, far more interested in spotting the man who came out early against junk bonds than the woman best known for hosting a cable cooking show.

The closer I felt to Teddy, the stronger my practical side pushed
back. Part of this was deeply buried guilt. The age difference between me and Salman had, I believed, played a major part in the undoing of our marriage. I had told Salman this and I believed it was true. Being with Teddy made me feel like a hypocrite. I could not help thinking about how Salman would feel when he heard the gossip. I felt ashamed, and very mixed-up.

For two years I told Teddy I didn’t want a relationship, that I wasn’t ready for one, and that even when I would be, I wasn’t sure he’d be the appropriate choice—even as we spent more and more time together and grew closer and closer. Whenever something good happened, Teddy was the first person I called. Whenever I needed advice about work or to vent or was scared, I called Teddy. We were thick as thieves and intermittently lovers, and I somehow convinced myself that if I kept telling him I couldn’t handle being in a committed relationship with him, I could keep us from getting too entangled romantically, yet preserve a friendship that was a main source of comfort and support at the time. But it was too late. We were already entangled. I just didn’t want to accept it.

Part of me just wanted to play the field, honestly, as cruel as that is. For practically the first time in my adult life, I was single. Until that point, my romantic life had consisted of a series of serious, committed relationships, from my college boyfriend to Daniele to my husband. In the short time between my move back to the U.S. and the day I met Salman, I had briefly dated, but that was the extent of my life as a bachelorette. Now I had little desire to be anyone else’s wife or main squeeze. I had had enough of smiling silently at all the fancy dinners, all the events that blurred into one another in a daze of cocktail dresses, champagne, cultured small talk, and hurt feelings at the end of the night.

All this “don’t tread on my freedom” stuff was just catnip to Teddy. There was nothing he liked more than a challenge, and after a lifetime of being chased by women who wanted to pin him down, my loner vibe
appealed to him immensely. And Teddy loved the idea of coming to someone’s rescue. He had ample practice at it given his own personal history with his father, who suffered from alcoholism and other issues and often took out his frustrations on his mother. Teddy hated bullies and always rooted for the underdog. I had certainly filled his ears full of all my insecurities about making it without my husband and finding my own way. He could see I was scared, incredibly disillusioned about love, burned by bad experience, and wanting the world to go away. He would not go away.

Somewhat early in our push-pull, “come closer, now go away” routine, I met a man named Adam Dell. It was November 19, 2007, and I was on a book tour for my second cookbook, doing a signing at the Strand. It was also the day I would find a listing for what would become my first home. I remember using the folded sheet from the Realtor as my bookmark. A mutual friend of ours brought Adam to the signing and afterward we all went out to a small dinner thrown for me by my friend Luca. Later that night we went dancing, and I liked how dainty I felt in contrast to Adam’s tall, broad-shouldered frame. I was with friends, letting loose after a horrendous year and a grueling book tour while at the tail end of a public divorce. It was therapeutic to dance and not talk. I felt liberated to a certain degree. He seemed to slip in easily among my friends and asked very little of me. There was a strong kinetic attraction between us. Nothing was verbalized or analyzed, but it was hanging in the air, daring me to do something about it. At that moment in time, just two months after my divorce, I didn’t trust my feelings about anything, and indeed was anxious not to feel anything, really, for anyone.