Ruth agreed to go to Ports with me afterward, and we drank more wine (when I snuck a bottle of mineral water in between sips of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, she accused me of “cheating”). After an hour or so, I walked Ruth to her car, and as we kissed good night, I told her that I would feel recalcitrant if I didn’t at least ask if she would like to come back to my apartment. She was hesitant, she said, because if she did, she’d want to sleep with me, and she didn’t want to sleep with me, though she did want to. . . . I talked her into at least stopping by briefly, and she finally consented. We walked to my place, where I made coffee and offered her some eglantine—eau-de-vie made from wild rose hips (“I have an eau-de-vie you’ve never tasted,” I said; “I’ll just bet you have,” she replied).
Being a red-blooded boy, I kept trying to get her into bed. She wasn’t the unfaithful type, she said, though she quickly added that that wasn’t what was stopping her. What was? The friends she was staying with would be worried, and it was too late to call them. Anyway, I was her boss, and it would be a bad idea to start something. Her life was complicated enough already, et cetera, et cetera. Finally, I gave up and walked her back to her car at Ports.
For some months, since before I’d been hired at New West, I’d been planning a long autumn trip to New York and Europe to see friends, revisit old haunts, and research a freelance piece or two. “When will you be in Paris?” Ruth asked when she was safely back in Berkeley. When I gave her my dates, she announced that, coincidentally, she might be there at the same time.
In the last days of September, before my trip, Ruth contrived some flimsy pretext to come to Los Angeles for a few days. We met for a late lunch at Scandia, and then I went home to shower and change and went off to Ma Cuisine, the newly opened cooking school attached to Ma Maison, to give a wine class. Ruth met me at the restaurant for dinner afterward. In her book Comfort Me with Apples, she remembers the evening dramatically and romantically. When Patrick led her into the restaurant, she writes, she found me sitting with Orson Welles (in fact, though I saw Welles often at the restaurant, we never met). She remembers the menu as starting with caviar and champagne, and then letting “a man in a tall white toque . . . [with] a round face and a snub nose he kept rubbing with his finger, like a little boy”—Wolf—prepare us a meal of baked oysters wrapped in lettuce and bathed in beurre blanc, terrine de foie gras, duck “just like Tour d’Argent!,” and, after that, some Roquefort and Brie, and finally a textbook dacquoise.
I don’t remember the food myself, but I remember that we talked intensely about all kinds of things—food and restaurants, writing, the nature of perception, the challenge of reconciling sensual pleasure with political belief. . . . At one point she said that she was surprised at how easily she lied (to her husband about her reasons for this trip to L.A., for instance), but thought that her proficiency at it must have to do with the fact that she greatly valued her privacy. She was swept away, she suggests in her book, by the food, the special treatment, and, well, me. “It all felt unreal, as if our dialogue had been lifted from one of those 1930s movies where mink coats go flying out of windows and there are only happy endings.”
After dinner, we went to Ports, had a few glasses of wine, talked a bit—weakly—about moral compunction, and then went back to my place. She’d known she was going to sleep with me, she told me, the first time we had lunch in San Francisco. “I don’t know which would be worse,” she said before we went to bed. “For us to end up hating each other or for us to end up liking each other too much.”
A few weeks later, I went to Paris. Ruth arrived a few days later—she’d been offered the use of a friend’s empty apartment on the rue Berthollet—and we met around six in the evening for apéritifs at Le Départ on the place Saint-Michel. From there, we went for a long walk, across the pont du Carrousel, up past the Louvre, back across the pont Neuf to the Île de la Cité, quickly into Notre-Dame, across to the Île Saint-Louis for a glass of Sancerre or two at the Brasserie de l’Île, then to a restaurant behind the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre called the Auberge des Deux Signes, which had medieval beamed ceilings, an abundance of candles in wrought-iron holders, Lully and Couperin on the stereo, pretty good food (including “gothique” specialties like pounti, a savory but slightly sweet Swiss chard tart, and talmouses, which were pillow-shaped cheese beignets), and an endless supply of Cahors.
Ruth moved into my room at the Hôtel Esmeralda, and we spent the next ten days together, wandering around Paris, eating lunches and dinners both serious and casual. If we didn’t have specific plans, I’d just ask, at some point, “Are you hungry?,” to which she’d inevitably reply “I could eat,” and we’d stop into whatever likely looking place we saw. Every morning, we’d have tartines and café crème at the Village Ronsard on the place Maubert—on days when the market was there—or the Le Départ or Le Saint-Séverin on the place Saint-Michel.
I introduced Ruth to Claude over lunch at Aux Amis du Beaujolais; he was impressed with her, he told me, when she got up from the table to negotiate the narrow, winding staircase down to the basement restrooms. A few nights after that, we went to dinner at his house—coquilles St.-Jacques and boeuf à la mode, cooked superbly by Pepita. Another evening, we ate choucroute at the Brasserie de l’Île with my friends Yves and Ursula. We had oysters and roast partridge at Artoise and côte de boeuf at Ma Bourgogne on the boulevard Haussmann. We drank at Le Petit Bar and the Closerie des Lilas. One night we ate sardines and lamb chops both grilled in a little fireplace in the dining room at a tiny spot called Robert. Another night, courtesy of Patrick Terrail, we dined at the Tour d’Argent, at the perfect window table, eating impeccable foie gras (me) and scrambled eggs with truffles (Ruth), and then duck—“just like Tour d’Argent!” To finish, there were raspberries and assorted sorbets. We drank a good 1974 Meursault-Charmes and a 1945 Château Petit-Villages, then some superb reserve cognac.
We spent most of one day at SIAL, the major French food show. At one stand, belonging to a big commercial charcuterie company, a comedian on a closed-circuit TV monitor was importuning passersby, and he fastened on Ruth, engaged her in conversation, and talked her into playing a quick game of Pong with him. She brought this all off with aplomb, and in French so good that I doubt anyone realized that she was American. Another day we took the train to Reims, in the middle of champagne country, to have lunch at Boyer, then still a two-star in its original farmhouse location, ordering “la fameuse truffe en croûte”—a whole black truffle as big as a golf ball, coated in foie gras, then baked in a flaky pastry covering and moistened with an intense brown sauce in which there were additional truffle pieces, just to make sure you got enough—followed by a perfect pièce de boeuf with marrow, cheeses, and tastes of three desserts, among them a pear sorbet, pure concentrated fruit, that Ruth proclaimed the best sorbet of her life.
On our last night in Paris, we watched the sunset from a café near the Jardin du Luxembourg, stopped into Notre-Dame to hear a few minutes of an organ concert, met Claude and Pepita at a Left Bank bistro for dinner, had digestifs at Flore, and then—I’d already checked out of my hotel—spent the night at Ruth’s friend’s apartment. The next morning, we had our last tartines and cafés crèmes, at a café near the apartment, then I took her by Métro to the Gare du Nord and put her on the train back to London, whence she was flying home. I walked off down the platform, and when I turned back to wave good-bye as Ruth’s carriage pulled past, I found to my surprise that there were tears lightly clouding my eyes.
Back in California, for the next few months, we’d take turns visiting each other, Ruth sometimes flying down to L.A. for the day, I contriving trips to the wine country, where she’d meet me. One day she gave me a signed copy of a little booklet called History of the World in Epitome by Bertrand Russell, which consists, in its entirety, of these words: “Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable.”
Ruth blossomed as a writer. From the beginning,
her reviews had been literate and highly readable, framed more as semifictional vignettes than rote critiques, but having to write a regular column for New West, with occasional longer pieces on the side, seemed to liberate her and give her new confidence. Her structural devices evolved into a real style, accessible, even a little chatty, but full of authority. In 1979 we started hearing rumors about a young American chef with French training who was going to open a new kind of restaurant in Santa Monica—French in inspiration but Californian in decor and spirit, with a menu glorifying the state’s best ingredients. His name was Michael McCarty, and he agreed to let Ruth hang out with him and his initial crop of chefs—Jonathan Waxman, Mark Peel, and Ken Frank, all of whom were to become culinary stars—as they worked to launch what was to become the celebrated Michael’s, not just planning menus and developing sources for raw materials but literally painting walls and laying tiles themselves. I’m not sure if the lengthy, impressively detailed article that she produced for the magazine was the first-ever “birth of a restaurant” piece, but it remains one of the best.
Besides just writing about food, Ruth wanted to keep learning about it. On one of my trips north, we visited the remarkable wine and food expert Darrell Corti at his store in Sacramento, then went back to his house for a memorable dinner. He served us Russian sevruga along with some caviar he’d made himself from California sturgeon, alongside a vodka produced by Gilbey’s for the English market in honor of Smirnoff’s hundredth anniversary; excellent smoked salmon from Washington; beef consommé with little cubes of foie gras floating in it, matched nicely with a 1950 Sercial Madeira; a Tuscan dish of duck roasted with bitter oranges (“the original duck à l’orange,” he explained) with three excellent Chiantis; and then plump asparagus spears drizzled with thick, dark umber drops from a little vial of aceto balsamico artisanale, artisanal balsamic vinegar. As difficult as this may be to believe in the twenty-first century, neither Ruth nor I had ever heard of balsamic vinegar, and I feel fairly safe in saying that if we hadn’t, not very many other people in America had either. It was a revelation, something truly special, dense and complex and perfectly balanced between sweet and acidic. I don’t know what we would have thought if somebody had told us that, twenty years later, there’d be cruets of “balsamic” on almost every restaurant table in America.
The next time I flew up north, Ruth picked me up at the airport in her old white, humpbacked Volvo and we went to lunch at an Italian restaurant we liked, Modesto Lanzone in Ghirardelli Square. As we ate, Ruth proposed that we consider renting a small apartment in San Francisco, sharing the cost, so that we’d have a place to go when I came to visit. (“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life across a restaurant table from you,” she said.) I suggested that we could take a place in the Napa Valley, where I could retire occasionally to write, and where I could even tell people I had taken a place. Over coffee, we reminisced about Paris, and she told me how alone she’d felt as her train pulled out of the Gare du Nord. As we walked back toward the car, we stopped behind a wall by the bay and necked, then later sat in the car in the parking lot and necked more. She kept asking where our relationship would lead. “We’ll end up just friends,” she said. “You’ll find a girl and not sleep with me anymore. . . .” That, of course, is exactly what happened.
THE NEW WEST OFFICE was full of interesting and attractive women, among them the tall, lively, exquisitely sarcastic Maureen Orth, who became my drinking buddy; the serious, somewhat ethereal Meredith White, who seemed soft and sincere; and Leslie Ward, my original contact at the magazine, of whom I noted in my journal, after my first day at the magazine: “She has beautiful golden-green eyes and . . . will be a useful ally.” Leslie and I did indeed become allies, and after-work confidants; we’d have lunch at El Padrino in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel or Carroll O’Connor’s place the Ginger Man, drinks at the Mandarin or Mr. Chow, sometimes followed by dinner, sometimes not. We bitched to each other, made catty remarks about various personalities at the office, talked office politics. We gossiped. We had fun.
One day, the magazine’s Southern California senior staff flew to the Bay Area for an all-day editorial meeting at Rosalie’s house. I’d planned to stay overnight in San Francisco and drive up to the Napa Valley to see some friends the next day, and at some point asked Leslie and a couple of the other editors if they’d like to come with me. Leslie said yes, but the others demurred. Checking out of our hotels the morning after the meeting, we headed for St. Helena, along the way rehashing the meeting at Rosalie’s house, excoriating the San Franciscans, making fun of Jon. When we got to our destination, we visited Joseph Phelps Vineyards and tasted some wines there, then went for burgers and shakes at the Yountville Diner. We ended the afternoon at Stags’ Leap Winery, run by my friend Carl Doumani, sitting on the veranda of the property’s big old stone house drinking old champagne and ’61 Cos d’Estournel in the clean air and perfect light. Then we drove back down to San Francisco and caught a 9:30 P.M. flight for L.A. A few days later, having drinks with Leslie, I allowed as how the fact that the two of us had gone off to the Napa Valley together must have made a few people wonder. “I wondered myself,” she said, which I liked. I was finding myself increasingly attracted to her, though she seemed scarcely any more available than Ruth (whom I was still seeing): She wasn’t married, but she was living with a man.
One evening, Leslie and I both worked fairly late, then repaired to El Padrino for a drink, which turned out to be two bottles of red wine. At some point, it came out that I’d never been to Las Vegas. “Let’s go right now!” she said, and that sounded like a good idea to me. I went to a pay phone (this was before cell phones) and reserved two seats on a flight that night and a rental car on the other end; we’d figure out accommodations when we got there, we agreed, or maybe just stay up and gamble till it was time to fly back. Leslie called her boyfriend and simply told him that she was going to Las Vegas with a coworker.
We drove to Ports to cash a check (this was also before ATMs) and stayed a little too long, and when we finally got to the airport we had missed our flight. There were no more seats on any of the remaining flights to Las Vegas, so after briefly considering a red-eye to New Orleans, we bought tickets to San Francisco. At the last minute, sitting at the gate, we decided that we didn’t really want to go there after all, so I drove Leslie back to her car near the office. Sitting in my old Mercedes, we kissed and kissed, and she made no protest when I started the car again and took her back to my place, where she stayed.
About six months later, Leslie and I got married at Stags’ Leap—secretly, to avoid complications at the office (the politics there were complex; I once bought a copy of The Prince and shelved it with the reference books, just to make a point)—with a local Episcopalian priest officiating and just a handful of friends in attendance. Back in L.A., we lived separately for a couple of months, sneaking out together whenever we could, and then found a rental house in Venice—in a part of the community, I used to tell people, where one saw more lawn mowers than Rollerblades. One afternoon, after we had set up housekeeping, we announced what we had done to the entire New West staff, which had assembled for an all-hands-on-deck editorial meeting. Some office wag cracked that the building shook from all the jaws hitting the floor.
We renewed our vows publicly in Paris in September, in a Malachite Orthodox ceremony at the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, across the street from the Hôtel Esmeralda. Claude, of course, was my best man. We’d brought a bottle of Stags’ Leap petite sirah as a gift for the Lebanese-born monsignor who officiated—it seemed like a nice way to connect the two ceremonies—and when he gave me the ritual sip of altar wine during the ceremony, he asked, sotto voce, “Vaut-il mieux que le vin de Californie?”—“Is it better than the wine from California?” After the ceremony, we walked around the corner to the Auberge des Deux Signes for a banquet of foie gras, pike soufflé, roasted lamb, Cantal, and marzipan-frosted wedding cake. About fifty of our friends, from both Europe
and the States, came to the wedding and the dinner afterward. At least three sets of the single guests, meeting for the first time, ended up spending the night together, which I took to be a sign of a successful wedding.
We honeymooned in Avignon, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Nice, and Venice. On my first day back in the office, Jon took me out to a Swedish café a few blocks from the office and fired me. “You’re good at the details,” he said, “but not at the big picture” (or was it vice versa?). He told Leslie that I had been let go because he just didn’t think I was any good at my job. “Around the office,” Leslie told me years later, “people knew that wasn’t true, and many subscribed to the ‘too many roosters in the henhouse’ theory.” I just figured San Francisco had finally won.
I’D GOTTEN INTO THE HABIT of having a weekly lunch at Ma Maison with two writer friends of mine, the theater critic and mystery novelist Dick Lochte and the writer-director Nick Meyer. Because Friday was celebrity madness day at the restaurant, we agreed to meet on Thursdays—though there were plenty of famous faces on the patio on that day, too. Wolf always came out to see us, and sometimes recommended new dishes he was trying out. Patrick had decided that he liked me, and always greeted me effusively when I arrived and made sure that we had a good table. I remember remarking to Dick and Nick that it was too bad I wasn’t in the film business myself, because the importance Patrick seemed to accord me at the entrance to the patio could probably double my asking price one day.
The food at Ma Maison remained superb. When my friend Margaret Stern, who was doing wine business public relations, brought the Austrian winemaker Lenz Moser to town to promote a new bottling of his, we had dinner at Ma Maison, and I asked Wolf to make us whatever he wanted. He dazzled his fellow Austrian (and us) with perfect big cold asparagus in lemon sauce, striped bass stuffed with fish mousse en croûte, and thin slices of duck breast over buttery apples, covered with green peppercorn sauce, followed by frisée salad made with crispy duck skin instead of the usual lardons. Another night, while I was still at New West, I came in late with Jon and discovered that it was Patrick’s birthday, and that he was celebrating with a dozen or so friends at a table inside. Wolf served Jon and me endive salad, salmis de pigeon, and tarte au citron, a perfect supper, and when we had finished, ushered us into the party, saying, “Come see the cake we made for Patrick.” It was decorated with a large white, sugar-frosted phallus, standing upright in the middle. Patrick invited us to sit down. Everyone at the table was asked to say a few words about him, and most speeches were a combination of insult and praise. When it was my turn, I said, “This is the best night I’ve ever had at Ma Maison: I had a good dinner with my friend and didn’t have to look at Patrick once—and now that I do have to see him, he’s pouring free champagne.”
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 18