The next day, Thursday, she consented to have dinner with me. I casually raised the question of whether she was interested in cooking. Her first reaction was incredulity. I told her what I had been thinking, at least a sort of watered-down version. She shrugged, smiled, said she didn’t think it was my fault, she’d always wanted to be with her father, anyway. But her mariner was less hostile than usual, and, after some hesitation, she said it was possible she’d like to learn sometime, but did I want to know what she needed right now? The phone company was going to install her wiring the next afternoon, between one and five. She’d asked them to make it as late as possible, but if the guy should happen to arrive before she got home from school, would I let him in and show him the spot?
As it worked out, she was home at three-twenty and I left to do my shopping for the weekend, so she dealt with the phone company man when he came. After work, Leon would drive his kids to Greenwich, and then he’d return to the city, and then he and I would be . . . where we would be.
Thus did our friendship progress to a lovely affair. He kept his old promise of secrecy, which created difficulties, but nothing we couldn’t handle. In fact, I would say in retrospect that we thrived on them. Everyone’s dimly aware that discarding the old rules about sex in the sixties and seventies was followed by some loss of interest in same during the eighties. Perhaps what was lost was the excitement in the forbidden that had once carried people who weren’t certain they wanted sex or marriage through one or both. If it was still nearly impossible to find the flatly forbidden, Leon and I at least had the juicy pleasure of waiting until nobody was around, the childish thrill of locking doors and lowering voices, the fun of being able to forget about how much noise we were making on the rare occasion when there was nobody on the other side of a wall. Mostly we made love in his apartment, because the walls were real. I crept downstairs later if the kids were home, as they usually were. But during those giddy first months it was hard for us to keep our hands off each other, and occasionally, if the key turned in my lock when we had just laid them on, we scampered guiltily into my room, whispering and shushing each other, burying ourselves under the heavy quilt for as long as we could bear to.
At some point Leon made it clear to me that he wasn’t seeing anybody else. And, of course, I had grown deeply and firmly attached to him. In fact, I had fallen in love, and thus come to understand, for the first time, the meaning of the phrase.
It was the beginning of winter, one of those all too rare weekends when each of his kids was invited away someplace. This weekend provided a first-time delight in that Olivia had been invited by Mayumi’s parents to a weekend of ski instruction in the Berkshires, so we had both apartments to ourselves. We sneaked up and down the stairs between them, pretending it was important that the neighbors not see us. We slept in his bedroom, ate in my kitchen, lounged in both living rooms. At Saturday breakfast I attempted to duplicate an apple pancake he remembered having years earlier at a Vermont inn. He claimed mine was much better. Then we settled into separate sofas, he with some professional journals, me with the pile of books and magazines I needed to plunder for my next talk with Sheldon and Bob Kupferman.
I looked up. He was reading. It happened. I understand why people, in the absence of anything better, use the phrase falling in love. But I didn’t so much fall as something in me dissolved at the center. The outside did what I had to do, but I lost sway over some inner part of me. Nor did I appear to need it. It was only the part that had told me that I was I, and he was he, and what happened to him was less important than what happened to me. Instead of my being at my own center, he was there. I was off to one side someplace. Watching him. Taking him in. How could I not have realized how extraordinarily beautiful he was? (My outsides still knew that he was not beautiful, just an ordinarily pleasant-looking man.) How could I have failed to notice the way his eyes played with what they saw?
“Jesus,” he said, “listen to this.” He looked up, was thrown by the intensity of my gaze. He’d been in love, but wasn’t with me. He grew uneasy even as he prepared to bask in it. He read me something from one of his journals characterizing children who were ill and under stress. He thought it was brilliant. I thought it was dumb, went against what I remembered of Livvy and Max, not to say his own kids, but I had no need to argue. It appears to be a characteristic of the state of being in love, as opposed to the latter (if you’re lucky) stage of just loving, that nothing the loved one does can alter it. Acts that earlier and later are deemed dumb, hostile, repellent, might be understood to have any of those qualities, yet do not repel. The understanding goes no farther than the part of the brain that perceives; it can’t touch feeling.
He had me. If he was my faithful lover, I did not yet “have” him. That would happen in a later and more comical way.
The conference was held in Bob Kupferman’s office and included Perry and a woman who took notes but was not identified. Bob Kupferman mostly just nodded and shook his head, but his eyes were keen and he was always listening. It was time, Sheldon announced, to get going if we wanted to have something ready for the following autumn. He showed the tape of me he’d made way back when my traveling bread show was supposed to zoom past Julia into the stars. When the tape was finished, he gave an idiotic speech about how ridiculous it was that “we” (sic, although Kupferman had made no commitment as yet) had “a major talent” (sic) on our hands and weren’t doing anything with her. We needed “a concept.”
“I don’t actually understand what the problem is,” Perry said in his soft, rather hesitant, manner. “It’s clear that it turns her on just standing up in front of a class and teaching people about food. She’s sort of quiet the rest of the time, but as soon as she gets up there, she has everyone. They listen. They laugh when she means to be funny. They want to try what she wants them to try.”
“Teacher,” Sheldon said, making a face. “School.” It was the first time his reaction to anything had been the same as mine. “Anyway, a class would cost money.”
Perry shrugged. “Use the audience.”
“You know,” Kupferman said after a moment, “I think we might have something there. I mean, if the classroom is what turns her on, why shouldn’t part of the audience be her class?”
Sheldon said to Kupferman, you couldn’t even hear his gears shift, “You know, I think you might have something there.”
“The beginning of something, anyway,” Kupferman said. “And we don’t have to call it a class. It’s just this big, warm kitchen a few people gather in to learn something about food. ‘Caroline’s Kitchen.’ ”
“Some people call me Cara,” I volunteered.
He nodded. “That’s even better. ‘Cara’s Kitchen.’ ”
I remained an interested observer during the months in which Kupferman finally contracted for thirteen weeks of a show to be called “Cara’s Kitchen,” worked out with the people in Sheldon’s small company the details of a show called, at that point, “The Melting Pot,” and with me as something resembling a consultant, put the final touches on what was now called, and would remain, “Pot Luck.”
We’d pick eight to ten people from the studio audience. They would sit on the stage in an “almost semicircle.” My kitchen would be “large but cozy, modern but old-fashioned.” I insisted that I needed some shelves for cookbooks I could refer to. Sheldon was concerned about advertising the competition, a conceit that left me speechless. The matter was settled when someone said they’d fix the books so none of the titles was conspicuous. I didn’t bother to mention that I might want to read from some of them. They always got nervous if I mentioned doing something that wasn’t active. Visual. Anyway, the books were more talismanic than practical for me. I could remember most of the lines I’d want to quote, but the books meant I wouldn’t be up there alone if I forgot something. The issue that most concerned everyone was who could be trusted to select my stage pupils, and on what basis they would do it. Some should be good-looking, young-bride types,
while you didn’t want too many of those because you might turn off . . . etc. I suggested they find people who looked difficult, because they’d make it livelier, but nobody was prepared to listen to that one yet. They wanted people who’d give me the opportunity to be funny, but got nervous at the suggestion that such people might themselves be out of control. So be it. At least for the time.
In fact, it worked very well, my life’s proceeding without all of me in it. Bob and the agency’s sporadic opacity, Sheldon’s dumb cunning, Livvy’s rages and rudenesses, all mattered, but not as they might have if I weren’t in love. The show took me away from the apartment, and from my daughter, which was useful. At home, I was still too much controlled by her moods, tended to worry from the beginning of my afternoon class about her coming home after school and, if so, whether the person who came through the door would be my worst enemy, or an indifferent-to-reasonably-friendly human.
As the spring term of her sophomore year progressed, she began to talk about going to Harvard. I heard Mayumi tease her when she mentioned it, but apparently Shevaun shared the dream, and Livvy’s good marks. That was all to the good, but what worried me, and should have more than it did, was that Livvy talked about Harvard as though it were the only school in the United States worth going to. Even as she acknowledged that some good students went to other schools, a shrug of the shoulders, a bored expression, dismissed the possibility that she’d be one of them. I kept thinking she was doing what she’d done once before, refusing to acknowledge the possibility of not getting into the Chosen School. But my parents and I agreed that if we’d known more about the specifics of that exam, we’d have tried harder to discourage her. While the guidance counselor at Humanities thought that between her close-to-perfect grades and her unusual background, not to speak of the fact that she was coming from a new experimental school rather than one where every senior applied, she had a good shot at Harvard. Anyway, we didn’t have to think about all that before her junior year. Her friends came home with her less often, she was spending far more time on the phone. When her words were audible, they were usually about homework. Apparently she lowered her voice for the good stuff. Once in a while, I eavesdropped on the theory that if there were things she didn’t want me to hear, it was possible that I should hear them. I’d sit with a book or magazine on the sofa that backed up on her bedroom wall. I began to be uncomfortable on that sofa even when I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.
Everyone except my sister thought I worried too much about my daughter; I was afraid that between my classes, my love affair, my scrambling for a TV show, and my upstairs children, I worried too little, and only when it was convenient. That is, when Leon wasn’t around.
Late on a Friday afternoon, when he’d announced that tonight he was going to take out “just my kids,” his girls were feeling neglected, I sat on the sofa, feeling neglected myself. There was nothing I wanted to do that didn’t involve him. Or him and them. Livvy’s phone rang and, when she’d answered, her voice lowered in the way I’d become accustomed to. But for the first time, I had the impression that she was speaking flirtatiously to a male. I was uneasy, whether because there was a sexual tone to the conversation, which made it different for me to be listening, or because—The girl was fifteen years old, for heaven’s sake. There was no reason she shouldn’t be flirting with a boy, though there was every reason to make sure that she knew how to protect herself before she got anywhere near a bed with him. Surely nobody in Rome had ever told pre-high-school girls about condoms. My ruminations were cut short when, apparently in response to some question, Olivia said, “Oh, you know. It’s better than the ones that are full of Jews.”
I felt as though I’d been privy to plans for an assassination. Someone I knew well. Probably me. I stood, went to get a jacket and my handbag. I was no longer concerned about Livvy’s knowing I’d heard her. I wanted her to know. I tried to figure out something I could say to her, but when I left the house, she was still on the phone.
I walked toward the Village, my usual destination, but when I got there, I didn’t turn toward the Italian markets on Bleecker where I normally shopped. Instead I continued south toward Houston Street, then east. It was in the back of my mind that I might cross the Manhattan Bridge, as they say, when I came to it. But it was nearly dark by the time I got there, so I just continued walking, toward the Bowery and the Lower East Side.
All four of my grandparents had come to the Lower East Side from Russia (my mother’s parents) and Lithuania (my father’s), had joined the neighborhood associations of immigrants, sent their children to the public schools, eventually moved on to Chicago (my mother’s parents) or Newark (my father’s). My parents had met at the University of Chicago, then come east together to do their graduate work, marry, and earn their Ph.D.’s. (My brother and sister both were born before my mother had hers.)
Beatrice and Gus had memories of early-childhood holidays celebrated with our paternal grandparents before they left New York, but I had none. At first, we’d gone to New Jersey to celebrate Passover with them in the spring, Rosh Hashanah in the fall, but then, as we grew older, and my parents became increasingly drawn to Europe, increasingly capable of getting grants to subsidize their travels, they’d sometimes been abroad during the most important holidays, in the spring or fall, and formal celebration had often fallen by the wayside.
I’d never been to Jewish landmarks like Ratner’s restaurant and Katz’s Delicatessen until I went to them with friends, the former after an evening at the Fillmore, the latter with a group of Columbia students who’d heard from their suburban parents about Katz’s pastrami and corned beef. After moving to the Village, and at my parents’ suggestion, I’d shopped on Grand Street for bed linens and wallpaper, Orchard Street for clothing. But aside from those specifics, nothing had drawn me.
Was it Jewish anti-Semitism that had prevented me from relishing the neighborhood? Probably not. There wasn’t much there anymore. I’d spent more time in a couple of Chinese food markets on Mott Street than in all the Jewish stores combined. They were more inviting. Even if good cheap Chinese food was so readily available as to make it the first you thought of for a cheap meal out, the last you were likely to cook at home, many ingredients—roast pork, Szechuan peppers, dried mushrooms, ginger, and a variety of fresh vegetables—had found their way into my cooking.
So had matzo meal. Not that cooking matzo balls made me Jewish any more than making roast pork egg foo yong made me Chinese. Of course, nobody had to make me Jewish, I was that already. On the other hand, even if one were willing to have her entire cultural identity reside in the mouth, good Jewish food had fed and been fed by a wider culture, which made for a somewhat more confused identity than I was willing to grapple with at the moment.
To the extent that Jewish identity required false subordination and real exclusion, it had been dealt lethal blows by our diverse, loosely embracing American culture. Actually, when you thought about it, American culture was so diverse as not to exist. That was why we had all suffered a loss under the awful regulations that moved every American holiday except Thanksgiving to a nearby weekend that became three days. Those holidays had formed a fragile link between us and the past; now Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July were the only ones you still felt like celebrating.
I thought of an evening during my childhood. A Sunday with my father’s parents, who would only come to dinner that night if we’d listen to their radio lineup, then Jack Benny, Phil Harris and Alice Faye, Fred Allen, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. On this evening, my father’s father would not be swayed from the notion that Fred Allen was Jewish.
My father, with a wicked grin, finally asked, “Okay, and what about Charlie McCarthy? Is he Jewish, too?”
“What difference?” my grandmother had replied with a shrug. “He’s only a puppet.”
What difference if he hadn’t been a puppet? Why was it so important to my grandparents that these comedians be Jewish? Well, immigrants needed to feel a footh
old in this country. The pride of identification. Myself and others. Ourselves and others. A logical extension. The world was too big not to be broken down into some kind of groups. Maybe you needed customs because, without them, groups’ identities would lie only in their competitive and hostile feelings, their impulse to war. No. There was something else. Ways were needed to mark time. To give a shape to life. And perhaps, in so doing, to pay tribute to whoever you were, as well as whoever, whatever, you weren’t. The parts that it wasn’t for you to decide. Maybe if Livvy had naturally taken part in some Jewish holidays with us, from the time of her arrival in New York, or better yet, when she and I were in Italy, she would have had some sense of being Jewish, part Jewish, that provided an internal counterweight to her father’s anti-Semitism. Well, there was no sense flaying myself over that now, when nothing else I’d said or done appeared to have weighed in the balance.
Approaching Grand Street, I remembered my eagerness to tell Angelo that some of his favorite dishes (his likes and dishlikes, as I just found myself writing) were very Jewish. Recently, in researching for interesting programs, I’d found a variety of other wonderful foods that had been brought by the Jews to countries other than Italy and adopted as national dishes. But even if one were willing to have one’s entire cultural identity reside in the mouth, the good Jewish food had all been adapted and neutralized, and could no longer provide that identity.
Grand Street was dark and depressing. Filthy sidewalks and rundown stores, many permanently closed, evidently deserted by Jews for places that were more Jewish or less so, or simply more comfortable. No community appeared to have replaced them.
Olivia Page 19