by David Leite
Ingredients we’d never cooked with started appearing on our counters: wasabi paste the color of our backyard in spring; fish sauce, with its nauseating smell; fresh handmade ravioli; anchovies; salty-sour capers; bison. We went to the Eldred Preserve nearby and bought fresh rainbow trout; other fish and meats came from Citarella and Fairway in the city.
During the week, we would plan our country feasts: whipped carrot soup from Le Cordon Bleu; a French daube that took two days to make; Lidia Bastianich’s tagliatelle with sweet shrimp and leeks; luscious white beans; orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage; and Alan’s roast chicken. His chicken became our new Sunday supper, that last meal of the weekend before we closed up the house and headed back to the city for another round of counting the hours until we could be away alone, cooking. And it would, in time, come to act as his Love Food when my periods of dark hollowness descended.
I ate, unabashedly. I bought larger jeans, but I didn’t care. I was in love, well fed, and finally free.
What’s this all about?” David Lindsey asked me, when I told him of the activity humming in the country. He sat there serenely, his eyes on me.
“What are you talking about?”
“I smell somethin’.” A favorite phrase of his. “All that sanding and painting and cooking?”
“What?”
“I don’t know; you haven’t told me yet.” I’d been working with David Lindsey long enough to know that when something I said didn’t jibe, he heard it, even if no one else did, like a dog whistle. And he became a bulldog, and like a bulldog, he wouldn’t let go.
“Well, it’s called happiness,” I said, irked that my good mood and sudden domestic interests were suspect. “You should try it.”
“And I’m happy you’re happy,” he said. “I really am. But I’m not convinced.”
“This is just one of my extroverted times,” I explained. Early on in therapy, years before I’d met Alan, I’d explained to David Lindsey how I categorized my days or months by where they fell on the continuum of introversion and extroversion. Introverted times were when I ducked out of going out with friends, felt tired, closed my door at the agency, couldn’t care less about dating. At those times, all I wanted to do was burrow into a book in my apartment and be left alone. Extroverted times were all about bouts of creativity at work, long nights of boy craziness, carousing with friends, dancing, drinking, and making delicious spectacles of ourselves at gay-pride events.
Even while I defended myself to him, I was aware of a thin thread of irritability that was knitting its way into my days.
During spring semester, I was taking two psych classes, plus volunteering as an LGBTQ peer counselor, all while still working part-time. At my latest ad agency, a large, has-been shop where I’d sold out for even more money, everything rankled. At performance evaluations, my boss classified me as “ornery,” “difficult,” and “not a team player.” I classified him as a shit, because he had on more than one occasion stolen my work and passed it off as his own. To cope, I’d escape to the cookbook section of Rizzoli bookstore during lunch to catch up on homework and plan dinner parties. If I couldn’t get my assigned reading done there, I’d burrow into a corner of the school library until it closed, then grab the crosstown bus back to the West Side, willing myself not to fall asleep.
That was work and school and life; they were supposed to be stressful. But not cooking—that was my refuge, my meditation. Yet I grew even more ambitious with our entertaining. I’d plan too many courses, especially on weeknights, even though Alan kept trying to pull me back. I’d insist we make not only every dish but a lot of the ingredients for the dishes, as we did in class. Tagliatelle Bolognese wasn’t the same unless I simmered the sauce for hours and made and cut the pasta myself. Homemade butter had to be slathered on homemade bread. Hamburgers were made from hand-ground meat; the pickles were ones we had put up ourselves. Even our ketchup was house-made.
Obsession itched my skin from the inside. Classic puff pastry, which I had folded and rolled into 1,457 faultless layers of butter and dough, was measured and cut into exact ninety-degree angles using a ruler and triangle. Because I was always running late, something would get messed up—a pie dough was overmixed, or a salad dressing broke—and I’d scream, “Tonight’s going to be a fucking disaster!” and throw it in the trash and start over.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” Alan would say, laying his hand on my arm, trying to turn me from the counter. “It’s only dinner.” I would shoot him a look that pinned him to the wall. Fed up, he’d lift his hands in the air and mutter, “Fine, whatever you want,” then walk to a safer part of the apartment.
Guests became superfluous. Dinners weren’t about getting together with friends anymore; they were an opportunity to showcase my growing talent, and I wanted praise. And when that praise came, as it always did, I’d bat it away, outlining for the table—point by point—every flaw in the meal that they were too stupid to notice. “Well, I thought it was just great!” or “I could never cook like this—it was wonderful,” were the usual replies. What asses, I’d think as I smiled at them and cleared their plates.
After everyone left, I could sense Alan keeping to the sidelines, careful not to walk into my crosshairs. I’d inevitably apologize and blame school, or my workload, or exhaustion.
“Go to bed, you look awful,” he’d say. “I’ll clean up.”
Full of remorse, I’d lace my arms around him, and he’d pull back, just a little. “Thank you,” I’d whisper.
Lying in bed listening to the clinking of dishes, I’d be seized with fear that he would leave me. I imagined waking up the next morning, feeling his side of the bed, and finding it empty. Propped up on the breakfast table would be a piece of light blue stationery lipped in dark blue. On it would be just one line: “I can’t do this anymore.”
31
THE OLD ONE-TWO PUNCH
I paced the kitchen, twisting my fingers into knots. Millions of nerves stretched like elastic bands until they snapped, stinging my legs, arms, neck, back. I closed my eyes and tried breathing deeply, but the air shuddered in my lungs. My heart was beating so hard, my body rocked, as if it were keening. Flee, defect, escape, cut and run. The claustrophobia of knowing that I couldn’t bolt—that Alan and our life had nailed me to that spot—left me dizzy. Instead, I slammed pans onto the stove and rummaged through cabinets to distract myself.
The noise brought Alan down the stairs. “What’s the matter?”
Shame prickled my cheeks. “Nothing.”
Again, this time emphatically: “What . . . happened?”
I battled telling him. Once he knew firsthand, once he saw the effect, I’d forever be branded the sick one in the relationship, the pobrinho: poor little thing.
Finally: “I had a panic attack.” A full-price, premium-brand panic attack.
Early on, I’d told him about them and my breaks while we were lying in bed in my old apartment, the darkness allowing us to talk unfiltered about our childhoods, the dents in our lives, our disappointments.
“Oh.” He just stood there, arms by his side, useless. I hated him fully and without remorse. At last, he added, “When?”
I walked him through it like a crime scene: I had been with Becca at the movies, having a good time. We were feeding each other popcorn and goofing at ads for real estate brokers who looked like flight attendants. Then—slam!—no reason, no provocation, no warning. Machine-gun rounds discharged. Somehow I stopped myself from running out of the theater, but I couldn’t stop the offensive my body had launched. What fueled the high-fidelity screaming inside was the terror that I would again be staring down sleepless nights and lead-heavy months of agony. I reminded him that there were times it had taken years before I felt better.
“Don’t put the cart before the horse.” I hated him even more. I needed to burrow into him, tumbling over myself like a cat until I found just the right position to rest, but instead, he was offering me platitudes. And then th
e elevator free fall of realization: He couldn’t take care of me. He had never experienced a panic attack; he knew nothing of the horror, of how it atrophies a life.
How could this happen again?” I demanded of David Lindsey at an emergency session. It was a bald-faced indictment of his abilities. I don’t recall his measured response, but he mentioned depression again.
I leaned forward in the chair, screaming, “I am not depressed. Why do you keep bringing that up?”
“Depression and anxiety are sometimes two sides of the same illness.”
“I have nothing to be depressed about.” The more I yelled, the more he seemed rooted in place, an oak against a storm. “Do depressed people have full-time jobs while going to school at night? Do they get A’s in every subject? Are they witty and charming and do they host fabulous dinner parties? Do they have a successful relationship that even you have to admit is great? No—they don’t.”
“Some do.” He said it so quietly, with such compassion, I broke. I cupped my hand over my mouth and sobbed, my gut convulsing, and then a long, pitiful howl of sorrow. In that moment, I allowed myself to know.
“I want you to see Jack Constantinides.” I could sense the plea in his voice. Jack was a psychopharmacologist he often worked with.
I shook my head. “I don’t believe in drugs,” I said. “You know I refused Valium when I was a kid.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“You’re not a kid,” he said gently, “and you have too much to lose.”
That was it: I had too much to lose. I’d thought the stakes had been high at Carnegie Mellon, where I’d refused to consider the unimaginable defeat of dropping out until I couldn’t imagine the pain of continuing. But if I’d chosen, I could have started again, a clean slate. There was no do-over now. Ever since I was sitting on those side steps on Brownell Street, I’d been waiting for something special, something amazing, that was rightfully mine. After thirty years, I knew it was this one man and this one life.
“Get the medication so that we can take anxiety and depression out of the equation and see what’s going on.” Reluctantly, I agreed.
Later that week, I left Jack’s office with prescriptions for the anti-anxiety drug Ativan and the antidepressant Prozac. I filled them that night, put the pills in my underwear drawer, and refused to take them.
Instead, I tried to work it out on my own. I walked to and from work, thinking the exercise would help. Something about a brain chemical that’s released when you move. But too often, I ended up sitting on a bench, head in hands, crying as I stared at the pavers between my sneakers. I doubled up on therapy. I took a yoga class, but kept finding myself staring off into the middle distance, forgetting to change positions. “Are you okay?” the teacher whispered, laying her hand on my arm. I looked at her and blinked. I grabbed my jacket and, summoning all the veneta I could, slammed the door on my way out. Who the hell does that deodorant-phobic, granola-munching bitch think she is? I ran down the stairs and out onto West Seventy-Second Street. At Gray’s Papaya across the street, I ordered the Recession Special, two hot dogs and a coconut drink, and stuffed my face.
As it had before, a switch flipped, and just like that it was over. I was back to my Extroverted Self. My joints felt scrubbed and newly greased. I glided through my day, easy and unruffled, like I was on a flowered parade float, my hand oscillating a greeting to onlookers below. My grade-point average was still bulletproof at 4.0. Over the summer, I felt so good, I quit my job and registered for a full load of classes for autumn. To give myself something to do in the meantime, I took a statistics intensive for experimental psychology that squeezed a semester’s worth of material into just four weeks. I got a one hundred on every test, including the two-hour-long final.
“No one has ever done that before,” my teacher confessed over her second glass of the precocious white wine she brought. I’d invited her to dinner, and she and Alan were sitting at the table on our roof terrace as I grilled tuna burgers on a small hibachi.
“Really?” I asked, not because I didn’t believe her, but because I wanted to hear it again.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “No one came close.” I poured her another glass of wine and passed the wasabi mayonnaise.
I had drop-kicked anxiety back into the past where it belonged—on my own, without the crutch of chemicals. I had one thing left to do. I went up to our room and fished out the pills from my underwear drawer. In the bathroom, I poured them slowly into the toilet and flushed.
I had won. I was victorious.
After my last class of fall semester, I was crossing the skyway that connected two academic buildings on either side of Lexington Avenue when I suddenly stopped short, fear nail-gunning me in place. Students passed, some muttering and staring—a sudden boulder in a river. A thought flooded me, causing me to involuntarily gulp for air: For the next month, I wouldn’t have any schedules or routines, the barbed wire that sharply defined the perimeter of my days. Now, suddenly, they would be shapeless. The impending inactivity felt like death. What made it worse was that Alan was going to visit his mother for Christmas, while I stayed in the city; I felt too scattered to visit my parents. I’d be alone. Since I was a kid, I’d never liked being alone. There was always something sinister and dark about it. I collected myself and continued to the library to return my overdue books.
With so much time on my hands, I had to do something. So I created lists. Pages and pages of lists. And along the way something happened. I was no longer writing the pedestrian lists of ordinary people, but the exalted lists of the Revered and Admired. I wrote about defeating the ignoble, championing the silent, being One’s True and Highest Self. (The Capital Letters were back, and I felt almost as electric as I had back in the Carnegie Library.)
Emboldened, I sat on the bed with the phone in my hands. My stomach swilled; my throat kept catching. I took a deep breath and dialed my parents. As we talked, I imagined the Christmas tree blazing in the living room. My mother’s plywood Santa Claus painting now under their mattress for support. In its place, a giant spotlighted banner that read: “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season.”
I hadn’t told my parents about Alan, out of cowardice. I’d met his family, and the only reaction I’d gotten was from his sister, who blurted, “Does that make you my unofficial brother-in-law?” as Virginia was putting dinner on the table. For my mother, whose embossed Bible had been worn smooth from all her thumping, being gay in the abstract, and from a distance, was one thing. But to know that it was real—and in the form of another man who gets all jiggy with her son—was something entirely different.
It was time.
Finally: “Mom, I’ve met someone.” And to make clear this wasn’t going to be any long-awaited come-to-Jesus moment, I added, “A man.”
Silence. I couldn’t tell if it was frostiness, or if she was trying to gather herself. Then, “Oh, really?” Yup, frostiness.
“Yes. We’ve been together for more than two years.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m very happy for you,” after which followed a series of hollow thunks as she dropped the receiver and let it clatter against the kitchen wall. I could hear her voice, tinny and distant: “Manny! David wants to talk to you.”
My father picked up the extension. “Dave?”
“Hi, Daddy. Dad banse.”
“What’s happening—?”
“And let me tell you something else.” It was my mother again. “That man will never, ever step foot in this house. I don’t care if you’ve been together two years or two hundred years. Do you hear me?”
“Loud and clear, Ma. And neither will I.” I slammed down the phone.
“It’s okay,” Alan said later that night from Baltimore. “She probably just needs to get used to the idea of me. Up until now she always thought of you as alone.”
The idea of him. If she only knew of his kindness, his patience, his good
humor, of how he had changed me, she couldn’t possibly remain implacable.
“Come home soon,” I said when we were hanging up. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
For the rest of the holiday, I wandered through the apartment. Barryville was out of the question; the isolation, even with our cats Ariadne and Maxine, would crush me. The city with all its distractions was a better place; I just didn’t want to go anywhere. I cooked, not for the pleasure of the food but for the comfort of the act, yet it eluded me. When Alan returned, we spent New Year’s Eve in the country, as we always had, alone over an elaborate dinner that included foie gras and Kenny G, and we rang in 1996 in bed, watching the ball drop ninety miles downstate in Times Square.
February. I was sitting in an experimental-psychology lab, listening to the professor explain populations, statistical significance, and blind and double-blind studies. For the first time since I’d started classes eighteen months ago, I was disinterested. Bored was more accurate. What was preoccupying my thoughts was the bag in front of me on my desk. Inside was a madeleine pan. I’d never baked a madeleine, never even eaten one, I was sure of it. I wondered how many homemade madeleines I could knock back in one sitting. I bet that would be statistically significant.
I had doubts about becoming a shrink, too. “I don’t think I want to make eighty grand a year,” I said to Alan as we prepared dinner one night. Advertising salaries were astronomically high, especially for freelancers. Therapists made so little in comparison. I had made a mistake; I just had to face it. Nonetheless, I was determined to get my bachelor’s degree, after almost twenty years. So I trudged along, dutifully conjugating French verbs, collecting data for experimental psychology, comparing and contrasting different theories of the mind. And the drudgery, the banality of what I was learning, pulled on those nerves, stretching them tighter and tighter.
One Friday, Alan double-parked the car in front of our brownstone so we could load it for our weekly pilgrimage to Barryville. When I came out, a policeman was giving us a ticket.