Dinner with Edward

by Isabel Vincent

  “Wow, I really don’t think we’re going to get on this train,” I said, surveying the crowds.

  She gave me a look that I can only describe as a mixture of pity and contempt. “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Canada,” I said, sheepishly.

  “You’re definitely not getting on this train,” she said with a smile.

  Then I watched as this refined creature clutched her buttery leather handbag, and gently but purposefully nudged herself into the crowded train. She never had to push to squeeze into the packed subway car. There was an elegance and grace in the way she inserted herself into the train just before the conductor slammed the doors shut.

  I waited for the next train. It was also crowded, but in that split second as the doors burst open, I became a New Yorker. Without any fanfare, with no “excuse me” or “so sorry,” I joined the crowd and slipped onto the train.

  My husband refused to adapt, and a week didn’t pass that I wasn’t greeted with a time limit on our stay in what to him was the worst place on earth. “One more year, and that’s it,” he would say. But it was more than our move to New York that was threatening our marriage. We had long carried our emotional baggage over two continents. We were constantly in motion, packing and unpacking boxes, arranging furniture at the different houses we owned, filling out long government forms seeking visas to travel to places as diverse as Kosovo and Brazil. All of this prevented us from dealing with our fraying relationship. When the bitterness bubbled to the surface, when the tension increased, we craved new vistas. And so after unsuccessfully settling in a cramped apartment on the Upper East Side, we decided to try another part of the city, both of us still convinced that real estate would save our faltering marriage.

  Roosevelt Island had an affordable parking garage, even though it was dilapidated, with a leaking roof and barely functioning elevator. And the nearly two-­mile-­long island seemed to be a pleasant retreat from the chaos of Manhattan, yet easily accessible by tram and subway to midtown. In the spring, the promenade facing Manhattan’s East Side is crowded with parents pushing babies in strollers, joggers, and couples holding hands. On summer nights, the smell of grilled beef lingers in the heavy air as residents gather at the barbecue pits that line the northern end of the island. There is a riverside café, which affords spectacular views of the United Nations, and tugboats chugging back and forth under the Queensboro Bridge.

  And so a few months after I ate dinner with Valerie in the Upper East Side restaurant on Christmas Eve, I found myself living just blocks from Edward. Our meals gradually became weekly events. I knew he looked forward to them as much as I did. He spent hours writing out recipes for me and giving me rather frank opinions about how I was leading my life. He was still mourning his beloved Paula and I was starting to see just how unhappy I was in my marriage.

  But whatever happened in the world outside Edward’s Roosevelt Island apartment, dinner was a magical interlude. We shared cocktails, a bottle of wine, and whatever Edward was inspired to cook that day. Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Ute Lemper sang in the background, but sometimes there was just comfortable silence and the wind whistling outside his fourteenth floor windows.

  2

  Flounder, Poached in Vermouth, Sauce Fumet

  Pommes de Terre Sarladaises

  Baby Spinach

  Avocado Salad, Homemade Blue Cheese Dressing

  Apricot Soufflés

  Martinis, Vouvray

  I arrived at Edward’s apartment just before sunset, walking the few blocks from my own apartment on the island, along the East River promenade, toward the Queensboro Bridge, negotiating little clusters of pushcarts and cyclists speeding along the riverside track. It was springtime, and the cherry trees that lined the promenade were bursting with white and pink blossoms, offering what I am sure must have been picture-­postcard views of Roosevelt Island to those who lived on the other side of the river in Manhattan.

  Alerted to my arrival by his doorman, Edward had already made me a martini by the time I took the elevator to the fourteenth floor. The glass was cold and the cocktail was topped with a perfect icy patina. It sat on the Formica kitchen counter next to a plastic container of goose fat, which Edward was planning to use to fry slices of parboiled potatoes. Edward had performed this trick before­—peeling the skin off the small and slightly shriveled spuds, slicing them as thinly as possible and turning them into pommes de terres Sarladaises, a dish named after a medieval town—Sarlat­—in the Dordogne region of France. The area was famous for its goose fat. Sometimes, just after panfrying the potato slices to a crispy, yet silky, perfection, he would toss in fresh parsley and minced garlic.

  Edward had already warmed two dinner plates and piled each with a mound of baby spinach. He was poaching flounder in vermouth. When the fish was ready, he would spoon it on top of the spinach and add the sauce fumet, which he made from sautéed fish bones, white wine, carrots, onions, and butter. The sauce wilted the spinach until it was just slightly undercooked.

  As usual, he refused my offers to help him prepare dinner. “Stay out there!” he ordered, pointing to the living room. I sat in an easy chair sipping my martini and looking out as dusk began to fall and lights twinkled from the buildings that stood against the river on the Manhattan side. Ella Fitzgerald crooned in the background, “There’s a somebody I’m longing to see, I hope that he turns out to be someone to watch over me . . .”

  It was clearly a female presence who watched over us in Edward’s apartment. Months after her death, Paula was still here. Edward had taped several color photo­copies of her last photograph to the walls of the living and dining rooms. Although her face was lined with wrinkles, I would be hard pressed to describe her as elderly, even though she was well into her nineties when the photo was taken. She was resplendent in red lipstick and dangly earrings, her chin slightly raised in an air of self-­assuredness, defiance even. Edward placed the photos at different angles so that he could talk to Paula when he cooked, look up at her when he made dinner or sat on the sofa to read a book.

  After she died, Edward began writing her letters, telling her about what he had cooked that day, which of their friends he had bumped into. Shortly after we met, he started to write to Paula about me. “Paula would have liked you because you have fabric—character,” he said to me.

  Despite the little I knew about either Edward or Paula at that point, I was both flattered and reassured that Edward and I were becoming friends. Now the minutiae of my life—my adventures in the city working for the Post, my crumbling marriage, the difficulties of raising my daughter—filled Edward’s thoughts and his letters to Paula. Soon he became so wrapped up in helping me navigate my middle age that sorting out my problems dispelled the dark notions that had weighed on him after Paula died.

  Not that I confided much in those early days, beyond the indignities of my new job working at a tabloid in the world’s most competitive media center.

  “The editors yell at reporters in the newsroom!” I told Edward, reminding him that I had cut my teeth as a reporter at a Canadian newspaper, a far more genteel place than the Post’s aggressive newsroom, where one of the first communications I received from my editor was an e-­mail with “WTF?” in the subject header.

  That same week, my boss, a stocky, tough-­talking Puerto Rican­ – Irish newsman, completely deleted a story I wrote about an environmental charity run by the musician Sting and insisted I rewrite it on the spot. I am sure most veteran reporters would have been offended but I took it in stride, even though I had more than twenty years’ experience in journalism, much of it spent as a foreign correspondent.

  In New York, though, I was always reporting by the seat of my pants. An Australian intern I met put it best: “It’s news on steroids.” Still, I was astounded when, after reading the Sting piece, my editor took a gulp of his impossibly beige half and half – infused coffee and pressed the delete button.

  “This is how you write a story,” he b
arked, pointing a stubby finger at the now blank computer screen. “Statement! Quote to back it up! Statement! Quote to back it up . . .”

  Despite the harshness of the newsroom, where my rickety computer always seemed to freeze in the minutes before deadline and the printers broke down several times a day, I was also making good friends. My best friend became the woman who sat in the cubicle next to the one I was assigned during my first week at work. As I told Edward, Melissa and I were polar opposites. Where she was impeccably coiffed and elegantly dressed, with perfectly lacquered fingernails and precise bangs, I was disheveled, usually arriving late for work after dropping off Hannah at school, my nails chipped, my hair windblown. She once gave me a hairbrush as a gift.

  I called Melissa when I got lost in the city, which was often. Another friend referred to her as my personal GPS. She even knew where to stand in any given subway station to be closest to the exit you wanted when the train arrived at your stop. She had an app on her phone for that. When I went on assignment alone, she made sure I was armed with a paper map because I had trouble deciphering directions on my phone.

  We became fast friends, our connection forged in what she called “the paragraph factory” and what I more sinisterly dubbed “the gulag” of tabloid journalism. “It’s like breaking rocks at the gulag,” I said, every time our copy came back with a long list of questions, the answers to which we were asked to provide in the minutes before deadline, and we knew they would never make it into the paper. Our editors thought nothing of sending us out on an assignment at four a.m. to attend Friday prayers at a mosque in lower Manhattan or stake out the alleged mistress of a senator in suburban New Jersey, sitting for hours in a hot car in high summer.

  “What’s wrong with you?” barked my editor into the phone when I lost sight of the senator’s mistress because I left my post for a half hour to buy water and go to the bathroom. While I was gone, she had gotten into her car and left home. My trail went cold.

  “YOU CAN’T GO TO THE BATHROOM DURING A STAKEOUT!” my editor screamed in what seemed to me all caps. “You go to the bathroom before a stakeout or after a stakeout but NEVER DURING A STAKEOUT!”

  I regaled Edward with tales of the Post newsroom, emphasizing the humor and the characters I was meeting, but though my stories often made him laugh, they also gave him pause. Edward thought I was working too hard, that I needed to ask myself some serious questions about what I really wanted to achieve.

  “You know,” said Edward, after I told him about an episode at work, “I’ve never really seen you laugh, in a loud voice, with your head tossed back, like you are really enjoying it.” Edward refilled my glass with the crisp Vouvray we were drinking and we both started on our avocado salads, using thinly sliced pieces of baguette to lap up Edward’s pungent blue cheese dressing.

  A few days later a letter arrived in the mail, in Edward’s familiar script, on cream-­colored stationery attached to a photocopy of the recipe that had inspired his apricot soufflé I had complimented at dinner. He had clipped it from the New York Times in the early 1990s when he first started cooking for Paula and their friends and family. Despite his prejudice against following recipes, he had obviously kept a few favorites over the years. It was labor-­intensive, calling for dried apricots that had to be boiled and pureed, then chilled for several hours before they could be added to the stiffened egg whites.

  Edward had made us individual soufflés in little rame­kins, putting them in the oven as we began our main course. He served them immediately after they were done, their puffy meringue swirls tinged golden brown and looking like the whimsical domes of some dreamy cathedral from a fairy tale, dusted with confectioners’ sugar and topped with freshly whipped cream. There was magic in Edward’s fluffy confection. That first time—and every time after that he made it for me—I savored each spoonful as the swirl of cream, meringue, and apricot melted in my mouth.

  Though our early dinners were not gloomy, it’s likely that Edward had already picked up on my matrimonial woes. Appropriately, in the letter that accompanied the soufflé recipe, Edward felt compelled to warn me against living an unromantic life: “That is a somber thought,” he wrote. “For as I have tried to remind you, there is much about you that is not just attractive but very lovable. As important as career is to women, they must not forget who they are and what they are.”

  Edward came of age in the 1950s when a good career choice for a woman was being a housewife. After all, Paula gave up her dream of becoming an actress and stayed at home to raise their two daughters. Edward took a series of jobs to keep the family afloat. But they were no ordinary suburban couple. In their spare time they wrote plays; Paula even wrote a young adult novel, which she managed to have published. Edward’s advice to me was clearly drawn from his personal experience and was at times tinged with sexism. But, strangely, I didn’t really notice, not until other women pointed it out to me. I saw Edward through such a benevolent lens that it never occurred to me to question his wisdom. For on some level I felt he was correct—I was working so hard that I had neglected many things about myself. And listening to him talk about Paula, I was beginning to see just how doomed my own marriage was.

  “I’m a man who loves women, for all the obscure reasons as well as the obvious ones,” Edward wrote to me in a letter shortly after we met. “Their femininity, their charm, desirability, delicacy, warmth, beauty, tenderness and on and on—a list too long to record. But I have only been in love with one woman all my mature life.”

  To say Edward loved his wife is an understatement. “I wouldn’t have lived this long without her,” he would tell me repeatedly about the woman he first saw in New York in the waning days of summer in 1940.

  In the thick scrapbooks and photo albums he keeps on the shelves of his living room, Edward seems to have every letter he exchanged with his wife, every theater program, restaurant business card, and handmade Thanksgiving dinner menu adorned with pressed autumn leaves. The first volume, which dates back to the year he met Paula, begins with the unembellished black-­and-­white photos that they took of each other on a beach in California (“We always took interesting pictures, never normal,” he told me). The photos of Edward and Paula—both tall, lanky, young—are accompanied by descriptions on index cards, cut to fit the photo album pages and written in Edward’s loping hand.

  Then there are the pages and pages of plastic-­covered birthday and Valentine cards. On Paula’s eighty-­fifth birthday, Edward wrote, “How I ever got you is beyond belief. So don’t wake me up at this date—just let me go on thinking that I’m special enough to deserve you!” In a card to her husband, written at about the same time, Paula wrote, “To my own Eddie: We dreamed we’d get to the top of the mountain, and here we are. I’ll be lovin’ you, always!”

  Tonight, flipping through the cards and letters between Edward and Paula, I casually mentioned that I had never sent anyone a Valentine’s Day card (not since grade school, anyway). Sadly, I had never thought to send one to my husband, even in the early days of our relationship when I still lived in an illusion of happiness. And since moving to New York we had grown so far apart that there seemed no breaching the chasm.

  Edward was silent, as if suddenly suspended in a state of disbelief. He leaned over the table, poured us the remaining drops of the Vouvray, and then we both lingered over the last spoonfuls of our apricot soufflés.

  A few days later, when Edward’s recipe came in the mail—along with his admonition to be more romantic—I set out to make the soufflés on my own. I removed the eggs from the refrigerator, making sure they were at room temperature, heated the apricots with sugar, and allowed them to chill in the refrigerator before mixing in the rest of the ingredients.

  “This recipe never fails,” Edward had told me. And he was right, because for one of my first renditions I used fresh apricots and my soufflé turned out bland. The puréed dried apricots, which were packed with flavor, made for a richer, more complex dessert.

  I wo
uld eventually learn to follow Edward’s recipes with a heightened degree of precision, whether they were instructions for the preparation of food or for life. His assertions never veered too far from certain fundamental themes—he spoke about recognizing “the stranger in all of us” and achieving what he liked to call “a resting place of the soul,” by which I now realize he meant self-­assurance and being happy in your own skin. Or as he put it, “a place in your head where you are at peace with your life, with your decisions.”

  3

  Scrod, in San Marzano Tomato Sauce

  Orange Zest Salad

  Apple Galette, Vanilla Ice Cream

  Pinot Grigio

  In the nineteenth century Roosevelt Island, then known as Blackwell’s Island, was crowded with more than a dozen prisons, a smallpox hospital, workhouses, and even a home for “wayward girls.” Municipal leaders in the growing metropolis across the river decided that Blackwell’s Island would be the perfect place to lock away the criminal, the indigent, and the insane, convinced that “the pleasant and glad surroundings would be conducive to both physical and mental rehabilitation.” In 1828, New York City purchased the island for $32,000 and, four years later, the Blackwell’s Island penitentiary and hospital opened.

  When I moved to the island in 2010, nearly fourteen thousand people—many of them UN bureaucrats and émigrés from the former Yugoslavia—lived among the remnants of that sad history. There are still the ghostly skeletons of abandoned hospitals, and even the modern residential buildings, most of them completed in the 1970s, resemble correctional facilities, minus bars and barbed wire fencing. Inside, the stained carpets in the hallways smell of cigarette smoke and stale cabbage. By contrast, Edward’s building is one of the more elegant and well maintained, with a small army of solicitous doormen.

  During the year I lived on Roosevelt Island, there were few restaurants and only a Starbucks and a supermarket that residents referred to as the “antique store” because many of the products were past their “best before” dates. The island, which is about eight hundred feet wide at its widest point, turns into a ghost town after dark. When I invited an eighty-­year-­old friend who had lived in Manhattan for most of her life to visit me, she looked suspiciously around a deserted Main Street at night, and tentatively asked where she might find the wine store.