Dinner with Edward

by Isabel Vincent

  That’s how I pictured it, anyway. I had no idea how hard the job would be or that life as a reporter at the Post would present its own set of challenges. Still, when it comes to work, I have no fear of seeking out the truth. My personal life is another matter. I have always approached it as an afterthought, although looking back I don’t think I ever thought even that much about it at all. In fact, when I found myself mechanically reciting “I dos” and “I wills” before a justice of the peace at Toronto’s city hall, it was a purely bureaucratic decision. In order to take up residence in New York, we all needed to travel under my immigration visa—an “O” given out sparingly to foreigners and referring to section 101 (O)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which provides for “aliens of extraordinary ability” to be admitted to the United States. The INS would not accept our common-­law arrangement, and the only solution was marriage.

  Which is how I found myself on a cold, gray February day at the Marriage Bureau, repeating my vows even as the signs of impending doom were everywhere. I wore black for the occasion, and the groom smirked—I thought he was just nervous—throughout the ceremony. Later, he confessed to me that he felt his life had been ruined. Maybe he suddenly felt trapped, unable to continue the peripatetic life of a photojournalist. Was there a tearful breakdown when I heard this? I can’t remember. I think I simply shrugged and bulldozed ahead.

  In the end, marriage really killed the relationship. It always does.

  Years before, I had married my college boyfriend in a city hall ceremony, against the better judgment of just about everyone I knew.

  He was an earnest English major from the Midwest whose purity of spirit and earnest manner I cherish still. The marriage was my idea. His Canadian student visa was expiring and marriage was the only way for him to continue to live in the country. On my twenty-­second birthday—a gray, bitterly cold day in February—we repeated our vows before heading off to a local pub to watch the America’s Cup final. He was a sailing fanatic and refused to miss the race. On our honeymoon we went to Quebec City, where I was bitten by a stray dog. I spent my first weeks as a newlywed getting a series of rabies vaccines ordered by the Canadian health authorities.

  The marriage ended several years later, as inauspiciously as it had begun, in a government office in Rio de Janeiro where we were working as foreign correspondents. We both showed up at the Canadian consulate, a high-­rise with stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean and the sunbathers on Copacabana Beach. We signed our separation agreement under a Canadian flag and a photograph of Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, somber in her diamond tiara and lace gown. Maybe it was my imagination, but I detected a hint of disapproval in her forced smile.

  Edward smiled when I told him the story of that first marriage and divorce, as I buttered a piece of baguette and took a forkful of his delicious avocado salad. I was relieved. I had told few people about it, fearing their judgment, embarrassed that I had treated marriage as a legal convenience rather than a magical union predicated on love. But Edward surprised me when he launched into a discourse on the meaning of love. He had done this before, emphasizing that I should never forget that romantic love is a practical exchange, a transactional agreement, and that attraction almost never lasts.

  “Attraction is the beginning, but who can predict where that will lead? Or when it will end?” he said. “In fact, do we ask such basic questions? Seldom, if ever.”

  “Life’s needs met life’s needs,” he had written in a poem, which he had sent me, about his first sighting of Paula. He repeated the line now.

  “Give of yourself, not yourself,” he continued.

  I told Edward he wasn’t being entirely honest about the practicality of attraction. I reminded him that on other occasions, after a tumbler of whiskey and a glass of wine, perhaps, the meaning of love took on a greater urgency, suffused with passion, desperation, even.

  “Is there someone who will stand naked with you in the shower and hold you and comfort you?” he had once said in a hoarse whisper, his words seeming to tumble over one another. “If you can’t do that with the person you’re with, then you’re not really in love.”

  The truth is Edward was preoccupied with defining love. I never understood if he was doing this for my benefit, or if he was somehow trying to come to grips with the very special relationship he’d had with Paula. Every morning, when he sat down to his coffee, scrambled eggs, and toast slathered with butter and apricot preserves, Edward went through a few pages of the dictionary, working alphabetically, searching for words that added to his compendium of love. He began with “admiring,” moved on to “adoring,” and the last time I checked, he hadn’t progressed much beyond the c’s—“caring” and “cherished.”

  “You make a mistake if you don’t try to figure out love,” he said now as he served the tarte citron—boldly tangy with a hint of sweetness held in his feathery pastry. “If you give yourself to someone without understanding it, you are only asking to be a slave.”

  A few days later I found a four-­page letter in my mailbox. “What is love? Like the majority of us you struggled to supply an answer, for the very simple reason that we seldom attempt to define it, even less to comprehend it,” Edward wrote. “Love is being, not belonging. Giving and receiving, not possessing.”

  I’m not sure I fully understood what he was telling me. But there was something beautiful about the fact that Edward was exploring the meaning of love.

  ON NEW YEAR’S EVE I had finally picked up my dress from Saks in the package room of my apartment building. I had been invited to a party. I would go un­escorted, but as I put on my dress, I suddenly felt foolish. I was going to lose my nerve. I resisted the temptation to ring in the new year alone, curled up on the couch with a book or watching the crowds watching the ball drop in Times Square on television.

  I stopped by Edward’s apartment, partly to show off the dress he had picked out. The door was ajar, and I let myself in. Edward seemed tired and was slumped in a chair in the living room. It was just after eight in the evening, but he was clearly exhausted. The apartment was unusually silent—no jazz came out of the living room speakers, no cheery French songs that he liked to sing along to, mangling the words because he had never had the opportunity to learn the language. There was only the eerie howling of wind outside his windows.

  But my arrival seemed to give him purpose, and he was all business by the time I took off my coat.

  “Turn around,” he ordered, and steered me to the mirrored wall in his dining room. First, he told me my earrings were all wrong. Then he was troubled by my hair. “On the left side, you need to put it behind your ear, and on the right, let it drape down your face,” he said, fixing my hair the way he wanted it to look. “Don’t keep pushing it back.”

  He looked me up and down, told me to remove my watch—“It’s too distracting”—then grabbed his cane and limped into his bedroom to rummage through Paula’s old jewelry box. He came back a few minutes later with a necklace, a bold, brown, enameled choker that had been one of Paula’s favorites, he said.

  “There.” He stepped back and assessed me. “You look smashing!”

  I stood in front of the mirror, looking at myself. The necklace was indeed perfect, the hair was just as Edward had ordered, and even the Dior lipstick, which I had applied earlier, looked natural to me. I was beginning to recognize this new woman I had become.

  I caught sight of Edward behind me, looking admiringly—his project, his Eliza Doolittle finally transformed into a proper lady.

  “You know, Edward, one day I hope I am lucky enough to meet a man just like you.” I addressed his image in the mirror.

  Edward seemed startled and suddenly he blushed with nothing to say. Our eyes met in the mirror, and there was a long silence. “I wouldn’t want you to be late for the party,” he finally said. Slowly, he helped me on with my coat, grabbed his cane, and walked me silently to the elevator.

  “Happy New Year!” I said, as the doors bur
st open.

  “Pump yourself up, kid,” he said. “You’ve got a lot going for you. A lot on the ball.

  “And,” he paused, reaching over to smooth my hair. “Knock ’em dead.”

  10

  Pan-­Fried Cod on Steamed Spinach

  Fresh Tomatoes with Homemade Pesto

  Fleur de Sel Caramels

  Turkish Coffee

  Pinot Grigio

  Edward served up the imported fleur de sel caramels with a flourish.

  “They were sent from Megan,” he said, fixing me with a momentous expression to make sure I had understood.

  We had just finished a simple meal, by Edward’s standards: Fresh cod, lightly sautéed in olive oil, a splash of white wine, on a bed of steamed spinach, sliced tomatoes with Edward’s nutty homemade pesto.

  Ella Fitzgerald sang in the background: “Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear; And he shows them pearly white . . .”

  There was still a half bottle of pinot grigio on the table, and now he pressed Megan’s caramels on me. They were “artisanal,” each elegantly wrapped in silver cellophane. He had just received them in the mail.

  OK, and just who is Megan?

  Edward gave me a mischievous look. “You know you’re not the only woman I write to,” he said, with a wink.

  I was taken aback. Could he be a little bit jealous? Was he feeling neglected that I had not been able to come over as often lately? I had been consumed with work, with finding a new place to live. The lease had finally expired on Roosevelt Island and I was thrilled to be moving back across the river to Manhattan. Of course it also meant that I probably wouldn’t be seeing Edward as often.

  So maybe I was the one who was jealous. I knew that Edward had other women friends, but I thought all of them were part of a couple—neighbors, mostly, whom he had known for years.

  Megan was a foreign interest. Yet he must have told me where he had met her, why they were corresponding. Maybe I had been so wrapped up in my move, sorting through the detritus of my marriage, packing boxes every day before and after work, that I hadn’t paid that much attention. Suddenly I remembered that Megan was a graphic artist, that she was in her thirties. No doubt she found Edward charming.

  Everyone did. Edward had no shortage of fans. There was Tad, the architect, who lived on Roosevelt Island. They had become so close that Edward once described him as the son he never had. Edward called him “darling,” which is what he called all his good friends, male or female. He taught Tad to shuck oysters. Whenever he saw Tad, a stylishly bald middle-­aged man with a cheerful disposition and a permanent five o’clock shadow, he kissed him on both cheeks.

  “Remind me to teach you to shave, Tad!” he said, when he saw him at the small, community gallery that Tad ran on Roosevelt Island. Edward had taken me to the gallery to show off his own sculpture—a whimsical elaboration of human DNA that he had fashioned out of egg cartons and wire coat hangers.

  “It’s just something fun, to make you laugh,” he said.

  It was at the gallery, during another opening, that I was introduced to a couple, two men whom I had never met. Edward kissed both of them warmly. Edward was dressed in a cuffed white shirt and had on a tartan tie that he had fashioned from a ribbon that had once graced a Christmas present someone gave him. He wore a blue blazer and brown oxfords that he had polished until they shone.

  “Edward’s going to be the best man at our wedding!” gushed one of the men. They were going to be married at St. Mark’s Church in the fall. I wasn’t surprised that this ninety-­three-­year-­old Southern gentleman was to have an important role at one of the first gay weddings in New York State history.

  Nor was I surprised by the people Edward started inviting to our dinners, turning his living and dining rooms into an artistic and literary salon. He was definitely back in action now, having found the will not just to keep on living after Paula’s death but to enjoy entertaining as well. On these occasions he called on me to act as his sous chef of sorts—the only times he allowed me to help him in the kitchen.

  “You’re not filling those plates properly,” he scolded, as I arranged lettuce and then spooned his homemade vinaigrette on top of the individual salad plates.

  As usual, an eclectic and even odd group of people assembled around Edward’s oak dining table. There was the sixty-­six-­year-­old Czech artist, with the salt and pepper pony­tail, and his American TV producer wife, who was some twenty years younger, with long, straight black hair and tight jeans. The artist had fled an oppressive Czech state and moved to New York in the 1970s. At one dinner, he told us that he had spent several years researching sex clubs in Manhattan for an art project. He said that during the UN general assembly, which had taken place a few days before, he had been invited to an event at which the Czech president had grabbed his wife’s ass during the photo op.

  Everyone laughed, except for the Albanian couple sitting next to him. They were immigrants from Monte­negro and had arrived in the United States as part of a wave of refugees after the 1999 NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia. They lived on the island, where they found themselves surrounded by Serbian neighbors. They said they didn’t feel comfortable among them, that the ugly Serb nationalism that had fueled years of conflict in the Balkans had followed them to New York.

  Then there was the dentist with the Long Island accent who had owned the pediatric dental practice on the ground floor of Edward’s building, and still lived in an apartment there with his wife. Edward was often moved to invite them to dinner after meeting them in the elevator, the lobby, or the swimming pool.

  One night the Czech artist told us he had cried the first time he had dinner at Edward’s apartment. Maybe it was Edward’s prime rib or the Grand Marnier soufflé he made for dessert, he said, but when Edward carved the roast the Czech artist was overcome with gratitude that such an elderly man was being so generous and that he had put so much time and effort into preparing dinner.

  “I love entertaining,” Edward had said.

  Tonight as we enjoyed Megan’s fleur de sel caramels, I realized that I wasn’t the only single or devoted woman in his life. There was his next-­door neighbor Suzanne, a milliner, who owned a tony boutique on Madison Avenue and was regularly invited to dinner. She often came with Rita. Rita was Tad’s wife, but sometimes she came to dinner without her husband. A graphic artist who spoke with an exotic continental drawl, she would often swing by bearing exquisite chocolates, boxes of macarons or flowers for Edward. She sported a Louise Brooks bob and favored crisp, white, oversized linen shirts and big jewelry. She would head straight to the freezer to serve herself the martini that was always waiting there for her when she came for dinner. She poured the chilled cocktail into the icy glass that Edward had set aside.

  “Oh, Edward, it’s perfect,” she would say, savoring the martini, while peeking under the lids of the pots that were simmering on the stove. “What did you cook for us tonight, Edward?”

  Every year, Edward and Paula had spent Thanksgiving with Rita and Tad and their family on the island. He and Paula had treated the couple’s two children like their own grandchildren. When Rita and Tad’s daughter Eliza died suddenly of an aneurysm in her dorm room at college, Edward was devastated. Years later he still couldn’t speak about her death without sobbing.

  I thought back on how many other lives Edward had touched, people he had met in a seemingly random fashion—waiting for the F train, at a shoe store in midtown, at the counter of his local butcher, or even in a hospital room after a routine surgical procedure. Edward found people special and he had a unique ability to coax the most profound stories out of just about everyone he met. When I finally left Roosevelt Island, I missed being able to just drop by unannounced and hear a story about someone Edward had met. One night at dinner Edward told me the story of his Irish neighbor, another Megan, who had confessed to him at the butcher shop how she had stolen a shilling when she was a six-year-old living in poverty in Ireland. They were speaking about
Angela’s Ashes, and Megan was explaining to Edward how true to life Frank McCourt’s book about poverty in Ireland really was.

  “One day when I was a child, I went alone into the church,” she told Edward. “I sat down in the middle of the pews and a lady I knew came in and walked to the altar rail.” Megan went on to describe how the lady knelt and prayed and then lit a candle before dropping a coin in the offertory box but missing the slot. “I watched as it fell to the floor. It rolled and it rolled and it rolled and then it stopped.” Megan went to pick up the coin.

  “Did you put it into the offertory box for her?” Edward asked.

  In what seemed like a momentous confession some fifty years after the fact, Megan was near tears when she told Edward that she had pocketed the coin. She bought a loaf of bread with the money. “And I’ve felt guilty ever since,” she said.

  Edward then asked her if she was a Catholic.

  “Well, I was,” Megan told him. “I’m not much of anything anymore.”

  Edward disagreed with her. She was still “under the influence” of the Catholic Church, “in a good and positive way.”

  “Under the influence, yes,” she’d said to Edward. “I like that.”

  Edward was so moved by his encounter with Megan that he wrote out her story in longhand. When he felt it was good enough, he asked Valerie to type it.

  Edward said that writing about people he encountered made him feel alive. He needed to record his experience, he said; it reminded him that he was still someone who could feel very deeply, even though he knew his life as he hit his nineties had become limited. He once confessed to me that he knew he would never be with a woman again, never feel a woman’s body next to him in bed, legs entwined, arm around a firm waist, head resting on a warm shoulder. In a moment of intense despair, he told me that he now sought solace in a hot shower. He described the sensation of scalding water cascading over his arthritic hands as “orgasmic.” Physical intimacy was in the past; Edward knew that, but he still lived intensely and he was determined to continue doing the things that made him feel alive and useful to others.