by Gael Greene
The truth is, Clay loved writers and writing. He surrounded himself with writers (marrying Gail Sheehy, one of the best-selling of New York’s many best-selling authors). One day at a brunch sometime in the late seventies on the back veranda of their East Hampton house, Clay looked around the table and his eyes lighted up.
“How many books do we have sitting at this table?” He went around the table and we counted: Peter Maas, Ed Epstein, Gail, and me (I can’t remember who else was there—just eight of us, counting Clay). Three books, four, two—he added it up and announced it triumphantly like a kid with a Matchbox car collection: “We have eighteen books sitting at this table.”
I learned Clay liked telling his friends and the powerful whose brains he picked every day at lunch that he’d fished me out of nowhere . . . that I’d never eaten a hot meal before becoming the magazine’s restaurant critic. The conceit was too cute to contradict.
Meanwhile, my unfinished novel moldered away on the floor of a closet. I didn’t even feel guilty ignoring it. A whirlwind of celebrisociety was emerging in Manhattan, churned up by Clay, with the magazine as its weekly locomotive, and by the emerging, increasingly aggressive ink-stained media gossips. I seemed to have become a boldface name myself, a minor league star, invited everywhere, indulged by the restaurants I’d come to love once they recognized me, suffered grimly by those I’d panned, and indulged anyway. I had dreamed of being a movie star. I had imagined critics invoking Scott Fitzgerald or Ford Madox Ford in extolling my novel. My neck would never be as long as Babe Paley’s nor my pedigree as fine, but I had dared to hope restaurateurs would find my ass as kissable. I’d not set out to be a power of the food world, but that seemed to be what I had become. So quickly. And it was fun. I fell for it totally.
13
MA VIE AVEC LE GRAPE NUT
WHEN HIS BEST FRIEND, JULES THE OPHTHALMOLOGIST, CAME HOME from military service in France with a huge cache of ’61 Bordeaux to “lay down” and explained to us what that meant, Don was determined to create a wine cellar, too—if only in our front closet. Soon he was caught up in the deeply occult scientology of the grape, trying to memorize Schoonmaker’s Encyclopedia of Wine. He quickly learned three of the most important things to know about wine: Château Lafite Rothschild, Château Mouton, and Château Margaux.
He developed a passion for great Burgundy, specifically Richebourg of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, when we stumbled into a small, unknown bistro in Lyon one night in our early days of seeking nirvana abroad. To show the ancient sommelier he was not the callow youth he appeared or just another uncivilized American, Don had ordered a dusty treasure at a princely twenty dollars the half bottle, far beyond our budget. “A noble Burgundy,” the old man said, congratulating Don. “A bon complement for monsieur’s rack of lamb.” The man trembled as he decanted the Richebourg and poured a taste. Don sniffed, swirled, sniffed, tasted, sighed, and seemed drunk already just on the fumes. Although he later turned out to be discreetly unfaithful to me, my darling husband was true forever to Richebourg, long after it became so expensive that neither of us could afford it.
Actually, Don’s palate showed early promise. One night our dinner host, the learned and self-confident über-Hungarian, George Lang, invited us to taste a trio of champagnes poured in the kitchen into numbered glasses. “I like number three,” said Don. “Is it Taittinger blanc de blanc?” Impressed? George was visibly shaken by such sensitivity from the taste buds of someone he regarded as a philistine. In fact, the two of us had developed a taste for Taittinger early on and had sipped it at dinner only the night before. (Of course, no need to tell George. It was fun to see the mighty Lang visibly rocked.)
But now as a restaurant critic, I needed to be a wine expert, too. I needed to learn about wine and I had to learn fast. It wasn’t enough to recognize Lafite, Mouton, or Château Margaux at Macy’s—wines I wouldn’t dream of ordering even in the seventies on my seemingly unlimited expense account. I needed to navigate a restaurant’s wine list smoothly, to recognize a wine that was ready to drink, to find a beautiful wine at a reasonable price—and in those days, the wine was most likely French. In the innocent dawn of the seventies, no one east of the San Fernando Valley took California wines seriously. Was the wine corky? Materized? Over-the-hill? How would I know?
New Yorkers, even masters of the universe and the widely traveled, often knew as little as I did at the dawn of the revolution in dining, and, like me, they quaked when an arrogant sommelier handed them the unintelligible wine list with a sneer that said, This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me. True, a handful of experts were writing about wine then: Schoonmaker, of course, Alexis Lichine, Hugh Johnson. I surrounded myself with their weighty tomes.
A self-satisfied snoot of early grape nuts, like early foodies, found one another. All it took was money, the male chromosome, the right connections, and a cellar lined with status Burgundies or proper Bordeaux to win a spot in the local chapter of France’s exclusive wine societies—the Commanderie de Bordeaux, the Chevalier du Tastevin. There, the chosen ones knighted one another with a dull sword and celebrated their superiority. Wooed by ambitious importers and indulged by restaurateurs who feared to deny them discounts, they spit and drooled and tasted, one-upping one another at bring-your-own bottle bashes. Women were distinctly not welcome, except at the once-a-year galas open to wives, mistresses, and female restaurant writers.
But life was heady for New York magazine’s Insatiable Critic. Wine collectors collected me. There I was, basking in the spotlight of my reviews just as our town was unzipping its puritanism and discovering there was more to dinner than well-done lamb chops and orange sherbet. My unabashed passion for eating made great cooks I’d never met want to feed me, and great collectors dangled guest lists of luminaries to tempt me to dinners designed around their greatest bottles. I got out my black velvet ball gown (Oscar de la Renta on sale) for their fancy dinners. And I tasted. Tasting great wines won’t necessarily guarantee a sharp palate. But it makes for a divine kindergarten.
Meanwhile, winemakers and importers—the whole spirits industry—were conspiring to wean Americans from scotch, Coke, and highballs to the grape. Marketing experts were sure that if they could lead Americans to Chardonnay, they could make them drink. I was invited to countless wine seminars and I went because clearly the best way to learn was by tasting wines side by side, comparing flavors, labels, and vintages. The experts were so deft and full of esoteric information, I felt mastering wine was only slightly more difficult than brain surgery.
I would mention loving a wine in a review—La Doucette, a sauvignon blanc, for instance, and watch the prices soar. (Well, a name Americans could pronounce without mangling was always a plus.)
Soon I knew a little, enough to spike my reviews with helpful wine chat. I put together a list of Bacchic bon mots that an apprentice oenophile could toss out nonchalantly to impress and thaw a glacial sommelier, and was bold enough (or obnoxious enough) to use them myself.
Innocent pals would watch, mesmerized (or even embarrassed), as I squeezed the cork, swirled the wine and sniffed, swirled again, sipped, and chewed. “I find it acid . . . astringent . . . balanced, bitter, brilliant. Clean, isn’t it? Cloudy, coarse, common, dull, earthy, nicely flinty . . . a bit flat . . . hmm.” I could parrot my betters’ alphabet of joy or dismissal: “Powerful, ripe, rounded, soft, steely, stemmy. And young. So young.”
When the mythic and magisterial Gregory Thomas (president of Chanel in America and a revered Feinschmecker) stood up at a small and ridiculously exclusive wine dinner at the Four Seasons to dismiss a fruity little Beaujolais as “a simpering teenage cheerleader,” I felt learned enough to leap in and defend my sex.
“Oh, really, Gregory,” I began. “I find it more like a young lifeguard with his nose peeling from sunburn.”
Soon I was summoned to perform onstage with my mentors. Actually, I think Danny Kaye and I were cast for comic relief among the Establishment pros in a tastin
g panel Time magazine put together in the late seventies to compare the new, aggressively marketed California wines with the long-respected bottlings of France—blind, of course. Even blind, I recognized Gallo Hearty Burgundy at once. It was a cross between Beaujolais nouveau and strawberry Jell-O in a jug, and Americans, including me, adored it. “I know this is just a little California jug wine,” I whispered to the vaunted expert Frank Schoonmaker on my right, “but I like it.”
“I do, too,” he said, and to my shock, the loftiest wino of them all cast his vote for Gallo Hearty Burgundy.
Now when we were out at reviewing dinners, Don would hand the wine list to me. “You know what you want,” he might say. The day my wine knowledge surged ahead of his, someone less myopic than I might have seen the small gray cloud floating over our marriage. Not me. I was too much in love.
For so long, we agreed we had the best marriage. I remember friends envying us. Our high ceiling with the cherub frieze, the living room’s big bay with double windows like French doors, the bed on the balcony with its wrought-iron railing, terra-cotta floors, and the row of tall stained-glass windows. How close we were . . . what fun we had . . . trips to Vermont each fall to see the colors, collecting antiques and Early American folk art, the precious little dinners we cooked, and our annual Christmas Eve open house. Don was unabashedly romantic. He found vintage diamond earrings for my birthday. He left love notes everywhere with wonderfully sappy love names. We never put each other down in public as our friends sometimes did. We never fought. Should that have been the giveaway that something might be wrong?
Very early, I realized that neither of us wanted children. We agreed we would never have children, so we could always be children ourselves and not be forced to move to the suburbs for better schools or change our carefree ways for lack of a nanny. I wrote about the “Joys of Not Having Children” for The Saturday Evening Post. The editor called it “A Vote Against Motherhood,” a more inflammatory title. He made me promise not to have a child for at least a year from the date of publication.
“Do you think this is a joke?” I asked. “Or that I would write this just for the money? We are not having children. I can promise you.”
My mother was deeply disappointed. “But you love dolls and baby clothes.”
“For other people’s children,” I said.
I received more than five hundred letters from Saturday Evening Post readers, most of them urging us not to miss out on parenthood, although many said, “You don’t deserve children; you’re too selfish.” The saddest letters were from women who’d had children and deeply regretted it.
The intimacy Don and I shared seemed organic, touching, a miracle. Don reading the morning papers in the club chair, with me sitting a foot away on the floor.
“Promise me you’ll never leave me,” Don would say.
“Promise me we’ll grow old and gum our gruel together,” I said. We promised.
I had never imagined I could love someone so much or that I would be so loved. So why was it we rarely made love? I don’t remember when the sexual heat began to cool, just that often I was sleeping when he came home and he didn’t wake me, or I was waiting up with a late supper and he was too tired for sex. We hugged and kissed, swore eternal love, wept, and cuddled, sleeping like two spoons, tucked into each other side by side, chaste and miserable. I couldn’t understand what had happened. I knew he was frustrated and unhappy at work. When the Trib folded in 1966, and was about to be embraced in a bizarre threesome with the former World-Telegram and Journal-American after a bruising strike, he’d gone to the Times.
After years of synchronized opinions and agreeing about everything, our playful weekends had been strained by my ideas on how to restore the little church we’d bought on top of a hill outside Woodstock. I believed in do-it-yourself and he, true child of Brooklyn apartment living, believed in calling the super. But he acquiesced. He always seemed to come around to my way of thinking. Don bought The New York Times Handyman’s Guide and read it till late at night, well after I’d fallen asleep.
No sex? Not even on the weekend. I snuggled against him in the little bedroom that had once been the Dutch Reformed Sunday school, attached to our precious church. He didn’t snuggle back. “This is how you fix a running toilet,” he said, reading aloud to me.
I had always wanted a doll’s house. Now our church on the hill became my dollhouse. The family who owned it had put up walls everywhere, creating a warren of rooms. As we smashed down the Sheetrock, the church got smaller and smaller and more beautiful. We took out the picture window behind the altar and installed a baronial fireplace salvaged from the men’s room of the Paramount Theater on Broadway, condemned and about to be demolished. It cost us seventy-five dollars. Don built shutter frames and I stretched red-and-white workman’s bandannas across them to let in light through the bathroom window. I dipped rattan in tea to make it look aged and covered the sink cupboard with it, framing the seams with bamboo that I antiqued with a blowtorch to match the Victorian bamboo hat rack that held towels. Don mitered the corners, marveling at the crude miracle of an old miter box and the saw that came with it. Every drawer in the house was lined with something—vinyl, gingham, book-binding paper, felt. Was there some Freudian implication? I glued lining into every box and drawer in sight.
“Look at this, darling,” I said, showing him a small article in the Woodstock Times. “You can buy twenty-five trees for ten dollars from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. We can fill in the spaces between trees on our hill and one day the church will be invisible from the road. . . . Won’t it be wonderful to be hidden by pines?”
Did we need to borrow a truck to bring our saplings home from the post office? No. They came in a tiny package, not much bigger than a rolled-up rubber bathtub mat. The tiniest seedlings.
“We’ll be dead by the time these twigs are trees,” Don said, wanting to toss them in the garbage.
But we planted them. Half of them died. And the rest of them grew. By the time the marriage was dead, the church was indeed invisible from the road.
Don always deferred to me, sweating in the heat, getting splashed and burned as he stood on a tall, rickety ladder, stripping the woodwork with some toxic liquid . . . storing up the suppressed rage I would only later discover. He worked all week, out of place, he felt, at the Times and spent his weekends trying to be a handyman in a ripped shirt while I mixed wallpaper glue to dress the entrance with marbled book paper from Italy. Wasn’t it fun? Why spend money to hire workmen when you can do it yourself? I was blindly caught up in my fantasy of the exquisite little church on top of the hill.
And with its eight-dollar potting-shed table stripped and stained, the needlepoint dining chairs, the massive stone fireplace, the turn-of-the-century stained-glass windows, and the custom-made kitchen with its handmade copper range hood, it was a showpiece. House & Garden came to photograph the two of us in the open kitchen and get my recipe for mushroom-cream cheese strudel and cold tomato-sour cream soup.
One Saturday, the gifted photographer John Dominis and reporter Anne Hollander came up to photograph our place for a Life magazine feature on churches transformed into other uses. They were on their way that afternoon to the Woodstock Festival, which had been forced to move to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel because Woodstock’s town council had refused a permit. They invited us to come along.
“It’s supposed to rain,” I said. “And I hear traffic is backed up for miles.”
“But Life has a trailer with air conditioning, a bathroom, and ice cubes,” Anne said.
What was the matter with us? We said thanks but we’d pass. I cannot remember why. I think we were both pleased with our prescience when we saw the photos of mud-wallowing bodies. What was happening to us? We’d promised to be children together forever, loving, spontaneous. How had we gotten so stodgy?
Then, on a freelance assignment in Los Angeles, I let the unthinkable happen. Half a bottle of red wine, two desserts in
that dimly-lighted Hollywood restaurant. I was nervous. He was too good-looking, my friend’s ex-husband, wonderful Irish face, blue eyes, and a romantic shock of thick black hair. It could only have happened in a far away zip code. He kissed me and I let him. He touched me and I burst into flames. I let myself. After nine and a half years with just one man, just Don’s touch, just that familiar smell, just that one cock, I was invaded by a stranger. I was trembling, unable to stop, scared, keening and giggling and feeling alive again.
When Don called the next day from New York to say good morning, I could barely talk, my throat paralyzed by guilt. “Laryngitis,” I croaked. “Let me call you back later.” How would I ever face him? I had thrown away the best thing in my life . . . for what? For a hot night with a man I’d never see again. No. I’d done it for sex. To feel sexual again, to emerge from a cocoon of nothingness, where I felt isolated and ugly. I looked in the mirror to see if what I’d done was somehow written on my face. I saw a little abrasion from his unshaven stubble.
Don would know at once, I was sure. He would see it in my eyes, just as I would see it in his at once if he were unfaithful. I got home from the airport before he came in from the office—late, as he often was those days. I offered to do a frittata for dinner. He’d eaten, he said. I chattered away inanely about the shoes I hadn’t bought and the irresistible date and nut chocolate ice cream at Wil Wright’s. I’d bought a pint and eaten it all, one spoonful at a time, I confessed.