by Gael Greene
One might become ironic, but it was impossible to be jaded.
42
ON MOUNTAIN TIME
I LIVED MY LIFE IN THE EIGHTIES BETWEEN MEALS. EACH SUMMER WAS A long parentheses focused on my writing somewhere in the Hamptons—in whatever rented cottage I could afford that year. Americans were infinitely less shocked by explicit sex when my second novel, Doctor Love, came out in 1981.
I went on the road to promote Doctor Love, leaving a trail of newspaper clippings, boosting it briefly onto the best-seller lists. Then I moved to the beach for the summer for another try at writing Jamey’s story as fiction. Twenty-two publishers had already turned it down. They didn’t seem to like either the Prince of Porn or the Junk-Food Queen. “Nobody cares about your two characters,” my agent told me. Of course I took that personally. I knew some people found it hard to see beyond Jamie Gillis the porn star. Repugnance for porn colored their response to Jamey. As a writer, I had failed to capture the charm that had captivated me, perhaps because I was too angry with him for not letting my Henry Higgins turn him into My Fair Laddie. But had I made the fictional Upper East Side older woman who falls for him shallow and uninteresting, too?
“Most of the editors are women,” my agent pointed out. “I think the book upsets them, that a woman like you could fall for this guy. It’s too threatening.” I was determined to make my protagonists more compelling. After all, if people were fascinated by Hannibal Lecter, why not us?
Waking one Sunday morning in 1981, I was not exactly hungover, but I was ruing a dismal reviewing dinner the night before. I brought myself breakfast in bed on a tray—espresso and a too-generous chunk of my favorite Russian coffee cake from Zabar’s—and the Sunday Times. I could not get past one headline: CITY SCRIMPS TO FEED THE AGED. There was a photograph of a sad-faced old woman sitting in front of a partitioned plastic tray with food and some Styrofoam cups. It seemed there were 350 homebound elderly New Yorkers who got a hot lunch delivered every weekday, but government funds were inadequate to cover weekends and holidays. If Monday happened to be a holiday, some of these shut-ins—many of whom lived alone—would go without a meal for seventy-two hours. And the woman pictured was disabled, unable to get out of her third-floor walk-up except when her meal-delivery man carried her down on clinic day. She might save a banana or a slice of bread from Friday’s lunch for Saturday. Just $340 per person would buy weekend meals for a year, a social worker was quoted as saying.
My Russian coffee cake sat like a lump in my stomach. It wasn’t right that I lived a life of such delicious excess when aging, ailing people across town were so deprived—on the Upper East Side, no less. I called James Beard, knowing he was a spokesman for Vermont maple syrup and, I’d heard, all sorts of products. He’d seen the same story.
“Let’s fill Christmas baskets for these people,” I said.
“What about weekend meals?”
“Well, we’ll take care of that, too,” I responded without really thinking. It didn’t sound like much money. “Call everyone you can think of and I will, too.” I felt no one I knew could say no to helping the hungry. I started calling food-world pals: restaurant consultant George Lang, Sugar Foods executive Donald Tober, restaurant publicists Ed and Michael Gifford, Roger Yaseen (top gun of the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs—in my articles I referred to him as the “Wall Street voluptuary”). Some of them called their friends, too. Beard enlisted restaurant consultant and cookbook writer Barbara Kafka, who called Joe Baum and went through her Rolodex. We asked everyone to give $340. By Monday morning, our friends had pledged $35,000 and a truckload of Cookin’ Good chickens.
At the NYC Department for the Aging, Commissioner Janet Sainer came on the line. “Friends in the food world have pledged thirty-five thousand dollars and some chickens,” I said. “We want to pay for weekend and holiday meals for these homebound people, but you must promise not a dime will go for office expenses.” I’d heard stories of charity funds that spent more than they raised.
She jumped right on it, gambling that we were not delusional. “No problem,” she said. “We’re a city agency with funds for administrative needs. Your money will go only for meals.”
It turned out there were actually 6,500 homebound elderly New Yorkers getting weekday meal deliveries but nothing at all on weekends and holidays. Our modest funds bought Christmas dinner for thirteen thousand elderly neighbors who would otherwise have gone without. Throughout the city—in Harlem and Chinatown, in Bay Ridge, on Staten Island, on the Upper East Side (where there were thousands of impoverished elderly), voluntary centers opened their doors to cook the meals we’d bought.
I remember how thrilled we were at what we’d managed to do over a weekend. Now restaurateurs vowed to do more. Bloomingdale’s found a Harlem community center to pick up everything left in its bakery at the end of each day. Shun Lee’s owners, Michael Tong and T. T. Wang, initiated a campaign to get Chinese restaurateurs throughout the city to deliver meals to Chinatown community centers. We realized we had to organize. Janet Sainer asked her assistant Marcia Stein to channel our energy and keep us legal. We called ourselves Citymeals-on-Wheels. I reminded Marcia I could not solicit restaurateurs and cautioned her never to tell me who said yes and who declined. We would do a fund-raiser at Club A. We would have an auction of gourmand adventures money could not buy.
In Paris, Yanou Collart rallied the greatest chefs of France, hôteliers, the famous wine and champagne houses. She created priceless gourmand adventures for our first auction at Le Périgord. Our guests, smashed on their own rare bottles of wine, couldn’t resist a market trip with Paul Bocuse, lunch with the Troisgros family, a Sunday at home with Frédy Girardet. I auctioned a manila envelope stuffed with menus and memorabilia from the late Pavillon. It went to Ed Victor, the late Henri Soulé’s lawyer, for eight hundred dollars. New York’s editor, Ed Kosner, let me write a column about Citymeals, and checks poured in. “But money cannot buy family,” I wrote. “For some, loneliness is starvation too.” I dreamed that every family, every Cub Scout troop, every grade-school class or PTA—even banks and restaurants, grocery stores and canasta groups—would adopt a neighborhood shut-in. I felt a shiver of delight imagining the old woman lucky enough to be adopted by the employees of Zabar’s.
My adoption fantasy was never realized, although the ranks of volunteers who visit homebound seniors keeps growing. I soon became as obsessed with raising money for Citymeals as I had been with dancing or sex or seared foie gras. It was an incredible rush when I asked for ten thousand dollars and someone said yes.
The 1980s were a strange time, aptly dubbed the “Me Decade” by New York. Some of us were dancing on the edge of the bonfire. Some of us were dying. The growing AIDS plague, seemingly confined to gay men and IV-drug users, had not yet terrorized me and my free-loving friends, but we were growing nervous and more careful.
I wrote my reviews. I tried to keep up with the ecstatic flights and shocking tumbles, rushing to be first in print with the newest sizzle before it fizzed out. I usually danced after dinner. Night-world gatekeepers at the Sanctuary, the Roxy, and the Palladium seemed to have my name on the list. My faithful agent sent the revised version of my novel around again. I tried calling it Hard Candy. Still no takers. Jamey had long ago lost faith that there would be a book. Now I was beginning to lose mine. It had taken four years to write Blue Skies, five years to finish Doctor Love. Now I had nothing to show for all the years of living, transcribing, and writing this novel.
I knew I needed to publish another book. Joyce Carol Oates had probably published a dozen novels in the time I’d spent struggling to make my characters appealing. Since I had not surrendered to the computer age yet, it would take a year to redo the Jamey book yet again on my Royal standard. And if anyone bought it, another year would pass before it would be published. Maybe the Prince of Porn and the Junk-Food Queen were hopelessly unsympathetic people, as the rejection letters said. Maybe there was nothing I could do to make a reader care. It was
already 1984 and I had no contract. What could I write quickly? That was the summer of thirty-day-wonder books. Thin Thighs in 30 Days. 30 Days to a Tighter Bottom. Thirty Days to a Flat Abdomen. I created a proposal for Better Sex in 30 Days. The replies were maddening. Everyone wanted to keep a copy of the proposal, but no one wanted to publish my clever treatise.
“I don’t think it’s for us,” one editorial director wrote. “Needless to say, I’ve Xeroxed the material and am keeping it beside my bed.”
“Thanks for sending me Gael Greene’s proposal. It has changed my life,” the president of a small publishing house wrote. “Unfortunately, I’m surrounded by a group made up of feminists . . . and they won’t let me do it.”
“It is with great dismay that I must return the manuscript,” a top executive wrote, promising to collect a five-dollar readership fee from anyone at his office who asked to see the manuscript and a twenty-five-dollar fee for onetime use of a single technique from “anyone actually using any of the suggested techniques to improve their intimate interpersonal relationships.”
So much for a sure thing. Then someone pointed out to my agent that there was already a book called Thirty Days to Better Sex. I bought it and wept. It was so thin and serious and unimaginative compared to mine. I spent that summer fussing with the Jamey book again.
A year later, Prentice Hall, deciding its list needed some juice, bought the book. I dropped the thirty-day concept and rearranged my advice from anatomy for beginners to advanced sexual play for keeping a longtime relationship hot. I threw in a recipe for Chocolate Wickedness, designed a page of cards with sexual requests for shy people winning at strip poker to present to the loser, and outlined fantasy scenarios for those of limited imagination. Alas, Delicious Sex, a third of it devoted to “fork play” (foreplay at the table), was published just as news headlines were forecasting an imminent breakout of AIDS in heterosexuals. Prentice Hall didn’t want to seem irresponsible by dropping a “recipe book” for joyous sex into the marketplace. Discretion was the byword. The full-page ad in the Sunday Times Book Review looked very medical, as if it were for mail-order liver pills. It saddens me that Delicious Sex never got the workout of the 8-Week Cholesterol Cure. It was much more fun.
That winter, I read the ads for Hampton rentals with fading enthusiasm. Moving to the beach every summer with the hope of falling in love and writing my novels had reached a dead end. Every summer, there were the same parties, the same cast of characters—some I adored; some were amusing—the same men, along with their new wives or their new ex-wives or their newest playmates. A friend said she would join me and share the rent wherever I went as long as it was in the United States. Where should I go? I needed a place that was not too hot in August and stirringly beautiful, with a little bit of culture, a reasonable source of single men, and disco dancing. Many friends suggested Aspen. It had mountains and men, a famous music festival, and men, and discos and men to dance with.
Once we had moved out of our first rental, a Woody Creek house with bats that swooped into our hair, my friend and I settled into an overpriced hovel on a not-yet-gentrified street, eager to get into an Aspen groove. We had decided the summer was an ideal time to get thin. Every night, we took turns broiling skinless chicken breasts and tossing a salad with just lemon or wine vinegar. Then, cranky and craving sugar, we headed for the bars, where there were, in fact, a wealth of great-looking gray wolves, really fit from mountain life, single guys our age or not that much older. Susan, my roommate, was great at bar talk. I was not. I tried to pretend I was a reporter writing a story on life in Aspen, but it didn’t work. I was at a loss on a bar stool. I would wander home alone. Once, I found the oven still on and a chicken breast turned to charcoal.
One day, the two of us were in town, trying not to think about lunch, when Susan spotted a man she knew from college seated at a table on the deck of a restaurant called the Weinerstube. The two of them chatted. I talked to his friend, a tall, tan, dramatic-looking woman named Darlene. “Have you been hiking yet?” she asked.
Hiking. Oh yes, that was why everyone was clunking around in those high-top boots with tank treads. “Not yet,” I admitted.
Darlene took me hiking up Hunter Creek trail. Susan begged off on the grounds of having bad feet. Up was easy enough even for me, a city creature who had worked out with a trainer every day for a decade. Down was scary, with rubble that moved when you stepped on it. Still, I was thrilled I could do it. I felt like an athlete.
“I have a friend who says he knows you from New York,” Darlene told me the next day. “You went to a party at his loft once with your husband.”
She introduced him at the bar that night. Steven Richter. I didn’t remember the party or the face, but he looked good—tan, with a hippie mustache and a fabulous smile, the top of his brown hair lightened by the sun. He seemed very Western in an old tweed jacket and baggy worn jeans, drinking Mexican beer from a bottle held low at the crotch between swigs. I figured that was western, an old mining town thing. Darlene invited him to hike with us the next day.
Steven wore frayed cutoffs and had great legs. He taught me a few downhill tricks. You needed to lean back so you would fall on your ass and not on your knees. Funny how we both expected I would fall.
I invited him to dinner that evening. I can’t imagine what I was thinking, but I served him a skinless breast of chicken. At least it wasn’t carbonized. In his honor, we dressed the salad and opened a bottle of red wine. That helped. I discovered he was a Bronx-born cowboy, very smart. He didn’t say much, but when he spoke, his comments were pointed and witty.
He spent the night. Next morning, he was still there. He liked my coffee. I thawed a bagel from the freezer. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Eventually, he went off to his job at the Aspen Art Museum.
I was wowed. How lucky can you be? He was not a foreigner I would have to adjust to. He was a homeboy. We shared big-city paranoia and a love of pizza. In New York, men are always leaving. Sometimes they have to get home to their wives or their dogs, or to their special pillows for their asthma, or because they can’t wear the same shirt two days in a row. Once, I dallied with a guy who had to go home to walk his parrot. Another date had claustrophobia in anything smaller than a king-size bed. Another’s mother would be upset if she called and he did not answer. Steven Richter was not in a hurry to leave. And he returned for dinner the next night. I was ready with a big sirloin, a baked potato, and garlic bread. I think he went home seven or eight days later to do the laundry. I went along. By that time, we were an item.
He lived down valley, in affordable Basalt, as many Aspen workers do. His zucchini had taken over the vegetable garden in his absence. I said I could do all kinds of things with zucchini—pancakes, frittata, crisps, grated zucchini cakes. We were an odd couple, and I think that was part of the attraction. I was decidedly, incurably an indoors person. Steven had become a mountain man in the twenty-five years he’d been in Aspen. He’d gone there to ski, worked as a busboy at the Red Onion, then as a bartender, and spent two summers fighting fires in Alaska. He would go back to New York just to make enough money as a graphics designer to spend the winter skiing. Finally, he had settled in Aspen, working as a carpenter and contractor, remodeling old Victorian houses. He specialized in kitchens. Ah, Fate. By the time we met, he was working at the Aspen Art Museum, designing and installing shows. I thought it was not too late to get a little outdoorsy myself. Soon it was my feet in those lace-up tank-treads boots. At one point, I even signed up for cross-country ski lessons—I thought strength from years of aerobics would make up for lack of grace and balance. The instructor was discouraging. “I’ve never seen anyone less flexible,” he said. (I’ll admit I’d heard this before, though not in an Achilles-tendon context.)
Steven was surprised to hear I’d never gone camping. “It’s not because I don’t want to go camping,” I said. “It’s just that people seem to think I’m not the type.” He borrowed a four-wheel-drive truck so we could cli
mb right up the pass to Lincoln Gulch, his favorite camping site. He pulled off the trail near a hidden knoll beside a stream and began to unload the tent, a roll-up mattress, down pillows, patchwork quilts, and a bottle of red wine. He handed me potatoes to peel and slice, while he built the fire to grill our steaks in a huge black iron skillet. It grew dark and the smell of potatoes frying in butter was dizzying. There were more stars than sky above—millions of stars, a few of them streaking across the sky. Undearneath my jeans and sweater, I wore a red satin teddy.
I began to commute back and forth to Aspen as often as I could, arriving with enough eating research to write four or five columns for New York. His friends turned out at the Explore bookstore for an autograph signing of Delicious Sex and bought copies by the half dozen.
I noticed Steven had not read the copy I autographed for him. When I mentioned this, he said, “I don’t have to. I live with the original.”
I could not decide if that line revealed something wonderful about me or something unknowable about him. But I forgot to worry about it as I headed back to New York table games.
Juliette’s Grandma’s Fruit Crumble
In summer, I use blueberries, plums, or nectarines; peaches are okay, too, except you have to peel them. In the fall, I use tart apples like Granny Smiths, unpeeled and sliced thin. I sometimes mix the apples with half a cup of slivered dried apricots. This is the low-fat version. Needless to say, it’s better with butter.
3 pints blueberries or 5 cups sliced plums, nectarines, or Granny Smith apples
1/2 cup sugar (plus 4 tbsp. more if the plums are very sour)
3 tbsp. freshly squeezed orange juice
1 tbsp. quick-cooking tapioca
3/4 cup all-purpose flour