10
Torta ai Fichi e Limone
In the years since I had bailed Emma out of that Boston jail—a rare altruistic act that sprang from a motivation I still don’t understand— we wended our way to friendship. We took to our mutual affection like a pair of feral animals stuck on a raft in the middle of a wide and frightening sea. Neither of us trusted the other, yet we recognized kinship in each other’s alien sensibilities, and we saw the value of coming together, adrift as we were in a hostile world. What began as a curious détente had over time morphed into wary caring and then to devotion. Emma and I loved each other with the ferocity borne of a twisted shared history. I have no other explanation for our relationship.
After her unremarkable Pennistone years, Emma grew into being an exquisitely skilled, absurdly successful, and intensely reclusive adult. It was a flowering that stemmed from a rocky origin: her first panic attack. Shortly after her Boston arrest, Emma waited at the Pleasant Street Station on the MBTA Green Line and felt the earth shudder a seismic tremor under her feet. A Titan’s hand gripped her rib cage. Her breakfast swirled and flipped in her tiny guts. Stars blinked in her eyes; invisible seashells clapped her ears, submerging her in a white roar. Emma fell to her knees, ripping her fishnets and her dignity.
Emma took one look at that chest-clenching, panting, and pained experience and she made a life where she wouldn’t have to leave her apartment. The day of her first panic attack, she quit her job at a tony Back Bay framing establishment and secured employment as a phone sex operator. She sent one of her lovers to buy her a phone
and a headset at RadioShack. She then gathered her vulvar ceramic vases, her EDP Wasp synthesizer, her megaphone, and her blue plastic kiddie pool (but not the case of canned frijoles negro), and she dumped them in the trash. Emma bid adieu to her dreams of being the next big thing in spoken word poetry and Karen Finley- style performance art and repudiated all creative outlets that required physical presence. In their place, Emma started painting. Tender deBris is dead! Long live Emma Absinthe!
Crowned with her headset, her brush a scepter in her hand, Emma was king of her domain. She was in control of her breath, her work, and her life. Most important, she could multitask. As a phone sex operator, she’d slip into a character—film noir dominatrix, doe- eyed college girl, Southern-fried frisky housewife—and she’d spin sweaty, semeny yarns that developed a cult following of horny men who, credit cards on file and dicks in hot hands, would cream themselves to her dulcet tones. In those days, the mid-to-late ’80s, phone sex operators got a flat fee of $5 per call, no matter how long the conversation lasted. Emma saw her job as a kind of game: get the guy off as quickly as possible with maximum enjoyment. She had the preternatural ability to discern a man’s most purple desires from a few words and to tailor a story to fit his dirtiest, most inexpressible longing. The company Emma worked for loved her because she was reliable and available; the squelchy-dicked men loved her because she wove fantasies that spoke to their tenebrous sweet spots; and Emma loved it because she could draw and paint as much as she wanted from the safety of her apartment while making pots of money.
As the phone sex model changed from paying by the call to paying by the minute, Emma shifted with it. For all her Jessica- McClintock-furbelow past and Goth-inflected sartorial present, Emma was motivated by capitalism. Making money now meant keeping men hanging on the telephone, so Emma rewrote her script. She still divined the man’s murky desires and dragged them to conversational light, but now she amplified them, extended them, turned them luxurious, rococo. She kept those men squelching away on the other end of the phone for an obscene length of time. Men spent the kind
of money on Emma’s voice that they would on a firm-fleshed and mucous-membraned woman. It was a marvel, really.
As she talked, Emma painted, and she became hard, glittering, diamond-like. She drew and she painted, and somehow, without leaving her apartment, she found lovers who would bring her the things she needed to live her frugal, productive life. Having the appetite of an aerialist, Emma hardly ate. Her rent was low; she lived in a tiny two-room apartment over a Chinese restaurant, waking and painting and talking and fucking her string of lovers, male and female, to the scent of moo shu pork, egg rolls, and General Tso’s chicken. This probably aided Emma in not eating. And, of course, Emma rarely went anywhere, which is a thrifty way to live.
Within a few years, Emma had built a body of work strong enough to get a show at a small gallery in Back Bay. She’d finagled her connections to get some dealer to visit, view, and fall in love with her first set of self-portraits, a show she called “Juvenile Deliquescence,” a series of paintings of Emma as the titular heroines in the recognizable style of famous children’s book illustrations.
Emma as Dorothy from Kansas, Emma as the Lorax, Emma as Alice holding a querulous flamingo, Emma as the baby bear finding Goldilocks asleep in her bed. But in each of the paintings, painstakingly done in the style of the original, Emma painted herself as an adult woman, her face showing that exquisite torment that could only be orgasm.
It was the economic boom time of the first Clinton administration, and Emma’s cheerfully subversive work sold like tech stocks. So many people had so much money, and they were not chary about spending it. It was win-win-web for Emma: the tech explosion that brought her sacks of cash came from the people who gave us dial- up modems and the internet, which made Emma’s increasingly agoraphobic life ever easier. Each new year saw new ephemeral inventions, new ways of being, and a new understanding of what it meant to be human, and each new thing increased the possibility that Emma would, indeed, never have to leave her apartment or interact in person with anyone.
About the time that Clinton was finding novel uses for Monica Lewinsky’s vagina, Emma used the ’Net to find and secure a loft in
Hell’s Kitchen. I think, though I could be wrong, that, previous to testifying at my trial, the last time she left her home was when she moved into this Hell’s Kitchen loft in 1997. For example, when a fire broke out in an upstairs apartment, Emma climbed onto her fire escape, lit a cigarette, and moved to the ledge as the firefighters tromped down the stairs. That was about as far as she could travel into the frightening, crepuscular world that lay beyond the safety of her doors.
Happily holed up in her home, Emma cultivated the life of a latter- day Emily Dickinson. People tend to think of Dickinson as a hermit, but she wasn’t. She was like a spider: a master manipulator who used her cloistered charm to bring people close. As Dickinson’s local fame grew, people came to visit her and hear her read her poetry.
She would sit in a room at the top of her Amherst home, her ghost voice calling down to her guests. As time passed, Dickinson wore white, wrote orgiastic odes to death, and grew slowly ever more disembodied—pure voice, an apparitional presence that drew the living with their sad, moribund meat-suits to prostrate themselves at her words. Like Dickinson, Emma made others come to her, and in her studio she held court while others kissed her ring and scurried to curry favor.
The internet enabled Emma. Anything she didn’t have, she could order in, and the more money she made, the more she could do from the sanctity of her loft. You see, Emma is a rarity; she is a woman artist who is her own cottage industry, supporting a staff of helpy helpertons that enable her ceaseless capitalist creations. These people do the work of Emma Absinthe Enterprises: the public relations, the organization, the curating, the myth-building, the shipping, the receiving, and the thousand other sundry things that keep Emma famous and expensive. As Emma’s enterprise grew, she rented the loft below her studio to house her costume-makers and her prop builders, her Gal Friday’s office and her Gal Friday’s computer, her flat files and her mock-ups, her canvases waiting to be stretched and her canvases prepped with gesso and linseed oil.
Emma has, I think, visited this secondary loft thrice—once for ten days when she repainted the walls and sanded the floors of her living loft; the other two times occurred as she got ready for that
temporary move. Emma, disembodied and regal, relies on Skype, computer cameras, and the fanatical devotion she inspires in the people around her. She is very rarely disappointed.
Thus it is that the woman I’d bailed out of jail three decades ago is also the person whom Art in America called “arguably the greatest American Realism painter working today,” a coup, I pointed out to Emma, because nowhere in that clause did the words “female,”
“woman,” or “feminine” appear. Emma has, improbably, become my best friend, my closest ally, and the only human who knew me almost as well as I knew myself. Naturally, it would be she who saved me from myself until she didn’t.
Two weeks after Eat & Drink fired me, after my banana bread bender, after Emma told me to get off my ass, I returned to work. I first tended to my book. I had edits to make, drafts to review, desires to stoke. Then, in the interest of my career and to quell boredom, I decided I would remake myself as a food writer, and not be solely a food critic. After nearly two decades of hiding under wigs and caftans, I’d had enough of living my professional life with the cloak and dagger (the cloak at any rate; I could never quite relinquish my dagger). I would reveal my true physical identity with the publication of Voracious. My book publisher loved this idea, of course, because I was seasoning the publication of my book with a spicy revelation. My publisher—for it wasn’t just magazines that were feeling the cold, hard economic pinch of the internet—danced a little jig over my news.
Before Voracious, you couldn’t find a picture of my face. Not on my book jackets. Not in the magazines, not in the newspapers. Not on the web. And, believe me, it was a job of work policing this moratorium on images. Keeping my identity a secret from the restaurant public—whether the people dining at the tables, running the front of the house, or toiling in the kitchen—was imperative to my work as a critic because only if I was just anybody could I be assured of getting just anybody’s dining experience. This “anybodyness” is why Gael Greene wore her Bella Abzug hats for so many years, why Sam Sifton shape-shifted in a string of bland button-downs, why Ruth Reichl employed wigs. (Food writers are, by and large, a plain
sort; so dowdy, like high school principals.) You can’t let people know who you are or you will be treated unlike everyone else, and this is not what you want. I hid from the limelight, and it pained me. Such are the sacrifices of a food critic, at least until she’s done with it all and can rip off her wig and tell the blazing world to go fuck itself.
I reworked my career, and as 2008 became 2009, I returned to the slog through hip-deep oatmeal that is freelancing, something I hadn’t done since I’d moved to New York two decades earlier.
Career-wise, I had been extraordinarily lucky. Hired out of college at the Boston Phoenix, I freelanced only a few months before my one- year stint at the short-lived Gotham Ace, and during this lean time, I’d had the lofty cushion of my inheritance. In 1990, Noir hired me directly from Ace; in 1997, I moved seamlessly to Eat & Drink, where I started as a featured writer and became a contributing editor after Ravenous won the James Beard Award in 2000. Contributing Editor is a largely ceremonial title, but it confers respect and money. I’d had a shockingly easy life for a writer—until 2008, when I got shit- canned.
Now, at the age of forty-six, I had to hustle. I’d always written the odd piece here or there for other publications—you might remember the op-ed in the Times on Crisco, American comfort foods, and trans fats in 2006, a prescient piece where I called for a ban that received raging pushback. It’s rare I write about healthy food, but I find Crisco and its elastic-waist, artificial culture so repulsive that any excuse to revile it felt like a gift. Middle America and its widening asses and widening car seats and widening highways needs to turn off Paula Deen, step away from the television, and take a long, hard look at its naked, pocky flesh in the mirror. If the denizens of the wide swath of states from Ohio to Nevada were filling their hot-pocket pie-holes with foie gras and burrata, I wouldn’t say anything. Those foods may be terrible for your waistline, but they don’t cause cancer, and they taste divine. I’ll never understand people choosing to eat soulless foods—monsters all, say I, the cannibal.
Freelancing meant that suddenly I had to rely on my wits and my charm to make my money. I had the book coming out, I had consistently kept up my blog, and I had the severance package that, while far from strictly “generous,” was something. I was not in critical
financial shape, but one does get accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and I’d grown complacent living on a fat paycheck. One enjoys purchasing airline tickets when one wants, one feels validated when one’s rituals include hideously expensive face creams, one feels better in Ferragamo pumps, and one likes to avail oneself of all these items while still having the psychological freedom of a tidy nest egg. I had to get hustling.
I thought it would be unappealing; rather, the hustle was energizing. I did some fancy strategizing and managed to monetize my blog—and can we for one moment ponder the violent deformity of that phrase, “monetize my blog”; it’s so grotesque that Diane Arbus could photograph it. On the one hand, paid content makes me shudder. On the other, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that duping the slathering hordes into buying things didn’t thrill me. To my credit, I never plugged any product I myself didn’t like. I mean, every kitchen should have a proper hand blender; Cuisinart makes a fine one.
Every kitchen should have a quality eight-inch knife; Wüsthof knives were in my kitchen. Everyone needs a Champagne stopper, a microplane zester, and a laser thermometer—why shouldn’t I guide people in their choices? The ethics of bloggers being paid to write about the wonders of a specific Dutch oven is no different from magazines offering glossy four-color consumer porn of items from companies that pay for advertising. Everyone does it. Bloggers just do it for themselves, and that’s something I always endorse.
During this time of crafting together my financial crazy quilt, I still dated Gil, the ousted publisher of Eat & Drink. Gil was like my stateside Marco, minus Marco’s glowering conflict and tortured conscience. Energetic and staunchly nice, Gil was there when I called him, many more times than not, regardless of his marriage status. I like a man who can keep his commitments. Let me rephrase that: I like a man who can keep his commitments to me. Gil and I had come a long way from the days when I taught him the saline pleasures of shad roe, the sweet ecstasy of eel, the sea-swept delectation of abalone, the bitter euphoria of being bound tight to a chair, blindfolded, naked in abnegation, waiting to be hand-fed a delicacy. Gil was fixed as a North Star, and as much as I appreciated
the unfettered sensuality of our time together, I believe I appreciated the constancy more.
Thus it was in late June 2009 that Gil, ex-publisher now semi- retired, and I, ex-staffer reborn as freelancer, boarded his sailboat to sail across Gardiners Bay, a lovely half-moon of ocean fitting between the North and the South Forks of Long Island. Gil’s family had long owned a house on Shelter Island, and though theirs was a modest in-island cottage, Gil’s own home was a sprawling white- wood minimalist villa, all right angles, clean lines, and the thick scent of discretionary income. Gil kept his sailboat, a Hunter 45CC, at the Island Boatyard and Marina; this fiberglass cruiser was the love of his life. Sailing it, Gil radiated a nearly postcoital joy.
A well-appointed boat, Gil’s Hunter had a charming galley with a three-burner gas stove and the most adorable oven. I packed the makings for a delightful lunch: a chilled white gazpacho; a savory frittata with rabbit sausage, potatoes, and fresh herbs; a salad of ripe melon, arugula, and mint; and a wonderful torta ai ficht e limone, which is a terribly fancy-looking but ridiculously easy pastry that eats like a lemon cake baked inside a jam tart. I brought the gazpacho and the pastry crust, cooking the remainder of the meal in the galley, a most efficient little kitchen—I’m quite sorry to have lost it. I brought a bottle of really nice Prosecco to serve with the meal and a flask of Poli Miele, a lilting grappa liqueur flavored with honey and herbs, to complement dessert.
The weather was guileless as a child’s drawing. The sea was calm, and Gil and I ate as the breeze blew and the sails luffed rhythmically. We didn’t chat much, intent on enjoying the feel of the boat rocking below us, the sun on our shoulders, and the slow progression of flavors and textures—the fatty cool of the gazpacho, the fragrant weight of the frittata, the fragile crunch of the salad, and the delicate zip of the torta. Some meals, simple as they may be, unfurl with the sacred precision of art, and this was one. Nature had conspired to give us a beautiful day, Gil had used his skill to give us a beautiful sail, and I had made a beautiful meal.
Now all I had to do was wait for Gil’s anaphylactic shock to kick in before I pushed him overboard and cut out his tongue.
