Oh, bliss and delight! Those first few weeks of falling in love, when I waltzed around my tiny apartment on West 107th Street (my third but not the last during the Columbia years), hugging myself, singing along with Linda Ronstadt, “Love has no pride….”
Generally, I took the M110 and Fifth Avenue buses to his place on 76th Street, just off Fifth Avenue, which then as now felt to me like such rarefied territory that I feared getting busted for wearing shoes from Macy’s. His apartment was even smaller than mine, but it had a handsome, if nonworking, fireplace, and generous bay windows overlooking a garden in the back. He had two frisky cats, not the most aromatic of assets in a studio apartment. One took an immediate dislike to me, which would continue throughout our relationship, and peed in my shoes after our first night together in his place.
What was it I liked so much about this man? I try to remember now that we’ve been divorced for nearly a quarter-century. He was, as mentioned, smashingly handsome, so much so that the vice-president for Estée Lauder, who lived in his building, asked him to pose for test shots to advertise Aramis, a new fragrance for men the company was launching that year. Snooty little me, much to my regret during the lean years yet to come, said, “Oh, no, you don’t want to debase yourself like that!” What was I thinking???
On the intellectual front, he seemed to possess sufficient heft to pass muster with my overeducated friends. He claimed to have once landed a book contract for a biography of Edmund Wilson (why was this book never completed? who was the publisher? why didn’t I ask more questions?) It would be years before I learned that he was fudging about the source of his college degree, and by then I was so deep in the soup that I was drowning.
But none of this matters during those early heady days, when you are blinded by moonbeams and your head is full of pixie dust. I finally screwed up the courage to ask him to my apartment, of which I was certainly not ashamed, just wary of luring him too far out of his comfort zone. And sure enough, when the taxi dropped him at Amsterdam and 107th, he called from a pay phone on the corner. “Am I near your place?” he asked in a fearful whisper. “There’s a Puerto Rican funeral home on the corner!” That was most likely the night I made him my disgustingly simple linguine with clam sauce (recipe below).
And then after a couple of months it was time to meet the parents
Neither my mother nor father had much interest in art. Though my mom dutifully subscribed to the Metropolitan Seminars in Art and took me to museums as a kid, the works on the walls of our various apartments in New York and the house in Montauk were singularly dreary. We had Great Aunt Ella’s heavily varnished painting of a marble bust of Lorenzo de Medici (what was Lorenzo doing in a suburb of Detroit?), an equally shellacked and earnest still life by the wife of one of my father’s business colleagues, and a large abstract painting by another of his friends, Bert, who had told us the way to gauge a really good abstraction was if you could hang it upside down and it still made sense. We had no coffee table books of the sort that seemed to be de rigeur in upper-middle-class living rooms, but I do recall a book called Art Afterpieces by Ward Kimball, which featured the author’s doctored versions of famous paintings, such as Gainsborough’s Pinkie brandishing the Russian flag or the Mona Lisa in pink plastic curlers.
So my pursuit of an advanced degree in art history probably left them a bit bewildered.
Of much greater concern was my unmarried status at the age of 26. My mother would frequently implore, “Don’t you want the security of a husband? Don’t you want to feel protected?” Or she might intimate darkly, “Your father and I can’t retire until we see you settled,” as though my perpetual single status condemned them to a life of drudgery right up to the grave. (And where was my brother through all this? Safely “settled” in Kansas, tenured at the university from the age of 28, thoroughly uninterested in maintaining family connections. He was not the kind of brother you turned to if you were having parent problems.)
So when I brought Mr. Landi home, there was an almost palpable ripple of hope a relief. Picture my parents then, on a fall evening on West End Avenue: my mother wearing one of her ruffled hostess-y palazzo pants outfits, scarlet nails and lips, black high-heeled sandals, pouf-y blonde hair from her weekly wash-and-set at an Upper East Side salon, to which my father drove her every Saturday. My dad in a tweedy sports coat, open-necked shirt, polyester slacks, and those clodhopper slip-ons called Hush Puppies. And me? Oddly, I have no idea how I dressed in those years, other than jeans and high-heeled boots, though some photos (which I will share in time) show me wearing demure black skirts and body-hugging sweaters. At 125 pounds and nearly six feet in heels, I may have cut an occasionally dashing figure. I can remember standing in front of the Woolworth’s at 79th and Broadway one winter evening, waiting for the uptown bus, when a Black guy reeled out of the pool parlor upstairs and yelled, “Hey, baby, you standin’ so tall and lookin’ so good, you must be the cause of the crime rate goin’ up!”
And Mr. Landi? Well, Mr. Landi was the Aramis man manqué.
After one drink my mother could turn alarmingly flirtatious, as my father was sliding into genial pomposity at the far end of the table—on his third scotch or second glass of wine. He was seldom offensively drunk and often slipped off to bed around 8:30, awakening at five to listen to CBS news on his transistor radio. I’m guessing my mom would have made lamb stew or boeuf bourguignon, her two party specialties. The table would have been set with a lace cloth and her Royal Danish silverplate. We had gilt-trimmed ashtrays (everyone but my dad smoked) and little individual salt and pepper shakers.
Mr. Landi and my mother hit it off embarrassingly well. At a certain point she passed him the breadbasket, asking, “Would you like a roll across the table?” At another, she declared, “You know what you have? You have coglione. Do you know what those are?”
Of course he did.
Did I feel my future hopes and dreams sputtering low, like the candles?
Not really. That was my mom. She was part of the package, take it or leave it.
In the kitchen between dinner and dessert, she looked at me sternly. “Don’t fuck this up.”
And I didn’t, not for many many years.
Disgustingly Easy Linguine and White Clam Sauce
Yes, you can make this from real clams (which run to about 10 bucks a pound in my part of the world), but the canned variety make this a satisfying quick dinner for two.
1 Tbs. butter
2 Tbs. finely chopped parley
Pinch of dried thyme
1 garlic clove, finely minced
1 can minced clams (Snow’s or Gorton’s), 6.5 oz
6 oz. linguine
1) Melt butter in small saucepan. Add parsley, thyme, and garlic and cook for about 1 minute. Dump in clams, juice and all. Heat on low but be careful not to boil or clams will become tough.
2) Cook pasta in salted boiling water until al dente. Drain and serve with sauce on top
People will tell you that real Italian chefs never serve seafood sauces with parmesan, but I like this with a dusting of grated cheese (pecorino or Romano is good too) and several generous grinds of black pepper on top.
it looks like he has the Botticelli lips
very entertaining!!!
I still remember that delicious pasta, Ann.