The summer after my first year of graduate school I hoped to avoid the usual grind of temporary secretarial work, and so I took out an ad in the classifieds section of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, broadcasting my skills as a researcher and writer without specifying what kind of research and writing I could do.
I got a call a couple of days after the ad appeared. “Did you go to Princeton?” asked the mildly astonished voice at the other end.
“I did indeed,” I assured him.
When he told me his name, I shamefully fell back on stereotypes: short, dark, Italian. He described his project, which didn’t sound up my alley at all. A sprawling four-volume guide to the great outdoors, these were to be sort of like the Mobil travel guides but for people who were backpackers, hikers, skiers, fishermen, kayakers, campers—all those outdoorsy types who never much interested me at all. But he mentioned a weekly salary that was more than enough to pay my rent and then some. And added, “These will be backlist books for years to come.”
I had no idea what a backlist book was, but we agreed to meet at a burger place on the Upper East Side. When I asked how I would recognize him, he said he would be reading the Times at a table toward the front. I told him I would be wearing a blue bandanna (it was the only way I could keep my frizzy hair in check in summer weather) and jeans. I added: “I will most likely be the tallest woman in the place.”
And so we met at JG Melon’s on East 76th Street and Third Avenue, an establishment still in business decades later. I immediately spied a good-looking man, dining solo, and almost cowering behind a copy of the Times, held up to cover half his face.
The source of his anxiety became immediately apparent: a six-foot-tall blonde, wearing a bandanna around her neck, braying loudly at the bar. She had the kind of hair a journalist once called “fried, dyed, and swept to the side” in describing a Texas socialite.
Mr. Landi relaxed visibly when I strode forth with my hand outstretched. And I had to do some quick recalibrating of my own ethnically grotesquely biased expectations in sizing up the man before me (but please remember that I had briefly dated a real baby mafioso). He looked Italian, yes, but recycled by way of J.Crew. About a half-dozen years older than I, I calculated, and perhaps a couple of inches taller, or so I would discover when we left the restaurant. Broad shoulders, dark hair, and a mouth that reminded me of Sandro Botticelli’s in a famous self-portrait, though with none of the Renaissance artist’s heavy-lidded arrogance. He seemed, above all, like a grown-up, which was not a quality I would ascribe to most of my grad-school crowd since we all seemed to be doing our best to prolong adolescence—and enjoying it immensely.
Over lunch, he further described the great outdoors guides, for which he’d secured a contract from Bantam Books, and none other than Bantam’s famed founder Oscar Dystel was to be his editor. Problem was, the partner, yet another of those heirs to a publishing fortune who had graduated from Princeton, was not able to contribute much by way of practical help, like writing. His wife had discovered my ad in the PAW. And so Mr. Landi (I’m sorry but somehow I can’t bring myself to use his given name, though we are still friends) needed a scribe to contribute essays to add to the practical information contained in the guides.
This was way outside my areas of interest or expertise, but who cared, as long as I could get to meet regularly with my handsome employer and bask in his aura of manly competence? And so that summer I wrote essays on the Mountain Men, on Native American tribes, on exotic animals like bald eagles and caribou. I scoured Butler library for source material, and wrote in a voice that I hoped was not too academic, but I am sure the essays were hopelessly long-winded and as I recall most wound up cut from the final volumes (I no longer own copies, but surprisingly they are still available on Amazon).
We met frequently, in coffee shops, in the park, in his apartment in an impressive Stanford White building on 76th Street off Fifth Avenue (for months I would assume it had a bedroom or two off the living room, but it turned out to be a studio). I learned a few important facts—like, there was no girlfriend in the picture, he’d gone to a respectable college, he worked for a large media conglomerate before striking out on his own with the great outdoors guides (at one point he showed me the contract, and I was suitably impressed by the sum doled out upfront).
And I felt a powerful physical attraction, as did he, or so I hoped. But I was not about to make a move while still on the payroll (I may have been a little fast, but I wasn’t stupid), and he was equally circumspect.
In August, I signed on for my second years of classes at Columbia and a few weeks later held a party for friends at my parents’ new apartment on 93rd Street. They were gone for a couple of weeks, I’m not sure where, and were always quite indulgent about lending their premises for low-impact debaucheries. I invited the usual crowd, extending an invitation to Mr. Landi, not sure how he would fit in with a group of aspiring academics. One of whom, sure enough, held forth on the defenestration of Prague. But he circulated easily, showing no signs of boredom or impatience, and at the end of the evening I made us coffee and served it in my mother’s elegant, mismatched china cups, which I still have to this day.
I can’t say who made the first move, but we ended up in my parents’ king-size bed for the next five days (I won’t go anywhere near the Freudian implications of this), pausing only to graze from the fridge or order up Chinese. No doubt we included cold sesame noodles with cucumber, and so I offer a recipe from Epicurious.com here in the hopes it will recharge your libido as it did ours.
Cold Sesame Noodles with Cucumber
8 ounces Chinese egg noodles, cappellini, or pad thai– style rice noodles
1 tablespoon peanut oil
1/4 cup peanut butter
1/2 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 teaspoons toasted sesame seeds
1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons freshly grated ginger, or 1 tablespoon ground ginger
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon sriracha or other red chile sauce
2 Persian cucumbers, 1 grated, 1 thinly sliced
1 scallion, chopped
1/4 cup salted roasted peanuts, chopped
1/4 cup fresh cilantro leaves, chopped
Step 1
Bring a pot of water to a boil. Prepare a bowl of ice water.
Step 2
Cook the noodles in boiling water until al dente, 3 to 5 minutes. Drain and transfer to a bowl of ice water and soak for 5 minutes, until well chilled. Drain again, return to the bowl, toss with the peanut oil, and set aside.
Step 3
In a large bowl, whisk together the peanut butter, sesame oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame seeds, honey, ginger, garlic, red pepper flakes, and sriracha. Fold in the grated cucumber, half the scallion, and half the peanuts. Add the chilled pasta and toss to coat thoroughly. Transfer to a serving bowl, twirling the pasta into a nest shape. Top with the sliced cucumber, cilantro, and the remaining scallion and peanuts.
Indeed I did. I still recall coming across a volume called "Napoleon, etair0il un Macon?" (aka Mason)....you could lose your mind in Butler Library. I think more than a few probably did.
Thank you for sharing another memory.