LONG: How I Gave my Heart to the Restaurant Business
Elizabeth & Keith Falkner
I found this on the NYTimes site:
CHAPTER ONE
How I Gave My Heart to the Restaurant Business
By KAREN HUBERT ALLISON
The Ecco Press
Born to eat, born to cook," Slav Czesny, astrologer, sighed as he looked
up from his ephemeris.
"Any road you take will lead you back to food. Sun, Venus and
Mercury in Virgo at the midheaven."
Slav looked up at me from behind his bifocals, shrugging. "For
better or worse, from now on, your
life is a soup bone."
The cosmic checkup confirmed what I already suspected. We were
sitting in my kitchen. I lived in a
railroad flat in the East Village where I had a sunny front
room I used as my studio, a bedroom and a
large purple and green kitchen with a bathtub big enough for
keeping lobsters alive overnight. I was
three months away from earning my Master of Fine Arts, trying
to finish enough canvases to mount
an exhibition of still lifes that would stand as my thesis:
sweating apples, oozing cheese, crumbling
breads. The completed paintings hung on the wall: Napoleons
for My Mother, Figs Seducing Baked
Apple, Canadian Cheddar Meets Slab Bacon, Hot Chocolate and
Custard Pie Discuss the News.
As for the dozen unfinished canvases, it seemed that every
time I sat down to paint, I got up to cook
instead.
By the age of twenty-four I had already fricasseed my way
through Julia, volumes I and II, flirted
with vegetarianism, fallen in love with beef marrow, goose
liver, port wine and triple cream cheeses.
I had uncovered the secrets of pate brisee and worn out the
treads of my pasta machine.
I had been bred for a life of gallery shmoozing, not cooking.
My parents, through hard work,
sacrifice and clever deal-making, had successfully pursued a
lifetime of collecting and selling early
twentieth-century art. Some parents wish for a boy, others for
a doctor or lawyer. Mine wanted an
artist. I had hoped Slav would predict a future both my mother
and I could live with.
Slav's heavy-lidded eyes bulged with the urgency of celestial
information. He looked up at me
through his bifocals, hummed and agreed with himself. He was
absorbed in the configuration of my
planets, spread out like stellar Rorschachs.
"Moon in Taurus. House of comfort, digestion, rich foods." He
leaned closer. "Wake up, you silly
girl, and smell the baguettes. Change is in the wind,
Kitterina Kittridge." He closed his worn book.
"Culminates in a year or two. A few rough spots down the pike
after that, but it won't last. You'll
always be able to stir a pot and make a buck. You were born
with food in your fingers. Born to eat,
born to cook."
Instead of painting, I was a foodie madwoman caught up in a
cooking frenzy. I spent the whole
week planning my Saturday night dinner parties when I invited
graduate students and teachers to my
home and cooked my heart out for them. It didn't matter that I
wasn't much of a conversationalist,
that I dried up like zwieback when guests discussed political
issues or their root canal operations. I
didn't have to talk, I cooked. People were happy at my dinner
parties. Lovers cuddled and danced,
friends got drunk and arm wrestled, advertising majors argued
politics. I transported them all, via
boeuf en daube with caramelized parsnips, to the streets of
Paris, and with bigoli al ragu di polpi, to
the canals of Venice. One weekend I served rich Czarist
Russian fare; the next, post-revolutionary
pirogies and roasted root vegetables as a paean to Marx.
"So, you see me with a nice little cozy cafe somewhere in the
country?" Gingham curtains, colorful
linen, flowers on every table, an original menu, grateful
guests.
"I see a shiny asteroid in New York's current culinary galaxy.
I see money, success in the fifth
house."
At the end of our reading, I could almost taste the direction
my life was about to take, I could almost
see what the universe had in store for me, though it never
occurred to me to leave school and cook
for a living. But a few days later, my next-door neighbor
Wally saw God in my kitchen, and that
changed everything.
Wally never missed my dinner parties. He ate hungrily,
lavished compliments, and was the only guest
who ever brought me flowers. Wally loved to eat, but all he
knew about cooking was to throw
everything he had into one pot and cook it for eight hours. He
called it La Boheme stew, and he ate
it out of the pot all week long.
Walter Willicott III was tall and handsome with sandy hair and
eyes that changed from blue to
cloudy gray. He had a healthy, athletic body, owned a cat
named the General, and lived in a
disorderly apartment he cleaned once a month by opening wide
all his windows regardless of the
season or temperature. These aerations had a kind of
restorative effect on him, and afterwards he
was always happier and calmer. We were next-door neighbors on
the fifth floor of the same walk-up
tenement. It was a clean, well-kept block, dominated by
Ukrainians who had brought up generations
of children in small, chain-like apartments passed down
carefully like family jewels.
Unlike myself, Walter lived the cliched life of an artist: his
cramped rooms were filled with rolled
canvases and the smell of oil paint. He cultivated eccentric
habits, expressed emotional highs and
despairs, gave wild parties, and disdained authority. For all
this, Wally was the worst painter in the
world, but he loved making art with a passion I had never
known.
Talented or not, he offered to paint my portrait in return for
all the meals I'd fed him. I had no use for
his paintings, which I considered inferior in every way to
mine, so I flatly refused to pose for him.
Wally painted me anyway, while I cooked in my kitchen,
preparing Saturday dinner. He worked on
it for several weekends. I didn't mind because I liked company
while I cooked, even the kind that
Wally offered. He was much funnier than the radio. Wally was
full of advice and one-liners as he
painted me. He quoted the Beatles and Schopenhauer and gave
pedantic speeches about politics
and art. Always art. He ranted art history, raved art
criticism, took issue with biographers of artists
whose lives he admired. He jabbered on imperiously about
Lautrec, Degas. He insisted he had
blood ties to Browning, emotional ties to Rembrandt, spiritual
ties to Gauguin. And when the portrait
was done it was just as ugly as all the rest of his work.
Still, I was touched when he asked that I
hang the painting in my kitchen.
"Where your heart is," he explained.
One Saturday night after a group of us had eaten, Wally
renamed me. He stood on a chair in my
kitchen and called for the guests to be quiet. Wally the
arrogant toasted my stove as he waved his
lifted wineglass at my glass cabinets stocked with ingredients
and dishes. "This is your life's work.
Forget painting; it's more angst per square inch, anyway. It's
a sideline compared to the work you do
in here. To Kitchie," he said, and afterwards the name stuck.
Wally believed in the redemptive suffering of artists, a
notion I couldn't stomach. I knew perfectly
well the relationship between making art and making money, and
Wally would have none of it. I
found his concept of the-artist-as-sufferer as boring as
mashed potatoes. I, who was very good at
making art if school grades were any measure, never did it,
and he, who was patently untalented,
desperately toiled away all the time. Painting was a
burdensome family mantle I had inherited, like
unwanted wealth or title. I had been made to feel I had a
certain responsibility to it, to the talent as
my mother called it, as though it had its own life within me.
I felt obligated. I had grown up as an altar
girl in the New York Cathedral of Art. Poor Wally was a
storefront Baptist by comparison.
My parents collected Henry, Jackson, Davies, Bellows, artists
blown into obscurity by the Armory
show of 1912, affordable investments for some decades after.
Lilly and Theo lived for their
ever-expanding collection, were most alive when contemplating
a purchase. They had not started out
as people of means, but in time their flourishing collection
was worth a great deal of money, more
than one would expect to be amassed by a bookkeeper and his
wife who managed a lingerie
department in Macy's. They had brown-bagged it to work every
day of their working lives and
invested every cent of their modest salaries in art. Until I
was a teenager, we did not go to movies,
take vacations, or eat out. By then, Lilly and Theo were known
around galleries as two of the
shrewdest collectors of American paintings in New York. My
father died soon after achieving that,
and with the money she received from his life insurance, Lilly
went on to make some of her greatest
deals, increasing her net worth substantially.
As a child, I viewed their growing collection suspiciously,
like an unwanted sibling. I was raised as an
art zombie, and comparisons could be drawn between the
training I received under my mother's
hopeful eye to the training of young ballet dancers who
practice until their little toes bleed. When I
was eight years old Albers' color theories were being read to
me as bedtime stories. I knew the
difference between gouache and watercolor, as well as the feel
of a real sable brush. There were
classes and seminars at the museum school and every Saturday
morning and Thursday afternoon I
attended an anatomy and figure-drawing class, in which I was
the only child. On one occasion, my
fifth grade teacher, Mrs. MacWhirley, asked those of us who
left early on Thursdays for religious
instruction to raise their hands. I raised mine. As she wrote
our names on a list, she called on me and
asked, "Immaculate Conception or Temple Beth Shalom?"
"Art Students League," I answered.
Wally painted me standing at a yellow stove cooking with
purple pots. My hands, a watery fleshy
pink, bled into a bunch of orange carrots as though my fingers
had melted into vegetables. My
cheeks were high and full. "You're always chewing, so I made
you look like a squirrel," he explained.
Wally's portrait of me as a cooking squirrel was not the
result of painterly intention, but of limited
ability to render a face attached to a body. I wish I could
say that there was some raw, abrasive
energy in Wally's paintings, or vivid color and brash
technique, but the only thing that shone through
his work was dogged insistence.
Most times, my friendship with Wally had nothing to do with
art. It was more about that
borrow-a-cup-of-sugar thing that exists between neighbors,
especially single ones. If we were both
up at 2:00 A.M., we would visit and talk. We collected mail,
accepted packages, traded errands,
picked up groceries, loaned irons, took shirts to the Chinese
laundry for each other. We were more
like brother and sister than conveniently placed artists.
Wally became the unofficial host of all my Saturday night
dinner parties. A great storyteller, he had a
handy supply of jokes, an ample collection of the
controversial, an inexhaustible number of stunning
facts of the believe-it-or-not kind most often encountered at
barside. It was not for the purposes of
information-gathering that Wally spent so much of his time in
bars. The son of two alcoholics, he was
raised by his aunt, a famous psychiatrist who specialized in
treating alcoholics. Aunt Dorian kept
Wally in a constant supply of Antabuse pills which he took
each day. Unless he was off on a bender.
Wally was the only son of Aunt Dorian's youngest and favorite
brother, Wally Jr., who had died an
alcoholic death. Wally's mother, a wild woman in her day, had
managed to live out her marginal but
dry life in a Salvation Army residence in the city. It took
all of Wally's mother's energy not to drink.
There was nothing left over with which to raise a child, so
custody of Wally was given to Aunt
Dorian, who was busy with her medical practice. And so, young
Walter grew up treated to
round-the-clock nannies.
Doses of money and private schools, blue blazers and French
lessons did not change what his aunt
referred to as Wally's chromosomal pool. "Genes. Runs in the
family," his aunt confided when we
first met. "If you see him drinking, just call me," she added
and handed me her card. At a tender age,
Wally had found the keys to the liquor closet and was
diagnosed by Aunt Dorian as an official
alcoholic by the time he hit junior high school. Even though
he was now grown and out of college,
Aunt Dorian policed him at least once a month. Whenever Aunt
Dorian dropped by to check on her
nephew, she slid a card under my door. Being policed by older
women was something Wally and I
had in common. While Wally's aunt was hot on his trail for
liquor on his breath, my mother made
routine visits to my studio to chart my all-too-slow progress
towards the full-blown artistic career
she intended to manage for me.
Wally, a few years older than me and a graduate of Bard
College, lived off a modest trust fund his
aunt had set up for him, enough to cover food and rent. For
everything else, including art supplies,
Wally had to scramble. This was where Wally was an original.
His most imaginative effort was his
"Send a Young Artist to Mexico" campaign. His old classmates
(whose monthly trust fund checks
came to far more than his) paid to send him to Puerto Vallarta
one summer in exchange for free
paintings. Just as I would always have food in my life, Wally
Willicott III would never be short on
people to care for him.
For the most part, during the three years Wally and I were
neighbors, he was off the wagon. He
would socialize with me when he wasn't drinking, and when he
was he would all but disappear from
my sight for days or weeks. I could hear shrieks of laughter
and strange celebrations from his
apartment next door. An odd assortment of strangers would go
in and out of his apartment all day
and until late at night. Just as he lived a studied cliche of
an artist's life when he was sober, Wally
lived the cliche of the cheerful, carousing drunk when he was
drinking.
It was during one of Wally's longest and worst drunks that I
found myself unable to finish the last
three canvases for my Master's thesis. I had tried to work,
but why paint an apple when you could
eat it? Besides, Slav had left me with the impression that I
might as well never paint again. I
wondered if I had cooked the art out of me. It had paled, like
a beet that's lost its color to a boiling
soup.
On the day my art career officially hit the dust, I was
already a month past the second extension of
my thesis deadline. I had suggested to the chairman of the
M.F.A. program that the painting
department let me cater its spring party in place of the
missing canvases. "I could photograph my
cooking and maybe I could present it as a happening, or as
edible art, or how about half and half?"
The chairman urged my watercolor professor, Franklyn Mist (a
man who loved my eclairs), to visit
my studio and talk some sense, or some art, into me. Franklyn
was a bear of a man at almost seven
feet tall, and loved by students for his course How To Find
Your Empty Space and Paint It. A
watercolorist, he painted the space around trees and in
between branches, and never worked on
paper larger than twelve inches.
It was a beautiful morning, a pure blue winter light, good for
painting, if you're painting. The stuff of
still lifes, bread, bottles and fruit, were arranged on
separate tables all over my studio. I waited for
Franklyn to arrive as the sun drenched the walls, the radiator
hissed, and the shriveling melons and
pineapples fermented like overripe fruit salad. I sipped
coffee out of a turquoise mug, worrying less
about the fate of my unfinished canvases and more about
whether Franklyn would like the scones I
planned to serve him, when the banging in Wally's apartment
started again.
The noise had started at the beginning of Wally's current
bender. It had started the usual way, with
his disappearance for a few nights, then his return home,
holding long, loud parties with one or two
other drunks, a few reasonably happy screeches with possible
sexual overtones, and then of course I
had found the General meowing, hungry, in the hallway. I had
let him into my apartment and had
been feeding him now for about a week. None of this seemed
particularly different from Wally's
behavior in the past. Except for that banging. At first it had
a nice rhythmic pattern to it. Very Zen of
Wally to make such orderly noise. But then the hammering went
on for days, while the breaks in
between grew shorter. I wondered if he had taken his new love
affair with Rodin to heart, if he had
turned to sculpting. Perhaps a change in metier would help
Wally to produce things that looked
good.
I stood the hammering for as long as I could, and on the third
night I disobeyed our unwritten
agreement not to interrupt each other when one of us was
working. Even Brancusi had to get some
sleep. It was after midnight. He had to stop. I broke our
code. I knocked. And knocked. And
knocked.
Wally opened the door suspiciously. He wore a strange,
frightened expression and would not open
the door fully. His eyes darted back and forth, and he was
unshaven. He kept the chain on.
"Who is it?" he asked, looking straight at me.
"Kitchie."
What was this business with the chain? Who was he keeping out?
"Are you all right?" I asked. "Do you want some tea or soup or
something?"
"None of the above," he said. "Have to go now. Company's
calling."
I had heard no one go in or out for days.
"Wally, listen, I hate to complain, but all the hammering, I
can't get to sleep. Please--"
His eyes widened. They seemed grayer and cloudier than usual,
the pupils like black rivets. He had
the grizzly makings of a red beard.
"I know," he whispered, "it's driving me crazy too. Any idea
who's doing it?"
"Come on, Wal," I said, smiling at his obvious invitation to a
cat-mouse game. "I know you're
sculpting in there."
He unhooked the chain, squeezed through a narrow opening of
the door, and ventured out into the
hallway. Still careful not to let me look inside. He looked
past me towards the stairwell, as though he
were afraid someone he didn't want to see might be coming up.
Then he abruptly put his arms around me and hugged me tightly,
squashing my face against his chest.
He pulled me away, held me at arm's length, and looked at me
with gratitude.
"Kitchie, Kitchie, Kitchie." He shook his head as though I'd
just answered some metaphysical
question he'd been wrestling with.
"That's it exactly! I'm a sculptor. A goddamn sculptor."
He let me go and drew himself up, a breath deeper, an inch
taller.
"Space is so eternal. But you know all about what's important.
You're a feeder. A natural-born
cook." Then he patted my arm. A look of beatific largesse came
over his face.
"You're a tit, Kitchie. An eternal tit." Then he went back in
to his apartment, shut the door, locked
up again, and I was left standing there in the three feet
between our apartment doors, wondering if
I'd really heard all that.
The banging stopped and I got some sleep that night only to be
awakened early in the morning by
more banging. I got up, washed, dressed, and cleaned the
studio. Franklyn Mist was on his way.
Scones were baking, coffee was brewing. I turned the radio on
full blast, hoping to drown out some
of the banging coming from Wally's studio, and waited for my
advisor to arrive.
When Franklyn arrived, he was far more curious about my
kitchen than my studio and took to
studying my collection of copper pots and whisks. We got to
talking recipes. He was hungry for a
good cassoulet, and he loved the scones, but even fresh
currants and a hint of anise and orange
couldn't compete with the pounding that was going on next
door.
"Neighbor renovating?" he asked politely.
He tried to ignore the noise, and after two cups of coffee,
admitted he had come bearing bad news.
The three paintings were due next week, or else. "Nix the
catering idea," was how Franklyn put it.
We moved on to the studio to the dried pasta still life
awaiting completion. A nagging study in
shapes, I called it Vermicelli Lost on Blue Velvet. Noodles
could be tricky, I explained, especially in
oils. Franklyn was about to discuss the properties of
methylene blue when the pounding next door
became really intolerable, even for a moon child like myself
with a gift for ignoring the obvious. The
banging became so loud it seemed to be closing in on us. My
ears and head hurt. The rhythmic
thudding and crashing had brought us both, advisor and
student, to the edge of polite tolerance when
suddenly Franklyn pointed at the wall of my living room which
had begun to pulsate, to breathe and
heave. I had a brief, mystical flash that my life as I knew it
was about to end. Change is in the wind,
Kitterina Kittridge. Slav's warning flashed as Franklyn pulled
me out of the studio and we backed
into the kitchen, watching as the wall between my studio and
Wally's swelled out like a belly, then
cracked slowly like a hard-boiled egg. Spiky fissures branched
into jagged splits that grew in size
until the wall caved in and cement crumbled down, clearing a
hole large enough for Wally to climb
through, holding the largest pickax I had ever seen.
He wore a smile of utter victory and confidence. Sporting his
new beard, long johns and ski jacket,
Wally looked like a cross between Nanook of the North and
Admiral Perry in thermals, whomping
his way through ice to get to the last vestige of unexplored
territory left on earth.
"Well," he sighed, relieved, as though he had finally reached
the Pole.
"There He is." He held the blade of the ax in his hand and
pointed the tool's wooden end towards my
stove.
"Right where I thought He'd be." Wally smiled his fearless,
self-congratulatory, arrogant smile and
looked right past us to the stove in the corner.
"Standing right here, in your kitchen." His eyes started
filling up the way they did whenever he talked
art foolishness. I never took his tears seriously. It was just
Wally being Wally. But this time his
penchant for the dramatic had gone too far, and I was about to
tell him so when he pointed his ax
again and said, "God is standing in your kitchen, over by the
pot rack, you lucky woman."
There stood Wally, covered with plaster dust, full of the
vision of God. It would have been very hard
to say whether Wally was more impressed with me for having
such special company or himself for
discovering the divine and seeing the invisible.
The three of us were locked in a spiritual face-off, a moment
of divine reckoning. Who would do
what next? My poor friend was nuts and had just crossed over
into a personal twilight zone. On the
other hand, I was still young enough to think that such
spiritual gibberish might be visionary. I still
believed enough in magic so that all I could think was: If God
has taken up residence in my kitchen,
why the hell am I the last one to know about it?
Franklyn waited with me until the ambulance came. He took the
two extra scones I wrapped up for
him and waved a solemn goodbye as the siren wailed and took
Wally and me off to Saint Vincent's
Hospital. I rode with him and held his hand. I stroked his
forehead and said reassuring things.
Meanwhile he kept repeating, savoring the wonder of it, that
he had seen God. He admonished me,
wasn't I the lucky duck to have entertained The Great One at a
spiritual power breakfast in my
apple-green and purple kitchen.
In time Wally got better.
"You mustn't take Antabuse and drink alcohol at the same time,
dear," cautioned Aunt Dorian.
When I had returned from the hospital that afternoon, I saw
the building had been cordoned off. I
looked up and saw a gaping hole where the two windows to
Wally's apartment ought to have been.
I understood it was just one of Wally's aerations gone too
far, a crazy person's version of
housecleaning during which Wally had disposed not only of all
the plaster walls, but his two front
windows. Wally was evicted after the landlord inspected his
meticulous removal of plaster, walls and
windows.
"I needed space, more light, I needed to let God in," he
explained to me conspiratorially during one
of my later hospital visits. Apparently, Wally had been
entertaining the Holy Spirit of Art while
removing mortar and bricks when he suddenly decided to take a
break and pay me a visit through
our common wall.
"You weren't using your studio," he explained, "so I figured
you wouldn't mind if I came in and
borrowed some of your space, you know, like a cup of sugar,"
he explained.
From a madman's lips come the simplest truths. Why hadn't I
had the heart to see God at my stove,
banging pots or stirring soup or whatever it was Wally saw him
doing there? Slav had told me, but I
hadn't listened. It took Wally chopping down my studio.
Truth is, I never painted again. I never lifted another brush,
stretched another canvas, prepared
another palette, or arranged another still life. That night I
made myself an estouffade with three meats
and abalone, which I had with red wine, crusty bread, a slab
of St. Andre and a ripe comice pear. I
ate every bit of it myself, and the next morning I bought the
New York Times, read the Help
Wanteds, went right out, and found myself a job cooking. I was
willing to start at the bottom,
confident that, like good cream, I would quickly rise to the
top.
(C) 1997 Karen Hubert Allison All rights reserved. ISBN:
0-88001-522-5
Elizabeth
MajicChef
In article <35928B9D...@home.com>, Elizabeth & Keith Falkner
<falk...@home.com> writes:
> "Space is so eternal. But you know all about what's important.
>You're a feeder. A natural-born
> cook." Then he patted my arm. A look of beatific largesse came
>over his face.
>
> "You're a tit, Kitchie. An eternal tit." Then he went back in
>to his apartment, shut the door, locked
> up again, and I was left standing there in the three feet
>between our apartment doors, wondering if
> I'd really heard all that.
What pretentious bullshit. Typical NYTimes drivel.
~
Regards and good eatin'
MajicChef
"HAAAAPPY trails to you....
until we eat again."
MajicChef
> "You mustn't take Antabuse and drink alcohol at the same time,
>dear," cautioned Aunt Dorian.
>
>
My aunts were always full of wisdom like this.
MajicChef
> I
> ate every bit of it myself, and the next morning I bought the
>New York Times, read the Help
> Wanteds, went right out, and found myself a job cooking. I was
>willing to start at the bottom,
> confident that, like good cream, I would quickly rise to the
>top.
>
>
Or go sour like the spittle dribbling from an infant's mouth.
Young
Elizabeth & Keith Falkner wrote:
> Now that you get the drift... Should WE each write a chapter of a really
> bad novel about food and life and get OUR book reviewed in the New York
> Times on the way to become a best seller?
>
> Profits to be evenly divided, of course.
>
> Elizabeth
(laughing!!!) I think that's one of the best ideas I've heard in
a long time. I don't think dividing the profits will be a problem.
nancy
Elizabeth & Keith Falkner
MajicChef wrote:
>
> In article <35928B9D...@home.com>, Elizabeth & Keith Falkner
> <falk...@home.com> writes:
>
> > ate every bit of it myself, and the next morning I bought the
> >New York Times, read the Help
> > Wanteds, went right out, and found myself a job cooking. I was
> >willing to start at the bottom,
> > confident that, like good cream, I would quickly rise to the
> >top.
> >
> >
>
> ~
> Regards and good eatin'
>
> MajicChef
>
> "HAAAAPPY trails to you....
> until we eat again."
MajicChef
In article <3592D1B6...@home.com>, Elizabeth & Keith Falkner
<falk...@home.com> writes:
__My__ share of the profits can go to Sheldon.