the doors carefully, and then patted each car on the roof when it was ready to take off, and then the next one would pull up in the queue and she would install a few more of our party, and tap the roof of the car signaling the driver, until she had us all successfully whisked away like visiting foreign dignitaries in sleek black Town Cars that crept through the tiny streets of the deep West Village and spit us out on Carmine at Bedford. We spent the waning afternoon hours having chilled Lambrusco and soppressatta tramezzini, all twenty of us packed into that tiny space where Jason, the owner, let us bring in, instead of wedding cake, a large platter of burratta—the soft, custardy fresh cow’s milk cheese from Puglia, which Michele had introduced me to—and thirty silver soupspoons, and for our wedding cake moment, amply photographed, we exchanged big killer spoonfuls of soft, creamy burratta.
Starting with our very first morning of a seven-day honeymoon in Paris, Michele changed his hard-driving campaign of “get-the-girl” to “get-away-from-the-girl.” I’ve never seen anyone so abruptly debilitated by the prospect of his own marriage—and the emotional intimacy of it—as he became. We found the neighborhood where we’d arranged to stay, and as we were rolling our luggage along the cobblestones to the little apartment we’d rented, he was half a block ahead of me, where he stayed the rest of the trip. While I strolled the boulevards, looking in all the shop windows, gawking at the precision of the pastries and the gelatines and even the string to tie the little boxes, Michele bolted ahead, looking for a signal on his cell phone, leaving a perpetual half block between us the full seven days of our “honeymoon.”
At our meals he overate so nervously and so terribly that each night after dinner, back in our apartment, he moaned on the couch with severe indigestion and I pretended to read in the empty bed, wondering what was exactly going on. I ended up eating our last dinner in Paris alone, after a day neither of us will ever forget, roaming around Père Lachaise cemetery together but apart, where I only sometimes caught a glimpse of his back as he scuttled along a path in urgent search of a particular mausoleum. For the INS wedding album we knew we had to assemble, we stood with our heads leaned in together and held the camera at arm’s length, catching a shot of us in front of the Centre Pompidou, the Galleries Lafayette, and en fin, in front of la Tour Eiffel. As we boarded the plane home, Michele walked down the aisle holding his three newspapers in three different languages, rather conspicuously I felt, and we flew that long transatlantic flight as we would a dozen times hence—almost without speaking. For someone who had almost cruelly emphasized the green card nature of the wedding, even I was curious about how devastated I felt.
13
SO I CAME TO POSSESS, OF ALL THINGS, A HUSBAND. THIS DIDN’T make sense for the longest time, to anyone, myself included, but that was also before I had met his Italian mother. Eighty-year-old Alda Fuortes de Nitto cooks eggplant that satisfies like meat, grows her own olives, peels apricots from her own trees, and sun dries tomatoes to make her own tomato paste. I adore her and our summer visits to her home in Puglia, at the tip of the Italian boot heel.
She drives like a bank robber and calms my babies as only a mother of six can. Every exhale is accompanied by staccato grunts that make it sound as if she is perpetually enjoying a private joke, and hip surgery has not stopped her from cooking delicious meals for the entire family.
Her food is so simple and prepared with such dispatch that it is almost unnecessary to speak of recipes, and wrangling one from her is more of a poetic than a didactic encounter.
How many potatoes? “To the eye,” she says. How long should I cook the onions? “Until you put a dent in them,” is her answer. What is the melted butter for? “Per la faccia,” she says, for the face.
The first meal of Alda’s I recall was a lunch of simply vegetables, well boiled. The table was set with a cloth, a water and a wine glass, five pieces of good silver per setting. And a cruet of her own golden, buttery olive oil in the center—all this for a