Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,64
too late.
“Aren’t you sorry?” Stevie asked the next time we had lunch. “Now you’ll never have the chance.” It was the first time in my whole life I’d seen Stevie looking sad. “Every morning I pick up the phone to call Blass. And then I remember that he’s gone. I’m dreading Thanksgiving. We always spent it at his house.”
When he grew uncharacteristically quiet, I tentatively suggested he might want to share Thanksgiving with us. He didn’t say anything, and I blushed; of course Stevie didn’t want to come to our house. He undoubtedly had dozens of more interesting invitations.
The silence lasted a few seconds and then Stevie blurted out, “Blass could have left me more in his will.” It was so unlike him that I chalked it up to mourning. “It all went to some dog organization,” he continued, “and he knew I could have used the money.”
But today Stevie was his normal ebullient self, and I settled in to enjoy the show. “You order for me,” he said to the maître d’. “You know exactly what I like.” Meals with Stevie always reminded me of that scene in Gigi where Aunt Alicia shows the young girl how to judge jewels, eat ortolans, and choose cigars: It was a window onto a life of a bygone era. Sure enough, the waiter was soon shaving great fat slices of truffle over our pasta, the scent hovering deliciously above the table.
Stevie waited until we were alone. Then he picked up his fork and waved it at me. “I need to tell you something. I want to set the record straight.”
About what? I wondered.
“They’re closing my company. The owner’s decided to move to Israel.”
“It’s probably time,” I said. “You are, after all, ninety.”
“Probably,” he agreed cheerfully. “But the bookkeeper called the other day to ask where she should send my weekly check.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I. But it turns out that for the last twenty years Blass was secretly paying my salary. He even left a stash so it would continue after his death. Isn’t that wonderful?”
I stared at him, speechless.
“I wanted to tell you because I was so ungracious about his will.” He peered at me. “Ruthie, are you crying?”
“Of course not.” I hastily wiped my eyes. It wasn’t the money—which would have been nothing to Bill Blass. It was the trouble he’d taken to save Stevie’s pride.
When Stevie died, just short of his ninety-first birthday, the Times titled his obituary “The Death of an Unknown Man Who Knew Everyone.” “He never did a single thing of note in his life,” the author wrote, “except find a million ways to enjoy it.”
The extraordinarily long obituary ran in the style section, and people talked about it for days. Stevie would have loved that. He would have loved everything about the piece, especially the notion that his talent for happiness was both worthwhile and exceedingly rare.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about Bill Blass. I thought back to that first night with Giulio, when he’d looked at three chefs talking together. “You don’t get it, do you?” he’d said. “What an amazing world you live in.”
Now, for the first time, I thought that maybe he was the one who hadn’t gotten it right. Every world has its extraordinary side. It’s just that so few of us know how to find it.
LET ME SAY RIGHT NOW that if I had known that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had been targeting the Maine Lobster Festival for some ten years, I would have realized that sending David Foster Wallace off to write about it was a bad idea. But as the great man set off for Maine, I remained blissfully ignorant.
DFW was a legend, a brilliant, iconoclastic writer with a devoted following. I loved his work, and even though Gourmet had a long history of publishing great literary writers, when Jocelyn Zuckerman suggested asking him to write for us, I doubted that he’d do it. In the early years, distinguished writers Ray Bradbury, Hilaire Belloc, Kay Boyle, Annie Proulx, Joseph Wechsberg, Anthony West, Anita Loos, Anthony Burgess, Mary Cantwell, and Laurie Colwin had all appeared in Gourmet’s pages. In recent years we’d persuaded Pat Conroy, Calvin Trillin, Diane Johnson, Michael Lewis, Richard Ford, Julian Barnes, Jane Smiley, and, of course, Ann Patchett to write for us, but I still didn’t think DFW would be game.
To be honest, I’m not sure why he agreed to do it: From the beginning he made it clear