Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,91

arms around me and I began to cry. My mind was not working, and I found it impossible to process the fact that Gourmet, a publication older than I, was dead. I’d fortified myself against the pain of being fired, but this was worse: They had murdered the magazine.

It was James Rodewald who broke the silence. He walked out of the conference room and into the glorified wine cellar he called an office, returning with an armful of bottles. “I’ve got hundreds,” he said, “and we’re not going to leave them a single drop.”

We drank while the phones rang and people packed up a lifetime of possessions. Many had spent their entire careers at Gourmet, and a cloud of dismal unreality hung over the office.

Is death always like this? I wondered as I discovered the strange, enervating energy of endings. Light-headed and unable to eat, I raced through the office, trailed by Robin, who was fielding calls from every news outlet in the country.

“I have nothing to say,” I kept telling her.

“They still want to talk to you,” she insisted, dragging me back to the phone, where I repeated, over and over, “I don’t know.” It became a mantra as one reporter after another demanded to know why Condé Nast had closed Gourmet. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. “Why Gourmet and not Bon Appétit?” they kept asking, and I could only repeat the answer.

“What did Si say?” they insisted, hungry for crumbs.

“That it is very sad.”

“That’s all?”

“Condé Nast is a privately held company. He doesn’t need to explain himself to anyone. And certainly not to me.”

I was exhausted, a little bit drunk, overwhelmed. Human Resources asked me to stay on for six more weeks to finish the book tour and launch the television show, and for some reason I said yes.

Later I wondered why I’d agreed to honor contracts that no longer concerned me, but the entire day is enclosed in a bubble of unreality. When the cookbook’s editor, Rux Martin, called, begging me to attend a special dinner in Kansas City the following day, I said yes. Farmers had spent three months raising special chickens to celebrate the book, and as Rux pointed out, the chickens had already been slaughtered. Somehow, that made sense; it would be wrong to waste them.

The sky grew dark and evening approached. We were in a crazy collective state of inebriation, running in and out of one another’s offices to hug and weep. When would we ever be together again? In a maudlin moment I shouted, “Everyone come to my house!” Then I turned to Robin.

“Call Mustafa and get enough cars for everyone. Si can afford it.” It occurred to me, as we rode uptown in this last gasp of silly splendor, that I would probably never say those words again.

We stayed up most of the night, and when Mustafa arrived the next morning, I was hungover. “You haven’t eaten anything,” Michael said as he saw me off. “Promise you’ll get something at the airport.” He was deeply opposed to my going and felt bad that I had to do it alone. “I wish I could come with you,” he repeated over and over again. “I don’t know why you agreed to do this—it’s not as if it’s your book.”

“It seems like the right thing to do. It would be rotten to run out on the publishers at this point. Houghton Mifflin agreed to Si’s million-and-a-quarter advance, and this is certainly not their fault.”

“Just take care of yourself.” He looked so worried.

Mustafa wore the same expression, and he was almost speechless with chagrin. “I can’t believe it,” he said as he dropped me at Newark Airport. He stopped, searching for words. “I’ll be waiting when you come back. You know I’ll always be your driver.”

I got out and stumbled around the airport in a daze. “Eat,” I said to myself. “You promised that you’d eat.” I walked into the little sandwich shop and rooted through the offerings, picking up a steak sandwich; maybe it would give me a needed jolt of energy. I went to the cash register, but as I pulled out my wallet the cashier shook her head.

“This one’s on me,” she said. “I loved that magazine. I’m really going to miss it.”

EPILOGUE

THOSE WORDS WERE PROPHETIC: I missed the magazine terribly. Just not in any of the ways I had anticipated.

Like every other Condé Nast editor, I’d let Si tie me up in golden strings. The