Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship

by Isabel Vincent

When I hinted at my own predicament—I did not want to burden Valerie with my own problems when her father was ill—she suggested I have dinner with Edward.

It was probably a combination of loyalty to Valerie and curiosity about her father that propelled me to Edward’s door a couple of months later. Whatever it was, I could never have imagined that meeting Edward would change my life.

Edward was neither a snob nor an insufferable foodie. He just liked to do things properly. He cared deeply about everything he created—whether it was the furniture in his living room or his writing. He had built and upholstered all of the furniture himself and wrote out his poems and short stories in longhand, patiently rewriting each draft on unlined white paper until he felt it was good enough to be typed by one of his daughters. He treated cooking much the same way, even though he had started doing it late in life, in his seventies.

“I don’t ever think of what I’m doing in terms of recipes. I just don’t want to bother looking at recipes. To me, that’s not cooking—being tied to a piece of paper.”

Cooking was a passion and sometimes a serious art form, to be shared with a select few. He refused to provide tips or write out his recipes for people he felt had no affinity for cooking. As he poured some Malbec, he told me about another dinner guest who had raved about his chicken paillard. Oh, Edward, you must give me the recipe! But Edward told me he had no intention of sharing his paillard secrets with her. “Real cooking requires devotion,” he pronounced. “And I could tell she was not devoted.”

But from the beginning of our relationship, I knew instinctively that his culinary tips went far beyond the preparation of food. He was teaching me the art of patience, the luxury of slowing down and taking the time to think through everything I did.

When I asked him for a lesson in deboning a chicken in order to make a galantine, I knew that what Edward would end up imparting was far weightier than the butchery of poultry. In hindsight, I realize he was forcing me to deconstruct my own life, to cut it back to the bone and examine the entrails, no matter how messy that proved to be.

My husband refused to adapt, and a week didn’t pass that I wasn’t greeted with a time limit on our stay in what to him was the worst place on earth. “One more year, and that’s it,” he would say. But it was more than our move to New York that was threatening our marriage.

I found myself living just blocks from Edward. Our meals gradually became weekly events.

As usual, he refused my offers to help him prepare dinner. “Stay out there!” he ordered, pointing to the living room. I sat in an easy chair sipping my martini and looking out as dusk began to fall and lights twinkled from the buildings that stood against the river on the Manhattan side. Ella Fitzgerald crooned in the background, “There’s a somebody I’m longing to see, I hope that he turns out to be someone to watch over me

“You know,” said Edward, after I told him about an episode at work, “I’ve never really seen you laugh, in a loud voice, with your head tossed back, like you are really enjoying it.” Edward refilled my glass with the crisp Vouvray we were drinking and we both started on our avocado salads, using thinly sliced pieces of baguette to lap up Edward’s pungent blue cheese dressing.

Tonight, flipping through the cards and letters between Edward and Paula, I casually mentioned that I had never sent anyone a Valentine’s Day card (not since grade school, anyway). Sadly, I had never thought to send one to my husband, even in the early days of our relationship when I still lived in an illusion of happiness. And since moving to New York we had grown so far apart that there seemed no breaching the chasm.

The sadness stemmed from loneliness. Despite our moving to Roosevelt Island at his request, my husband still hated New York so much that every school holiday and summer vacation became excuses to leave town with Hannah. Sometimes he didn’t even need the excuse and left on his own. When his mother became ill in Canada, I tried to be sympathetic but he was gone for increasingly long periods. We had spent most of our savings moving to New York; my husband didn’t have a green card, so I had no choice but to work to support all of us. In the mornings, I took the subway to my midtown office, and came home late at night to a cold, too-big apartment, overlooking the lights of Manhattan.

Edward had made his famous apple galette.

At a previous dinner, when for the first time I really told him some of the details of my faltering marriage, and how I was too afraid to take any definitive steps for fear of traumatizing my young daughter, Edward was silent. A few days later, I received a letter that I still take out to read when I am feeling besieged. He noted, in part, “You are a fine and talented woman, whose potential is yet to be realized given the love and support and luck we all need. Where you lost the will to fight for what is yours, where you gave away control of your life, is the mystery you are now unraveling. When you get it all back, hold on to it.”

Joy, happiness—it snuck up on me every time I saw Edward. In spite of everything that was going on in my life, I smiled.

Edward took the mollusks and stashed them in his refrigerator. Then he offered me a seat on his sofa, walked over to the hutch in his living room and divided the last of his Kentucky bourbon evenly between two glasses. He didn’t bother with ice, or tonic or pastis, or even a squeeze of lime. He limped over to the sofa, shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and handed me my glass.

He needn’t have asked. I inhaled the soothing liquid heat and soon after that everything came pouring out of me. I told Edward about the horrible arguments, dishes crashing on the floor, a family dinner that became so bitter and nasty, my daughter left the table in tears and hid herself in her room.

“I’ll never forget this dinner as long as I live,” she cried. Nor, I thought, would I. But now on Edward’s sofa I could no longer recall what had been so terrible that it resulted in platters laden with food being hurled across the dining room table and red wine splashed violently against a white wall, an approp...

In the following weeks we began to stake out territory in the apartment, and carve out separate kingdoms. I barricaded myself in a bedroom or took over a spot on the sofa in the living room while he stockpiled an arsenal of once-shared belongings in his home office. He had laid claim to a mountain of books, dishes and our imported French pots, the plasma TV, and even cans and boxes of non-perishable food. At first, I considered myself above such pettiness, but I eventually worked up the nerve to seize the coffeemaker and the toaster only after Melissa urged me to snag what I wanted.

At first they welcomed us to their parties and barbecues because my husband was of Serbian origin and I had covered the Balkans as a foreign correspondent before we moved to New York. After my husband informed them of our separation, I might as well have had a huge scarlet “D” for divorcée affixed to my back. I no longer received invitations to parties and some of the men of the community even refused to acknowledge me when I bumped into them on Main Street. The coup de grâce came when one of the mothers—a fifty-something homemaker fond of track suits—refused to allow her nine-year-old to have a play date with my daughter at our apartment. It might not have been seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, but I had been formally expelled from the Serbian ghetto. Roosevelt Island became even more of a prison for me.

When he wanted to go into “the city,” as islanders referred to Manhattan, he squeezed into the tram, then journeyed by foot the more than sixty blocks to Chinatown for the duck he liked to use in his cassoulet and to the French butcher in Chelsea for the best merguez.

My transformation didn’t happen overnight. It was gradual. I still took the lonely walks along the East River, but now I plugged headphones into my phone and began to listen to music. I went to parties, to the theater. I ran six miles a day, and I started to reread the poetry I had once loved as a university student.

We took solace in our mutual love of food, taking turns buying Petrossian croissants—fat, chewy, and buttery—whenever we had to go on a stake out. When on assignments in Flushing, Queens, we conducted “source” meetings at Joe’s Shanghai so that we could order the soup dumplings—pork meatballs encased in delicate little pagodas of white dough, steaming from the broth. We picked up tuna sandwiches—on thick slices of freshly baked, crusty rye bread, with finely chopped iceberg lettuce and tomato slices—from a Westchester deli when we were in the area. It was unlike any other tuna sandwich I’d had, and I am not sure if it was because it was truly great or because food just tasted better outside the newsroom, where on many days we ate three meals at our desks piled high with documents, which, in my case, intermingled with crumbs, stray pouches of Heinz ketchup, and old paper coffee cups.

Today, whenever I describe my life on Roosevelt Island, I talk about it as the worst time of my life. But I would be lying if I didn’t tell you it was also the best time. Because of Edward.

As we sat down to eat Edward’s oysters Rockefeller—a riot of green served on the craggy half-shells—I moved the bottle of wine and reached over the breadbasket to squeeze his hand.

Still, when it comes to work, I have no fear of seeking out the truth.

“Is there someone who will stand naked with you in the shower and hold you and comfort you?” he had once said in a hoarse whisper, his words seeming to tumble over one another. “If you can’t do that with the person you’re with, then you’re not really in love.”

“Turn around,” he ordered, and steered me to the mirrored wall in his dining room. First, he told me my earrings were all wrong. Then he was troubled by my hair. “On the left side, you need to put it behind your ear, and on the right, let it drape down your face,” he said, fixing my hair the way he wanted it to look. “Don’t keep pushing it back.”

He once confessed to me that he knew he would never be with a woman again, never feel a woman’s body next to him in bed, legs entwined, arm around a firm waist, head resting on a warm shoulder. In a moment of intense despair, he told me that he now sought solace in a hot shower. He described the sensation of scalding water cascading over his arthritic hands as “orgasmic.” Physical intimacy was in the past; Edward knew that, but he still lived intensely and he was determined to continue doing the things that made him feel alive and useful to others.

Before Edward, Paula had only met men who were “big talkers”—the kind of intellectuals who sat at Blenheim’s cafeteria at Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street chain smoking and drinking cup after cup of coffee, talking about all the things they would do, but getting nothing done. Edward wasn’t like that. He could build furniture, grow vegetables, tailor a suit. And, as I had come to realize, Edward was still a man for whom nothing was impossible.

I bit into pink flesh glistening with bits of fresh rosemary. The broccoli rabe was a deep green, slightly bitter and smoky, and so tender there was almost no need to chew—it simply melted on my tongue. The corn bread was dense and only a little sweet—a perfect counterpoint to the gaminess of the lamb and the smoky richness of the greens.

Dispensing with my utensils, I picked up one of my lamb chops with my hands and tore into the meat, gnawing it to the bone to savor every last bite. When I finally looked up from my plate, I told Edward that I agreed with him about how quickly time was passing. It had been more than three years since I met this endearing man. I was now officially divorced and my daughter was rapidly becoming a teenager. But Edward shook his head. No, he said, he meant something else. He meant that he was conscious of time running out and that he just wouldn’t have the energy to do some of the things he wanted to do before he died. He got up to clear the table.

“His family members got up to speak but they were too emotional,” complained Edward. “That’s not the way to honor someone’s life or to tell a story.”

So Edward, who was sitting in the back row, decided that Mike needed to be remembered a different way and asked the family if he could say a few words. Edward got up to speak in front of the sixty or so mourners, and after a few minutes had everyone laughing at the memory of a man who was the youngest in a family with five girls, whose Jewish parents were so grateful to have a boy that they always called him by the Yiddish term of affection bubala. For years, Edward told the group, almost no one in his family could recall his real name! Which is why he was known as Michael Michaels.

He had tears in his eyes when he talked about Beatrice and said that he hadn’t realized the important part she played in his life until years after her death. Despite Veronica’s benign neglect of her children, she was passionate about Leslie. As her husband lay dying, she devoted herself to his care, even as she was forced to transfer him to Nashville’s Protestant Hospital, where he became a charity patient in a crowded ward.

One night, a talent scout connected with Columbia Pictures saw one of his performances and asked him to set up a screen test. But Edward’s timing was off. His screen test was cancelled after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged America into the Second World War.

Occasionally, to make up the shortfall, Edward took the train to Belmont to bet on the horses. Sometimes he won several thousand dollars. But these events were few and far between.

And as he approached his family home in Nashville, he braced himself for what he knew would be a final meeting with his father. But nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to encounter in the hospital room. “He looked, lying on that bed, like the victims we had seen in Shoah,” recalled Edward. The horrors of the Nazi Holocaust had been revealed only a decade earlier. Edward wanted to take his father off life support, to end his suffering, and tried to rally his mother, brothers, and sisters to the cause. “Fuck the hospital,” he had said to his family; this was no way for any human being to die. “He was all protruding blue veins and tubes and wires,” recalled Edward. “Tubes from plastic bags overhead fed solutions drop by drop into his veins on quivering arms and body. And from his bladder and colon, contents flowed through more tubes into pans beneath the bed. I begged the intern to remove the tubes and allow him to die with dignity, but no one listened.”

“I killed the mockingbird,” he said in a hoarse whisper. He sat on the ground in the garden of his childhood home cradling the dead bird, a symbol of the South, his youth, and perhaps his innocence. He didn’t need to hear the news from the hospital messenger who had been incessantly ringing the doorbell. He already knew that his father was dead.

Maybe Edward was right to be concerned, because when I moved off Roosevelt Island and started to date, I did everything wrong. For one thing, I became determined to find a younger version of Edward, and though I saw glimpses of him in the handful of the men I met, in some dark recess of my brain I must have known this was a recipe for disaster, that I was setting up unrealistic expectations, but I did it anyway.

I thought I was making a wise choice in the financier. We weren’t officially dating.

He didn’t see me. How could he see anything through those wraparound glasses and the aura of self-importance that was as finely tailored as the expensive suit he wore? Strange that I had never noticed it before. But in the split second that I caught him making his way through the crowded restaurant with the leggy woman and a studied nonchalance, he suddenly seemed like a cliché.

The barista made me a perfect espresso in a white and peach porcelain cup. I downed it in one gulp. It was worth $5.

If we don’t amputate, the doctor warned him, gangrene could develop: “She’ll have to go to a hospice where they will zonk her out with morphine until the end. However long that might take. Maybe weeks. Not a happy ending.”

Canapes of Sun-Dried Tomato and Chèvre Cream of Cauliflower Soup with Truffle Oil and Dried, Reconstituted Porcini Mushrooms Prime Rib New Potatoes, Haricots Verts Grand Marnier Soufflé with Fresh Cream Turkish Coffee Cabernet Sauvignon

I like to think that Edward had a hand in making us all feel better.

When you know, you just know. I knew the first time I saw him, in his well-appointed office in midtown Manhattan, where I showed up to interview him for an article. He spoke fervently about his work, and all I could do was stare at his hands. They were rough and callused and seemed out of place on the gray-suited attorney with close-cropped salt and pepper hair sitting too upright in the wood-paneled office. Who is he? I thought.

That night, after the storm, on that dark beach, he held my hand and whispered, “Thank you for rescuing me.” And I couldn’t stop smiling. For, really, it was me who had been saved.

It was dated “Friday 2:38 a.m.” and written to finally address the heartfelt letter I had written to him some weeks earlier. Edward’s letter said, in part, “The thought you expressed that I am not as understanding of the depth of feeling I have made on you in our friendship leaves me querulous, somewhat sad.” He went on, “It is not easy to appreciate how much strength we expend in establishing and maintaining relationships of varying depths. And when young enough for our bodies to create the energy needed to exist, we take it for granted without analyzing this fact of life. But let me tell you that this age I’m into now is revealing a lot of things I never imagined existed.”