Chapter-15

Edward and Paula’s wedding anniversary was in early November. To celebrate Edward invited me to dinner.

It was just the two of us, and we settled into a long-forgotten routine. I presented Edward with a bottle of wine. It was a Portuguese rosé, a wine more appropriate for a summer meal than the pre-winter feast we were about to enjoy. But I knew Edward loved the wine and I couldn’t resist bringing him a bottle when I saw it in the store. He promptly labeled it with my name and stored it in his hall closet in the makeshift cellar behind the winter coats.

In the kitchen, he offered me a plate of his homemade chicken liver pâté. The creamy pâté was sublime, with hints of cognac and cream. I spread it on crackers as I watched Edward prepare our meal. He limped to the refrigerator and removed two pieces of flounder, which he had coated in flour, bathed in an egg wash, and rolled in bread crumbs.

The fish fillets sizzled for about three minutes. They sizzled but never smoked because Edward did all of his frying and sautéing with clarified butter. He had a small container of it in his refrigerator and explained to me that he melted butter and waited until it solidified before he removed the watery whey that caused the butter to smoke and burn. Edward removed the pan-fried fish fillets to a platter and wiped the hot skillet clean with a paper towel.

“Put a dab of veg or chicken or beef bouillon in pan and sauté on med heat,” he wrote me after I asked how he made the sauce. Then he added vermouth, chopped fresh thyme, and strained the sauce with a fine mesh strainer, returning it to the skillet, adding more stock and finishing it off with a squeeze of lemon juice.

Now, ordering me to step aside, he took warm plates from his oven, filled them with steamed spinach, and perched the steaming flounder covered with the lemony sauce on the green beds.

As we sat down to eat, I wanted to tell him about everything that had happened to me over the last several days, but something stopped me. Would he think me foolish? Immature?

“When did you first tell Paula you loved her?” I asked him.

Edward gave me a quizzical look, but he knew better than to answer my question with a question. I’d teased him too many times about that habit.

“The very first day we were together,” he said. “On that first night I told her I loved her.” He smiled and gave me a long look. “When you know, you just know,” he said, downing the remains of his wine in a single gulp.

Was there something I wanted to tell him? his expression seemed to ask. But how could I possibly describe to Edward the breathless events of the past few weeks? After all, I was still processing everything myself.

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.

But there were no clues to his identity. No framed family photographs on his desk, no wedding band on his finger. Only the stack of Food and Wine magazines under his desk and a collection of vodka bottles on his shelves offered glimpses into his personality.

He cooks! I thought.

On our first date, we walked nearly half the length of Manhattan holding hands. The good-night kiss outside my apartment building was so passionate the doormen on duty teased me for weeks. I walked into the lobby alone, blushing violently.

The first time he came over to my apartment, he brought me fourteen Ziploc bags of herbs that he had carefully cut, separated, and cleaned. They were from the garden of his home, a ranch-style bungalow he had recently bought on a canal on the east end of Long Island. He proudly showed me photographs of the renovations he had just completed. I made him Edward’s shrimp and corn chowder. The herbs reminded me instantly of Edward. And, like Edward, I stored most of them in the freezer.

But it was Hurricane Sandy that really brought us together. For a few days after the storm hit, I felt that I had returned to covering a war. New York was battered by Sandy and for days Manhattan south of Thirtieth Street remained a disaster zone, with no subway service or electricity. Ninety percent of Long Island was in the dark.

In the early hours of the storm, my little corner of Manhattan experienced a heightened state of emergency. And while there were no sandbags outside the Russian Tea Room for this hurricane, the aftermath might have been described as equally strange. On the night Sandy struck, I rushed to cover the story of a crane that dangled precipitously from the seventieth floor of an unfinished residential skyscraper on West Fifty-Seventh Street, right near my apartment. I had seen the crane snap in high winds outside a window in my building and held my breath imagining that it would crash onto the street. Up close, the swaying crane seemed attached by a string to the towering half-finished development, where a penthouse apartment had just sold to a Russian billionaire for $115 million.

Flashing my press credentials, I tried to sneak through the yellow tape that the New York City Fire Department had used to cordon off the street. But I didn’t make it beyond the back entrance of the New York Athletic Club two blocks away. Two cops told me to stay put, and I found myself packed into a crowd of exasperated New Yorkers who sat with their beautifully groomed dogs and overnight bags. They had been evacuated from their tony apartment buildings situated directly underneath the crane. Many of the upscale refugees had already gone to the second-floor bar for a drink. The ones who were hanging out in the lobby were not allowed to go upstairs because of the club’s strict rules governing pets. The elderly man, dressed in tweeds and a raincoat, who wearily slid into the seat beside me, said he was homeless now that he had been forced out of his building. It was but a momentary state of affairs, though. A few minutes later his wife got off the phone with the Harvard Club, where they were members. She secured them a room at $400 a night.

Edward laughed when I told him this story over chocolate cake. I could not yet find a way to tell him what happened a few days later: I waited on East Fortieth and Third Avenue for the Hampton Jitney—the bus that makes regular stops in the villages and hamlets that dot the north and south forks of Long Island. I was headed toward the coast, the storm-ravaged danger zone, to the outer reaches of Long Island, where hundreds of homes had been destroyed, where tens of thousands were without electricity, and where there were long lineups at all the gas stations the jitney passed on the Long Island Expressway. I had packed essentials—rubber boots, food, wine. On the bus, I cursed when I realized that I had forgotten a flashlight, a Swiss Army knife.

All I knew was that the attorney refused to evacuate his home during the worst of the storm. Later, he showed me where he had sat out the tempest alone, facing the living room window in his rocking chair, surveying the rushing floodwaters as they came to within three feet of the house he had moved into just a few months before. To this day, that’s the image that always comes to mind when I think of him—a modern-day cowboy defending the homestead.

The night I arrived, we rode bicycles along darkened streets, where the ravages of the storm were everywhere—roadways blocked by felled tree branches, downed power lines, and the occasional frightened deer. The ostentatious summer homes near the shore were shuttered and eerily empty, and the sky was streaked an inky gray and black.

When I moved to New York, I had dreamed of the landscape on the eastern end of Long Island that I’d seen only in photographs, imagined visiting the strips of land that jutted out into the Atlantic Ocean. Sagaponack, Shinnecock, Quogue, Montauk—the names were elemental, pure, ancient, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “fresh, green breast of the new world.” At the end of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald describes the view that greeted seventeenth-century Dutch sailors when they came upon the coast of Long Island. “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

The wind was calm as we walked hand in hand along the deserted beach. I felt Fitzgerald’s “transitory enchanted moment” and I held my breath in the presence of this landscape and this extraordinary man.

“There is somewhere someone who will feel lucky knowing you. And if lucky enough, loving you.” The words from one of Edward’s early letters—a message so crucial that he had walked to my apartment building on Roosevelt Island over dangerously slippery, ice-packed sidewalks to deliver it to my doorman. Now his lines came back to me in a flood of emotion. But I recognized that I was the lucky one.

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.