SLOW DEATH BY MAYONNAISE
AS CLAY FELKER HAD SUSPECTED AND CONFIRMED WITH HIS INSPIRED gift for casting in the fall of 1968, I was a foodie, a full-blown gourmand, long before New York and America fell in love with dining out . . . obsessed ahead of the times. Indeed, foodie wasn’t even in the dictionary yet. When I did truly fall in love and he wasn’t married, only elusive and uncertain for a while, I found a game dining coconspirator across the rewrite desk at the New York Post.
Don Forst had grown up in Brooklyn and his attorney father invested in restaurants. Don could handle the gruff maître d’ at Lindy’s, near Broadway, where we had strawberry shortcake after seeing Robert Preston and Barbara Cook in The Music Man. Don knew how to score three helpings of shrimp in pink Louis sauce at Mamma Leone’s (where Lots was the motto and we prepped at eating Italian). He was trained by his folks at how to scope out a table about to be vacated in vast, raucous Lundy’s, the seafood gymnasium in Sheepshead Bay. Easy. You found people eating dessert and stood close, boring hate rays into the back of their necks, till they couldn’t sit still another minute and decided to skip coffee. Then you elbowed all claimants away and swiftly ordered two shore dinners, double coleslaw, and blueberry pie à la mode. This was New York City–honed sophistication that meshed perfectly with my Paris veneer.
Don worked nights and I worked days on the Post rewrite desk at the tail end of the fifties. He’d prepped at the Houston Press and the Newark Star-Ledger. I had been determined to escape Detroit the minute I could, but no news outlet in New York would hire me fresh out of college. I was stuck. When my United Press job in Detroit gave me weekdays off, I would fly to New York with scrapbooks and clippings, scrounging for an opening. Then a Post editor, barely looking up from his typewriter, offered me a one-week tryout during the summer. (That was how the Post filled out the city room during summer vacations.) But my boss in Detroit wouldn’t give me a week off—I hadn’t worked long enough to earn it. So I quit. The one-week tryout led to two, led to a month, finally led to a job.
A reporter I was dating introduced Don and me as we passed in the morning at breakfast in the Post luncheonette. Don was engaged to a Danish woman, he confided, a brunette with the most amazing full lips. Did he have to mention those lips? (Now that I think of it, “being engaged” was close enough to being married that I could feel safe.) I don’t remember if he told me this before or after we moved from sunbathing on my terrace to my bedroom, both of us warmed and scented with that sweet smell of sun on skin, in a tangle of fierce and uninhibited lovemaking. I was already falling in love with his profile, his straight, thin nose and dark, sad eyes, the slight boyish body with one very muscular arm from playing squash. (Squash? In Detroit, we didn’t eat squash, much less play squash, in my crowd.) I found him pleasingly urbane, funny and smart, endlessly profane. All the men at the Post used the F word at least once in each sentence as noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. He was also brashly cynical, like all romantics.
Don took me to dinner at his favorite place for impressing first dates (he later confessed), the Little Old Mansion, a southern restaurant in midtown with the cranky grande dame owner southern restaurants seemed to demand. On the way to dinner, he bought me a bikini—shocking pink on one side, reversing to black on the other. It was a tribute, I felt, to how juicy I’d looked on my terrace in a pink-and-white-checked gingham bikini. The slight qualms I felt, being an inch or two taller than he in heels, were quickly melting. On the banquette beside me, he sat tall. I had the lobster with black walnuts in a saffron rice ring.
Rather quickly, it began to feel like love to me. Before Don, there had been many men—wild crushes, consuming dalliances, fleeting affairs, one-night stands and one-week stands. But this was love at another level, not just lust and an electric sexual connection but also a joy in the amazing intimacy we shared and the way his need freed me to reveal my own.
It’s easy to see now that all that traffic in and out of my bed before Don was due not just to my uninhibited appetite for sex but a way to get close and make somebody love me. I was rarely cool. I thought getting a man was like getting the story. You had to be smart and aggressive, tie up the phone, park on the doorstep, and shove interlopers out of the way when necessary.
I was a wreck when Don went off to Denmark to see why his fiancée, the brunette with the bee-stung lips, had not yet come back to New York. He didn’t tell me all the details on his return, only that it was finished. I determined to show him how lucky he was—what a perfect mate he had in me. Collagen injections didn’t exist then, so I couldn’t do much to fatten my lips beyond cheating with lipstick beyond my lip line and pouting a lot. I comforted him with matzo ball soup and chocolate mousse.
It took a year to convince him that we should live together. His dark ground-floor studio, shades pulled to keep out the stares of passersby, was too tiny and grim. But there was a small one-bedroom walk-up with dormer ceilings and funny little windows on the top floor we could rent for very little money. Before he could change his mind, he had signed the lease. And we dragged our stuff upstairs and moved in. Of course, when my folks came to New York, we flipped the bell plate around so it said Greene and not Forst/Greene. That way, my parents could pretend they didn’t know we were living together. We took them for dinner at the American Pavilion during the 1964 World’s Fair, where Don, with great bravura, ordered a Richebourg, one of the greatest red Burgundies, expensive even then, and my mom threw in two ice cubes to chill it. I loved that he never held that against me.
Soon we were pooling our savings to explore all the great restaurants, Craig’s favorites, whatever Silas Spitzer recommended in Holiday magazine, and Gourmet’s monthly picks.
Once I was with Don, other men became simply male humans, not possible conquests. I didn’t see them as men I needed to seduce. I didn’t have to prove anything anymore, because Don seemed to adore me. He was smart and funny and brooding, with a deep melancholy streak. Sometimes he would be telling a story so sad that he would cry. I was moved by his tears, his deep sadness. I would be his woman, his mistress, his muse, his good mother.
Don and I would lie in bed after making love, trading bedroom stories, tales of a thousand and one nights. He’d slept with hundreds of women. And it didn’t matter how many men I’d been with. “Whatever you’ve done is what makes you what you are,” he said. “And that’s the you I love.”