Dinner with Edward Read Online Free

never make it into the paper. Our editors thought nothing of sending us out on an assignment at four a.m. to attend Friday prayers at a mosque in lower Manhattan or stake out the alleged mistress of a senator in suburban New Jersey, sitting for hours in a hot car in high summer.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with you?” barked my editor into the phone when I lost sight of the senator’s mistress because I left my post for a half hour to buy water and go to the bathroom. While I was gone, she had gotten into her car and left home. My trail went cold.
    â€œYOU CAN’T GO TO THE BATHROOM DURING A STAKEOUT!” my editor screamed in what seemed to me all caps. “You go to the bathroom before a stakeout or after a stakeout but NEVER DURING A STAKEOUT!”
    I regaled Edward with tales of the
Post
newsroom, emphasizing the humor and the characters I was meeting, but though my stories often made him laugh, they also gave him pause. Edward thought I was working too hard, that I needed to ask myself some serious questions about what I really wanted to achieve.
    â€œYou 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.
    A few days later a letter arrived in the mail, in Edward’s familiar script, on cream-­colored stationery attached to a photocopy of the recipe that had inspired his apricot soufflé I had complimented at dinner. He had clipped it from the
New York Times
in the early 1990s when he first started cooking for Paula and their friends and family. Despite his prejudice against following recipes, he had obviously kept a few favorites over the years. It was labor-­intensive, calling for dried apricots that had to be boiled and pureed, then chilled for several hours before they could be added to the stiffened egg whites.
    Edward had made us individual soufflés in little rame­kins, putting them in the oven as we began our main course. He served them immediately after they were done, their puffy meringue swirls tinged golden brown and looking like the whimsical domes of some dreamy cathedral from a fairy tale, dusted with confectioners’ sugar and topped with freshly whipped cream. There was magic in Edward’s fluffy confection. That first time—and every time after that he made it for me—I savored each spoonful as the swirl of cream, meringue, and apricot melted in my mouth.
    Though our early dinners were not gloomy, it’s likely that Edward had already picked up on my matrimonial woes. Appropriately, in the letter that accompanied the soufflé recipe, Edward felt compelled to warn me against living an unromantic life: “That is a somber thought,” he wrote. “For as I have tried to remind you, there is much about you that is not just attractive but very lovable. As important as career is to women, they must not forget who they are and what they are.”
    Edward came of age in the 1950s when a good career choice for a woman was being a housewife. After all, Paula gave up her dream of becoming an actress and stayed at home to raise their two daughters. Edward took a series of jobs to keep the family afloat. But they were no ordinary suburban couple. In their spare time they wrote plays; Paula even wrote a young adult novel, which she managed to have published. Edward’s advice to me was clearly drawn from his personal experience and was at times tinged with sexism. But, strangely, I didn’t really notice, not until other women pointed it out to me. I saw Edward through such a benevolent lens that it never occurred to me to question his wisdom. For on some level I felt he was correct—I was working so hard