Dinner with Edward Read Online Free Page A

that I had neglected many things about myself. And listening to him talk about Paula, I was beginning to see just how doomed my own marriage was.
    â€œI’m a man who loves women, for all the obscure reasons as well as the obvious ones,” Edward wrote to me in a letter shortly after we met. “Their femininity, their charm, desirability, delicacy, warmth, beauty, tenderness and on and on—a list too long to record. But I have only been in love with one woman all my mature life.”
    To say Edward loved his wife is an understatement. “I wouldn’t have lived this long without her,” he would tell me repeatedly about the woman he first saw in New York in the waning days of summer in 1940.
    In the thick scrapbooks and photo albums he keeps on the shelves of his living room, Edward seems to have every letter he exchanged with his wife, every theater program, restaurant business card, and handmade Thanksgiving dinner menu adorned with pressed autumn leaves. The first volume, which dates back to the year he met Paula, begins with the unembellished black-­and-­white photos that they took of each other on a beach in California (“We always took interesting pictures, never normal,” he told me). The photos of Edward and Paula—both tall, lanky, young—are accompanied by descriptions on index cards, cut to fit the photo album pages and written in Edward’s loping hand.
    Then there are the pages and pages of plastic-­covered birthday and Valentine cards. On Paula’s eighty-­fifth birthday, Edward wrote, “How I ever got you is beyond belief. So don’t wake me up at this date—just let me go on thinking that I’m special enough to deserve you!” In a card to her husband, written at about the same time, Paula wrote, “To my own Eddie: We dreamed we’d get to the top of the mountain, and here we are. I’ll be lovin’ you, always!”
    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.
    Edward was silent, as if suddenly suspended in a state of disbelief. He leaned over the table, poured us the remaining drops of the Vouvray, and then we both lingered over the last spoonfuls of our apricot soufflés.
    A few days later, when Edward’s recipe came in the mail—along with his admonition to be more romantic—I set out to make the soufflés on my own. I removed the eggs from the refrigerator, making sure they were at room temperature, heated the apricots with sugar, and allowed them to chill in the refrigerator before mixing in the rest of the ingredients.
    â€œThis recipe never fails,” Edward had told me. And he was right, because for one of my first renditions I used fresh apricots and my soufflé turned out bland. The puréed dried apricots, which were packed with flavor, made for a richer, more complex dessert.
    I would eventually learn to follow Edward’s recipes with a heightened degree of precision, whether they were instructions for the preparation of food or for life. His assertions never veered too far from certain fundamental themes—he spoke about recognizing “the stranger in all of us” and achieving what he liked to call “a resting place of the soul,” by which I now realize he meant self-­assurance and being happy in your own skin. Or as he put it, “a place in your head where you are at peace with your life, with your decisions.”

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    Scrod, in San Marzano Tomato Sauce
    Orange Zest Salad
    Apple Galette, Vanilla Ice Cream
    Pinot Grigio
    I n the nineteenth century Roosevelt Island, then known as