Big Apple Bites

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I never wanted to live in New York. Though a starry-eyed actor from aged fifteen to thirty-two, I never set my sights on the city of theatrical fantasy, overwhelmed by its enormity, its noise, its sheer density of population (and within that population the density of crazies, drunks, and other assorted wayward and/or lost souls), its dearth of sky and trees and clean air.

And then at 47 years-old, because of my husband’s career, we moved to the city that never sleeps…and I loved it. Age was on my side. I’m not compelled to see or do everything in one day. I go to bed by ten, safely tucked in with my husband, my cat, and a prim Victorian novel. If I’ve been in the fray one day, slogging through Chinatown or (heavens forfend!) midtown, the next I’m at the library or in Central Park. (Did I mention I live on the Upper East Side with the other kept women? Every bit helps.)

My husband always says you’ll have your best and worst day in New York. It’s a place that magnifies whatever you’re experiencing. When it’s right, it’s so very right, and when it’s wrong, it’s Circus Maximus wrong.

The other day was a very right day. It started down on Wall Street to visit the new Printemps, a French department store that opened here last year. Since 1865, Printemps has served the Parisians, and now the company has two international locations, one in Doha and the other here (they’ve been owned by the Luxembourg-based, Qatari-backed Divine Investments SA since 2013). The last time I was in a Printemps was when it was still the only one, thirty years ago in Paris. I still remember the pieces I bought there, a sailor-inspired striped shirt, of course, and a black zip-up jacket, both of which I had for years, both by the designer Agnès B., whose shop on Madison Avenue, near where I live, possesses, for me, the flavor of a Proustian Madeleine, drawing me back to a very different version of myself, one nascent but no less dazzled by style and beauty. (And before you, dear reader, come for me about the length of that last sentence, read À la recherche du temps perdu.) The New York locale, in a gorgeous Deco building, is dazzling on its second floor, the first being literally entry level, with decadent mosaics, fantastical light fixtures, and a burst of color befitting the department giant’s name.

Next, I wandered up Greenwich Avenue into Tribeca to find Joanne Hendricks’ used cookbook shop. In the front room of a small house that’s withstood the demolition and new builds of the neighborhood sit shelves of books nestled in plastic sleeves. From The Antarctic Housewife to volumes about reading tea leaves to Dickens’ writings on his travels in Italy, the store is a trove of finds, including a Holy Grail of Italian cookery, which I snapped up, clutching it to me lest anyone else wander in and filch the prize.

I first discovered the In Bocca series through Katie Parla, one of the best authors on Italian food, history, and its multivalent meanings. Each region boasts its own cardboard-clad volume, and originally printed on oatmeal paper in the late 1970s, they’re more grimoire than mere collection of recipes, an invitation into a world of grandmothers and chefs from ages past, a world of poetry and cultural custom, a world illustrated by modern paintings and 19th-century etchings.

And there at Joanne Hendricks was Toscana In Bocca. I carefully took it out of the sleeve and flipped through it, tears welling in my eyes. This was the real deal. Expensive? Sure. Worth it? Absolutely. Who needs both kidneys, anyway? (Hendricks told me she used to have an entire set, but a washed-up, so-called celebrity “chef,” against whom I have a longstanding vendetta, snapped them up…and obviously has never used them.)

I scurried off, continuing my march up Greenwich Ave. before I dove into the heart of the Village, heading to the IFC Center to catch Ask E. Jean, the documentary about E. Jean Carroll, the advice columnist and journalist who won two cases against Trump to the tune of near-$90 million for his rape and rape of her character. I first read about the film in a guest editorial for the Times by the film’s director Ivy Meeropol, where she disclosed her suspicions about, what she calls, “the Trump effect.” Distributors dried up for the film as the convicted rapist and felon rode roughshod not only over our media environment but our laws. Luckily for me, IFC was showing the film, and my husband and I grabbed tickets right away.

It’s a marvelous and marvelously inspiring documentary, which, though centered on a very specific moment and a very specific person, I suspect will have an unfortunately long shelf-life because of the questions it asks about how men treat women, about how women treat women (never more enraging than in the deposition footage), about the nature of power, and about the mob gone mental. At times harrowing, I left the theater in love with E. Jean Carroll and asking, for the millionth time, “How did this fuck-tard get to be president…twice?”

But I couldn’t forget or ignore that New York hatched him just as it’s hatched countless remarkable artists, actors, writers, activists, and thinkers. The city amplifies our best and worst, our savagery and our generosity, and the possibility that, on any day, you can have the ne plus ultra of either – and, sometimes, both.