THREADING THE NOODLE

My wife, Suzanne, can’t cook a meal without following a recipe. God help you if you suggest a bit more of this, a bit less of that; these TuttoRosso will certainly not do as well as San Marzano….Everything by the book. I collect cookbooks – have a whole wall full of them – and rarely crack one open save for those times when I just don’t know what to do with that rancid eggplant. Even then I usually don’t go much beyond the index, taking inspiration from an entry and creating the thing the way I imagine it might or could be. Sometimes this works out, sometimes….not so much. Often I’ll throw open the cupboards and just root around, putting together a bit of this and that and making a meal out of whole cloth, from the blank page, so to speak.

   As an erstwhile painter, back in the day, I would sit for hour after agonizing hour, chain-smoking and staring at that blank canvas in the hope that something would strike me before the overwhelming urge to pack it in and head to Fannelli’s  snuffed out the creative spark. Eventually I would make more or less the same painting as the one that had preceded it…which is more or less why I stopped painting. Because I insist on producing a proper dinner every evening, though, Suzanne says that cooking has replaced making art as my creative outlet. And whereas painting, like, say, poetry is entirely subjective and need only please or antagonize its creator; most meals I make should, at the very least, appeal to Suzanne as well.

 

Suzanne’s blank page is the dressmaker dummy upstairs in the sewing room. She heads up there after her coffee in the morning and I won’t see her again until I’ve made dinner. I have no idea how much time Suzanne spends staring at her naked dummy before draping that first bit of muslin across a shoulder, but I do know that whatever she ends up with will be different from what she introduced last season and will have to appeal to a great many people. At any given moment she is working on several designs at once and has been doing so now for many, many years. I never find her pacing, smoking or heading out to the bar; she just goes about her day, creating one amazing garment after another, every tuck, fold and stitch just so, every buttonhole and bar-tack impeccable. There are no directions on how to do this, no recipe to follow, just the stuff of the sewing room: the fabrics and notions, the pins and needles, pinking shears and pencils, the humming herd of machines. And the blank, unclothed dressmaker dummy.

   Sometimes I’ll sneak up there on little cat feet and peek through the door. Suzanne will be quite contentedly stitching away, one side of her mouth full of pins as the other side carries on a conversation with the murmuring radio. I will be afraid to startle her, lest she swallow those pins, so I’ll slink back down leaving the now beautifully gowned dummy a silent witness to my wife’s tireless and inspiring creativity.