Born Round Page 23
And I behaved, partly because the rhythm of my twice-weekly appointments with him allowed me to stop thinking in such big, daunting, long-range terms, and to start thinking in increments. The goal was simply to be good for another three days, until the next session. The goal was to shut him up.
But I also behaved because I finally had the ability to keep to a schedule and no longer had excuses not to. Working for the magazine meant that my deadlines came along only every few weeks and I had flexibility in planning interviews and establishing the structure of my days. I could decide to take three five-mile runs in a given week and, if I found the energy and will for them, also find the time.
I was lucky in another way, too: my many years of competitive swimming had taught me what serious exercise was, giving me a sort of body memory of it. I knew how to work out, or rather knew that working out wasn’t fifteen minutes of moderate walking on an inclined treadmill while reading the latest issue of the Economist.
I also knew that I had to try to find some joy and reward in the exercise itself. As my running routes along the Potomac grew longer, I made certain that they were the prettiest ones I could trace, with water views, bridges and grass-lined paths.
The more weight I felt myself losing, the more determined I was to keep losing it. The adage was true: nothing succeeds like success. And I was exhilarated by my success. I was addicted to it.
I still ate a lot. Although I didn’t count calories closely, I had many days when I consumed more than three thousand and possibly as many as four thousand. It seemed to me that by not trying to push the calorie count too low and by trusting that this sustained and sometimes furious exercise would pay off, I avoided those anxious binges, the ones that sprung so readily from the valley of low blood sugar and profound hunger, and I avoided sleep-eating and the compulsive counting of the days until whatever diet I was on was done. I wasn’t so focused on an end point, and thus wasn’t consumed with the idea that everything leading up to it was an act of barely endurable asceticism.
On some nights I’d nonetheless be tempted to stage one of my all-out feasts, but I’d think about my upcoming visit to Aaron or the next run I was going to take and about how mad I’d be for not feeling any lighter and for having wasted the last training session or most recent run. I’d been stuck for too long, and this liberation from that feeling was infinitely more rewarding than anything I could eat.
Every two weeks or so I made a point of going out and buying some new article of clothing I wouldn’t have been able to fit into on my previous shopping trip, and I also made a point of rummaging through my closets and throwing out something that had become too loose. I set it up so that if I gained weight again, I didn’t have old clothing to return to and would instead have to go out and buy replacements for it, spending money I didn’t want to. That became another threat that helped to keep me in line.
I began to experience familiar routines in unfamiliar ways. There was a diner of sorts around the corner from where I lived; I had often gone there in the late morning to get a toasted bagel with a fried egg, a sausage patty and cheese on it. I still did this, because I needed fuel before or after a run or a session with Aaron. But in the past I’d thrown on a pair of loose sweatpants and my hooded sweatshirt and even a baseball cap to walk to the diner, and while waiting for my breakfast sandwich, I had tried not to make eye contact with the server, and I’d willed the people around me not to notice me, a man too heavy to be eating this way. Now I found myself entering the diner without a cap, in the T-shirt and shorts in which I was about to exercise or in which I had just exercised. And I occasionally struck up a conversation with the server.
With a cousin, Mark (second from right) and Lisa
as I work my way back to fitness.
Two months after I’d started with Aaron I was even able to fit—snugly—into some size 36s that didn’t come from Brooks Brothers.
It had taken years for me to get as big as I’d gotten; it took much less time to get smaller again. Maybe that was another bit of luck, or maybe a testament to how fiercely I wanted this.
On so many fronts I was calmer and more content, and that included work. I preferred my magazine job to my previous jobs in Congress, on the campaign trail and at the White House. Not only were the hours saner, but I liked being able to dwell on a topic and to take the time to fret over the structure of each piece, even each paragraph.
I landed the first long interview that Gary Condit, the Congressman then under suspicion in the disappearance of a female intern, gave after a disastrous TV interrogation by Connie Chung. And I got an unusually generous amount of time—hours and hours—with Hillary Clinton, who was early in her first term as a New York senator. The editors at the magazine had the clever idea of a joint profile of her and of Chuck Schumer, the senior senator from the state; it was smart because each senator had to worry that the other would try to hog my attention, so neither could be stingy with the access I was allowed.
At one point I had dinner with both of them, and Schumer, trying to get over a cold, ordered tea. Clinton asked me what I was going to drink. I sensed that she was looking for permission, and I said I might like some wine. She instantly echoed that, her smile widening, and went on to drink two glasses. Up close, she was a good deal less stiff than she had ever seemed from a distance.
About six months into the job, as my editors and I pondered who else in Washington to profile, I was presented with a much different opportunity. The position of Rome correspondent for the Times had suddenly become open, and the newspaper needed to fill it with someone who didn’t have a web of personal commitments and could relocate right away. I qualified. On top of that I had some exposure to Italian culture, had studied Italian for a few years in college and—because of the book on priest abusers—had some knowledge of the workings of the Catholic Church. The newspaper’s foreign editor asked me if I might be interested in the position.
Absolutely. It was a chance not only to live and work abroad, but to do it in Italy, which wasn’t exactly a hardship. It was a position with clout but without huge responsibility: the most serious European news was covered out of Paris, London and Berlin, the capitals of countries that mattered more to the United States, both economically and diplomatically. The newspaper’s Rome correspondent typically spent more time on colorful features than on straightforward news stories. That suited me.
And the timing was ideal. As much as I loved hearing Washington friends and acquaintances marvel at how much weight I had lost, their comments were a constant reminder that in Washington I wasn’t simply fit: I was the fat guy who’d become fit. People there saw me through the prism of my weight, and every compliment was a retroactive gibe.
I wanted to be seen as who I now was, or was quickly becoming: a normal guy, neither trim nor tubby, whose size didn’t warrant particular notice, positive or negative. In Italy I could be that guy, so long as the absence of Aaron didn’t trigger a backslide.
I certainly feared a backslide, but I also knew that I couldn’t lean on Aaron forever or let worries about regaining weight hold me back from the sorts of adventures that were the best part of life. I had withdrawn from the world during my fattest years. I wanted to throw myself back into it now. I wanted to know what it would be like to walk through Piazza Navona on my way to work, to hear the music of the Italian language every day, on every street corner. I wanted gelato. No, I’d have to go easy on the gelato, to give myself a better chance at an Italian romance, which I wanted, too.
So when the Times formally offered me the Rome job in late May 2002, I took it, agreeing to land in Italy by the middle of July. Then I signed up for a crash course in Italian, put my house on the market and sold my car.
Shortly before I left, I went to Scarsdale to visit Dad. I hadn’t seen him or any of my siblings in months. Mark was also visiting, with his wife, Lisa, and their kids, and at one point we all went to the Scarsdale Golf Club to use the pool. I splashed around with the kids, and when I c
limbed out of the water and stretched out on a lounge chair, I didn’t bother to put on a T-shirt.
Lisa looked me up and down, smiled and uttered just two words, as powerful in their way as Harry’s remark at that New Year’s Eve party.
“Nicely done,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant.
Nicely done. I kept hearing the words, basking in them. Nicely done. Nicely done. They were musical. They were the two happiest words I could think of.
· FOUR ·
Critical Eating
Fifteen
Think of Italy and you think of food. You think of prosciutto, pancetta, guanciale and all the ways that enterprising Italians have devised for butchering, curing, smoking and ingesting a pig. You think of veal, or at least you should, because Italians are nearly as calf-adept as they are pig-obsessed, and I’m not talking veal piccata (too austerely lemony) but rather veal saltimbocca (the pig joins the calf!) and osso buco (a fatty cut of shank, with a cavity of marrow to boot) and vitello tonnato, northern Italy’s nonpareil contribution to surf and turf. For the uninitiated, it’s a quasi carpaccio of thinly sliced meat smothered in a paste of tuna and capers and anchovies—but just faint traces of the anchovies, for an extra-salty edge—and olive oil. Imagine the richest, most liquid tuna salad you could possibly whip up. Now imagine pouring it without particular restraint on the pinkest, most delicate ribbon of baby beef you could find. That’s vitello tonnato at its best, and that’s reason alone to fly round-trip to Italy, no matter how awful the euro-to-dollar exchange rate, no matter how much the airlines have started charging for an extra suitcase.
Beyond the meat there are Italian cheeses, matched in quality and variety only by those of France, certainly, and maybe Spain. I suppose there’s an argument for Britain, too. But that’s it. And none of those countries have anything exactly like Parmesan, intensely salty and at once gritty and milky, or like Italy’s mozzarella di bufala, made with milk from water buffalos, which gives it a vague, pleasant sourness that rescues it from any blandness, a taste crucially racier than the cheese’s texture.
And the pasta. I haven’t gone into the pasta. There are more kinds of pasta than most non-Italians ever realize: quadruple the number, quintuple, as if the historical purpose and defining mission of this boot-shaped peninsula—at least once it moved past aqueducts, plumbing and all those other basics-of-civilization advancements—were to curl, straighten, flatten, thicken, elongate, abbreviate, coil, spiral and otherwise sculpt noodles until any and every conceivable shape had been achieved. There’s a pasta to evoke butterflies, for which it’s named: farfalle. There’s a pasta mimicking little worms, for which it’s named: vermicelli.
Does a cuisine need bucatini as well as spaghetti in addition to linguine and on top of tagliatelle? All are long, relatively thin strands, but an Italian will tell you that no two types of strand hold sauce quite the same way, so different dishes call for different varieties. There’s no fudging or approximating or compromising when it comes to pasta. A given dish, meal or appetite needs what it needs, and there should be a noodle to meet those exact criteria. Italians are picky that way.
So why aren’t they fatter? That was a question—asked not only about Italians but also about French people and some other Europeans—that I frequently encountered in articles in American newspapers and magazines, perennially intent on explaining our own country’s plumper populace. And when I moved to Italy, it was a question with special resonance for me.
If I could just figure out how Italians staved off second chins and love handles, maybe I could do it, too. The answer might give me some sort of meaningful protection—not just another new, doomed trick—as I romped across a landscape more delicious than any I’d previously inhabited.
The answer wasn’t exercise. My experience trying to find and use a proper gym—somewhere with a full complement of weights, an attractive array of cardiovascular machines for rainy or cold days, and a setting that blunted the potential drudgery of it all—made that immediately clear.
In the center of Rome, where the Times office was located, there was nothing like a spacious, gleaming Equinox. What passed for legitimate fitness centers were the sorts of perfunctory setups you found in hotels: a few rooms with meager scatterings of equipment. They were depressing. They weren’t going to motivate me to visit often or linger for more than a few minutes at a time.
But in a slightly less central location, along one edge of the Villa Borghese park, was the Roman Sport Forum, or La Roman, as people in the know called it, speaking of it as they might La Loren or La Jolie. Romans saw it as an ostentatiously endowed diva of a gym, even though it was little larger or better outfitted than the kind of health club you find in any strip mall in any American exurb. It had a modest pool, a weight room with scores of machines, a glass-walled exercise studio for calisthenics, and perhaps two dozen treadmills, StairMasters, recumbent bikes and the like. It was darker than any American gym I knew, making me wonder if Italians considered mood lighting a catalyst for working out. I was thinking along the wrong lines. Working out wasn’t really the point of La Roman.
In fact the managers of La Roman seemed intent on preventing it. For starters, there was the signed doctor’s note they insisted I get in order not just to join the gym but even to venture as far as the locker room during an initial visit. I produced a note, paid for a six-month membership, changed into my workout clothes and found an available treadmill. I had been on it less than five minutes when I noticed one of the gym attendants standing at my side, flapping his arms and yelling at me.
“È vietato!” he was saying, and I would soon realize that whether you were speaking to an attendant at La Roman or reading one of the many signs posted on the walls, that phrase was the most prevalent one, a kind of motto for the gym. È vietato! È vietato! Translation: it’s forbidden. But precisely what about my activity on the treadmill was vietato? Running? All the Italians on the treadmills around mine were walking, and they were walking rather slowly at that, nary a pinprick of perspiration smudging their fashionable exercise outfits. My own T-shirt was already mottled and wet. Maybe sweating was vietato.
The attendant explained that while the note from my doctor entitled me to use the gym’s pool, weight machines, locker room and of course snack bar, it didn’t entitle me to use any cardiovascular equipment. For that I needed to submit to an independent examination, including a stress test with heart monitors taped to my chest, by the gym’s own physician. It would cost me a hundred dollars. And an appointment wasn’t available until a week from then.
I bided my time, paid my money, passed the stress test and returned to the treadmill without incident, using my gym visits to run three or so miles on a treadmill and spend thirty to forty minutes lifting weights. In the weight rooms were signs spelling out, for unexplained reasons, that it was vietato to chew gum. It was vietato to leave free weights lying around, a transgression that might require one of the half dozen attendants to do something other than gossip with one another, harangue unauthorized treadmill users and unwind in the snack bar, which was a nearly full-scale trattoria, with seating for dozens and a menu that included bucatini all’amatriciana and prosciutto e melone. My path to and from the locker room skirted its tables, at which I’d sometimes spot, on my way out of the gym, the same La Roman staffers and members I’d spotted on my way in.
It apparently wasn’t vietato for a member of La Roman to lean against or straddle a weight machine for twenty uninterrupted minutes, monopolizing it without attempting anything more physical than the arching of an eyebrow. La Roman members did this all the time, provided that the weight machine in question afforded them a good view of other patrons and vice versa. Although most of them were thin and no small number of them were gorgeous, their time at La Roman deserved little credit for that.
I was marveling one evening at their languorous, even phobic relationship with physical exertion when, yet again, a flapping, yelling gym attendant materialized at my side.
He spoke in such rushed, histrionic Italian that I had to implore him a half dozen times to slow down, back up, repeat himself, maybe use fewer polysyllabic words. What exactly was il problema?
He pointed to my gym shorts, then grabbed my arm and tugged me toward a sign I hadn’t noticed before. It explained that it was vietato to wear shorts that didn’t adhere tightly to your legs. My shorts didn’t, and were thus vietato.
Trust me on this: the shorts I was wearing were as unremarkable and unobjectionable as athletic shorts could be. They were precisely the type of shorts—ribbed waist, drawstring, thick cotton, material reaching more than halfway down the thigh—that every college since the dawn of academia has printed its logo on and sold in the student store. They weren’t flamboyant shorts. They weren’t tattered shorts. They weren’t skimpy shorts. They were archetypal, boring athletic shorts.
Why did it matter whether they adhered to my legs?
I told the attendant, in my flawed but functional Italian, that for my next visit to the gym, I would get and wear shorts that were adherent or adhesive or whatever they were supposed to be. Then I turned away from him and headed to the next weight machine I planned to use. I felt a tug on my arm. He wouldn’t let me go.
He held up an index finger—the international signal for “wait a second”—and bolted away. Within less than a minute he was back.
With two thick blue rubber bands.
I’d seen rubber bands like these before: they were the kind often wrapped around the base of a head of broccoli. Maybe that’s where they’d been at some point. But as he handed them to me, I understood that where they were supposed to be now was wrapped around each too-floppy leg of my too-floppy cotton gym shorts.