Born Round Read online

  I approached the most wildly caloric days and potentially ruinous meals as dares, challenges, my task to get a fair sense of everything without pushing the ultimate tally of calories—which I couldn’t, and didn’t, actually count—any higher than I had to. It wasn’t exactly easy, but it wasn’t all that hard, because I knew that another big meal, probably a good one, maybe even a great one, would come along the next day and again the day after that. I didn’t experience the old panic: eat all of this before someone else does, before you lose the chance, before you consign yourself to a fast or a juice cleanse or swear off carbohydrates or banish all fat. Forced to eat a certain amount, I developed an ability not to eat too much more than that.

  I now had something other than massive volumes of food to reward and satisfy the eating-obsessed part of me. I had an incredible variety of food. I had that Italian pleasure of lingering at the table, of dining at length, nibbling on this, sipping that. And I had the challenge and diversion of coming to conclusions about everything I tried.

  “I love the caramelized surface of these scallops, but they’re undercooked inside,” I’d say to my friend Charles, who would note that the kitchen had been sloppy with his foie gras, stippled with tough, ropy veins. I’d try it and concur, then move on to the gnocchi, and wonder if they’d been doused with too much butter.

  I’d pause almost as soon as I thought that and I’d marvel: Too much butter? Had there ever been such a thing as too much butter for me in the past? Now there was.

  This mulling over the nuances of what I ate helped keep the weight off, at least according to the yardstick I’d long used in lieu of scales: my pants. When I’d returned from Italy, I wore a mix of 36s and generously cut 34s. After a year in New York, I wore only 34s. After another year, I actually found a few 33s I could squeeze into. The 36s were deep in the back of the closet.

  But making my eating life about quality instead of quantity was only part of the answer. An equal part was rolling like a ball, crawling like Spider-Man and going through all the other paces to which I let Aaron and the trainers after him subject me.

  On my own I wasn’t so shabby about exercise, and often pushed myself harder than I’d been able to in the past. In Dallas, midway through the fast-food odyssey, I took a long morning off, drove about fifteen minutes from my hotel downtown to White Rock Lake and ran—slowly, and with a sad little limp toward the end—the entire trail of more than nine miles around it. In Barcelona, on the day before elBulli, I spent ninety minutes in a gym, using the treadmill and the elliptical and lifting some weights.

  And at home in New York, I exercised an average of two out of every three days, and I usually exercised hard: a solid eighty minutes. Half of that time would be spent running on a treadmill at the Reebok club or on the trails in Central Park. The other half would be devoted to some mix of weights, mat exercises and stretching.

  But my feeling about exercise was that if I wanted to keep at it with the intensity and steadiness that I had to, given how much I wound up eating even when monitoring my portions, I should outsource some of the responsibility and get others to fill any gaps in my motivation and help make working out as interesting as possible. I should schedule firm appointments. I should pony up the money for trainers.

  My success with Aaron had persuaded me of that, but Aaron himself couldn’t last. About four months after I started making my Wednesday train trips to D.C., I stopped, the commute becoming too monotonous and costly. While I was lucky enough to be able to afford private training, its expense offset largely (and poetically) by my low food bills as a professional eater, I couldn’t keep up with both the training and the train tickets. So at Reebok I connected with Cathy, a Pilates instructor.

  Pilates, according to Cathy, would give me actual abdominal muscles, as opposed to whatever lay dormant beneath the pudding of pink flesh that was my stomach, even now. Cathy said that in time I’d be able, from an outstretched position on my back, to hinge all the way upward from my waist, my upper body and my stiffened legs becoming two halves of a V that would narrow and narrow until I was staring at my shins. She called this maneuver a “teaser.” Teaser, I guessed, because it was an unattainable goal, and I and most anyone else who hadn’t medaled in the pommel horse or uneven parallel bars would never quite accomplish it.

  Pilates was a brimming dictionary of loopy terms that cunningly cast exercise as something else, something more like charades. In addition to the teaser there was the “elephant” and the “saw” and the “monkey” and the “tower”: each a different elongation or contortion of the body, none of them all that accurately evoked by its nickname, the sum of them designed to give me a solid “core,” which I now understood to be not just a spiritual asset but also a physical one. With a solid core, Cathy assured me, everything else fell into place. She made it sound like a trust fund, or like Prozac, without the narcolepsy and the sexual frustration.

  It was during our fifty-five-minute Pilates sessions that she told me to bring my knees to my chest, hug them with my arms, bend my head forward and “roll like a ball,” an activity supposedly helpful in hollowing my stomach.

  When Cathy wasn’t telling me to roll like a ball, she was telling me to “clap like a seal,” which was basically rolling like a ball but with my legs pretzeled around my forearms—or were my forearms pretzeled around my legs?—so I could bang the soles of my feet together as if they were flippers.

  These were exercises done on a mat. When I was exercising on the “universal reformer” or the “Cadillac”—contraptions with pulleys and harnesses and little leather ankle cuffs that seemed designed for something more salacious than a solid core—Cathy would insist that I “leave room for the ladybugs,” which meant I should keep my tailbone and lower back flat but not too flat against the surface of the machine.

  “You’re killing the ladybugs!” she’d protest if I pressed my back too hard against it. Could she really hear herself? I hoped not, because all of this semantic nonsense succeeded in distracting me somewhat from the pain in my overworked, underdeveloped midsection and in making the fifty-five minutes go by faster.

  But Pilates seemed to be almost exclusively about that midsection—er, core. What about my outlying regions? Amid all this monkeying and towering and seal-like flipper-clapping, shouldn’t I do some exercises that just tested and developed my arms and legs? Like squat thrusts or bench presses?

  I found Ari, and added a weekly session with him to my weekly session with Cathy. He worked out of a Spartan two-room exercise studio downtown. While Cathy was a font of the chirp and chatter on which dental hygienists once maintained a monopoly, Ari was a wellspring of the imperturbable calm associated with Buddhist monks. When I cursed him the way I had always cursed Aaron, he didn’t shout back at me. He just shook his head slowly, radiating regret over the negativity that coursed through me, over how it separated me from the nirvana I might otherwise know.

  In the Pilates studio, trying to keep it all together.

  He talked incessantly about the value of a good deep breath and told me to feel things in the backs of my eyes. Sometimes he made me do exercises while keeping a mouthful of water that I was forbidden to swallow. It was a way to prevent me from panting—from wasting all of that precious breath.

  But I was there for more than a respiration tutorial, and Ari obliged.

  He made me pretend that I was Spider-Man and that the wood floor was the side of a skyscraper. I had to make my way across it on all fours, moving sideways and fleetly, my knees never dropping, my upper arms and thighs tensed, my butt held high. This supposedly tackled some half dozen major muscle groups at once.

  He made me pretend I was a frog, crouched but not too crouched, leaping in a forward direction for the length of two rooms. This supposedly worked wonders on the “glutes.” I wasn’t entirely sure what or where “glutes” were, but I trusted that mine could use significant improvement.

  For Ari I jumped rope, about two hundred times per session. At fi
rst I could accomplish this only in 50-jump segments, but I eventually worked my way up to 125 jumps in a row on a good day. I’d be winded at the end, and sometimes even dizzy. I relished dizzy. Dizzy, I figured, was worth three to four ounces more of a lamb shank than I really had to eat. Dizzy was my get-out-of-love-handles-free card.

  For Ari I also did push-ups: on a big soft ball; on a small hard ball; with each hand wrapped around one of two handles placed three feet apart; with my feet elevated on a short stepping stool; with my feet elevated on a taller stepping stool.

  Sometimes I even smiled while I did them, or laughed.

  “That’s not the usual reaction,” Ari said to me once.

  I guessed not. But was the usual person as stunned as I was that I could get through twenty push-ups and be ready for another twenty just a minute and a half later? That I had made it to this point?

  A whole wall of one of the rooms in which Ari and I did our workouts was mirrored. I couldn’t avoid myself. But that was okay, because I didn’t really recognize myself, either. The man staring back at me wore a light gray tank top, which left his shoulders and upper arms exposed, and it didn’t look ridiculous or pointless on him, because his triceps and biceps had some minor definition. The tank top was perhaps clingier than wisdom would dictate. It did nothing to hide the way his midsection quivered when he jumped rope. But his cheeks and his chin—they didn’t quiver, not even when he whipped the rope around and pushed off the floor as fast as he could.

  I put Ari in charge of the Men’s Vogue photo shoot. I knew a few of the top editors at that now-defunct magazine, and to my amusement they had asked me to write about staying fit while eating for a living. They had also asked if, to illustrate the article, they could photograph me while I exercised. They promised to obscure my face or crop it out of the picture, so that I wasn’t giving chefs and restaurateurs an easily accessed up-to-date picture of me.

  Ari and I prepped for the shoot, devoting a half hour of one of our weekly sessions to figuring out which of the many exercises we routinely did would give me as streamlined a silhouette and as seemingly winnowed a waistline as possible.

  “What about the one where I put my feet on the ball, my hands on the bench, and make a bridge of my body?” I asked Ari.

  “If you can finally get your body into a straight line, that’d be good,” he said.

  There was a twinge in my memory. All of this reminded me of something, but what?

  Ah, yes: the fretting over, and plotting of, my Ambling author photograph.

  This fretting and plotting felt entirely different.

  For the shoot, Men’s Vogue sent a coordinator, a photographer, his assistant and a stylist. The stylist was in charge of a rack of at least four dozen articles of clothing, mostly sweatpants, shorts and designer T-shirts in about six different colors. He also helped with such matters as taping the insides of the dark blue shorts I ended up wearing to my thighs, so the material didn’t ride up on me as I did the bridge exercise and other ones.

  Whenever I took a break, the stylist rushed at me with a blow-dryer and went to work on the darkening patches of my dark blue Calvin Klein T-shirt.

  “He’s sweating a lot,” the stylist said to the photographer.

  “I’m exercising,” I pointed out.

  “We may have to swap out the shirt, get a new one,” the stylist announced, speaking once again as if I weren’t present—as if I were just an object, a prop.

  Wasn’t this the way models were treated?

  Excellent!

  “When we’re done here,” I asked the stylist, “do I get to keep the T-shirt?” Sweaty or not, it fit me better than my usual nondesigner T-shirts, and it was a memento of the improved me.

  The stylist rolled his eyes. “Sure.”

  “What about the wristwatch?” I ventured, testing my luck. Although I never wore a watch and couldn’t see what a watch had to do with working out, the Men’s Vogue crew had decided to accessorize my dark blue shorts and dark blue T-shirt with a black high-tech digital one. I got the sense that photo shoots were governed—and stylists’ salaries justified—by a “when in doubt, accessorize” philosophy.

  The stylist didn’t respond. Maybe he hadn’t heard me?

  I usually managed to make my way to Harry’s house outside L.A. every nine months or so, and was lucky enough to have one four-day stay coincide with a big party he was throwing. He loved to play host. More so than Mark, Adelle or me, he’d inherited the Bruni entertaining gene, the impulse to generous excess when it came to food and, in his case, wine.

  For this party he rented a small outdoor tent so that, in the rare event it rained, he’d be able to cook on his gargantuan outdoor grill. And he needed the gargantuan grill because he was making paella for forty. He had bought the biggest paella pan I’d ever seen and more than one huge lobster tail per person, along with sausage, chicken legs, shrimp and more. He manned that pan for hours, stirring and watching, watching and stirring, and when the paella was finally done, he served it with Spanish reds from an actual wine cellar below the kitchen of his rambling house with views of the Pacific.

  Harry was the sibling who surprised me the most—the way he’d turned out. Over time Mark had never really changed much. He’d taken on more serious responsibilities, but every stage of his life had been marked by the same talent for getting people to like him, the same unflashy competence, the same self-fulfilling confidence that everything would turn out okay. He’d never even toyed much with the scenery around him. Amherst hadn’t looked all that different from Loomis, and from his freshman year at Amherst onward, he never lived anywhere but Massachusetts. He was living now in a house and a suburb almost interchangeable with those from our family’s Connecticut years. In adulthood Mark had largely reconstituted his childhood, only with himself in Dad’s role.

  And Adelle’s traits as a young working mother were pretty much those that she’d had as a little girl and then a teenager and then a college student: the wit that caught people off guard and threw them off balance; the intelligence that snuck up on them, because she veiled it in a consciously silly manner; the bawdy streak that had prompted her, back as a teenager, to pump me for sexual advice.

  But Harry—Harry hadn’t stood still. He’d evolved first from an introverted dreamer with a taste for gadgetry and science fiction into a high school student as social as any other, and less focused on schoolwork than my parents harangued him to be. Then, toward the end of college, he’d developed into a driven striver with his eye on a big career and income in investment banking. He’d achieved both, in part because he’d learned to be the smoothest of operators: better read and more cultured than many of his financial-wizard peers, a slick dresser, contagious in his enthusiasms. Looking at him, I’d know that Grandma’s pithy adage—Born round, you don’t die square—wasn’t really right. A person could leave behind some or much of who he was. He could take on a new shape.

  On the day before and then on the day after Harry’s paella party, he and I went running together. Both times we drove to a beachfront parking lot near his house and did the same route: a stretch of hard-packed sand right on the Pacific, then a longer stretch of concrete bicycle path parallel to the shoreline, then a series of streets leading back to where we’d started. It was about a 3.5-mile run, and at the 3-mile mark, there was a choice, a fork. Veering to the left meant adding an extra mile, including a long and crazily steep hill that was debilitating just to look at. Twice I chose the hill—made myself choose it—while Harry, with a grunt and a wave, headed right. We met back at his car.

  “Who won?” asked my niece Leslie, the oldest of Harry’s four kids, when we returned from the second of these runs, as her sister Erica, two years younger and something of a hug machine, rushed to welcome me back with an embrace. As soon as Erica’s fingertips made contact with the soggy back of my T-shirt, she recoiled.

  “Sweaty!” she yelped. “Ewww.”

  “That’s the hope,” I said. “That’s the
goal.”

  “Daddy, too,” she said, correctly, pointing to the dark, wet patches on Harry’s T-shirt.

  I told Leslie, “No one won. We weren’t racing.”

  “But who was faster?” Leslie had watched many a family Oh, Hell game, and had even started playing in a few of them. She’d absorbed and adopted the family’s competitive ethos.

  “Your Uncle Frank was faster,” Harry told her. “Your Uncle Frank is faster. He’s better about staying in shape than your daddy is.” That statement probably didn’t sound odd to Leslie and Erica, the way it did to me—their memories didn’t go back to my midthirties and to who I’d been then. They saw me as a different person.

  My siblings, it turned out, had come to see me as a different person, too. During our annual week in Hilton Head, they no longer watched me when I assembled my plate in the rental house’s kitchen. What I assembled usually wasn’t much different from what anyone else did. Even if it was, nothing about how I looked suggested that I was being reckless if I decided on a big meal, that I was digging a perilously deep hole for myself.

  I ate less than Harry, who was now slightly chunky, mainly because the double demands of a career and fatherhood left him limited time or energy for exercise. I still ate more than Mark, whose continued commitment to his mincing bites, even on vacation, had turned him into the only one of the four of us who remained downright svelte year after year.

  And I ate more than Adelle, who had slimmed down considerably in her late twenties and thirties, even while she was having her two children. Especially while she was having her two children. During each of her pregnancies she had realized that she was in a situation that encouraged abandon around food, and she pushed back with more restraint and discipline than she’d usually been capable of. She gained an average of only twenty pounds and was thinner a month after childbirth than she’d been before conception.