Augustus is dead. I can’t get my mind around it.
Damn it. Fresh grief and shock move through my gut. For once I’d found something I thought I could call my own, a man who worshipped me from the first moment we met, a man who swept me out of my hardscrabble life into the elegance of his own, into his Spanish-style mansion overlooking the ocean, into a world where I didn’t have to worry about my next meal. It was like one of the white paperback romances one of my foster mothers used to read by the hundreds. I never believed it could happen in real life.
I light another cigarette. Inhale, blow it out hard, watch blue smoke rise in a cloud against the moon.
I didn’t come to California for Augustus, actually. I came to find Meadow.
Her book changed the trajectory of my life. I knew I wanted to write, and I’d majored in gender and women’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania, on a full-ride scholarship. I was a good student—one of the best—and not because anyone had given me much of a leg up, but because I worked my ass off. At the end of my junior year, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do.
I found Meadow’s book purely by accident, wandering through the food memoirs and histories at a favorite bookstore near campus, House of Our Own Books.
I’d read all the classics of food writing by then, of course. In a literature class I read M. F. K. Fisher, and loved her rich, clear accounts of eating. I’d found the original archived blog written by Julie Powell about her one-year experiment with cooking every single recipe from Julia Child’s first cookbook and been completely swept away. Her writing was harsher than Fisher’s, but also earthier. I found Bourdain, and fell in love with his lusty approach to life and cried for three days when he killed himself.
All of them. And then I found Meadow Beauvais. It had been a terrible day. I’d poured everything I had into attempting to land an internship with a publisher I desperately wanted. Friday, I found out I’d lost it to one of the princes of the universe who peopled the gilded kingdom to which I was trying to gain access.
I still had to go to work at five and sling cocktails for other princes who would tip me and flirt aggressively, but it was still too early to show up and I wandered into the bookstore not far away from the bar. Bookstores can solve any problem, at least for a little while. It was humid and too warm inside, the lights bright against the gray day, and it all smelled of paper and glue and dust and humans and damp wool and coffee brewing somewhere. Only this place of wonders could soothe me.
Meadow’s book was on an endcap near the cookbooks, which wasn’t the right place for it. It wasn’t a cookbook. It was a memoir.
I’d seen the book, Between Peaches and Pork: A Celebration of Sustainable and Festive Food, before. The cover is red, tomato red, to match the short-sleeved peasant blouse she’s wearing in the photo of her smiling into the camera, an enormous flat basket of herbs balanced on her hip. She’s stunningly beautiful, of course, with that long wavy red hair and big pale eyes, and the photographer gave the viewer just a slight glimpse of her cleavage, hinting at the voluptuous breasts that match her juicy lips and the invitation in her eyes. She’s holding an apple in her free hand.
You can’t help but fall in love with her, or maybe long to rest your head on her bosom and let her sing you to sleep. The ultimate Demeter, mother of all. Naturally I, the motherless daughter, was drawn to her. How could I help it? And even as I intellectualized my longing, slightly embarrassed at my lingering neediness, that little orphan girl picked up the book.
Peaches and Pork. The title of the book, the name of the restaurant. The story of a marriage. Who couldn’t fall a little in love with Augustus, the way she wrote about him, the way he loved her?
The marriage had failed by the time I made it to Santa Barbara, as much as you can say a marriage failed after twenty years. Does it only count if it lasts forever? I mean, I’d be pretty happy with twenty years of almost anything.
Anyway. I inhale more acrid smoke. Meadow. I fell for her image, her words, her funny way of writing. I connected with her so very deeply, feeling that she somehow knew me, that if we met, we would be friends.
The book woke me up. If the boys’ club wouldn’t let me in, I’d make my own way. I changed my focus to writing about women and food, and managed to land a place in graduate school at Harvard. In the back of my mind, I’d always thought to interview Meadow, along with other women chefs, particularly about the ways they influenced the male-dominated world of food.
It took some time to get through my graduate program, working and supporting myself as well as taking classes. I was getting worn down by it all, wondering why I didn’t just find a job and get to work, when Meadow landed in my sights again. She was named one of the top food influencers in the country, and Padma invited her to cohost an episode of her television show, one featuring California cuisine.