It came to me in a flash: sell the house. After my husband lost his
second job in eight months and after my agent stopped returning my calls. It
was the solution to all our problems. We hired a realtor – a young energetic
woman called Jen – and made a plan. We would sell our three bedroom home and
move to a loft in downtown Los Angeles. We would be downsizing, but it would be chic.
It was a bitter pill to swallow, selling the home that we had lived in for twenty-one years and raised our children. But really there was no alternative to our diminished earning capacity. Added to the embarrassment of having a ‘For Sale’ sign planted on our front lawn and explaining to all our inquisitive neighbors why and where we were moving. What I had failed to take into account was the effect that this momentous decision would have on our eating habits. What nobody tells you when you are trying to sell a house is that cooking in your home becomes virtually verboten.
In these tough economic times if you want to sell, you have to ‘Stage’. When you live in the film capital of the World, people want to buy houses that look like movie sets. This requires cramming every personal item you own into a closet and making your house look like nobody lives in it. But at the same time it has to look like Martha Stewart was your interior decorator.
When it comes to serving wine with seafood, we want the wine to marry with the delicate flavors of the fish. In other words, the wine or the fish should not upstage each other in any way. Remaining complementary is key.
When I was a younger man, I was quite the spendthrift blowing through tons of money that I didn't actually have. Like many others of my generation, I lived way beyond my means on a series of credit cards that I would repeatedly max out the credit limits on and end up slaving away, some times for years, in an effort to pay off. When I first moved to New York in the late 80s to attend the NYU publishing program, I did so with visions of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City dancing in my head. I eventually landed a job at Random House and wasn't daunted by the fact that it only paid $13,000 a year because in my mind I was on my way to living the life I had always dreamt about.
A good friend of mine from London moved back to Paris a few years ago and met her now-husband on her first weekend back in the City of Lights. He is now a Senator, and this lovely couple invited us to join a private tour and dinner at the Sénat last night.