What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death

What We Hunger For

.120. WHAT WE HUNGER FOR in the spring of , i was working as a lowly editor at Playboy when the executive editor called me into his office. Sitting behind his desk, a thin, perennially agitated man wreathed as always in cigarette smoke, he excitedly announced that M.F.K. Fisher was going to write a piece for the magazine on New Orleans food and restaurants. He saved me from saying, “M.F.K. Fisher? Who’s he?” by relaying her one demand. She’d told him she would need a cohort for her time in New Orleans. If she were to visit any restaurant unaccompanied and anonymous she’d instantly be steered to the room’s Siberia, the dark corner by the kitchen, behind the aspidistra. I understand, the editor had told her. And I know just who to send to accompany you. A very bright young woman, the new star of our staff. No, no, she’d said. Two women would suffer an identical fate. The dark corner. The aspidistra. The crashing cymbal-sounds of pots and pans every time the kitchen door swung open. Her companion must be male. The executive editor added, laughing, “She told me, ‘I don’t care what sex he is, as long as he wears pants.’” a what we hunger for .121. I did, still do, wear pants, and fairly expertly if I do say so. But this was the extent of my qualifications. I was almost twenty-six years old, had recently moved to Chicago from Des Moines, and I would bring to the task of M.F.K. Fisher’s dining partner exactly no sophistication regarding food (or anything else). My idea of an accompanying sauce was ketchup. “I am, as often, tempted to start a personal book,” Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher wrote in her journal, on the fourth of March, ,“mais a quoi bon? I think my present life is a strange, complicated , interesting one. But my deep distrust—or is it timidity, cowardice even?—of such self-revelations will, perhaps, always prevent me from thus relieving myself.” She’d left California the previous fall with her husband, Al Fisher, to share a house in a vineyard above the Swiss village of Vevey, with its owner, their friend, the painter Dillwyn Parrish, whom everyone called by his nickname,Timmy. And by the following early spring, when she made this journal entry, her marriage was ending, Al was returning to the States to teach at Smith, and Mary Frances was about to return as well, but only briefly, to tell her parents she was divorcing Al Fisher and marrying Timmy Parrish and that the two of them would continue on together in Vevey. A strange, complicated, interesting life indeed. She was twenty-eight years old in , just two years older than I was the day I learned in my ignorance that we were about to meet. It was also the year she published her first book, Serve It Forth. Like the majority of her writing—more than twenty books, most of them, to borrow one of her titles, devoted to “the art of eating”—it speaks in anecdotal glimpses of cooking and dining and living with her senses as her guide. In Vevey, she and Timmy Parrish had nearly a year of idyllic life. He painted. She wrote. They ambitiously gardened. They entertained their rustic neighbors and loved doing so. And then Parrish got sick with what proved to be Buerger’s disease, a rare what we hunger for .122. illness of the veins and arteries in the arms and legs. He was in great pain and a first operation made it greater and a second, to amputate his left leg, left him suffering even more. The following year they moved back to California, to a crumbling house in the Mojave Desert. They called it Bareacres. In her journal she speaks of the barren beauty of the landscape and of plans for expanding the house. But more and more their life became his illness and their efforts to solve it. Of clinics visited, of medicines tried. Until this journal entry, on September , : “I drink a toohot , too-strong toddy in bed, and if my luck holds I get to sleep after some dutiful trash reading. . . . [A]bout one morning out of three or four, I sleep heavily until : or so without hearing the shot. I try to live (even asleep?) with what dignity I can muster, but I wonder if there...