From Reflected by Vijay Balakrishnan, a portfolio in issue no. 185 of the Review.

“Restaurants will break your heart” is something that I often hear myself saying. It has become a mantra. When did I start saying it, I wonder. Maybe it was when I first discovered the criss-crossed lines of affection; falling in a crash-out kind of love with a fellow line cook because he helped me with my mise en place. Maybe it was when my sous-chef first called me mediocre; we all watched slices of chocolate cake I cut pile up in the garbage because of my disappointing quenelles. Maybe it was the first time that I had to fire a kitchen assistant over the phone, hearing him quietly murmur in response, “Okay.” Maybe (definitely) it was the time I got fired—the bad news sandwiched between my manager saying I was “amazing” and also “so great.” Maybe it was the first time I watched a plate of food I made go out and I understood, profoundly, that I would never know who might eat it.

In his new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, Keith McNally’s tells us that his heart has been broken many times over—but it seems that restaurants are, in fact, what have saved him. As a diner, his restaurants have certainly given me much life force and heart-mend; they are perhaps the most accessibly glamorous in New York City, where I grew up. Over the course of his career, McNally, who is now seventy-three, has opened Augustine, Balthazar, Café Luxembourg,  Cherche Midi, Lucky Strike, Nell’s, Minetta Tavern, Morandi, Pastis, Pravda, and Schiller’s, as well as Balthazar in London and the new Minetta Tavern, in Washington, D.C.

This memoir spans the course of McNally’s life. It loops and shifts between timelines, but in a way that is forgivable and even charming: it reads like McNally remembers as he writes and then—urgently—wants not to forget. A funny tension for someone who claims to regret almost everything. He weaves together memories from the working-class London of his childhood to his young man’s adventures abroad and the sets (strip clubs and playhouses alike) where he realized that film and theater were what moved him most. But more often than not, we’re in New York City in the eighties, witnessing, up close, the building of his empire, the explosions of his love affairs, and time’s passage and pains to the present. McNally turns on the overheads: We get intimate, poignant, sometimes brutal moments from his marriages (two, both now finished) and earnest, messy fatherhood. Lights intensify on a stroke, a suicide attempt, a stint at McLean, and an arrival at new kind of life. 

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Nettie Pearl Jones, 1984. Photograph by Fern Logan.

Fish Tales, first published in 1983, is a novel told in short, vivid vignettes. A woman named Lewis comes of age hardscrabble in early sixties Detroit. It was a difficult time to be born a girl. Teachers slept with students without consequence; an unexpected pregnancy meant you could be expelled. Secrets and illegal abortions, it seemed, were the best ways for a girl to hold onto her pride.

The novel opens with an illicit scene between twelve-year-old Lewis and the “shit-yellow” older boy who impregnates her. Just pages later, she announces that she has aborted the child, “with a hanger.” It is clearly traumatic for young Lewis, but in the world of the novel, trauma is neither acknowledged nor named. Lewis simply goes on. She barrels headfirst into the arms of Peter Brown, her social studies teacher, beginning an affair that lasts for almost a decade. When he marries a woman closer to his age, Lewis is devastated and enraged. She visits their home and causes a grand, dramatic scene:

“Desecrator, rapist, slimy child molester” spilled out of me into that quiet room.

“Pete told me you were nuts,” [his wife] said from her bed. “He was right. He told me that he’s tried to help you since you were twelve.”

“Help me?” I screamed out. “By fucking me? Huh?”

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Old cherry orchard, 1994, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

What do we hold fast, what do we let go? The question, like a living being, hovers onstage in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. It hovers, whirls, mutters, speaks aloud, corrects itself, mutters, as Firs—an elderly butler who has faithfully served the Ranevskaya estate for so many years, his chest covered in medals from forgotten skirmishes—is left behind when everyone departs for the train station. In the beautiful rendition of the play now at St. Ann’s Warehouse, even Firs’s voice, with its House of Lords vowels, is a murmur of an annihilated past, gone now to the carapace of lost things.

Thwack! is the sound of the ax in the cherry orchard where Lyubov Ranevskaya sees her dead mother walking in the evening among the white blossoms, the trees like angels of heaven that the gods have not neglected. My grandmother loved the theater, and when my grandfather’s hearing began to fail, she began to take me with her. I was then probably seven. About the theater she used to say, “You could get me up in the middle of the night.” When she was young, she’d been an actress in the Yiddish Theatre—somewhere there is a photograph of her playing Ophelia at the Henry Street Settlement, with her hair down to her knees. She lived for Chekhov. How many productions of The Cherry Orchard, of The Seagull, did we see together? “Shh,” she would say. I wasn’t allowed to whisper, ever, after we took our seats. “Shh,” she said, “you’ll wake the actors from their dream.”

What is the story of The Cherry Orchard? Lyubov Ranevskaya returns to her family’s estate, which has within its precinct a famous cherry orchard. The estate is inhabited by characters who filter in and out: her brother, Gaev; her adopted daughter, Varya; the old servant, Firs; her drowned son’s tutor, Trofimov, who is a perpetual student, waving his rhetorical fists. The estate is heavily mortgaged, and there’s no money to pay it off; Lopakhin, a rich businessman whose father was a serf on the estate, offers to buy it and subdivide the land for holiday houses. The orchard is untended; there are no longer any serfs to turn the cherries into jam. A frenzy of regret and magical thinking ensues—the old question, wearing its fools cap: What do we let go? Read More