Lunch in Paris (36 page)

I
f
Sex and the City
taught us anything, it’s that Paris is the only city in the world that New Yorkers actually fantasize about.

Mayur and Kate arrived for a week in October, and the apartment turned into an obstacle course of shopping bags. I love it
when my friends from New York come to visit me in Paris. It’s a thrill to see that Kiss My Face organic toothpaste on the
sink, to trip over the beribboned Ladurée bags in the hall. They don’t care that the chocolate and rosewater macaroons will
be stale by the time they hit JFK or that the Longchamp totes are probably cheaper in duty free. New Yorkers never want to
visit the Eiffel Tower (they’ve had their own near-death experience waiting in line to go to the top of the Empire State Building
the day after Christmas). They want you to take them to your “little gem,” your “local,” the twin of the bistro one of their
racquetball partners just fronted in deepest, darkest Brooklyn.
Do you think those Art Deco chandeliers are for sale?

Mayur is a friend from college days, a(nother) lawyer who works in new energy. Like Gwendal, he has a right brain and left
brain that function at the same time, and can discuss with equal
passion physics, poetry, and how to make a good vermouth. His girlfriend Kate is a favorite of mine, a willowy brunette with
a few scattered freckles and huge Irish smile. She is political and spiritual—one of the only people with whom I can talk
about my interest in religion without getting into an argument about God. After college, she taught public school in East
Harlem. Last January, on her way to the entrance exam for the Columbia School of Journalism, she got a headache that almost
killed her. A small aneurysm was followed by a big one; she received her acceptance letters to Yale and Harvard Divinity Schools
in the ICU. Nine months later, she is walking with a cane, slowly learning to speak and read again through the gaps in her
memory. She is twenty-five. I admire her, as much as I admire Mayur, who I might previously have described as the Playboy
of the Western World. In addition to being Kate’s boyfriend, he has become an expert logistician and caregiver. Here are two
people thrust into a much darker unknown than I’d ever experienced, and they seem to be handling it with grace and as much
good humor as humanly possible.

Mayur is also an excellent cook. When he is around, I tend to play
sous-chef:
chopping, cleaning, and practicing my proper folding technique.

Taking Mayur to the market is a little bit like taking a foot fetishist shoe shopping. He gets this look in his eyes, and
he likes to pet the vegetables. I had discovered a new market, open Wednesdays and Saturdays, just on the other side of the
boulevard de Belleville. This one was more expensive than my regular market—there were smaller producers, more wicker baskets
and baby zucchini.

Like most American foodies when they come to France, Mayur was in ecstasy over the variety of mushrooms, the comparatively
low cost of oysters, foie gras, and, of course, champagne. I thought
he was going to cheer when he saw the scallops. “They sell them
live,
” he said, loading us up with three kilos. They offered to shell them for us. “
Non, non,
” he insisted with a defiant wave. “We’ll do it ourselves.”

I let Mayur do the menu planning for the week. He wanted to make wild boar. I was just relieved that he didn’t want to go
out to the forest at Fountainebleau, Henri IV style, and kill it himself. Instead, we got in line behind the grannies at the
butcher; Matt Dillon barely looked up as I placed my order and took my ticket over to the cashier. Like a pro. Like I’d been
doing it all my life.

By six p.m. the kitchen looked like a bomb had exploded. Mayur was over the sink, wresting open scallop shells with one of
my many dull knifes. He carefully poured the juice into a bowl and rinsed the scallops to remove any sand caught between the
tender white meat and the firmer coral-colored roe, wrapped around it like a socialite’s fur stole.

Mayur is the kind of cook (my kind), who thinks the chef should always have a drink in hand. He was making the scallops with
champagne custard, so naturally the rest of the bottle would have to disappear before dinner. He poured a cup of champagne
into a small pot and set it to reduce on the stove. Then he put a sugar cube in the bottom of a wide champagne
coupe
(Lalique, service for sixteen, direct from the attic on my mother’s last visit). After a bit of a search, he found the
crème de violette
in one of his shopping bags and poured in just a dash. He topped it up with champagne and gave it a swift stir.

“To dinner in Paris,” he said, glass aloft.

“To the chef,” I answered, dodging swiftly out of the way as he poured the reduced champagne over some egg yolks and began
whisking like his life depended on it.

“Do you have fish stock?”

“Nope.”

“Chicken?”

“Just cubes. Are you sure that will work?”

“Sure. This is the Mr. Potato Head School of Cooking,” he said. “Interchangeable parts. If you don’t have something, think
of what that ingredient does, and attach another one.”

I counted, in addition to the champagne, three other bottles of alcohol open in the kitchen. The boar, rubbed lovingly with
a paste of cider vinegar, garlic, thyme, and rosemary, was marinating in olive oil and red wine. It was then to be seared,
deglazed with hard cider, roasted with whole apples, and finished with Calvados and a bit of cream. Mayur had his nose in
a small glass of the apple liqueur, inhaling like a fugitive breathing the air of the open road.

As soon as we were all assembled at the table, Mayur put the raw scallops back in their shells, spooned over some custard,
and put them ever so briefly under the broiler—no more than a minute or two. The custard formed a very thin skin with one
or two peaks of caramel. It was, quite simply, heaven.

The pork was presented neatly sliced, restaurant style, surrounded with the whole apples, baked to juicy, sagging perfection.

M
AYUR AND I
were sitting on the couch, drinking tea and catching up on the news about mutual friends. Kate called from the bathroom.
He came out looking bewildered. Could I go in? They had a reservation at a Michelin-starred restaurant that night, and she
was having trouble with her mascara. The facade of the expert caregiver cracked for just a second. He looked frustrated, exhausted,
worn out from a collective effort spent on the smallest things. More than my mother, more than Afra and Amanda, more than
the self-admonishing voice inside my head, this was the moment that made me feel like a spoiled
brat. I had everything, so maybe it was time to stop feeling like nothing at all.

For whatever reason, I couldn’t stop doing the math, the comparison shopping. The news from New York was the usual—promotions,
partnerships, and 401(k)s—or the lack thereof. Sometimes meteoric success, sometimes burning out, or selling out. Always something
to do with money. I knew where they were going for dinner; it would cost half of what Gwendal earned in a month. I was starting
to notice what the French would call a
décalage,
a kind of cultural jet lag in these conversations. Part of me still thought these things were very important, and was scared
not to have them. But part of me knew my life couldn’t be judged or summed up in quite that way. At some point I was going
to have to stop comparing apples and oranges. If I wanted to be happy here, I was going to have to evaluate my life in Paris
on its own terms.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Kate and I went to vespers at Notre-Dame. Kate was raised Catholic, and I’m convinced I would have made a very good Catholic,
particularly in the sixteenth century, on account of the music. I respond to churches in much the same way that I respond
to museums, as buildings whose search for beauty and meaning take us outside ourselves for a moment. Mayur had rented a car,
because Kate wasn’t up to walking long distances yet. The boys went to look for a parking spot, have a drink, and talk about
comic books, leaving the religion to us.

It was getting dark as we made our way over the cobblestone square toward the cathedral. It is difficult to imagine that the
same imposing towers and jutting gargoyles have been presiding over Paris since before the printing press, or the bubonic
plague. Kate is still missing a lot of the connectors in her sentences; they
tend to come out in short bursts—subject, verb, object. “God, testing, me,” she said, with a little rise in her voice that
was both a question and an answer. I grabbed her hand. I didn’t have anything useful to say. I thought about the road that
lay in front of her. Everything she took for granted that was gone, everything she used to know that she would have to relearn.

The thing I like best about churches is that they are thinking spaces. Sitting on the austere straight-back chairs in the
crowded nave, I felt the chill of the stone under my feet. My gaze was drawn upward to the points of the graceful arches.
It’s one of the tricks of Gothic architecture; there is so much air above your head that you can’t help but raise your eyes
toward the heavens.

The vibrations of the organ hit us from behind, prickling the hair on the back of my neck. I needed a plan, and not the old
kind—not a checklist, not someone else’s hardened wisdom about the nature of success. Success means different things here.
Time, as well as money; family life, not just public recognition. I was still searching for a project. Something I really
wanted, instead of something I was supposed to want. I needed a feeling, as well as a five-year plan. And the courage to do
something about it.

Since God isn’t usually who I consult on such matters, I started thinking about a different kind of teacher.

I had an English professor at Northfield named Anthony Chastain-Chapman; his students called him Cha-Cha. He had wrinkles
and big glasses and terrible prewar English teeth. He was a specialist in Elizabethan theater. He never tired of reminding
us that Shakespeare probably wrote his prologues to summarize the story, so that the guy feeling up his girlfriend in the
front row didn’t miss anything.

When we finished reading
Hamlet
he put down his yellowed copy and looked at us. “Do you know why Fortinbras comes back at the end of the play?” There was
a blank as he looked around
the classroom. “To drag the dead bodies off the stage. There was no curtain in Shakespeare’s theater, and actors who had just
been killed in a duel couldn’t simply get back up again and take a bow.”

I think of Cha-Cha every time I need to stop my existential dithering and just get something done. Life is not always poetry.
Sometimes it’s about the heavy lifting, the reality check. Sometimes it’s about dragging the dead bodies off the stage.

Gwendal recently came back from LA with an article he’d ripped out of the Air France magazine. It was about country music.
He’d been collecting odd song titles since he came back from a conference in Atlantic City, where the hotel played “She Thinks
My Tractor’s Sexy” on a continuous loop. There were a few born classics—a breakup tune called “Shove This in Your Pipe and
Smoke It, You Harpy,” followed closely by “Do You Have a Sister?”

“This one’s my favorite,” said Gwendal, pointing to the bottom of the page:

“Cause the Ass Ain’t Gonna Kick Itself.”