The Dinner (5 page)

‘Well, it doesn’t seem to want to cooperate,’ he said as the top of the cork broke off and the wreckage came out with the corkscrew.

The manager was now faced with a dilemma. Should he try to ease the other half of the cork out of the bottle, here at the table, under our watchful eyes? Or would it be wiser to take the bottle back to the open kitchen for some expert help?

The simplest solution, unfortunately, was unthinkable: to push the stubborn half of the cork down into the bottle with the handle of a fork or spoon. You might find little crumbs of cork in your glass afterwards, but so what? Who cares? How much did this Chablis cost? Fifty-eight euros? The price meant nothing anyway. Or at most it meant that you had an excellent chance of coming across exactly the same wine on the supermarket shelf tomorrow, for €7.95 or less.

‘Excuse me,’ the manager said. ‘I’m going to fetch another bottle for you.’ And before we could say a word he went striding off past the other tables.

‘Ah, well,’ I said. ‘I suppose it’s like a hospital. You’re better off praying that one of the nurses will take your blood, and not the specialist himself.’

Claire laughed out loud. And Babette laughed too. ‘Oh, I felt so bad for him,’ she said.

Serge, though, sat there brooding. The look on his face was almost sorrowful, as though something had been taken away from him: his little toy, his self-important blather about wines and vintages and earthy grapes. Indirectly, the manager’s bumbling reflected on him. He, Serge Lohman, had picked the Chablis with the rotten cork. He had been looking forward to an orderly process: the reading of the label, the approving nod, the thimbleful that the manager would pour into his glass. That last bit, above all. That was, by now, one thing I couldn’t stand to watch any more, couldn’t bear to hear: the sniffling, the gargling, the smacking of the lips, the wine that my brother would roll across his tongue, all the way to his gullet, and then back again. I always had to look the other way.

‘Let’s hope the other bottles don’t have the same problem,’ he said. ‘That would be a pity: it really
is
an excellent Chablis.’

He was clearly in a bad way. He was the one who had picked out this restaurant, they
knew
him here, the man in the white turtleneck knew him and had come out of the open kitchen specially to shake his hand. I wondered what would have happened if
I
had picked the restaurant, a different restaurant, one he’d never been to before, and if the manager or a waiter had failed to uncork the wine at one go: you could bet your life on it that he would have smiled pityingly, then shaken his head – oh yes, I knew my brother well enough by now; he would have given me a look with a message only I could read: that Paul, he always takes us to the weirdest places …

You have big politicos who like to work in the kitchen, who collect old comic books or have a wooden boat they’ve fixed up all by themselves. The hobby they choose usually clashes entirely with the face that goes with it, going completely against the grain of what everyone has made of them till then. The worst stick-in-the-mud, someone with all the charisma of a sheet of cardboard, suddenly turns out to cook splendid French meals at home in his free time; the next weekend supplement of the national newspaper features him in full colour on the cover, his knitted oven mitts holding up a casserole filled with Provençal meat loaf
.
The most striking thing about the stick-in-the-mud, besides his apron with a reproduction of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster, is his completely implausible smile, meant to convey to his constituency the joy of cooking. Not so much a smile, really, as a fearful baring of the teeth, the sort of smile you wear when you’ve just been rear-ended and have lived to tell the tale, and which above all communicates relief at the simple fact that the Provençal meat loaf has not burned to a crisp in the oven.

What exactly had Serge been thinking when he chose wine as his particular hobby? I’d have to ask him sometime. Maybe this evening. I made a mental note; this wasn’t the right moment, but the night was young.

When we were still living at home all he ever drank was cola, huge amounts of it; he had no problem knocking back an entire king-size bottle at dinnertime. Then he would produce these gigantic belches, for which he was sometimes sent to his room, belches that lasted ten seconds or longer – like subterranean thunder rolling up and exploding from somewhere deep down in his stomach – and for which he enjoyed a certain schoolyard fame: among the boys, that is, for he knew even then that girls were only repulsed by burps and farts.

The next step had been the conversion of what was formerly a messy walk-in closet into a wine cellar. He bought racks to stack the bottles in, to let the wine age, as he put it. When guests came to dinner he began to deliver lectures about the wine being served. Babette viewed it all with a kind of bemusement; perhaps she was the first to see through him, the first not to completely believe in him and his hobby. I remember calling to talk to Serge one afternoon and getting Babette on the line. Serge wasn’t there.

‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley,’ she said: there was something in her voice, something about the way she said ‘tasting wine’ and ‘Loire Valley’ – the tone a woman uses when she says her husband is working late, even though she’s known for a year that he’s having an affair with his secretary.

Claire, as I noted earlier, is smarter than I am. But she doesn’t blame me for not being her equal. What I mean to say is that she never looks down her nose at me, she doesn’t sigh deeply or roll her eyes when I don’t get something right away. Obviously I have no way of knowing how she talks about me when I’m not around, but I’m very sure, I have absolute faith in the fact, that Claire would never adopt the tone I detected in Babette’s voice when she said: ‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley.’

Babette, in other words, is also much smarter than Serge. That’s not saying a hell of a lot, I might add – but I won’t: some things speak for themselves. All I want to talk about here are the things I heard and saw during our little get-together at the restaurant.

‘The lamb’s-neck sweetbread has been marinated in Sardinian olive oil with rocket,’ said the manager, who had by now arrived at Claire’s plate and was pointing with his pinkie at two minuscule pieces of meat. ‘The sun-dried tomatoes come from Bulgaria.’

The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but there are voids and then there are voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle.

It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation. ‘You wouldn’t even dare!’ the plate said, and laughed in your face.

I tried to recall the price; the cheapest appetizer was nineteen euros, the entrées varied from twenty-eight to forty-seven. And then there were three set menus of forty-seven, fifty-eight and seventy-nine euros each.

‘This is warm goat’s cheese with pine nuts and walnut shavings.’

The hand with the pinkie was above my own plate now. I fought back the urge to say, ‘I know, because that’s what I ordered,’ and concentrated on the pinkie.

This was the closest he had come this evening, even when pouring the wine. The manager had finally opted for the easiest solution and returned from the open kitchen with a new bottle, the cork already sticking halfway out of the neck.

After the wine cellar and the trip to the Loire Valley, there had been the six-week wine course. Not in France, but in a classroom at a night school. Serge had hung the diploma in the hallway, somewhere no one could possibly miss it. A bottle with the cork sticking out of it could contain something very different from what was on the label: that must have been dealt with during one of his very first lessons in that classroom. It could have been messed with; a malicious person could have diluted the wine with tap water, or dribbled saliva down the neck.

But after the aperitif of the house and the broken cork, Serge Lohman was apparently not in the mood for any more mucking about. Without looking at the manager, he had wiped his lips with his napkin and mumbled that the wine was ‘excellent’.

At that moment I glanced over at Babette. Her eyes behind the tinted lenses were fixed on her husband; it was almost impossible to tell, but I would almost have sworn that she had raised an eyebrow when he passed his judgement on the pre-uncorked wine. In the car, on the way to the restaurant, he had made her cry, but by now her eyes were looking much less swollen. I hoped she would say something, something to get back at him: she was entirely capable of that, Babette could be very sarcastic when she put her mind to it. ‘He’s tasting wine in the Loire Valley’ had been one of the mildest expressions of that.

In my mind, I egged her on. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. When it came right down to it, that might be the best thing: a huge, knock-down, drag-out fight between Serge and Babette before we moved on to the main course. I would speak soothing words, pretend not to take sides, but she would know that she could count on me.

To my regret, though, Babette said nothing at all. You could almost see the way she gulped back her undoubtedly murderous comment about the cork. But still, something had now taken place that kept alive my hopes of an explosion later in the evening. It’s like a pistol in a stage play: when someone waves a pistol during the first act, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will be shot with it before the curtain falls. That’s the law of drama. The law that says no pistol must appear if no one’s going to fire it.

‘This is corn salad,’ the manager said; I looked at the pinkie, which was no more than a centimetre away from the three or four curly little green leaves and the melted chunk of goat’s cheese, and then at the entire hand, which was so close that I would only have had to lean forward a little to kiss it.

Why had I ordered this appetizer, when I don’t even like goat’s cheese? To say nothing of corn salad. This time the stingy portions worked in my favour: my plate too was mostly empty, although not as empty as Claire’s; I could have devoured the three leaves in a single bite – or simply left them lying on the plate, which amounted to pretty much the same thing.

Whenever I see corn salad I’m reminded of the little cage with the hamster or guinea pig that stood on the windowsill of our classroom in elementary school. It was there because it was good for us to learn about animals – to learn to take care of animals, I suppose. Whether the little leaves we pushed through the bars of the cage each morning were corn salad, I can’t remember, but they looked a lot like it. The hamster or guinea pig nibbled at the leaves and then spent the rest of the day sitting in one corner of its cage. One morning it was dead, just like the little turtle, the two white mice and the stick insects that had preceded it. What we were supposed to learn from this high mortality rate was never dealt with in the class.

The reason why I now had a plate of warm goat’s cheese with corn salad in front of me was simpler than it seemed. I had been the last to order. We hadn’t really talked beforehand about what we were going to have – or maybe we had, and I’d missed it. Whatever the case, I had settled on the vitello tonnato, but Babette, to my horror, ordered exactly the same thing.

No problem: at that point, I could always switch to my second choice: the crayfish. But the next to last person to order, right after Claire, was Serge. And when Serge ordered the crayfish, I was stuck. I had no desire to order the same appetizer as someone else, but to have the same appetizer as my brother was out of the question. Theoretically speaking I could have switched back to the vitello tonnato, but that was purely theoretical. It didn’t feel right: not only would it look as though I wasn’t original enough to choose an appetizer of my own, but it might, in Serge’s eyes, raise the suspicion that I was trying to close ranks with his wife. Which was true, of course, but I couldn’t be so obvious.

I had already closed the menu and laid it beside my plate. Now I opened it again. Reading like lightning, I skimmed down through the list of appetizers, adopting a thoughtful expression, as though I was only looking for the dish I’d already chosen in order to point it out on the menu, but by then of course it was much too late.

‘And for you, sir?’ the manager asked.

‘The melted goat’s cheese with corn salad,’ I said.

It came out a little too readily, a little too sure-of-myself to sound credible. Serge and Babette didn’t notice a thing, but across the table I saw the look of bewilderment on Claire’s face.

Would she try to protect me from myself? Would she say, ‘But you don’t like goat’s cheese?’ I wasn’t sure; at that moment too many pair of eyes were on me for me to shake my head at her, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

‘I hear the goat cheese is from an urban farm,’ I said. ‘From goats that live out in the open.’

At last, after he had granted thorough attention to Babette’s vitello tonnato, the vitello tonnato that, in the best of all worlds, could have been my vitello tonnato, the manager left and we were able to resume our conversation. ‘Resume’ was not exactly the right word, though; as it turned out, none of us had the slightest idea what we’d been talking about before the appetizers arrived. That was one of the disadvantages of these so-called top restaurants: all the interruptions, like the exaggeratedly detailed review of every pine nut on your plate, the endless uncorking of wine bottles and the unsolicited topping up of glasses, made you lose track.