It was too late. “How do you sing that ‘I loove you, you loove me’?” Amandine asked haltingly in French, when the program ended.
“I love you, you love me,” Jolie answered swiftly. “Happy family” Luke prompted. For the next week the song resounded from the street the way “La Ronde” had, long before.
A couple of weeks later, at breakfast, Luke made an announcement. “Daddy,” he said, “I don’t like Barney.”
“You don’t like Barney?” I asked, incredulous, delighted. “No, I don’t like Barney” He paused. “I like to watch Barney” He had stumbled, in a Barneycentric manner, on the essential formula that could be applied to almost every American spectacle: I don’t like the 0. J. Simpson trial, I like to watch the O. J. Simpson trial; I don’t like Geraldo Rivera, I like to watch Geraldo Rivera. And most basic of alclass="underline" I don’t like television, I like to watch television. When he watches Barney now, it’s with a look in his eye that I know too well and that I can only call the American look, the look of someone who, though he has seen right through it, still can’t take his eyes away—one of us, despite it all.
Lessons from Things, Cristmas Journal 3
A French school term that I have learned to love is lecons des choses, lessons from things. It refers to a whole field of study, which you learn in class, or used to, that traces civilization’s progress from stuff to things. The wonderful posters in Deyrolle, which Martha and I love and have collected, were made for lecons des choses. They show the passage of coffee from the bean to the porcelain coffeepot, of wine from the vine and soil to the bottle, of sugar from the cane to the clafoutis. They always show the precise costume that the beans and grapes and stuff end up in: the chateau bottling, the painted coffeepot, the label on the jam jar. The Deyrolle posters simultaneously remind you that even the best things always have some stuff leaking out their edges—a bit of the barnyard, a stain of soil—and that even the worst stuff is really OK, because it can all be civilized into things. The choses, the things, are what matters.
Of all the lecons des choses I have absorbed in Paris, the most important has come from learning to cook. I cooked a bit in New York, Thanksgiving dinner and a filet mignon or two, and summers by the grill, like every American guy. But here I cook compulsively, obsessively, waking up with a plat in mind, balancing it with wine and side dishes throughout the working day (“Do I dare poach a Brussels sprout?”), shopping, anticipating six o’clock, when I can start, waiting for the perfectly happy moment when I begin, as one almost always does, no matter what one is cooking, by chopping onions.
The beautiful part of cooking lies in the repetition, living the same participles, day after day: planning, shopping, chopping, roasting, eating, and then vowing, always, never again to start on something so ambitious again… until the dawn rises, with another dream of something else. (Hunger, I find, plays a very small role in it all.) I have learned to make fifty or sixty different dinners: roasted poulet de Bresse, blanquette de veau a vanille; carre d’agneau; gigot de sept heures. I can clafoutis an apple, poach a pear, peel a chestnut. Big dishes, big food. Much too big food, the old cooking. (There is a little culinary bookstore on the rue du Bac that sells menus from the turn of the century. How did people, rich people, middle-class people, eat so much? Our stomachs must have shrunk, an argument for the plasticity of appetite, or at least of tummies. Is it fashion, culture, though? Or is it simply central heating; is it that we need fewer calories now than then and eat like West Indians—ginger and lime and rum marinades—because our indoor climate is now West Indian?)
I shop every day, making the rounds: the nice butcher on the rue de Verneuil, the grumpy butcher on the rue du Bac; the expensive excellent vegetable shop on the rue de Grenelle, or the homey mom & pop cheaper vegetable place on the rue de Verneuil. The one good fish place on the rue du Bac, cheese from Barthelemy on the rue de Grenelle (which Luke won’t enter, from dislike of the smell, and so he waits outside, picketing). Maybe a bottle of wine at Le Repaire de Bacchus, where we discuss what I’m cooking; dessert from the grumpy ladies at Michel Chemin or the smooth, charming, expensive ladies at
Dalloyau, and then I come home, my hands torn and aching from all the plastic bags biting into them.
Shopping in Paris, even for a simple family dinner, takes a solid hour, since everything has to be picked over, made ready, sorted out. (Of course, there are supermarkets, but real supermarkets—grands espaces, large spaces—are not allowed into Paris proper, and, anyway, the local merchants still thrive.) The chicken must have its head cut off, its feet cut off, and then it must be gutted. There is really nothing I enjoy more than watching a good butcher gut a chicken; it is a legon des choses with bloody hands. The butcher incises the gut and then reaches in and pulls out the -whole insides, a (shocking fact this, to a supermarket-stupid American) long, squalid string of mixed-up stuff, guts and gizzard and liver and heart, and then neatly shifts the disgusting to one side and the palatable to the other. You calm down—oh, look at that, that’s nice, that’s nasty—although at the moment that he actually pulls out the guts, your North American nice-nasty meter has been swinging wildly from one end of the scale to the other. Guts to one side, liver and heart to the other:
That’s just stuff, but that’s a potential thing, and what about the neck? Might possibly with a lot of work become a thing, but it’s discardable as stuff too if you feel that way about it.
The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things. It is the moment when the red onions have been chopped and the bacon has been sliced into lardons and the chestnuts have been peeled, and they are all mijoteing together in the pot, and then—a specific moment—the colors begin to change, and the smells gather together just at the level of your nose. Everything begins to mottle, bend from raw to cooked. The chestnuts, if you’re doing chestnuts, turn a little damp, a little weepy. That’s what they do; everything weeps.
I suppose there must be a good evolutionary psychologist’s reason for the appeal of this transformation, some smart, smutty thine about color change and female rears, but cooking isn’t really like sex: appetite and satiation and appetite again. Sex is ravenous rather than reflective. The passage from stuff to things, the moment when the vegetables weep, is a meditative moment and has no point, really, except the purely ephemeral one of seeing it happen. You cook for yourself, or I do anyway. Martha picks through things, New York girl with a New York appetite, and Luke, like an astronaut, would prefer to live on a diet of milk shakes and nutrient pellets. Cooking, for middle-class, end-of-the-century people, is our only direct, not entirely debased line with the hermetic life, with Zen sitting, with just doing things without a thought. No wonder monks make good cheese.