But How was the lamb? The wine was excellent. The tarte aux pommes was fine.
And the lamb? Well. The lamb had a strong resemblance to a third baseman’s mitt—if I had Antoine Jacobsohns gift for precision, I would compare it to Buddy Bell’s glove, circa 1978—with interesting hints of Naugahyde, kapok, and old suede bomber jacket. There were plenty of white beans, though, and some sauce, so everyone pushed it around politely on the plate. I think I know now what went wrong: after three years of a French oven, I realized that it was easy to forget that American cookbooks were still written, so to speak, in Fahrenheit. De Groot’s two hundred degrees were almost half as hot as the two hundred degrees of my Celsius oven.
I also saw that Alice Waters didn’t notice. If you are playing tennis with Martina Hingis, she does not notice when your backhand is off, because she does not notice when your backhand is on. What you have is not what she would call a backhand. At least I was able to explain to the company that the lamb came from Roy de Groot’s book, and I talked about what a haunting image it gave of a now-vanished French cooking culture: the iron pots on the hearth, the shy Provencale lady in the kitchen, the daily bounty from the farms and the hunters. Alice got that look in her eye. “I love that book,” she said. “And I went on an expedition to the Alps just to find the auberge.”
Did that perfect auberge really exist? I asked.
“Well, no, not really. Not exactly,” she said, in a tone that sounded like “not at all.” “I mean, yes, it didn’t, not like that.” She thought for a moment. “Of course, it existed for him. It still exists for us, in the minds of the people around this table. Maybe that’s where the ideal restaurant always will be.”
Postscript: After Alice Waters left Paris, Le Figaro published an interview with her in which she gently reviewed her concerns about the Rungis market. the markets in paris are shocking! was the headline on the piece, whose effect, from a PR point of view, was like that of a Japanese baseball manager who, after a trip to Yankee Stadium, is quoted in a headline saying, “You call that a ballpark?” Alice Waters is learning that the real France is an inscrutable, hypersensitive place.
I have come to suspect that what is called a seven-hour lamb was really meant to be seven-hour mutton. I am aware of course that there may be other, better recipes for this dish and other, more careful cooks who have prepared it. (The four-hour lamb was great.) But it is also my suspicion that like so many vanishing things in French cooking, the seven-hour recipe was actually made for harder sheep in tougher times. In the late-modern world, where we get all the pleasure we can as soon as we can get it and on any terms we can, and none of us wants to take a nap, for fear of missing some pleasure we might otherwise have had—in a world like that, as I say, there may just be no place left for the seven-hour gigot.
A Machine to Draw the World, Cristmas Journal 4
In April the knock we had been fearing came on the door. The owners of our apartment were coming back from Tokyo. The Asian banking crisis had sent them back to Paris a year early, History leaping its track to knock Experience cold. It came as a shock. Three months and we would have to leave, be gone from 16 rue du Pre-aux-Clercs.
The phone call came, exasperatingly, in the French manner, the way the apartment had come: your whole life thrown upside down in an aside. “Oh, the owners are coming home and will need the apartment in July,” the real estate woman said; no apology or even a “sorry for the inconvenience.” We stayed up all night debating, in the way you do with big news: avoiding, digressing, suddenly feeling sick in the pit of the stomach at the thought of leaving. When we lost the apartment, we thought of going home early, and so we asked ourselves what were the things we loved in Paris, really loved, not just officially appreciated or chose to be amused at? Well, the places our child went. The Luxembourg Gardens at three in the afternoon. The Guignols, and Luke saying, “I’m so excited” before the curtain went up.
The curious thing was that with the loss of Paris threatening, we became more Parisian. The same thing, I had noted, had happened in our last few months in New York. The city, which had become increasingly difficult, suddenly seemed like a playground—people eating outside, in T-shirts and shorts and sneakers in the Italian restaurants in SoHo; the open-all-nightness of New York; the sweet funkiness—registered as it hadn’t in years. When we left the loft for the last time, without trouble, with tears, the music box on Luke Auden’s stroller played “Manhattan.”
Now after the knock on the door, it happened to Paris. I began to cook Parisianly. I bought the chef’s cookbook from Le Grand Vefour and began to make the buttery, three- and four-part dishes that I had been exasperated by before: supremes de volaille, with mint, that sort of thing. I even made souffles again. We put Trenet back on the CD player; strangely the clarity of his French had improved enormously over three years, so that now one could understand the meaning of nearly everything he sang. Or maybe it was just a better record player.
Is this simply the unique perversity of the human heart that wants (and wants and wants) what it doesn’t have—Italian food in Paris, American jazz in Saint-Germain—and, only when it is about to lose it, returns to the things that drew it to the desire in the first place? Or was there a kind of peace in it too? We would now never be Parisians or integrate; we might not even stay in town more than another eight weeks. Loss, like distance, gives permission for romance. In a better-ordered Verona, Romeo and Juliet would have grown up to be just another couple at dinner.
Finally we went for a long walk, down to see the boats, by the river, and thought, No, we’re not ready to leave yet, haven’t yet found a good-bye. So we moved. To a bigger, actually nicer apartment. A slight, permanent overhang of depression lifted; the new place was so bright, and it was connected to the street, the life of the city. One by one our stuff came over, three blocks from one apartment to the other.
In every move, I’ve noticed, there is always something—a roll of Christmas wrapping paper, a boxful of hangers from the dry cleaners, a metal extender whose use no one can recall—that is left over in the apartment you’re leaving, which you step around in curiosity and then, on the last trip, take with you. In this case it was an antenna that belonged with something—a shortwave radio? a portable television?—which we could no longer recall, a plastic dagger, with a “Kings and Knights” sticker on it, and a hardcover of Nabokov’s Pnin, which came from nowhere and I could never remember reading in Paris. Leaving 16 rue du Preaux-Clercs for the last time, I opened Pnin at random, to a bit about a boy’s imaginary father, a king: “‘Abdication! One third of the alphabet!’ coldly quipped the King, with the trace of an accent. ‘The answer is no. I prefer the unknown quantity of Exile.’”
Just after the move, for my birthday, Luke and Martha gave me a wonderful toy. La Machine a Dessiner le Monde, a machine to draw the world. Really, all it is is a camera lucida, but nicely done in plastic, with a viewing stand on top. You put a piece of vellum on it, and if the light’s bright enough, and it has to be very bright, it projects the thing you’re looking at right onto the paper. All you have to do is trace it.