A Covert Affair (36 page)

Paul responded to Julia's letters with a steady stream of his own. They are tender in tone, though guardedly at first, the entertaining stories about work and gossip about old colleagues gradually giving way to more open expressions of how much he missed and adored her. He sent bundles of photographs, mostly of himself, as well as pictures of their favorite haunts in Kunming, his sketches and other artwork from China, anything he could think of to remind her of what their days together meant to him. He continued to worry that she might turn out to be a fusty old virgin or, worse, a prude, and urged her to read racy novels and books about sex. As the months passed, loneliness eroded his lifelong reserve and his letters echoed hers in longing and unconcealed desire.
“You play a leading role in my fantasy life,”
he confided. In May, she replied by thanking him for the latest photograph of himself and confessed it made her “ache” to be with him. She wondered how it was that their six-month correspondence had the effect of making her want him more than ever: “Indeed I still think you are
the
nifty, and think so evermore. Why is that? Because we are having only a communion of minds, which, having had a taste of body, makes even words desirable and sweeter. I feel I am only existing until I see you, and hug you, and eat you.”

In the spring, Julia wrote Paul that with her father about to head
off on his honeymoon and her sister moving east “to have a try at NY,” she was finally on her own. “This makes me really a fancy foot, free and loose.” She renewed her invitation that he fly out to California for a visit. She proposed they drive slowly back across the country together—with “the excuse” that they were visiting friends along the way—perhaps ending up in Lopaus Point, Maine, where the Child brothers had built a rustic cabin. In any discussion, Paul's favorite term was
“operational proof,”
by which he meant subjecting a theory to a test to see what happens. (His father had been a physicist, and Paul was sure that with his own love of logic and precision he would have made a good experimental scientist.) Well, what better way to see if they could stand each other's company over the long haul than a road trip? The close proximity would either confirm their compatibility or do them in. Paul agreed, and he applied for five weeks' leave.

When Paul arrived at Union Station in Los Angeles on July 7, Julia was pacing the platform. She was understandably nervous—and not just about their reunion. Paul would be meeting her father, and the traditional, old-guard Republican John McWilliams could be
“very difficult”
at the best of times, let alone when towering over the smallish, balding, mustachioed forty-four-year-old artist his older daughter had brought home from the war. Her worst fears were confirmed when it quickly became apparent the two men in her life did not get on. Paul's European style of dressing, particularly his soigné habit of tucking scarves into his open-neck shirts, rubbed the old man the wrong way. That Paul was also a Democrat and most likely responsible for the introduction of liberal rags like
The New York Times
into the McWilliams household, did not help.

Even more problematic was Paul's habit of trying to engage all those around him in philosophical conversations about everything from how the vastness of the West inspired the local architecture to what constituted a life well lived. Not only did they have nothing in common, but Paul and her father were almost diametrically opposed in their views of people, politics—everything.
“My father was very conservative and nonintellectual,”
Julia recalled. As far as Pops was concerned, “intellectuality and Communism went hand in hand, so you were better off not
being an intellectual.” She loved them both but was resigned to the fact that they would never be friends. It was the first important step in what Paul would later describe as Julia's
“divorce”
from her father.

After a tense few days, Julia and Paul piled into her old Buick and made their escape. They spent the next month meandering through dusty small towns and sunburnt canyons, sticking to back roads and cheap motels. Although she had never been in a motor court before, she made the best of it, camping out without hesitation and preparing delicious meals under the most primitive conditions. She even surprised him their first night by pulling out eight bottles of her father's best whiskey, another of a gin, and a flask of mixed martinis.
“Julie is a splendid companion, uncomplaining and flexible—really tough-fibered, a quality I first saw in her in Ceylon and later in China,”
Paul wrote his brother from Billings, Montana, adding, “She also washes my shirts! Quite a dame.” A California girl at heart, Julia was in many ways much hardier than Paul, who fancied himself quite the mountain man despite a rather delicate constitution. Julia, on the other hand, had grown up in the West and spent her early years on horseback riding and hunting with her brother, John. As a strapping girl in her twenties, she had thought nothing of bagging sixteen ducks and bringing them home with just as many friends for dinner. She had no trouble peeing behind a bush or walking barefoot (“with rouged toenails”) into a lumberjack's bar and downing a beer. She was from pioneer stock, sturdy and unpretentious, and completely at home with the rough country and male company she and Paul encountered on their travels.

As their journey neared its end, it was clear to Paul that Julia had passed all his tests with flying colors, even proving—much to his relief—to have
“no measly Mrs. Grundyisms about sex.”
In his typical analytical fashion, he noted that she was much improved compared to his “findings of two years ago,” and he sent his brother a summary of her better points entitled “The Good Julia.” Above all, he recognized that Julia's finest quality was that she was always entirely herself,
“a firm and tried character,”
with a boundless love of life and spontaneity that balanced his more sober, inward personality. “She never ‘puts on an act,' or creates a scene,” he wrote approvingly. “She has a deep-seated
charm and human warmth which I have been fascinated to see at work on people of all sorts, from the sophisticates of San Francisco to the mining and cattle folk of the Northwest. She would be poised and at ease anywhere.”

By the time they reached Maine, they were madly in love. No one was the least bit surprised when Paul declared his intention of getting married.
“Well!”
his brother and sister-in-law said in one voice. “We thought you'd never come out with it!” This time, Paul would brook no delay. Charles offered to have the wedding at Coppernose, their stately home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which had been in his wife's family for years. Plans were immediately put into motion. Barely a month later, on September 1, Julia and Paul exchanged vows in a small civil ceremony at the home of a neighboring lawyer; a garden party for family and friends followed. The reception was crowded with pals from their OSS days making champagne toasts and telling amusing anecdotes about the unlikely lovebirds.

It was funny how they all ended up in Paris. What were the odds? So much had happened to them in the last few years, almost seven, between the end of the war in Kunming and sitting together in a café on the Left Bank. Of course, once they started talking and comparing notes, it made perfect sense. Julia and Paul had moved to France in the fall of 1948, when Paul took a job as exhibits officer with the United States Information Service. They had been there several years when an OSS colleague came through and mentioned that he had heard that Jane Foster was
“somewhere in Paris”
and he wondered where she was and what she was up to. Julia and Paul were horrified to think they had been living in the same city as their old friend all that time and had somehow remained ignorant of her presence.

They had last seen Jane in Washington shortly after they all got back from overseas, before she mysteriously
“dropped out of sight.”
Her disappearance had aroused all sorts of speculation:
“That's a name that's been in the mouths of all the ex-OSS-in-Ceylon people since the war's end,”
Paul wrote in his Paris diary, which continued to double as an intimate record of his daily life for Charles. “Mutual friends said
they'd heard she'd married a mysterious Pole after one week's acquaintance and that she couldn't even remember his name. She was reported in Montevideo, in Brussels, but the most persistent rumor had her lost behind the Iron Curtain because her husband was a Red. Ever since, whenever we've seen any of our former OSS colleagues, the first thing we've asked each other has been traditionally, ‘Look—have you got any dope on the whereabouts of Jane Foster?'” No one ever did. Discounting the more fanciful stories they heard, Julia and Paul persisted in trying to find her, but she seemed to have vanished without a trace. No one in their tight-knit little expat community had seen her, Julia recalled,
“so several people wondered about that.”

Then, one brisk November afternoon in 1952, after tracking down a particularly delicious omelet recommended by Julia's new pen pal Avis DeVoto (who would soon become her literary agent), Julia and Paul were prowling the art supply shops along the quay when he spotted a poster in a store window and immediately recognized the drawing as one of Jane's. He was certain it had to be her work, the style was
“unmistakable.”

Sure enough, the poster turned out to be an advertisement for an upcoming exhibition of paintings by a “Jane Foster,” and the small print at the bottom gave the name and address of the art gallery.
“So we hied ourselves to the gallery,”
Julia recalled. The paintings were clearly Jane's: they were modified abstractions, with unusual color combinations and a sensuous feeling. As further proof, some of the subjects were Malaysian and Sinhalese. Confirmation came from the gallery owner, who explained that Jane was now called Madame Zlatovski, that she lived nearby at 32 rue Mazarine, and to the best of his knowledge she had been there for some two and a half years. Paul scribbled a short note and left it in care of the little man, who promised to pass it on.

Dearest Janie
:

Ay Bong! (Sinhalese greeting, which roughly translates as “Hi there!) We love your paintings; and we've always loved you, too. We'd like to see you if you'd like to see us. Our telephone no. is INV 92.90.

Paul and Julia Child

Paul only half expected to hear from her because of the
“inexplicable suddenness with which she seemed to cut everybody off.”
Then again, if Jane was hiding, she would “never have had a poster stuck up with her name on it.” He had to admit to being intensely curious about what had become of her.
“If you'd been in Ceylon with OSS you'd know why this interested us,”
he informed Charles. “Everybody loved her, except a few people who hated her guts. We saw her, worked w/her, ate w/her, drank, sang, walked, talked and scrapped every day for almost a year.” It was hard to be that close to someone and then just suddenly have that person vanish. If she had met with some accident or terrible fate, surely the news would have reached them.

She did not keep them in suspense for long. The following day was Sunday, and rather on the late side of morning Jane had rung to say yes, indeed, she was living in Paris and they must meet up at once.
“She sounded exactly like the same familiar, warm, nice, outgoing, and enthusiastically vague Jane,”
Paul noted with satisfaction. “She was astonished to learn we'd been here for four years. She must be just as lazy, hazy, impractical & loveable as she was 7 years ago.”

The next day, Jane came to lunch at their little third-floor apartment at 81 “Roo de Loo” (rue de l'Université), which was only a short stroll down Saint-Germain—“that euphoric boulevard”—from her place. They spent hours talking that first afternoon, catching each other up on the intervening years as the sky darkened and the shop lights came on and cast their rosy glow over the old city. Paul quickly filled Jane in on his marriage to Julia (she knew, of course, courtesy of Betty) and career moves. His job at the State Department had been eliminated by peacetime budget cuts in March 1947, and he had spent an anxious six months looking for work. During this enforced hiatus, he had taken up his painting and photography again and proudly told Jane about his one-man show in New York. When he was offered the post in Paris—the embassy was desperate for people with fluent French—he had grabbed it, and thank heaven for that because they were having the time of their life. The U.S.I.S. was essentially responsible for the propaganda campaign hitched to the great American money wagon that was the Marshall Plan, its mission being to check the spread of
Communism in Western Europe. Most of Paul's work involved staging U.S. government dog-and-pony shows, complete with art exhibits and banal photographs portraying
“the American way of life.”
The job was fine as far as it went, and it involved opportunities for travel to international trade fairs, but the real treat was being back in Paris.

From her first bite of sole meunière, Julia had been smitten with the food in France. It was a revelation. She had worked diligently at her cooking prior to her marriage and during her two years as a Washington hostess, but it was not until they moved to Paris that she discovered the world of truly exquisite, glorious food. She was obsessed with what she rather grandiosely referred to as
“la cuisine française,”
enthusiastically trilling the words in her extraordinarily operatic, uniquely accented French. In a stroke of brilliance, Paul had pointed her in the direction of Le Cordon Bleu, and what had begun as a hobby had become her true passion and life's calling. She regaled Jane with stories about her rocky start at the famous French school of culinary arts. How after two trying days with rank beginners, she insisted on being transferred to the professional course, which was designed to turn out future restaurant chefs, only to discover that her classmates were eleven hopeless GIs. After six months, the “boys” still had not mastered the fundamentals and did not know
“the proportions for a béchamel or how to clean a chicken the French way.”
Fed up with their lack of seriousness and their tortoiselike pace, Julia had dropped out and hired the school's legendary instructor, master chef Max Bugnard, to give her private lessons.