Eating Crow (7 page)

“No they’re not. They’re the simplest to get right.”

“That’s just cynicism, Luke.”

“I’ve had enough. I’m going to call for the bill and a straitjacket.”

L
ater, back at the flat, I emptied the Vice Drawer of its brittle store of Manjari and poured myself a large vodka. Lynne was out, hosting a reading by a bunch of gloomy Czech writers, and wouldn’t be home until much later. The place was mine. I stoked up the computer, finished the chocolate, and swilled the vodka around my mouth to strip away any residue on my tongue. It was time to write.

Once, in this column, I claimed that a dish I had eaten had tasted like dog food, only without any of the grace notes. I said of another that it would probably taste better coming up than it did going down. I have used words like “effluent” and “slurry,” “contagion” and “toxic scum.” I once called for a chef to be tied to a pole in a market square—any pole, any market square—and pelted with platefuls of his own glutinous mash. I suggested another might like to try grilling one of his own kidneys, to see if he would then treat the poor, maligned organ with a little more respect. Most recently I argued that a chef should face the death penalty for the crimes against cooking of which he was guilty.

I said all of these things partly because I really did hate the dishes I had been served, but mostly because I believed that my job as a restaurant critic was to serve you, the readers, not necessarily by providing information but by presenting you with something readable and entertaining. To judge from my mailbag I had good reason to believe that like the Parisians who crowded about the guillotine, you appreciated these sudden outbursts of violence.

I see now that I was serving you badly. Cruelty may entertain us for a moment, but it is a transitory and, ultimately, feeble pleasure; a tiny one compared to the pleasures of a good meal easily taken. I have concluded I should be finding you fewer cruel jokes and more good meals. And so, from here on, you will no longer find anything negative in this column. If I tell you about a restaurant it is because it is good. If I mention a dish it is because it is worth eating. Life is too short to be wasted on the substandard. I shall, instead, seek out for you only the diamonds in the rough. Which brings me, rather neatly, to the Hanging Cabinet in Smithfield …

I finished with a few rapturous words about my steak and Luke’s oxtail. I printed it out, scribbled
Lynne, if you’re sober enough, have a look at this
across the top, and went to bed. It was to be the last restaurant review I would write for a very long time.

“He’ll sack you.”

“No he won’t.”

“I’d sack you.”

“You’re not Hunter.”

“No, I’m your girlfriend and I’d still sack you.”

“It’s the hangover talking.”

“It’s the girlfriend talking with assistance from the hangover.”

“Why will he sack me?”

“Because your columns will be boring.”

“What’s boring about good restaurants?”

“Nothing. It’s reviews of them that are boring.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Yes, necessarily. It’s the way you are. You write better when horrible things happen to you. Happiness makes you gauche, at least in print.”

“Maybe that’s the way I was. Maybe I have woken up to nice experiences.”

“This isn’t you, Marc. None of it’s you.”

“Maybe it’s just that you don’t like the idea of me moving on—”

“And what? Discovering yourself? Finding the real you? Listen, if you’re thinking of going for a spot of rebirthing, give me a warning so I can lay down a few towels.”

“All the apologies I’ve made will be worthless if I merely carry on writing nasty reviews. I’ll be creating new victims to whom I’ll need to say sorry. What’s the point of that?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“What d’you mean?”

“You said it. What’s the point of apologizing to people? You asked the question.”

“No, what I said was—”

“You said, ‘What’s the point?’ I heard you and you’re right.”

“It’s about … it’s about sorting through the things I’ve done wrong.”

“No it’s not. It’s about enjoying the purging of guilt. It’s all about you wanting to experience extremes again.”

“Again?”

“You’ve always done it. You pretend to be so cool and still, an emotional dead calm, but really you’re just swinging between the ends of the scale.”

“No I’m not.”

“Absolutely you are. Marc Basset is unattractive. Marc Basset can’t get laid. Marc Basset hates this restaurant, loves that one, is the best writer. Adores his dead father—”

“Lynne!”

“Okay. Unfair. But only a little. You major in self-pity and self-congratulation. Nothing by halves. So now you’re hooked on this apologizing thing because you like the ride. In fact, shall I tell you why you should rewrite this column? Because if you carry on shit-bagging restaurants, that will give you a whole bunch more people to apologize to and you’ll just love that.”

“There’s no point in rewriting it.”

“Why not?”

“The paper already has the copy. I sent it last night.”

“Oh, terrific. Did you also write ‘Please sack me now’ at the bottom? You might as well. In fact, why don’t you email them? Go on. Press the self-destruct button. ‘Dear Robert Hunter, I don’t want my job, Yours sincerely, Marc Basset …’ Marc! Marc, are you listening to me. Marc!”

The television was on in the corner of the room, muted. I had been staring at it studiously as a way of avoiding eye contact with Lynne, but now something really had caught my attention. The news was on, and even though the sound was off I could tell that the item was about the international aid workers being held on the Russian-Georgian border and efforts by their families to get the various governments to do something to secure their release. I had seen the huddle of parents and siblings being interviewed once before: their skin, slack and gray from worry and lack of sleep; the blinking mothers trying not to weep; the tense jaws; the heads tipped attentively toward the interviewer. This time they were standing outside the heavy gray doors of the British Foreign Office on King Charles Street in Whitehall, where presumably they had just met ministers who had tried, and failed, to sound reassuring.

It was not they who interested me. It was the woman advancing up the street behind them toward the entrance who I was looking at, the same woman I thought I had recognized in items from outside the slavery reparations talks in Alabama, days before. This time I really did recognize her. I pointed at the screen.

“Look at the way she’s holding those books out in front of her.”

Lynne turned toward the screen, irritably. I was pointing now. She said, “Who?”

“Her. Coming toward us. Look. It’s her. Don’t you remember? That’s exactly what she used to do at university. The books. Up and in front of her, a bit defensively. Hiding herself—”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yes it is. It’s—”

“So what if it’s her? What difference does it make? It doesn’t make any difference.”

“You know it does. You know what I did to her. You know what happened.”

“You think I’m the person you should be discussing this with?”

“If there’s one person I should say sorry to, it has to be her.”

“Shit, Marc, there’s only so much of this I can take.”

Jennie Sampson. Even just the sound of her name could make me think of myself as repulsive. We were students together in York, where we both studied politics, she intently, me with deliberate casualness. For two years and seven months we barely exchanged a word, even though we were often in small group tutorials together. When we passed each other on campus, we would find ways to look at the ground or the trees or anywhere else but at each other because we had both grown tired of saying only “hello” with a fixed grin. She was intense and earnest, and although she made an effort to indulge the latest fashions, there would always be something—the terribly sensible shoes on her feet, or a beige cardigan worn over a zipper top—which suggested she couldn’t really be bothered with it all. She had a fine narrow nose, delicate lips, and she wore no makeup. I always thought of her as more than just a little pleased with herself.

Then one morning, out of nowhere, she came to my aid. It was a tutorial on the Paris Commune and I was arguing that it had come about not through some hunger on the part of Parisians for equality, but instead out of their feelings of superiority over and hatred for the rest of France; that the decision to throw up the barricades was merely an expression of cosmopolitan disdain at its most acute. The Parisians simply hated everybody else. It was a great theory save in one regard: I had done no reading whatsoever and had nothing with which to support it. I had plucked it out of the air because I was bored of listening to the tutor, a tiresome man who insisted on calling everyone comrade. He had been arguing that the project emerged out of a genuine belief in the invincible logic of organized equality, and while I appreciated the sentiment, I was irritated by his smugness. I held my ground for about five minutes, and then, just as I was thinking I would have to admit defeat, Jennie waded in magnificently. She cited this history of Paris and that. She quoted Racine and Hugo. She described, in terrifying detail, the machinery of French local government. But it was the last line that stuck with me:

“As Bocuse wrote in his seminal history of the French peoples, Paris is not a place but a state of mind, which defines itself solely by what it is not. And what it is not is France.” There was silence. The tutor’s nose twitched. He sniffed. Then he looked at his watch and told us he would see us all next week.

Afterward, outside, with the wind blowing harshly through the stone canyons of the modern campus, I thanked her.

“But that last quote. Where did you get that one from? Who is Bocuse?”

She chewed her bottom lip and looked down shyly at the ground. “Paul Bocuse.”

“The chef Paul Bocuse?”

She nodded.

“He wrote a history book?”

She shook her head. “No, I made it up. I needed something to deal with that little arse.”

I smiled. The word “arse” seemed so much harder and ruder and
mean
, coming from Jennie Sampson.

“So you chose a great French chef?”

“I was reading one of his books last night and it was the first name that came into my head and, well …”

“You read recipe books?”

She blushed. “It’s kind of a hobby of mine.”

“Are you serious? I can’t believe this. I thought I was the only one who …”

She came over to my studio the next night, bringing with her a simple and rather nicely executed onion tart. (I supplied a main course of duck that I had confited myself.) We ate dinner and she looked at my collection of cookbooks, and eventually, standing there by the meat section, we kissed. It should have been straightforward after that. There should have been a series of simple maneuvers that would lead us easily from standing to lying, from dressed to naked, from aroused to spent. And there would have been had the man involved not been me.

I hadn’t stayed a virgin until my twentieth year by chance. It was a part of me, like my battered feet and my ungainly thighs—and it all dated back to that desperate night with Wendy Coleman when she had tried to get hold of me and failed. The experience had been so dismal that two years later, when something approaching sex next offered itself, I was so terrified I would fail to attain the necessary hardness that I remained inconsolably soft.

This second humiliation led to a third and a fourth and so on until, quite reasonably, I found myself running away from women unless I was horribly and unattractively drunk, in which case there was no chance at all. I wasn’t impotent. I had no trouble doing it by myself, and I did, rather too much at times. For a while I even wondered if I were gay. I overcame excruciating embarrassment and purchased a gay mag from a small newsagent’s in King’s Cross. Swiftly I realized that didn’t do it for me. The pictures were startling and informative and full of pink flesh, but they weren’t arousing. If the thought of sex with other men did not get me going when I was by myself, it was not going to work when I was with someone. Homosexuality wasn’t the solution. My virginity had begun to hang about me like a bad smell. By the time Jennie Sampson rolled up, I was more than a little desperate.

And yet, halfway through that evening together, I suddenly became convinced that she could be the one. Everything about it seemed right: the setup, the apparent mutual interest, this clinch now on my makeshift bed of two single mattresses slapped down on the floor. Which, of course, was when I began to panic. Surely it couldn’t all go wrong again? Or perhaps it could. How could failure be turned into success when the most important part of the equation—me—had not changed in any way? I heard myself begin to make a speech:

“I just want you to know I’m not going to have sex with you tonight.”

“No?”

“No. I just don’t, not on a first night. Never have, never will. There’s this belief that, you know, men have to perform. That we immediately have to be able to generate these impressive erections to order, whereas women, well, they can just lie there and hope they get into it, and if they don’t, so what.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, there is. I think it’s quite oppressive, actually, although nobody’s ever going to be bothered to start a campaign or anything, are they? I mean, ‘Save Men from the Oppression of the Erection’ isn’t really a rallying cry, is it?”