Lunch in Paris (25 page)

I
’ve read enough fairy tales in my time to know that the wedding is supposed to come at the end of the story. But in real life,
even in Paris, happily ever after is just the beginning.

Three months after our wedding in New York, my father-in-law, Yanig, was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. I wanted to
yell at somebody. More specifically, being American, I wanted to sue somebody. But there was no one to blame. His family doctor,
who had ignored ten years of stomach pains and diarrhea without so much as suggesting a colonoscopy, was the head of the local
medical board. We did not want to spend what little time we had left writing letters.

There was no more “getting to know you”; I was now part of the family. Gwendal and I traded weekends, taking the three-hour
train ride to Saint-Malo. We drove home from the station past the winter sea, a dark mirror, calm and matte. While Nicole
continued to see patients in her office upstairs, I handled the shopping and the cooking.

Maybe it was the urgency of the situation, but Nicole was surprising graceful in letting me take over her kitchen. In the
past year
I had tried to be a careful assistant, observing the way she spread a little mustard on the bottom of a quiche crust or pooled
a few drops of vinegar into one of Yanig’s ceramic bowls to make dressing for a salad.

It was a slow, solitary time. I diced onions, boiled small red potatoes, trimmed leeks, and washed heads of purple-tipped
lettuce. Gwendal and I were supposed to be thinking about our future, but my thoughts kept wandering toward the past. And
while I was supposed to be thinking about Gwendal’s father, I was thinking about my own.

My father and I spent a lot time in the kitchen together; he liked experimenting. He used to volunteer as a teacher of English
as a second language; he had a lot of Asian students, and probably more than one Asian girlfriend. Some time in the early
eighties, he bought a wok, and the cabinets were often stocked with ingredients I’d never seen before—bags of dehydrated mushrooms
and jars of oil with labels in Japanese. He had a sweet tooth; he kept raisins in the refrigerator and mini Milky Way bars
in the freezer—very dangerous for my braces. His studio apartment in Chelsea (before it was trendy, or gay) had what was,
by Manhattan standards, an eat-in kitchen. There was just enough room for a small round table and two chairs overlooking the
black tar roofs and riveted water towers of Eighth Avenue.

On Sunday mornings, before my mother picked me up, he would bring back two croissants from the French bakery around the corner.
He heated them briefly in the oven and put them on the plates we’d picked out together upstairs at Zabar’s. They had a white
rim and featured a village scene in the center like a child’s drawing: green grass, tiny women in red aprons standing in front
of Monopoly-sized houses whose chimneys puffed curlicues of gray smoke. I have a picture in my mind’s eye: when my father
finished his croissant, he would press the tip of his thumb into
the center of the plate to pick up any last crumbs. When he died I gave away a lot of things, but I kept the plates and the
wok, its metal base blackened by years of grease and fire. Six years after his death, what was left of my father were these
flashes of memory, often easier to live with than the reality of the man I knew. I wondered what Gwendal would remember when
Yanig was gone.

Yanig was sleeping a lot. Bach cantatas played softly on the stereo; he sat on the couch with a book, eyes closed. When I
dropped a pot cover on the kitchen floor he would wake up. “
Je dors pas. Je ferme les yeux
.” That’s exactly what my father used to say. I would be sprawled out on the rug or on my little chair bed watching
The Love Boat
or
Fantasy Island
. “Daddy,” I would say to the couch behind me. And the answer was always the same. “I’m not sleeping. I’m just resting my
eyes.”

In fact, the food I made most during Yanig’s illness wasn’t French at all; I made chocolate chip cookies. It felt like the
right thing to do. They are warm, lumpy, and imperfect, so different from their more sophisticated cousins in the window of
the
boulangeries
. The brown sugar makes them forthrightly sweet in a way that’s conspicuously American. My mother sent an extra set of plastic
measuring cups and bags of Nestlé Toll House Morsels. When I ran out of chocolate chips, I chopped thick bars of bittersweet
chocolate I found at the local supermarket. The weeks when Gwendal went without me, he carried a batch under his arm on the
train.

Yanig had them with tea in the afternoon. He became rather possessive about them, tucking them in the back of the cupboard
and jokingly refusing to share them with Affif, whose visits became more frequent. Yanig’s appetite, along with his massive
frame, was shrinking. Physical tasks were wordlessly delegated to others. Yanig used to shuck oysters like he was popping
a soda can. Soon Gwendal got up to do it without being asked. A neighbor came by to mow the lawn. To everyone’s relief, even
during the chemotherapy, Yanig
never lost his beard. Neither Nicole nor Gwendal had ever seen him without it; it would have made him unrecognizable.

H
OSPITALS SMELL THE
same all over the world. Like death and disinfectant.

When you live in another culture, sometimes even life-and-death decisions are made in a way that you don’t understand. Suddenly
I was plunged into a world where a second opinion was an insult to your doctor; patient and family received different, often
contradictory sets of facts; and a precise diagnosis, never mind a comprehensive list of treatment options, was simply never
presented.

The French are often touted as having the best health care in the world. It’s universal, it’s cheap, and it’s technically
up to snuff. The system’s fine. The part they don’t tell you about is the doctors themselves—an entire generation trained
on the premise “doctor knows best.” They look down from on high, feeling no need to explain themselves or involve you in any
way. Like other French figures of authority—teachers, bankers, politicians, priests—it’s OK to grumble about their performance
over dinner, but not to challenge them.

The doctor said there was something they would “try.” I waited for Nicole or Gwendal to come back with a list of questions.
I had been to the National Cancer Institute website; it was all there in black and white: stage IV colon cancer. Spread to
liver? Yes. Lungs? No. Diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, clinical trials. There was no such website in France. La Ligue Contre
le Cancer had a hotline you could call for information from nine to four; it rang and rang into the void.

They never told us he was dying, which of course he was. They never gave him the choice to get up while he still could and
go for a last sailing trip around the world. So we just waited, while they
“tried things.” Time, which should have become so concrete, so precious, was knotted up in their evasive web of words. I waited
for Nicole or Gwendal to confront the doctors, to demand to be part of this process. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t. When Gwendal
finally asked for Yanig’s records to get a second opinion in Paris, the doctor refused to release them. When we insisted,
the doctor tucked his chin into his neck and snorted through his nose like a horse. “You need to
decide
who his doctor is.”

There was something else. When Gwendal’s father left boatbuilding to become an artist, his official status, the one that showed
up on the hospital admission records, was
chômeur—
unemployed. He had chosen to step outside of France’s sacred societal superstructure, and this made him, in some way, expendable.
Gwendal and Nicole never lost their conviction that this influenced the quality of his care.

I’m sure everyone feels helpless in these situations, but my helplessness was compounded by the fact that I was working with
a cultural handicap. I didn’t know how to make an impact. If I had been in New York, I would simply have stood there until
someone gave me an answer. I would have called the nurse, the doctor, the head of the hospital, made enough noise so that
someone would have to listen to me. We found the French doctors to be experts at avoiding this type of confrontation. Legions
of secretaries, phone messages unreturned, endless public holidays, ski vacations. In France, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get
the oil, it gets the evil eye.

I was frightened and frustrated by Gwendal’s behavior. Why wouldn’t he fight with these people? Would he fight for me? What
if one of our children was sick? Would he stand there mute and bewildered and say that he simply couldn’t get anyone on the
phone? That the doctor was on vacation? If I was dying, would he say that there was “something they would try”?

It dawned on me for the first time. In coming to Paris, in marrying Gwendal, I had signed up for more than flaky croissants
and shiny mackerel. I had accepted a way of dealing with life and death. If I got sick tomorrow, there would be no Sloan-Kettering,
no fourth opinion from a specialist in Minneapolis with a promising new drug. I felt trapped in someone else’s system, like
I’d bought a one-way ticket to a place I didn’t understand.

B
ACK IN
P
ARIS
, Gwendal and I were lying in bed with the dictionary open between us. “It’s like a big, fat white carrot,” I said, flipping
through the pages. I was looking for a parsnip to make matzo ball soup.

We found “parsnip” in the dictionary.
Panais
. “Never heard the word,” said Gwendal, “never seen one.”

Whenever someone wants to make an unfair substitution in life, it is usually accompanied by the phrase “not bad, just different.”
But there is no such thing as “different” matzo ball soup. My mother’s is a steaming pot of chicken broth, doctored with dill
and parsley, slices of carrot bobbing to the surface. The matzo balls—floaters, never sinkers—are pale fluffy dumplings that
soak up the broth and fill up the tummy. Never mind that the broth comes out a can and the matzo balls out of a box. This
was my chicken soup for the soul, and as with any magic spell, there could be no changes, no substitutions. My mother’s recipe
called for a parsnip. Damn if I wasn’t going to have a parsnip. I was a woman on a mission.

Clearly this was not just about root vegetables. In the weeks since Yanig’s diagnosis, fear and frustration had infected every
corner of my life. I fought the little battles because I couldn’t fight the big ones.

At the market the next morning, I could see my breath as I inspected the piles of winter vegetables. The
vendeurs
had been
there since seven a.m., wearing dark hats, hooded sweatshirts, several layers of woolen sweaters, and knit gloves with the
fingertips cut off. Their hands were cracked and dry, like the skin of the onions loosely piled on the wooden stands. I surveyed
my choices: there were white radishes and black radishes, both as long and thick as cucumbers. There were turnips—colored
like a basket of marbles—deep purple and white, sherbet orange and pale green. There was always my pet celery root. But this
particular day I wasn’t looking to experiment. What I wanted was an exact match. Where was my dun-colored, slightly hairy,
tapering-down-to-a-point parsnip—the same one I could buy in ShopRite for $1.99 a pound?

I decided to table the root vegetable issue and move on to the supermarket. Turns out, there was no point in worrying about
the parsnip at all. I had a bigger problem: there was no chicken broth. I don’t know why I’d never noticed it before, but
the only broth sold in France comes in the form of dehydrated powders or cubes. What did the French do when they wanted honest-to-God
bouillon?
Make their own?
I took a deep breath, puffing out my cheeks and exhaling in the middle of the aisle. Soup, justice, and the American way
just wasn’t happening. I was going to have learn to make soup
à la française
.

I went back to the market, my breath rising like a column of smoke from a fire-breathing dragon, and took home as many onions
as I could carry. If I couldn’t make
my
classic, I would make
their
classic. I would make French Onion Soup. Screw ’em. I would make “Better than French” onion soup.