Lunch in Paris (38 page)

Spring had come to the market as well. Everywhere there were young green things, the tips of asparagus, young leeks no bigger
than scallions. There was crisp arugula, curled and tangled, and fresh green peas, plump in their pods. I had no idea what
I
wanted to make for dinner. This didn’t pose a problem; on the contrary, it was an opportunity, a mini adventure. The season’s
new ingredients brought new ideas. The first baby tomatoes were coming in from Sicily. I bought a box of small red globes
still on the vine and a red onion in my favorite childhood shade of royal purple. Maybe I would make a salsa for the
dorade
I’d picked up at the fishmonger. I imagined a bright confetti, the tomatoes mixed with freshly chopped coriander, maybe a
sunny mango. I thought about Gwendal and his non-recipes—throwing this and that into the pan. This no longer seemed like a
totally foreign idea to me. I’d become so experimental in the kitchen, embracing unknown ingredients and making things up
as I went along. Could I learn to do that for other parts of my life? In France, composing a well-balanced meal is easy; a
well-balanced life is another story. How could I keep my American just-do-it attitude without the accompanying fear of failure?
How could I keep the French pleasure of savoring the moment while still building for the future?

My bag was fairly bursting as I placed a head of spiky
frisée
salad on top. Even as I hoisted the sack over my shoulder for the walk down the hill, I was thinking about next week’s creations,
what new berry would appear, when would the apricots be ripe? More than the museums, more than the ancient streets, these
stalls of fruits and vegetables and spices were the Paris that inspired me. What if the market, instead of being part of the
problem, as Afra had suggested, was part of the solution?

T
HE CHINESE STILL
refused to budge. It was July, and a formal eviction notice had been issued by the courts, but the police, in an election
year, had decided not to enforce it. Still clinging to the American hope that a good lawyer can solve anything, we finally
got one of our own. In addition to his private practice, he was a
professor of real-estate law at the Sorbonne. His secretary showed us into a high-ceilinged office with two polished wooden
chairs. The size of the room and the ornate flowering of the moldings inspired confidence. Monsieur Baston leaned forward,
the lapels of his gray pin-striped suit touching the leather surface of the desk. “If this were a normal situation I’d recommend
a
huissier un peu musclé
—that’s lawyer talk for a little local muscle—but since there are children involved, we can’t go that way. You could always
pay them to leave.”

“Pay them?”

“Yes, this is sometimes done.”

“How much?”

“How much is the apartment worth to you? I would start with forty thousand and see if they accept.”

He saw that we were waiting for a better solution, but he had none to offer. “If you play by the rules and your opponents
do not,
monsieur,
you lose.
C’est aussi simple que ça
. It’s as simple as that.”

I was done. The apartment was simply not meant to be. I could not spend the rest of life keeping up with the Joneses, clawing
my way to bigger and better. My mother was right; a baby could sleep in a dresser drawer for at least a year. We paid Monsieur
Baston his enormous fee and left.

Then something extraordinary happened. As soon as I gave up control, relaxed the grip of my whitened knuckles, as soon as
I admitted that I could not right a tilted universe with my bare hands—the squatters up and left.

It was late August when I headed down the stairs with my suitcase on the way to the airport for a trip back to the United
States. At eight thirty on a Wednesday morning the foyer was full of mattresses, boxes, tricycles, and frying pans. We called
the owners, who weren’t aware of anything. It seems that the Chinese
Mafia had stretched the State’s patience as far as they cared to, and the Dong family (Gwendal followed the trail of boxes)
was moving up the block. On the corner of avenue Parmentier there was a brand-new Chinese furniture store selling velvet-covered
barstools and white lacquered vanity tables.

I kissed Gwendal and reluctantly closed the door of the taxi, my palms pressed up against the glass. Bigger and better was
back.

I rolled down the window and kissed him again. How long would it take to change the locks? “Sleep in front of the door if
you have to.”

T
he cookbook was Affif’s idea. Or rather the idea for a cookbook came to me while I was standing in Affif’s kitchen, nose in
a pot, inhaling the cinnamon-scented air.

The whole family had been invited to Affif and Annick’s farmhouse in the south of Brittany for New Year’s Eve. Mom, Paul,
Nicole, Gwendal, and I were already well stuffed from Christmas in Saint-Malo: foie gras, Breton lobsters, and a not entirely
successful holiday experiment with sea bass and chocolate sauce.

My mother stepped out of the car in the middle of the dun-colored fields. The grass was crisp with frost. Telephone poles,
standing as straight and tall as girls in their last year of finishing school, were the only sign of civilization. The dip
of their wires stretched out into the hazy winter morning. I saw one of the cats, with one blue eye and one brown, run for
cover as we rolled our suitcases across the clearing next to the barn. “Wow,” said my mother, with affectionate bewilderment.
“Life leads you to amazing places.”

Annick, in a bright shawl and a chunky beaded necklace, met us at the door. “
Bon-JOUR,
Karen,” she said to my mother, in an
exaggerated professorial tone, kissing her on both cheeks. Annick teaches French as a second language, and over the years
my mother has become a favorite, if insubordinate, pupil.

The imposing stone house has been in Annick’s family for generations; they have the deeds going back to the eighteenth century.
It’s the
maison de maître
, the master’s house, the seat of a family who would have owned the surrounding land and paid tenant farmers to work it for
them. Annick has dozens of stories, most as foggy as the mist that covers the fields at dawn. My favorite involves a daughter
of the local gentry, who some time before the First World War was married off to a peasant—punishment for a clandestine love
affair and an illegitimate child.

There was a
boulangerie
with a brick oven attached to the house, where the family once baked their bread. Awaiting repairs to the chimney, it now
served as a giant pantry. Along one side of the house, Affif keeps a
potager,
a vegetable garden, growing his own beans, lettuce, carrots, and, of course, leeks. The first time I’d visited, not long
after my arrival in France, Affif had me on my knees in the dirt, digging potatoes. The photo of me with the bucket made the
rounds in New York, much to the amusement of my family and friends. Now I was an old hand, clad in woolen layers and sensible
shoes.

My parents had been given a bedroom with a sloped ceiling under the eaves and thick wooden beams you had to remember not to
smack your head on in the middle of the night. The house was heated, in a manner of speaking. Even so, I knew my mother would
be sleeping fully clothed.

While everyone else went upstairs to rest, I went to spy in the kitchen. Varnished wooden beams and blue and white tiles lined
one long wall and the counter, and a huge bouquet of coriander sat in a glass on the windowsill. Mismatched pots and conical
ceramic
tagines
were stacked on the shelves and, higher, on
the beams themselves. There were ribbons of garlic and dried peppers in a hanging basket and a bin of onions in the corner.
The kitchen opened directly into the dining room with its long wooden hunting table and benches on either side. You could
easily hibernate all winter long in a room like this.