The Suitors (32 page)

“It opens his third eye, which is called ajna, and that brings him clairvoyance,” added Alvin.

“Which is …?” I prompted, with the unpleasant feeling that the more I asked, the less I’d understand.

“It means he can know certain things in advance or learn things during meditation sessions, during flashes when he can instantly master the techniques of painting or photography, for example.”

“And is he a Sohami?” continued Vanessa.

“And what’s that?” I asked faintly.

“An honorary title for yogis.”

It was a foreign language they were speaking, Alvin and Vanessa, for I had the uncomfortable and humiliating impression that I did not understand them, as when I was a child who couldn’t make any sense of the adult world, unable to fathom their words or how they used them.

I was in hostile territory, reduced to interpreting the most diverse signals, smiles, frowns, postures, all in an effort to deduce if we were speaking almost in jest, or quite seriously, or condescendingly, or frankly—and this feeling of exclusion was so painful that I understood only too well how someone confronted with a sect and its enigmatic vocabulary might join the sect simply through a desire to penetrate its mystery and to rise in the ranks of an esoteric ideology conceived precisely as a come-on. Then Alvin and
Vanessa—kindly, gently, exactly as if they had been members of a sect—tried to rescue me from my confusion.

“Your body is made of the five elements of the universe: earth, fire, water, air, space. In ayurvedic medicine, there are three doshas, or body types: vata, pitta, kapha. Each of us has all three, but to varying degrees, with one dominant …”

Alvin was attentive enough to take my pulse, which allowed me to confirm that I felt not the slightest thrill at his touch. And I was thoughtful enough to ask him a few more questions, in an effort to make my interest in his beloved yoga seem a little more than just cordial.

The truth was, however, that although I respected Alvin’s spiritual aspirations, his thirst for purity and the absolute, I was not impressed by his intelligence. Seeking reassurance and structure, he displayed a great need to impose rules for living on himself, and I felt that he was not free but imprisoned by restrictive protocols that I found frankly off-putting, as was the smug and self-satisfied way he preached about them, going on like a broken record.

I have always tried to be a decent person, with a code of ethics that drives me to improve and even perfect myself in every way, and I feel it is essential that everyone should have this same aspiration. At the same time, I feel equally strongly that religion, which I believe demands
no creativity from its passive, obedient followers, appeals chiefly to imbeciles. In general as stultifying as television, religion can nevertheless provide matter for reflection, on an equal footing with philosophy and the other human sciences. Thanks to Jung, though, I still remained convinced that God—or fate—was nothing more than our unconscious.

What should I do? Where Alvin was concerned, I felt no attraction, physical or any other kind. Should I abandon the idea of seducing him and resign myself to seeing L’Agapanthe put up for sale? To tell the truth, since the very beginning of our plan I’d found it hard to imagine what lay in store for the house because I felt so anxious and uncomfortable thinking about that, although I hadn’t liked to admit it. And suddenly, I knew why: imagining the future of L’Agapanthe meant envisioning life without my parents, which meant envisioning their death. And I was not ready for that.

In any case, if I had to take stock of our campaign, the least I could say was that it had been inconclusive. Even worse, it seemed that Marie and I were unable to maintain our close sisterly bond if one of us took an amorous interest in some attractive man, because although we took pleasure in our unanimous rejection of an unsuitable suitor, like the unfortunate Jean-Michel Destret,
any flicker of interest in a possible lover disrupted our complicity completely. Hadn’t Marie wounded my feelings, back when I’d met Rajiv, without even realizing that we’d both been attracted to each other? As for me, feeling desperately alone when she’d been bowled over by Béno, hadn’t I recovered my joie de vivre only when I could console her over her broken heart? Oh, we’d been quite a tight team, all right!

I went back up to the house only to run into my mother, who asked me to go see how our substitute chef was doing—without letting on that I was on a mission, of course.

I walked into the kitchen just before the bell was due to ring announcing the staff mealtime break.

“I’ve come to see if things are going well,” I told the cook, who had a swarthy complexion and startling blue-green eyes.

“They are, thank you.”

“And what’s the menu?” I asked, nodding to Anagan, whom I’d just noticed in an adjacent room.

The cook seemed so pleased with himself, as he handed me a handwritten sheet of paper, that I was careful to let nothing show on my face as I read it.

Good Lord! I thought, he’s certainly gussied things up. I could just see the face my mother would make at this grandiloquent menu.

“And what menu were you asked to prepare?” I asked sweetly, and was handed the house menu book open to that day’s page.

Nothing like, of course! I noticed, for example, that the cook had promoted the artichoke salad to a “symphony of vegetables en demi-deuil.”

“And what is that, exactly?” I asked him with feigned enthusiasm.

I then discovered that the cook had a thing for the same square vases that the new butler had used for his flower arrangements. Had they pooled their orders to buy them in bulk? Did I dare ask him about that? Chickening out, I studied the alternating layers of artichoke purée and tapenade that filled the vessels.

“So what do you think?” asked the cook.

“They remind me of Daniel Buren’s striped columns at the Palais Royal,” I replied, instead of remarking that the culinary use of the term
en demi-deuil
, “in partial mourning,” implied—as I understood it—the use of truffles, not black olives.

But luckily I did not run short of diplomatically thoughtful metaphors, for I next compared his scrambled eggs to the ice cores geologists punched out of Arctic glaciers, because the cook had presented his egg dish as a
verrine
—layered ingredients in a small glass, in this case about the size of a vodka glass—on a bed of coarsely chopped tomatoes, instead of in tartlets of puff pastry, the way our chef usually did. Then I reviewed the entire menu in its “reconceptualized” form. And the cook seemed so proud of having transformed the
salmon into carpaccio, and the melon into soup, and of having presented the salads in fancy individual bowls of different sizes and shapes, that I congratulated him before leaving the kitchen.

In the name of what, after all, would I have criticized this young man’s efforts to put his personal touch on a menu that seemed too simple to him? But then I asked myself what made his menu seem so silly to me. Was it the emphasis on presentation (a successful effort, moreover) affected by this Adonis? Or his love of innovation, which betrayed a kind of contempt for, or ignorance of, the past and its traditions? Or was it that in cuisine as in couture, less is more? And just as it was vulgar to overplay elegance by being overdressed, or outfitted from head to toe in some ostentatious “total look,” thus betraying a desire to
appear
and a social angst synonymous with an absence of natural elegance, food should never be either pretentious or overelaborate. It should be simple in its presentation, as in its menu description, and look as if it has only just come out of the oven. It should be unostentatious, like my grandmother’s shaved sable.

I thought about Alvin’s clothing, all in earth tones,
and about Vanessa’s simple, confident sense of style, that chic baby-doll dress she’d worn the previous evening without any jewelry, with her hair hanging loose, even tousled, and I decided that appearances notwithstanding, their wardrobes made compatible and even related statements. Because if Alvin’s clothing announced his ecological sympathies, his preference of the essential over the accessory, the East over the West, of being exotic, his garments succeeded all the better since they distinguished themselves from the ordinary garb of the average American who seeks comfort above all else in shorts or jeans.

In the same way, Vanessa’s elegance, to which we all aspire, showed a sense of refinement that was the visible sign of an
art de vivre
implying a constant choice of spiritual over material concerns, of art and culture over materialism, and discretion over crass display. Her elegance was also, however, a reflection of a desire to distinguish herself from the middle classes, who are constantly engaged in a restless search for style in a consumerist orgy of accessorized and designer-labeled fashion.

I saw confirmation of that demand for sobriety and detachment in my mother’s reaction when I reported the
changes our young cook had wrought in the menu, most particularly with the variety of bowls and dishes he had used to “modernize” our meal, because she simply said, “It’s the fable of the Fox and the Stork,
⁴
what you’re telling me. But what can we do about it?”

MENU

Scramble of Eggs on a Bed of Tomato Concassée
Symphony of Vegetables en Demi-Deuil
Farandole of Salads
Melon Soup
Salmon Carpaccio
Cheeses
Apricot, Mango, and Passion Fruit Sorbet

ALVIN’S MENU

Kale with Gomashio
Gluten-free Sesame Noodles
Stuffed Tomatoes
Swiss Chard with Sliced Grilled Tofu
Romanesco Cabbage Pie
Miroir aux fraises

More than the menu had changed at L’Agapanthe, I thought glancing around at our luncheon guests, I spotted a current government minister and an anchor on the eight o’clock news among them.

“Now we’ve seen everything!” I murmured to Marie, who patted my arm in commiseration.