I DIDN’T KNOW IF I would ever become a cook, and I didn’t have the faintest idea if it was real, or even important, but one thing was certain: nearly all my thoughts revolved around cooking and eating. My mother, who observed my fussing about in the kitchen with a mixture of admiration and concern, claimed that it was all Humbert Coe’s fault, and although he had undoubtedly had something to do with my culinary fervor, I knew there was another reason.
There are people who think in three dimensions, who immediately see objects in relation to their surroundings: they might become architects. Other people are good at breaking down objects and images, visually, into their various components. Alberto Giacometti once described such an experience. He had been desperately searching for the right way to paint eyes, and one afternoon, tired of thinking, he went to see a Laurel and Hardy movie. At a certain point he realized, to his amazement, that the image on the screen had broken down into black and white segments and that he was no longer seeing figures and backgrounds, but compositions of light and dark planes. After that he was able to paint his famous portraits.
Something similar happened to me, with food. One day we were eating a sauerkraut casserole that tasted different than usual. I asked my mother what she had done, but she was unaware of having done anything special. As she was telling me this, the taste broke down, in my mind, into its components and I knew she had used cumin. When I asked her this, she frowned, then remembered that she had, in fact, on the advice of the greengrocer, added cumin to the sauerkraut.
But it was true that Humbert Coe had had something to do with it.
In a certain sense his influence began before I was born. That was a long time ago, during the war, when he taught my father to eat Marmite, had him taste wines that most people would never be able to taste again and explained to him how one could recognize a good restaurant and what day of the week one should eat there. Because of this I was the only child who took Marmite sandwiches to school, was given, at an early age, a glass of wine on festive occasions, and would, for the rest of my life, find it hard to dine out on a Monday.
The first time Humbert Coe came to the house, I didn’t actually meet him. I only heard him.
One night I was woken up by the doorbell. My father stumbled down the stairs to the front door. There was a long silence, then a cry, unintelligible but clearly surprised. Two pairs of feet came up the stairs, the living room door opened, and I heard my father’s voice. He was laughing. I hadn’t heard him sound so cheerful in ages.
I lay there for a while wondering who it was and why my father sounded so happy, but soon sleep drew me back into her warm, dark embrace and everything faded away.
The next morning there was a man sitting at breakfast who was so enormous that I stopped dead in the doorway. The doors to the balcony were open and a gentle breeze blew in, smelling of freshly mown grass and morning dew. The stranger smiled the indulgent smile of a fat man. He leaned back slightly in his chair, placed his hands on the tabletop, and spread his fingers. They were big hands, and his fingers were plump, yet at the same time they were the hands of a man who knew how to touch things—and people—with tenderness. He wore a light-colored suit and a sumptuous, high-necked burgundy waistcoat that on anyone else would have looked pretentious but, on him, only emphasized what he was: a man who demanded quality, without reservation.
“You,” he said, as one of the fleshy fingers moved and seemed to be pointing at me, “you must be young…”
“Have you two met?” My father was standing in the doorway. He gave me a nudge in the back. I went up to shake the visitor’s hand. “This is Humbert Coe. We’ve known each other since the war.”
I couldn’t imagine this big man sitting in the cramped cockpit of a Hurricane or a Spitfire. Even if they had given him a Mosquito…
“I was a bit more slender in those days,” said the visitor, who saw my frown.
My father laughed. “Mr. Coe wasn’t an airman. He was a spy.”
Coe roared with laughter. “Spy…You mean, someone who was unfit to do anything useful and was dropped behind enemy lines in the hope that he would find something there to keep him occupied. The very word ‘espionage’ reminds me of Manhattans, hard-boiled eggs with Beluga…”
“Humbert, everything reminds you of Manhattans and hard-boiled eggs with Beluga.”
They laughed.
Coe flipped open a cigarette case and held it out to my father. As they were lighting up, he tapped his cigarette lightly against the case. I stared at him, but he didn’t seem to mind. There was a contented smile on his lips. He looked like the kind of man who was accustomed to having people stare at him, and who had not only grown used to it, but even come to appreciate it.
The smell of fried eggs drifted in from the kitchen. My mother had already set plates out on the table and poured coffee. Behind her, the frying pan sputtered and crackled on the stove.
My father and Coe talked. The visitor held his head to one side as he listened. Everything he did, breathing out smoke from his cigarette, listening, smiling, watching, drinking, he did with care. He was slow, but his slowness seemed to be
