“You’ve earned that Haut Brion,” said the chef. “What do you say we open it right now?”
I thought that was a fine idea.
“The sauce,” he said. “That was your recipe?”
“It’s based on a couple of things from Artusi.”
Coe leaned toward me slightly. “You’ve read Artusi?”
One of the galley boys came in with the wine. He handed it to his boss, who carefully uncorked it and put it down on the wooden table in the middle of the kitchen. There was bread, cheese, salt, and water. The chef poured me a finger of wine. I swirled it in my glass, sniffed, took a sip, sloshed it around a bit, and then nodded.
“Dear boy,” said Coe, “who taught you this great love of food?”
“I did, I think. And Mrs. David.”
“Mrs. Who?” said the chef.
“Elizabeth David,” said Coe. “That, De Jong, is your problem: you don’t keep up with the literature. An Englishwoman, who writes primarily on French and Italian cuisine. How else do you think this young lad, in this poor country, would have heard of garlic and crème fraîche?”
I looked at Coe and took a sip of the fragrant Haut Brion. I had never tasted this wine before. I had seen it mentioned in a wine guide I’d read in the bookstore. The description had been so enthusiastic that I had never forgotten the name.
“I don’t think you’re a cook at all.” Coe said, turning to me, “Cooking isn’t even particularly interesting. A cook is always having to contend with limitations: the kitchen, the boss, the customers, the region, the country. If you can you should write about food.”
“If everybody wrote about food and nobody cooked anymore, Campbell’s soup would be the Bocuse of everyday life,” said the chef irritably.
Coe drank his wine. He smacked his lips and then pursed them. “An excellent choice. What would you have liked to eat with this?”
“Tagliatelle with ragout of lamb and maybe a salad: curly endive and sweet potato.”
The chef frowned. “Sweet potato?” he mumbled.
Coe looked at me in surprise. He thought for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. “I think,” he said, “we’ll have to do this more often.”
That night when I came home, my mother was sitting at the table, reading. She kissed me, and recoiled in horror. “You’ve been drinking!” I smiled like a tailor who has sewn himself into his own suit. “An Haut Brion,” I said. “I won it cooking.” She shook her head and stood up. As we walked upstairs, I told her about my peculiar dinner with Coe and my heroic feats in Lejeune’s kitchen. In the bathroom, I brushed my teeth, while she looked at me in the mirror. “Promise me one thing,” she said. “Whatever happens, you’ll finish school.” I laughed too loudly and nodded. “I mean it,” she said. “Boris had to do it all later, and he’s never really amounted to anything.” I rinsed my mouth, and as I spit the water into the sink, where the red of the wine and the white of the toothpaste formed a dirty gray foam, I suddenly felt an ominous kind of sadness creeping up inside me.
Three
EVEN THOUGH IT DIDN’T STOP RAINING, MY MOTHER and I went that summer, like every other summer, to the village in the dunes where her father had been mayor. He now spent his days polishing his old rifles, waiting for friends who, like him, had come to look more and more like shuffling old badgers. His wife wandered through the house with a wicker basket, in which she carried a bunch of keys and a cologne-soaked handkerchief. Her life was an endless opening and closing of doors, restless peering into empty rooms, and whispered mumbling. Ever since she had asked the baker for half a loaf of green and a loaf of plaid, sliced, they had had a housekeeper.
Those two weeks in the dunes had never been an excursion I’d particularly looked forward to. Even before she had gotten lost in the fog my grandmother had looked at me sideways, and my grandfather, for as long as I could remember, seemed to be awaiting the moment when I would prove myself a man, grab one of his old rifles, and shoot a prizewinning rabbit. Now that it wouldn’t stop raining, that annual visit was even less appealing. The bad weather however only seemed to increase my mother’s determination. According to her, it was usually better at the seaside, and the salty air would do me good.
A day after our arrival, my grandfather called me into what he referred to as his “study.” I hardly ever entered that room. It was at the back of the house and overlooked a rolling stretch of dunes covered with tough, sharp grass. In the distance you could see the first houses of the village he had governed half his life without much enthusiasm and where he now, in more ways than one, was an outsider. The walls were hung with tinted etchings of hunters riding horses frozen in a ludicrous swan dive. Here and there was a rifle leaning against the bookcase, and the smell of grease and gun oil was so overpowering that it could just as easily have been a gunsmith’s workshop.
My grandfather pointed me to a chair that came from the old council chamber, on the back of which was the faded, embroidered coat of arms of the village, a plump little fish that floated, grinning stupidly, above something that looked like the serrated blade of a knife, but was no doubt meant to represent the sea. “I’ve asked you here…” He cleared his throat, removed a book of illustrations of lushly colored pheasants from his chair, and lowered himself down. “I’ve asked you here, because you…well, because you’re nearly grown, a grown man, and it seemed to me that it was time we talked man…to man.” He looked visibly relieved to have the introduction over
