Breathless (17 page)
Authors: Nancy K. Miller
There were not quite as many guests as cheeses. Jim’s old friends, Paul, the French Communist schoolteacher (who had rescued my
navets glacés
from culinary disgrace), and Danh, the Vietnamese philosopher; Hannah; Monique and Alain; Nicole, my friend from Barnard who had married Laurent, a French engineer; Leo; Nathalie from the lycée; Philippe and Anne; Jean and his new wife; and several of the teachers who taught for Jim but were also friends. Thomas and Micheline sent a wall-sized tapa cloth from Tahiti with their regrets. Our social world was still small, even motley, but for the time being, at least, it fit the scale of the apartment. Everyone thought it was very like Jim to have pulled off the cheese-and-wine pairing, even finding cheeses the French friends did not recognize. Sunday afternoons in Paris were gloomy affairs, almost provincial, when everything was closed. The party was seen as a charming interlude, if also, despite all the exotic French cheeses, very American, which of course it was.
A
FTER THE SUCCESS OF HIS
first letter, Jim started corresponding with my parents on a regular basis. He described the party and the highlights of the honeymoon. I sometimes wondered if he had married me in order to have an audience he took to be knowledgeable enough to appreciate the culture he had acquired, since references to French writers and history and his knowledge of wine and cheese were lost on his family. He narrated our wedding trip back and forth to Geneva, emphasizing its literary stopping points: Langres (birthplace of Diderot) and Morat (where Rousseau had visited). It never occurred to him that my parents weren’t as fascinated by the Enlightenment as he was.
The trip’s highlight and Jim’s secret destination for us—this was not part of the travelogue—was the Issenheim altarpiece in Kolmar. As we stared at the nails embedded in Christ’s flesh, the twisted toes dripping blood, Jim reminded me that he had always said he would marry me. Didn’t I remember that first day in my room when he promised that he would take me to
l’autel
(altar)? Yes, but I thought he meant
l’hôtel
—as in tryst. Jim’s joy in punning was a symptom of his James Joyce obsession. He was especially proud of any pun I missed.
Typically, Jim’s letters detailed household activities, made requests—back issues from the
New York Review of Books
, recipes for Jewish dishes—and reported about me, my health, my exams, my shoe shopping. I was the center, the heroine, of this domestic narrative. Sometimes his letters eerily echoed mine, down to the same language—my “elation” after teaching the translation class. He even enclosed examples of the texts I assigned the students to translate—Stendhal, Zola, Camus, Colette. He promoted me to my own parents as a teacher of literature.
Most of all, Jim loved to say “we”; so did I. “We are both very busy, but it’s a pretty good life. Once we get a decent apartment, life will be perfect.”
The ranch.
Jim had started a campaign to convince my parents of his interest in Judaism. On the envelope of one of his first son-in-law letters to my parents, fat and heavy with the mimeographed pages of my class assignments, are several stamps, one of which represented a column of men with shaven heads, wearing the striped uniforms of the concentration camps, emerging through an archway that resembles the Arc de Triomphe. The men appear to walk through strands of barbed wire, as well as a linked chain. The caption reads: “The return of the deported.” The date was April 1965. There had been a ceremony in Père Lachaise cemetery that month to dedicate a monument to the many thousands of the French deportees who died in Buchenwald. It was the anniversary of the liberation of the camp prisoners nineteen years earlier. Like the Chagall stamp of the shtetl betrothal, the liberation stamp carried proof of Jim’s desire to feel solidarity with his Jewish family, to identify with Jewish suffering.
I had hoped that in marrying Jim and living with him in Paris, I would escape my nice-Jewish-girl destiny. I longed for glamour and style, Frenchness, Jean Seberg in
Breathless
, or Jeanne Moreau (even more of a reach) playing the Marquise de Merteuil in the movie version of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
. I had not foreseen
Yiddishkeit
on Hudson transported back to the banks of the Seine. I wanted to travel to Italy, not Israel. Getting married had messed up the geography and collapsed the distances.
I
FELT AT LEAST AS
jubilant as Jane Eyre when she finally married Rochester. There was, I confess, more than a whiff of that heady perfume—wedding the older man who is difficult, moody, who comes with secrets, stamped with something opaque about his past. The older man who after employing you, comes to recognize you as his equal and co-conspirator. Lucy Snowe and Monsieur Paul, the stern schoolteacher. At every chance I stretched out my arm and spread the fingers of my left hand to admire the slenderness of the wedding band we had chosen. In French the gold band is called an
alliance
—I loved that idea, our alliance that I spelled out in a hyphenated last name, linking our ancestors and our destinies. Of course, Brontë doesn’t tell us much about what happens
after
her heroines get married. It’s not hard to understand why that might be. Except for the adultery plot of continental novels—
Madame Bovary
or
Anna Karenina
—how do you keep the reader’s attention with the ordinary details of married existence?
When my parents came to Paris that summer of 1965 on their annual European jaunt, I invited them for dinner along with Monique and Alain, and Monique’s parents, who had definitively left Tunisia for Paris. After their disappointment over my breakup with Bernard, Monique and Alain had slowly come to accept Jim as my partner. They had been married for over a year and played old-married couple to our nervous newlywed game. Bringing the two families together was my way of showing my parents I could live the way they did. Was I trying to please them, or worse still, trying to be them?
I decided on a
boeuf en daube
as a main course. I had never cooked a
daube
, but Jim wanted to reenact Woolf’s famous portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay’s dish in
To the Lighthouse
. Jim liked the idea of French cooking filtered through a literary example, even if English. Literature raised food to a higher level, he said, whatever its national origin.
In
French Provincial Cooking
, Elizabeth David tries to reassure the novice cook by saying that, basically, cooking
en daube
is just like braising. You brown meat on a high heat and put it in a slow oven. “This is an easy recipe,” she begins. I took Elizabeth David at her word. After all, I had seen my mother make pot roast many times. Of course I didn’t know what rump of beef was (her recommendation) and didn’t have an oven. I told the butcher I was making a
daube
. The meat he offered me looked a little fatty. I hesitated, but he insisted that I didn’t want meat that would dry out; that’s why you also needed cubes of bacon. The meat marinated in a pot on the windowsill overnight (cold enough that July), soaking in a mixture of vinegar, olive oil, some red wine, herbs and vegetables, and a
bouquet garni
, all designed to lend flavor to the meat while it tenderized. The
bouquet
wasn’t mentioned by Elizabeth David, but the butcher said it was a good idea and I figured he should know. I was just a
petite dame;
he was the butcher. The next day, I simmered the
daube
on low heat for several hours.
I brought out the dish in a large earthenware terrine, glazed on the inside, as per Elizabeth David’s instructions. It looked perfect at the center of our new table. With the wedding present check sent by my aunt and uncle, we had bought a reproduction eighteenth-century Spanish
rustic table with sculpted legs and a curved cast-iron base, around the corner on the boulevard Raspail. The mixture of meat, vegetables, and herbs gave off a scent of the French countryside; it gave life to the dark-stained table. I served everyone, ladling the right balance of meat and liquid onto each guest’s plate.
The respective parents kept up the conversation in a mixture of French and English—Monique’s father speaking English to my father, my mother speaking French to Monique’s mother—but a strained silence settled over the table once everyone tackled the
daube
, which in theory should have been tender enough to eat with a spoon. Instead, I heard the work of knives and forks, spearing and trimming the meat on the plate. The chunks of beef had slimmed down to nubs of gristle with a few glimmers of meat attached, a bay leaf floating sadly on the surface of the fatty sauce. My father, who liked fat, tried to console me by saying that the sauce was good, and demonstrated his solidarity by soaking it up with a piece of baguette; my mother offered to send me
her
recipe for
daube
.
I escaped to the kitchen as often as possible, desperate for dishes to wash, but by the end of the meal the disaster of the
daube
had moved into a past tense, mitigated by the salad (I had perfected my vinaigrette), the cheese course, the fruit, and the dessert, not to mention several bottles of very good Burgundy. In a parting gesture, Monique’s father toasted us by reciting some of his poetry.
After the guests left, my parents asked us to sit down in the living room with them. My father handed Jim an envelope. It contained a check generous enough for us to buy a car, with the condition, my mother said as she walked out the door, that Jim teach me to drive.
E
VERYONE IN
T
O THE
L
IGHTHOUSE
agreed that Mrs. Ramsay’s dish was a “perfect triumph.” While I finished drying the dessert dishes and the glasses, Jim read aloud the dinner table scene from the novel. In company, Jim had sought to divert attention from my failure by talking up the wine and pushing the cheese course. Alone with me, he couldn’t resist the usual critique of my culinary performance, which
sadly received a very poor grade. I pointed out that credit for the
daube
masterpiece properly belonged to Mildred, the cook—and also that we didn’t have an oven. Still, we had survived the bridal ritual: cooking for the parents.
In London, we bought a dark green Austin-Mini 850 and drove it to Ireland for our delayed honeymoon.
J
IM’S COUSINS FOUND US A
cottage on a hilltop looking out at the mountains in the west of Ireland. The cottage had two rooms, the larger of which was a spacious kitchen with a big turf stove and a settee. We had electricity but no running water. The young couple who rented the house to us brought us fresh water and a small sack of potatoes daily. It rained lightly every day, almost invisibly—what the Irish call “soft” weather. We bought heavy cable-knit sweaters, made in the Aran Islands from wool so thick and rich with lanolin it was almost rain resistant, and kept the turf fire burning day and night. I spent most of the day under the quilt reading. Cows circled the cottage, grazing on our rented twelve acres. Sometimes when I got fed up with the sound of their bells, I wrapped myself in a knee rug that I used as a shawl when I went outside and ran around beating pots and pans to make the cows wander off.
That summer, Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station, started broadcasting off the coast of Great Britain, and we listened, ravished, to the Beatles, and to music from America. We took Cher’s hit “I Got You Babe” as our anthem.
Green vegetables were scarce, but meat was copiously available. The butcher in town would cut slabs from a large side of meat hanging from a hook above the counter. He would ask how much you wanted and then cut big chunks of whatever part he happened to have under the cleaver. He threw the meat on one side of the scale and individual weights on the other. The method was primitive compared to the minute calculations of the knives and scales in Paris, but the meat, especially the lamb, was fresh. We probably had just seen the donor wandering down the road. In a quest for herbs, we combed our few acres in vain. But there seemed to be an infinite variety of potatoes. Potatoes and onions thrown together with the meat were what the butcher recommended. By the end of the month I turned out a decent Irish stew, consoling myself briefly for the
daube
fiasco.
“T
HE FLESH IS SAD, ALAS,
and I’ve read all the books.” The line of poetry whose authorship we had debated when we met—Mallarmé or Baudelaire?—had become a standing joke. During damp midsummer in Ireland, however, the honeymoon flesh
was
sad, a mute frustration I tried to ignore. Sex with Jim was frequent, but it was shaped by his fantasy, not mine. My fantasies were always about seduction, the man and I were fully clothed and on the verge. The fact that Jim took everything Georges Bataille had written about eroticism to the letter and would urge me to say transgressive things made him—sometimes me—feel daring and modern. Uttering the words didn’t necessarily dissolve boundaries or shatter consciousness, which was what Jim, following Bataille’s philosophy (maybe you had to be Catholic) seemed to believe. Whatever the philosophy, and even with the example of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, a novel that had electrified my imagination when I was a virgin in high school, endowing sexual organs with names felt ridiculous off the page.
Thanks to Bernard’s tutelage, I could produce the occasional orgasm, but something I never quite named to myself was always missing. Maybe this was what sex in marriage was. After all, the hot sex in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, like the scenes in the nouvelle vague movies that came later to fuel my curiosity, took place between lovers, not spouses. Clearly, Emma Bovary was looking for something that escaped Charles’s imagination. And like Charles, Jim had no clue that anything was wrong.
The act itself often felt like a brutal interruption, especially at dawn. I didn’t welcome Jim’s morning salute as a tribute to my charms or as proof of his superior virility, as he liked to claim. I didn’t know how to get past his complacency, and I worried because my previous encounters had also left me wondering. Was this all there was? When a married friend told me that in her husband’s arms it was always like paradise, I was impressed but baffled, and much too embarrassed to ask for details.