Insatiable (29 page)

“You didn’t have the same perversity in your relationship with your husband,” he said. “Scandinavia . . . I suppose this is the last gasp of a dying man.” He mused. “I should go home and grab Renée [his first love] and marry her, or marry Andrea, or marry you.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. The sane, sensible part of my brain thought he just wanted me there to make arrangements and pay the bills. “I should go to Iceland,” he said. “The girls there are really desperate. Nobody ever goes to Iceland.”

“Maybe I should see Sweden,” I said. “And Copenhagen, too.”

I called Naomi in New York to see if she could put some money into my account to keep checks from bouncing and get her secretary to cancel a few appointments. I was already late delivering a piece. My editor would be screaming. “Your column hasn’t been in the magazine for weeks,” Naomi said. “That’s a mistake. I don’t see what you see in this man. He’s totally self-centered, contemptible. He’s like a self-indulgent twelve-year-old. What disturbs me is that you want so little for yourself.”

I defended him. I tried to explain that it was more than just sex. It was about helping him be all that he could be, I explained, although it looked like he was running away from that. I knew she was right. I had to go home. It would be less painful to make the break now than to drag it out.

He was dancing around the room, exuberant because American Express had called to say they were able to book him on the later ship. I told him I was going home. He went silent, acted sullen.

“I’m not rejecting you, Jamey. I’m not abandoning you. I love you. You’ll be fine. You’ll be better without me around. Everyone will want you. All the blondes will be begging to take you home. I’ll loan you the money.”

He disappeared into the bathroom. I heard the sound of his voice. Was he taping? He emerged, naked, with his new little France-plumped belly and the recorder. “I’ve been trying to decide if I should play this for you.” He played it. He’d been on his way back to the hotel yesterday, he was saying, and he suddenly missed me and wanted to get home. Thinking of the hotel room as home. And he got a hard-on for me, astonishing himself, thinking how pleased I would be. He shut it off. “You see. You must come to Sweden with me. Just come for a week.”

At first, I was moved. And then I was furious, remembering how the previous day he’d come into the room, where I was being as calculatedly sexy as I could be in my rose satin caftan with the slit up the thigh. “Pretty hot, babe,” he had said. And he’d done nothing. He hadn’t even kissed me, or touched me.

There seemed no point in complaining anymore. I felt light, carefree. I felt a surge of happiness. I was going home the next day and I wouldn’t have to want or beg or buy anything from him again.

Alain Senderens came out of the kitchen at l’Archestrate that night to marvel at how much we had eaten. We’d had the chef’s grand tasting menu, and as if that weren’t beyond gluttony, a few extra entrées, too. “Sometimes I’m nuts about you,” Jamey had said when I went along with his mad need for too much. “Sometimes I think I love you,” he said. “But it’s so hard to know if I love you or if it’s what you give me that I love.”

Senderens signed the menu, a copy for each of us. On Jamey’s, he wrote, “To the gourmand with the astonishing appetite.”

“Look what he wrote,” said Jamey. “Everyone who knows me will know it means me.”

“Let’s not go crazy,” I said as we gathered goodies at Fauchon the next day for one last picnic in the room before I had to leave for the airport. “We can only eat so much.”

He pouted. “I have to have it all because I didn’t have it when I was a child. I didn’t have anything. I want to feel I can have it and throw what’s left away. I’ll pay half,” he said, actually spending ten francs of his own for fruit tarts.

I covered the bed with bath towels and we spread out our feast. He rearranged it a bit. He stood at the foot of the bed, taking it all in, and roared like a lion contemplating a limping gazelle. “It’s all arranged in the order we should eat it,” he said. He pulled up a chair on his side of the bed and started with the terrine de campagne, ripping off the heel of the bread. “You said you didn’t want herring. Last chance, I’m taking it all.” And then he was sobbing.

I knelt at his feet. “Darling, what’s wrong?”

“Everyone always talks about pain. Women want to possess you. They are always saying I bring them pain. And then I’m the one who gets left alone.”

“But all those women loved you.” I was crying, too, for fear I was one of them and not really ready yet to quit cold.

“I need unequivocal love. Why is that so difficult?” He dabbed his eyes with the sheet. There was a knock at the door. He wiped his eyes and my eyes, too, and he kissed me. He kissed me hard on the mouth, then again.

The bellman had come for my bags. I looked back to wave good-bye. He looked like I had abandoned him on a sinking ship.

I was feeling shipwrecked, too. But then I took a deep breath, belt barely permitting, and realized I had done it. I was going home. The low-grade knot of frustration in my tummy was already fading. I had cut the cord. Quit cold turkey. I was free.

38

A W
INE
R
OMANCE
T
HIS IS

F
LUSHED BY A SUCCÈSS D’ESTIME THAT HAD EMPTIED THEIR BANK ACCOUNTS
, Michael James and Billy Cross asked if I would come back to Napa Valley for another cuisinary high-wire act. Would I help them lure Jean Troisgros? How could I say no? Jamey was off the radar, harvesting blondes in Scandinavia, out of sight, out of mind. I was eating again as fast as I could, dancing away the calories, and flying off whenever booked to promote
Blue Skies, No Candy
. Napa would be a time out of time, like stepping through the looking glass, with Jean all to myself. Well, mostly to myself, I imagined, with only two dozen or so foodies vying for a sliver of attention. And I’d pocket a nice little fee for just being there and contributing some pith and patter. “Speak to Roger Vergé,” I told Jean. “He’ll tell you what fun it was. And bring your tennis racket.”

I had continued to see Jean whenever we were on the same continent. I am not sure what Jean Troisgros and I were all about. He was single. I was single. We ate. We made love. We talked about food. We had dinner with mutual friends who spoke French and amused him while I sat there, sometimes a bit sappy, admiring his face, the big dark eyes almost bruised in golden skin. Most especially, I loved his hands, huge hands with perfectly formed fingers . . . as if sculpted by a master. (Look at the hands of the older chefs, chefs who have actually cooked for years, hands plunging into boiling water, moving hot pots. They are often giant hands, swollen by heat, with muscular fingers.) Jean was not much taller than I—we were probably the same height in my lowish ankle-strap wedgies—and his arms and legs were like steel.

Jean was only in his early fifties then, but with his mustache and beard almost completely white, he seemed older, and he struck me as almost fatherly in his thoughtful, caring, protective ways. But he was a desirable widower, after all, and eventually there was a special woman back in Roanne, as friends who did the circuit two or three times a year made sure that I knew. Jean never spoke of her. Indeed, I do not remember Jean ever speaking of himself, or family, or feelings, or of his son Georges, a journeyman at Regine’s on Park Avenue, who was lean and had a full black beard, and would later become a stalwart visible through the pass-through to the kitchen at Lutèce.

Jean spoke little English. My French was never good enough to follow a whipsaw conversation among Frenchmen, never good enough to say anything particularly deep or poetic or funny. As a seventeen-year-old in Paris, I’d mastered the uvular
r
—I loved that uvular
r
—so I sounded like I spoke French, and people would chatter back at me till my brain glazed. I never thought Jean was the man for my life or I for his. But between the hurricanes of emotion that seemed epidemic in my new singlehood, he was occasionally there, solid, straightforward, and calm.

Jean was the strong, silent type—he’d spent most of his life in a kitchen, as French chefs did until Paul Bocuse started jetting around the world in 1973, taking his kitchen pals along with him, and making a splash by cooking brilliantly publicized dinners. The kitchen was where most chefs were planted—not exactly fertile ground for intellectual insights or social repartee. When the press quoted Bocuse, it was usually when he had said something bluntly outrageous, blindingly chauvinist, or hopelessly misogynist. And he was the spokesman for his tribe. Jean was reserved, even shy.

I remember telling Jean that the notoriously restless Paul was losing credibility with the food press and the growing ranks of gourmand travelers because he was almost never in his restaurant at Collonges, especially by the time he, Roger Vergé, and the celebrated pâtissier Gaston Lenôtre opened the Three French Chefs restaurant at Disney’s Epcot Center in Orlando. Bocuse had left two wives behind in Lyon, one official wife, the elegant and patrician-looking Ramonde, who ran the restaurant, later with their grown daughter by her side, and the other, unofficial “wife,” mother of his son.
*

“The person who cooks when I am here is the same person who cooks when I am not here,” Bocuse responded to the critics. I’d eaten an astonishing meal when neither Bocuse nor his trusted chef stand-in, Roger Jaloux, were in the kitchen. But pilgrims from abroad making that long and costly trek were less likely to drop to their knees over the pastry-wrapped
loup de mer
with scales incised in the dough, and the chef’s inimitable floating island, when they didn’t spy that famous eagle profile under the grand toque stalking the room.

Jean defended Bocuse. “If I were going to have my last meal, I would choose Paul to cook it,” he told me.

The bills for the wanton luxury and drama at High Tree Farms had left Billy Cross and Michael James broke, but by the time Jean was booked to cook, they had found sheltering arms and a properly plump budget for their cooking extravaganza at the Robert Mondavi winery. “I like the idea of linking the wines of California with the cuisine of France,” Mondavi said as he launched The Mondavi Wine Country Cooking School. Jean and I would live in the winery guesthouse, a sprawling A-frame, its vast glass facade looking out on row after row of the vineyard that surrounded it.

I managed to get a column ahead at the magazine and flew out from New York with Jean. We spent the night at the Stanford Court so he could supervise the shopping the next morning. He almost provoked a riot in the supermarket when he bit into a daikon radish and, rejecting it, tossed it back onto the produce pile. Jean wanted fish. Where would he find fish fresh enough? Michael James took us to Chinatown. Jean stroked a few likely specimens, looked them in the eye, lifted their gills. He’d never seen sand dabs before. He had to try them. It wasn’t even whole fish that he bought finally, but some very ordinary, schlumpy-looking fillets of red snapper. I was certain he was courting disaster. Fillets would never last. Jean instructed the fishmonger to put everything on crushed ice and into the trunk for the drive north to the Mondavi winery. To keep those fragile fillets fresh-smelling, he stored them in metal bins on ice in the fridge—frigid but not frozen under wet dish towels that he would change twice a day. Jean barely had time to unpack what he’d brought: a bathing suit, his tennis racket, a two-hundred-dollar can of black truffles, and ten quarts of essence of veal bones (reduced to a demiglace by his son Georges).

The communicants, nested in inns and lodges nearby, arrived for lunch. They came from Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Kankakee, Illinois, wearing dungarees and major jewels. They were sybarites and everyday gourmands, professional cooking teachers, food writers, and unabashed chef groupies, as well as Augustin Paege (the eccentricly quotable Bulgarian who’d been our unctuous host at the upstate Box Tree Inn) and an amateur cook and food lover who introduced himself as Joel. That was Joel Grey, fresh from winning an Oscar for
Cabaret.
An architect from San Francisco carried his own chef’s knife in a leather hip holster. The wife of a doctor (who also built racing boats) wore surgeon’s whites and a 12.5-karat emerald.

With his smile and four English phrases—“Thank you,” “Hello,” “I love you,” “More butter”—Jean instantly won them over.

Midway through class that first evening, swiftly slivering cucumbers into crisp, perfect matchsticks, Jean was already communicating easily with the vivid gestures of his kitchen technique. But he was worried about the flour, remarkably different from flour in France. How would he adjust to make his pastry? And what about the butter? he wondered.

Michael tapped the bricks of butter on the counter. “You don’t know what it took to find this quality of butter,” he said.

Some of the students managed to gulp down their first kidney ever that evening. Dazzled by the posh of the table—waiters in black tie, orchids in glass bricks, cabbage in clay pots at lunch, a parade of crystal goblets by candlelight—a real estate and insurance salesman announced he would leave the business world and open an inn.

“You have to watch everything Jean does,” he confided to me. “You have to be here to see him spear a garlic clove with a fork and use it to stir the spinach.”

The class seemed enthralled even with such basics as peeling Swiss chard. “What do we do with the chard remains?” someone punned.

After breakfast each day, we raced off to vineyard tastings. Lunch looped into afternoon haze and often more vineyard visits. At Domaine Chandon, where Moët & Chandon was bottling its pioneer Franco-American sparkling wine to go on sale that December, Jean slashed a champagne bottle open with a knife as if it were a sword and poured aperitifs for the class. At Heitz Vineyard, Jack Heitz waited till everyone had arrived to open a bottle of his rare and legendary Martha’s Vineyard cabernet.

“You wouldn’t open it ahead to let it breathe?” I asked. Breathing was a sacred ritual among the serious winos I knew.

“No,” Heitz said. “I want you to experience that first taste, and then we can all see how it evolves in the air.” That first sip was so complex and powerful, I had to lean against the wall to think about it. (And I went home a convert, astonishing friends and frustrating sommeliers for the rest of my life by not letting them open a young red till we were ready to drink it.)

Jean would disappear for a few rounds of tennis between winery marathons. One afternoon, half the class got lost on the road to Mayacamas Vineyards. Jean disappeared into the brush and plucked wild plums, lest someone starve between breakfast croissant and lunch.

When the class gathered in the Mondavi winery kitchen at five o’clock to cook dinner, a few imprudent drinkers who couldn’t bring themselves to spit expensive Chardonnays came staggering in late. By that time, Jean’s lightning-swift knife had chopped turnips, carrots, shallots, kiwis, and grapefruit skin. Jean was a surgeon dissecting the baron of lamb, an alchemist elevating humble Swiss chard to buttery sainthood, and a puzzled man trying to skin an American fish of unknown ancestry.

“If God had meant a fish to be skinned, he would have given it a zipper,” a West Coast restaurant critic observed.

The class punster couldn’t resist. “This is a zipless fluke.”

“All it takes to be a restaurant critic in Portland is being able to tell which frozen cheesecake is Sara Lee,” the Oregon reviewer had lamented, confessing how he envied me the richness of my bailiwick.

Joel Grey’s face was radiant as he mastered the art of disjointing a chicken. “You must do it in one blow of the knife,” Jean commanded. “Two will disjoint your fingers. If you cut yourself”—he looked up from slivering turnips—“be sure to leave the blood for the sauce.”

I watched Jean wrestle a twenty-five-pound mattress of puff pastry into submission for the evening’s dessert. Surely it had been years since he’d had to knead and roll and turn his own dough. Back home in Roanne, that was a job for the pastry team. Watching him in the kitchen was like watching Nureyev, I thought, or an Olympic slalom champion. A master of his métier performing was incredibly sexy. And it was not just me who found his cooking erotic. I noticed a few of the women gasping for breath, and I thought, Yes, yes, yes.

Indeed, most of us were so gaga, we missed picking up the real secret of the haunting fish sauce. Jean would shoo us off to the dining room as he and Michael and our friend from New York, Naomi Linden, plated the food. Jean always did my plate himself, Naomi told me later. He would select what he considered the most beautiful fillet, the most perfectly rare breast of pigeon, ladle the sauce in a precise geometric swirl, wipe the edge of the plate, and instruct a waiter to carry it directly to me. That’s how Naomi discovered the fish sauce’s crucial ingredient, never revealed to the class.

“It’s the veal demiglace he stirs into it,” she confided to me later. “I caught him doing it and he made me promise to keep it a secret, just for myself. But of course I am sharing it with you.”

Jean was a model of discretion in class, relaxed and proper. At night, he was comfortable and affectionate in the big bed we shared on the open balcony overlooking the soaring living-dining space below. Our friends Naomi and Greg Linden remained invisible in their bedroom. Sometimes the morning light pouring in would wake us. Sometimes it was the bustle of the staff setting up breakfast on the table below, shushing one another not to disturb our sleep. Jean would wake as men often do, primed for making love. And I would climb on top, riding to my own rhythm, my arm pressed against my mouth so no telltale cries could escape. Once my breathing returned to normal, I would call out over the balcony rail, “Good morning, everyone.”

Those muffled moments felt naughty and delicious, almost as naughty and delicious as raspberry pie for breakfast. It wasn’t rich enough merely to have fresh raspberries in an era before berries might arrive in the market more or less ripe from somewhere around the globe every day of the year. But to have them for breakfast on pastry cream in an exquisite tart shell baked by Margaret Fox, the woman who ran the Café Beaujolais down the road, that was paradise. Some mornings when the sun had time to dry the dew, the table was set outside and we sat surrounded by grapevines, picking raspberries off the last of the tart.