Paris Was Ours (14 page)

I see them now with the affection that one has for those with whom one has gone through hard times. It was a camaraderie of the constantly exhausted. There was the Breton chef who, bellowing from the garde-manger station, ran the subterranean kitchen near Invalides and kept me close by his side, supervising my every move. That he was my superior was never in doubt (among my duties was splashing just enough white wine into his cup while preparing large trays of
maquereau au vin blanc
). And yet each evening we said good night at the Invalides RER station—where he started the journey toward his distant suburb—with the clipped “Salut” of equals.

I see Gaetan, the
commis
at the Michelin one-star in the sixteenth whose promotion depended on my not screwing up while under his supervision. We’d commiserate over staff meals such as roast rabbit heads (I kid you not) and a yogurt. This just before launching into preparing
suprême de volaille aux truffes
. One day, a crippling flu (which is pretty much what it would take) made him unable to come to work. I was thrown into the breach. When he returned, the chef told him that I’d managed to get out of my own way enough not to have the entire restaurant come to a logjam at the vegetable station, and Gaetan ribbed me for the next few days by calling me “chef.”

For me the decision to leave Paris was certainly gradual, so gradual I wasn’t even aware of it. If anything I was getting further and further into Paris. I was taking catering jobs in distant restaurants. I was the fill-in guy a chef could call. I had made the transition from being one of the many who are constantly descending on the city to being someone who could, in a pinch, handle a station and whom you could contact. The twist—it is
the expatriate twist itself—is that you have to reach this level of familiarity with a place before you understand that it is not part of the future that awaits you.

After four years of cooking at various restaurants, I had finally reached
commis
at the meat station of one of them. I was not
chef de partie
, the person directly responsible, but it was still a huge responsibility. The dish we specialized in was a
salmis de pigeon
, and if French cooking is a story of great stocks, this dish defined it. The term
salmis
was borrowed, since classically it is a stewed pheasant preparation requiring a long cooking time. We instead took the pigeons from the oven, delicately lifted the breast meat off the carcass, and made an instant
salmis
sauce, hitting the bones with an intense brown chicken stock and giving it an additional gaminess with a ladle of hare stock. The sauce reduced on a high flame, received the requisite knob of butter and pinch of herbs, and was ready to be spooned over the plate.

We must have made that preparation forty times a night. I still think the chef was right to do it the time-consuming way he did. Preparing the sauce at the last minute allowed it to remain a bouillon, a good broth, one that was capable of evoking, if only distantly, simmered country roots. A finished sauce, heated to order or kept warm throughout the service, might have been more practical, but it would have sucked the lyricism out of the dish. So it was worth it. Not that I thought that as I waited for a train at the Argentine Métro station on the avenue de la Grande Armée, nor when, exhausted, my head bobbed against the glass window all the way to Bastille. I’d drag my legs up to the maid’s room where I lived, tucked under
the eaves of the building. In summer I’d crawl out the window and sunbathe on the slope of slate. Now it was winter. The vegetable oil above my camping stove was often solid from the cold. I guess it was on one of those spent nights when I took out the American passport I’d always kept and said to myself, “Why not?” It was as easy as that. An exhausted cook saying to himself, “It can’t be harder than this over there.”

During the next few weeks it was difficult. I was still shaking hands dutifully at the start and end of each day, but something had changed. I had made a decision to leave. I saw dishwashers who’d quickly cleared pans with food I’d burned before it was seen, and I realized just how they had saved me. I saw the young cooks with whom I’d worked in a new light. We were wiping down the kitchen after the week’s last meal, and I understood that I owed them everything. They’d taken me in when they had no reason to; they’d allowed me into a world, to develop professionally, to figure things out with few questions asked. More than anything, I understood that to them this was not a phase; wherever I might be going after learning to cook in Paris, they would still be here.

I caught the train down to Spain to tell my father of my decision. He agreed it was the right one—he who had sailed out of Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1952 in a camel hair coat with enough money guaranteed by the GI Bill to see him through. Though I had an American passport, I didn’t feel American. Nor did I feel Irish, Spanish, or French. I did feel like a cook, though. I was someone who was wrapping a pairing knife bought at Dehillerin in an apron and placing it in my suitcase. But more than that, I felt like a Parisian cook. Surviving in the crucible
of the city’s kitchens gave me the confidence to face whatever awaited me. I knew how to break down a recipe to an efficient series of movements, just as I knew that it was not my role to escalate an argument. In the years to come, it would serve me well to remember that a professional “Oui, chef” was the only acceptable reply to a chef’s cries of “Bordel de merde!”

Two Paris Poems

On the métro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside
her to make room for me;

she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely
looks up as she pulls them to her.

I sit, take out my own book—Cioran,
The Temptation to Exist
—and notice
her glancing up from hers

to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms
herself physically,” that is,

she’s
present
in a way she hadn’t been before; though she hasn’t moved
an inch, she’s allowed herself

to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception,
so I can’t help but remark

her strong figure and very tan skin — (how literally golden young women
can look at the end of summer).

She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she
doesn’t pull it away;

she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our
forearms, sensitive, alive,

achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and
thus acknowledged,
known
.

I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I
have no desire for more,

but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of
something like its opposite:

a memory—a lovely girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from
me in the library in school,

our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I
craved that touch to mean,

my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time
had pressed, but a table leg.

The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against
the lurch of the slowing train,

and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts
her bodily being again,

(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends,
not once looking back,

(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that
though I must be to her again

as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps
there was a moment I was not.

Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa!
the butcher we used to patronize in the
Rue Cadet market,

beside himself, shrieked at a black man in an argument the rest of the
import of which I missed

but that made me anyway for three years walk an extra street to a shop of
definitely lower quality

until I convinced myself that probably I’d misunderstood that other thing
and could come back.

Today another black man stopped, asking something that again I didn’t
catch, and the butcher,

who at the moment was unloading his rotisserie, slipping the chickens
off their heavy spit,

as he answered—how get this right? — casually but accurately
brandished
the still-hot metal,

so the other, whatever he was there for, had subtly to lean away a little,
so as not to flinch.

Understanding Chic

P
ARIS WAS MY
first taste of a Latin country. I was thirteen and went with my godmother, Marigold Johnson, and her three teenage children. We traveled by car. I cannot remember crossing the channel—we were coming from England—but I do recall a noisy traffic jam caused by a motor bike accident. It was a hazy afternoon, our car windows were rolled down, and I was struck by the smell of baked baguettes wafting along the street, the feisty honking of cars, and a toddler with a blunt fringe catching my eye and slowly sucking on her lollipop. The Parisians were different, I quickly registered.

A FEW HOURS
later, I poured water and shook sugar into my first
citron pressé
. The next morning, I found myself admiring the clipped lawns of the jardins du Luxembourg. Topping everything off was the discovery of school notebooks packed with cubed pages as opposed to lined ones. I remember gliding my hand down their brightly colored covers and liking the rainbowlike array they formed in my suitcase.

Ten days later, I returned to my family and became a Paris Bore. Every conversation became an occasion to slip in tales
from my Parisian adventure. Someone adult pointed out that I had been to Paris in August and that “no one chic ever stays there then.” I refused to give the woman’s remark much credence. Besides, what on earth was “chic”? Undaunted, I bounced along in my enthusiasm. Paris was hard to fault. Unlike London of the mid-1970s, it basked in the beauty of tradition—the ritual and order were an indication of that—and there was a respect for vegetables. In shop windows, polished tomatoes were lined up like jewels. French civic pride.

Visiting the château de Versailles, I briefly stepped on the cordoned-off lawn, an easy enough mistake that had a shocking consequence. A Frenchman—not a guard—came forward and slapped me full in the face. Whatever prompted him to
gifler
(slap) an ungainly teenager was his problem—but it became briefly mine. I burst into quick, embarrassed tears. My godmother quickly admonished him, as did the rest of the family, a brave brood when tangled with. Apparently, we all hugged afterward. I write “apparently” because I mentally zapped this drama from start to finish, only to be reminded of it thirty-three years later. (No doubt I did this because the horrible man and his offending
gifle
did not fit into my perfect, picture-postcard memories.)

In retrospect, I doubt whether the experience would have put me off. Still, it might have prepared me for how tricky the French can be. Am I suggesting that behind every French person lies an unexpected slap? That would be unfair. But my experience with the Parisians is that, mentally, there is a slap instinct—mild in some, more fervent in others. Defensive, they tend to attack. The briefest grasp of their city’s history offers
reason for this: being besieged several times leaves its mark. Yet that very “slap instinct” is both the Parisians’ strength and their weakness.

It also explains why Paris remains the fashion capital. Fashion, when exciting, is all about the shock of the new—the equivalent of a swift slap. And being chic can be viewed as a visual slap enforced by the wearer’s character, taste, eye. It’s being au courant and yet daring to be different.

When I announced my decision to move to Paris in 1989 — I was then living in New York—my acquaintances were surprisingly negative. Indeed, apart from my mother and my then boss Shelley Wanger, there was underlined outrage and a hint of resentment. It showed in a sequence of questions: Did I speak French? Where would I live? What would I do? I was well armed for all three. I had been taking lessons at the Alliance française, I had found an apartment in the Marais, and thanks to
Vogue
’s Anna Wintour, I had letters of introduction to all the top couture houses. Surely, this should have satisfied, but the mention of fashion led to their trump card. “Oh my God, but aren’t you terrified?” I can still hear the feline malevolence to certain voices. “No, why should I be terrified?” I asked, already geared up by the energy of the upcoming move. “Because the women running those places are both terrifying and terrifyingly chic,” was the gist of their answers.