Seduction (5 page)

“Maybe you’ll be able to teach me a thing or two from
that fancy school,” she’d said. Well, maybe I would.

My aunt and great-grandmother were entirely on board too. At least they pretended to be. I knew they were trying not to smother me.

“This will broaden your horizons,” Aunt Agnes said with a brittle sort of cheer.

“And if you need anything, just whistle,” Gram added. Gram is an empath, meaning she’s a healer and also a bit of a telepath. She was saying that if I ever needed help, I could reach her just by thinking. That’s easier said than done, though. Agnes and Gram communicate telepathically with each other all the time, but I don’t exactly have the hang of it yet. But we could still write letters and e-mails.

The hardest good-bye was Peter. That is, I didn’t say good-bye to him at all. We hadn’t spoken since that terrible lunch at Pizza World, and . . . well, I was afraid he’d blow me off if I tried to see him, and that would ruin my whole summer in Paris.

So I didn’t say anything. He was working on the day I left.

Anyway, I made it to Paris, and was enrolled at the Clef d’Or.

“Kooking school,” as Fabienne called it.

I’d done it. Found the razor’s edge. Took a walk on the wild side. Said good-bye to my inner mom.

He probably doesn’t even miss me,
I thought.

CHAPTER

•

FIVE

Dear Gram,

Well, the Clef d’Or surely lives up to its reputation as the greatest cooking school in the world! We are learning time-honored methods of preparing traditional French food, with no shortcuts. There are about thirty students in my class (Soups and Appetizers for the next two weeks). Most of them are French. Some are Japanese. There is one other English speaker, a Canadian named Margot. I’m sure we’ll get to be good friends.

Love,

Katy

Never mind that Margot was a fifty-two-year-old travel writer for the Toronto
Sun
, and was in Paris to cover a story
about her close friend Chef Durant, the head chef of the school. Chef Durant does not speak to students, and neither does Margot, except in the capacity of interviewer. The one time I tried to talk to her, she asked me if I missed McDonald’s, which was pretty dumb, since there are McDonald’s all over Paris. Fortunately, she’s only staying around for Soups and Appetizers.

Today we made
coquelets sur canapés
, which translates roughly to “disgusting critters on toast.” The class began with the chef’s assistant handing out little dead birds. I didn’t know what kind of birds they were, although he told us—one of the many mysteries of French cooking is the French language—but they were pitiful, scrawny little things, with their limp little necks and pathetic, blank eyes. We were told to plunge them into boiling water and then pluck the feathers off them, cut off their heads and feet, and remove their organs (the liver, mixed with raw pork fat, is a big part of the dish) before roasting them.

The whole process was hideous. When I was working in Hattie’s Kitchen, I never had to chop anything’s head off, although I suppose someone did. I never had to sauté animal glands or skin eels (I won’t even begin to tell you how that’s done). Hattie didn’t even serve lobster, because she didn’t like the idea of taking an eight-year-old sea being and boiling it alive.

“Deserves a sweet old age, if you ask me,” she’d say.

At Hattie’s, I’d learned to cook with love. That is, love was my specialty. Hattie’s Kitchen was a magical restaurant. It was said that everybody got what they needed at Hattie’s, and when what they needed was love, my job was to stir a dose of it into their food.

But I wouldn’t be using any magic at the Clef d’Or. I was going to learn the right way to cook, even if it was repulsive and took forever. And no shortcuts.

That was another thing about Hattie’s Kitchen: We hadn’t been that fussy about making everything from scratch. Hattie’s grilled cheese sandwiches were made from processed American cheese. The chefs at the Clef would probably faint at the thought of that, but to tell the truth, those sandwiches tasted really good. When you’re sick, there’s nothing like grilled cheese on white bread with a bowl of canned tomato soup.

We made real tomato soup at school. First we roasted the tomatoes, then put them through a Foley mill, cooked a lot of vegetables for stock, sautéed shallots and garlic, and then sprinkled in dill, which we’d grown in pots. If I’d been sick, I think I’d rather have stayed hungry than go through all that.

Anyway, speaking of hungry, I was. Usually at the end of class we got to eat whatever we’d made that day, but after all the horrible things I’d done to my poor bird, all I wanted to do was give it a decent burial. My stomach started growling on my way home.

Except for my morning croissant and coffee, consumed standing up at the zinc bar near the school, I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I hadn’t sat down all day either. So, throwing my dirty chef’s coat over my shoulder, I took a stroll down the treelined avenues of the sixth arrondisement, where the school and some of the more comfortable Parisians could be found, to look for a café where I could buy myself a special dinner.

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein,
James Baldwin, Mary Cassatt, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson had all walked these elegantly cobbled streets before me. They had looked up at the tall windows showing glimpses of gilt-paneled rooms and chic salons. They, too, had followed their rumbling stomachs to the finest food the world had to offer, available on every street corner.

Unfortunately, my meandering route took me past no restaurants that weren’t American burger joints. I was about to give up and order a Blimpie’s special when I spotted a street sign reading
Rue des Âmes Perdues
.

It rang a bell. Fabienne had said her mother lived near the school, and that she herself would be in Paris before long. She’d even given me her address on a card I’d stashed somewhere in the backpack I used instead of a purse.

On impulse, I scrambled through my things until I found it. There it was: 24 Rue des Âmes Perdues. I checked the house numbers around me. It wouldn’t be far, I realized, five or six blocks.

It occurred to me that I really
wanted
to see Fabienne. I’d been in Paris for weeks, but I hadn’t made any friends at all. I certainly couldn’t count Margot the snooty middle-aged Canadian. The other students in my cooking class seemed all right—some of them were actually my age—but, being French speakers, they understandably preferred to be around people they could talk to. My grasp of the language was still limited to statements like, “We get bird chop head?”

I hadn’t spoken a word of English, except in my dreams, when someone promised to love me for a year and a day . . .

Witches called it
handfasting
. That was when two people promised to stay together faithfully for a year and a day. It
wasn’t marriage, but it was more than dating. Handfasting meant you loved someone, and wanted to look after them and would never hurt them.

Peter and I were handfasted, although I didn’t know if that meant much to him anymore.

I walked more quickly, trying not to remember. The sun was beginning to set, a wash of pink and blue over the stately grays of the city.

Then I saw the house, if you could call it that. Number twenty-four was a magnificent three-story mansion shaped like a gigantic horseshoe behind a tall iron gate. There was a courtyard in front with green grass and a lot of pretty flowers, entrances at both ends of the horseshoe—one for people and one for cars—and a grand entrance in the middle, above a long flight of marble stairs and between imposing columns.

“Wow,” I said out loud as I double-checked the address. Fabienne hadn’t told me that her family abode was a palace the size of most big-city museums. Even the gate intimidated me, with its wrought-iron fleur-de-lis design nestled between its forbidding bars. There was a button of some kind tucked near the upper left hinge. I pressed it, not really expecting anything to happen, but after a few seconds a buzzer sounded and the gate clicked open.

I walked inside, marveling at the gorgeousness of the tall windows and decorative stonework. Most of the buildings in Paris, I’d read, were either seventeenth or eighteenth century. But this place didn’t look like anything I’d seen in the guidebooks I’d amassed for my journey here. There was something timeless and ancient about the place, as if it held the secrets of the whole city.

As I walked toward the main door, I occasionally saw a face gazing down at me from behind the draperies in one or another of the windows on the upper floor, and felt my heart beating faster as I approached two enormous stone lions on either side of the broad stairs leading to the colonnaded entrance.

Sweaty and out of breath, I finally made it to the top, looking up at a huge brass knocker in the shape of a stylized wolf’s head. I lifted it and let it fall with a thud. No one answered. I tried again. The third time, the heavy door swung open.

I’d been hoping Fabienne herself would answer the door, so I wouldn’t have to deal with parents or housekeepers, but that was not to be. The person who stood in front of me was a guy, a tall, handsome guy with honey-blond hair and gray eyes and a mouth that dropped open in surprise when he recognized me.

“Peter?” I croaked.

CHAPTER

•

SIX

I don’t know if it was because I hadn’t eaten enough, or because I just wanted to die then and there, but before I could make my escape, my legs gave out from beneath me and I felt myself spiraling toward the marble landing.

No!
I kept shouting to myself as Peter swooped me into his arms. I didn’t want him to rescue me! Not after what he’d said to me at Pizza World! I didn’t want my ex-boyfriend who no longer cared about me to be smelling the odor of sautéed pork fat in my hair, to see dried bird blood on my clothes.

“Please,” I grunted as he set me down on an uncomfortable chair upholstered in white damask. “I’ll be all right.”

“Just take it easy,” he said, unbuttoning my collar. I pushed his hand away. Then I blacked out.

Suddenly there seemed to be a whole lot of people in the room, all gathered around me. Most of them were women. They were of vastly different ages, but all of them were dressed beautifully, their hair saucy, their makeup flawless
as they all talked at once in rapid-fire French. I caught a few words—“homeless” seemed to have been repeated more than once—but after a few seconds, I gave up on trying to follow anything they were saying. I just wanted to get out of there.

“Zut-zut-zut!”
an elegant elderly woman said, cutting through the throng with a wave of her perfectly manicured hand. To my surprise, she knelt down, offering me tea in a delicate porcelain cup and saucer.

She smiled at me. Her teeth were perfect, but it was her eyes, crinkling kindly at the corners, that were smiling. For the first time since my arrival, I felt that I could breathe.

“Marie-Therèse,” she said, indicating herself. She pronounced it
Ter-EZZ
. “Drink this.” She said it in French, but slowly enough so that I could understand her.

The tea she gave me was hot and sweet, and honestly did make me feel better. I looked around, first at my legs that were sprawled on the floor. My dirty chef’s jacket was bunched up in a ball over my stomach. I tried to arrange myself more attractively, but there’s only so much dignity you can muster after collapsing in the middle of a house full of beautiful European strangers. Peter was wearing a black band-collar silk shirt and slim jeans over a pair of expensive-looking loafers. He didn’t look even slightly American.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Me?” I shrieked. “You were supposed to be in New York. Or something . . .” I squeezed my eyes shut so I wouldn’t pass out again. Peter was the reason I’d left Whitfield in the first place. Now here he was, dressed in black silk and surrounded by beautiful women.