A Cook's Tour (6 page)

     The first night, I slept badly, dreaming of my aunt, Tante Jeanne, yelling at me for throwing firecrackers into the outhouse: ‘
Défendu! Prison!
’ she shrieked. Even my dreams seemed penetrated by the smell of dank, musty upholstered chairs and the peeling pink wallpaper.

     Chris woke up looking cheerful and excited. Not me. I declined breakfast in the hotel, wondering when they’d seen their last guest – and if he’d survived the experience. My brother and I hurried to the station and took the short ride to La Teste. It may not have been summer, and we may well have been two silly old farts bundled up to our chins, but for a few moments of anticipation, after stepping off the train, we might have been kids again. Neither of us had said a word the whole way, only smiled, a giddy inability to put into words what we both were feeling. Just standing there on the platform, I felt for a brief moment as if it really were 1966 again. The bare telephone pole that I’d shimmied up as a kid to win a chocolate bar during the Fête du Port was still there in the square in front of the station. The port, with its sagging moorings and old-style
pinasses
(flat-bottomed fishing boats), the oyster boats, the two-story cinder-block and stucco homes with their red tile roofs – all looked exactly the same.

     Shoulder to shoulder, we strolled down empty streets under a cold gray sky, doing our best to ignore a quiet mist of rain. ‘It’s this way,’ said Chris in a hushed voice. ‘Past the fire station and the gendarmerie.’

     ‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

     We found rue Jules Favre just where we’d left it, and after one block, then two: our house. Or what used to be our house. The driveway had changed. It being winter, there were no roses blooming in the front garden beyond the hedges. The wooden shed to the right, where my father had posed for a photograph as a little boy – in beret and short shorts – where my brother and I later posed (in the same much-hated outfits), was still there. But the swinging gate we’d leaned upon, trying desperately to look cool, or at least less ridiculous, was gone. The house where our neighbor, the oyster fisherman, Monsieur Saint-Jour, had lived had been torn down and a new home erected in its place. The house my uncle Gustave had begun before his death (I remembered clearing bricks with him) was much the same. Beyond a new white picket fence and well-trimmed hedges stood our old summer home. There were a few seconds of stillness as Chris and I peered over the gate.

     ‘That was my room,’ said Chris, pointing to a window on the second floor.

     ‘Mine was across the hall,’ I whispered.

     ‘Yeah. You got the better one.’

     ‘I’m bigger.’

     ‘Tante Jeanne and Oncle Gustave were downstairs there.’

     ‘Why are we whispering?’ I muttered.

     ‘Should we knock on the door?’

     ‘You go. Your French is better. I want to see the back garden.’

     My brother hesitantly approached the house and rang the bell. Soon, the current owner emerged, a short older man, completely unfazed by the appearance of two tall, goofy-looking Americans and a camera-toting TV crew in the middle of winter. After a brief chat with Chris, he agreed to let us look over the old place, leading us around the side, through an old gate, to the rear patio and garden area, where Chris and I had played as kids: trapping lizards, exterminating snails, re-creating D-Day with our little army men. Beyond a low wall was a table where Tante Jeanne had served us
salade de tomate
, potato omelettes, steamed mussels, sautéed sole, buttery
haricots verts
, those big bowls of hot chocolate, and Bananya. The hand-cranked water pump was gone, and the old well from which it drew long plugged. The chipped ceramic pitcher we’d had to fill before visiting the outhouse was, of course, no longer there, but the outhouse still stood, and the compost heap behind it. Next to it, the lone American-style bathroom in southwest France, which my mother had insisted on building. Next to that, the outdoor fish kitchen and shed, where I’d stashed my Kronenbourgs and cigarettes as a twelve-year-old. The stone archway and heavy wooden door were still there, leading to a back alley. And around front, the garage, where my uncle had kept a 1930s Citrön sedan up on blocks, and his wine cellar – much the same. The garden was all grass now.

     ‘Think there are still little plastic army men buried in there?’ I asked.

     ‘Unquestionably,’ said Chris. ‘Probably still raise a company at least.’

     We didn’t go inside. It would have been too . . . weird. I often have nightmares about returning to our old house in New Jersey and finding strangers sleeping in my bed. I didn’t want to experience that for real.

     ‘I’m kinda excited . . . and kinda bummed out,’ I confessed to Chris as we walked slowly out.

     ‘Yeah. Me, too,’ said Chris. ‘Let’s get some
pain raisin
around the corner at the
boulangerie
. It’s gotta still be there.’

     We had one bit of unfinished business on the property. Assuming the position, we posed for a photograph, roughly where we’d stood as children so many summers ago. We had on no berets this time, thank God. And we were both, without any possibility of argument, finally old enough for long pants.

   
Le stade muncipal
(the stadium), where we’d watched the young men from the town chase and be chased by bulls, and
la forêt
(the forest), where the menacing hermit had lived, appeared to be housing developments now. The vacation homes with their summery names like Le Week-end and La Folie were shuttered and forlorn-looking in their emptiness.

     We walked down the middle of rue Jules Favre, turned a corner, and found the
boulangerie
still open. Entering with the customary ‘
Bonjour, madame
,’ we were greeted with a warm, sweet-smelling waft – brioches, and baguettes baking. We bought a bag of
pain raisin
– the sticky raisin Danishes we’d had so often as kids – a baguette, a croissant, and a brioche, eager to try it all, to see if it tasted the same.

     ‘The same,’ said Chris, exuberant.

     I was not so thrilled. Something was holding me back. The baked goods, after all this time, were identical in taste and appearance. The shop smelled just as it had twenty-eight years ago. But something was missing.

There was once a little café around the corner called Café Central. It had become our default dinner of choice on those nights when my mother had not felt like cooking or when we’d been unable to agree on where to go or what to eat. It had been a simple neighborhood joint with chipped plaster and whitewashed walls, football posters, a few local fishermen drinking
vin ordinaire
in the small dining room. I had fond, maybe overly fond, memories of their dark brown
soupe de poisson
, their clumsy but delicious
crudités varìes
, their
bavette à l’échalote
(flank steak with shallots) with limp but tasty
frites
.

     It was called Le Bistro now, and it had been decidedly gussied up. There were candles on the tables, tablecloths, framed paintings of oyster boats on the pastel-colored walls, furniture that didn’t wobble. But the fish soup was the same: dark brown, flecked with shreds of fish, milled bone, redolent of saffron, garlic, and anise; it was accompanied, just as I’d remembered, by little fried croutons, grated Gruyère cheese, and a little crock of rouille, the garlic and pepper mayonnaise. It was delicious. My first taste in almost thirty years of a soup that had seriously inspired me in my professional life. As a young chef, I had toiled mightily to re-create it, again and again, chasing the recipe, fooling with ingredients and amounts and procedures, until I’d finally gotten it right. Fact is, however wonderful the soup might have been, mine is better now. I use lobster. I roast the shells. I garnish mine with hunks of claw meat, making, finally, a heartier, more luxurious version. It may have tasted the same, but, like visiting an old girlfriend and wondering, What the hell did I ever see in her? I guess things had moved on.

     Desperately seeking epiphany, I ordered oysters – which couldn’t have been better – a plate of rouget, the tiny, bony but delicious fish from the Med, fried sardines, a pan-roasted
magret de canard
(duck breast) in green pepper sauce, and a
bavette
for good measure.

     But it still wasn’t happening for me. It’s not that I wasn’t happy. It was great to sit at a table in France again, to look up from my food and see my brother again, to watch him unrestrainedly enjoying himself, bathing in the normalcy, the niceness of it all. Compared to most of my adventures, this was laudable. Gentle. Sentimental. No one to get hurt. Waste, disappointment, excess, the usual earmarks of most of my previous enterprises, were, for once, totally missing from the picture. Why was I not having the time of my life? I began to feel damaged. Broken. As if some essential organ – my heart perhaps – had shriveled and died along with all those dead clumps of brain cells and lung, my body and soul like some big white elephant of an Atlantic City hotel, closed down wing by wing until only the lobby and facade remained.

     We walked off dinner by the port. ‘See that dock over there?’ I said to Chris, pointing out a sad-looking wooden structure collapsing slowly into the water. ‘I remember sitting on that dock when I was fifteen. Sam and Jeffrey and Nancy – all my friends – were in Provincetown that summer. And I was stuck here. Jesus! I was miserable here then! I was a lonely, bitter kid. I never got so much as a hand-job in this fucking town  . . .’

     ‘That was later. That was the last year we were here. When we were kids, it was fun, wasn’t it?’

     ‘I guess so. I don’t know. I’m still pissed about those shorts. Those berets. Jesus! What a thing to do to a kid.’

     Chris started to look worried. ‘Calm down. It’s over. No more shorts. Put it behind you. Let it go.’

     ‘If you see a phone booth, let me know. I’m thinking about calling Mom. I got a few scores to settle. Those shorts . . . And maybe I should settle the Pucci incident while I’m at it. Did Pucci really have to be put down? I have my suspicions, let me tell you! And what kind of a name is that for a puppy? Puccini? There should be a law against pet names that cute . . . And no Cocoa Puffs! Remember that? All my friends were eatin’ Cocoa Puffs, Trix, all the Lucky Charms they wanted! What did I get? “Too sweet. Bad for your teeth.” ’

     His big brother appearing to be on the verge of some sort of psychotic break, Chris did his best to pull me out from under whatever dark cloud was gathering. ‘Relax! You need a drink or something? Jesus, Tony. You can have all the Lucky Charms you want now! I saw a
supermarché
in Arcachon. We can go buy a box right now.’

     ‘It’s okay,’ I said, jolted back into the present. ‘I don’t know. I think I miss Dad.’

     ‘Me too,’ said Chris.

     We set off for the dune of Pyla, Europe’s largest sand dune, a favorite outing long ago. Where once my brother and I scampered up its steep face on young legs, we now slogged, wheezing in boots in the loose sand, pausing every few yards to catch our breath in the wind and cold. Pyla is a gargantuan pile of sand, skyscraper high and miles long, rising over the Bay of Biscay on one side and spilling slowly into pine forest on the other. There used to be blockhouses, pillboxes, and gun emplacements on top, but when we finally reached the summit, they appeared to have long ago been buried in the sand. We stood there, Chris and I, with a thin spindrift of sand hissing along the dune’s surface, grit catching in our teeth, looking out at the gray-blue water, the seemingly endless pines and scrub, yearning for . . . something.

     Our father had come here as a child, too. Back in the hotel, my brother had shown me an old hand-tinted stereoscopic slide my uncle must have taken back in the thirties. In it, young Pierre Bourdain, age eight or nine, skin browned by sun, stands triumphantly at the dune top, no doubt anticipating the best part of a child’s day trip to Pyla: the run down the dune face, leaping faster and faster, momentum and gravity pulling his legs out from under him, until he would topple over onto his face, to finish the trip in a whirl of sand, rolling dizzily, ecstatically to the bottom. His worried parents would have been waiting for him at the bottom – as ours were years ago – ready to treat him to a
gaufre
at the stand a few yards away. That’s how I imagined it anyway.

     ‘C’mon, Chris,’ I said, running straight at the precipice. ‘Race you to the bottom.’ Doing the best I could to imagine myself ten years old, I hurled myself into space, dropped, then ran as hard as I could, finally falling and rolling, Chris right behind me.

     There was no waffle stand at the bottom. No
gaufres
. Two confused-looking backpackers in comfortable Scandinavian hiking boots watched bemused as two overaged American knuckleheads rolled to a stop near their feet. The souvenir stands were closed. Not a Pschitt, an Orangina, a Bananya, or a
citron pressé
to be had. Cold silence but for a few rustling pines.

What is an oyster if not the perfect food? It requires no preparation or cooking. Cooking would be an affront. It provides its own sauce. It’s a living thing until seconds before disappearing down your throat, so you know – or should know – that it’s fresh. It appears on your plate as God created it: raw, unadorned. A squeeze of lemon, or maybe a little mignonette sauce (red wine vinegar, cracked black pepper, some finely chopped shallot), about as much of an insult as you might care to tender against this magnificent creature. It is food at its most primeval and glorious, untouched by time or man. A living thing, eaten for sustenance and pleasure, the same way our knuckle-dragging forefathers ate them. And they have, for me anyway, the added mystical attraction of all that sense memory – the significance of being the first food to change my life. I blame my first oyster for everything I did after: my decision to become a chef, my thrill-seeking, all my hideous screwups in pursuit of pleasure. I blame it all on that oyster. In a nice way, of course.