Lunch in Paris (2 page)

Up two flights of narrow spiral stairs, the apartment was New York size—pleasantly cramped, really one large room with a flimsy
wall down the middle and a plastic accordion door that led directly from the refrigerator to the bed.

Gwendal took an old teapot off a heavily loaded bookshelf. The bruised metal surface and graceful spout had the look of a
family heirloom. “It belonged to my grandfather,” he said. “He died in the war in Indochina, just after my mother was born.”
There was a tiny mother-of-pearl disk at the top, to keep you from burning your fingers when you opened it.

I laid my coat over the top of the futon and shook out my hair like a soggy kitten. Gwendal was already in the kitchen. “Kitchen”
is a generous term—it was a rectangle of linoleum with a counter and fridge on one side and a sink and hot plate on the other.
He took a bundle of fresh mint from a glass beside the sink and plugged in the electric kettle. It hissed and sputtered to
life.

“This is the important step,” he said, pouring boiling water over the mint leaves, wilting them like spinach. “It takes away
the bitterness.”

While Gwendal’s head disappeared under the counter, searching for the sugar, I looked around the apartment. There were bottles
of sand from his desert treks in Australia, a postcard of Marcello Mastroianni watching the girls go by. There were books
everywhere—philosophy (what is it about Frenchmen and philosophy?), literature, a book on American musical comedies (hmm),
and a book called
Hollywood, mode d’emploi
. There were three lava stones beside the stereo, one red, one black, and one
like a yin-yang, where the red and black teardrops had melted together.

Gwendal opened a box of gunpowder green tea, scooped some into the teapot, and threw in a few cubes of sugar. He was telling
me about a conference he’d just returned from in Orlando, Florida. “The receptionist was dressed as Donald Duck,” he said,
as he added the wilted mint. “I thought I was hallucinating. The only Internet access was in the video arcade and the only
newspaper I could find was the
Disney Journal
. It was like a whole universe created for five-year-olds.”

I told him about my first trip to Paris, with my lactose intolerant, almost-vegetarian best friend. We stayed in a seedy student
hotel in the 5th. Our one big bed had a hole in the middle, and the water from the tap ran rusty brown. “A donkey chewed on
my cashmere sweater in front of Notre-Dame.”

“What did you eat?” asked Gwendal, no doubt doing his best to imagine a Paris purged of milk and meat.

“A lot of mango sorbet.”

All the while, there was a parallel conversation going on in my head.
We hardly know each other. Maybe we should wait.
I heard my grandmother’s voice.
If you like him, send him home.
It sounded so stupid I might have actually shaken my head. I suddenly understood the frustration of every man I’d ever left
at the curb after a furious make-out session in the back of a taxi. There is something about the frankness with which Europeans
deal with sex, you can feel it in the way people study each other on the metro, the way couples kiss on the sidewalk—it’s
just so…
normal
. If I walked out now, he wasn’t going to think I was a
nice
girl,
the marrying kind
(again, the phrase my grandmother would use). He was going to think I was a girl who couldn’t take on what she really wanted.
And he would be right. I looked out the window down into the small interior courtyard. The walk through unfamiliar
streets had left me turned around. I had no real idea where I was. I felt like I’d been given some kind of diplomatic immunity.
I didn’t really understand the rules; how could I possibly follow them?

Tiny gold-rimmed glasses appeared from out of nowhere. Storage space in Paris, I was soon to learn, is a matter of great creativity.
Things are tucked into the strangest nooks and crannies. He poured the tea from a foot or two above the glass, making sweet
and smoky bubbles on the surface.

He had not, he mentioned innocently, reserved for dinner.

S
EVERAL HOURS LATER
the rain had stopped, and I found myself on a folding chair beside the kitchen table in one of Gwendal’s T-shirts, hair mussed
and absolutely ravenous.

There was nothing in the fridge but plain yogurt, a jar of raspberry jam, two carrots, half an onion, a package of something
that resembled chopped-up bacon, and a saucepan covered with a dinner plate. It was one of those ninety-nine-cent saucepans,
with the plastic handle and the brown and mustard-colored flowers painted tastefully on the side.

He inverted the pan, shook it from side to side, and out of the ninety-nine-cent pot came a dessert fit for Louis XIV, a perfectly
molded apricot charlotte, each ladyfinger standing at attention, held together by a layer of cream and studded with slices
of fruit. Did he always prepare this way for lady visitors? He seemed the very opposite of a cad. Surely, cooking for a woman
you hardly knew, on the off chance that she might find herself naked and hungry in your apartment, was sweet rather than predatory.

Gwendal lifted a thick slice onto my plate. He couldn’t possibly have known why I was smiling. When I was a kid, my mother
and I had a tradition called “backwards breakfast.” To keep me from playing sick during the winter, each year I got to choose
my own snow day. She would take the day off from work and we would sleep late, eat ice cream for breakfast or pancakes for
dinner—you get the idea. In my real life I’ve spent a lot of time keeping things in line; I’m a stickler for form. But today
felt like a snow day… dessert before dinner, sex before coffee. Things were so marvelously, exhilaratingly out of order.

We devoured the entire charlotte in fifteen minutes. I was ready for more. When I looked in the fridge I saw nothing, just
leftover odds and ends. Gwendal saw dinner. This was to be the way with so many exchanges in our relationship. Our blind spots
were different. Where one saw a gaping void, the other saw possibilities.

He took out a carrot and the onion half. I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone use half an onion. Or rather, I’d never seen anyone
save half an onion he hadn’t used. The real secret ingredient, however, was the package of
lardons fumés—
plump little Legos of pork—deep pink and marbled with fat. He dumped them into a pan with the chopped vegetables (he may have
washed the pan from the charlotte), and the mixture began sizzling away. A box of tagliatelle, the pasta spooled like birds’
nests, completed the meal.

Maybe it was the sex, or the bacon—or both—but it was without a doubt the best thing I’d ever tasted. “This is amazing,” I
said, twirling another noodle around my fork. “You have to give me the recipe.”

“There is no recipe,” he said, smiling. “I use whatever I have. It never tastes the same way twice.”

I had no way of knowing, that first damp evening in Paris, how much this man, and his non-recipes, would change my life.