The School of Essential Ingredients (19 page)

“But Mark is happy, and he gave you grandchildren.” Carl’s voice rippled with mischief.

They walked up to the restaurant, the garden around them February-quiet, all roots and no flowers. The bricks of the pathway clinked together under their feet in the cold; their breath moved ahead of them as if in a hurry to get inside the warm restaurant.

“I like winter,” Helen commented.

Carl took her hand and drew her closer. “Good thing,” he replied.

She had intended to leave her marriage, was ready to tell Carl, her heart full of fireworks for this new man, the one whose clothes by the bed she had never bought or washed or mended, whose fingers slipped across her skin like a river, tracing cool, lingering trails to the inner curve of her ear, the slope of her hip, as if he was on a trip with no itinerary, no return date.

She had begun the conversation with Carl straight enough, readying the words she would use to help him accept the end of a union that had lasted longer than either of their childhoods. She had chosen the kitchen table, a place of domestic warmth, without the passion of a bedroom; they had planned vacations there, chosen health insurance, decided what to do with the dead guinea pig they found one Saturday morning before the children were awake. They had always worked well at this table.

Carl sat across from her. She saw his face, his eyes scanning her expression for hints of delight or anger or confusion, a road sign for the direction of their conversation.

He doesn’t know what I am going to tell him, she thought. He doesn’t know—and the idea struck her, strange as a bell mis-chiming. I know something about me that he doesn’t. She couldn’t remember the last time that was true. She looked at him watching her and she realized—not that it made any sense, but even so—that for her somehow Carl had always been with her, in her mind, in her body, in some unconscious but completely tangible way, through all the kisses and moans and explorations of her affair, just as he was when she gardened in the yard or cut her toenails sitting alone on the edge of the bathtub. After almost twenty years she simply carried him, a part of her, like blood or bones or dreams. But he hadn’t been there. This man across from her, with his sandy brown hair and clear blue eyes, whose hands had held hers in childbirth and on every plane trip they had ever taken, was separate from her. And in that moment, Helen knew exactly what the pain of her leaving would look like, how it would wash across his face and turn his eyes a gray that would never exactly leave.

I would kill anyone who did that to him, she thought, and realized how completely that was true and that she could never do it herself. I love him, she thought, and the idea was as solid as the table between them.

Carl sat, waiting for her to speak.

“There was a man,” she told him. “It’s over now.”

Not that it Was; the body takes its time to follow where the mind leads. She never returned to her lover, but there were moments when she caught sight of a profile so like his at a traffic light that her body stopped, electrified, as if it was stepping without her consent into another life, as if being in both of those lives at one time, she might cease to exist completely.

If Carl knew it was not completely finished, it was not because she told him. He had entered the gray world of hurt, if not the one she had sworn to avoid, at least so close to it as to be easily confused. The irony of the situation caught at her, infiltrating her memories of her former lover until Carl became more a part of her lost affair than the man she had slept with. When she saw the men she thought were her lover, it was while driving her daughter to a sleepover, or carrying Carl’s shirts from the dry cleaners, the smell of starch creating its own world around her. If she thought about the affair, it was while lying next to Carl, at night when everything in the house was finally quiet, with Carl’s smell in the sheets, his breath playing across the pillow next to her. When she cooked using ingredients her former lover had introduced her to, standing half clothed in his tiny apartment kitchen, it was for her family, and over time the dishes acquired new meanings—Laurie’s favorite dessert, the soup that made Mark eat vegetables, the stew that could be counted on to comfort for the loss of a football game, a boyfriend, a job offer.

So when she finally did see the man who had once been her lover—at her son’s high school graduation, her daughter laughing and pointing at her brother, who was crossing the podium with just the slightest hop to his step—it was with the kind of longing we experience for something we never really intended to have in the first place. An older sister’s boyfriend. A year in Provence. When her mind cleared, her son was across the stage, arms raised in jubilation, and Carl’s hand was holding hers.

That night, after the cake and jokes and the symbolic glass of wine for Mark that everyone acknowledged was not legal but also not likely a virginal experience, after the children, who could no longer really be called children, had gone off to bed or parties, Carl had handed her an envelope full of the magazine pictures she had been cutting out for years.

“Provence,” said Carl, and smiled. “A month at the end of August, when Mark goes off to college.”

Lillian called the class to their seats. “It’s February,” she began. “Almost Valentine’s Day. I think Valentine’s Day is a gift, like the weather we had today. Here we are in the midst of winter. Our skin has been hibernating in layers of clothes for months; we are accustomed to gray. We can start to think that this is how it always will be. And then, there’s Valentine’s Day. A day to look in your lover’s eyes and see color. To eat something that plays with your taste buds and to remember romance.

“But here’s the thing.” Lillian ran her fingertips thoughtfully along the smooth surface of the wooden prep table in front of her. “If you live in your senses, slowly, with attention, if you use your eyes and your fingertips and your taste buds, then romance is something you’ll never need a greeting card to make you remember.”

Lillian looked out at her class, at Claire’s hair, still tousled from her baby’s exuberant good-bye, Antonia’s sleek black work blazer, Tom’s business shirt, rumpled at the end of a long day.

“It’s not always easy to slow our lives down. But just in case we need a little help, we have a natural opportunity, three times a day, to relearn the lesson.”

“Food?” Ian suggested with a grin.

“What a lovely idea,” Lillian responded.

“As a sensualist, your ingredients are your first priority,” Lillian remarked, holding up the bottle of thick green olive oil. “Beautiful, luscious ingredients will color the atmosphere of a meal and whatever follows it, as will those which are mean and cheap.” She poured a small portion of olive oil onto a plate, then dipped the tip of her finger in the liquid and licked it off contemplatively.

“Try this,” she said, passing the plate to Chloe, who sat at the end of the first row of chairs.

“It feels like a flower,” Chloe commented, sucking her finger to get the last of the liquid before passing the plate on to Antonia.

Lillian held up a second bottle, smaller and darker than the first. “Truly great balsamic vinegar is made through a long, careful process. The liquid is moved from one barrel to the next, each time taking on the flavors of a different type of wood—oak, cherry, and juniper—becoming denser and more complex with each step. Fifty-year-old vinegar is as highly prized and highly priced as great wine.”

“Ian, hold out your hand,” Lillian directed, and poured a few drops of balsamic vinegar, dense as molasses, in the curve of skin between his thumb and index finger.

“The best way to taste balsamic vinegar is with the warmth of your own skin,” Antonia explained to Ian, holding out her own hand toward the bottle.

After everyone had tasted the liquid from both bottles, Lillian set them all to tasks, half the class grating cheese and measuring white wine and kirsch and cornstarch, the other half washing lettuce and cutting up tomatoes and baguettes.

“Helen, put the grated cheese and cornstarch in a plastic bag and shake it. The cornstarch will coat the cheese and it will melt more smoothly,” Lillian suggested. “And, Carl, you can rub the inside of that red pot with a garlic clove. Some people like to leave the clove in the pot when they’re done, or even add others to it.”

“What are we making?” asked Claire.

“It’s fondue, right?” Ian jumped in.

“Indeed. It seemed like a fun choice for Valentine’s Day. Do any of you know where the word ‘fondue’ comes from?” Lillian asked the class.

“Fondre,”
replied Helen without effort. “It’s French.”

“To melt,” added Lillian.

Helen had ALWAYS wanted to live in France, although her French, studied assiduously in her early schooling, had over the years of college and marriage and children become an attic collection,
r
’s rolling like lumpy tricycle wheels, verb conjugations jumbled together without labels or organization. She had bought French audiotapes and the playful sparkle of syntax and syllables brought her delight, no matter how clumsy her attempts at imitation. She had always wondered whether, if she was given the chance, given a week, or two, to sink into another culture, this language would somehow rise out of her and become a way of thinking. What would she dream about, if she dreamed in French?

Provence, when she and Carl arrived at the end of August, had smelled of lavender—the air, the sheets, the wine, even the milk in her coffee in the morning—the lightest of undercurrents, a watercolor world of soft purple. She found herself breathing deeply and slowly, to pull it in, to hold it in every part of her for later.

In the mornings they woke to songbirds and church bells, then walked across the crunch of small white rocks in the courtyard of their bed and breakfast to one of the round green metal tables set under a linden tree. They poured thick black coffee from one silver pot and foaming hot milk from another into wide white cups that warmed their hands as they drank. They ate croissants that melted in their fingertips, scattering crumbs that disappeared among the rocks, only to be found by the songbirds after they had left.

They rented a small car and spent days exploring roads that wound like grapevines up through towns set on the tops of hills, their limestone houses drenched in wisteria, their shutters pale blues or violet or faded sage green, the smells of lunch and dinner slipping out of the windows like children, playing in narrow streets that curved and meandered and made no sense, if only you cared about where you were going, which they didn’t.

In tiny restaurants tucked into the corners of ancient, white towns, Helen and Carl made a pact, pulling out their dictionary, Carl vowing to try any dish they couldn’t find a translation for. To match his bravery, Helen shopped in the mornings at the tiny stores in their town and made fledging conversations with the fruit man until one day she triumphantly brought home a perfectly ripe melon, which they fed each other for lunch, its flesh warm and thick as the air.

It was hot in the afternoons, a heat that slammed through their open car windows and made them pant, pushed down on their shoulders and heads until finally they retreated to the shuttered cool of their room, to the delight of pounding water in their white-tiled shower, and finally to bed, where they stayed like teenagers until dinner. Only to do it the next day, and the next.

“This is why the Mediterraneans are so healthy,” Carl had remarked one night, as he stretched his long arms luxuriantly above his head.

“Oui,”
she said, and smiled at him over a dish they had thought would be a warm casserole but was, in fact, a cool assemblage of pink and white meats. (Should they buy a larger dictionary? they pondered. No, in fact, they would not.)

And that night she dreamed in French.

The class stood around the large prep table, two cheerful red pots perched on stands at each end, heated by small flickering silver cans underneath. The smell of warming cheese and wine, mellowed with the heat, rose languorously toward their faces, and they all found themselves leaning forward, hypnotized by the smell and the soft bubbling below them. Lillian took a long, two-pronged fork and skewered a piece of baguette from the bowl nearby, dipping it in the simmering fondue and pulling it away, trailing a bridal veil of cheese, which she deftly wrapped around her fork in a swirling motion.

She chewed her prize thoughtfully and took a sip of white wine. “Perfect,” she declared.

Helen prepared a bite and placed the fork inside her mouth, the sharpness of the Gruyère and Emmenthaler mingling with the slight bite of the dry white wine and melting together into something softer, gentler, meeting up with the steady hand of bread supporting the whole confection. Hiding, almost hidden, so she had to take a second bite to be sure, was the playful kiss of cherry kirsch and a whisper of nutmeg.

“When you live with your senses, your gestures don’t need to be extravagant to be romantic. I had a student once who courted a woman with fondue made over a can of Sterno in the middle of a park,” Lillian noted.

“How did that go?” asked Ian, curious.

“Rather well,” Lillian noted casually, “he got the girl.”

The class clustered companionably around the two red pots; they fed themselves, they fed one another, stabbing their forks into the squares of bread and then submerging them in the fondue, laughing when the bread threatened to break free and their efforts at containment were not as graceful as Lillian’s.

“Sacrebleu!”
Carl exclaimed. “It is escaping!”

“Let me help you, good man,” declared Isabelle, who only managed to push the bread from Carl’s fork down into the molten depths.

“Aren’t we supposed to kiss everyone when someone drops a bite?” Claire inquired.

“With food like this, who needs an excuse?” Carl responded, and took his wife in his arms to the admiring whistles of the rest of the class.

THEY Washed their palates with white wine and sparkling water, and cleansed them with salads made from fresh lettuce, bursting red tomatoes, and thick, rich olive oil touched with balsamic vinegar.