The French House: An American Family, a Ruined Maison, and the Village That Restored Them All

by Don Wallace

  I’m also reviewing novels for Kirkus Reviews at thirty-five dollars a pop, so I up my pace to one a week, reading them on the subway and at lunch, lying on the floor of my tiny office. Reading so many novels quickly and critically sharpens my eye, but unfortunately this only shows me the weaknesses in my own novel. A tome years in the making, it suffers from every disease known to writing. Eventually I deep-six it after composing a savage Kirkus Reviews epitaph: “…ponderous, pontificating prosody, poorly plotted…”

  One day at work I come across a file from my old job: twenty pages of an article I’d started a couple of years before about a Coca-Cola bottling manager who wanted to be a professional bass fisherman. At some point the story switches gears into fiction. The fisherman’s wife, a sort of proto-Sarah Palin, wants to be a soldier of fortune. The writing feels fresher than anything I’ve been working on, and so, breaking all the rules of publishing, I send the pages off to an editor whose name I’ve read in the newspaper.

  When Anton calls back and asks to see the rest of the novel I am almost, but not quite, speechless. I say I’ll finish “typing it up.”

  My new schedule is this: At night after dinner I put Rory to bed with a story, pour myself a strong cup of Earl Grey, put a chocolate chip cookie in my pocket, and head up a couple of flights of stairs to an empty apartment. There I drink the tea, eat the cookie, and put a cassette tape on the boom box—a mixtape of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, followed by three minutes of James Brown screaming “I Feel Good!” Thus fortified, I write until my forehead bangs the keyboard.

  I’m staggering in exhaustion through my days. But every week I send a new chapter to the forbearing editor, who accepts my increasingly dubious claim of “typing it up.” At work I take to closing the door to my office at noon, lying down with my head against it, and going to sleep, risking a broken neck if someone should open the door too quickly.

  A couple of my fellow editors cover for me. The phone rings: “They’re coming!” warns a hushed voice. When our snooping Tweedledum and Tweedledee come knocking, our editor in chief in tow, I’m upright and very professionally marking up a manuscript with a red pencil.

  I can laugh about it. It’s ludicrous. Because it’s working. Here at last I have a secret hope: a novel. Soon I’m typing “The End” and printing out a copy, popping it in an envelope, and sending it all of twenty blocks away. Now it’s sitting at the elbow of an editor named Anton. An escape hatch. A redemption of my soul. A Hail Mary in every sense.

  Mindy writes Gwened about the house and arranges to rent it. What about Denis LeReveur’s bills? The novel, I tell Mindy, will pay for everything. Just you watch.

  • • •

  When Anton called to invite me to lunch, we met at a venerable Gramercy Park watering hole (as the book trade gossip columns so suavely called it). I walked in trembling with the conviction that we were going to get that staircase and floor this year. And, oh, yes, I’d also be publishing a novel before I was forty, which was my new private default setting (adjusted upward from thirty exactly seven years ago).

  An hour and a half later, I reeled out the door of the pub like someone under the influence. Which I was: Anton had wanted to drink a couple of pints before getting down to business. Then, in an alcoholic haze, I began to realize that I’d succeeded as a writer of fiction, beyond my wildest dreams. My book had so affected Anton that he’d determined I really was a Coca-Cola bottling manager from the South who’d written a story about his favorite hobby, bass fishing. I probably shouldn’t have interrupted him to set him straight.

  So the lunch didn’t go well and I didn’t sell the book. I left unsure that I’d even convinced Anton that I wasn’t Garfield Foote, bass pro extraordinaire and leader of the Bass Commandos, the world’s first “paramilitary fishing team.” He did register my mild protest, however, and gave me the name of an agent whose name sounded like a type of fish.

  • • •

  In June we do the numbers and realize that we have a choice: pay Denis or go to France. We can’t do both, and as we still have some scrap of honor left, we cancel our stay at Gwened’s. We will stay home. With solemn ceremony we take the money we’ve made freelancing for France and write Denis a check for the rest of what we owe him. Then we drink most of a bottle of Sancerre. It’s funny, but we feel good doing it, as if we’re parents sending money to a child who’s far away and badly needs it. And that’s our Belle Île for this year.

  At Christmas we accept a family offer of a plane ticket to California. They want to see their grandson. Maybe us, too. Sooner or later we hear it from both families: We’re so glad that’s over. Are you going to sell it now?

  • • •

  In the new year, to save pennies and slough off the sour smell of Success, I walk home at night instead of taking the bus or subway. Who needs a gym? As far as I’m concerned Manhattan is just one long treadmill anyway.

  I usually pick up takeout. We sit down at a little table overlooking Rory’s playpen and eat our greasy grub—cheap Italian, Greek, Hunan, Peruvian (try the chicken, not the guinea pig), Southern, Afghan, or simply diner—all of which, Mindy often points out, are unhealthy and which, I retort, are keeping us from saving any money so why don’t you cook? to which she retorts, Because I’ve spent all day with the baby and we don’t have a kitchen!

  This last isn’t strictly true, but I concede the point. We have a strangely flattened galley in the foyer that hides behind folding accordion-style panels. When we fling them open at night it looks like an ant farm, there are so many scuttling roaches.

  Two visits from the pesticide guy later, with visions of string-bag shopping in Le Palais and Sauzon and on the rue de Buci in Paris, I am emboldened to go farther afield in search of true food. Under the rusted iron train-track trestles and piss-yellowed concrete underpasses of the Port Authority I find a small cluster of open markets in the French style.

  Well, maybe “French style” is overdoing it, but I am excited. There’s a bread shop! A pork store (that is actually what the sign outside says: Pork Store). A West African market full of exotic vegetables and rudely carved icons that turn out to be roots you can eat.

  What really grabs me is the block’s bookend fish markets: long, white fingers of crushed ice, be-ringed with shimmering vermillion poissons du jour, stretching out to claim the sidewalk and snatch me inside. Wherein all is clamorous and chaotic and grungy, the fishmongers scornful of any attempt to please the customer—especially timid, bespectacled Young Sophisticate Strudel in his thin poly-cotton Oxford shirt, half-knotted necktie, cheap chinos, and scuffed black Rockports. The clientele around me is mostly thick-bodied, half-shaven men in wool duffel coats. I watch them grunt and point and peel twenties off fat rolls, buying by the case. The fishmongers look right through me.

  At last I spot an elderly black lady going right up to the head Italian fishmonger standing in his rubber boots on his wooden box. No nonsense, she grills him about his porgies. He gives monosyllabic answers, no allowance made for her age and maybe some subtracted for her race. But she gets her porgies, and when she asks to have them cleaned, they do it.

  Before the lady’s arrival I’d been staring, transfixed, at a great, wet, whiskery head resting on the ice like the head of John the Baptist. I’ve seen that face before. On the quai of Le Palais after the fishing boats came in. La Lotte. The first time I ever tasted lotte, during our winter of 1980, we’d hiked in our cagoules in the rain across beaches and moors to Belle Île’s only one-star restaurant, La Forge. Mindy had made reservations. We were the only customers all night. The chef and his wife were the only staff. In the end, after our repeated urging, they joined us at the table for coffee and a discussion of what we’d eaten.

  It was that dinner that made me want to try to recapture some of the magic of the tastes I’d experienced in France with Mindy—me, the guy who learned to cook in the Boy Scouts.

  So I bought the fis
h (not the head). When I asked for lotte, though, the fishmonger shrugged. I pointed. “Goosefish,” he said.

  That night La Lotte was not a success. Every time we tried to cut into the triangle-shaped wedge of taut muscle, which I’d baked in one piece like a pork roast, our knives rebounded as if there was a force field protecting it.

  Finally Mindy laid down her fork and knife. “You didn’t ask them to clean it.”

  “It didn’t need cleaning. Look”—flipping it over in the dish—“no guts.”

  “It’s the capuchin,” she said, poking at a nearly invisible membrane encasing the lotte. “On Belle Île they remove it without asking.”

  “Capuchin? As in monk?”

  “As in a monk’s robe. That’s what they called it at La Forge.”

  Eventually we sawed our monk in half and pried out chunks, but it was not an encouraging start to my culinary ambitions. The evening’s end was worse. When she woke up in the predawn to feed Rory, Mindy flipped on the light and let out a scream. The roaches were back. By the time I got to the tiny foyer-kitchen they were almost all gone, the little devils, but the dozen I saw doing a six-legged can-can under the cabanet were enough to chill the blood.

  On the upside, at least they loved my French cooking.

  • • •

  Of course, glutton for punishment that I am, I do send the book to the agent, with Anton’s recommendation.

  Eventually “Ron Pickerel” responds and, in our meeting in a boarded-up storefront in the West Village, tentatively accepts the burden of representing me. Can I make four copies?

  Months go by without a word. Occasionally I stop by the boarded-up storefront and pound on the door. Once in a while Ron Pickerel answers and invites me in, shuffles through files and hands me one with a couple of form rejection letters in it. Gradually his office fills up with boxes of typescripts, loose pages everywhere. Ron’s mumbles grow indistinct, as do my hopes.

  • • •

  Despite the ecstasy of les cafards, the cockroaches, whenever I cook in le style Bellilois and the lack of encouragement from the fishmongers, I persist in my quest. Striped bass, halibut, mullet, shad, sardines, squid, clams and cockles, tiny rock shrimp from Maine: nothing is safe from my smoking skillet. When I take a wide sailor’s stance over the stove at night, I forget myself and New York. I’m back in Kerbordardoué.

  Mindy says the apartment smells of fish. Of course. I need to vary my offerings.

  Fortuitously, a couple of gay pioneers in Chelsea have just opened a tiny store: Epicure Cheese. It’s the first “gourmet” thing to dare show its face here. We’re a dark and struggling no-man’s-land; seven out of ten brownstones across the street are burnt-out ruins crawling with all kinds of strange shadows after dark. But at Epicure Cheese I can get little paper-wrapped slices of pâté de campagne. Dried mushroom tortellini. Cheese, of course. A good baguette, praise God. And—what are those sausages dangling from the ceiling at the back of the shop? Why, I know those dark-red, hard-gnarled fellows from the market in Le Palais!

  “Is that chorizo?”

  “Of course it’s chorizo.”

  “Is that the Don Moroni brand?”

  The sardonic chubby gay shouts over his shoulder to his partner, the skinny, tall gay with the beard: “Hey, we got a wise guy here. What’d you say your name is—Don Moron?”

  “I’ll take all you got.”

  “No, you won’t.” He sniffs. “You think I don’t have other customers?”

  I’ve only actually seen a couple of people ever come into the shop. “Not for chorizo.”

  In the end we compromise. He needs a few to dangle from the ceiling so the place looks like a real Old World fromagerie et charcuterie. The rest I take home. On Belle Île this particular chorizo is my miracle ingredient. Just add a half-dozen slices to a mess of sautéed zucchini and tomatoes and onions and peppers, to lotte, to a potato-kale soup, to an omelet, to the sweet clams called palourdes…

  • • •

  No word on the book. Itching for action, I decide to go downtown, fire Ron Pickerel, and rustle up another agent.

  But, it seems, the Pickerel has bought the farm. A trout farm. Or so his landlord tells me when I come knocking. He’s gone off to raise rainbows in Vermont. Authors keep showing up, looking for their books, his landlord says. But he threw everything in the Dumpster.

  When you have a story like that to tell, every writer you meet will have one that tops it. You’ll end up feeling better, too. But after you get home, the nights will still seem endless.

  • • •

  Okay, world, you win. I’ve had the stuffing knocked out of me. Let the roaches take back the kitchen, because I give up cooking. We sit blankly before our cardboard cartons of gluey Hunan Pan takeout. Fatigue is our friend, our enemy; we sleep instantly, deeply, but this just brings the next day closer. A busy city orbits outside our dark little cave.

  We keep on going through the motions, getting exercise, reading books to Rory. He’s the energy source now that our dreams seem dashed. A wonderful glowing spirit. We give ourselves a shake and admit how lucky we are. At least I can go to my job wondering how to apply my latest skill: building castles and galleons and space stations out of Legos.

  Hey, don’t laugh. I’m serious. When I was a kid, I was all thumbs, the only one who couldn’t make an identifiable object out of Popsicle sticks in art class. Now look at me. I have reconstructed the Middle Ages with Legos, taking up every available inch of our living-dining room floor, and my three-year-old admires me for it. He’s the first person in my life who doesn’t know I’m all thumbs.

  And you should hear me do the voices of the Lego action figures. I do a Chaucerian monk, a Monty Python Silly Knight, a poor, wee old woman crouched by the fire who has a cracked voice and reads omens at the bottom of Hunan Pan takeout cartons. I do Sir Gawain the Grouch, Good King Arthur, snippy Queen Guinevere (who bears a strong resemblance to Gwened, no matter how hard I try), and vultures.

  Why Lego put vultures in a kid’s puzzle kit I’ll never know, but boy are Rory and I surprised when they begin to talk! “Excuse me, sir Knight, are you dead?” “Pardon the interruption, my King, but are you dead yet?” “Sire, may I enquire if you’ll soon be dead?”

  Rory shrieks with hilarity and demands more variations. Mindy comes in from the bedroom looking alarmed. Now I can’t have a minute to myself without Rory coming at me with a black plastic vulture and the imperious demand: “Dad, make him say die!” What have I taught my child?

  The Vulture Variations dominate my home life. Trying to change the subject, feeling haunted by what I’ve unleashed, I tear down part of the Middle Ages and, to Rory’s intense interest, begin to build a humble village out of the ruins. We can’t live with it; we can’t live without it. There’s no avoiding it, Kerbordardoué.

  • • •

  One late spring day Mindy comes back from a warm Saturday outing with Rory. As we’re moving about the kitchen, preparing his snack and our cups of tea, she remarks that she met a rather odd person at the swing sets at the General Theological Seminary, the only bit of green grass in Chelsea.

  “Boy was she pushy!” says Mindy. “But in that native New Yorker way, kind of nice. Very nosy. Wanted to know everything. But she raved over Rory, kept saying how beautiful he was, so I think she’s all right.”

  “Of course. That’s all that matters.”

  “Her name’s Laurie, I think Colwin.”

  “The New Yorker writer?”

  “Well, I thought that, of course, but I wasn’t going to ask. I mean, there were other mothers around and we were pushing our kids on the swings.”

  Very carefully, neither of us said anything more about it.

  • • •

  “Tell me about your novel. Mindy says it’s funny.”

  “Well, it’s about a Coca-Cola bottling manager who wants t
o be a professional bass fisherman and his…”

  “Okay, so it’s funny. I’ve been telling Juris,” nodding ahead to her tall husband, walking with Mindy toward the bright lights of the Empire Diner, where Rory and Rosa are already choosing an outdoor table. “Juris hasn’t been doing anything funny. It’s just so damn serious over there.”

  “There” is her husband’s publishing house.

  The deal with Juris and his partner, Laura, is that I throw out the second half of the book and set the final showdown between the Bass Commandos and the wife’s soldier of fortune squad in Las Vegas. Makes perfect sense to me, especially as it comes with a contract and a check with some very slot-machine-like zeros on it.

  • • •

  And look: Is that summer on the horizon? Approaching in slow, agonizing, penurious motion? Yes. Are we really going to go back to France? Yes, it seems so. We write Madame Morgane, but the cabane is booked for relations who used to stay there and help with the harvest. Mindy writes Gwened, who replies that her house will be rented through September 15. Gwened herself is teaching summer courses in Tours to pay for an upstairs addition to her barn, a sleeping loft for her fellow kyudo novitiates. Once that is done, a guru may visit. The dojo is nearly complete.

  The tone of her letter is brisk, a bit reproving. Between the lines we hear: Why are you asking to use my house when you have one of your own?

  Because (we don’t say) you got us in this pickle, dear Queen Guinevere.

  Midsummer, I turn in the final of Hot Water—Laura having rejected my title, The Bass Commandos, and my backup, A Rod and Gun Marriage, and me having rejected her suggestion, See How It Wiggles. It’s done. Will you look at me? I’m actually ahead of schedule, having just turned thirty-eight.