Paris To The Moon

by Adam Gopnik

  Over time, an obsession with sex and drugs slid imperceptibly into an obsession with children and food. This obsessiveness is what separates Alice Waters from all the other "Anglo-Saxon" restaurateurs who have arrived in Paris recently to open restaurants. (Sir Terence Conran, the London food lord, has just remade an old cabaret on the rue Mazarine, for instance, bringing the new English style to Paris.) For Alice, the idea of making the millennial restaurant in France is a way of closing a romantic circle. Like de Groot, she sees France as the cradle of organic culture in every sense: "The restaurant I imagine is a way of repaying that debt to France, of Americans taking the best of ourselves, instead of the worst of ourselves, to help recall the French to their own best traditions, a way that my generation can repay the debt we owe to France."

  On the day of our dinner Kenneth Starr's report had just appeared, and all afternoon friends from New York were calling me about it. Susan Loomis and I ran back and forth from the study to the kitchen, doing a lot of "Can you believe what he's saying?" (and also a fair amount of "Can you believe what they were doing?"). I was trying to adjust the heat on the lamb when the phone rang, from Luke's school. Once again, as he often had since the term began, he had refused to take a nap, and the school wanted me to bring him home. I sighed, forgot about the report, checked the lamb, left Susan in the kitchen, and raced off to pick him up. (I thought ruefully that you could bet a million dollars that if he were in a school in New York, there would be a Nap-Averse Support Group, a special room for the dormitively challenged, and a precedent-setting lawsuit launched by the attorney father of an earlier child, guaranteeing the right of every child to refuse a nap. But this was Paris: strictly no nap, no school.) I hesitated about leaving the lamb in the oven untended, but then decided, well, seven hours. . . . Throughout the afternoon, instead of feeling, as I had hoped, like Roy de Groot luxuriating in the Alps, I felt a lot like Ray Liotta spinning in the last reel of Goodfellas, when he's cooking veal for his crippled brother, and the police helicopter is circling overhead, and he and the mule who's carrying the cocaine have to go and get her lucky hat.

  How was the lamb? The evening went well, though all through dinner the Starr report was being taxed to us by a friend; pages— four hundred of them—kept churning out of the machine, just a room away. You couldn't help hearing them as they arrived, and every now and then I would go in and peek at the latest revelation. There was an odd symmetry: on the one hand, at our dinner table the high priestess of the American generation that has come to believe that only through refined sensual pleasure can you re-create an ideal America; on the other, page after page of legal detail documenting the existence of those who believe that talking about ideals while pursuing sensations is just what makes this generation such a bunch of louses. It was a kind of two-course meal of radical hedonism and extreme puritanism, both as American as, well, apple pie.

  But how was the lamb? Alice spoke freely about the problems that the space at the Louvre represented. Listening between the sentences, you could deduce that if she had not lost heart, she had, at least, a larger sense of how vast and difficult a project it promised to be. Susan Loomis's aioli was fabulous. People talked, as they do everywhere, about Clinton and Monica.

  But How was the lamb? The wine was excellent. The tarte aux pommes was fine.

  And the lamb? Well. The lamb had a strong resemblance to a third baseman's mitt—if I had Antoine Jacobsohns gift for precision, I would compare it to Buddy Bell's glove, circa 1978—with interesting hints of Naugahyde, kapok, and old suede bomber jacket. There were plenty of white beans, though, and some sauce, so everyone pushed it around politely on the plate. I think I know now what went wrong: after three years of a French oven, I realized that it was easy to forget that American cookbooks were still written, so to speak, in Fahrenheit. De Groot's two hundred degrees were almost half as hot as the two hundred degrees of my Celsius oven.

  I also saw that Alice Waters didn't notice. If you are playing tennis with Martina Hingis, she does not notice when your backhand is off, because she does not notice when your backhand is on. What you have is not what she would call a backhand. At least I was able to explain to the company that the lamb came from Roy de Groot's book, and I talked about what a haunting image it gave of a now-vanished French cooking culture: the iron pots on the hearth, the shy Provencale lady in the kitchen, the daily bounty from the farms and the hunters. Alice got that look in her eye. "I love that book," she said. "And I went on an expedition to the Alps just to find the auberge."

  Did that perfect auberge really exist? I asked.

  "Well, no, not really. Not exactly," she said, in a tone that sounded like "not at all." "I mean, yes, it didn't, not like that." She thought for a moment. "Of course, it existed for him. It still exists for us, in the minds of the people around this table. Maybe that's where the ideal restaurant always will be."

  ***

  Postscript: After Alice Waters left Paris, Le Figaro published an interview with her in which she gently reviewed her concerns about the Rungis market. the markets in paris are shocking! was the headline on the piece, whose effect, from a PR point of view, was like that of a Japanese baseball manager who, after a trip to Yankee Stadium, is quoted in a headline saying, "You call that a ballpark?" Alice Waters is learning that the real France is an inscrutable, hypersensitive place.

  I have come to suspect that what is called a seven-hour lamb was really meant to be seven-hour mutton. I am aware of course that there may be other, better recipes for this dish and other, more careful cooks who have prepared it. (The four-hour lamb was great.) But it is also my suspicion that like so many vanishing things in French cooking, the seven-hour recipe was actually made for harder sheep in tougher times. In the late-modern world, where we get all the pleasure we can as soon as we can get it and on any terms we can, and none of us wants to take a nap, for fear of missing some pleasure we might otherwise have had— in a world like that, as I say, there may just be no place left for the seven-hour gigot.

  A MACHINE TO DRAW THE WORLD, CRISTMAS JOURNAL 4

  In April the knock we had been fearing came on the door. The owners of our apartment were coming back from Tokyo. The Asian banking crisis had sent them back to Paris a year early, History leaping its track to knock Experience cold. It came as a shock. Three months and we would have to leave, be gone from 16 rue du Pre-aux-Clercs.

  The phone call came, exasperatingly, in the French manner, the way the apartment had come: your whole life thrown upside down in an aside. "Oh, the owners are coming home and will need the apartment in July," the real estate woman said; no apology or even a "sorry for the inconvenience." We stayed up all night debating, in the way you do with big news: avoiding, digressing, suddenly feeling sick in the pit of the stomach at the thought of leaving. When we lost the apartment, we thought of going home early, and so we asked ourselves what were the things we loved in Paris, really loved, not just officially appreciated or chose to be amused at? Well, the places our child went. The Luxembourg Gardens at three in the afternoon. The Guignols, and Luke saying, "I'm so excited" before the curtain went up.

  The curious thing was that with the loss of Paris threatening, we became more Parisian. The same thing, I had noted, had happened in our last few months in New York. The city, which had become increasingly difficult, suddenly seemed like a playground—people eating outside, in T-shirts and shorts and sneakers in the Italian restaurants in SoHo; the open-all-nightness of New York; the sweet funkiness—registered as it hadn't in years. When we left the loft for the last time, without trouble, with tears, the music box on Luke Auden's stroller played "Manhattan."

  Now after the knock on the door, it happened to Paris. I began to cook Parisianly. I bought the chef's cookbook from Le Grand Vefour and began to make the buttery, three- and four-part dishes that I had been exasperated by before: supremes de volaille, with mint, that sort of thing. I even made souffles again. We put Trenet back on the CD player; strangely the clarity of his Fr
ench had improved enormously over three years, so that now one could understand the meaning of nearly everything he sang. Or maybe it was just a better record player.

  Is this simply the unique perversity of the human heart that wants (and wants and wants) what it doesn't have—Italian food in Paris, American jazz in Saint-Germain—and, only when it is about to lose it, returns to the things that drew it to the desire in the first place? Or was there a kind of peace in it too? We would now never be Parisians or integrate; we might not even stay in town more than another eight weeks. Loss, like distance, gives permission for romance. In a better-ordered Verona, Romeo and Juliet would have grown up to be just another couple at dinner.

  Finally we went for a long walk, down to see the boats, by the river, and thought, No, we're not ready to leave yet, haven't yet found a good-bye. So we moved. To a bigger, actually nicer apartment. A slight, permanent overhang of depression lifted; the new place was so bright, and it was connected to the street, the life of the city. One by one our stuff came over, three blocks from one apartment to the other.

  In every move, I've noticed, there is always something—a roll of Christmas wrapping paper, a boxful of hangers from the dry cleaners, a metal extender whose use no one can recall—that is left over in the apartment you're leaving, which you step around in curiosity and then, on the last trip, take with you. In this case it was an antenna that belonged with something—a shortwave radio? a portable television?—which we could no longer recall, a plastic dagger, with a "Kings and Knights" sticker on it, and a hardcover of Nabokov's Pnin, which came from nowhere and I could never remember reading in Paris. Leaving 16 rue du Preaux-Clercs for the last time, I opened Pnin at random, to a bit about a boy's imaginary father, a king: " 'Abdication! One third of the alphabet!' coldly quipped the King, with the trace of an accent. 'The answer is no. I prefer the unknown quantity of Exile.' "

  ***

  Just after the move, for my birthday, Luke and Martha gave me a wonderful toy. La Machine a Dessiner le Monde, a machine to draw the world. Really, all it is is a camera lucida, but nicely done in plastic, with a viewing stand on top. You put a piece of vellum on it, and if the light's bright enough, and it has to be very bright, it projects the thing you're looking at right onto the paper. All you have to do is trace it.

  All! For just tracing turns out to be the hardest thing of all. All the cliches and exasperating French abstractions about the insuperable difficulties of realism turn out to be plain truth when you have your machine to draw the world pointed out the window at the plane trees on the boulevard Saint-Germain, your pencil poised, and then you try to decide where to make the first mark. The world moves so much—shimmers and shakes like a nautch dancer, more than you can ever know when you're in it rather than looking at it. You bless any leaf that holds still long enough for you to get it. Hold still, you tell the tree, the light leaping up and down on the balustrade, as though you were talking to a small child as you try to get on its galoshes. Just hold still. Where you finally make the mark is mostly a question of when you finally get fed up.

  Tracing becomes a deep, knotty problem, a thing to solve, and I am completely absorbed in it. I take the Machine to Draw the World to the Palais Royal or the Luxembourg Gardens and just watch the screen, pencil poised, at the translation of Paris into this single flat layer of translucent, lucid shimmer. I no longer try to circus it, or mourn it, or even learn from it, since just drawing it is enough. What you really need from the world in order to draw it is a lot of light and for everything to just stand still.

  Martha and I went for our Christmas lunch together at Le Grand Vefour. The Palais Royal in December: undecorated sapins line the arcades, and Monet smokiness hangs over the gardens. Christian David, the maitre d', is suave and perfect and has been utterly worn out, in the five years we have lunched there twice a year, by the experience of having kids. One of his kids, Antoine, has swallowed a peanut, and he has spent six nights in a hospital; the other is having trouble at school, so David has, beneath a crackle of suave, the hollow, thousand-yard stare of the Parent.

  He insisted that next time, next spring we bring Luke Auden, and I told Luke (or Luca, as he now likes to be known) about the invitation when we got home. "Is it Chinese food?" Luke asked, eyes alight with faint hope. "Or regular Paris food?" Regular Paris food, I told him. His eyes became doleful. He loves Chinese food.

  One of our accomplishments of the year has been to invent Chinese takeout in Paris. There is a Chinese restaurant in the rez-de-chaussee of our new building, Le Coq d'Or or something, and we asked them if we could sometimes simply call them up and have them prepare the food in the kitchen and then let us come down and pick it up. They looked at us dubiously: We would call in advance and have prepared food awaiting us? Yes, we said. They could even, if it were convenient, have someone run upstairs with it; we would be glad to give this messenger a little something extra for his trouble. We now have this system worked out, and it is regarded as very piquant and original.

  We were so proud that we tried to extend it to the Mexican place around the corner. This was a new place that had just opened on the little street around the corner called, of all odd things, Spicy Dinners. There is a new, depressingly Japanese-Third World—style enthusiasm in Paris for "American"-style names. Some, like Buffalo Grill, are ordinary enough. Others are alarming: Speed Rabbit Pizza, for instance, a chain that is beginning to blanket the city, with a very up-to-date image of a racing hare. I don't think that you can actually get a rabbit pizza from them, a pizza au lapin, but they think it looks streamlined, late century, thrillingly global. A speedy rabbit, delivering speedy food. Anyway, Spicy Dinners really did have spicy dinners, and I miss them terribly, spicy dinners. It serves Mexican food basically, though with various West Indian accents. The owner seems to be East Indian, though. We proposed that we try the same system of calling up and coming over to take out, and the owner, after a few unconvinced looks, said fine, that would be good. Around six o'clock we called in our order—burritos and chili and enchiladas—and, eyes alight with expectation (man, at last some spicy food), went around a few minutes later. He had prepared all the dinner on normal plates—big, restauranty white china plates—and had it waiting for us. It was Parisian takeout;

  he trusted us with his plates. I held out my arms, and he carefully put one heavy plate after another in them, placing a second plate upside down on the first, to keep everything warm, so that I had six plates and three dinners all in my hands. I felt like a circus juggler. Luke delicately guided me home and, since I didn't have the use of my hands, had to punch out the code and push open the big courtyard door himself, while I balanced the plates and spicy food as best I could, with visions of crashing china and spilled burritos all over the boulevard. It was quite a weight. "Please bring back the plates," he had called out as we left the premises. But we ran them through the dishwasher that night, and then Nisha put them away, and we forgot all about them. A month later, when we remembered, the little spicy restaurant had gone out of business. We feel very guilty about the whole thing.

  Earlier in December Luke fell terribly sick—far sicker than I ever hope to see him again. We packed him off to his pediatrician, our wonderful Dr. Pierre Bitoun, who looks exactly like a kinder Groucho Marx. When we called him, he picked up the phone himself, as he always does, and said to get him over. Dr. Bitoun looked worried as hell and told us to get him to a surgeon right away. I picked Luke up in my arms, and we ran to the surgical hospital, where the gentle, grave-eyed surgeon, just emerging from an operation, examined him, said that he didn't have appendicitis but that he was very sick and that we ought to get him over to the Necker Hospital for an emergency workup. The Necker is the central children's hospital in Paris. We raced over, without an introduction, into the packed emergency ward, showed our carnet de sante, the pediatrician's record of inoculations and so forth. The girl at the desk barely glanced at it, and within an hour Luke had had a sonogram, an X ray, a barium enema, and var
ious other tests and got examined by three doctors. Two and a half hours later we were back home with a diagnosis. (It turned out that Luke had salmonella poisoning.) It was only after we had left the hospital that we realized that not only had we not paid a penny but that no one had asked us to show our insurance, fill out a form, or do any of the other standard, humiliating things that happen to our American friends with sick children. Nor had any of the procedures had to be run by the profit-and-loss manager of an HMO. This is socialized medicine, of course, which the insurance companies have patriotically kept Americans from suffering under. There are times, as one reads about the uninsured and the armed and the executed, when French anti-Americanism begins to look extremely rational.

  The Christmas windows are weird in Paris this year. Every year, in Paris as everywhere else, the American imperium of shopping opportunities continues to rage, unbanked. Yet the windows are weird, a fin de siecle note of disquiet seeping in. The Bon Marche, which usually has hordes of industrious elves and bears dancing at the end of invisible wires, this year has its windows filled with life-size human figures mechanically enacting a story of incest, bestiality, murder, and fashion narcissism. They play out an updated version of Charles Perrault's story "Peau d'Ane," in which a king in mourning for his queen threatens to force himself on his own daughter and is outwitted only by the princess's decision first to distract him with a series of overwrought holiday dresses and then by the killing of the royal donkey, whose dripping skin . . . well, it's a long story, and a strange one, and what connection it has with Christmas—or what the Parisian children, pressed toward the animated windows in their duffel coats, careful scarves bunched like packages around their throats, think of it all—is hard to imagine.