by Gael Greene
We were talking about skin and breasts, and whether I had ever eaten Chinese chicken salad, and if it was good to trade sexual fantasies in bed. I felt myself blushing all over. I was hot. Was he that cool? I wondered. Fortunately for my TV commitment, I found a few scribblings on the lunch in my notebook, because otherwise I would not have remembered even eating. I didn’t want him to go. It was almost four o’clock. Did he really have to go? What about dinner? Yes, he really had to go.
Don seemed much happier now that he had left the Times for an executive niche at Newsday—“the tabloid in a tutu,” they called it. Not even the draining daily commute to Garden City, Long Island, diluted his enthusiasm. We settled into our warped little domesticity, weekends in Woodstock, weeknights dining with friends on my reviewing rounds. Our circle of tasters loved the free meals but were grumpy when I insisted they order what I needed to taste, and if the meal was a bomb, someone might say, “Now you owe us a really good one.” Don was a contender for a top job at Newsday and he often worked late. I played games with my once-a-week wine merchant lover. He wrote crazed and highly original poems and mailed them to me, and between bouts of quite enjoyable sex, he did a nonstop monologue on the wine business. So I could say I was sharpening my grasp of wine marketing. Thus our affair was not simply deliciously high-risk, aerobic, and fun in the late afternoons but also good for my taste memory in my palate’s formative years. An unshakable Francophile, I was sure I’d never taste an Italian wine beautiful enough to make me weep. That all changed the evening he brought a Gaja Barbaresco of dignified age to go with the carryout pizza we planned to share in front of a fire in his country chalet. A swirl of the glass (of course, he brought those, too, a pair of balloon goblets) threw the scent of berries and truffles into the air. The first sip was bombastic, three baritones in simultaneous assault, but after a bite of pepperoni and cheese, and a few minutes in the glass, the deeply regal red warmed and softened, complex as a poem in a foreign language, like satin on the tongue. And I wept.
Nixon went to China. Clifford Irving admitted his Howard Hughes book was a hoax. Mrs. Aristotle Onassis sued photographer Ron Galella to keep his distance. “Honor Thy Pasta,” my survey of northern Italian restaurants—Romeo Salta, Nanni’s, Aperitivo, Giambelli 50th, Trattoria da Alfredo, San Marino, the Italian Pavilion, Giovanni’s, Nick & Guido’s, Ballato, and more—inspired a cover with naked New Yorkers swimming in a giant bowl of fettuccine. Don came along on the pasta binge—after all, it was for him I’d begged Marcella Hazan to share her technique of making fresh pasta by giving me a private lesson. But my onetime partner in delicious excess seemed less enthralled with the endless quest for the new and the sense-reeling. He needed to watch his weight, he insisted. He begged off my next eating swing through France. He couldn’t afford three weeks away from Newsday, he said, so I should find someone to go with me. A pal of ours from the Post said he would pay his own way just to share my dinners.
One early spring afternoon, Murray Fisher called out of the blue. I felt the blood rushing to my face. I stammered. Everyone from Chicago was in town for some Playboy Club event, he said. I suggested we meet at the Flower Drum, one of the more ambitious Chinese restaurants in town. Maybe they would do Chinese chicken salad. He had said he loved Chinese chicken salad. It seemed to be a West Coast fusion. He insisted on sitting next to me on the banquette. I ordered, but I can’t remember what or if we ate. Knowing me, I probably did. Murray was depressed and angry. Indeed, he was indignant. His wife had left him for her ski instructor in Aspen, he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked. Surely the snow would melt and she’d come back again. He went over all the things he’d done for her and how she’d misinterpreted every caring word and move as obsessively controlling. Ungrateful bitch, I thought. Lucky me.
“Well, you need to get away,” I said. “You should comfort yourself with truffles. Come to France and do this incredible trip with me. All you need is a plane ticket. The magazine pays for meals and hotels and our car. We’ll start in Paris, do Bocuse, Père Bise on Lake Annecy. Oh, you can’t imagine how beautiful it is. Then Troisgros. And we can stop in Les Baux—once, it was the medieval court of love. Oh, it will be magical.”
“We just ran a story on the Troisgros brothers in Playboy,” he said. “I edited it. Did you read it? The title was ‘Is This the Greatest Restaurant in the World?’”
“Well then, you’ll make the reservation at Troisgros,” I said. “Then I can be anonymous and we can be lionized anyway.”
He was making love to my hand again.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “My plane leaves in a few hours. Can you come to my hotel?”
I was supposed to meet Don at some Newsday gathering. “Let me call Don and tell him I won’t be there.”
I stepped into the phone booth. Don had already left for the party. For some insane reason, I was convinced I had to meet him. I can’t imagine why now. Murray and I kissed and rubbed against each other like teenagers. Amazingly, the phone booth didn’t melt. I pulled my clothes together, grabbed a cab, and left him panting on the curb.
In the seventies, sex was so carefree, so up-front, so ever-present, at least for me both before and after Don, it was easy to just leap off cliffs. At least it seemed so to me in the years since I’d started being unfaithful. Foreplay did not get much respect. Not that men hadn’t become more sensitive lovers. During the almost ten years that I had been faithful to just one man, the women’s movement had not only freed women to realize their sexuality; it had freed men, too. A lot of men suddenly got the drift of female anatomy. They seemed to know what it was and how to find it and what to do when they got there. Indeed, for me the two greatest discoveries of the twentieth century were the Cuisinart and the clitoris.
What seemed to be lost was classic old-fashioned foreplay, a courtship over time. A ritual game of seduction . . . with obstacles that keep two people from jumping into bed at the first little tickle. And that’s what we had, Murray and I, a long-drawn-out, wondrously torturous, and sizzling anticipation.
I didn’t cool down for days after he returned to Chicago, except briefly when a writing deadline or a fact checker interrupted my pornographic reveries of sharing foie gras and beds all over France with this complex and intriguing man.
I’d been banking my lust for weeks. Murray’s plane was due to arrive in Paris early in the morning. He would come directly to L’Hôtel. I’d never stayed there before, but it was the Left Bank inn of the moment, located in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with rounded walls and turn-of-the-century airs, legacy of denizens like Oscar Wilde and Mistinguett.
I set my alarm clock to wake me an hour ahead so I could bathe, put on makeup, fluff my hair, and slip into an unwrinkled sheer chiffon nightshirt and pretend his tap at the door had awakened me.
His knock kicked up my pulse.
Murray dropped his suitcase and swept me into his arms. He was wearing a double-breasted gray flannel suit, and I could feel the buttons and the scratchy wool through the chiffon. It came to me suddenly that this was a total stranger sliding his hand under my nightie—a man I’d never made love to—and we were committed to ten days of intimacy. What if it didn’t work?
Well, there were a few shocking revelations. Murray didn’t really like fish. And he wouldn’t eat anything with a face on it—like shrimp, crab, or lobster. Needless to say, sweetbreads, tripe, kidneys, and brains were unthinkable. And two of his favorite colors were purple and orange. What can I say? The hippie sixties didn’t really go away till far into the seventies, and psychedelic prints on polyester brightened his wardrobe.
But what might have been insurmountable conflicts were nothing really, small inconveniences in the glow of glorious astonishments. I’d always defined a great meal as one you couldn’t possibly make love after and had advised readers on the truffle trails to make love before dinner. I was wrong. We made love before and after every great meal. Sometimes I would wake before dawn, not s
ure where I was, and then becoming sure . . . we would make love again.
We so exhausted ourselves making up for lost time that first day in Paris, we almost missed dinner. I’d reserved at Lasserre, not because I had that much faith in its Michelin three stars for great food but because I remembered it as unrelentingly romantic—luxurious and old-fashioned, with a ceiling that opened on balmy nights.
When I tried to stand up to dress, my legs were trembling.
“We don’t have to go,” said Murray. “I’m not that hungry.”
“Of course you’re hungry.”
I staggered to the bathroom, bruising my hip on the jutting Empire dressers and vintage armoires crammed into that tiny room. I remember the dress was black, with a deep V that showed an edge of lace bra, and I was wearing black suede Roger Vivier cutout slingbacks—what Don called my “Joan Crawford fuck-me shoes.” I remember sipping a champagne aperitif in the bar at Lasserre while Murray’s hand caressed the arch of my foot, my insides fluttering. And I think possibly, probably, there was a meringue swan for dessert. We talked about what we had done in bed and how good a lover he was and what we would do in bed later, how perfect we were together, how amazingly suited for each other we were, nothing that would have amused anyone eavesdropping, but, for us, it was as if we were still in bed . . . and soon we were.
Chocolate Wickedness
This is a recipe adapted from Paula Peck’s Art of Fine Baking, with my own sauce. Kept in a jar in the freezer, it is always available for emergencies. (These instructions are for hand-beating, which I still do sometimes for nostalgia’s sake.)
1 cup heavy cream
1 1/2 lbs. semisweet chocolate
3 egg yolks
1/2 cup brewed espresso coffee or 11/2 tsp. instant espresso dissolved in 1/2 cup boiling water
1/2 cup crème de cacao
6 egg whites
Pinch of salt
1/4 cup sugar
Using a wire whisk or electric beater, whip cream until thick. Refrigerate until ready to use.
Put chocolate in a large heatproof bowl over a pot of simmering water. Do not let the bottom of the bowl touch the water. Heat until chocolate is melted. Stir in egg yolks, coffee, and crème de cacao. Mix until smooth. Remove from heat, and cool.
Beat egg whites with salt until they stand in soft peaks. Add sugar, a tablespoon at a time, beating after each addition. Beat several more minutes until very stiff. (If beating by hand, it will take at least five minutes.)
Fold whipped cream into egg whites and then fold chocolate mixture into that mix.
Pour into a large glass bowl or 10-cup soufflé dish. Freeze for a minimum of 4 hours. Let sit at room temperature for 15 to 20 minutes before serving.
Serve with mock crème fraîche, made by blending 1/2 cup heavy cream, whipped into gentle peaks, with the 2/3 cup of sour cream and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. Refrigerate until ready to use.
17
A GASTROMANIACAL INTERLUDE
YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT IS ENOUGH UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT IS MORE than enough.” William Blake had it right.
Murray had thrown himself into the delicious, artery- and liver-challenging excess that defined my assignment. Meals alternated with sex like a preposterously rich mille-feuille pastry—layers of sensuous pleasure. He seemed dedicated to extending the parameters of my orgasmic potential and I celebrated his dedication, exhausted, sometimes aching, and worn to a frazzle, but thrilled and amazed to discover this remarkable new me. I was staggered to be on this sensory roller coaster—great food, evocative wines, high-wire sex, and once in awhile an intellectual thought. It felt like paradise to me. Could one actually live like this in the everyday world? And write and shop and remind the dry cleaner to pay special attention to the food spots?
We had moments of supposed sanity. Skipping an occasional lunch meant dashing through small towns, collecting crusty baguettes, sliced sausages, a hunk or two of duck-liver terrine, and some cheese for a picnic alongside the road. This may not have been a wholesome savings in calories, but picnics did come with exercise, a short walk and lovemaking under a tree, with only a few drowsy cows to see.
Occasionally, the outside world intruded, a few words in a newscast, Governor Wallace paralyzed by gunshot, American planes bombing Hanoi. But that cacophony was noise in a distant room. Essentially, we remained isolated in an erotic cocoon, endlessly focused on sex, trading histories and markers, his first this or that, my first whatever . . . as if we’d both just escaped from a sexual drought.
Farms passed in a blur of green and narrow stone walls. A few shops with crates of fruit outside marked tiny villages as we drove the roads that stretched between meals.
“Oh look . . . poppies,” I cried, catching a blur of red flowers on my right. “The whole field is full of poppies. Like The Wizard of Oz.” Murray swerved and slammed on the brakes, pulling me out of the car. He pushed me down on the fender. “Hey, hey, wait.” I was laughing as he ripped off my panties and fucked me, surrounded by poppies on the side of the road.
We were not in Kansas anymore.
In those weeks of fiercely serious eating—research verging upon obsession—from the numbing joys of La Pyramide in Vienne and the creative vitality of Paul Bocuse, with his exquisitely etched pastry-wrapped loup de mer, to the blush-fleshed omble chevalier in a divinely humble butter bath at Père Bise. Les Frères Troisgros, in a little nowhere town called Roanne, one Alka-Seltzer east of Lyon, proved to be the most ingenuous sorcerers of all.
I insisted we arrive at Troisgros with an edge of hunger, stomachs empty, even though assorted senses might tingle with use and abuse. Let loose in the very heart of gastronomic freak-out country, Murray thought any attempt at moderation unseemly, but he acquiesced.
“Nothing in the solemn dignity and clarion discipline of France’s gastronomic temples quite prepares you for the sweet silliness of the maison Troisgros,” I wrote at the time. Brother Pierre in his tall white toque sat playing gin rummy in the middle of the dining room, where the awed pilgrims left over from lunch still nibbled petits fours, as we checked in. There were Troisgros dogs sniffing and champagne corks popping and old auntie asleep, propped on her elbow.
Well, of course, the important Playboy editor was expected. Though dinner was just a few hours away, the Troisgros family would not take no for an answer. “What do you mean, no late lunch? Are you thirsty? No? Well, here is a glass of icy Sancerre. Hungry? No? What a pity. Then you will have only one giant triangle of clafouti [sublimely simple pear and custard tart], not two.” And as this was a town where manufacturing shoes was the hot ticket, visitors with time to linger might find themselves shooting baskets with the sociable Troisgros brothers or tagging along on food foraging expeditions between lunch and dinner. And so we did.
The two of us, with our very long legs, were stuffed into the backseat of a smallish car because the front was reserved for brother Pierre and a giant wheel of almond custard tart. First stop, the house of Bonnin, Roanne’s most elegant delicatessen, just to schmooze with good friends. The Troisgros brothers, Pierre and the squarer, more reserved Jean, with his country gentleman beard, and hangers-on from the minicar in tow behind, headed directly for the cellar, where brother Jean tried to get his red-eyed hunting dog to climb into an empty vat by climbing in himself. There was champagne, a bottle of Burgundy—“Yes, just a small glass, just a taste, yes, you must”—and Pierre divided the almond tart with scissors. So much for our grim Spartan denial. Perhaps an hour of sleep would produce the hallucination of a reasonable number of hours passed without food.
Nine o’clock. A fine sharp air of expectation—not the electric voltage of formal dining, but something related to it—awaited. Pierre and Jean roamed the dining salon, serious now, but relaxed, champion athletes running a cinch race. The room was ringed by transient pilgrims of the palate, atingle with awe, like an alchemist’s aphrodisiac, stirring them and us, too, into a frenzy of expectation and desire.
Instead of th
e signature $13.50 dinner, the pilgrims came to worship—the Troisgros brothers had choreographed a numbing parade of seasonal dishes for us. “Just a little of each, just to taste.”
I felt uneasy out of my usual brown sparrow anonymity. I did not think they recognized me as a critic, but as the appendage of this Playboy editor, I was definitely sharing a regal fuss.
First came the snails, supersize mutants and amazingly tender, nourished by crunching on the leaves of the Burgundy grape, Jean pointed out. They had been snatched in adolescence, sautéed, braised, and somewhat blandly sauced in a swirl of herb-scented butter—a last-minute liaison requiring consummate timing, Jean observed: “Très difficil.” Murray ignored the animals and blissed out on the sauce.
Pierre was about to disclose the sex life of a snail, when the next plate interrupted: a billowing pastry feuilletée filled with fresh foie gras and tiny batons of poached turnip. A mellow Meurseult was poured with the copper cassolettes of crayfish: tender little beasts curled in a tarragon-spiked broth. Burgundy labels flashed before our eyes; glasses filled—“just a soupçon”—emptied, and disappeared. New glasses appeared.
The barely cooked salmon on its gleaming sorrel-flecked pool was supernal, surpassing even rose-prismed memory from my earlier visit. Just in time to revive hyperindulged senses came a goblet of bracingly tart lemon ice flecked with citrus zest. What sorcery. Just enough. Not sweet at all. I found myself contemplating raging-rare slices of Charolais beef as if it were a new day, with fresh reserves of appetite.
I did not hesitate to consider cheese, “for research sake,” I whispered into Murray’s ear. I found myself able to nibble a few crumbles of Fourme d’Ambert, salty, soft, uncharacteristically gentle, a prepubescent bleu. And from the dessert cart, strawberries in a raspberry puree, an Everest pouf of floating island, satantic chocolate truffles, macaroons, the flat butter cookie called “cat’s tongue” for its shape. By that time, champagne corks were popping again—a blanc de blanc with the Troisgros label. Seriously smashed, Murray and I smiled helplessly. “Rude to resist,” he whispered to me, slipping a few inches lower in his chair.
