The Dream Room

by Marcel Moring

  I had made my choice out of politeness, but nevertheless nodded confidently. Coe pursed his lips.

  The waiter took our orders and not long afterward the sommelier appeared with the bottle of gewürztraminer.

  Up until the main course, the evening went quite well. I drank a glass of the Alsace that indeed proved to be a spicy, deep yellow wine, and in the meantime we ate our breast of pigeon and I looked around. The room was full of middle-aged couples staring silently at each other. At the back was a round table with five men who ordered one bottle of wine after another. Every now and then someone stole a glance at us, but that only made me feel more at ease. Coe did the talking, telling me about England, the military base where he and my father had spent some time together, but I didn’t really seem to be hearing him. His words drifted across the table and dissolved in an overpowering feeling of contentment. Here I was and here was where I wanted to be. That night there wasn’t a doubt in my mind.

  When the main course arrived, my disappointment must have been obvious. Coe immediately leaned across the table and asked what was the matter. I pointed to the lamb cutlets, which were buried under a thick, grayish-brown sauce, and said, a touch of indignation in my voice, “I can’t even see them.”

  My table companion nodded.

  “And there are only two.”

  He kept on nodding.

  I scraped off a bit of the sauce, found a cutlet, and tried to slice it.

  “And they’ve been cooked too long. They’re gray!”

  Coe waited, with bated breath, for me to take my first bite.

  I put the fork in my mouth and chewed. Fried cardboard in a sauce of ground egg cartons. I laid down my silverware and shifted my gaze from Coe to his plate. He smoothed his napkin and took a sample. His eyes stared over my head, at some vague point in the distance, his mouth slowly moving. When he had swallowed his mouthful, he, too, laid down his fork.

  “It’s perfectly clear,” he said. “The poor creature has been slaughtered twice: once by the butcher and again, posthumously, by the chef. What do you think of the sauce?”

  The waiter appeared and asked if everything was to our liking. Coe smiled. He gave me the kind of look that teachers give their best pupils and said, “My nephew is not entirely happy.”

  The waiter looked from Coe to me and from me to the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. “And what seems to be the trouble, sir?” he asked,

  That was the wrong approach. I was willing to accept that some people didn’t know how to cook, but if anyone treated me like a spoiled child who was just trying to be a nuisance, I got stubborn.

  “Do you really want to know?” I asked.

  “I’m burning with desire.”

  Coe looked around, grinning broadly. At several of the tables, the conversations flagged.

  “The lamb cutlets are too well done. All you can taste is the pan they were cooked in. They’ve been buried under a typical Dutch roux: lots of butter and flour and no taste. And I don’t think the sauce was made à la minute.”

  The waiter looked at Coe. “The young man is quite the little connoisseur.”

  “The young man happens to be an excellent cook himself.”

  “Perhaps the young man’s taste needs to develop a bit,” said the waiter.

  I smiled at him. “Would you like me to show the chef how it’s done?”

  The waiter turned on his heel and strode out of the dining room. Coe hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat and waited for what was to come.

  From the back of the restaurant came the chef. He was still wearing his big hat and he looked as if he had just crawled out of a Dumpster. I didn’t think that was a very good sign. Good cooks don’t get dirty.

  “Is there a problem?”

  Coe nodded in my direction. I looked the chef straight in the eye and repeated what I had just said to the waiter.

  “And you think you can do better?” He didn’t sound unfriendly, just interested. I nodded.

  “Well, then,” he said. “Follow me. A bottle of wine from me to you if a random customer likes your food better than mine.”

  “What kind of wine?”

  The chef grinned. “Did you have one in mind?”

  “There’s an Haut Brion on the wine list.”

  Coe squinted and seemed to be thinking about something.

  “And what’s your bet?”

  I got up from my chair. When we were standing face-to-face I came up to his armpits. His stomach stuck out so far that we had to stand several feet apart. “The same bottle,” I said. The chef turned around and went ahead of me to the kitchen. “Are you sure you can afford it?” he asked over his shoulder. He pushed open the swinging doors and let me in. “Well?” I shook my head. “No,” I said.

  In the kitchen, on an empty space on the steel counter, I had him set before me a cup of cream (there was no crème fraîche), a cup of potato starch, and a dish of stock. I asked for a saucepan and poured in some of the stock. I placed the pan over a low flame, stirred the potato starch into the cream, and when the stock was warm enough I poured the cream into the pan. Several people had gathered around us: two boys my age, a man in a suit, and the waiter. “I need a small whisk.” The chef nudged one of the boys. I was handed the whisk and I beat and stirred until the sauce was of the proper consistency. At my request I was brought thyme and a clove of garlic, which I crushed with the flat of a knife and added to the mixture on the stove, and then—I hadn’t been busy for more than three or four minutes—I fished out the garlic and the sauce was ready.

  “That’s it?” the chef said.

  I took the pan off the flame and nodded.

  “Don’t you have to heat it through?”

  “No, that would weaken the flavor and make the sauce watery.”

  “Spoon!” yelled the chef.

  One of the galley boys grabbed a spoon. The chef took some sauce and put it in his mouth. He closed his eyes. He tasted. He opened his eyes again. He looked at Coe, at me, and then at his apprentice. “Make a note,” he said. “You there!” He shouted to a waiter. “You got a lamb cutlet on order?” The waiter shook his head, “Too late, we just served it.” The chef pulled open the refrigerator and slapped two curling pieces of lamb down on the stainless steel countertop. He looked at me. “It’s all yours,” he said. And to the waiter, “Bring it back. There’s another one coming.”

  I switched to another burner and cooked the cutlets au point, the way I had learned from the many books I had read over the years. I was slightly nervous—the kitchen was unfamiliar, the equipment was different, and I had never done lamb cutlets before—but I knew I could rely on my intuition. That was something I had discovered over the last few years. I could analyze a dish without tasting it, I could cook without measuring, and I could prepare any dish after only one reading of a recipe that described something similar. It wasn’t a talent, as Coe had said to my father earlier. It was intuition, imagination, or perhaps it was a talent after all, the talent to abstract a thing as organic and chaotic as cooking. When I was finished, the plate went out the door and Coe rested his hand on my shoulder. His round face was reflected in the gleaming metal of the rear wall of the stove. His eyebrows, which seemed to wriggle above his black eyes like caterpillars, gave him the appearance of a gluttonous Benedictine. He began to lecture the chef on what he called a “leveling of taste,” that dishes nowadays often had a kind of “surface taste” which could no longer be broken down into its various components. “Dutch chefs,” he said, “are afraid to let us taste the ingredients that compose a dish. When I eat hare, I want to taste hare, wine, thyme, and scallions, not some all-purpose herb mix.”

  The waiter came back into the kitchen. He looked like an undertaker.

  “Well?” asked the man in the suit.

  “He asked what the hell was going on.”

  I suddenly noticed how hot it was in the kitchen.

  “What did he mean?” asked the chef.

  “He said, ’Is thi
s some kind of test, first I get served that greasy dreck and then I get the real dish?”

  I avoided looking at the chef, who had raised his head and was staring at something at the back of the kitchen.

  “Well well,” he said.

  “What’s dreck?” asked the waiter.

  The chef began smiling.

  A waitress came in and after two steps shrank back in alarm.

  “What’s up, Thea?”

  She stood next to the swinging doors and looked suspiciously at the little group around the stove. “There’s nothing coming through,” she said. “Table Eight’s been waiting half an hour for two dames blanches.”

  I shivered.

  “Bet you can do that better too, huh?” said the chef. He signaled to one of his galley boys, who got out the ice cream and started preparing the desserts. The waiter, who still didn’t know what dreck was, left the kitchen.

  “You’ve earned that Haut Brion,” said the chef. “What do you say we open it right now?”

  I thought that was a fine idea.

  “The sauce,” he said. “That was your recipe?”

  “It’s based on a couple of things from Artusi.”

  Coe leaned toward me slightly. “You’ve read Artusi?”

  One of the galley boys came in with the wine. He handed it to his boss, who carefully uncorked it and put it down on the wooden table in the middle of the kitchen. There was bread, cheese, salt, and water. The chef poured me a finger of wine. I swirled it in my glass, sniffed, took a sip, sloshed it around a bit, and then nodded.

  “Dear boy,” said Coe, “who taught you this great love of food?”

  “I did, I think. And Mrs. David.”

  “Mrs. Who?” said the chef.

  “Elizabeth David,” said Coe. “That, De Jong, is your problem: you don’t keep up with the literature. An Englishwoman, who writes primarily on French and Italian cuisine. How else do you think this young lad, in this poor country, would have heard of garlic and crème fraîche?”

  I looked at Coe and took a sip of the fragrant Haut Brion. I had never tasted this wine before. I had seen it mentioned in a wine guide I’d read in the bookstore. The description had been so enthusiastic that I had never forgotten the name.

  “I don’t think you’re a cook at all.” Coe said, turning to me, “Cooking isn’t even particularly interesting. A cook is always having to contend with limitations: the kitchen, the boss, the customers, the region, the country. If you can you should write about food.”

  “If everybody wrote about food and nobody cooked anymore, Campbell’s soup would be the Bocuse of everyday life,” said the chef irritably.

  Coe drank his wine. He smacked his lips and then pursed them. “An excellent choice. What would you have liked to eat with this?”

  “Tagliatelle with ragout of lamb and maybe a salad: curly endive and sweet potato.”

  The chef frowned. “Sweet potato?” he mumbled.

  Coe looked at me in surprise. He thought for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. “I think,” he said, “we’ll have to do this more often.”

  That night when I came home, my mother was sitting at the table, reading. She kissed me, and recoiled in horror. “You’ve been drinking!” I smiled like a tailor who has sewn himself into his own suit. “An Haut Brion,” I said. “I won it cooking.” She shook her head and stood up. As we walked upstairs, I told her about my peculiar dinner with Coe and my heroic feats in Lejeune’s kitchen. In the bathroom, I brushed my teeth, while she looked at me in the mirror. “Promise me one thing,” she said. “Whatever happens, you’ll finish school.” I laughed too loudly and nodded. “I mean it,” she said. “Boris had to do it all later, and he’s never really amounted to anything.” I rinsed my mouth, and as I spit the water into the sink, where the red of the wine and the white of the toothpaste formed a dirty gray foam, I suddenly felt an ominous kind of sadness creeping up inside me.

  Three

  EVEN THOUGH IT DIDN’T STOP RAINING, MY MOTHER and I went that summer, like every other summer, to the village in the dunes where her father had been mayor. He now spent his days polishing his old rifles, waiting for friends who, like him, had come to look more and more like shuffling old badgers. His wife wandered through the house with a wicker basket, in which she carried a bunch of keys and a cologne-soaked handkerchief. Her life was an endless opening and closing of doors, restless peering into empty rooms, and whispered mumbling. Ever since she had asked the baker for half a loaf of green and a loaf of plaid, sliced, they had had a housekeeper.

  Those two weeks in the dunes had never been an excursion I’d particularly looked forward to. Even before she had gotten lost in the fog my grandmother had looked at me sideways, and my grandfather, for as long as I could remember, seemed to be awaiting the moment when I would prove myself a man, grab one of his old rifles, and shoot a prizewinning rabbit. Now that it wouldn’t stop raining, that annual visit was even less appealing. The bad weather however only seemed to increase my mother’s determination. According to her, it was usually better at the seaside, and the salty air would do me good.

  A day after our arrival, my grandfather called me into what he referred to as his “study.” I hardly ever entered that room. It was at the back of the house and overlooked a rolling stretch of dunes covered with tough, sharp grass. In the distance you could see the first houses of the village he had governed half his life without much enthusiasm and where he now, in more ways than one, was an outsider. The walls were hung with tinted etchings of hunters riding horses frozen in a ludicrous swan dive. Here and there was a rifle leaning against the bookcase, and the smell of grease and gun oil was so overpowering that it could just as easily have been a gunsmith’s workshop.

  My grandfather pointed me to a chair that came from the old council chamber, on the back of which was the faded, embroidered coat of arms of the village, a plump little fish that floated, grinning stupidly, above something that looked like the serrated blade of a knife, but was no doubt meant to represent the sea. “I’ve asked you here…” He cleared his throat, removed a book of illustrations of lushly colored pheasants from his chair, and lowered himself down. “I’ve asked you here, because you…well, because you’re nearly grown, a grown man, and it seemed to me that it was time we talked man…to man.” He looked visibly relieved to have the introduction over and done with. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had stood up, shaken my hand, and shown me to the door.

  But he sat back, let his fingertips wander over the arm of the chair and, for a moment, seemed very far away. Then he straightened up again. “You’re not a hunter,” he said. His head came up slowly, until he was looking me straight in the eye. His expression was accusatory and shy at the same time. I felt the urge to say that I was a hunter, that I would like nothing better than to march into the dunes with one of his rifles and kill something. “Your father wasn’t a hunter, either.” I realized that he meant something different than I had thought. “I had a word with my good friend Van der Molen last week.” That was the old lawyer, one of the men he played bridge with, chased small game with. “I’ve made my will.” He was looking at me closely now. “A will is a…” I nodded. “You know. All right. I have set up a fund whose goal is to buy up this land, piece by piece.” He gestured vaguely behind him, to where the dunes lay. “In due course, all that will become a shooting ground. This house will be the office and the home of the proprietor, the director.” He paused. “You will be the director.” He fell silent. Outside was a whispering rain, above us was the sound of footsteps on wooden floors.

  “The director?”

  “Yes.” He sprang to his feet, unexpectedly buoyant, rubbed his hands together, and began pacing to and fro. “The director! Imagine!” He ran his eyes over the walls, over the colored etchings, the dented bugle that a long-forgotten prince consort had flung to the ground, after an unsuccessful hunting party, during which they had hit only rabbits and hares, and left behind. He raised his right arm, his hand on a
level with his face, and said, “One day. All this. Will be yours.”

  I suddenly saw myself standing in front of the house in a kind of red-and-green elf costume, watching a troop of exuberant hunters on horseback as they disappeared into the dunes to slay a dragon.

  “I’m only twelve,” I said.

  “Nonsense!” He thrust out his chin. “A man’s character is formed in his early youth. At your age, in fact. Playtime is over. Port?”

  I was in no shape to answer. My grandfather walked over to a low cabinet, on top of which was a silver tray with bottles and decanters, and filled two glasses with syrupy, reddish-brown liquid. He handed one to me and then, sipping from his own glass, resumed his pacing. “A man has got to make something of himself. Some men go to college, some work their way up, others need a guiding hand…” He clenched his fist and held it out in front of him, as if he thought it was important that I saw it. “…the guiding hand of an experienced older man.”

  My eyes followed him back and forth, back and forth. I wanted to tear myself away from this mad conversation, from his self-absorbed pacing, but I couldn’t. I was mesmerized by the bizarre flight his thoughts had taken.

  “That was what your father lacked. Because of the war, many young men were hurled into the thick of it. Left to their own devices. Without law and order. Without the…the soothing effect of civilization.” He was on my side of the room now and stopped right in front of me. He peered into my eyes from under his bushy eyebrows. “Drink your port.”

  I wrenched myself away from him, raised my glass, and poured it down my throat. A sudden warmth exploded in my chest, shot up to my head, and filled my ears. My grandfather turned around like an old tortoise and started back toward the other end of the room. I waited, my eyes wide open, for the fire in my throat to die.

  Outside, a storm had come up. The wind tugged at the young trees along the path to the beach and the clouds blew across the village like shreds of unwashed curtain. My grandfather’s voice came from far away. He was holding forth about civilization and “the Huns” (whoever they were), about the hunt…Slowly I began to lose the thread of his story. The warmth of the port had nestled in my stomach and feet and the chair had become soft and embracing. I closed my eyes and saw myself standing in the doorway of the house again, in a green jerkin and a little red jacket, while Robin Hood’s Merry Men armed themselves with bows and arrows and set off for the dunes. I remember thinking that this wasn’t quite what my grandfather had had in mind when he had told me about his plans for a hunting reserve. After that I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes again, the windows were black and the room was empty.