Paris by the Book(45)

“And Paris,” Declan said.

“And wine.”

“And food,” Declan said, as the first plates arrived.



* * *



—

Part of what makes it hard to cook in Paris—apart from the fact that every last soul here does it better than I do—is that Robert was our chef at home.

Fatherhood brought this out in him. Prior to children, I don’t remember what we ate, or his taking much of an interest in food. I think we drank most of our calories. But when I became pregnant with Ellie, he became one of those dads who, abetted by too much time in the OB waiting room with too many maternity magazines, nags his wife to eat better. And I became one of those wives who bristled at the guilt being served. I said if he wanted us—me and the baby—to eat better, he could shop and cook. He considered this, and apologized for not figuring it out sooner. No better place to start proving himself fit to be a parent than in the kitchen.

And so we ate fresh, we ate healthy, we ate global. As the girls grew, he expanded his efforts. Banh mi for lunch, zipped into their reusable lunch bags. Borscht for dinner, ladled into their unbreakable bowls. Sometimes we’d have Eleanor over, and Robert and the girls would play cooking show: they were the cooks, Eleanor the celebrity guest (I was the audience). She ate it up. They ate it up.

Saturday, they’d set off to farmers’ markets, ethnic markets, libraries. Cookbooks came and went, and with them, trends. We ate vegan, we ate paleo, gluten-free, pesca-centric, Afro-centric. We ate equatorial. We ate tropical. Raw. Grilled. One-pot meals. Ten-plate tapas. Slow cookers. Flash-fryers. I had matching aprons made for them and he bought the girls floppy white chef’s toques. They wore all this with pride. I was proud of them—and Robert in particular. They were making meals, but also memories. I ignored the voice in my head that said that this was what procrastination tasted like.



* * *



—

Whenever Robert went away, we ate leftovers, or what the girls called, not quite disparagingly, “mom meals.” But the girls and I had actually eaten relatively well since coming to France, mostly because it was impossible not to. We’d never eaten as well as Declan and I did at the restaurant, though, and given the price, I knew I never would again. First Declan’s friend had brought vegetables—tiny plate after tiny plate. White and green asparagus, then a creamy concoction studded with little green jewels that turned out to be frozen peas. Cucumber in sesame oil. Then on to the fish: tuna with lemon, followed by a butter custard garnished with smoked salt. A ceramic spoon bore us a single bite of sea bass, here swashbucklingly called loup de mer, wolf of the sea. Chard and onions. A clear soup, bouillon, boring until the first sip, when it turned out to be—coconut. Basque veal. And now, ginger, two cubes. One a solid raw chunk, the other solid sorbet. Strawberry mille-feuille.

I finished not just full, but exhausted. Eating this meal was as physically passionate a thing as I’d done since coming to France. That I sensed that this had not been “strictly business” gave the meal an even greater charge, and when Declan offered to walk me home, I surprised us both by hailing a cab and pulling him into it. We needed to—see some books, now.

But because he is always keeping an eye out for me, even, or especially when I wish he would not, Laurent, my UPS man, was lying in wait. He’d been trying to make the day’s delivery, and I wasn’t in the store, and Madame wouldn’t come down.

I apologized, but Laurent didn’t quite listen; he was busy watching Declan head into the shop with a box he—Declan—had offered to take inside. I’m fairly certain that was against the rules, but Laurent had never been one to turn down help. He’d accepted Peter’s and Annabelle’s offers before.

“This is good you hire a man,” he said once Declan was inside.

“He’s just a friend,” I said.

“This is good you hire a friend,” Laurent said. He gave a little smile. I was a little drunk. After pouring our first glasses, the sommelier had said, in English, that the wine would be like “licking silk.” It had been.

“That’s all?” said Declan, already returning.

“Maybe not,” Laurent said. He turned to fiddle with the roll door for a while—just to make things awkward—and then finally nodded, once, raised his eyebrows, and drove away.

“He’s interesting,” Declan said.

“He brought me flowers the first week,” I said. “An opening gift. And then flowers the second week, at which point I woke up and saw that he was looking for a date.”

“Oh,” Declan said, as flummoxed as I suddenly was.

I’d spoken without thinking this through. During conversations with Declan subsequent to my first, I had built a tidy wall around Robert. He went only by “my husband” and I stuck to my first story, the simple story: I lost him. In doing so, I was only telling Declan what I told any other stranger: I lost my husband very suddenly, very young. And they would look at the ring I still wore (just the simple wedding band) and say, such a tragedy, and the matter would rest. Or they would ask, how? And I would say, I’d rather not talk about it. And the matter would rest.

Madame Brouillard knew more—slightly more. I hadn’t even told her that Robert was an author. I’d simply said that I’d had a husband, he’d disappeared. And when she asked how, I said the police suspected suicide and that I did, too. She herself was the one who urged me to start saying aloud something I’d only said in my head: he died.