I
No French
Dans la vie, on fait ce qu’on peut. À table, on se force.
In life, we do what we can. At the table, whoa, we eat everything!
ANONYMOUS LYONNAIS SAYING, TRANSLATED (LOOSELY) BY THE AUTHOR
On a bright, chilly, autumnal afternoon in 2007, I met Michel Richard, a chef and the man who would radically change my life—and the lives of my wife, Jessica Green, and our two-year-old twins—without my quite knowing who he was, and in the confidence that, whoever he might be, he was someone I would never see again.
My wife and I had just celebrated our five-year wedding anniversary, and were at the head of a line in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, waiting to board a train back to New York. At the last minute, the man I didn’t yet know to be Michel Richard appeared off to the side. He was out of breath and sizable, not tall but round, and impossible to miss. He had a modest white beard, a voluminous black shirt, tails untucked, and baggy black trousers. (Baggy chef pants, I realize now.) I studied him, wondering: I don’t know him, do I?
Of course I knew him! By what algorithm of memory and intelligence could I not have recognized him? He had written a book, Happy in the Kitchen, that, by a fluke of gift-giving friends, I owned two copies of, and, six months before, had won the “double” at the James Beard Foundation Awards in New York City, for Outstanding Wine Service and for being the Outstanding Chef of the United States—and I had been in the audience. In fact, at that moment, I had French chefs on my mind (for reasons that I was about to spell out to my wife), and here was one of them, regarded by many as the most delightfully inventive cooking mind in the Northern Hemisphere. He was, to be fair, looking neither delightful nor inventive and was smelling unmistakably of red wine, and of sweat, too, and I suspected that the black show-no-stains shirt, if you got close to it, would have yielded up an impressively compressed bacterial history. And so, for these and other reasons, I concluded that, no, this man couldn’t be the person I couldn’t remember and that, whoever he might be, he was definitively a queue jumper, who, casting about for a point of entry, had fixed on a spot in front of my wife. Any moment the gate would open. I waited, wondering if I should be offended. The longer I waited, the more offended I could feel myself becoming, until, finally, the gate did open and I did a mean thing.
As the man made his dash, I stepped into his path and, smack, we collided. We collided so powerfully that I lost my balance and flopped awkwardly across his stomach, which somehow kept me from falling, when, without knowing how, I was in his arms. We stared at each other. We were close enough to kiss. His eyes darted between my nose and my lips. Then he laughed. It was an easy, uninhibited laugh. It was more giggle than laugh. It could have been the sound a boy makes on being tickled. I would learn to recognize that laugh—high-pitched and sometimes beyond controlling—and love it. The line surged. He was gone. I spotted him in the distance, padding down a platform.
We proceeded slowly, my wife and I, and I was, for my part, a little stunned. In the last car, we found facing seats, with a table between. I put our suitcases up on the rack and paused. The window, the light, the October slant of it. I had been here before, on this very same day of the calendar.
* * *
—
Five years ago, having celebrated our just-marriedness with an impromptu two-night honeymoon in Little Washington, a village in the Virginia countryside, we were making our way back to New York and boarded this very train. At the time, I was about to suggest to my wife of forty-eight hours that we celebrate our marriage by quitting our jobs. We were both magazine editors. I was at The New Yorker. She was at Harper’s Bazaar. I’d prepared a speech about moving to Italy, the first step in the direction of the rest of our lives. I wanted to be taught by Italians how to make their food and write about it. Couldn’t we go together? It wasn’t really a question. Jessica lived for the next chance to pack her bag, and had a mimic’s gift for languages which included, conveniently, the one they speak in Italy, which, as it happens, I couldn’t speak at all.
We never went back to being editors.
We lived in Tuscany for a year, and, somehow, I went reasonably native and, to my continuing astonishment, when I opened my mouth and uttered a thought, it came out (more or less) in Italian. In the aftermath, I wanted to “do” France. It wasn’t next on the list (as in “Then we’ll ‘do’ Japan!”). It was secretly where I had wanted to find myself for most of my adult life: in a French kitchen, somehow holding my own, having been actually “French-trained” (the enduring magic of that phrase). But I could never imagine how that might happen. Our time in Italy showed me that it didn’t take much imagining—just get yourself there, and you’ll figure it out. Besides, Jessica’s gifts for languages included, conveniently, the one they speak in France, which, by another coincidence, I also couldn’t speak.
Jessica, no longer in an office job, had also owned up to a lifelong longing involving wine, its history as ancient as food, and she seemed to have a skill, comparable to knowing a foreign language, of being able to translate what she found in her glass. I bought her a gift, a blind tasting session hosted by Jean-Luc Le Dû, a celebrated New York sommelier and wine merchant, which consisted of twelve great wines from his personal cellar, attended by fifteen people, including Jean-Luc’s own manager, who had won international awards at blind-tasting competitions. Jessica was the only one who identified all twelve wines. Jean-Luc was baffled, and they were his wines. (“Where do you work?” he asked her.) She started a tasting club at home, ten women picked by her, educated New York City professionals who all said that they “love wine but don’t know anything about it.” She signed up for a course run by the British Wine & Spirit Education Trust, the so-called WSET, with several levels of advancement culminating in a famously challenging “Diploma.” By her second class, she discovered that she was pregnant.
It was a wonderful moment. We promised ourselves that our lives would not change.
We will be gypsies, she said. We imagined a worldly infant suspended in a sling contraption.
Four weeks later, she discovered that she was pregnant with twins, boys, the future George and Frederick. This, too, was a wonderful moment, doubly so, but we gave up on the idea of our lives’ not changing. In fact, we panicked (a little).
* * *
—
The train pulled out. Baltimore, the first stop, was half an hour away. What we’d planned to discuss, what Jessica wanted to discuss, was why, after three years, my French plan hadn’t been realized.
It wasn’t a mystery, was it? Weren’t their names George and Frederick?
It also wasn’t so complicated—I needed a kitchen—and I hadn’t found one yet. Once in a kitchen, I would pick up the skills.