B004MMEIOG EBOK (2 page)

Chapter 2
‘Walking Backwards for Christmas’

I’m walking backwards for Christmas,

Across the Irish Sea,

I’m walking backwards for Christmas,

It’s the only thing for me.

I’ve tried walking sideways,

And walking to the front,

But people just look at me,

And say it’s a publicity stunt.

SPIKE MILLIGAN, 1956

M
y first memorable walk of the year came both early and without notice. To be precise, at 3:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

Paris under snow

Although, after eating and sex, walking is Paris’s preferred activity, it is
never
practiced on Christmas Eve. The hostility to being on foot on December 24 is reflected in the national rejection of Father Christmas. Traditionally, it’s not
Père Noël
but the baby Jesus who distributes gifts, and he doesn’t need to trudge around as I was about to do, in parka, gloves, fur hat, and insulated boots.

O
utside
,
the temperature hovered around zero. Snow had ceased to fall, but an even gray tone in the sky promised more soon. One could almost hear the crackle as slush hardened into ice. Not that the risk of slippery sidewalks concerned us. Any walking that evening would begin at our front door and end a few meters away at the car parked at the curb. After that, we’d be on the freeway, plowed and gritted for the annual migration. Like Thanksgiving in the United States, Christmas was the time for bonding, for renewal, for reconciliation.
Nobody
stayed in Paris for Christmas.

For the last month, I’d been planning and preparing for Christmas, and in particular for the family dinner.

When I married my French wife, Marie-Dominique—known to everyone as Marie-Do—I’d been too bedazzled to quiz her about her family. Only after the wedding and the announcement that she was pregnant did she reveal that they had A Secret. None of them could cook.

“But . . . that’s impossible!” I protested. “Cooking for the French is like . . .” I searched for a comparison. “. . . the English forming queues. Australians liking the beach. Americans eating popcorn at the movies. It’s . . . genetic.”

But after a few meals with my new in-laws, there was no avoiding the truth. Academics, artists, writers, and, in my wife’s case, filmmakers, none could make a mug of instant coffee without reading the directions on the jar. They’d faked it with the help of Picard, the gourmet frozen-food chain, and the local
traiteurs
, who sell ready-made dishes that need only to be reheated. But now the secret was out. And when it became known I could cook, they designated me family chef.

During the year, this mostly involved fielding queries like “Is ‘a clove of garlic’ the whole bulb or just a segment?” and “What does it mean, ‘separate the eggs’? They’re already separate.” Christmas dinner, however, was a different matter. Traditionally eaten in the house of my mother-in-law, Claudine, in the village of Richebourg, one hundred kilometers west of Paris, it wasn’t so much a meal as a ritual, with the entire clan, sometimes as many as twenty, gathered at the long table. I expressed exasperation at being saddled with this task, but secretly I relished the compliment of being asked. For someone raised in an Australian country town, to cook dinner for the cream of French society in a sixteenth-century chateau represented a fantasy fulfilled.

The family was already converging on Richebourg as Marie-Do and I got ready to leave. The trunk and backseat of our car overflowed with gifts, cooking equipment, and everything necessary to feed eighteen people—everything but the
confiture d’oignons
I was stirring on top of the stove.

“Smells good,” said Marie-Do.

The apartment had filled with the tart-sweet aroma of a kilo of finely chopped red onions braised with sugar, spices, and red wine vinegar.

Christmas dinner normally began with oysters, eight dozen of which we’d ordered from Yves Papin of La Tremblade, the best in France and supplier to the president himself. But some guests didn’t like oysters, so we’d made an adjustment. My brother-in-law, Jean-Marie, offered a
foie gras
, cooked and preserved at his family farm in the Dordogne. Rather than serve it with just the traditional dry rye toast, I’d made
confiture d’oignons
. Its blend of tart and sweet undercut the fat of the liver, emphasizing its luxurious creaminess.

“And I used your vinegar,” I said.

The stoneware vinegar bottle was Marie-Do’s sole culinary contribution to the house. Into it, she emptied the few trickles of red wine left after a dinner party. Inside, the
mère,
or mother, a gel-like colony of bacteria, transformed it into an aromatic vinegar. This bottle, with the
mère
already inside, came to Paris in 1959 with Aline, the housekeeper hired to cook for Marie-Do, her young sister, and their widowed mother. Before that, who knew? Perhaps it had provided
vinaigrette
for a salad eaten by Napoleon
.
Julius Caesar’s cook might have used it to make that Roman favorite
In Ovis Apalis,
mixing vinegar, honey, and pine nuts as a sauce for hard-boiled eggs. As long as you kept it fed, the
mère
was immortal.

I let the confiture cool and packed it into two large jars. They exactly filled the last of the carryalls. Unlike other Christmases, which often verged on panic, this one, I’d vowed, would be properly organized.

We lowered the central heating, switched on the answering machine, and shut off our computers. We made sure that Scotty, our cat, had food and water, that his litter tray was clean, and that, if the mood took him, he could slip onto the balcony to see if snow really was as nasty as he remembered. Staring crossly through the glass at the white-blanketed terrace, he reminded me of the cat in a novel by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. Called Petronius Arbiter, he prowls from door to door, looking for the one he remembers from August that opens onto a warm and snow-less landscape—the door into summer.

We stepped out onto the landing. Marie-Do put her key into the door.

It wouldn’t turn.

She jiggled it.

The lock still refused to budge. And the key refused to come out, no matter how hard she tugged.

We went back inside and tried from the other side.

Solid.

It was a good lock. Heavy metal, with a deadbolt, and two bars that slid into slots in the floor and the door frame. In fact, it was
too
good. Because of a security feature, if we closed the door with the key inside, we wouldn’t be able to open it again. We couldn’t leave, but couldn’t stay either.

“If you want to see God laugh,” they say, “tell him your plans.”

Chapter 3
What a Man’s Got to Do

To this day, someone will say “Hemingway didn’t seem to have much of an education.” By this, I suppose, the academic critic means Ernest hadn’t taken his own formal academic drill. But as the philosophers themselves are aware, the artist kind of knowing, call it intuition if you will, could yield a different kind of knowledge, beyond rational speculation.

MORLEY CALLAGHAN,
That Summer in Paris

Y
ou can blame Hemingway for what happened next.

Well, not
personally
. He had, after all, been dead since 1961. But his celebrations of hunting, shooting, fishing, bullfighting, and war popularized the conviction that a writer should be a person of action as well as ideas. Numerous authors, inspired by his stories of safaris, boxing matches, and battle, had been gored, shot, knocked insensible, or (not least) left with horrific hangovers trying to prove they were his equal.

I was no different. When I visualized Hemingway, I never thought of him hunched over a notepad in a rented room, working on “Hills Like White Elephants.” What I remembered was Josef Karsh’s stern portrait taken at the time of his 1954 Nobel Prize. The bearded face above the roll-neck sweater radiated determination. Steven Spielberg, refining his concept of the extraterrestrial E.T., clipped the forehead and nose from Karsh’s image, added the eyes of poet Carl Sandburg and the mouth of Albert Einstein, and pasted them onto the photograph of a baby’s face to create an archetype of patient compassion and resolve.
That
Hemingway would never be defeated by a jammed door lock.

Rummaging in our toolbox, I rehearsed how his terse prose might describe what I was about to do.
He took the pliers in his right hand. The metal was cold. They were good pliers. They had been made for a purpose, and now they were to be put to work. . .

Watched nervously by Marie-Do
(What do women know of such matters? These are the things of men)
, I clamped the pliers onto the end of the key and pulled.

Nothing.

A twist and a yank.

Same result.

Marie-Do disappeared into the office. “I found the manufacturer’s website,” she called. “It says that, if the key is a duplicate, it might not have been cut correctly. It could have a ‘fish hook’ that stops it from being removed.”

“So how
do
you remove it?”

There was a pause. “It says, ‘Unscrew the whole lock and take it to a local locksmith.’ ”

“That’s
very
useful.”

“What about the locksmith on rue Dauphine. He might still be open.”

“On Christmas Eve?”

Just then, the phone rang. It was my sister-in-law. “Haven’t you left yet?”she inquired, sounding a little edgy. “The farmer just delivered the geese. When do you think you’ll get here?”

I passed the phone to Marie-Do, who put her hand over the mouthpiece and gave me the why-are-you-still-here? look.

“I’m going, I’m going!” I said.

Chapter 4
Heat

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

ROBERT FROST,
“Fire and Ice”

I
half-walked, half-skated down rue de l’Odéon, avoiding the worst sheets of ice and grabbing handholds where I could. Bad enough to be locked in; worse with a broken leg.

Mentally, I forgave Hemingway. It wasn’t his fault. In fact, that image of physical ease and technical competence was an illusion. In real life, Ernie was a klutz. After being blown up and wounded during World War I
,
the events that inspired
A Farewell to Arms
, he spent the rest of his life putting himself and others in harm’s way. He barely survived some close calls running the bulls in Pamplona. In a couple of Paris boxing matches, he was knocked about by portly but nimble Canadian writer Morley Callaghan, admittedly helped by some inept timekeeping by Scott Fitzgerald—not the man any sane person would have chosen for that task.

In World War II, cruising off Cuba with the drinking pals of his “Crook Factory,” he threatened the safety of everyone but the German submariners they were supposed to be hunting. The army kept him out of Europe as long as it could, but once it let him in, he played soldier all over northern France, getting into scrapes from which a friendly general had to extricate him. (Hemingway repaid him with the ambiguous compliment of making him the hero of his first postwar novel
Across the River and Into the Trees
, a notable flop.) After that, he was burned in a bushfire, smashed his knee in a 1945 car accident, and, on safari in Africa, survived two plane crashes, from which he never fully recovered.

A less life-threatening but typical accident took place in March 1928, when he lived just round the corner, on rue Ferou. After a heavy night at the Dingo Bar, he lurched to his toilet, which was equipped with an elevated cistern, and yanked the wrong chain, bringing down a skylight on his head. Archibald MacLeish applied toilet paper and drove him to the American Hospital in Neuilly, where they put nine stitches into a gash. To see him, grinning and bandaged like a veteran, posing for photos the following week in front of Shakespeare and Company, you’d think he’d fought off an armed gang with his bare hands. But, as one critic commented, employing an appropriate
corrida
metaphor, Ernest worked very close to the bull.

The end of our street, where it intersects with boulevard Saint-Germain, was normally the busiest in the area, but today its cafés and restaurants were shuttered and empty. In the bank at the corner, the
distributeurs—
ATMs—all flashed red. Emptied overnight, they’d remain so until next week, since the entire staff was on holiday, including the people who refilled them. In the métro, some trains would still be running but with few passengers. And nobody would be staffing the
guichets
, or ticket offices. You’d be expected to buy your tickets from the machines, feed them through the barrier, and find your own way to the platform. Soon, the métro would be like this all year round, not just at Christmas. The new lines are driverless. Computers open and close the doors and deliver us to our destination shrink-wrapped in technology.

A bandaged Hemingway with Sylvia Beach and her staff

I paused halfway across the boulevard. On an ordinary day, traffic would have mown me flat. But along the avenue, though every light was green and I could see at least five blocks in each direction, not a vehicle moved. Snow softened the buildings’ outlines and misted the air. It leached out color, leaving a landscape by Whistler. To my eye, led block after block by the perspective of those six-story buildings and their meticulously aligned balconies, the boulevard embodied rationality and intellect. Let others gather at Notre Dame, Saint Sulpice, Saint Peter’s in Rome, or King’s College Chapel in Cambridge to acknowledge the existence of a higher order.

My church was here.

W
ithin thirty minutes, I was back home, unsuccessful.

“Closed,” I said, shaking the snow off my hat.

“What now?”

At this point, I had The Idea.

To open a jar, one ran hot water over the lid, which made it expand. So obviously, if we heated the exterior of the lock cylinder, it would also expand, releasing the key.

We didn’t own a blowtorch, but I had a butane torch, used for melting the sugar on crème brûlée
.
It roared satisfyingly as I lit it up, producing a clear blue flame.

“It won’t set everything on fire?” Marie-Do asked dubiously.

“Like what? The lock housing is steel.”

Turning the flame on the lock, I gripped the key with our pliers and tugged so that the moment the cylinder expanded, I could extract it.

This didn’t happen.

Instead, the lock casing, which clearly
wasn’t
steel, softened and tore, like uncooked pastry. Not only the key but the whole cylinder came loose, with the key still inside. It left an irregular, smoking hole.

Hemingway wrote, “A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” For the moment, I couldn’t recall his thoughts about making a complete ass of oneself.

A
n hour later, I stood in the empty apartment, nursing a mug of coffee and staring out over the snow-covered roofs.

Marie-Do was on her way to Richebourg in the car, carrying what food we’d already prepared. The question of cooking the geese remained to be resolved.

As to the lock, it was Marie-Do who floated the option that we’d shunned so far.

“There’s the card on the fridge.”

We all have such cards. Headed “Useful Numbers,” they materialize on doormats every few weeks. Just a list of numbers useful in an emergency: ambulance, fire service, hospitals. At first glance, they seem a generous gesture—until halfway down the list, where the nature of the services becomes less public-spirited. “Poison Hotline” is followed by “Blocked toilet?” “Water leak?” “No electricity?” and “Broken door lock?” In each case, it assures us help is at hand. But nobody
ever
rings these 24/7 plumbers, glaziers, or locksmiths, since their prices are extortionate. In France, and probably in the rest of the world, to employ these sharks was to mark yourself forever as a dumbbell—in Parisian slang, a
plouc.

Calling the number, I half expected a recording advising us to call back in January. Instead, someone picked up on the second ring and promised to be there in an hour.

While I waited, I thought about California, where I’d lived before I came to France. Had this happened there, a neighbor would have fixed it in ten minutes. There was much I didn’t miss about the United States, but one thing that I did miss was the American skill with
things
: the legendary “good old American know-how.”

The foundation of this was Shop class. I never learned what constituted Shop, except that being good at it implied you were hopeless at everything else. Neither schools in Australia, where I was born and raised, nor in Britain, where I’d lived for many years, offered anything so practical. (It’s conceivable that some male students at British or Australian schools learned such skills in other ways. I just
assumed
the tough kids spent recess behind the toilet block smoking and comparing the length of their penises. Maybe they were actually exchanging information on how to cut dovetails and thread pipe.) But because of Shop, most U.S. drivers carried jumper cables and spare fan belts, and a toolbox was standard in every home.

“
They
wouldn’t melt a lock with a cooking torch,” I said to Scotty. He mewed, and rubbed my leg. He probably only wanted food, but I took it for consolation.