Authors: John Baxter
B004MMEIOG EBOK (3 page)
First, catch your hare.
RECIPE FOR JUGGED HARE,
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management,
1861
H
ot and stuffy, the car smelled of Four-in-One and Guerlain. The oil came from the clothes of my brother-in-law, Jean-Marie, whose car it was. He restored old motorcycles as a hobby and trailed the odor in the same way that my daughter, Louise, and Jean-Marie’s daughter, Alice, bickering in the backseat, trailed perfume.
Though clearly there existed a Christmas rich in goodwill, hospitality, and tidings of comfort and joy, thanks to my problems with the front door lock we were far from it. Instead of the Rush to Beat the Rush and the Rush itself, we’d got stuck in the Rush of Those Who Decided to Wait and Miss the Rush.
A glacier of metal crept forward in centimeters. Every few seconds, sleet sloshed across the windshield to drool like freezing spit in a gelid slush down the glass. Jean-Marie’s thumb flicked the wiper control, but those few seconds showed us only the nearest cars filled with people as bored and irritated as ourselves. A man slogged past us between the cars, hands in pockets, head bowed, leaning into a storm speedily deteriorating into a blizzard. A driver whose motor had died? Someone desperate for a quiet spot to pee? Or perhaps someone not unlike myself, wandering a desolate Saint-Germain in search of a locksmith.
Was that only two hours ago?
The young locksmith had arrived within the hour and wasted no time rolling his eyes at the damage done by my torch. Before I’d finished explaining, he was unscrewing the lock.
“Is nothing,” he said in approximate English. He was Spanish, maybe, or Portuguese; naturally no Frenchman would break into his Christmas. “If you close . . .” He mimed pushing the door shut. “ . . . is not possible open again with this lock. So some people . . . you know . . . to get out . . .” He mimed hacking with an axe. My melting the lock didn’t seem quite so stupid.
“Do you know why it wouldn’t open?”
“Sure.” He pulled the door open and pointed to scratches on the lock plate. “You see here, the . . .” He groped for the French word for “burglary.” “I think . . . a
cambriolage
?”
Somebody had apparently tried to break in. All they’d done, however, was ruin the lock, probably by breaking off a fragment of metal inside.
I
n the car, my mobile rang. It was Marie-Do.
“What happened?”
“He fixed it.”
I didn’t mention what it cost—a little over $2,000. A few times as he worked, he answered calls on his cell phone and noted down addresses. Business was good. No wonder he agreed to work over Christmas. He probably spent the rest of the year in the Bahamas.
“Where are you now?” she asked.
The snow-swept darkness gave no clue. “Somewhere on the road to Richebourg. Traffic’s impossible.”
“Everyone’s arrived. We’re just setting the table. What should we do?”
“If we want to eat before midnight, the geese should go in . . .” I looked at my watch. Six o’clock. “Now.”
“I can’t cook two geese!”
“It’s not so hard. The others will help.” Even as I said it, I recognized the absurdity of this. My in-laws could burn water. “If I have to, I can talk you through it.”
Marie-Do asked uneasily, “They don’t still have their . . .
stuff
?”
(In one of his comic books about the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Gilbert Shelton has the dumbest brother, Fat Freddy, roast a chicken.
“This is good chicken,” say his brothers. “What did you stuff it with?”
“Didn’t need stuffing,” says Freddy. “It wasn’t empty.”)
“Their stuff has been removed. Promise.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll get a piece of paper.”
“What for?”
“The recipe.”
And for the first time that day I really began to worry.
Non-cooks have a touching faith in cookbooks. They think that if you have a recipe, it’s just a question of following the directions. But a cookbook is like a sex manual: if you need to consult it, you aren’t doing it right.
“You don’t need a recipe.” I searched for a phrase that would reassure her. “They’re oven-ready.”
“Really?” I could feel her suspicion.
“Light the ovens, shove in the stuffing, put one goose in each oven, close the door.”
“But . . .”
“Done. I promise you.”
“But what about the potatoes . . . ?”
“Boil them for ten minutes, then put them in the fat under the geese. Simple.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t wait . . . ?”
So that we can eat at 2 a.m.?
“Absolutely not. These are foolproof. Just do as I say. Ring me if you have a problem. But you won’t.”
I put the phone in my pocket.
“Anybody know some good prayers?”
O
f course it came out all right in the end.
We arrived at Richebourg just as the geese were ready to come out of the oven. There are better ways of supervising a dinner than on a mobile phone with a failing battery while stuck in a freeway traffic jam during a blizzard, but our success was proof that it could be done. Fortunately, the birds were so fat that they lubricated themselves and didn’t suffer from being neither basted nor turned. The potatoes had roasted perfectly in the inch-deep fat that collected under them. We took the birds out, set them aside to rest before carving, and put the carrot and spinach
gratins
into the ovens to warm. At the table, plates were set out for
foie gras
, with dishes of
confiture d’oignons
and cranberry sauce, another U.S. innovation smuggled past the prejudice against foreign foods
,
and for the Pepin oysters Jean-Marie was busy opening. The French flair for compromise and improvisation had seen us through.
To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o’clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do.
RAY BRADBURY,
“The Pedestrian”
A
stuffy car at dead of night in a storm of freezing sleet had offered few opportunities for conversation. Even the radio fell silent, the signal of TSF 89.9, the all-jazz station, fraying at the limit of its range until we wearied of the occasional scraps of Miles and Coltrane and clicked it off. That left nothing to do but think.
Maybe it was the frustration of our immobility, but I thought about walking.
When I arrived in Paris, walking was the furthest thing from my mind. Two years in Los Angeles had persuaded me that going anywhere on foot wasn’t just unusual but downright unnatural, even illegal.
Before that, I’d lived in England, in a real East Anglian village, East Bergholt, where one walked as a matter of course. On Sundays, my friend and I would cross the fields behind our cottage, take the track past the pond where John Constable painted
The Hay Wain
, and follow the towpath along the River Stour to the village of Dedham and a pub called The Sun. Years later, I heard this stroll described in a BBC documentary as “for three hundred years an integral part of the English experience.” This was embarrassing. I should have paid more attention.
Even during the week, I walked. I’d often stroll a mile into the center of our village where one all-purpose shop doubled as market and post office. On the way back with a bag of groceries, I’d pause at one of its many pubs for a beer or cut across the fields to visit illustrator and novelist James Broom-Lynne, who never needed much excuse to be distracted. He’d designed all the covers for the twelve-volume series of novels by Anthony Powell called
A Dance to the Music of Time
, and some of Powell’s amused weariness seemed to have rubbed off.
The pedestrian-free streets of Los Angeles
Occasionally, I caught a bus to the nearest large town, Colchester, or to the railway station at Manningtree and thence a train to London, where I saw my literary agent or reviewed some book or film for the BBC
.
I assumed I could continue more or less the same way in California.
I was wrong.
Ray Bradbury’s 1951 short story “The Pedestrian” should have alerted me
.
It’s set in a future Los Angeles where nobody walks, least of all at night. They huddle inside, behind locked doors—not out of fear so much as inertia. One man defies this custom. Passing house after house with drawn blinds, he reflects on what lies within: “tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multi-colored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.”
One night, a robot police car halts by him.
“What are you doing out?” it asks.
“Walking. Just walking.”
“Walking where? For what?”
“Walking for air. Walking to see.”
The answers condemn him. Who but a madman would walk for pleasure? He’s hauled off for brainwashing at the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.
Veteran Avenue, where I lived in LA, is a long, quiet thoroughfare of low-rise apartment buildings that terminates in the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. Next to UCLA is the square mile of stores, cinemas, churches, and markets known locally as Westwood Village. And a village was a village, whether in Los Angeles or Suffolk. If you measured such things in distance, a walk to the East Bergholt store and to Westwood were the same.
I tried it one autumn afternoon just after I arrived.
It was eerie.
Back in East Bergholt, particularly on the outskirts, houses were scattered, even isolated. A stretch of woodland might separate one from the next. No wonder the English village was such a popular setting for murder mysteries. Even so, on my walks, I’d often encounter another pedestrian, or a man trimming his hedge, and though we didn’t know one another, we would exchange a nod or a “Good afternoon.”
But here in Los Angeles, on a street lined with apartment buildings, presumably all occupied, I saw no one. Worse, I sensed few people had stepped on this sidewalk in a year. In doorways seldom if ever opened, supermarket catalogs and menus for Chinese restaurants had gathered in drifts, yellowed and wrinkled by sun and rain. Crabgrass insinuated itself through gaps between concrete slabs, themselves dusted with grit like sand in a pharaoh’s tomb. Looking back, I saw my footprints outlined. Beyond well-tended lawns, neat signs on sticks poked up at the edge of the flower beds. In England, they would have read
Begonia acerifolia
or
Paeonia abchasica
. Here they announced:
WARNING! PROTECTED BY HIGH-TECH ARMED RESPONSE
.
On that first walk, I reached Westwood on foot but returned by bus, and when, shortly after, British screenwriter Troy Kennedy-Martin announced he was “leaving this bleeding town for good” and offered to sell me his car, I jumped at it. The
cinéaste
in me was intrigued by driving a vehicle formerly owned by the man who wrote one of the classic car-chase films,
The Italian Job
, and dreamed up its Mini Cooper pursuit around Turin
.
But mostly I craved escape from the sidewalks of LA and the paranoia of being a pedestrian.
This being Hollywood, the sale took more negotiations than a remake of
Gone With the Wind
. Finally, however, Troy, having given up his apartment, moved in with a producer friend for his last week in town. Booked on an early flight to New York, and thence to London, he still needed the car to get to the airport. So we agreed I’d take a cab to his friend’s house, drive him to LAX, and keep the car afterward.
In car-owning LA, cabs are uncommon, particularly at 4:00 a.m. The driver who collected me in the velvety darkness kept the bulletproof plastic screen locked down and shot me the occasional suspicious glance in the rearview mirror. As we pulled up at the address Troy gave me, our headlights washed over an imposing stone entrance and cast-iron gates. Beyond, a gravel drive led up to the residence. Obviously he was one of the producers who made money. Or perhaps he just maintained the illusion by stretching his credit cards, which in California acquire almost infinite elasticity. As one particular billboard advertised along Sunset, with their card you could
SEE A MOVIE—OR MAKE ONE
.
Only the width of the drive separated the portico of the front door from the guest house, where I knew Troy was staying.
“Just wait here,” I told the driver. “My friend said he’d come out.”
He switched off the motor but left the lights on. The only sound was the
tick-tick-tick
of the engine block contracting in the chill.
A few seconds later, the mansion’s front door opened, and Troy stepped out. He carried a toilet bag and a towel but was otherwise naked. Wisps of steam wafted from his body as, pink as a new-boiled shrimp, he tiptoed across the drive, pausing in the headlights to peer at us and give a “won’t be a minute” wave.
A moment’s thought would have provided the obvious explanation—finding his own shower broken, he’d used one in the house—but the driver didn’t hesitate.
“Fifty bucks!” His voice cracked with panic.
I’d barely passed the bills through the safety screen before the door locks popped open. An instant later, I stood alone, watching his taillights dwindle into the dark.
This was my Hollywood Moment—that instant when a new arrival discards his former personality and reemerges as a character in the collaborative screenplay that is life in Los Angeles. Survivors swap such anecdotes, like war stories. Richard Rayner, author of
The Cloud Sketcher
and
Los Angeles Without a Map
, had just arrived from London in 1992, in the midst of the Rodney King riots, when
Granta
editor Bill Buford called.
“Get down there,” he ordered. “I want a firsthand report.”
Watching on TV as mobs burned and looted, Rayner demanded, “Do you want me to get
killed
?”
Buford hardly needed to think. “Not killed,” he said. “
Wounded
would be good.”
Standing alone in the dark of Bel Air, the smell of burning rubber mixing with the cloying sweetness of night-blooming jasmine, I felt the same synthesis of exhilaration and threat.
There is a standard phrase for moments like this, often employed with a rueful shake of the head. Mentally, I used it now.
Only in Los Angeles. . .
