Mediterranean Summer (8 page)

I climbed up into my top bunk, turned on my side, and looked out of the cabin at the dimly lit crew quarters. Over a hundred yards of heavy anchor chains would run through steel tubes in the middle of the fo’c’sle and into lockers under the floor. I imagined how much space would be left after everyone brought their gear on board. The open hatch on deck let in the evening chill and the briny smell of seawater. It reminded me that one thing high and low alike would be forced to share on our voyage was the pervasive dampness that goes with living at sea.

As I lay there waiting for sleep, I focused on keeping my elbow clear of a thick iron deck beam that ran two feet above my chest. With the boat all to myself, I hoped I would get the uninterrupted night of rest I desperately needed. I knew this luxury wasn’t going to last.

Three

The One Without the Tan

Cap d’Antibes and the Estérel Coast

I
t was six-thirty in the morning, and I was on the foredeck trying to get through my daily routine of stretches and exercises. The night spent in the damp fo’c’sle had left my joints more than a little stiff, and my elbow ached from being banged against the overhead beam every time I rolled over in my bunk. Resting between sets of push-ups, my right cheek flat against the cold, dew-covered deck, I heard a greeting delivered in French-accented English.

“Welcome to
zee
pleasure dome!”

I craned my neck to identify the source of the greeting. A frazzled guy with a must-have-been-a-late-night look was standing next to me, a lit cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth, the smoke getting into his eyes. He extended a hand and introduced himself. “I am Richard Corsaire, the steward,” he announced, “but you can call me Rick.” Having lived in the States, he later told me, he found it easier for Americans to handle this short nickname than to attempt a proper pronunciation of his French name. He took a final drag from his cigarette and, while flicking the butt into the water, acknowledged my exercise routine: “Push-ups at this hour, that’s good.”

Had he intended the comment sarcastically? I couldn’t tell. So I presumed the best of intentions on his part. “It’s the only time that seems to make sense,” I said as I got on my feet. “Good to meet you. Patrick told me you’d be around today. It looks like we have our hands full to get set up.”

“I will help you, but don’t worry,” he assured me. “It won’t be all work.” He had obviously misread my concern. “I can show you the Côte d’Azur you’ve never seen!”

The idea was intriguing. It would be a few weeks before the real cruising began that would take us out of France for the rest of the summer. I had heard a great deal about the sheer opulence of this coast and its famous cities—Nice, Cannes, Monte Carlo, Saint-Tropez. I had been to parts of the Riviera over the course of my years in Europe, and the glint in Rick’s eye suggested he knew of special sensory delights lurking off the beaten path. But I had a galley to equip, I told him, and that would have to come first.

“As you wish,” he said and went below.

A couple of hours later he invited himself to go to town with me to get my kitchenwares and check out the open-air market. As we walked toward the old town along the wide quay of the yacht club, Rick could take only so much work talk before changing the topic. “Listen, let’s get this done so we can go to the beach clubs on the Cap d’Antibes.” The exclusive beach areas on the coast are like the VIP rooms at trendy nightclubs, and Rick was eager to demonstrate his easy intimacy with such places. I’m usually not one to turn down an opportunity to go to the beach, but I held my focus on why I was there. “Maybe we can go after I’m set up,” I said.

Rick wasn’t buying. “David, look where we are!” His arm swept in a wide arc. “On the French Riviera, Europe’s summer playground! The eggs can wait.”

“Don’t you have stuff to do below to get ready?” I asked him. As steward, he had the owner and guest cabins to set up and common areas to help organize and maintain. When the owners were on board, he would be server, butler, valet, and house cleaner. Beverages, floral arrangements, and laundry were also in his domain.

“Why so fast? You are too nervous,” he said as he cleaned the lenses of his sunglasses with his shirt. “The owners are not fools. They wouldn’t have hired you if you couldn’t handle the job.”

“Maybe, but I’m not taking any chances.”

Finally convinced that I intended to work at outfitting the galley
today,
with or without his help, he shrugged and said, “Okay, I will not desert you. The French shopkeepers will see the American coming and pick clean his pockets.” He wanted it understood that it was only for me that he was giving up on the idea of spending the day at Plage Keller, his favorite beach club. His body language suggested that as a Frenchman he had made a generous sacrifice for his new friend.

As we walked, Rick started to sing a jingle celebrating life in the south of France: “The women are so hot, hot, hot ’cause they make you feel good, good, good!” And he lived what he sang. Each woman we passed got a sultry “
Bonjour, madame
” or “
Bonjour, mademoiselle
” from him. I was surprised at how often he got a smile and a pleasant “
Bonjour
” in return. Or at least a saucy flip of their hair.

Even though I was tense and eager to get to work, this guy was hard to dislike. Rick was an authentic French bon vivant. A passion for la dolce vita was clearly his motivation. Curious to know what went into making him the man he was, I encouraged him to tell me about his background. He didn’t need any arm-twisting.

“I am a sailor by blood,” he explained. Born into a shipping family, he had grown up in Bordeaux and on the Atlantic coast. His father had skippered ferries from Calais across the English Channel to Dover. As soon as Rick was old enough, he went to sea, he said, to follow in his father’s footsteps as a sailor.

“I worked on one of the French America’s Cup challengers,” he added with unmistakable pride, “and had a great time in Newport, Rhode Island, then in the maxi circuit.” If there is a hierarchy among sailors who serve on yachts, those who have raced competitively on large maxis—sixty-foot, high-performance, and technologically advanced racing boats—make up the top tier. Then, as if to concede that his life had not been all highs, he told me in a confidential tone, “After that I made a big mistake. I got married.” His short marriage to an American took him to Washington, D.C., where his new in-laws owned an upscale restaurant. He promptly went to work running the dining room and learning the finer points of elegant service. “The marriage was
très mal,
but I picked up good skills. And,” he continued, “the marriage has given me a son, so it was worth it.” No false sentiment here—the mere mention of his son seemed to cause Rick to stand a little prouder. He volunteered that his ex-wife and son still lived in America.

“How did you get to
Serenity
?” I asked.

“I know Patrick for a long time. We ran into each other a few months ago, and he told me he was looking for a steward. I was working on one of the boats down the quay from us. Life got a little too wild in the Caribbean and I had to get off.” He broke stride to greet a server in an open-air café, then caught up to me. “I know these people from the inside out,” he said, referring to the owners of the mega-yachts lined up alongside
Serenity.
“They work hard, and when they are not working, they want to be made happy, to be entertained. I can take care of this for them.
Il Dottore
and
la Signora
are no different from other people around here.”

I pressed him on what he knew of our bosses. He filled me in, as much as he could, telling me that
il Dottore
had been born into moderate wealth, which he then multiplied many times over. Under his guidance, the family’s original textile business grew into one of Europe’s largest and most profitable privately held blue-chip companies. It was through his business dealings that he met
la Signora.
They had been married for many years.

“I will buy nice wine for the owners,” Rick assured me. “That will make them happy. Don’t worry. It will be easy to please them. You’ll see.”

I envied Rick’s confidence but didn’t share it. I had met the owners only once, during the job interview, and had definitely come away with the sense that they were not going to be easy to please.

Now, walking through the
old, narrow cobblestoned streets in the free commune of Safranier—a town within a town whose secessionist pride was expressed in the abundance of plants and flowers draping from overflowing window boxes—Rick and I arrived at a small but well-stocked kitchen supply store with the name Fournitures C. Quillier written across its awning. Inside, I carefully examined the copper and
inox
cookware and the large selection of professional kitchen tools they carried. How important was having the best kitchen equipment? There was no consensus among the chefs I had worked with. Bruno at Da Noi in Florence made magic using the humblest wares, while Larry at An American Place in New York never skimped on the quality of his equipment. It was Larry’s assertion that consistent results require a reliable
batterie de cuisine.

The
inox
pans were good because they were stainless steel both inside and out, making them easy to clean and resistant to corrosion from the salty air. I then found what I wanted most: a stainless set with clad layers of copper and aluminum sandwiched inside and stay-cool, ergonomically shaped handles. They would be up to the task of good heat retention and even distribution on my marine stove with low BTU’s. Because of the stainless steel interior, they would not cause food with high acidity like tomato sauce to have any off flavors. And their flanged rims around the whole circumference would make pouring sauces while under way in a rolling sea much easier.

Working from my lists, I sized the pots and sauté pans, selecting each with a capacity two sizes larger than needed. Yes, each pot would do less work than it was designed to do, but the over-sizing would help avoid spillovers when my gimbal-less stove pitched in rough seas. Rick helped by pulling from the shelves stainless bowls, strainers, and a selection of ceramic baking dishes. In addition to a food processor, I chose a nice-sized marble mortar and pestle. Given the marble fixtures in the guest heads on the boat, a little extra weight forward in the galley might even add ballast to the waterline of the boat.

Rick, once again being a true charmer, engaged the shopkeepers in a conversation about food and the good life. When they found out I was the cook on board, they gave me a couple of classic coastal French recipes, insisting that I absolutely had to have them in my repertoire if I would be sailing and cooking along the Riviera—
brandade de morue,
a whipped salt cod and potato preparation, and rouille, the rust-colored mayonnaise-like condiment for Provençal fish soup and poached seafood.

We retraced our steps to
Serenity
to drop off our purchases, a hundred pounds of nesting sauce pots, stacked sauté pans, and bags of kitchen tools. Rick came back to town with me, this time to the
marché Provençal
—Provençal market—that was set up under a long paned-glass roof supported by ornate wrought-iron columns in front of city hall in the old town. Once there I reminded him that we needed to work fast. “But first things first,” he corrected me as he filched a handful of strawberries from a stand. “You have to stay healthy,” he explained, pulling on his cigarette between bites. “It helps you party longer.”

The crowded market teemed with color, and the claylike smell of freshly picked produce was heavy in the air. Vendors greeted prospective buyers and shouted sellers’ talk to one another. The items marked
“fermier”
and
“de pays,”
which meant they were from the area, like the strawberries Rick snatched, were available from the local farmers along the center aisle.

All of a sudden I was back in the valley of the Vaucluse. Those initial Technicolor days when life in the south of France made its first impression. I’d shadow my host, Nathalie, on her daily open-air market expeditions, leaving early in the morning to go to a different market each day—Apt, L’Isle sur la Sorgue, Cavaillon, Saint-Rémy, Aix-en-Provence, Arles, and, once on a Sunday, Coustellet, where predominantly peasants and gypsies sold their goods from makeshift tables or from the backs of their little blue Piaggio Ape farm vehicles.

Those markets shared similar characteristics with the endless rows of stalls winding through the streets. Butchers, fishmongers, bakers, produce vendors, cheese sellers,
charcutiers,
and florists sold from tables, crates, baskets, and modified delivery trucks with sides that opened to reveal wonderful displays of food in long glass cases. Selling and buying were both very cordial: greetings were exchanged, choices made, quantities weighed, items wrapped, and cash paid.