Chez Moi Read online

  ‘Good,’ I say with a smile. ‘Very good, even. It’s weird. It’s going better than I hoped. I used to have a salon de thé in the Seventh Arrondissement. It was too tiring but, my God, we made a lot of money!’

  I fan myself with my hand as if feeling the heat from this past - fictitious - fortune.

  ‘In the Seventh Arrondissement?’ Vincent says, impressed.

  Don’t let him ask me the name of the street.

  ‘Yup, near Invalides.’

  I’m such a daredevil.

  ‘I don’t really like it round there,’ he says sulkily and I remember he has his reputation for pernicketiness to live up to.

  ‘You’re right. The customers were horrendous. Here they’re much more… much more…’

  I’m struggling to find the words because my customers are so few and far between it would be difficult to define them.

  ‘They’re more like family,’ he announces.

  ‘That’s it!’

  And a brilliant idea suddenly seeds itself in my mind. But I let it get away. I don’t have time to deal with it straight away, it’ll just have to come back later. It’s the eleventh day since I opened and things aren’t going well at all. There are leftovers piling up in the fridge, I’m chucking out shoulders of beef, binning leeks, throwing away tomatoes. Every time I lean over the bin my conscience is streaked by the whip marks of guilt. I feel as if someone’s watching me, and they’re not happy. This threatening presence might just be my own shadow; like when you frighten yourself walking through an empty house at dusk, glimpsing the white of an eye in a mirror. It’s your own face that has appeared in the mirror, but by the time you realize this your blood has already run cold. It could be that this critical eye watching me is my own, it could be that the courtroom in which my trial is being held is my own conscience, my poor whipped conscience. But then, standing facing Vincent who recycles his rotting flowers by giving them to me, a second brilliant idea suddenly comes to me. This man’s doing a lot for me, I tell myself. He’s giving me inspiration. He’s my muse. I get the feeling Vincent wants to ask me about my private life. He would love to know, for example, whether I’m married. Single women don’t make him very comfortable and there’s nothing odd about that - they’re bad for his business.

  ‘And you’ve reinvested it all in… in your…’

  Why’s he having such a struggle calling Chez moi a restaurant? If people have trouble identifying this as somewhere to eat, where you pay for food, it’ll never take off. It’s true I don’t have a sign. It’s true it doesn’t say ‘restaurant’ on the front, or ‘cafe-bar’ or ‘brasserie’. It doesn’t even say Chez moi, I haven’t had the time, or the ladder or the paint. But I do have a big window with the menu written on a slate and, just behind it, tables, chairs and a moleskin banquette and, right at the back, the dazzling nickel of my percolator. Shit, I think. That’s it. It’s as stupid as that: people don’t realize I’ve opened a restaurant. Oh, Vincent, Vincent, you’re such a help to me!

  ‘In my restaurant, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, well, in your - erm - business.’

  ‘No I put all the money from the sale of the salon de thé into the Stock Market. I felt happier taking out a loan to buy this business,’ I say, to impress him.

  ‘Clever’, he says softly, sketching a wink.

  I’m beginning to like my new personality, that’s one of the difficulties with being so adaptable: any set-up will do. I don’t feel cramped in a businesswoman’s smart shoes. I have a sudden urge to talk to him about my family, the family that would suit my new personality: I would have a lawyer husband, five children - yes, it turns out we’re Catholic (quite modern, granted, but we do insist on certain values). It would be a bit of a scrape, what with the holes in my apron and the scuffing at the bottom of my cords. And because of my face too, which - I’m well aware - looks more like a squaw who’s been around the block a bit or a gipsy on an assignment to infiltrate the ranks than some pious stalwart of the PTA. Adaptability and compulsive lying don’t make good bedfellows, contrary to what you might think. For a compulsive liar the pleasure isn’t just in catching out the person they’re talking to, it also draws on the fibber’s own astonishment at believing their fabrications themselves. With me there are no surprises. Whether I’m one thing or the other, it couldn’t matter less.

  There’s no coffee left in our cups. We can’t pretend to drink one last mouthful.

  ‘Do you like reading?’ Vincent asks me.

  He could have driven a knife into my heart and the pain wouldn’t have been more acute. I clench my jaw, don’t say anything. Can’t say anything.

  He gets up and casts an eye over the room.

  ‘It’s unusual,’ he says, ‘to have books in a… in a… Have you read all of them?’ he asks, taking one of the thirty-three volumes I’ve lined up on a shelf opposite the banquette.

  ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther,’ he intones. ‘That can’t be much fun. And what’s this, The Wild Palms? Is that English or German? How many languages do you speak? Ah, now, this is more me, Kingdoms of Elfin, have you read The Hobbit? I see you’ve got some children’s books, Alice in Wonderland, I think I must have read that when I was little. It was a talking book. Do you remember talking books? They’re useful for children who don’t like reading; and adults too, but you wouldn’t have that problem. Still, it’s quite surprising in a…’

  He’s going to mess everything up. If he opens one and starts reading, breathing into it, tainting the lovely smell of old paper with that foul stench in his mouth… but no. He isn’t that curious and, in fact, he’s very careful. Don’t let’s forget he deals in flowers. He sells living things, ones that die very easily too. He asked me whether I like reading, but he couldn’t care less about the answer and that’s just as well because it would take me too long to give one and he wouldn’t be back in time to open his shop. I know I’m safe not saying anything, he’s still got plenty to say. He’s perfectly capable of producing enough little remarks to punctuate the ten minutes till he has to leave quite comfortably. I let him get on with it. I let him talk. And, while he does, I think of one of my precious books, one that isn’t on the shelf, it didn’t come with me, I’ve lost it and I could almost cry if I didn’t secretly believe it will come back to me one day. Someone will bring it back to me, a messenger, an envoy from the past, in the last act, almost at the end, like in a Shakespeare play. I couldn’t buy this book again because I don’t know what it’s called or who it’s by. You think that’s odd. Yes, especially as I’ve read it several times. It’s a problem I have. Neurological. Neurological that is, not psychological (that’s a terrible word, it really is). I’m absolutely hopeless with book titles. I get all the authors confused. Just then, for example, I mentioned a Shakespeare play but it could be that the one I was thinking of was by Molière or Ibsen. I can only cope with the thirty-three volumes of my nomadic library. The rest is just a great heap, a muddle and, in my eyes, the site of all beauty. The book I’m thinking about, while Vincent explains the relative merits of slot-in record players and the sort with an arm, the book I’ve lost is a philosophical treatise. My favourite chapter is about dogs. In it the author explains that dogs are not animals. According to him, or her (I don’t know what sex authors are in the same way I don’t know their names), dogs are a concept. A Doberman is not much like a Cocker Spaniel which shares few characteristics with a Chihuahua; a Saint-Bernard can meet a Pekingese and, theoretically, they can mate, but does that ever happen and would it be a good thing? Because, although zoologically they belong to the same species, in practical terms it’s blindingly obvious they’re not made for each other. The author went on to say how amazed he (or she) was that his three-year-old daughter (the tendency to mix personal life with reasoning makes me incline towards an Anglo-Saxon writer) could always recognize a dog when she saw one in the street, even though the animals she pointed at so enthusiastically - delighted by an opportunity to display her combined mastery of la
nguage and categorization - didn’t look anything like each other. If a cat appeared, even a big beefy one, she would not be fooled. If a pony turned up, even the smallest of its lineage, smaller at the wither than a Great Dane, she would not cry ‘Dog! Dog!’ She knew. Even if they don’t bark, have their ears trimmed so they prick up, or are bundled into miniature anoraks to protect them from inclement weather, dogs maintain their conceptual integrity. A thought which, although confused, really bothers me in the context of the indiscernibility of my establishment. Vincent can’t say I’ve opened a restaurant. He doesn’t have a word to describe the place we’re in, and it makes me feel like a dog which doesn’t fall into the concept, the only dog that three year-olds sometimes mistake for a bear or a cat. I don’t understand how I could have created such an awkward situation.

  I wonder exactly when I realized I would have to work much harder than before to carry on living. Just living. I had always imagined, I have no idea why, that our existence was shaped like a mountain. Childhood, adolescence and early adulthood corresponded to the upward climb. Then, at forty or fifty, the descent began, a vertiginous one, of course, towards death. This idea, which I think is fairly common, is quite false. As I am discovering a little more clearly every day. It all starts with the descent, feel-wheeling, no effort required. We have all the time in the world to look at the scenery and enjoy the smells - that’s why childhood smells stay with us.

  The real slope only appears later, and we take a good while to recognize it for what it is: a hard climb with the same outcome as the steep drop we all imagined we would be projected into at top speed. And you wonder, one autumn evening, with your hands in a bucket wringing out the floor cloth before dragging it - is this the fourth or fifth time today? - over the filthy kitchen floor: how come sorrow is as heavy, lumpen and impenetrably black as an anvil? You wring out that grey rag which has picked up baby sick, their pee, spilt tomato sauce, wine, birthday champagne, thousands of droplets from a water fight enjoyed by some children who couldn’t bear the heat, and that horrible pavement grey which everyone takes home. You wring out that poor rag which has seen so much, and it’s your heart and your liver and your stomach that contort, spreading acrid thickened blood through your veins, blood which - if you could see it - you’d expect to be the same colour as the filthy water in the pail. Sadness wells up and you’d drown in it if there weren’t things to do, letters to post, bills to pay, holiday time to allow for. We all know that if we don’t put our lives together as we go along no one else will do it for us.

  I remember a cartoon from my childhood, called La Linea, I think. It was my favourite programme. It featured a little man in profile who was depicted by a line which came up from the ground, traced round the contours of his body and head, then went back down to the ground again, so that everything was jumbled up in the same line: the character, his setting, the horizon. The little man walked along, humming and mumbling quite happily and suddenly the line, the line drawing him, would stop two paces in front of him. And he would cry out in near gobbledegook tinged with an Italian accent, ‘Hang on, why isn’t there a line here?’. Quite often he would fall down the precipice, unravelling like unfinished knitting, screaming, ‘Aaaaaaah!’. Sometimes he would climb back up. He even occasionally managed to form the path in front of him by using some that he’d already walked over. He was the human equivalent of a train that has to lay down its own tracks every day. The adult human, it goes without saying, the human in the throes of that exhausting climb towards oblivion. One day that’s what happens: you end up, like LaLinea, with nothing in front of you and there’s no one to blame. You’re horrified not to have seen it coming, incensed that no one’s doing anything about it. ‘Hang on, why isn’t there a line here?’ you ask as you wring out the floor cloth. There isn’t a line because that was false too, that was all a dirty trick too. If we want to get on, just following the road isn’t good enough, we have to spend our every moment covering it with the unctuous Tarmac of our hopes and dreams, tracing it out in our minds, striving to anticipate the inevitable corners and bumpy patches. Sometimes, when things are going well, when by some miracle we’ve managed to get a little way ahead with this terrifying work of art, we enjoy a little respite and it all goes smoothly. We might even start thinking the worst of it is over, that from now on everything will be all right. We’re so naive and our memories are so short that we forget the ground ahead of us was put together by our own hands and our own minds - always so quick to imagine all sorts of things. We glide along gently until the next hole, and then peer down it in dismay. I haven’t got the strength any more, we think, and I deserve better than this, it’s about time someone helped me, it’s about time there was a hand to guide mine. And all around there are nothing but arms swinging aimlessly. Everyone’s tired. Husbands, wives, friends, everyone’s had enough at the same time and that’s when - but only if we’re very lucky, only if we’re not afraid or if we’re mad enough to pounce on the furtive bait - that’s when love comes along. And then it’s no longer Tarmac we throw into the void, it’s a suspension bridge opening the road up to infinity.

  This evening my brother has invited me to a restaurant. Charles, my brother, is a good man, everyone says so and it’s true. He has nothing but good qualities: he’s calm, sensitive, trustworthy, funny, inventive and - whatever the situation and wherever he is - he always feels comfortable. I sometimes think he’s like a version of myself that went right. When I was a child he irritated me because he never got annoyed. I would foam at the mouth, rage and scream, drum my fists and sob. Not him: he smiled, that mysterious smile perched at the top of his long neck like an unfurled sail. He’s four years younger than me, but I think he seems so much younger. He rang me this morning just after Vincent left.

  ‘It wouldn’t by any chance be your day off today, would it?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t have a day off.’

  ‘Exactly. Seeing as you don’t have one, we can make it whenever we like. If a whole day seems a bit much, let’s just say it’s your evening off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to take you out to a restaurant.’

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t even come to the launch of mine.’

  ‘I was in Toronto.’

  My brother travels, a lot, and very well. He doesn’t get sea-sick and isn’t affected by jet lag. He never talks about it, doesn’t boast about it. I only know these admirable details because I’ve travelled with him in the past.

  ‘And now you’re home,’ I say, ‘so you ring me because I’m at your beck and call. You just have to ring and I come running, I even shut up my restaurant. I’m about to go bankrupt, you know.’

  ‘Exactly. One evening off isn’t going to change anything. I’ll come and pick you up.’

  ‘On your motorbike?’

  ‘On my motorbike.’

  I’m the elder but he’s in charge because he’s more intelligent than me. That’s just how the cards were dealt, very early on. Even as a baby he impressed me. He was placid and did everything babies are supposed to do with bewildering skill. He ate well, slept well and made delightful comforting little utterances. I would look deep into his eyes, my heart constricted with loathing. His lead-dark irises reflected my image and, as I moved closer to get a better look at myself, he would reach out his hands, take hold of my cheeks and suckle absent-mindedly on my nose. Even though I was only young, I felt there was something inappropriate about this - which I loved and interpreted as a very individual brand of humour.

  The restaurant my brother has chosen is extremely sophisticated, not the sort of place I go to. Unlike him, I frequently feel uncomfortable. Everything here has been wonderfully thought out and designed. I notice that the table-cloths are short, revealing elegant legs in carved wood. I find this detail touching: if you have lovely legs, why hide them? The cutlery is unusual too: it has the snowy gleam of old silver but is very light, almost weightless, so
that it feels a bit like eating with your fingers, with nothing weighing you down; the food glides to your mouth. I wonder what the manager of this restaurant would think of Chez moi. I’m ashamed. The pitiful shame of a non-concept dog.

  I’ve ordered ice-cold ficoide in truffle vinaigrette. Ficoide is a rare kind of salad with thick fleshy leaves prettily arranged round a delicious pulpy stem. I don’t know where you buy the stuff. At Chez moi I have ordinary lettuce and romaine lettuce, and also rocket which I toss into gravy because I’ve got an idea rocket is a meat-like plant: I’m keen to reconcile it with its animal tendencies. It’s a waste because most people leave it on the side of the plate, shrivelled and pathetic as if it were a failed garnish. Still, I press on with my attempted trans-categorization: I feel it’s what the various foodstuffs expect of me, what I’m supposed to give to the world. Rocket with meat. Avocados with fruit. White wine with cheese. I realign friendships, cheat at Happy Families.

  I don’t know how they do the lighting here. I can’t see any lamps and there isn’t a single candle, and yet there’s light melting over us or, rather, we’re melting into it. We’re clothed in a golden glow, my brother, the other customers and myself. The waiters are haloed too, as if by a permanent sunset. We all look so gorgeous I wonder whether we’ve been transferred to paradise. Each of us a little figurine dipped by some deft and kindly hand into a pool of forgetfulness and languor, with iridescent crescent shapes highlighting our cheek-bones and foreheads. I eat my magic salad - for, now that I think about it, I realize ficoide can’t be bought, it’s picked in the forests of Brocéliande by the light of a torch which burns with a cold flame - and I think it tastes better than any of the dishes I make, the dishes I’m so proud of. I didn’t think it would happen so soon, being sanctioned like this, being informed that I’d lost the plot and that, at the end of the day, I’m not cut out for what I thought I was. This chic restaurant, whose identity and purpose no one would ever question, this perfectly conceptual restaurant presents me with an unbearable comparison. I’m not a Poodle faced with a Doberman or a Pekingese faced with a Labrador: at a real pinch I’m a cuddly toy dog, but an ugly one, the one no one wants, that sits gathering dust on the shelf in a village shop where they once thought they should get into toys to attract more customers. I wouldn’t have guessed that this bitter revelation would come from my brother, either. What was he thinking? Why has he brought me here? Perhaps he thinks the fall won’t be so painful if it’s very quick and very sudden. But no. Because he’s never been to Chez moi. He doesn’t know what you can eat there, or where you sit. He is talking to me, he hasn’t stopped talking since we got here and - and this is terrible - I haven’t heard a thing. I was aware of the sound of his voice in the way you can be aware of waves in the background, intoxicating or irritating, lulling or invigorating, but who would ever think of working out what they mean?