Eating Crow

by Jay Rayner

  She said, “I didn’t know when you’d be back.”

  “Are you hungry? There’s enough here. I could put some in a bowl and—”

  “No. It’s okay. I’ve already …” She waved in the direction of the front door, as if there were a table just out of view beyond it. She walked over to a desk and picked up a couple of books, studiously checking the covers before holding them to herself in a way that immediately reminded me of Jennie; not the confident, self-possessed version I had met today, but the more delicate creature from years ago, cowed by the world.

  We both opened our mouths to speak at the same time and then shut up.

  “You first,” she said.

  “No, you.”

  She nibbled her bottom lip. “I’m moving out. I think it’s for the best, just until—”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m, er, staying with Luke. Your brother said I could crash at his place until I find somewhere—”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “No, Marc. I do. We’re not … we’re just not, are we?”

  “No, I mean you don’t have to because I’m not going to be here. I’ve been offered a job.”

  “Oh?”

  “The United Nations.”

  She tipped her head to one side and fixed me with a look I had seen many times before, the one that, with a sweet, mocking intensity, said: Just what kind of fool are you? For a moment it cut through the embarrassment and the fury which were weighing her down. I told her about the job, about the terms, about the things I was being asked to do. When I was done she stared at me silently for a moment.

  “So you’re going to teach the world to eat humble pie?” she said eventually.

  “Well, I’ll be based in New York so I suppose I’ll be teaching the world to eat crow.”

  “Do you know any good recipes for crow?”

  I laughed. It was a nice feeling. “Apparently I do. I’m told it’s why they want me for the job. I make the best crow pie east of Long Island.”

  “First catch your crow—”

  “Exactly. First catch your crow.”

  She looked around herself, as though the room were suddenly unfamiliar. Until that point I think she had understood why she was bailing out on me. I had disappeared off down my own tight emotional rat hole, and it was a gap into which she was unable to follow. But now this job offer suggested something else. Apparently I hadn’t turned into some maladjusted clown. There was meaning here, a pattern that was to take me on an adventure.

  “I was emailed that video of you apologizing to Jennie Sampson this afternoon.”

  “Oh.”

  She raised her eyebrows as if to say, Yes indeed: Oh!

  She said, “I thought it was rather touching, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “In a buttock-clenchingly embarrassing way.”

  “It does have a high buttock-clench quotient, doesn’t it? Still, that’s what they want to pay me for.”

  She attempted a smile and said, “I’m pleased for you, Marc, really—”

  “The thing is, I won’t need the flat because I won’t be living here, and you don’t really want to stay at Luke’s. He was never the tidiest of boys. Have you looked under his fridge? There are life-forms growing under there. Whole families of microbacteria. There’s more culture under Luke’s fridge than there is on his bookshelves. Seriously, he’s—”

  She allowed herself a full grin. “Stop it, Marc. When are you going?”

  I shrugged. “Soon, I think. They want me in New York as soon as possible, so …”

  Lynne played with the keys that she still held in her free hand. “Look, maybe I’ll just hang on to these and come back when you’ve gone.”

  “You don’t have to go at all.”

  “I think I do, honey. It’s better this way. Give you some space. Give both of us some space.” And then: “I’m pleased for you. It’s a good thing, this, I’m sure.”

  “We’re a good thing.”

  Suddenly she looked unbearably sad. I wanted to reach across and embrace her, but the distance between us was too great. “Will you come and see me in the States? Maybe I could cook you one of my special crow pies.”

  “I’d like that,” she said, but from the droop of her shoulders and the way she turned her gaze from me to the books she was holding, it was obvious Lynne did not like the idea at all.

  Too often we only identify the crucial points in our lives in retrospect. At the time we are too absorbed in the fetid detail of the moment to spot where it is leading us. But not this time. I was experiencing one of my dad’s deafening moments. If my life could be understood as a meal of many courses (and let’s be honest, much of it actually was), then I had finished the starters and I was limbering up for the main event. So far, of course, I had made a stinking mess of it. I had spilled the wine. I had dropped my cutlery on the floor and sprayed the fine white linen with sauce. I had even spat out some of my food because I didn’t like the taste of it.

  But it doesn’t matter because, look, here come the waiters. They are scraping away the debris with their little horn and steel blades, pulled with studied grace from the hidden pockets of their white aprons. They are laying new tablecloths, arranging new cutlery, placing before me great domed wine glasses, newly polished to a sparkle. There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. I will not push the plate away from me, the food only half eaten. I am ready for everything they are preparing to serve me. Be in no doubt; it will all be fine.

  Fifteen

  Sitting at a back table in a small fondue place that I found two blocks north of Union Square in New York City, I could pretend that everything was fine. It was called the Matterhorn Café and inside the air smelled unself-consciously of dairy fats and hot wine. The boss was a Swiss Italian called Bruno who every evening occupied the last booth before the kitchen door, his huge belly wedged in against the tabletop, from where he directed his staff of young Czech waitresses, each as pale as he was dark.

  The interior gave out mixed signals. The walls were paneled in old varnished pine planks, and each of the booths had its own carved, overhanging faux roof, as if it were an Alpine chalet. But the tablecloths were of red and white laminated gingham and stacked about the walls were bulbous bottles of red wine, their bases encased in baskets. It turned out that Bruno, fearing New York wasn’t ready for a Swiss fondue joint, had tried to run a Swiss Italian trattoria here instead (lots of grilled meats with heavy cream and mushroom sauces and attitude) only to discover that Manhattan definitely wasn’t ready for one of those. So he had gone back to Plan A and begun serving fondues. Now they came: the middle-aged couples from the outer boroughs who remembered fondly their young-married years in the early 70s when fondues were somehow chic, and the gay boys from the Village who thought there was something kitsch about the place, and the confused former restaurant critic with a new job at the United Nations who was wondering if he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

  This retreat to the Matterhorn Café had nothing to do with my dad, though I can see why some people might assume so. André Basset may have been Swiss but he was endlessly dismissive of the fondue.

  “One thousand years of civilization and this is the best they can do? A gallon of boiling wine and ten pounds of cheese? This they call cooking?”

  He hated any trend and fondues were exactly that when I was a kid, so he would have nothing to do with them. It was my mother who was determined not to be left out. The fondue was the only thing I ever remember her cooking before my father died and then just the once. I have scant memory of the dish itself, save the smell when it was cooking and that I burned the roof of my mouth on the hot, molten cheese. I have better memories of my mother dipping chunks of French bread into a little glass of kirsch that she, and only she, had at her side, before dipping it into the pot. She did this with every piece of bread and with a marked precision and daintiness, as if it
could not be a proper fondue unless the rituals were observed. I remember my father glowering and my mother giggling uncontrollably, and us little boys joining in too because Mum, who was always steady and cool, was so very funny when she laughed. (We didn’t join in, though, with her shouts of “mountain boy” at Dad, which made him blush.) The next morning Dad made our breakfast and Mum stayed in bed because, he said, “she has become ill.” He hummed to himself as he warmed the milk for our porridge, the stove his domain once more.

  In a strange city the Matterhorn Café reminded me of who I was. The main event, a fondue des Mosses from Vaud made with Gruyère and Appenzell, was good. There was no aftertaste of raw alcohol or uncooked cornstarch, and alongside it they served plates of viande des Grisons, those exquisitely fragile slices of Swiss air-cured beef that could put a Harry’s Bar Carpaccio to shame. There was also a neighborhood feel to the place. I noticed the same guys in there night after night. The balding fellow in the checked sports jacket up at the bar. Green salad. Plate of cheese, basket of bread, and the sports pages of USA Today. Then, a few booths behind me, an older guy with a graying buzz cut and a black suit, a steak and a magazine—fishing or cycling, always some kind of red-meat outdoor sports—whom I would pass on the way to the toilets at the front by the door. At the Matterhorn Café I could be one of them, another single man who needed dinner and who chose to take it here, where he belonged. Christ knows, I didn’t belong anywhere else in the city. I worked that one out early on.

  The gatekeeper for the United Nations, the single person with the power to grant access to the headquarters of the most overarching internationalist organization the planet has ever seen, was a soft-cheeked middle-aged woman with pencil lines for eyebrows, a saggy gullet, and a name badge that read Nora. She peered over the counter of the tight, circular reception desk at the suitcases scattered about us.

  “You the team from UNOAR?”

  “Yes,” Jennie said tersely. She rocked back on one heel. She had done exactly the same when she discovered there was no limo to meet us at the airport: one foot back, rocking on the heel, as if by keeping all the movement below the knee, no one would notice her irritation. Then she muttered to me, “No one who flies first-class should ever have to take a cab. Remember that, Marc. No one. First-class. Ever.” She sent Will Masters and Satesh Panjabi to join the taxi line.

  Now it was happening again.

  “You got bags?” the receptionist said.

  “Yes.”

  “They been through security?”

  “Naturally. Can you call the UNOAR secretariat’s office and tell them Marc Basset is here?”

  “There’s no one in the UNOAR office.” This as if lecturing an idiot. Nora pushed herself back on her office chair from the curve of desk and barked at a colleague a few inches away over her shoulder. “Doreen? Who’d’we call for UNOAR? Larry?”

  The other woman didn’t look up. She kept on punching away at a computer keyboard. Just kept on pushing those buttons. “Yeah, Larry. Extension twenty-seven sixty-four seven.”

  “I’ll call Larry Zwegller.”

  “Fine. Please do.”

  And then he was there, a small man in a cheap blue suit with a big bunch of keys hanging off his belt and a film of sweat clinging to his top lip.

  “You the UNOAR guys? Larry Zwegller, Facilities.” Vigorous handshakes all round, as if the human contact might save him. “Jesus, but am I pleased to see you. Sorry the greeting isn’t more, you know, fitting, but what with the situation an’ all … You got bags? They been through security? Good. Hey, Tony? Tony here will deal with the bags. Check ’em, won’t you, Tony? We leave ’em here and we’ll take elevator seven. I’ll show you around and then, you know, then you can get to work.”

  We stood in the lift, the five of us trying not to notice the smell of dry cleaning fluid and sweat coming off Zwegller’s suit.

  “So the thing is, Miss …”

  “Sampson. Ms.”

  “Sure, Ms. Sampson. The thing is, arrangements have been a bit … anyway, just expect a bit of noise up there.”

  “On the fifteenth floor?”

  “Fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth—take your pick,” he said wearily, looking upward as if through the lift ceiling he could see something the rest of us could not.

  The lift doors opened on that very special kind of chaos only a failed attempt at organization can create, like the disruption of a beautiful place setting after the meal has been eaten. There were huddles of men, backs against the corridor wall, hunched down on the old gray linoleum-tiled floor shouting into mobile phones, surrounded by arcs of strewn paper. Through office doors we could see people jabbing each other in the chest across desks and others shouting into telephones or at each other, or both. Weaving in and out of them were tidy young women, with fixed smiles and shiny heels, carrying stationery supplies from one place to another as if a sense of purpose might save them from being swallowed up by this clutter of noise and motion.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Larry said, deadpan, “welcome to the United Nations Office of Apology and Reconciliation.”

  We stepped into the thick broth of shout and accusation. Jennie flinched and pressed one hand to an ear to help herself think.

  “What in god’s name is going on?”

  Zwegller leaned into her. “We had to come up with a plan for the desks,” he said, all but shouting to make himself heard. “So some guy—”

  Before he could finish, a short dark man with a Velcro strip of mustache battered him on the shoulder. “Mr. Zwegller, it is intolerable. We must be moved. My people, we cannot take this offense. We must—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa there. Which delegation?” Zwegller leaned his ear toward him.

  “I am from Armenia. The Turks are on the next desk. Do you know about the Armenian genocide by the Turkish? Do you know of this stain on the world’s history? We cannot tolerate to be so close to these … people.” He spat out the last word. “And the Kurds, they are there interrupting our arguments with the Turkish and saying their claim is newer and so should take precedence. It is intolerable, heinous—”

  “Okay,” Larry said. “Okay. Listen. I am only Facilities. I do desks. I do telephones. Not stains on history.” He hesitated, apparently looking for a solution. “I may be able to do screens, though. Maybe I get you a screen to separate you from the Turkish delegation as a stopgap? How’s that?”

  The man looked mollified. “You are a good man, Mr. Zwegller.”

  “Here to serve, my friend. Here to serve.”

  He turned back to us with a big see-what-I-mean shrug. “So some shmuck, he set the desks up geographically. End result, we got Israelis sharing a desk pod with the Palestinians, the Australians with the Aborigines, the East Timorese with the Indonesians. It’s a friggin’ disaster, I tell you. ’Scuse my French. So anyway—”

  “Why doesn’t the secretariat sort this out?” Jennie said, leaning back in to him.

  Larry Zwegller blinked for a moment, then nibbled his lip. “Okay, lady. What we have here is what I think is called a communication breakdown. Let me get you to your offices and I’ll, you know … then we can talk. And step carefully. As you can see, my friends, there are people who’ve just shifted out of their desks altogether and are camping out in the corridors. UNHCR is thinking of popping up here to have a look-see,” he said and grinned encouragingly, but none of us grinned back.

  On this side of the fifteenth floor, which faced into Manhattan, were the delegations from the European and Near Eastern special interest groups who had been invited to research and register their apologizable hurts. The Middle and Far East, Africa, and Australasia delegations were on the floor above, Zwegller shouted at us, where they would eventually be joined by Financial Control. Historical and Verification was meant to be on the floor below, along with Legal Affairs, Psychology, and ancillary services like Transport and Accommodation. We pushed through a set of new double doors on the East River side of the building and the n
oise immediately subsided.

  “And this,” Zwegller said, with a dying fall, “is the secretariat.” There was a long, thickly carpeted, newly painted, and deserted corridor off of which stood a set of deserted offices filled with empty desks and bare bookshelves, each offering a lovely, unbroken view of the East River. We padded slowly through the silence.

  Jennie said, “Where is everyone?”

  “Just through here, Ms. Sampson, if you please, ma’am.” Another set of double doors and into an anteroom where two young women, with nothing to do, jumped up from behind empty desks and straightened their skirts. “Alice, Francine, good to see ya, let’s take these good people onward.” They led us through a last set of doors, to a massive corner expanse that looked out in one direction on uptown Manhattan, and in the other, over the river. There was modern window seating padded in caramel-colored leather, a sofa area, and a couple of separate goldfish-bowl offices. There was tasteful modern art. There were healthy rubber plants. There was the gentle hum of air-conditioning.

  I went and looked out at the view of the city, this vast, shuddering creature that looked calm and at rest compared to the craziness out beyond the doors behind me.

  Jennie said, “So …?”

  “We have this situation.”

  The secretariat were the bureaucrats who would be responsible for the day-to-day running of UNOAR: overseeing the compilation and verification of hurts, the staging and financing of apologies, the work of various other apologists scattered about the globe (of whom I was, notionally, the head). Normally, secretariat-grade UN employees move to each new task without a murmur, but here they had made an exception.

  “These guys, apparently, they don’t do feelings,” said Zwegller, whom I was coming to like. “They do administering. They say to their line managers, in this department maybe, ‘I’ll be required to have emotional responses.’ This, they say, is a dangerous business. At the least, they say, they run the risk of passive empathizing.”