‘How the hell am I going to serve all this, much less cook it?’
No answer from my co-host. V. is busy preparing the ‘grounds.’ He’s inspired Eva-Marie to gild empty peanut butter jars for hanging on the branches of all the pine trees near the garage, and place votive candles inside. A trail of more little candles will sit on mounds the boys have fashioned by overturning my salad bowl filled with snow along the walkway in front of the house.
I gaze out of the kitchen window as he points proudly to the mounds.
‘A corridor of fairy lights to mark the entrance of the Court,’ he explains. ‘Once Pompadour, dressed as Night, led us through the dark forest to a clearing where she had a troupe of players waiting to play for the King. The guests, even Louis himself, picnicked on logs and stones. It was a great success. What do you think? Mon Dieu, it’d better not rain.’
I glance down during this distraction at a caramel sauce that has suddenly granulated into something like maple sugar. My furious expression is all the answer V. needs. He backs off before I can caramelize his wig.
‘Bien. Une idee, simplement.’
I can’t keep track of V. after that, although I hear laughter and wild violin bowing coming from the playroom. The cooking proceeds, less by inspiration than by putting one pan in front of another, hour after hour. I’ll break it to V. later that I’m skipping the truffled turkey, but at least I found pigeons at the supermarket to fill in for partridges. The trout will give Peter a last-minute errand to keep him out of my hair. I’m investing a paint-by-numbers faith in cookbooks, clearing out the freezer of prepared sauces and gratins that seem to multiply upwards like stones of the Egyptian pyramids. You don’t know how the Egyptians got to the pinnacle, but they did.
Ed, my familiar face at ‘court,’ arrives from Paris with his own wild card in tow—an opera singer, a cuddly Russian beauty half his age with the improbable name of Khatuna. They have known each other all of three weeks, he explains with the delight of a boy who has found a new toy. She speaks Georgian, Russian and Italian and clearly adores my old friend, hugging and snuggling and cooing to him, ‘Ours, ours.’ Bear, bear.
Peter gives me an amused glance. ‘I have a feeling I know where she does her best singing,’ he whispers.
‘Do you think she’s one of those illegal passport hunters? Where will we put her at the table?’ I ask Peter on the night.
‘Compared to everyone else, she’s another generation. Which one of your guests can babysit in Italian?’
‘Maybe Jean. He’s got a summer house in Tuscany.’
I try to imagine the aristocratic Jean spending his New Year’s Eve next to the lusty Russian. Ed good-naturedly volunteers to prepare the pile of seventy-five oysters. An hour later my oven mitts are stinking, frayed memories of their inner selves, but sixty-nine glistening oysters are on ice-filled, foil-wrapped cookie trays laid outside in the snow under the rising moon. Six bad oysters have been tossed aside in the bushes. I think of the smell luring wild cats that haunt our back cliffs, but what can we do?
‘There wasn’t any room in the fudge,’ Ed explains, and heads upstairs to change.
‘MADAME!’ Voltaire shrieks, rushing in from the dining room. ‘Who laid the table? Where is the gold and silver plate?’
‘I don’t own any gold or silver plate. That’s my best china.’
Voltaire throws up his hands. ‘Mon Dieu!’
The rest of the guests arrive in a sudden downfall, like an avalanche of snow poured from the inside of a tourist van. That’s how I’ll survive this evening. I’ll be a tourist attraction, I think, with my faulty French, Americanized food, and missing footmen. Flowers and bottles fly around the kitchen. Everybody is kissing everybody. My kids sweep off Charlotte, Jean and Christine’s tiny daughter, to the playroom. We settle Estelle, the new baby of Peter’s former Hong Kong assistant, Catherine, upstairs in my office in a carrycot, right next to V.’s invisible oxygen experiment.
The Court of Geneva has descended on our little Versailles. The women from Geneva are dressed like Calvinist priests in sober black pant-suits devoid of adornment, their men in sober dark suits hardly festive gear.
Nobody notices Voltaire, standing at the door bowing to each guest, a preposterously happy grin on his face. He is dressed entirely in crimson velvet.
It hasn’t occurred to me, preoccupied with my own new isolation, that poor V. has spent far longer than me waiting for the good times to roll.
Something over two hundred and fifty years.
Chapter Fifteen A CAT CAN LOOK AT AN OYSTER
Already I can see that one guest has come to have a bad time.
While the arrivals are tossing off their heavy coats, offering champagne bottles, and distributing presents to my over-eager children, a woman slightly older than myself is muttering, ‘I’ll keep my coat on this evening, thank you. It’s so cold in these mountains! And all those curves! I’m completely carsick! How can you stand the commute, Peter?’
I feel like sinking through the kitchen floor. Or kicking this prematurely gray spirit, Ghislaine. Pompadour had beauty and charm to spare when dealing with the powerful women of Versailles—the royals who mocked her. I lack those advantages, but there is no time to brood. V. flies across the kitchen behind the cluster of guests, snow fluttering off his wig.
‘The fairy lights were a grand success. Where did that infant go?’
‘To the office.’
He’s horrified. ‘To my suite? You’ve already put that Irish-American and his Russian coquette in my bed!’
Just then Ed and Khatuna descend from Voltaire’s rooms into the living room. It’s hard to know where to look. They are resplendently overdressed, he in a tuxedo with green satin cummerbund and she in sequins and a very tight skirt.
I catch sight of the unhappy Ghislaine smiling to herself meanly at the over-the-top foreigners from Paris. I’m already christening her the Duchess of Geneva, a Calvinist bastion of restraint and rigidity.
‘The caviar stars by the fireside!’ V. prompts.
The guests settle themselves strategically, the elegant Jean inquiring of Catherine, ‘Where do I remember you from?’
Catherine’s doting and obedient husband, until very recently her imperious, dashing boss, is singing the baby to sleep upstairs while she sips her aperitif downstairs.
V. whispers to me, ‘Jean reminds me of the Due de Richelieu—when he finally became first Chamberlain to King Louis—like Richelieu, he immediately tries his hand with the prettiest girl in the room.’
‘I was a guest in your own house at your own table less than two years ago,’ Catherine pertly replies to Jean. Beneath his handsome features, Jean blushes with embarrassment at betraying the forgetfulness of age. Jean’s wife, Christine, smothers an indulgent smile.
‘That is just like Richelieu,’ V. nods. ‘And his wife, Christine, just like the Duchesse de Richelieu, full of sagesse, ‘with smiling blue eyes.’
‘Enough about Richelieu. I’m worried about the oysters and the wild cats,’ I mutter to V. ‘I thought I heard some wailing outside.’
The party is under way, and V. and I can safely sneak out of the kitchen door as Peter pours out drinks and stokes the fire with the help of Roger, Ghislaine’s husband. Ghislaine has made such a point of her chilblains that she has been accorded a prime chair near the hearth.
Christine is trying unsuccessfully to make conversation with Ghislaine, quite unconcerned at Jean’s flirtatious efforts in Catherine’s direction. Ed and his songbird are cuddling at the end of the sofa.
I’m stunned by the frigid air that slaps my cheeks. Foggy day has turned to polar evening. And the oysters have turned to—ice.
‘They’re frozen to the front lawn!’ I gasp.
‘Oui.’ V. says lamely, staring down at Ed’s improvised platters of oysters frozen solid in their juice to the snow. The plume on his party hat droops low over his brow.
‘Ouick! Do something! You know the French, They’ve got t
o have their oysters or the whole evening doesn’t count as a New Year’s Eve.’
‘Worse, Madame. The French have a sense of humor. You have a roomful of Genevans. They have no sense of humor whatsoever—Wait!’
He suggests we fetch Theo’s ‘Little Carpenter’ lKEA tool kit. I try to saw the ice away from the trays while V. wields the pliers. The oysters won’t give and the saw breaks instantly. V. runs into the house again to look for more tools just as I see two ominous feline silhouettes slink through the pines. They rest on their haunches just outside the margins of the flickering candles.
Four green eyes calmly survey my panic.
‘Scat! Shoo!’ I start throwing pine cones to scare them off.
The eyes don’t move. These are warriors of the cliffs, hardy, sharp-clawed hunters. I’ve seen them attack each other, put out eyes, fend off huskies, and polish off hedgehogs. I’ve no doubt there were moments when Pompadour’s entertainments in the woods hit obstacles. I wonder what Old Pomp would do with these circumstances.
‘Voilà!’
V. is back brandishing fireplace tongs. He makes a fulcrum from a log and together we fix the iron rods under one of the trays and shove, stomp, and kick. Despite his unathletic build, V.’s concentration is only too successful. One of the cookie sheets flies loose, thirty oysters fly skyward, then disappear into the deep snow. There is a satisfied growling sound from the starving onlookers. We scramble to excavate our oysters with our bare fingers. The nasty, savage cats lower their heads and move slowly forward.
‘Allez-y!’ V. roars, flinging the tongs at the cats. They back off angrily, knocking over a fairy light, but retreat no farther than the circle of light coming from the house.
Through the living room window I spy our guests chatting amiably.
‘Huitres!’ I announce brightly, only a few minutes later, floating as gracefully as I can into the living room with trays of oysters. I watch the grimaces of pain as the guests realize that what I have served is not so much oysters as ‘oystercicles.’ Jean gallantly shows how a little warm breath and a dollop of lemon juice will loosen them from their shells, and following his example, they finish them off. Ed takes a bow for his manly shucking. We move to the next course in the dining room.
‘What’s in this soup?’ demands Ghislaine, the Duchess of Disdain.
‘Celery, onion, leeks, shallots and—’ I hesitate. In English, parsnips might sound acceptable, but the French for parsnips is ‘country turnips,’ and I realize how rustic and ill-chosen this will seem for New Year’s Eve customers expecting lobster bisque.
I play for time, ‘Um, I can’t remember . . . ’
‘There is quelque chose,’the Duchess presses me. ‘Hazelnuts,’ I smile.
‘Non, non, non,’ she smiles back, and I feel her teeth as if they were in my ankle. ‘Something a little -’ I put down my soup spoon and surrender, ‘Something a little WEIRD?’
‘Oui . . . étrange. . .’
Suddenly four guests rise to their feet and leave through the kitchen door. To throw up? I look up at V. in total dismay. He’s enjoying Khatuna’s décolletage. He shrugs in confusion. Peter addresses me from his throne at the other end of the long table.
‘Smokers,’ he explains. ‘I just told them about Theo’s asthma.’
Ed is laughing at Khatuna. She has found no common language at the party and so is making kissy faces at her lover across the table. As I clear the empty soup plates, I find all but three of our guests standing blue-faced, wrapped in blankets, sucking on cigarettes, stamping their feet and no doubt, comparing notes on turnip soup, the Duchess among them. Six feral silhouettes watch them from the shadows of the pines, licking their paws.
‘Never have I been forced to leave a New Year’s Eve just to smoke!’ Ghislaine protests.
The trout and pigeon courses are survived, eaten even, as a sort of accompaniment to constant cigarette breaks. Catherine’s husband is so addicted to tobacco that I realize he’s hosting a parallel smokers’ New Year’s Eve party outside.
Towards the end of the main course, Ed insists I open his ‘hostess gift.’ He’s just finished shooting a documentary about miracles and has brought us a plastic bottle in the form of the Virgin Mary containing genuine water from the Shrine of Lourdes.
V. shakes his head with amazement to see such a thing in the twenty-first century. The Duchess of Darkness hasn’t given up. She challenges Ed from the other end of the table. ‘Surely you don’t believe in miracles and all the rest of that Catholic, well, myth.’
It’s obvious she was about to say the French equivalent of ‘drivel.’ As a freelance producer, Ed’s favorite miracle is probably a paycheck sent on time, but since he doesn’t like the Duchess, his face betrays an urge to make mischief.
‘Well, more than sixty miracles have been attributed to Lourdes and tested by independent science,’ he says, straight-faced.
‘But in this day and age, surely . . . ’ Catherine equivocates with slightly more charm than the Duchess.
‘Absolutely proven, documented by outsiders, including atheist medical experts,’ the joker Ed persists. His twinkling Irish-American-Catholic humor shines forth, leaving the Genevans unsure. Is he pulling her leg? Have they fallen into a den of Papist fanatics?
I scramble to serve the salads and cheeses. Jean sneaks into the kitchen to find me struggling with plastic bags of pre-cut lettuce.
‘You’re not supposed to be in here,’ I protest, as he empties the leaves on to the waiting plates. ‘You’ll have to pretend you saw me wash this stuff.’
‘Why do you think we all buy it in bags?’ he says with courtly forgiveness. I realize with complete shock that with six courses down, punctuated by frequent sessions of glacial smoking, it’s already 11:35.
‘Where the hell is the entertainment?’ I quiz my co-host. I suspect V. of breaking his usual rule of coffee only, as an opened champagne bottle left in the kitchen is looking inexplicably empty.
‘Here they come,’ V. signals with a flourish of his hand, and I see my three costumed children descend the stairs overlooking the dining table. Alexander is carrying a box of magic tricks. Eva-Marie has sparkles in her hair. Theo is carrying a wand. Little Charlotte is watching my older kids, fascinated.
They circle the table of overfed guests, each child addressing one person, and then another in rotation. I hear their surprisingly professional magic spiels with delighted surprise as they tackle these strangers with their, ‘Can you believe it?’ ‘Please tell me when to stop,’ ‘Now take a card,’ ‘Please choose the middle card,’ ‘Tell me what you see,’ and so on. There is laughter, and good-natured, ‘Oh, I know this one,’ ‘I’ll take this one instead,’ ‘No, no, I want to take that one!’ V. is darting around the table, unobtrusively adjusting a card here, smoothing down a handkerchief there.
At last, I start to enjoy the party. As the magic show nears its conclusion, Theo slips off to the living room, and we hear the first strains of a half-sized violin playing by the fireside, heralding the fast-approaching turn of the New Year with a ‘Russian Fantasy,’ by Portnoff. The guests move through the kitchen back to the fireside. Encouraged by his audience, Theo puts impressive energy into his bowing. The music quickens and crescendos, climaxes and finally, Theo takes his bow. I see V. in the corner nodding with an impresario’s approval—off the beat, but who’s to know?
The Duchess suddenly speaks. ‘He has touched my heart,’ she announces to everyone. ‘Come, Theo. Let me kiss you.’
Who needs Lourdes for miracles?
The stroke of midnight sounds with the recorded cry of a mullah calling the prayers of an Islamic dawn. From Peter’s bedside table, V. has stolen the Bahraini clock-radio Allen gave me in England, and has set the alarm for twelve! There is laughter from all of Peter’s old friends who remember their shared missions in Beirut, Aden, Kabul and Kandahar. Missions in the Middle East and other war zones on this of all nights are remembered, and toasted.
Amid much kissi
ng all around, I take a picture of Ed happily crushing his starched shirt in a passionate embrace with Khatuna.
Alexander takes his turn at the piano with a piece of jazz and everyone sips more champagne. Somehow I find Peter in time for a kiss, as I listen to the mellow riffs that without warning bring a painful yearning for New York. But this wave of nostalgia is broken when Eva-Marie replaces her brother at the keyboard with a rousing ‘Indian War Dance.’
‘Why is she playing with all five fingers rounded, even using her thumbs?’ V. asks. ‘I never noticed that before. She looks like a monkey clutching at the instrument.’
I am bewildered. ‘Well, how would you play?’
‘With only three middle fingers, and flat, not curved,’ he says. ‘Everybody plays the clavichord like that.’ He shakes his head, muttering as he wanders off, ‘I’ve never seen anyone play so strangely . . . imagine, the whole hand!’
‘And now Khatuna’ll sing for us,’ Ed announces proudly.
And now I’m worried. I have no evidence that we have an opera singer in our midst and I wonder how much proof even the besotted Ed has.
‘Did you have a chance to rehearse this?’ I ask V. He shakes his head, no.
All eyes and ears rest on Khatuna. To my surprise, she stays seated. What opera singer sings sitting down? Social panic closes in on me. There is a terrible silence of judgment about to fall from the Duchess of Sour Notes.
Ed sits erectly in a chair next to Khatuna, his lips pressed together in a tense smile. Nothing comes for seconds. She looks at Ed, her hands clenched tight. Slowly, a low note rises up out of her high bosom. My first impression is that at least she’s singing, and it takes a few seconds to be sure that what we are hearing is a pure alto soprano voice. She has chosen to start with a Georgian folk song, and the low notes reverberate around the hushed audience. I watch Ed’s lips smiling more easily now as he beams proudly through two folk songs.
I think of my college girlfriend who married Ed long ago. B. committed suicide so young, almost as young as the girl who is sitting in front of this room of strangers twice her age.
A Visit From Voltaire Page 18