by Baxter, John
Well, not personally. He had, after all, been dead since 1961. But his celebrations of hunting, shooting, fishing, bullfighting, and war popularized the conviction that a writer should be a person of action as well as ideas. Numerous authors, inspired by his stories of safaris, boxing matches, and battle, had been gored, shot, knocked insensible, or (not least) left with horrific hangovers trying to prove they were his equal.
I was no different. When I visualized Hemingway, I never thought of him hunched over a notepad in a rented room, working on “Hills Like White Elephants.” What I remembered was Josef Karsh’s stern portrait taken at the time of his 1954 Nobel Prize. The bearded face above the roll-neck sweater radiated determination. Steven Spielberg, refining his concept of the extraterrestrial E.T., clipped the forehead and nose from Karsh’s image, added the eyes of poet Carl Sandburg and the mouth of Albert Einstein, and pasted them onto the photograph of a baby’s face to create an archetype of patient compassion and resolve. That Hemingway would never be defeated by a jammed door lock.
Rummaging in our toolbox, I rehearsed how his terse prose might describe what I was about to do. He took the pliers in his right hand. The metal was cold. They were good pliers. They had been made for a purpose, and now they were to be put to work. . .
Watched nervously by Marie-Do (What do women know of such matters? These are the things of men), I clamped the pliers onto the end of the key and pulled.
Nothing.
A twist and a yank.
Same result.
Marie-Do disappeared into the office. “I found the manufacturer’s website,” she called. “It says that, if the key is a duplicate, it might not have been cut correctly. It could have a ‘fish hook’ that stops it from being removed.”
“So how do you remove it?”
There was a pause. “It says, ‘Unscrew the whole lock and take it to a local locksmith.’ ”
“That’s very useful.”
“What about the locksmith on rue Dauphine. He might still be open.”
“On Christmas Eve?”
Just then, the phone rang. It was my sister-in-law. “Haven’t you left yet?”she inquired, sounding a little edgy. “The farmer just delivered the geese. When do you think you’ll get here?”
I passed the phone to Marie-Do, who put her hand over the mouthpiece and gave me the why-are-you-still-here? look.
“I’m going, I’m going!” I said.
Chapter 4
Heat
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
ROBERT FROST, “Fire and Ice”
I half-walked, half-skated down rue de l’Odéon, avoiding the worst sheets of ice and grabbing handholds where I could. Bad enough to be locked in; worse with a broken leg.
Mentally, I forgave Hemingway. It wasn’t his fault. In fact, that image of physical ease and technical competence was an illusion. In real life, Ernie was a klutz. After being blown up and wounded during World War I, the events that inspired A Farewell to Arms, he spent the rest of his life putting himself and others in harm’s way. He barely survived some close calls running the bulls in Pamplona. In a couple of Paris boxing matches, he was knocked about by portly but nimble Canadian writer Morley Callaghan, admittedly helped by some inept timekeeping by Scott Fitzgerald—not the man any sane person would have chosen for that task.
In World War II, cruising off Cuba with the drinking pals of his “Crook Factory,” he threatened the safety of everyone but the German submariners they were supposed to be hunting. The army kept him out of Europe as long as it could, but once it let him in, he played soldier all over northern France, getting into scrapes from which a friendly general had to extricate him. (Hemingway repaid him with the ambiguous compliment of making him the hero of his first postwar novel Across the River and Into the Trees, a notable flop.) After that, he was burned in a bushfire, smashed his knee in a 1945 car accident, and, on safari in Africa, survived two plane crashes, from which he never fully recovered.
A less life-threatening but typical accident took place in March 1928, when he lived just round the corner, on rue Ferou. After a heavy night at the Dingo Bar, he lurched to his toilet, which was equipped with an elevated cistern, and yanked the wrong chain, bringing down a skylight on his head. Archibald MacLeish applied toilet paper and drove him to the American Hospital in Neuilly, where they put nine stitches into a gash. To see him, grinning and bandaged like a veteran, posing for photos the following week in front of Shakespeare and Company, you’d think he’d fought off an armed gang with his bare hands. But, as one critic commented, employing an appropriate corrida metaphor, Ernest worked very close to the bull.
The end of our street, where it intersects with boulevard Saint-Germain, was normally the busiest in the area, but today its cafés and restaurants were shuttered and empty. In the bank at the corner, the distributeurs—ATMs—all flashed red. Emptied overnight, they’d remain so until next week, since the entire staff was on holiday, including the people who refilled them. In the métro, some trains would still be running but with few passengers. And nobody would be staffing the guichets, or ticket offices. You’d be expected to buy your tickets from the machines, feed them through the barrier, and find your own way to the platform. Soon, the métro would be like this all year round, not just at Christmas. The new lines are driverless. Computers open and close the doors and deliver us to our destination shrink-wrapped in technology.
A bandaged Hemingway with Sylvia Beach and her staff
I paused halfway across the boulevard. On an ordinary day, traffic would have mown me flat. But along the avenue, though every light was green and I could see at least five blocks in each direction, not a vehicle moved. Snow softened the buildings’ outlines and misted the air. It leached out color, leaving a landscape by Whistler. To my eye, led block after block by the perspective of those six-story buildings and their meticulously aligned balconies, the boulevard embodied rationality and intellect. Let others gather at Notre Dame, Saint Sulpice, Saint Peter’s in Rome, or King’s College Chapel in Cambridge to acknowledge the existence of a higher order.
My church was here.
Within thirty minutes, I was back home, unsuccessful.
“Closed,” I said, shaking the snow off my hat.
“What now?”
At this point, I had The Idea.
To open a jar, one ran hot water over the lid, which made it expand. So obviously, if we heated the exterior of the lock cylinder, it would also expand, releasing the key.
We didn’t own a blowtorch, but I had a butane torch, used for melting the sugar on crème brûlée. It roared satisfyingly as I lit it up, producing a clear blue flame.
“It won’t set everything on fire?” Marie-Do asked dubiously.
“Like what? The lock housing is steel.”
Turning the flame on the lock, I gripped the key with our pliers and tugged so that the moment the cylinder expanded, I could extract it.
This didn’t happen.
Instead, the lock casing, which clearly wasn’t steel, softened and tore, like uncooked pastry. Not only the key but the whole cylinder came loose, with the key still inside. It left an irregular, smoking hole.
Hemingway wrote, “A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” For the moment, I couldn’t recall his thoughts about making a complete ass of oneself.
An hour later, I stood in the empty apartment, nursing a mug of coffee and staring out over the snow-covered roofs.
Marie-Do was on her way to Richebourg in the car, carrying what food we’d already prepared. The question of cooking the geese remained to be resolved.
As to the lock, it was Marie-Do who floated the option that we’d shunned so far.
“There’s the card on the fridge.”
We all have such cards. Headed “Useful Numbers,” they materialize on doormats every few weeks. Just a list of numbers
useful in an emergency: ambulance, fire service, hospitals. At first glance, they seem a generous gesture—until halfway down the list, where the nature of the services becomes less public-spirited. “Poison Hotline” is followed by “Blocked toilet?” “Water leak?” “No electricity?” and “Broken door lock?” In each case, it assures us help is at hand. But nobody ever rings these 24/7 plumbers, glaziers, or locksmiths, since their prices are extortionate. In France, and probably in the rest of the world, to employ these sharks was to mark yourself forever as a dumbbell—in Parisian slang, a plouc.
Calling the number, I half expected a recording advising us to call back in January. Instead, someone picked up on the second ring and promised to be there in an hour.
While I waited, I thought about California, where I’d lived before I came to France. Had this happened there, a neighbor would have fixed it in ten minutes. There was much I didn’t miss about the United States, but one thing that I did miss was the American skill with things: the legendary “good old American know-how.”
The foundation of this was Shop class. I never learned what constituted Shop, except that being good at it implied you were hopeless at everything else. Neither schools in Australia, where I was born and raised, nor in Britain, where I’d lived for many years, offered anything so practical. (It’s conceivable that some male students at British or Australian schools learned such skills in other ways. I just assumed the tough kids spent recess behind the toilet block smoking and comparing the length of their penises. Maybe they were actually exchanging information on how to cut dovetails and thread pipe.) But because of Shop, most U.S. drivers carried jumper cables and spare fan belts, and a toolbox was standard in every home.
“They wouldn’t melt a lock with a cooking torch,” I said to Scotty. He mewed, and rubbed my leg. He probably only wanted food, but I took it for consolation.
Chapter 5
Two Geese A-Roasting
First, catch your hare.
RECIPE FOR JUGGED HARE, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861
Hot 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.
In 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?”
Of 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.
Chapter 6
The Hollywood Moment
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 m
ost 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.