Dirt

by Bill Buford

  It was everything a future resident of the city could hope for. It seemed to play out what our future life in Lyon might be. It also made me very uncomfortable.

  The apartment echoed. It had a kitchen but nothing in it: no oven, no stove top, no dishwasher. There was no washing machine or dryer. There were no light fixtures, or curtains, or doormat. In France, renters carry their stuff, all their stuff, piggyback to their new residence. We were going to have to buy everything. Finally, it seemed like too much.

  I had just wanted a stint somewhere in a restaurant to learn how to cook French. Moving to Lyon: It was a bigger choice. Should we be selling our apartment in New York? The lease called for a six-month security deposit (because we were foreigners) and a six-month notice to terminate (because we were foreigners).

  Jessica, meanwhile, was admiring the apartment’s marble fireplaces (six of them), the view of the river, the bedrooms (four), the bathrooms (three), the vast living room, the antique wooden shutters, and the breezes that blew crosswise when you opened them.

  I was mentally compiling a list of what we needed (including a new computer—since the voltage was different in France, no?—and a printer), plus beds and cribs and toys and rugs and a table for breakfast, and a television, and had just reached the conclusion that, no, this whole moving-to-France thing was, alas, mathematically impossible, when I overheard Jessica tell the agent, in French, “Thank you, it’s perfect, we’ll take it. N’est-ce pas, Bill?”

  “We will?” I blurted.

  She ignored me. She was looking through the window and asking if what she saw was a school.

  Once Jessica reconfirmed our commitment (“Don’t worry about my husband”), and was promised a lease before the end of the week, she then led me outside to investigate “that school.”

  It had been built in 1908, and was called L’École Robert Doisneau, after the legendary photographer, famous for the smoochy kiss shots in the Paris streets. He was also accomplished at capturing the poetry of children’s faces, and many of those photos adorned the classroom walls.

  The semester was about to start, and the principal happened to be in her office, the only one there besides a custodian. She introduced herself as “Brigitte” (no “Madame,” no vous, no last name), and when Jessica, not wasting the chance, asked if places could be found for our twin boys, aged almost three, she said, “Absolutely,” and put them in the class roster, just like that. There was no question of tuition because we now had residency visas. It was free, although we would have to register at la mairie, the quartier’s mayor’s office, when we returned. She then assigned them cubbyholes to put their things in and invited us in so that we could help the boys find them on their first day, in two weeks.

  I thought: Two weeks?

  In the morning, we checked out of the hotel and caught an early flight, feeling outright pleased with ourselves, having completed a remarkably productive visit. We had an apartment. We had enrolled our boys in a school. And I probably had a kitchen.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, September 10, we had nothing.

  Another party had seen the apartment before us—the broker was sorry, a colleague had handled the visit—and they had taken it. Like that: We’d had it. Like that: It was gone.

  And Marc Veyrat’s surgery failed. He would close the restaurant.

  At nine o’clock, by which time I had fled and disappeared into an office at The New Yorker, my wife, jetlagged and unshowered, was surprised by the arrival of two Jack & Jill teachers at our door.

  At midday we conferred: Now what? Lyon now seemed very far away.

  Jessica bought the boys urgent school supplies.

  Undeterred, I embarked on a long-overdue urgent French-language education and engaged a native speaker for private lessons—Arlette, a wiry bohemian figure with a cigarette-raspy voice and a blunt manner.

  Midway through our second week, only my fifth lesson, I had a precocious breakthrough. I’d thrown myself into telling a story with a punch line.

  Arlette listened intently, chin on her palm, nodding. “That was interesting,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I think I understood most of it.”

  “Rough?” I had issues with pronunciation, but in the telling, I’d experienced a metaphysical grammatical clarity of some kind.

  “The difficulty, for me, is that I don’t speak Italian.” I must have looked confused. “You didn’t know that you were speaking Italian?”

  * * *

  —

  On September 24, the day our boys turned three, students at the Jack & Jill preschool, our new normalcy, Jessica received an e-mail from the rental agency in Lyon. The deal for the apartment had fallen through. The property was available. It was ours, if Jessica returned to Lyon by September 30, signed the lease, made the deposit, and concluded an inventory of the apartment before midnight.

  Were we interested?

  Well, yes! No! Yes, of course!

  On September 29, Jessica left me and the boys behind, took an all-night flight, arrived in Lyon at 7:00 a.m., met with a banker at 9:30 to arrange the deposit, appeared at the Realtor’s office at 11:00 to sign deeds in multiples, ate lunch at 12:00, conducted an exhaustive inventory of the apartment (e.g., “one cracked electrical socket plate under the second window of the first bedroom”), and by the end of the French workday phoned me to say that she’d done it. Her voice betrayed spent adrenaline. It echoed against the walls of the apartment. She had the keys. The apartment was empty, but ours.

  We were moving to Lyon. We hadn’t told our families, or our children, or their teachers, or the magazine where I worked. We hadn’t told anyone. But it was a fact: We were moving to France.

  * * *

  —

  Jessica returned to Lyon a month later, the beginning of November, to get our apartment ready for dwelling in. Jessica, who loathes shopping, was self-dispatched to acquire, well, everything: appliances, computers, IKEA furniture, light fixtures….

  I went to a dark office, my windowless cubicle at The New Yorker, wrote out verb conjugations, and read Brillat-Savarin.

  Brillat-Savarin is the author of three books, but only one matters. The book is (probably) the first book about food that isn’t about how to make it but how to think about it. It is referred to as The Physiology of Taste, but this excludes the subtitle. To wit: Meditations on a Transcendental Gastronomy, a work of theory, history and topicality dedicated to the Parisian gastronomes by a professor and member of several literary and scholarly societies.

  The “professor” referred to, incidentally, is the author. He wasn’t a professor. He was called “the professor” by people who suffered his pontifications. He was a lawyer in a small town (Belley, population two thousand at the time, sixty-five miles east of Lyon, on the river Rhône, at the foot of the Alps, once the idyllic home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas). He was also a member of an amateur orchestra, a deputy to the National Assembly during the French Revolution, subsequently an exile in flight fearing execution, a violin teacher on New York’s Lower East Side, and an inventor of culinary aphorisms.

  Like: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”

  Or: “A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.”

  The difficulty of the book, which Brillat-Savarin worked on for three decades (and died just before it was published in 1826), was that it is pretty tough going. Every time I tried to read it, I gave up. (Why is no one else saying this? In the two-hundred-year history of this book, am I really the only one who finds it to be a slog?)

  But this time, on the eve of my French future, I pressed on, and the second part was simpler and clearer and a revelation. There are many passages worth thinking about, but, studying the book in my Manhattan corporate-office space, I was struck by an appealingly pas
toral account. It describes a meal that Brilliat-Savarin ate at a monastery on an isolated plateau high in the mountains, after a hearty all-night walk from his home, in the summer of 1782, when he was twenty-seven years old. It is a poignant recollection, written long after the event. I now refer to it as “The Walk” and have read and reread it as though it were a poem.

  I located the monastery. It is not far from Lyon. It is now a ruin.

  The monastery was among the first items on a to-do list that I would then begin compiling. Brillat-Savarin had walked there from Belley. I wanted to see what he saw. It was a small thing, but a first thing. I was imagining a life in France.

  Meanwhile, Jessica, dealing with our prospective life there on a more practical level, had bought toilet seats, studied up on gas BTUs of stove-top burners, nailed the measurements of the space we had for a refrigerator, and become an expert on flat-screen televisions. I had never owned a flat-screen TV. I coveted one, even if we would mainly be watching Scooby-Doo. The boys would like the television for how it connected them to the United States, and they eventually watched only the English-language stations, studying them for phrasings that American children used and then trying them out on their parents.

  In the evenings, Jessica began investigating the eateries. One night, she joined an American friend of a friend, Jenny Gilbert, who introduced her to a brasserie run by Paul Bocuse. “It is where the musicians eat because it’s open late.” Jenny is the first violinist in the National Orchestra of Lyon. The city, Jessica had discovered, hummed in the key of Fauré and had more violin makers (artisanal shops, one person, rarely two, instruments hanging from a rafter) than she had seen in her life. Jenny would be one of three English-language speakers, two Americans and one Liverpudlian, who became how-to-live-in-Lyon coaches. (And the food at the Bocuse brasserie? I asked. “I had sole meunière,” Jessica said—the famous flat fish served with brown butter and a squeeze of lemon, famously simple provided that the timing is flawless—“and it was exquisite.”)

  * * *

  —

  I visited Daniel Boulud at his New York restaurant, an overdue expression of gratitude.

  That first time I had met Boulud was in 1995, not long after he opened Daniel, his first restaurant. It is now called Café Boulud, a name inspired by the village “café” that his family had once run out of its home. Boulud’s parents are peasant farmers. In 1995, Daniel didn’t seem like much of a peasant. He was a Frenchman at ease among New York City’s power players—effortlessly charming, always on, meticulously presented—and the food he made could be counted on to satisfy an expectation of what a French meal should be, a special occasion, a performance piece, perfect.

  The Boulud I met now was a citizen of Lyon. He seemed so different I wondered if he deliberately kept his Lyonnais side hidden. I felt a new comradeship.

  “Mathieu Viannay,” he was saying. “You must meet Mathieu. Write that down. Younger chef, very Lyonnais, the future. He just reopened La Mère Brazier—last week, in fact.” He shouted to an assistant to produce a phone number. “You know about La Mère Brazier, no?”

  I nodded. Its reopening had been talked about when we were there.

  “You went to Vienne?”

  “Vienne?”

  “South of Lyon? You were in a hurry. For La Pyramide.”

  “Of course, the famous.” It was said to be the birthplace of modern French cooking.

  “When you return, you will go to Vienne. D’accord?” He called out to his assistant to add La Pyramide to a list.

  “Mionnay,” Boulud said, accelerating. “For Alain Chapel. I used to stop there on my way home. When I worked for Georges Blanc. Oh. Bill should know Georges, non?” he shouted to his assistant.

  “Orsi,” he said next.

  “Orsi?”

  “Pierre Orsi. And Nandron, of course.”

  “Nandron?”

  “Nandron.”

  I asked him to spell it.

  “You don’t know Nandron?” He stared at me to see if I was joking. “C’est vrai? I don’t believe you.”

  No, I confessed, and made a note to investigate.

  “Nandron is very important. Two stars. Two-star restaurants belong to the town. It’s where the locals go. Three stars belong to the rest of the world.” (Nandron died in 2000, and was in fact very important to Boulud: His restaurant was the first place Boulud worked, at age fourteen.)

  “You know about the Bocuse d’Or?”

  I didn’t know about the Bocuse d’Or.

  “You will. I’ll be over for it. In January. With the American team.”

  He mentioned societies, journalists, a member of the city council, a money guy….“Write down the money guy for Bill.”

  “A money guy? You mean an investor type?”

  “You never know.”

  The list was three pages. Who had I heard of? Almost no one. I wondered: Will there be a time when I will know everyone?

  Jessica returned the following evening. We had designated it as the night when we would break the news.

  * * *

  —

  We summoned our children for a family meeting and gathered on our bed. We had never had a family meeting. We had never gathered on the bed.

  I set a globe in the middle. We sat around it cross-legged.

  “We have an announcement,” I said.

  I showed them where we lived, a spot on the East Coast of North America. I introduced the idea of hemispheres and continents, and invited them to imagine that my finger was an airplane flying over a large blue-green expanse. “This is the Atlantic Ocean,” I said. “This is Europe. This is England, where I once lived. This is Italy, where we once spent a summer vacation with your cousins. And this is France. Do you see it?” The boys leaned in close. “And near the bottom of France, between the mountains and the sea, is the city of Lyon. Do you see it? This is where we are going to move to.”

  George leapt off the bed, tipping over the globe, and dashed out of the room. We could hear him in his closet. He returned, dragging behind him a small yellow plastic carry-on SpongeBob suitcase.

  “I am ready to start packing!”

  We were leaving soon, I explained, in about two weeks, and he didn’t need to pack this very minute.

  “We can’t leave now? Oh, please, can we? Can we?”

  No, I said.

  He fell to the floor, as if the bones in his little body had been made of string, and wailed.

  I don’t know the best age for moving to another country with your children. Maybe any age is a good age. But age three might be perfect. Or maybe it was that, at age three, the child has no idea what he or she is about to get into: And that ignorance is what’s perfect.

  * * *

  —

  By a happy coincidence, I won an Italian literary prize and was invited to Rome to receive it on December 17. We now had a plan. Jessica would fly once more to Lyon without us, on Monday, December 8, to prepare our new home. The boys and I would follow, leaving on Friday, December 12, the day they finished their semester at Jack & Jill, and the family would spend its first French weekend together. On Monday, we would confirm that the boys still had a place at l’École Robert Doisneau, even though they hadn’t been seen, register them at la mairie, and fly off the next morning for a three-day, expenses-paid sojourn in Rome, the beginning of our European life. We would have Christmas in our new home.

  The eve of Jessica’s departure, we held a party for friends. We drank an imperial of Le Pergole Torte, a festive but not exactly apposite wine from Tuscany, and said goodbye. We would be back by Labor Day, I said, for the new school year. In the event, we did return on Labor Day—not nine months later, but four years and nine months later. Jessica was animated, she was buzzy—the radicalness of it all, our next life, this life, whatever it was going to be, our nextness.

/>   Once she was gone, I started packing. On Thursday morning, I had a mischievous thought. I could get a babysitter. And then, with the boys looked after, I could slip off to Washington, D.C., to say goodbye to Richard.

  * * *

  —

  I got there in the afternoon. We ate, we drank, we talked food. Actually, I have no idea what we talked about. We were two friends hanging out.

  In Lyon, he reminded me, I would learn French with a Lyonnais accent. He pronounced “beurre,” butter, with an extended guttural quadruple “rrrr.”

  In Lyon, I would meet Paul Bocuse.

  “You will meet Bobosse—a friend of Monsieur Paul. Oh, and that’s the other thing, in Lyon everyone calls him Monsieur Paul.”

  He pondered.

  “You will meet Jean-Paul Lacombe, of course. What’s his restaurant?”

  I said nothing.

  “Lyon de Lyon? No, Léon de Lyon. I met his father, too. Jean Lacombe. All the chefs in Lyon are the children of chefs. You will discover that, too.”

  He said: “In Lyon, you will be introduced to the community of Lyonnais chefs. It is like nowhere else in the world.”

  I felt close. I was grateful. I now thought: I couldn’t have had a better first teacher.

  “Oh, Michel, please excuse me, I’ve got to get to the station.” Without my realizing, the hour had got late. It was nearly nine o’clock. The last train was at nine-thirty. The babysitter had her own children to go home to.

  I made to leave, shoving everything into my bag, making haste.

  “I will drive you,” Richard said.

  “No, no, no, really. I’ll get a taxi.”

  “I insist.”

  This was a bad idea.

  “It is our last evening together.”

  “You are right,” I said.

  Richard’s car was in a garage basement. I waited outside. (I really should have taken a taxi.) His vehicle emerged, a long black thing. I got in. There was a pinging sound. Richard carried on with his Lyonnais riff. “How in Lyon everyone makes a pâté-en-croûte. And their charcuterie. There was a woman famous for it. What was her name? Sybil? And the other one, known for her cheese? Mère Richard. That’s it. Like me!” Other names came to him, or didn’t, and the more people he mentioned, the more his sense of urgency seemed to drain away. He stopped early for a red light.