Thierry took himself off for a midmorning digestif, and by the time he returned, the little pots had set and darkened to a glossy sheen. He frowned, then announced to the fridge that this was all they were good for, this and eating his money. He took out a tiny silver spoon and let me taste a side of the lime one. It was extraordinary. Lighter than air, whisked into a melting nothingness that left a dark rich sensation on the tongue and an extraordinary desire to eat more of it; it was hardly like eating at all, more like a dream of flavor.
He priced them at something extortionate. We sold out in fifteen minutes. I made him promise to stand over me one more time while I made them, and he said he didn’t have the necessary forty years to teach me where I was going wrong, but I was pleased nonetheless.
When I got back that evening, Sami was cross. He was making costumes for a production called La Bohème. (He said it in a way that assumed I had heard of it. I had never heard of it, but nodded my head importantly. I guess to him it was like someone saying they’d never heard of Michael Jackson.) Anyway, he said his bohemians had all gone too far bohemian and he couldn’t get them to come to any fittings, so he was going to have to track them down at their house, except they were living on a barge and setting it loose.
It was a gorgeous evening; the light in Paris felt like dripping gold.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to come,” said Sami with some sarcasm, because he kept asking me to come out in the evenings and I hardly ever said yes, partly because I was shy, and a lot because I was constantly knackered, embarrassed about my French, and smelled of greenhouse.
But I was buoyed by Thierry’s careful lesson of the day and how accepted it was making me feel, and for once not too exhausted, so I said yes, to his total surprise.
The singers were living on a houseboat on the Seine. It was full of people enjoying the evening, drinking and juggling and hanging out. I pasted on my best grin as Sami got swallowed up by a hundred of his closest acquaintances and got myself a glass of champagne (I was quite impressed that they didn’t have enough money to rent an apartment but wouldn’t dream of stinting on the fizz), and by the time I came back up deck from the tiny galley, someone had started up the engines and we were putting out into the Seine itself. I wasn’t entirely sure this was legal and looked around dubiously as the barge narrowly avoided the pleasure boats—the bateaux mouches—that patrolled the waters. The boat went upstream under the bridges and passed the crowded stone banks. The towers of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower bobbed in and out of sight as we moved. The party grew wilder as we moored just off the Île de la Cité, and suddenly two men, to huge roars of encouragement, took out huge brands that were their fire-eating torches. At first I was horrified—they were going to set the boat on fire and kill us all. But then I sort of thought, well, I am away, in a foreign country, having an extremely foreign experience, and anyway I can’t get off the boat, so I may as well just go with it. But I made sure I was as far back as possible.
The boys, stripped to the waist, lit the torches and then, to my excited horror, started juggling with them. The boat was bobbing up and down but they kept their balance perfectly, and it was both funny and frightening at once. People on the banks of the river were hailing each other to watch. Sami was ring-mastering, shouting and gesticulating with his arms.
Suddenly I saw a familiar face, bent low in conversation with a girl, but, it seemed, not really paying attention to what she was saying. His eyes searched the boat. Then they saw me and smiled, briefly, in recognition, and he raised his hand. Before I realized what I’d done, I’d smiled too and waved back. It was Laurent, Thierry’s son. Instantly I felt rather guilty, as if I were double-crossing the lovely day I’d had at work with his dad. I bit my lip, and he grinned and got back into conversation with the girl, but not before Sami grabbed his arm and started yelling at him. At first he shook his head no, no, definitely not, but before I knew it, someone had stuck a frying pan in his hand and a white chef’s hat on his head, and the music had been turned up and everyone was clapping. He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender and, in the oddest coincidence, started cracking eggs into a bowl. His deft strong fingers behaved exactly like his father’s. I was hypnotized. Someone brought up flour too, and milk, and he whisked it up—again in the same way—and the fire-eaters brought their torches down and started throwing them more gently, as, to my utter astonishment, Laurent melted some butter in the little pan, then started to cook pancakes over the flames of the fire-jugglers’ torches. This must have been a party trick; each new one was flung in the air in near-perfect timing with the torches themselves and greeted with rounds of applause, particularly the one that flew right off the boat, to be immediately snapped up by an enormous seagull.
It was true; everyone Sami knows is basically in show business. I am completely the most normal person Sami has ever met. He thinks I’m really exotic as a consequence. He keeps asking me if it’s true that we eat things out of paper and what toast is.
It was stunning to watch. At one point, Laurent had to reach for a pancake he’d flipped right up out of the pan and stretched a long arm over me, lost his footing, and landed nearly in my lap.
“Oof,” he said. “Bonsoir, mam’zelle.”
“Hello, Laurent,” I said. He’d straightened up really quickly.
“The spy!” he said, but his eyes were twinkling in a way I’d seen before.
“I’m not a spy! How could I be a spy? What, I’m going to steal a pancake recipe?”
“You shall tell my father I am a partying good-for-nothing,” he said, his big black eyes sparkling at me.
“That very much depends,” I said, “on whether or not I get the next pancake.”
He looked at it, all perfectly cooked, then grabbed a bottle from the side of the boat and poured Grand Marnier, the orange liqueur, all over the top. It sizzled, and as the alcohol burned off, a delicious smell filled the air. Then he picked up a napkin and, in a move that seemed almost like magic, flicked the pancake onto it, and in a trice, folded it up into an envelope so I could eat it.
“I shall tell him you’re a very good boy,” I said. The crepe was painfully hot, but totally delicious.
Something crossed his face at that moment, something that wasn’t just about him being a party boy. Some remembered pain.