Through the Children's Gate Read online

  We walk across the park on a Sunday morning and bump into our friend the baker and our old acquaintance from graduate school (what the hell is she doing now?) and someone we have been avoiding for three weeks. They all invite us for brunch, and we would love to, but we are too … busy. We bump into Charlie Ravioli and grab a coffee with him—and come home to find three e-mails and a message on our cell phone from him, wondering where we are. The crowding of our space has been reinforced by a crowding of our time, and the only way to protect ourselves is to build structures of perpetual deferral: I'll see you next week, let's talk soon. We build rhetorical baffles around our lives to keep the crowding out, only to find that we have let nobody we love in.

  Like Charlie Ravioli, we hop into taxis and leave messages on answering machines to avoid our acquaintances, and find that we keep missing our friends. I have one intimate who lives just across the park from me, whom I e-mail often, and whom I am fortunate to see two or three times a year. We are always … busy. He has become my Charlie Ravioli, my invisible friend. I am sure that he misses me—just as Charlie Ravioli, I realized, must tell his other friends that he is sorry he does not see Olivia more often.

  Once I sensed the nature of his predicament, I began to feel more sympathetic toward Charlie Ravioli. I got to know him better, too. We learned more about what Ravioli did in the brief breathing spaces in his busy life when he could sit down with Olivia and dish. “Ravioli read your book,” Olivia announced, for instance, one night at dinner. “He didn't like it much.” We also found out that Ravioli had joined a gym, that he was going to the beach in the summer, but he was too busy, and that he was working on a “show.” (“It isn't a very good show,” she added candidly.) Charlie Ravioli, in other words, was just another New Yorker: fit, opinionated, and trying to break into show business.

  I think we would have learned to live happily with Charlie Ravioli had it not been for the appearance of Laurie. She threw us badly. At dinner, Olivia had been mentioning a new personage almost as often as she mentioned Ravioli. “I talked to Laurie today,” she would begin. “She says Ravioli is busy.” Or she would be closeted with her play phone. “Who are you talking to, darling?” I would ask. “Laurie,” she would say. “We're talking about Ravioli.” We surmised that Laurie was, so to speak, the Linda Tripp of the Ravioli operation—the person you spoke to for consolation when the big creep was ignoring you.

  But a little while later, a more ominous side of Laurie's role began to appear. “Laurie, tell Ravioli I'm calling,” I heard Olivia say. I pressed her about who, exactly, Laurie was. Olivia shook her head. “She works for Ravioli,” she said.

  And then it came to us, with sickening clarity: Laurie was not the patient friend who consoled you for Charlie's absence. Laurie was the bright-toned person who answered Ravioli's phone and told you that unfortunately, Mr. Ravioli was in a meeting. “Laurie says Ravioli is too busy to play,” Olivia announced sadly one morning. Things seemed to be deteriorating; now Ravioli was too busy even to say he was too busy.

  I got back on the phone with my sister. “Have you ever heard of an imaginary friend with an assistant?” I asked.

  She paused. “Imaginary friends don't have assistants,” she said. “That's not only not in the literature. That's just … I mean—in California they don't have assistants.”

  “You think we should look into it?”

  “I think you should move,” she said flatly.

  Martha was of the same mind. “An imaginary playmate shouldn't have an assistant,” she said miserably. “An imaginary playmate shouldn't have an agent. An imaginary playmate shouldn't have a publicist or a personal trainer or a caterer—an imaginary playmate shouldn't have … people. An imaginary playmate should just play. With the child who imagined it.” She started leaving on my pillow real estate brochures picturing quaint houses in New Jersey and Connecticut, unhaunted by busy invisible friends and their entourages.

  Not long after the appearance of Laurie, though, something remarkable happened. Olivia would begin to tell us tales of her frustrations with Charlie Ravioli, and, after telling us again that he was too busy to play, she would tell us what she had done instead. Astounding and paracosmic tall tales poured out of her: She had been to a chess tournament and brought home a trophy; she had gone to a circus and told jokes. Searching for Charlie Ravioli, she had “saved all the animals in the zoo;” heading home in a taxi after a quick coffee with Ravioli, she took over the steering wheel and “got all the moneys.” From the stalemate of daily life emerged the fantasy of victory. She had dreamed of a normal life with a few close friends and had to settle for worldwide fame and the front page of the tabloids. The existence of an imaginary friend had liberated her into a paracosm, but it was a curiously New York paracosm—it was the unobtainable world outside her window. Charlie Ravioli, prince of busyness, was not an end but a means: a way out onto the street in her head, a declaration of potential independence.

  Busyness is our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us. Many friends have said to me that they love New York now in a way they never did before, and their love, I've noticed, takes for its object all the things that used to exasperate them—the curious combination of freedom, self-made fences, and paralyzing preoccupation that the city provides. Now when Martha and I ask each other, “How did you spend the day?” instead of listing her incidents, she says merely, “Oh, you know … just … bumping into Charlie Ravioli,” meaning, just bouncing from obligation to electronic entreaty, just spotting a friend and snatching a sandwich, just being busy, just living in New York. If everything we've learned in the past year could be summed up in a phrase, it's that we want to go on bumping into Charlie Ravioli for as long as we can.

  Olivia still hopes to have him to herself someday. As I work late at night in the “study” (an old hallway, an Aalto screen), I keep near the “nursery” (an ancient pantry, a glass-brick wall), I can hear her shift into pre-sleep, still muttering to herself. She is still trying to reach her closest friend. “Ravioli? Ravioli?” she moans as she turns over into her pillow and clutches her blanket, and then she whispers, almost to herself, “Tell him call me. Tell him call me when he comes home.”

  The Cooking Game

  I enjoy the company of cooks. I admire them because they are hard workers, and because they make delicious things. But, more than that, I like to contemplate the way they have to think in order to make the things they make. They are the last artists among us who still live in the daily presence of patronage. In the two centuries since the Romantic revolution, the arts have, one by one, been Byronized, set free from the necessity of pleasing an audience—a process that began with the poets and painters and took in the architects and novelists and has swept up, most recently, the rock musicians and shoe designers. All have taught themselves that they are there to instruct and puzzle an audience, not to please it.

  But although cooks are a source of romance, they are not themselves Romantic. They practice their art the way all art was practiced until the nineteenth century, as a job done to order for rich people who treat you as something between the court jester and the butler. Cooks can be temperamental—cooks are supposed to be temperamental—but temperament is the Byronism of the dependent; children, courtesans, and cooks all have it. What cooks have in place of freedom is what all artists had back before they were released from the condition of flunkydom: a weary, careful dignity, a secretive sense of craft, and the comforting knowledge of belonging to a guild.

  I also enjoy the company of cooks because I have always wanted to be one. A surprising number of writers I know, apart from the bitter ones who dream about being publishers, share this fantasy. Words and food are bound together in some inexplicable way, a peculiar communion that lends grace and mystery to what otherwise would seem to be a simple exchange of gluttony for publicity.

  Overt collaborations between writers and cooks, however, are rare, and I was therefore happy and surprised last March when two cooks whose compan
y I enjoy a lot asked if I would, so to speak, write them a meal. The two cooks were Dan Barber, of Blue Hill, in Greenwich Village, and Peter Hoffman, of Savoy, in Soho. It was Peter who called me first and asked if I would be interested in organizing a jeu de cuisine, a cooking game. The game, he said, had been invented by Robert Courtine, who, under the name of La Reynière, was the gastronomic columnist of Le Monde for many years. (He had been a full-fledged collaborator with Vichy during the war; afterward, he became a reactionary of the table and flourished.) In the early seventies, when nouvelle cuisine was just appearing, Courtine chose a list of ingredients from the Paris markets and then had five cooks prepare a menu from them. Peter told me that five young New York chefs had agreed to cook for a week from a list of ingredients of my choosing from the farmers’ market in Union Square. The cooks would use the foods I chose in whatever way they wanted, with whatever else they wanted to add. (It wouldn't be a competition, he said, in the tone in which extremely competitive people say those words.) I agreed, of course, although I later explained to him and Dan Barber that they would have to be responsible for my education: I had to confess that I had never visited the green market. They seemed unsurprised by this information; whatever they were coming to me for, it wasn't expertise.

  I have known Peter since 1990, when he opened Savoy, a lovely, neighborly restaurant, with a golden-lit Arts and Crafts–style room, all blond wood and copper mesh and candlelight and welcome, eclectic food. Dan Barber was a more recent friend. A year ago, I wandered into Blue Hill, which he oversees with his fellow chef Mike Anthony, expecting the kind of well-meaning meal you get from a young guy who has cooked for a couple of years in France; and instead, I ate as good a meal as any I have had outside the three-star places in Paris. Describing food is difficult, not because we can't capture in words things that are sensual—we do fine with painting and pubic hair—but because memorable description depends on startling metaphors, and startling metaphors depend on a willingness to be startled. Nobody did much with landscape, either, until it suddenly became respectable to compare a Swiss mountain to the whole of human destiny. We don't allow that freedom when it comes to what's on our plates. If someone wrote, for instance, that Dan Barber's foie gras with ground coffee beans is at once as inevitable as a tide and as astonishing as a wave, the reader's first response would be to think, quite rightly, that it is not at all. (And yet it is.) People used to feel this way about metaphors for sex—the English still do. They have just gotten over Evelyn Waugh writing “I was made free of her narrow loins.” But we all still resist “I was made free of his thick loin chops.”

  Dan is not merely an aspirant to intellect but a real-live émigré from academe. In 1991 he had been waiting to go to China on a Fluorite in political science when his grant program was canceled, and he set off instead to a job at a bakery. “Dan has this whole right-brain, left-brain thing going, which is rare for one of us,” another cook said. There was something almost Salingeresque about him. He grew up on the Upper East Side—a Dalton lifer, kindergarten through high school; he cooked for his father after his mother died—and the way he generally looks and talks (acerbic, observant, self-critical), added to the natural diffidence of chefs, puts one in mind of the way Zooey Glass would have, had he chosen cooking over acting.

  The three other chefs were to be Philippe Bertineau, of Payard Pâtisserie & Bistro, on the Upper East Side; Sara Jenkins, of Patio Dining, in the East Village; and Romy Dorotan, of Cendrillon, in Soho—one French cook, three Americans, and a Filipino. All of them did most of the shopping for their kitchens at the farmers’ market in Union Square, and all of them were, directly or indirectly, sons and daughters of Alice Waters, the Jeanne d'arc of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, who brought to America the doctrine of the seasonal, the organic, and the sincere. The doctrine includes the belief that all shopping, if humanly possible, should be done at a farmers’ market, that small producers are better than large, and that the cook should decide only after seeing what's in the market what he or she wants to cook that night.

  When I got home and told my family that I had been specially selected as the point man for a demonstration of the virtues of the seasonal and the natural, of farmers’ goods and nature's bounty, they were unimpressed.

  “Will it be like Iron Chef?” my son, Luke, asked. He has become a great fan of the bizarre Japanese cooking competition that is broadcast on the Food Network every Friday night. On this program, two grim-faced chefs have an hour in which to cook a four-, five-, or even six-course meal, built around a single ingredient chosen by the host—a strange, melodramatic figure in black, who spits out Japanese. The special ingredient rises from beneath the floor, like the Phantom of the Opera's organ, in dark expressionist lighting.

  “You'll be the guy in the black leather pants,” Luke said, and barked “Tuna!” in a mock Japanese accent.

  “No, I won't,” I said. “This is not going to be a competition. Just an exhibition. Like the Dodo's race in Alices Adventures in Wonderland. All must have prizes.”

  After years of Paris markets, with their abundance and bad faith—the Marché Biologique, the organic market on the Boulevard Raspail, sells a lot of terrific produce, but I have always doubted that pineapples are actually being grown organically on the Île-de-France—I confess that I found the pickings at the Union Square green market on a spring morning a little scrappy. The rules of the market insist that only a narrow band of local farmers can participate, and this limits your choices, especially between seasons.

  “There's a lot of ramps and some good rhubarb” was the kind of cheering but not exactly inspiring summation you would hear on an April morning. “And some nice storage potatoes and some, uh, storage apples.” (I didn't even know what ramps were, though I quickly learned: They are small wild leeks, which have suddenly become fashionable. Why this should be is hard to say, the appeal of a wild leek not being so great that it makes you regret that leeks were ever tamed.) In truth, the chefs, too, found the market disappointing on most mornings, and that, I realized, was exactly what appealed to them. Instead of ranging through the market like cooks in a television commercial—squeezing an apple, smelling a ramp, feeling up a chicken—they tended to go where they knew they wanted to go, seeing at a glance if what they were looking for was there, and then quietly taking as much of it as they could get. They didn't taste much, because experience with the vendor and the look of the item told them what it would taste like. Expertise, I was reminded, isn't seeing all there is. Expertise is knowing what you're looking for.

  And knowing what you're looking at. Peter could station himself in front of a fruit and give you twenty minutes on its pedigree and possibilities, like an Icelander telling you her family history. Once we stopped in front of a crate of strawberries at the stall of Franca Tantillo, one of the more vivid farmers at the market. “These are the only good strawberries,” Peter said. “Franca and the people at Fantasy Fruit are the only two people who are growing those strawberries right now. They're day-neutral, which means they completely ignore the usual Circadian cycle. They continue to flower even though the day is getting shorter.” I tasted a couple. They were nothing like the familiar American Driscoll's strawberries—bright red outsides and hard white mealy insides. Instead, they were sublime tiny berries with the fragrance of a French fraise des bois, perfumed and intensely sweet.

  On another visit, we stopped at a table of desultory-looking green leaves, the kind of things you cut off the ends of leeks before you put them in a soup. It was a cold and rainy morning, and there didn't look like much that was worth taking the subway for.

  “These are scapes,” Peter said. “And to understand what they are, you gotta understand the truth about garlic. There are two major groupings of garlic: hard neck and soft neck.” We were examining the hard neck. It looked like garlic with a leek stalk. “Hard-neck garlic grows a flower stalk that pulls energy away from the bulb. So you have to cut the flower off each plant, which takes forever, and only
a handful of farmers are willing to do it—they cut off the flower stalks and we call them garlic scapes. Real hard-neck garlic came from Central Asia, and it requires a cold winter to get that juicy, full, pungent garlickness. We have a very Central Asian–, Afghanistan-garlic-type winter here.” I tasted a scape. It had a sharp and intense garlic flavor and a green, leafy undertone.

  “You know, we have to put up with certain frustrations,” Peter went on as we tramped through the market. “But that's part of the whole expression. What produces great taste? One thing. Stress. French winemakers are always pushing the limit of viability. You can't really grow grapes in Champagne because it's too damn cold, and you can't really grow grapes in Châteauneuf-du-Pape because there's no soil there, but you force the vines to adapt to the environment and search for nutrients, and where the season is short enough and you have to crop close enough, you get terrific flavor. What drives great taste in the field is stress.”