would have been happy only for some quiet, but he found instead three paintings that combined into a single lasting image of his entire experience in Europe.
The Beheading of John the Baptist
. He stopped primarily to admire Fabritius’s depiction of Salome, a frivolous aristocrat, which brought to mind the Audi or the Saab or the Benz that might as well have been waiting for her out front of the prison. But the image lingered as he moved on; Salome the patron had so airily inspected the proffered head as it dripped in front of her, held high in the hand of the workmanlike executioner, whose face reflected technical satisfaction in a distasteful assignment.
Bueckelaer’s
Well-Stocked Kitchen
. It made him smile. A meta-image of thankfulness and plenty. Christ sat with Martha and Mary, surrounded by skewered game birds, Dutch hares, ducks, finches, pheasants, partridges, roosters, sandpipers, zucchini, cauliflower, tomatoes, grapes, artichokes, plums, cucumbers, lemons, apples, squash and blackberries.Jeremy imagined working with the large clay oven in the background.
Then:
The Threatened Swan
. Standing like a boxer, beak set to jab, wings cocked, feathers flying. Jeremy admired the bristling stance the bird took towards the attacker, knowing that in Asselijn’s day, the threat might well have been a rookie cook like himself.
He walked the gallery many times, seeking out all the food pictures, all the glistening still lifes, but returned again and again to these three. The patron, the kitchen, the swan. As the clock marked off the few hours until departure, he stood in front of these images, one after another, and he found himself thinking again of his American friend who set to war the culinary Crips and Bloods. His mind swirled over his time in the
relais
, over his Sunday nights. Those loud late evenings when Patrice did not go home to Pellerey but consented to return to his bed with him. The hours and days he had spent with her in the forest above the town. The source d’Ignon. The true source of the region. It seemed that all his time in France had been captured in these images, triangulated. Fixing him like a crapaudine on the skewer of his own culinary training.
“These have been the years,” Jeremy thought, reflecting now on his return to North America with new, unexpected enthusiasm, with something like zeal. “These years have made me Blood.”
The Monkey’s Paw Bistro was conceived of this conviction. It took him four years to raise the nerve and figure out how to raise the money, and a few weeks longer to convince his new friend Jules Capelli to join him as sous chef and pastry chef.
They had met only six months before, appropriately enough at the public market. He spotted her first. He was sifting through a basket of chanterelles, for his own dinner on a Monday night off. She was across the way, intently unstacking and restacking a pile of celery roots, setting aside ones that metsome clearly exacting standard. His attention was arrested. She was about his age, thirtyish or a few years younger. Attractive, definitely, but she also emanated a quality he wasn’t sure he could articulate. Something like strength and vulnerability at the same time. She had eyes too large for her face, almost sorrowful, but set under impossibly strong black eyebrows. A straight, austerely beautiful helmet of even blacker hair, blue-black, which she stroked gently behind her ears. And as he watched, she leaned over the stainless steel counter and auditioned the celery roots in her strong hands, the veins standing out in firm relief as her long fingers felt the rough surfaces. She held each one gently up to a nose that arched distinctly across the bridge. Smelling one in particular, she closed heavy lids over her eyes, finding the quality she sought. He held his breath, a chanterelle in one hand, halfway to the bag.
Jules felt this stare on her eventually, opened her eyes and turned to find it. Jeremy looked away sharply
The Beheading of John the Baptist
. He stopped primarily to admire Fabritius’s depiction of Salome, a frivolous aristocrat, which brought to mind the Audi or the Saab or the Benz that might as well have been waiting for her out front of the prison. But the image lingered as he moved on; Salome the patron had so airily inspected the proffered head as it dripped in front of her, held high in the hand of the workmanlike executioner, whose face reflected technical satisfaction in a distasteful assignment.
Bueckelaer’s
Well-Stocked Kitchen
. It made him smile. A meta-image of thankfulness and plenty. Christ sat with Martha and Mary, surrounded by skewered game birds, Dutch hares, ducks, finches, pheasants, partridges, roosters, sandpipers, zucchini, cauliflower, tomatoes, grapes, artichokes, plums, cucumbers, lemons, apples, squash and blackberries.Jeremy imagined working with the large clay oven in the background.
Then:
The Threatened Swan
. Standing like a boxer, beak set to jab, wings cocked, feathers flying. Jeremy admired the bristling stance the bird took towards the attacker, knowing that in Asselijn’s day, the threat might well have been a rookie cook like himself.
He walked the gallery many times, seeking out all the food pictures, all the glistening still lifes, but returned again and again to these three. The patron, the kitchen, the swan. As the clock marked off the few hours until departure, he stood in front of these images, one after another, and he found himself thinking again of his American friend who set to war the culinary Crips and Bloods. His mind swirled over his time in the
relais
, over his Sunday nights. Those loud late evenings when Patrice did not go home to Pellerey but consented to return to his bed with him. The hours and days he had spent with her in the forest above the town. The source d’Ignon. The true source of the region. It seemed that all his time in France had been captured in these images, triangulated. Fixing him like a crapaudine on the skewer of his own culinary training.
“These have been the years,” Jeremy thought, reflecting now on his return to North America with new, unexpected enthusiasm, with something like zeal. “These years have made me Blood.”
The Monkey’s Paw Bistro was conceived of this conviction. It took him four years to raise the nerve and figure out how to raise the money, and a few weeks longer to convince his new friend Jules Capelli to join him as sous chef and pastry chef.
They had met only six months before, appropriately enough at the public market. He spotted her first. He was sifting through a basket of chanterelles, for his own dinner on a Monday night off. She was across the way, intently unstacking and restacking a pile of celery roots, setting aside ones that metsome clearly exacting standard. His attention was arrested. She was about his age, thirtyish or a few years younger. Attractive, definitely, but she also emanated a quality he wasn’t sure he could articulate. Something like strength and vulnerability at the same time. She had eyes too large for her face, almost sorrowful, but set under impossibly strong black eyebrows. A straight, austerely beautiful helmet of even blacker hair, blue-black, which she stroked gently behind her ears. And as he watched, she leaned over the stainless steel counter and auditioned the celery roots in her strong hands, the veins standing out in firm relief as her long fingers felt the rough surfaces. She held each one gently up to a nose that arched distinctly across the bridge. Smelling one in particular, she closed heavy lids over her eyes, finding the quality she sought. He held his breath, a chanterelle in one hand, halfway to the bag.
Jules felt this stare on her eventually, opened her eyes and turned to find it. Jeremy looked away sharply
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